How Germany Thrived and Died by its Culture of Excellence

Modern German genius, and the danger of cultivating a middle class when the existential truth is bleak

German culture was dominant in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, and its dominance was just as strong, albeit in a negative way, in the 20th. In fact, the story of modernity is very largely the story of recent German history, and it’s about the rise and the fall of that society.

So argues the historian Peter Watson in The German Genius. In some 900 pages, Watson presents the many facets of German cultural dominance. Following his example, you could just list some German personages, such as Kant, Humboldt, Marx, Mendel, Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe, Nietzsche, Planck, Einstein, Freud, Weber, and Hitler, and ask whether any other country can boast as many towering figures in this period.

Germany dominated in both the arts and the sciences, fulfilling the promise of the “Renaissance Man.” The rise of modern Germany was spectacular, as was its fall in the two world wars.

What intrigues me most here is Watson’s explanation of how the reasons for Germany’s collapse were the very same ones that account for that society’s meteoric rise. I think there’s a more general warning that can be drawn from that explanation.

Some elements of modern German genius

Watson posits several factors to explain Germany’s rise and fall.

First, there was Germany’s vastly more educated middle class, compared to that of other European countries. For instance, “In the early nineteenth century, when England had just four universities, Germany had more than fifty.” In “the late nineteenth century, illiteracy in the German army was much lower among Italian or Austro-Hungarian soldiers, 1 in 1,000 as opposed to 330 in 1,000 among Italians, 68 in 1,000 among Austro-Hungarians.”

Second, there’s Germany’s culture of “inwardness.”

The combination of Lutheranism and Pietism was a starting point here, both being more concerned with inward conviction than with outward displays of religiosity. Another factor is that Germany’s centers of learning — its universities — came on stream between the advent of doubt and the arrival of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, when the theological understanding of man was under severe threat…

This modern crisis of meaning hit Germany especially hard, giving rise to its great period of speculative philosophy (Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marxism, and Schopenhauer), and Germany’s high literacy rates transmitted those speculations to the educated middle class.

Third, there was the prominence of the concept of Bildung, the social obligation to cultivate the members of society so that they can fulfill their personal potential. Here, with this emphasis on what Isaiah Berlin called “positive” rather than “negative liberties,” German culture is comparable to China’s Confucianism, except that Germans are more inward, romantic, and idealistic than the Chinese.

Fourth, there was the Ph.D. program of research and scholarship, which Germany invented. Although Germany didn’t invent research itself, it institutionalized research at its universities, especially with its graduate studies programs. Indeed,

the habit of having a well-educated young adult, usually in his or her mid- to late twenties, spend three or more years examining in detail a very specific aspect of the world about us, for little money but instead for love of the subject and, no less important, the honour of putting the letters “Dr.” before one’s name, setting one slightly apart (and above) and being accepted as part of the professoriate, has had an extraordinary effect on our times. It means that, at relatively little expense, we know our world in far more detail than anyone before, say, 1780, could ever have imagined.

Fifth, and finally, for Watson, there was “the longing for a redemptive community,” a sort of conservative nostalgia for belonging to a social whole.

Germany’s downfall

Watson combines these elements to show how Germany’s educated middle class adopted a nationalist culture of pessimism in reaction to much of the so-called modern progress that Germany itself led the way in producing. Specifically, the greater prominence of the sciences marginalized the specialists in the humanities, exacerbating the latter’s alienation and nostalgia for some form of redemption.

Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, for example, was just one of many German jeremiads. The worry was that modern progress was illusory or superficial, that there was a cultural decline and no obvious way to reverse it due to what Nietzsche called the “death of God.”

The paradox is that Germans were both supremely modern in some ways, and anti-modern in others. The concern, says Watson, was that a Bildung society of “spiritual substance” was ‘destroyed by materialism, mercantilism, and science, which had caused Germany to “lose its soul.”’

Watson agrees with Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis when she argued: “that what happened in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s was a temporary alliance of the educated elite with the mob.” The First World War had created the concept of “the masses,” of the anonymous, dehumanized canon fodder that was arbitrarily gunned down, regardless of their former social station, so that the elites and the mob could see themselves as equally bitter and longing for some prospect of breakaway heroism. Arendt called this collective bitterness the “pre-totalitarian atmosphere.”

Thus, according to Watson, “the crucial failure” in Germany in the period leading up to WWII “was first and foremost among the educated middle class, precisely because they alone possessed the education needed to exercise skepticism and forestall mob action and behavior.” Watson paraphrases Arendt as saying that “only educated people can have a private life,” which fits with TS Eliot’s “argument about skepticism being the great aim of education…People without a private life soon become a mob, where everything that matters, or seems to matter, takes place on the streets.”

The folly of mainstreaming neo-shamanism?

Modern Germany, then, is a case study of what happens when the best of the humanities, and especially philosophy takes over the culture. In late-modern America, by contrast, we’re seeing what happens when the worst of the humanities, when the hysterical cult of “wokeness” predominates in educated circles as an overreaction to right-wing populism and to threats posed by the rise of social media and of unrestrained capitalism.

But in the Enlightenment, Germans gorged themselves on the best of the humanities, on artistic masterpieces, and on ingenious systems of speculation, in addition to the sciences.

As a result, for a couple of centuries, German culture flourished and practically defined what it meant to be “modern.” But Germany’s educated middle class curdled, not because it was unfit for knowledge but because modern knowledge is unbearable. Scientific and industrial progress made for scientism and the denigration of the humanities, which turned the educated liberal elites into a virtual underclass that was ripe for subversive demagoguery.

Thus, the rise and fall of modern Germany was due to a concentrated case of the perennial clash between mainstream culture and the neoshamanic counterculture. As I explain elsewhere, “neo-shamans,” or artistic, philosophical, or spiritual outsiders have tended to confront the existential predicament that civilization ignores or obscures, leaving the majority free to pursue their distractions. Civilization thrives, then, by sacrificing the welfare of the cultivated minority to sustain the vulgar majority’s contentment.

Neo-shamanic cults bubble to the surface, sometimes gaining mainstream attention, only for the dominant culture to assimilate what’s useful in the countercultural vision (in the product of uncompromising artistic or philosophical exploration) and to marginalize the rest. This is partly how cultures evolve and rejuvenate themselves.

What happened in Germany is that the cult of rational liberal enlightenment went mainstream without censorship or whitewashing. The elites themselves were the revolutionary cult leaders, and the fruits of their existential reckonings were consumed far and wide.

Those were the fruits of absurdity, as I’ve argued elsewhere, since the fearless rational exploration of our existential condition is bound to confront the strangeness of people’s position in an impersonal cosmic wasteland. That clash was revealed in the German elites’ horror and despair since they bravely dispensed with the theistic or anthropocentric sugarcoating.

This needn’t have entailed Germany’s pessimism, but it certainly made for a meaning crisis. The advances of science and industry in Germany exacerbated that crisis not just by imperiling the jobs and social status of the artistic leaders, but by enriching our knowledge of nature’s inhumanity (thanks to scientific objectification) and by perverting the neo-shamanic sensibilities in a capitalist manner, with consumerist distractions, as in the Golden Twenties.

Leo Strauss’s cynicism and the return to liberal mediocrity

The philosopher and German émigré Leo Strauss would say that the fate of Germany supports his thesis that the ancients knew better how to handle philosophy since they kept it a secret for a cynical, rather masochistic elite minority. The masses ought to be fed “noble lies,” as in feel-good myths that act as propaganda for social unity. By contrast, modern intellectuals were arrogant in believing that the truth should be dispersed, that the truth sets us free and should itself be liberated.

Arguably, the existential truth itself contributed to Germany’s downfall in WWII. The harsh truths are that life is absurd and that thought leaders can’t remain long in the limelight unless they succumb to the civilizational impulse and propagandize for industrial progress and economic growth. Those truths killed the spirit of neo-shamanic, inward-looking German intellectuals, rendering them helpless against the Nazi’s noble lies that filled the cultural vacuum. The cult of Nazism united Germany to cover for the fact that the mainstreaming of excellent philosophy and art may have been a foolish enterprise.

The German preoccupation was with Bildung, self-fulfilment through cultivation. Germans mastered the art of education, which only brought them to the precipice of existential horror. Perhaps no civilization can endure on such a cultural basis, which is why prehistoric tribes would have scapegoated their mentally tortured shaman, leaving him or her on that precipice to digest cosmic truths, freeing the tribe to think more practically about its survival in the wild. Modern Germany had institutions to sustain and to grow, so the show had to go on despite the stultifying effects of its mass education.

Germany’s genius was self-destructive in that the existential facts themselves radicalized the elites, setting them at odds with the social interest. The sciences proved more useful to society than the arts, and once the artists and philosophers were disheartened by the existential horror, they lacked the resolve to doubt the merits of Nazism.

Indeed, if life is absurd, isn’t any social response as fitting as any other? Many German intellectuals — perhaps most famously the existentialist Martin Heidegger — were swept up in Nazism. Many doubters fled Germany instead of fighting the Nazis at home. Those who stayed and fought were slaughtered.

Nazi populism was a last gasp of German genius, a refusal to succumb to national pessimism and to defeat under the Treaty of Versailles. But just as the dark existential truth can’t sustain a country for long, neither can a pack of lies.

As Peter Watson points out, postwar Germany liberalized itself not just under the Marshall Plan but in the 1960s, when Germans moderated their aspiration for Bildung and internalized the late-modern liberal’s imperative of compromise. Intellectualism and the standard of personal authenticity would recede to the background. The country deradicalized itself and learned to live with mediocrity.

Plato said the enlightened are free from the “cave” of ignorance, while those who haven’t recognized their basic condition in life are as good as prisoners chained to the cave wall, mistaking shadows for the light of reality.

But in the cave of society, as it were, the inverse holds: enlightened artists and philosophers are imprisoned by their marginalized position, and those who are blissfully ignorant are the freest to frolic in the shadows that somehow glow brighter than the lights of the outer wilderness.

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