Ominous Parallels (22 page)

Sometimes the heroes of the conservative writers were mystics in quest not of God, but of “nature.” If the German did not care to read the so-called “asphalt (city-oriented) literature” of the modern writers, reeking as it did of Joyce, genitals, and socialism, his alternative was to turn to the romanticists’ “literature of the soil,” which brushed aside as contemptible distractions all human achievements, including machinery, wealth, cities, and extolled instead the simple, mindless life of the village peasant.

Although the German left had growing doubts about the process of industrialization, most Marxists in the twenties were still defenders of technology. On this point the conservatives were ahead of their time. Germany’s Old Right beat America’s New Left by fifty years: it took the soil seriously. The Industrial Revolution and all its products, said some of the loudest right-wing voices, is a secular, soulless, capitalistic (and essentially American) evil, an evil to be swept away and replaced by a return to nature, in the form of unmechanized rural subsistence.

Life without technology, its advocates admitted, might not advance human comfort, ease, or enjoyment. But happiness, these brooding nature-apostles felt, is not man’s destiny. By its very essence, they said, life is war, suffering, death—in Spengler’s words, “death of the individual, death of a nation, death of a culture.”
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Both sides in Germany’s cultural battle elevated feeling above reason. And both sides experienced the same basic kind of feeling. The left called it alienation or the angst of nothingness. The right called it götterdämmerung or the philosophy of Schopenhauer. The common denominator is the conviction of doom.

It is an understandable conviction on both sides. Man without his mind is doomed.

The same epistemological cause leads ultimately to the same social effect. The left culturati called their political ideal “socialism.” The right culturati called theirs “Prussianism.” But, as Spengler pointed out in an influential work entitled
Prussianism and Socialism,
there is no essential difference between these two concepts. Under both approaches, he noted, “Power belongs to the whole. The individual serves it. The whole is sovereign. . . . Everyone is given his place. There are commands and obedience.” The first conscious socialist, Spengler concluded, was not Marx, but Friedrich Wilhelm I.
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Like their elders of both types and for the same kind of reason, the youth in Germany were eager to serve “the whole.” This was particularly true of the country’s organized youth groups, most of which, thanks to the chauvinism of the German schoolteachers, were avidly nationalist. (Prior to World War I the German youth movement was called the Wandervogel; in the Weimar years its counterpart was referred to as the Bünde.)

The youth, taught by their bourgeois teachers to despise the bourgeoisie, proceeded on cue to stage a rebellion. As early as the 1890s, children ranging in age from eleven or twelve through the twenties began to declare their rejection of their parents, their commitment to “German” values, and their need of fundamental social change. The young rebels represented a kind of elite: for the most part they were urban high-school students—Protestant, middle-class, well-educated.

Widely regarded as gentle, if peculiar, idealists, the German schoolboys acted out literally the ideas they had learned. Whenever they could, they escaped from the “cold,” “mechanistic” cities they had been taught to hate, in order to become addicts of restless “rambling”—roaming the countryside in groups, hiking, camping, singing German folk songs, visiting venerable ruins, etc. In one observer’s words, the Wandervogel were “long-haired, untidy bacchants ... strumming on their guitars their collective revolt against bourgeois respectability.”
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The same ideas which led to the rise of Expressionist art in Germany and of medieval Wotan-worship led also to the rise of a whole army of hippies, half a century before Haight-Ashbury.

Like their elders, the German ramblers dismissed “the whore of the Enlightenment,” which is what many of them called the faculty of reason. Like their elders, they sought instead to experience a certain kind of feeling (“warm,” “vital,” “spontaneous”), the kind of feeling, they said, which could be found in primitive societies or in primitive nature or in the Orient—if one gave up one’s individuality and merged oneself into an appropriate, “organic” youth group. Such merger, the youngsters added, requires a leader, a man whom the group members accept, respect, and obey. As a rule the leaders selected were three to six years older than the membership—old enough to be authoritative figures, but young enough to remain part of a crusade directed against adults. The movement’s description of this policy was “youth led by youth.”

On the whole, Germany’s youth movement was socialist but antipolitical. Committed to freewheeling “German instinct,” eager to escape the restrictions of ideology, the members were not much interested in the theory or practice of socialism; typically, they flaunted their disdain for political parties and programs. “Our lack of purpose,” they often said, “is our strength.”

The youth groups did seek action, but in the words of one observer it was action of a special kind: “action without any conscious purpose, without any goal whatsoever.... ‘[I]t would be hard to find a “purer” type of irrational social action in any society.’ This ‘goalless’ activity, motivated more by feeling than by thought, was encouraged by the leaders.”
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The “youth led by youth” were being led in fact by the adults. The group leaders were merely following the national trend. They were doing to their unformed charges what the country’s erudite professors were doing every day to their graduate students—and what the new playwrights were doing every night to their audiences.

The Weimar left was disturbed by the country’s youth groups, and especially by the politics of these antipolitical ramblers. When Walther Rathenau, for instance, was murdered by Free Corps assassins in 1922, the graves of the assassins, who committed suicide, were strewn with flowers and were for years regarded as a shrine, which was regularly visited by reverent youngsters.

The Social Democrats and their allies knew that they had somehow to produce a different kind of German youth. Since the school and university system remained in the hands of the nationalist professorate, there was not much that the socialists could do in the way of educational reform, but they did make some attempts, enough to indicate their ideas on the subject.

What the socialists did, primarily, was to try to spread Progressive education.

The German Progressives purported to foster gentleness and tolerance in the schools as against the harshness of Prussian discipline. Like the nonobjective artists, they spoke of novelty and experiment as against tradition; of free self-development as against what they called the stifling dogmas of the nineteenth century; of peaceful, humanitarian values as against the bloodthirsty nationalism of the regular schools.

The Progressives’ method of achieving these goals was to declare that education is not to be subject-centered but child-centered; that the child learns not by thinking, but by feeling and doing; that the schools must get away from “the onesidedness of a barren intellectual culture”; and that what counts is not the student’s mind or “the logical development of a school subject,” but “the whole child,” especially his heart (or “soul”). “The highest thing is not learning and not subject matter, but the human soul!” said the prominent educator Alfred Lichtwark, who founded the radical Lichtwarkschule in Hamburg.
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The same words could as easily have been spoken by Spengler, or by the Nazi educator Hans Schemm, or by the faculty of the Bauhaus.

While the rightist schools, using the methods of Prussia, were pounding into their students the virtue of unrestrained “instinct,” the Progressives were trying to stem the tide by teaching their charges the virtue of unrestrained “spontaneity.” The Progressives, however, did not pound; their method was to eliminate restrictions, i.e., all educational standards and requirements. In many schools, according to two admiring American observers in 1929, “[t]ime schedules were torn down.... Prescribed curricula vanished.... Subject lines were blotted out.... Children were allowed to choose their own teachers, direct their own work or study and control their own behavior.”

“The immediate result,” these observers write, “was chaos. Not in every school, for there were many which made a more gradual extension of liberties, but in several of those which regarded anarchy as the first step toward freedom there was an era of ‘wildness.’ ” The new schools, however, placed a certain limitation on the wildness.

Yet to-day the individual is not overemphasized. He is not set apart from his connections with the group as if he were an entity, but he is generally looked upon as one whose development and interests are closely bound up with those of society. Room for individual variation is allowed, but the good of the group is to set the limits of personal freedom.
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In the most famous Progressive institution of the Weimar era, the Karl Marx elementary school in Berlin, the group (the child’s peers) became the arbiter not only of freedom, but also of morality and truth. Objective standards of performance were dropped. “The judgment of the group is the standard by which the work and conduct of the individual is measured.” As to any nonconformists in attendance, they soon discovered how much “peaceful tolerance” they could expect from their classmates. In the Karl Marx school, notes E.A. Mowrer, “anything but radical socialism among the pupils was for several years punished by the other pupils with violence and boycott.”
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The socialists’ plan for undercutting the educational establishment was to replace one set of Hegelian disciples by another: to fight brutal, mind-deadening authoritarianism à la Bismarck by means of gentle, mind-deadening subjectivism à la Dewey; to fight elitist romanticism by means of “democratic” anti-intellectualism; to eradicate passionate collectivism (of a nationalist variety) by instilling in the children passionate collectivism (of a socialist variety).

While the children of the bourgeois establishment, trained to be obedient, were taking to the countryside as whim-ridden ramblers, the children of the Progressive institutions, encouraged to be “free” and “wild,” were learning to be socially adaptable, i.e., obedient. Regardless of their teachers’ intentions, both groups were being prepared. They were being prepared interchangeably for the illogic of Kandinsky, the “liberation” of Schoenberg, and the orders of Hitler. As it happened, the wildness of the children proved to be merely a phase; the obedience lasted.

During the twenties, Germany’s youngsters (both rightist and leftist) were in the vanguard of the growing rebellion against the Weimar Republic. The youngsters were rebelling against the establishment in the name of every fundamental idea which they had been taught by every influential spokesman of that establishment. Their parents and teachers, reluctant at first to go along, sought to preach the standard slogans of German ideology, while permitting some remnants of the Enlightenment spirit to be smuggled into the country’s life and institutions. The children rejected the attempt as hypocrisy. They insisted that the adults practice the slogans fully.

In 1890, the signs of what was to come in Germany from the undiluted reign of German philosophy were just beginning to be perceptible. By the 1920s, on both sides of the cultural-political divide, the signs had become blatant.

Such was the nature of the zeitgeist during Germany’s first era of comparative freedom after generations of autocracy.

In any culture, however, there can be exceptions to the dominant trend. The comparative freedom of Weimar Germany gave rise to a flowering of authentic talent which, despite everything else, still gives the period a retrospective glow of light and life. There was an abundance of great names and achievements in the physical sciences and the performing arts. There were Berlin’s celebrated cafes and night-life—in part, decadent; in part, imaginative and colorful. There were the fading, often magnificent, remnants of an earlier, stylized view of art and of man—e.g., the film direction of Fritz Lang and Jo May, and the operettas of Franz Lehar and Emmerich Kalman.

Elements such as these were the products of a brilliant, foredoomed minority. They were the products of men with no intellectual base in the culture and no long-range hope; men who represented the Western past, not the German future, because they had no weapons with which to counter the dominant trend, the irrationalism that called itself Prussia or “progress.”

The European avant-garde did not always cling to the term “progress.” Some groups, such as the Dadaists of France and Germany, were more explicit.

Their purpose, the Dadaists said in 1916, is to cultivate the senseless by unleashing on the public every imaginable version of the unintelligible, the contradictory, the absurd. “Dadaism,” said its advocates, “is against everything, even Dada.” It is against every form of civilization and every form of art. “Art,” they said “is shit”—a dictum faithfully implemented by pictures of the Mona Lisa wearing a mustache, or by collages pieced together from the leavings in somebody’s gutter, or by exhibits such as Max Ernst’s in Germany in 1920. One entered the exhibit through a public urinal, in order to contemplate, among other items, a block of wood with a notice asking visitors to chop at it, an aquarium containing sundry objects immersed in a blood-colored fluid, and a young girl in a communion dress loudly reciting obscene poetry.
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Dadaism is a consistent extreme of the cultural trend of the period. It is the voice of unreason in art gleefully taking on the forms of madness. This is the movement which a prominent American philosopher, some years ago, hailed as “one of the
valid
eruptions of the irrational in this century,”
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and which the German avant-garde at the time praised as daring, witty, and anti-middle class.