Ominous Parallels (27 page)

“Nihilism” in this context means hatred, the hatred of values and of their root, reason. Hatred is not the same as disapproval, contempt, or anger. Hatred is loathing combined with fear, and with the desire to lash out at the hated object, to wound, to disfigure, to destroy it.

The essence and impelling premise of the nihilist-modern is the quest for destruction, the destruction of all values, of values as such, and of the mind. It is a destruction he seeks for the sake of destruction, not as a means, but as an end.

This is what underlies, generates, and defines “Weimar culture.”

Contrary to the cataract of rationalizations spread by their apologists, the Weimar intellectuals were not moved by a feeling of rebellion against the stifling conformity of the German bourgeoisie or the Prussian mindlessness of the imperial establishment. Men do not rebel against mindlessness by urging the abandonment of the mind, and they do not rebel against a specific social class by lashing out at man as such.

The roots of Weimar culture do not lie in the disgust of the younger intellectuals at the senseless slaughter of World War I or the frenzied insanity of the German inflation or any similar “practical” horror. Men do not fight against senselessness by demanding more of it, or against horror by wallowing in it, or against rot by glorifying disease, or against insanity by enshrining lunatics.

The actuating impulse of the Weimar modems was not passion for innovation. Innovation does not consist in reversion to the prescientific era, or in movements urging “back to Kant” or back to Luther or back to astrology, Bushman paintings, and jungle dance rituals.

The Weimar moderns were alienated, as they said, but the cause was not anything so superficial as social institutions or political systems. Their alienation existed on the most profound level men can experience: they were alienated from the basic values human life requires, from the human means of knowledge, from man’s essential relation to reality.

A mass revolt against a specific set of fundamental ideas can be explained only by an acceptance of opposite ideas.

The late-nineteenth-century German intellectuals absorbed what all their deepest thinkers had taught them; they caught the essence of the message: reality is out, reason is out, the pursuit of values is out, man is out; and then they looked at the world around them, the Western world still shaped by the premises of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The intellectuals saw pyramiding scientific and technological discoveries. They saw value-glorifying art animated by an inspired vision of man. They saw purposeful innovators in every field creating unprecedented achievements, men who did not find reason impotent, but who were smilingly confident of their power to achieve their goals. They saw the “bourgeoisie” and the workers and every social class, excepting only themselves and the remnants of the feudal aristocracy, reveling in the luxuries of an industrial civilization, producing goods and happiness, seeking more of both, refusing to sacrifice the treasures which, for the first time in history, masses of men were able to acquire.

The intellectuals saw it, and they knew they had to choose. They had to challenge the anti-mind doctrines they had been taught, or the minds of those who had not yet been indoctrinated. Their alternative was to demolish the view of life bred into their feelings, or the glowing aftermath of the world of the Enlightenment, a world which was, to them, an alien planet and a reproach. They chose according to their fundamentals and their guilt. They became nihilists.

Such men could not create an authentically innovative culture, not while believing that reality is unknowable and that man is helpless. All they could do, aside from resurrecting the irrationalism of the past, was to find their “creative” outlet in destroying what they saw around them. Their goal and product was a cultural wasteland, reflecting the kinds of ideas they felt they could live with.

In the case of the leaders of the modern rebellion, many ugly psychological factors were undoubtedly at work, such as self-loathing, and resentment of the success of others, and the lust to be of significance by destroying what one cannot equal. By themselves, however, motives as vicious as these are impotent: they pertain in any age only to a handful of men, and do not explain the world influence of any trend, including the modernist one. The thing that makes the difference between evil private psychology and powerful public movement is: ideas, fundamental ideas, and the science that deals with them.

It is philosophy—a certain kind of philosophy, established on the world scene by means of formal, detailed, multivolumed, universally respected statement—which left certain kinds of men with certain kinds of psychological motives free to bare their souls publicly, and which wiped out the possibility of any effective resistance to these men and motives, first in Germany, the cultural pacesetter, then everywhere else. Just as a few men with Hitler’s kind of hatred for the Jews have existed for many centuries, but remained impotent publicly until they heard, voiced on a world scale, the philosophical premises they needed to implement their hatred; just as these men were then free to rationalize their feeling as a crusade for purity or lebensraum, to disarm an entire nation, and to gain mass converts to the cause of mass slaughter; so a few men with the modern intellectuals’ hatred for values as such have always existed, but remained impotent publicly until they heard the premises
they
needed. The premises freed them to disarm men on an international scale, to rationalize their hatred as “modern culture,” and to unleash, on a cowed, bewildered public, a crew of noisy activist-“innovators” dedicated to the cause of mass destruction.

The basic liberator (in both cases) was Kant’s philosophy. No earlier system could have done it.

Kant denies this world, not in the name of a glowing super-reality, but, in effect, of nothing, of a realm which is, by his own statement, unknowable to man and inconceivable. He rejects the human mind because of its very nature, while using the same kind of argument against every other possible form of cognition. He regards men, all men, as devoid of worth because they seek values, any values, in any realm.

Kant is the first major philosopher to turn against reality, reason, values, and man as such, not in the name of something allegedly higher, but in the name of pure destruction. He is not an otherworldly thinker, but an antiworldly one. He is the father of nihilism.

The moderate politicians of the Weimar Republic, anxious to combat the irrationalism of the entrenched professorate, created a new university at
Hamburg,
then elevated to the chair of philosophy Ernst Cassirer, one of the country’s top neo-Kantians. This indicates what Germany’s leaders grasped about the cause of their plight or about the effects of ideas.

The German intellectuals translated Kant’s system into cultural terms in the only way it could be done. They created a culture in which the new consists of negation and obliteration.

Thus the “new” novels, whose newness consists in having no plots and no heroes, novels featuring characters without characterization and written in language without syntax using words without referents; and thus the poems “free” of rhyme, the verse “free” of meter, the plays without action, theater without the “theatrical illusion,” education without cognition, physics without law, mathematics without consistency, art without beauty, atonal music, nonobjective painting,
un
conscious psychology—philosophy without metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, or thought.

And thus, too, the conservative intellectuals of Weimar Germany, who hated the modernists’ hatred, and supplied their own brand.

The tone-setters among the conservatives were not nostalgia-craving deadwood, yearning to go back only a few decades or so. They were a new breed, relatively young, highly educated, and more ambitious than that. Such men knew what they thought of thought and of its products, they knew the practical meaning of their crusade against “bourgeois materialism,” they knew what the age of pre-industry and pre-science had been, and that it could be again. Thus Spengler, like Sombart, “repudiates even technological progress and labor-saving devices. The fact that they save hard labor and drudgery and open up the possibility of a good life for the workers is reason enough for condemning them. Work and hardship are good in themselves and general education and progress, illusory.”
¹⁹
And thus in another variant, Ernst Jünger, the fiery conservative youth leader, who hurled anathemas at the bourgeoisie, demanded “heroic” activism, And urged violence, revolution, bloody war—not, he told his eager following, for the sake of ideas or purposes of any kind, but for the sake of violence, revolution, and bloody war.

If “conservatism” means the desire to preserve the traditional forms of a culture, the key to such intellectuals lies in the fact that they were
modern
conservatives, i.e.,
conservative nihilists,
who sought to preserve in order to destroy. What they sought to preserve were the most irrational features, social and intellectual, of the German past. What they sought to destroy were any rational, “Western” imports.

The left-moderns claimed to like the West, but hated its distinctive, nineteenth-century culture. The right-moderns liked the nineteenth century—unmechanized nineteenth-century Prussia—and hated the West. The result was, in effect, a division of labor: the left-moderns concentrated on the
intellectual
attainments of the past, on the destruction of art, education, science (while, sometimes, wishing to retain technology); the right-moderns, taking German irrationalism for granted, concentrated on the
material
attainments, on the destruction of the machine age and of industrial civilization.

Such was the kind of choice offered to Germany by its intellectual leaders: the hatred of every human value in the name of avant-garde novelty, or in the name of feudal reaction. The rejection of nature by the Oriental method, or by the medieval method. The denunciation of the mind as an obstacle to “self-expression,” or to social obedience. Man as a primordial, Freudian brute versus man as a primordial, Wagnerian brute. Ideas as futile versus the intellect as arid. Life as horror versus life as war. Cynical pessimism on one side versus cynical pessimism on the other side. The open nihilism of Brecht or of Ernst Jünger.

In the orgy which was the cultural atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, the Germans could not work to resolve their differences. Disintegrated by factionalism, traumatized by crisis, and pumped full of the defiant rejection of reason, in every form and from all sides, the Germans felt not calm, but hysteria; not confidence in regard to others, but the inability to communicate with them; not hope, but despair; not the desire for solutions to their problems, but the need for scapegoats; and, as a result, not goodwill, but fury, blind fury at their enemies, real or imagined.

Nihilism in Germany worked to exacerbate economic and political resentments by undermining the only weapon that could have dealt with them. The intellectuals wanted to destroy values; the public shaped by this trend ended up wanting to destroy men.

The social corollary of “Weimar culture” was a country animated, and torn apart, by hatred, seething in groups trained to be impervious to reason.

The political corollary was the same country put back together by Hitler.

For years the Weimar culturati, left and right, dismissed Hitler as a crank who was not to be taken seriously. The leftist intellectuals regarded Nazism as a movement devoid of Ideas; Hitler, they said, is merely a vulgar rowdy or a lackey of big business. The rightist intellectuals, as a rule cultured men who were not racists, listened uneasily to Hitler’s gutter denunciations of their own favorite targets, such as communism and cultural Bolshevism; the Nazis, they said, are rabble who are debasing the ideal of a reborn Germany. Both these groups found 1933 inexplicable. How, they wondered, as they stumbled dazedly out of the country or into the concentration camps, could a band of near-illiterates have been able to achieve respectability and power on a nationwide scale?

To an extent, the role of the conservative intellectuals in this regard has been recognized. (Their political ideas are so close to those of the Nazis that it is difficult for anyone to miss the connection.) The role of “Weimar culture,” however, has not been identified.

Did Freud say, pessimistically, that man is ruled by violent Instincts which no rational political arrangements can alter, and that social equilibrium depends on each individual repressing his deepest desires? The Germans heard Hitler say it, too—euphorically. And they heard that, in regard to enforcing such repression, there is an agent more potent than the superego: the SA.

Did the progressive German hear the Existentialists say that one must think with one’s will? Did he hear the new theologians say that the “self-sufficiency of reason” is the fundamental sin? He heard the Nazis promise “the triumph of the will” and an end to the age of reason.