Wagner prisms: Romanticism/Modernism, Fascism/Nazism/Communism
Laon
to observe that romanticism led to fascism and Nazism, and that
fascism and Nazism are a kind of final development of romanticism.
For example, here's a quotation from entry on Nazism provided by the
free on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia, article on Nazism:
"Many see strong connections to the values of Nazism and the
irrationalist tradition of the romantic movement of the early 19th
century. Strength, passion, lack of hypocrisy, utilitarianism,
traditional family values, and devotion to community were valued by
the Nazis and first expressed by many Romantic artists, musicians and
writers."
The Wikipedia on-line encyclopedia is a good example for my purposes,
since while it may not be accurate on matters of fact, it is an
excellent guide to what a moderately well-read person might say at a
dinner party, about a topic they didn't know all that well. That is,
it's a perfect guide to received opinions and widely-held unexamined
beliefs, which is what I'm interested in here.
The relevance is that this belief about romanticism is for many people
a prism through which they perceive Wagner. That is, their view of
Wagner is both coloured and distorted by the beliefs they hold about
romanticism and modernism, and also about fascism, Nazism and also
communism. Thus the "romanticism" section of the Wikipedia article on
Nazism continues:
"For instance, the Nazis identified closely with the music of Richard
Wagner (a noted anti-Semite and the author of Das Judenthum in der
Musik). Many of his operas express the ideals of the strong dominating
the weak, and a celebration of traditional Norse aryan folklore and
values. The style of music is often vry militaristic."
I'm not going to bother picking through that interesting summary of
what "Richard Wagner" is all about, because in this context I'm more
interested in what is said about romanticism. But it's a good example,
demonstrating how a distorted picture of romanticism is connected to a
distorted view of Wagner. (I don't want to pick on Wikipedia unduly; I
think it's a good project and I hope it will continuously improve.)
So that's my topic. The plan of subheadings I've set myself goes
something like this:
1. Overview of the sort of claims that are made about romanticism by
people who want to link the romantic movement to fascism and Nazism.
What assumptions are made about the nature of romanticism, and what
philosophical and political ideas are associated with romanticism, by
people making these claims?
2. At the same time, who makes these claims about the nature of
romanticism?
3. To what extent, if any, are the claims true? That is, is there
such a thing as romanticism, or are there many different romanticisms?
If a central political or philosophical thread can be discerned in,
or associated with romanticism, what is it? If not, is it possible to
produce a genealogy of romanticisms, with different philosophical and
political ideas?
4. If the claims about romanticism appear to be true, then of course,
that's the end of the issue. But if, when identified and examined,
they seem instead to involve substantial misrepresentation, then the
question of agenda arises. What agendas are served by a radical
misrepresentation of the nature of romanticism, and a spurious linkage
from romanticism to fascism/Nazism?
That's basically the topic to explore, as I currently see it. My
initial bias is obvious enough: right now I think that romanticism is
grotesquely misrepresented by those writers who link it to fascism or
Nazism. Just the same, this is an exploration, not an exposition.
That is, I mostly plan to wander round library shelves and search
engines, and find things out as I go along. And while I'll be starting
out with some views on the answers to question 3, I don't have much on
questions 1, 2, and 4.
So other than trying to follow the plan above, I don't know where this
will go. But this is a project I've been thinking about and putting
off for quite a while, and it's time to get stuck in. I hope it's
occasionally entertaining.
Excelsior!
Laon
REP
news:4f8f3beb.04060...@posting.google.com...
One of the most important aspects of the Romantic movement is the
re-discovery of nature and its breadth, which the Nazis seemed to lack
beyond comprehension. As for the other things ("Strength, passion, lack of
hypocrisy, utilitarianism, traditional family values, and devotion to
community"), I just have to balk. I mean, what? Are we talking about the
Nazis, Romantics, or Betty Crocker?
According to dictionary.com, Romanticism is "[a]n artistic and intellectual
movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by
a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual's expression of
emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of
classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions."
In other words, everything the Nazis weren't.
REP
Richard Partridge
[snip]
> Thus the "romanticism" section of the Wikipedia article on
> Nazism continues:
>
> "For instance, the Nazis identified closely with the music of Richard
> Wagner (a noted anti-Semite and the author of Das Judenthum in der
> Musik). Many of his operas express the ideals of the strong dominating
> the weak, and a celebration of traditional Norse aryan folklore and
> values. The style of music is often vry militaristic."
>
>
[snip]
That is a truly remarkable quotation! We can't help but wonder where such
misinformation comes from.
Dick Partridge
Elizabeth Hubbell
Laon wrote:
> <SNIP>Thus the "romanticism" section of the Wikipedia article on
> Nazism continues:
>
> "For instance, the Nazis identified closely with the music of Richard
> Wagner (a noted anti-Semite and the author of Das Judenthum in der
> Musik). Many of his operas express the ideals of the strong dominating
> the weak
hmmmm.....I suppose we see that in Parsifal?????;-)
<sigh>
Well, Laon, I certainly see problems in that Wikipedia quote for starters.
Respectfully,
Geoffrey Riggs (Assoluta Monster<G>)
www.operacast.com/assoluta.htm
Laon
I suppose I might send Wikipedia a suggested correction (though where
would you start?), but in the meantime I'm mainly interested in their
quote as an example of how perceptions of romanticism affect
perceptions of Wagner.
Anyway the first task I set myself was:
1. Have a go at getting an overview of the sort of claims that are
made about romanticism, by people who want to link the romantic
movement to fascism and Nazism. What assumptions are made about the
nature of romanticism, and what philosophical and political ideas are
associated with romanticism, by people making these claims?
I'm starting by giving various examples, showing the different ways in
which this idea, that Nazism is an outgrowth of romanticism, is
expressed. At this stage I plan to comment briefly on obvious major
errors and rhetorical tricks in these citations as we go along, but to
hold the detailed arguments until the key claims and issues have been
identified.
After collecting a range of examples of passages in which a writer
either argues or takes it for granted that fascism and Nazism are a
development from romanticism, I've decided to arrange my sample quotes
into four categories. That means I can just give a few emblematic
examples in each category.
First category: Romanticism/Nazism as truism: or, "Everybody knows
that Romanticism leads to Nazism, so I don't need to argue it"
So the idea of a supposed link from romanticism to Nazism is not
usually transmitted by argument. Instead, the writer wanting to
promote this idea simply assumes, or pretends, that the connection
between romanticism and Nazism is something so well known and so
universally agreed that it needs no justification or discussion. The
Wikipedia article I cited earlier provides one example of that.
Here's another example showing the idea as a received, supposedly
uncontroversial truism. It's from the program to a 2003 exhibition on
Expressionist German films of the 1920s, at the Goethe Institute at
Montreal.
"And, when Louis-Bernard Robitaille reminds us in La Presse, November
3 2002, that 'Nazism found its source in part in Romanticism', it is
his way of telling us that the films of the New German Cinema hold up
mirrors which are difficult to look into, but which expose a human
face, demanding to be exorcised."
La Rochelle, Réal, Introduction to _Shadows of Romanticism_, January 9
- March 14 2003, Goethe Cinema, Goethe Institut, Montreal.
Comment:
A neat example of the rhetorical implication that it isn't even
necessary to argue this claim about romanticism; all that
Louis-Bernard Robitaille needed to do is "remind us", as it is
something that we all already know.
(By the way, that mirror that Professor La Rochelle mentions, the one
that exposes a human face when you look at it, seems a bit
unremarkable to me. My experience is that most mirrors will do that.
But as for that face needing an exorcism, he can speak for himself.)
Still with the world of the arts, here's another example.
"National Socialism was a decadent flowering of Romantic Nationalism,
aimed at restoring Germany to the status it had in Medieval times,
encouraging an aggressively expansionist drive, supported by notions
of race and Lebensraum."
Source: Becker, Lutz, "Aspects of Art in the Third Reich", from _The
Romantic Spirit in German Art 1790 - 1990_, South Bank Centre,
National Galleries of Scotland and Oktagon Verlag, p 391.
Comment:
We'll leave aside the fact that "restoring Germany to the status it
had in Medieval times" presumably means "dividing Germany back into
hundreds of principalities, and having those tiny principalities
regularly bashed about by every passing army in Europe".
Instead we're only interested in Becker's claim that this is the sort
of thing that "decadent romantics" are likely to want. "Aggressive
expansionist" drives and "notions of race and Lebensraum" were also
part of the romantic agenda, apparently. Gosh. Which romantics would
that be? Becker doesn't think it necessary to say.
I'll finish this first section with a more substantial set of claims
about the fascist/Nazi nature of romanticism. In this quotation the
claims are still made as if no evidence or argument is required. But
at least it goes into specifics that give a better idea of what these
people might mean.
"Romanticism, the third major secular world view, has spread widely
from its original homeland, late 18th and early 19th-century Germany.
Romantics reject both reasonableness and rationality, they exalt the
inspired unreason of the artistic genius, the child, the primitive
uncorrupted by civilisation. Rousseau, Emerson, Wagner, Nietszche and
Frantz Fanon should be on a list of romantic prophets, and idealist
philosophers like Kant and Hegel arguably are closer to romanticism
than to humanism or rationalism. [...]
"[...] The second world war was a struggle between three secular
civilisations: the humanist (Roosevelt and Churchill), the rationalist
(Stalin), and the romantic (Hitler)."
Source: Lind, Michael, Whitehead Senior Fellow, _Prospect_, October
25, 2001
Comments:
1. France has at least as much claim as Germany to be the "original
homeland" of Romanticism, according to orthodox sources such as the
_Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought_, the _Columbia History of
Western Philosophy_, and others. But you make Germany the "original
homeland" of Romanticism by claiming the Schlegel brothers, Tieck,
Schleiermacher and Novalis as the first romantics; you make France the
"original homeland" by pointing to Rousseau, who pre-dated the lot of
them. You make England the "original homeland" by pointing to George
Crabbe and Robbie Burns, who also pre-date the Germans, and dismissing
Rousseau (corrently in my view) as an Enlightenment figure who
influenced the romantics but was not one himself. I'm sure you can
also argue a case for Italy, Belgium or the Netherlands being the
"original homeland" of romanticism. The truth is that romanticism was
a pan-European phenomenon whose origins are ill-defined. Citing
Germany in particular as the "original homeland" of romanticism is not
a historical truth but a rhetorical claim: the agenda, in the case of
a writer wanting to link romanticism to Nazism, is fairly obvious.
2. Lind's chosen time period for romanticism, "late 18th and early
19th century" is also less innocent than it might appear. It's clear
from other reading I've done, which I'll discuss later, that Lind is
following other sources by American political conservatives, and he is
quite possibly unaware of why he is departing from the usual timespan
given for the romantic period. The usual time period would be around
the latter half of the 1790s through to around the 1890s, with
significant strands of romanticism surviving until the First World
War. The rhetorical purpose of pushing romanticism back in time, to a
period much earlier than any of the figures usually thought of as
romantics (for example Shelley, Wordsworth, Turner, Delacroix, Hugo,
Hölderin, Schumann, Berlioz, Chopin, and so on) is to include as
romantics a number of anti-Enlightenment figures who were political
authoritarians, but who were actually contemporary with the
Enlightenment. But I'll discuss this issue of chronology and sleight
of hand in more detail later.
3. A rejection of "reasonableness and rationality" is not a common,
let alone a defining, characteristic of the actual historical
romantics. For example of the figures cited above, Shelley was a
sceptical thinker whose philosophy was deeply influenced by the
Enlightenment genius Hume. Hugo was a middle-of-the-road liberal while
Wordsworth was a fairly middle-of-the-road conservative. The others
were somewhere in between. Perhaps Chopin was the most testy figure of
that randomly chosen set of romantics, and even he could hardly be
described as a rejector of "reasonableness and rationality".
4. Probably the only member of Lind's list of "Romantic prophets" who
was deinitely a part of "romanticism" is Wagner. Rousseau was an Age
of Reason philosophe along with his contemporaries Voltaire and
Diderot, though his novels influenced the romantics. Emerson lived
during the romantic period (1803-1882), but is not usually described
as part of the romantic movement, while my view would be that
Nietzsche emphatically rejected romanticism. And including Franz Fanon
as a romantic, when he was actually a 20th century Marxist
revolutionary, was flatly dishonest on Mr Lind's part.
5. In fact any list of supposed "romantic prophets" is dishonest if it
excludes all such far more typical and mainstream representatives of
romanticism as the names listed under point 2, above, or other typical
romantic figures such as Keats, Coleridge, Brahms, Verdi, Heine,
Gericault, Liszt, Stendahl, Tchaikovsky, and so on.
It is reasonable to suspect that Lind chose not to mention many actual
romantics because simply to list the names of real major romantic
figures, the real ones who lived on the real Planet Earth, is to go a
long way towards ridiculing Lind's claims about that dreadful movement
they belonged to. [Warning: some rhetoric may have been used in the
preceding sentence.]
6. The sentence about Kant and Hegel being closer to romanticism than
humanism or rationalism hangs on the spurious idea, implied but not
openly stated, that romanticism is somehow incompatible with
rationalism or humanism. In reality somewhere between all and very
nearly all of the romantics can be described as humanists, while the
majority of the romantics were also rationalist.
7. In any case, Lind defines romanticism as, among other things,
"rejection of reasonableness and rationality". I am no fan of either
Kant or Hegel, but I still know that it's untrue beyond the point of
absurdity to charge either thinker with rejecting "reasonableness and
rationality". Nor do they really fit into any of the more standard,
non-silly, definitions of romanticism. Of people who really were
romantics, some liked them (for example Coleridge deeply admired
Kant), some thought idealist philosophy was a joke (for example
Byron), while most of the romantics showed no sign of caring about
either philosopher, one way or the other.
8. Calling Stalin "rationalist" is merely a rhetorical device for
smearing rationalism, in the same way and for the same reasons that
calling Hitler "romantic" is a rhetorical device for smearing
romanticism.
That'll do for now. Next post will look at some of the more nuanced
claims, that actually try to argue a case. And I'll throw in a couple
of nutjobs, eg Lynd0n Lar0uche's take on the romantic movement, for
comic relief.
Cheers!
Laon
REP
You're welcome!
[...]
> 1. Have a go at getting an overview of the sort of claims that are
> made about romanticism, by people who want to link the romantic
> movement to fascism and Nazism. What assumptions are made about the
> nature of romanticism, and what philosophical and political ideas are
> associated with romanticism, by people making these claims?
Let me start by saying that before now I'd never before even heard of anyone
linking Romanticism with fascism or Nazism during my comparatively short
life. The idea strikes as me complete bunk hardly worth rebutting, but I
guess I'd better one-up some of these jive cranks with a little argument.
[...]
> Here's another example showing the idea as a received, supposedly
> uncontroversial truism. It's from the program to a 2003 exhibition on
> Expressionist German films of the 1920s, at the Goethe Institute at
> Montreal.
>
> "And, when Louis-Bernard Robitaille reminds us in La Presse, November
> 3 2002, that 'Nazism found its source in part in Romanticism', it is
> his way of telling us that the films of the New German Cinema hold up
> mirrors which are difficult to look into, but which expose a human
> face, demanding to be exorcised."
> La Rochelle, Réal, Introduction to _Shadows of Romanticism_, January 9
> - March 14 2003, Goethe Cinema, Goethe Institut, Montreal.
>
> Comment:
> A neat example of the rhetorical implication that it isn't even
> necessary to argue this claim about romanticism; all that
> Louis-Bernard Robitaille needed to do is "remind us", as it is
> something that we all already know.
[...]
A somewhat ambiguous statement ('Nazism found its source in part in
Romanticism.') Yes, I think it's safe to assume that Nazism is a synthesis
of many different things, and that Nazism found its source "in part" in many
different things, one of which might have been Romanticism. I find this
citation too vague to be incendiary or even meaningful, but its not quite
harmless, either. Certainly it begets an explanation, which is sorely
missed.
> Still with the world of the arts, here's another example.
>
> "National Socialism was a decadent flowering of Romantic Nationalism,
> aimed at restoring Germany to the status it had in Medieval times,
> encouraging an aggressively expansionist drive, supported by notions
> of race and Lebensraum."
>
> Source: Becker, Lutz, "Aspects of Art in the Third Reich", from _The
> Romantic Spirit in German Art 1790 - 1990_, South Bank Centre,
> National Galleries of Scotland and Oktagon Verlag, p 391.
Restoring Germany to the status it had in Medieval times might not have the
meaning the author had in mind because, as you say, the 'country' wasn't
that much to look at during the Middle ages. Germany's Medieval 'pride'
sprouted up during the 18th century with the rediscovery of the
Nibelungenlied, among other things. Even then I don't think their pride had
anything to do with Germany's political status, but instead focused on the
culture and art that they had produced during those times. (Certainly Die
Meistersinger is about artistic and not political pride.) This was, after
all, the beginnings of Deutschland's real national history, as anything
prior to the First Reich would have been too separated from contemporary
national identity to be considered anything more than pre-historic. I
consider this to be the peoples' re-discovery of their roots, and its more
than excusable considering my own American infatuation with my country's
history and founding fathers.
Wagner inserted a certain kind of 'Nationalism' into, and depicted Medieval
settings in his works, as did so many other Romantics. But both Medievalism
and Nationalism existed long before the 18th century; for example, even when
discounting the Histories, many of Shakespeare's plays are set in Medieval
times; Wagner and the Romantics were no different from Shakespeare in how
they utilized the Medieval setting for a dramatic purpose. While all of
these artists could recognize the inherent drama and beauty found in
Medieval subjects, they knew there could not be a return to those more
heroic times, nor did any of them desire it either in its ideal (the
imaginary Germanic history of the 19th century) or realistic (the true
Germanic history) realizations. As for Nationalism, that goes at least as
far back as the ancient Greeks and Romans.
[...]
> "Romanticism, the third major secular world view, has spread widely
> from its original homeland, late 18th and early 19th-century Germany.
> Romantics reject both reasonableness and rationality, they exalt the
> inspired unreason of the artistic genius, the child, the primitive
> uncorrupted by civilisation. Rousseau, Emerson, Wagner, Nietszche and
> Frantz Fanon should be on a list of romantic prophets, and idealist
> philosophers like Kant and Hegel arguably are closer to romanticism
> than to humanism or rationalism. [...]
>
> "[...] The second world war was a struggle between three secular
> civilisations: the humanist (Roosevelt and Churchill), the rationalist
> (Stalin), and the romantic (Hitler)."
>
> Source: Lind, Michael, Whitehead Senior Fellow, _Prospect_, October
> 25, 2001
Here is where the confusion and word-twisting occurs. First of all, 'world
view' is used in perhaps the most misleading and confusing way imaginable.
What exactly does the author mean by that? First of all, Romanticism was a
movement (emphasis) and not an epoch as the author seems to want to make us
forget, or at least blur the lines. If Romanticism is to be an epoch, then
any thought, event, or occurence can be linked to it simply by virtue of the
fact that it was contained within its time parameters. Perhaps what the
quote you originally cited from Wikipedia meant to say was that Nazism found
its inspiration in events or thoughts that occured coincidentally with the
Romantic movement (meaning, in the 19th century), and not that the movement
itself espoused prototypically Nazi ideologies, because that's a very hard
pill to swallow. Romanticism is clearly defined, as are the historical
figures related to it, none of whom can be seen as the symbollic forebears
of Nazism or fascism.
REP
Laon
> A somewhat ambiguous statement ('Nazism found its source in part in
> Romanticism.') Yes, I think it's safe to assume that Nazism is a synthesis
> of many different things, and that Nazism found its source "in part" in many
> different things, one of which might have been Romanticism. I find this
> citation too vague to be incendiary or even meaningful, but its not quite
> harmless, either.
True. That's my fault, for trying to keep the examples brief, and
over-doing it. Giving a bit more of the citation gives a better idea
of the flavour of it. This wasn't a nuanced statement that some
aspects of romanticism might have payed a peripheral role in the
ancestry of Nazism, but a link from romanticism, only, and no other
movement, to Nazism.
"Shadows of Romanticism
"Sturm und Drang. Storm and Stress. The term used at the turn of the
nineteenth century to characterize the new Romanticism which, born in
Germany, spread to all corners of Europe.
[...]
"The Führer is a German product, just like the Haydn of the national
anthem, or the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony, or the temple of
Bayreuth where Winifred Wagner was so pleased to receive Hitler for
the anti-Semitic high mass of the Meistersingers of Nuremberg, or
indeed the long populist, nationalistic cycles of the Tetralogy or
Parsifal.
[...]
"And, when Louis-Bernard Robitaille reminds us in La Presse, November
3 2002, that 'Nazism found its source in part in Romanticism', it is
his way of telling us that the films of the New German Cinema hold up
mirrors which are difficult to look into, but which expose a human
face, demanding to be exorcised."
[Professor Réal La Rochelle]
I hope that gives a better picture of where the writer was coming
from. In context the claim, "Nazism has its source in part in
romanticism", was certainly intended to convey that romanticism was a
major and important source of Nazism, the only "source" of Nazism that
La Rochelle mentioned. The extra context I've provided also gives
another example of how this attitude towards romanticism affects
perceptions and portrayals of Wagner: I particularly like the line
claiming that _Die Meistersinger_ is "the anti-Semitic high mass".
> Wagner inserted a certain kind of 'Nationalism' into, and depicted Medieval
> settings in his works, as did so many other Romantics. But both Medievalism
> and Nationalism existed long before the 18th century; for example, even when
> discounting the Histories, many of Shakespeare's plays are set in Medieval
> times; Wagner and the Romantics were no different from Shakespeare in how
> they utilized the Medieval setting for a dramatic purpose.
Agreed. One of the minor reasons for being thankful that fascism never
got more than a toehold in England is that an English fascist state
would certainly have made maximum use of Shakespeare, especially but
not only the Henry IV and Henry V history plays. {As I think Mike has
recently said.] Also Milton and Wordsworth, of course, and Elgar,
Vaughan Williams and Purcell, and so on. And later, a school of
writers would come along to try to do the fascists the enormous and
undeserved favour of arguing that they had been quite correct to lay
claim to these artists; that Shakespeare, Vaughan Williams, etc,
really were proto-fascists all along.
> Here is where the confusion and word-twisting occurs.
Yes, Lind is a piece of work, isn't he? The basic method for
justifying the claim the romanticism led to Nazism, or that Nazism is
a decadent outgrowth of romanticism, involves constantly slipping the
boundaries of what the relevant words mean. So "romanticism" first
refers to one period, then another; includes people who have nothing
to do with romanticism, and then transfers the attributes of those
people to other people who actually were romantics in the normal sense
of the word; and so on.
But as a general comment I'd reiterate that this linkage from
romanticism to Nazism is certainly false, but also that it isn't just
a mistake made by a few eccentrics. My impression is that there has
been a sort of campaign to promote that idea. I don't mean a
"campaign" in a conspiratorial, or even coordinated, sense. I just
mean that there were and are cultural interests that are/were served
by having "romanticism" take a fall in prestige, and so writers from a
number of perspectives started taking whacks at romanticism's edifice.
I'm starting to clarify my ideas on the various directions that this
has come from, but I'll try to leave that topic till later.
I said that in the next post (ie this one) I'd give examples of the
more nuanced and better-argued attacks on romanticism. But I'll hold
that for now.
Instead I'll give more examples of Category 1: "Everyone knows this,
so it doesn't need to be argued"
Here's one:
"The final piece of the roots of Fascism, along with the Enlightenment
and Romanticism, is Romantic Materialism, which came about in the
latter half of the 19th century."
Source: A Right-wing US Christian web Site, arguing that romanticism
caused Hitler - along with atheism, of course.
The url was: home.infostations.com/quietsun/athart4.htm, but the page
seems to have moved. However you can find the cached version of the
page by googling any of the above words. (This one skips any mention
of Wagner.)
Here's another:
"Köhler traces the legacy of the German romantic tradition and the
irrational, egocentric, nationalistic and intolerantly utopian
features which were shared by Wagner and Hitler."
Source: The publisher's blurb for Joachim Köhler's _Wagner's Hitler:
The Prophet and his Disciple"
And:
"II. The Origin and Roots of Fascism
[...]
It arose out of the following milieu:
1. Alienation: [...]
2. Romanticism: This was a reaction to the above alienation.
Romanticism reasserted the value of the natural world in that it was
seen not as a machine but as a living organism. Nature must not be
approached with reason and intellect but by experience and emotions,
irrationalism as opposed to rationalism. The immanance [sic] of God
(or gods) was emphasized while transcendence denied. Romanticism was
also characterized by a nostalgia for the past and an admiration for
the primitive. It was believed that primitive cultures were morally
superior because they were more in tune with the natural world.
3. Darwinism: [...]
4. Existentialism [...]"
Source: A Texas-based Christian Right web site, run by the Christian
Information Ministry. The article is unsigned, but credits its ideas
to _Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian World View_, by
Gene Edward Veith Jr. The ideas on romanticism that Vieth, among other
Christian Right writers, appears to be promoting are (1) insane and
(2) influential.
I know these guys are nuts; but that's no reason to dismiss them as
irrelevant. They are culturally very influential. And it's cultural
influence and the transmission of ideas that I'm trying to trace here.
Another example, coming from a different perspective:
"Arendt identified two poisonous roots of the tribalism that
culminated in twentieth century totalitarianism: Romanticism and the
race-thinking which took the form of pan-Germanic and pan-Slavic
movements. [...] In mid-nineteenth century the Comte de Gobineau,
enthralled with Romanticism, welded the two notions [romanticism and
race-thinking] together into his historical doctrine of the
"spiritual" superiority of the German race. It was a doctrine that
borrowed much from Hegel, Nietzsche and Romantic Idealism in general."
Source: Hutcheon, Pat Duffy, "Hannah Arendt on the Concept of Power",
paper to Conference of the Research Committee on the History of
Sociology (International Sociological Association), Amsterdam, May,
1996.
Comment: This time romanticism is raised to the status of being one of
the only two reasons for "twentieth-century totalitarianism", the
other being "race-thinking".
Side-issue: If Hutcheon has reported Hannah Arendt accurately, then my
opinion falls even further, of the woman who helped Martin Heidegger
get away with his Nazi-period crimes, including getting his Jewish
colleagues sacked from their university posts, leading to at least one
death (Husserl's).
Arendt's material on Gobineau, if reported accurately, goes beyond
possible mistake and on to what has to be deliberate fabrication. In
the next paragraph, not quoted by me, Arendt is reported as claiming
that Gobineau identified Jews as the enemies of Aryans, and as the
"lowest of sub-races". That isn't a possible misunderstanding of
anything Gobineau actually said; that's a dishonest academic telling
lies, presumably in the knowledge that at the time Gobineau's book was
out of print and his reputation at a low ebb, so it was probably safe.
Gobineau was racist in other ways, and deserves a bad reputation for
other reasons. But if Hutcheon has reported Hannah Arendt accurately,
then she was telling lies about a topic of some importance, which is
something that academics should try to avoid.
Even more of a side-issue: Arendt reportedly claimed that Gobineau
borrowed from Hegel [which is utterly untrue] and also Nietzsche. That
last is some achievement, since Gobineau wrote the _Essay on the
Inequality of Human Races_ around 1850, while Nietzsche's first book
was published in 1872.
Anyway, I promised that my next post (ie this one) would include
citations from a few nutjobs, for comic relief. And with the extra
examples I've cited it looks like I've delivered, even though I'd
actually decided against it. But as I said, the Christian Right is a
very powerful force and shouldn't be dismissed, and they do seem to be
an important player in a move to link the romantic movement to Nazism.
I'll theorise about reasons for this later.
Cheers!
Laon
Chernobog
--
Chernobog
Laon <pra...@presto.net.au> wrote in message
news:4f8f3beb.04060...@posting.google.com...
Laon
while, and I'm already finding out things that I, at least, am finding
fascinating. A couple of things I've happened across have surprised
the hell out of me, though I won't be writing about them for a few
posts yet. One surprise is that George Dubbya Bush, POTUS and
potentate, actually features as a bit player in this particular
cultural fight. It's an unexpected connection, and I'll come to it
later.
The other discovery is only a personal one, but I've enjoyed it; that
is, making the acquaintance of the early German romantics, especially
Novalis. Good writers, honourable people, being systematically
traduced and defamed in some circles. There are interesting
similarities between Novalis' political ideas (a republic, but one
that has a king), and ideas on the role of art as a replacement for
religion, and those of Wagner. However I can't find a single reference
to Novalis anywhere in Wagner's prose, or letters, or in his or
Cosima's _Diary_ entries, so there may not be any direct influence at
all. Anyway, that's also a topic for later.
I'll start with my first correction so far. When I attacked Hannah
Arendt for helping Martin Heidegger to cover up the extent of his
actual criminality during the Nazi years, I gave as an example of
Heidegger's crimes the dismissal of Jewish university enployees,
including Husserl. In saying that I was following Elzbieta Ettinger's
_Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger_ [1995].
However it seems that this was incorrect: that particular deed was
done by Heidegger's predecessor as rector of Freiberg University. (Now
I'm following Mark Lilla's _The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in
Politics_ [2001].) Still, Heidegger cut off contact with all Jewish
academics, refused to supervise Jewish students, wrote pro-Nazi
propaganda, and secretly denounced at least two anti-Nazi academics to
the Nazi authorities. Much admired these days by some on both the left
and the right of politics, Heidegger was no romantic, but he was a
Nazi. But I digress, as Tom Lehrer used to say.
Anyway, I identified a second category into which several of the
attacks on romanticism fit, and promised to gie examples. We are
talking about the nutjobs. The idea that romanticism is a cause of
Nazism, or that Nazism is a decadent product of romanticism, has also
permeated the halls and the occipital bones of the barking mad.
Category 2: Nutjobs
First up is Islamic writer Harun Yahya, author of the searing exposé,
_Romanticism: A Weapon of Satan_. Yahya's book kicks off with a verse
from the Quran 17:64): The promise of Satan is nothing but delusion.
Chapter 3, "Romantic Nationalism" explains that, as we'd expect,
Nazism is a product of that form of romanticism known as romantic
nationalism. Moreover, romantic nationalism itself is the fault of
evil atheists, such as Charles Darwin:
"Romantic nationalists have resorted to a few philosophical and
so-called scientific revelations to help justify their penchant for
the shedding blood. The basis of these revelations is Darwin's Theory
of Evolution."
The blood-thirsty nature of Darwinist romantics naturally led to
Nazism, and the subsequent slaughter, explains Yahya:
"More precisely, the Nazi meetings were mass-hypnosis sessions, which
completely robbed people of their reasoning faculties, and put them
under the spell of romanticism. Triggering the Second World War, this
romantic hysteria cost the lives of 55 million people.
"Nazism is merely one example of the destructive consequences of
romanticism. Because romanticism robs people of their reason, and
places them under the power of their emotions, it can lure them into
every kind of perversion."
[Source: _Romanticism: A Weapon of Satan_, chapter 3]
Comment:
In fairness to Harun Yahya, I should say that at least his site
condemns antisemitism and is unequivocal about Hitler having been a
bad thing, which is not something you can take for granted in
Muslim-run websites. So while Yahya seems to be somewhat off his
trolley, he's not as bad as some of his on-line co-religionists.
The other point worth making is that Yahya isn't really much crazier
than the Christian Right writers I cited earlier. Both have a story to
tell, and it's that Nazism is caused by an absence of fundamentalist
religion, especially in the form of romanticism, Darwinism, and
atheism in general. (And the religious right had nothing to do with
Nazism at all.)
The odd part of this apparent hatred of romanticism, emanating from
the fundamentalist religious right, is that while Shelley and a few
other major romantics were atheists, and Wagner probably was, overall
romanticism was not especially atheist in orientation.
Here's another:
"So, Romanticism is of that form. It takes the form with Liszt, of
someone who is clever, who is well trained, who knew how to fake it,
and could fake Classical performance, Classical forms and composition.
That is one form.
"The other form is the more extreme form of Nazism and similar kinds
of things, or the rock-drug-sex counterculture. This is another form
of Romanticism. Complete irrationalism, controlled by wild
emotions--'I feel, I feel, I feel, I feel.' That's Romanticism."
[Source: Why yes, that's Lyndon Lar0uche.
It's an excerpt from "Answers From Lar0uche": Q: Could you enlighten
us on Romanticism? November 1, 2003 East Coast Cadre School.]
Comment:
Hmmm. So romanticism not only caused Nazism, but also
sex'n'drugs'rock'n'roll. There's probably no need to comment, except
to ponder the thought that Lyndon R. believes that the Queen of
England is a major drug dealer. I can think of at least one place
where all those drugs must be going.
I'm going to quote one more. It's from a crap science-fiction writer
called David Brin PH D, and it comes in the middle of a screed
accusing Tolkein of being a fascist.
(So did I, a while ago, but I was wrong. I've read some more on the
point, including Tolkein's own statements, and I withdraw the slur
entirely. I have various reservations about the politics of LOTR, but
I acknowledge the reality that Tolkein was strongly anti-fascist.)
Anyway, here's David Brin:
"Calling the scientific worldview "soul-less," [Tolkein spurned] the
modern emphasis on pragmatic experimentation, production, universal
literacy, progress, cooperative enterprise, democracy, city life and
flattened social orders. In contrast to these "sterile" pursuits,
Romantics extolled the traditional, the personal, the particular, the
subjective, the rural, the hierarchical and the metaphorical.
[...]
"Romanticism never made any pretense at equality. It is
hyperdiscriminatory, by nature. (Have you ever actually read Byron or
Shelley?) Whole classes of people are less worthy, less deserving of
life, than other classes. The Nazis were archetypal Romantics. (Ever
listen to Wagner?) Deal with that."
Comment:
In the version published by _Salon_, the editor tried to save Brin
from embarrassment by cutting his words: "(Ever listen to Wagner?)
Deal with that." However Brin put his original draft up on his
website, so I've quoted the version he obviously preferred.
Anyway, Brin claims that romanticism is opposed to such things as
science, literacy, democracy, etc. And he claims that romanticism
promotes the view that whole classes of people are less deserving of
life than others: next stop the Holocaust.
I'd probably have lumped Brin in with the equally clueless writers
from the Christian right, rather than with Lar0uche and Yahya, except
for the one detail of his rhetorical quesion: "Have you ever actually
read Byron or Shelley?" For Brin to write that empty challenge isn't
just clueless, it's insane. Because anyone who has read either writer
knows that Byron was a passionate democrat, and that Shelley was not
only a passionate democrat but the most passionately pro-science great
writer in English. Brin clearly knew nothing of either writer, and
bluffed, hoping that no-one else would have read them either. But
their work is not exactly hard to find. A bluff that easily called
strikes me as ... nuts.
Anyway, that's enough of the silly stuff. In the next posts I'll move
on to the people who offered actual substantive arguments.
Cheers!
Laon
Derrick Everett
<snip>
>
> The other discovery is only a personal one, but I've enjoyed it; that
> is, making the acquaintance of the early German romantics, especially
> Novalis. Good writers, honourable people, being systematically
> traduced and defamed in some circles. There are interesting
> similarities between Novalis' political ideas (a republic, but one
> that has a king),
Although this idea of a king as the head of a republic might seem odd
today, it was taken seriously by Immanuel Kant. The same idea was
advocated by Wagner in his speech to the "Vaterlandsverein" in 1849.
> and ideas on the role of art as a replacement for religion, and those of
> Wagner. However I can't find a single reference to Novalis anywhere in
> Wagner's prose, or letters, or in his or Cosima's _Diary_ entries, so there
> may not be any direct influence at all. Anyway, that's also a topic for
> later.
I'm not at home and therefore unable to check immediately but I seem
to recall at least one reference to Novalis in CT. In any case there
are passages in the libretto of "Tristan u. Isolde", especially in the
second act, that have Novalis written all over them ("Hymns to the
Night").
<snip>
>
> The odd part of this apparent hatred of romanticism, emanating from
> the fundamentalist religious right, is that while Shelley and a few
> other major romantics were atheists, and Wagner probably was, overall
> romanticism was not especially atheist in orientation.
>
I think it would be difficult to make a case for Wagner as atheist,
although it could be argued that he was agnostic. His many statements
about religion are varied and not, or at least not obviously,
consistent, except for his constant scepticism towards organised
religion and for his prevailing interest in mysticism. It is clear
that some of his views on religion changed over the years. In his
later years, under the influence of Darwin, he said to Cosima, "God is
Nature". That statement has to understood, like many statements made
by Wagner in later life, in the context of Schopenhauer. Even if
Wagner was not an atheist, Schopenhauer certainly was one, and his
view of Nature was that she is indifferent to our fate.
On another occasion (also recorded in CT) Wagner said that he did not
believe in God but only in divinity, which fits in with the reference
to "'o dios" (Greek for "the divine") in his essay "Religion and Art".
Here I suspect the influence of Marcus Aurelius. So if Wagner did
believe in God, his belief tended towards Stoicism rather than
Christianity.
--
Derrick Everett
Laon
> > There are interesting
> > similarities between Novalis' political ideas (a republic, but one
> > that has a king),
And Derrick responded:
> Although this idea of a king as the head of a republic might seem odd
> today, it was taken seriously by Immanuel Kant. The same idea was
> advocated by Wagner in his speech to the "Vaterlandsverein" in 1849.
I was thinking of the "Vaterlandsverein" speech in particular, which
seems to be a direct echo of Novalis, but without mentioning his name.
Though Wagner expressed a broadly similar idea about 15 years later,
in "On State and Religion", though this time without using the
paradoxical term "republic". But he described a democratic
constitutional monarchy, in which a citizenry with equal rights bans
together into fellowships to represent their interests. These
"equal-righted fellowships" become the political parties, and contend
for Government, in a system that allows regular changes of Government.
But there is also a King with symbolic and representational functions,
to ensure continuity and stability, and to represent national ideals
higher than mere party politics.
> I'm not at home and therefore unable to check immediately but I seem
> to recall at least one reference to Novalis in CT. In any case there
> are passages in the libretto of "Tristan u. Isolde", especially in the
> second act, that have Novalis written all over them ("Hymns to the
> Night").
There are no references to Novalis in the index, at least of Skelton's
translation. However it's often struck me that the indexing of CT was
a very shoddy job. So Novalis' absence from the index unfortunately
does not mean that he is necessarily absent from the text. But I don't
feel like skimming the 2,000-odd pages looking for him. If you can
remember the wherabouts of a discussion of Novalis, or even a passing
mention, I'd be most grateful.
> I think it would be difficult to make a case for Wagner as atheist,
> although it could be argued that he was agnostic. His many statements
> about religion are varied and not, or at least not obviously,
> consistent, except for his constant scepticism towards organised
> religion and for his prevailing interest in mysticism.
Yes, I think you're right, and though I hedged my bets with a
"probably", even that was too strong a statement. I've never found a
clear statement from the later Wagner on theological matters, though
my impression is that he was not a theist. Even the mysticism does not
seem to me to be theist in form. But it's a murky area. In the
meantime I'll amend to "probable agnostic" rather than "probable
atheist".
Regards to you, and thanks for those comments.
Laon
Derrick Everett
<snip>
>
> Though Wagner expressed a broadly similar idea about 15 years later, in
> "On State and Religion", though this time without using the paradoxical
> term "republic". But he described a democratic constitutional monarchy,
> in which a citizenry with equal rights bans together into fellowships to
> represent their interests. These "equal-righted fellowships" become the
> political parties, and contend for Government, in a system that allows
> regular changes of Government. But there is also a King with symbolic
> and representational functions, to ensure continuity and stability, and
> to represent national ideals higher than mere party politics.
>
>> I'm not at home and therefore unable to check immediately but I seem to
>> recall at least one reference to Novalis in CT. In any case there are
>> passages in the libretto of "Tristan u. Isolde", especially in the
>> second act, that have Novalis written all over them ("Hymns to the
>> Night").
>
> There are no references to Novalis in the index, at least of Skelton's
> translation. However it's often struck me that the indexing of CT was a
> very shoddy job.
At least that of Skelton's English translation, especially the first
volume, whose index is enough to drive one to drink.
> So Novalis' absence from the index unfortunately does not mean that he
> is necessarily absent from the text. But I don't feel like skimming the
> 2,000-odd pages looking for him. If you can remember the wherabouts of a
> discussion of Novalis, or even a passing mention, I'd be most grateful.
>
>
Indeed, Novalis is not mentioned in the index of either volume of
Skelton's English translation of the diaries. Nor is Friedrich von
Hardenberg. However, turning to the German edition, I found three
references: they directed me to the entries for 16 April, 18 April and 19
May 1879. It is good to know that my memory has not failed completely!
In April and May 1879 it appears, from the Diaries, that Wagner was
reading Carlyle's book about Novalis. (Wagner's interest in the
anti-democratic radical Carlyle is, of course, an interesting subject in
its own right). No reference, however, to Wagner reading Novalis himself,
although it is likely that he had read both "Hymnen an die Nacht" and
"Glauben und Liebe", since it is in the latter that Novalis wrote of the
king as republic.
--
Derrick Everett (deverett at c2i.net)
==== Writing from 59°54'N 10°36'E ====
http://home.c2i.net/monsalvat/index.htm
Laon
> > There are no references to Novalis in the index, at least of Skelton's
> > translation. However it's often struck me that the indexing of CT was a
> > very shoddy job.
Derrick wrote:
> Novalis is not mentioned in the index of either volume of
> Skelton's English translation of the diaries. Nor is Friedrich von
> Hardenberg. However, turning to the German edition, I found three
> references: they directed me to the entries for 16 April, 18 April and 19
> May 1879. It is good to know that my memory has not failed completely!
Your memory inspires me with awed admiration. Thanks for that! Though
I suppose this means I'll have to read Carlyle on Novalis. Which is a
shame. I've several times got up to about page 20 of Carlyle's _The
French Revolution_ before giving it up; the man writes gush, fluent
gush and lots of it, and I find him literally unreadable.
I agree that Wagner is likely to have read "Hymnen an die Nacht" and
"Glauben und Liebe", just on the grounds that he was an educated 19th
century German, as well as the question of influence.
Anyway, I've covered two categories of statements disseminating the
romanticism/Nazism meme:
(1) The "this is so well known that I don't need to provide argument
or evidence" approach; and
(2) The barking mad, as in, "Help! The romantics are coming, with
their drugs and electric guitars, their atheist Darwinism and their
elitist anti-literacy campaigns, and they've hypnotised all the
Germans!"
The other two categories are:
(3) Statements where the author makes some show of presenting an
argument or evidence, but writes about romanticism as if it were one,
unified phenomenon;
(4) Statements where the author makes some show of presenting an
argument or evidence, and bothers to distinguish which writers, which
kinds of romanticism, are being discussed.
I'll give a couple of examples from category (3) in this post. They're
reasonably typical.
Here's a writer beloved by US conservative intellectuals, Isaiah
Berlin. Berlin wrote enjoyable essays, often on interesting topics,
and he projected a pleasantly humane and cultured persona. And it's
not obvious (to me) from his writing that he would inherently support
the "right" rather than the "left" of US politics, as those terms are
used in the US. So I'm not expressing any partisan feeling about
Berlin when I say that I have no idea why he is apparently held in
such reverence. Certainly his take on romanticism is no great evidence
for his accuracy as a resource or his acuity as a thinker.
Anyway, take it away, Isaiah Berlin:
"Suppose you went …and spoke with [various European Romantic
intellectual figures, including Hugo, de Staël, Schlegel, Goethe,
Coleridge, Byron etc] Suppose you had spoken to these persons. You
would have found that their ideal of life was approximately of the
following kind.
"The values to which they attached the highest importance were such
values as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one's life to
some inner light, dedication to an ideal for which it is worth
sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and
dying. You would have found that they were not primarily interested in
knowledge, or in the advancement of science, not interested in
political power, not interested in happiness, not interested, above
all, in adjustment to life, in finding your place in society, in
living at peace with your government, even loyalty to your king, or
your republic.
"You would have found common sense, moderation, was very far from
their thoughts. You would have found that they believed in the
necessity of fighting for your beliefs to the last breath in your
body, and you would have found that they believed in the value of
martyrdom as such, no matter what the martyrdom was for. You would
have found that they believed that minorities were more holy than
majorities, that failure was nobler than success, which had something
shoddy and vulgar about it. The very notion of idealism, not in its
philosophical sense, but in the ordinary sense in which we use it,
that is to say the state of mind of a man who is willing to sacrifice
a great deal for principles or some conviction, who is not prepared to
sell out, who is prepared to go to the stake for something which he
believes, because he believes in it - this attitude was relatively
new.
"What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul,
the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no
matter what it was.
"No matter what it was: that is the important thing."
[Source: Berlin, Isaiah, _The Roots of Romanticism_, Princeton
University Press, February 8, 1999, pp 8-9
Comment:
This provides valuable insight into what people may be thinking when
they claim that romanticism is a precursor of Nazism. I'll form a
summary of these themes later, after presenting all of my selected
examples.
An oddity is that Berlin's factual claim about "what romantics
thought" is backed by a list of examples, but his claim is not true of
a single one of the people on his list. In fact I don't know of any
romantic figure of whom it could be said that they did not care about
the difference between one idea and another, that they did not care
what they believed so long as they believed it strongly.
For example could Byron have supported the brutal Turkish occupation
of Greece as readily, or as passionately, as he supported the cause of
Greek independence?
Could Schiller have written in praise of an Austrian overlord in
Switzerland just as easily he wrote _William Tell_ about a Swiss
rebel? Or Rossini set it?
Could Coleridge just as easily have been a Methodist, say, instead of
a Kantian Christian?
Of course not. In each case and more, of course not. Romantics may
have held some positions passionately, though they also held positions
half-heartedly, or ironically, or nonchalantly, or calculatedly, and
so on, depending on the individual and the issue. But they generally
arrived at their positions through a combination of reasoning and the
application, consciously or otherwise, of guiding principles which as
a matter of historical fact were generally derived from the
Enlightenment: for example liberty, democracy, national independence
from foreign occupation, the "brotherhood of man", the virtues of
benevolence and philanthropy, and so on.
So why would Berlin say something so obviously false, so plainly
silly? I think it is because he did not stop to think about a single
one of the people he named. Instead his error arose from thinking of
them as part of a de-individualised mass, "the romantics", a category
that did not, for him, contain anything as inconvenient as real human
minds and personalities. De-individualisation and depersonalisation of
this kind is, of course, one of the intellectual and moral failings
generally associated with the 20th century tyrannies that Berlin
opposed. It was seldom, I think, a fault committed by the romantics
themselves.
By the way, the attitudes attributed by Berlin to the romantics do
arguably exist, but not among the romantics. Oscar Wilde sometimes
said things like that, though I feel that his supposed substitution of
aesthetics over morality was a pose, something that Wilde did not
really believe in. But you might find something of the kind in early
modernists such as the French decadents Huysmanns, Bataille, and so
on, whose writing I'm afraid I find extremely silly and irritating.
We've got room for one more in this post. This is a historian, J G
Stern, getin out of his field and his depth.
"Romanticism places individual man in opposition to a world now only
conceived and experienced as the world outside, and it sees man in
terms which hitherto had been thought contradictory, as a creature
both sentimental and heroic. The value by which this new man lives is
neither piety nor virtue, neither loyalty nor constancy nor even the
search for scientific truth, but his capacity for experience.
Romanticism informs him at one and the same time with a boundless
sensitiveness and openness toward ever subtler impressions from the
world outside, and a capacity for heroic self-assertion: He lives in
this conception of himself by his imagination and by his
self-determining will. And under both these aspects - as artist and as
man of power - he sees himself, not as the executor of a Divine Will
or the servant of an acknowledged authority or the member of a
preestablished hierarchy, but as a maker and creator. The will - not
the common will of a body politic but his individual solitary will,
mythologized to a heroic dimension - is his instrument. He is a maker
of his kingdom: the powerful embattled personality we find in ... [The
will] imposes its demands upon the world and attempts to fashion the
world in its own image. Romantic, Faustian man forms, and in all but
the literal sense creates, his own conditions and thus the world.
"To this new conception of man the imperatives of traditional
morality, whether Christian or Enlightened, do not apply and, given
his assertion of autonomy, it is hard to see that any objective moral
scheme, anything but a purely private morality, is likely to command
his allegiance. His acts are no longer judged in relation to a
publicly sanctioned moral code or agreed scheme of public virtues, or
by his conformity to a conscience (for conscience can never be
anything but the inward form of a publicly sanctioned moral code). His
acts are judged according to a criterion of immanent, inward
coherence: that is, according to the degree to which a man's
utterances and actions express this total personality and indicate his
capacity for experience. Utterances are seen as actions as poetry, and
poetry as the consummation of living experience."
Source: Stern, J P, _Hitler: The Fuhrer and the People_, University of
California Press, 1975, p.43.
Comment:
My impression here is that Stern has assembled a hodgepodge of things
that are said about, variously, about romanticism, Nietzsche, and
Existentialism, and said them all about romanticism.
But rather than do any detailed analysis or argument now, I'll add it
to my summary of the themes that underlie the attack on romanticism,
and discuss those once this exposition, and the summary, is complete.
Next stop Ivan Tillich.
Cheers!
Laon
Laon
> > Novalis is not mentioned in the index of either volume of
> > Skelton's English translation of the diaries. Nor is Friedrich von
> > Hardenberg. However, turning to the German edition, I found three
> > references: they directed me to the entries for 16 April, 18 April and 19
> > May 1879.
I wrote:
> Your memory inspires me with awed admiration. Thanks for that! Though
> I suppose this means I'll have to read Carlyle on Novalis. Which is a
> shame.
Sydney Uni has an ancient Victorian set of Carlyle; it seems to have
rested undisturbed for the last several decades. The "Novalis" essay
focusses principally on Novalis as a mystic, only secondarily as a
poet, and not at all as a political thinker.
I was interested in Carlyle's citation from Tieck, who said that
Novalis died too young to fully learn and understand renunciation; I
thought Wagner was likely to respond to that remark. Which it turns
out, from Cosima's _Diary_ entry, he did.
Wagner also singled out one of Novalis' remarks, quoted by Calyle, on
the poet Klopstock: that Klopstock's poetry reads as if it were a
translation from some unknown great poet, carried out by a talented
but unpoetical philologist. Which is a rather good line: malicious,
but not wrong.
Derrick also wrote:
> > Wagner's interest in the anti-democratic radical Carlyle is, of course, an
> > interesting subject in its own right
Yes, but although he liked Carlyle's style as an essayist, he didn't
necessarily share Carlyle's opinions. For example Monday 27 February
1882:
"Then R. expresses his surprise over his [Carlyle's] taking sides
against the Negroes, saying how rarely a person is completely free; he
feels that deism, which inhibited even Goethe, also oppressed
Carlyle's spirit."
That would mean that Wagner had just read Carlyle's essay, "On the
Nigger Question", which is as distasteful a piece of writing as it
sounds. Carlyle set out to defend slavery, and chose to do it by means
of what he must have thought was humour, or at least irony. Carlyle's
thumpingly facetious tone as he tries to mock abolitionists, suggest
that whipping never did a black person harm, and similar themes, is
seriously repellant even from this distance in time.
So it's good to see Wagner reacting against Carlyle's views, though
hardly surprising, since Wagner's opposition to slavery and support
for the abolitionist cause (after all, the United States only got
round to abolishing slavery relatively late in Wagner's lifetime)
comes up a number of times in the _Diaries_.
Tillich and romanticism will have to wait for now.
Cheers!
Laon
Alberich00
Thanks for your comments on Carlyle and his sickening views on the
slavery question. I recall another of Wagner's remarks to Cosima
(can't remember the date from the Diary, but probably in 1879, when
the Zulus vanquished a whole British regiment (or whatever) at
Isandhlwana), castigating Prince somebody or other (the son of
Napoleon III, I think) for going off to Zululand to join the British
in their trumped up spree against the Zulus, a shameless land
takeover. The Prince died at the hands of the victims of his sport,
and Wagner observed that the Zulus are human beings too. Of course,
like most white guys in the 19th Century he also thought, sadly, that
they were inferior.
Most scholars of the 19th century, even the brightest, seem not to
have grasped the complex laws of history, and how what we describe as
higher, literate civilization begins and spreads. Europeans had
nothing to do with it until Cretans absorbed the lessons of Egypt and
the Levant. Most forgot that the majority of Europeans, until medieval
times, were illiterate and on more or less a bronze-age level, i.e.,
in a cultural situation somewhat similar to many of the tribes and
states of sub-Saharan Africa, and that it was only thanks to the
conquests of Christian states which had inherited the legacy of the
classical world, that many Europeans were introduced to what we now
call higher civilization. It is on record that the original tribe
which gave Prussia its name was still using stone tools in certain
large swamps of present day Poland until the 13th century.
alberich00
pra...@presto.net.au (Laon) wrote in message news:<4f8f3beb.04060...@posting.google.com>...
Mike Scott Rohan
from alber...@operamail.com (Alberich00) contains these words:
> Dear Laon:
> Thanks for your comments on Carlyle and his sickening views on the
> slavery question. I recall another of Wagner's remarks to Cosima
> (can't remember the date from the Diary, but probably in 1879, when
> the Zulus vanquished a whole British regiment (or whatever) at
> Isandhlwana), castigating Prince somebody or other (the son of
> Napoleon III, I think) for going off to Zululand to join the British
> in their trumped up spree against the Zulus, a shameless land
> takeover. The Prince died at the hands of the victims of his sport,
> and Wagner observed that the Zulus are human beings too. Of course,
> like most white guys in the 19th Century he also thought, sadly, that
> they were inferior.
Except, oddly enough, the British of the day, who knew better of the
Zulus and did not -- as a rule -- regard blacks as a whole as subhuman
in the manner of, for example, the vicious German and Belgian colonists
in Tanganika and the Congo. Even the despatch reporting the massacre at
Isandlwhana pays tribute to the Zulus' military organization and
discipline. While you are right in regarding the Zulu War as a
deliberate move against the Zulu kingdom, it was not a "trumped-up
spree" or, as it's more subtly put by some US historians, an attempt to
Balkanize the "Zulu" tribes. It was certainly a colonialist takeover,
but not an attempt to exterminate the Zulus or evict them from their
land -- I believe that was largely done by the Boers, later on. At the
time it was simply seen as another stage in bringing a dangerously
savage people under civilized control. Not what we would approve of
today, but neither evil nor extreme by the universal standards of the
time -- far less so than contemporary American actions against Indian
tribes, or the actions of other colonial powers. The Zulus were an
extreme threat both to colonists and to their own neighbours. Since the
time of King Dingaan and his more famous son Shaka they had been
organized into what we would call, literally, a fascist military
dictatorship with a built-in compulsion to expand and colonize. Shaka, a
psychopath's psychopath, believed in a state of permanent war and
regimented his people accordingly. His kraal was surrounded with the
rotting corpses of his loyal subjects, impaled for offences like not
being enthusiastic enough in assegai drill, or having sex with a woman
of the tribe before they were middle-aged (raping women of lesser tribes
was okay, or preferably the quivering corpse of an enemy -- he
encouraged that). In his own lifetime he subjugated, very nastily,
thirteen other tribes, which were subsumed into the Zulus and provided
them with cannon-fodder. They'd subsided a bit since then, but Cetewayo,
their most able monarch since Shaka, had ambitions. Hence the British
moved against them, and hence Isandlwhana, which seems to have happened
due to a combination of surprise, munitions problems -- the wrong
calibre ammunition, among other things -- and sheer overwhelming
numbers; the Zulu generals made no attempt to preserve the lives of
their warriors, but would simply have them stand there and be killed
simply to gauge the range of the enemy's guns, or send them repeatedly
into a wall of fire simply to exhaust ammunition. In short, they weren't
very nice people, and pretty much as supremacist and racist as any
Europeans. The racism reappeared in the dying days of the old South
African regime, when Zulu goon squads willingly terrorized other tribes
at the behest of the white government; they felt they had more in common
with the Boers.
As to the Prince, I'm not aware of any "sport" he had with the Zulus;
you make them sound like poor innocent victims he was hunting for
pleasure, or something of the sort. In fact he was riding with a small
patrol, about ten or fifteen men, I think, at a fairly quiet time when
they were ambushed by a greatly superior force. They tried to escape,
but most were pulled down and butchered. He was probably just a normal
army lieutenant of the time, and the accounts and memoirs we have of
other such young officers make it clear they were not monsters or
brutes, but rather ordinary people, often with a positive liking for the
natives. There were exceptions, of course, as there are in any group of
people, but on the whole British culture of the time militated against
real brutality. The common soldier was more likely to be brutal, usually
out of ignorance,but that too was discouraged; in India, for example,
soldiers were heavily penalized for offending native religious
sensibilities. If you want to see an example of British attitudes to
natives at the time, try Rider Haggard's romance King Solomon's Mines.
It has plenty of patronizing attitudes, but also a deep respect for the
natives. Haggard served in Africa for many years and knew the Zulus
well, and he makes an "unspoiled" Zulu civilization the centre of the
book. He opens it with his narrator remarking that he has known whites,
even the best educated, who were not gentlemen, and natives who were;
and goes on to demonstrate it with the character of the exiled Zulu
prince and preux chevalier, Umbopa, who is acknowledged as the equal of
the idealized white man Sir Henry,. There's also a highly sympathetic,
though doomed, interracial romance. Not everyone would have gone that
far; but Haggard was among the two or three best-selling British authors
of his day, so people evidently liked his ideas.
Carlyle, thankfully, was not very representative -- hence the force of
his expression. He was an extremist, a wild card, and a mighty windbag,
very much like Wagner in his anti-semitic diatribes (Carlyle was fairly
anti-semitic too, especially where Disraeli was concerned). And like
Wagner, and again thankfully, Carlyle was a much pleasanter and more
decent person in everyday life, notably kind to indigents like Leigh
Hunt even when he was poor himself. He even made it up with Disraeli,
more or less.
> Most scholars of the 19th century, even the brightest, seem not to
> have grasped the complex laws of history, and how what we describe as
> higher, literate civilization begins and spreads. Europeans had
> nothing to do with it until Cretans absorbed the lessons of Egypt and
> the Levant. Most forgot that the majority of Europeans, until medieval
> times, were illiterate and on more or less a bronze-age level, i.e.,
> in a cultural situation somewhat similar to many of the tribes and
> states of sub-Saharan Africa, and that it was only thanks to the
> conquests of Christian states which had inherited the legacy of the
> classical world, that many Europeans were introduced to what we now
> call higher civilization. It is on record that the original tribe
> which gave Prussia its name was still using stone tools in certain
> large swamps of present day Poland until the 13th century.
But this is just the PC version, just reversing the blinkered 19th
century attitude for nose-thumbing purposes -- "Europeans savage!
Non-Europeans good!". In actual fact you can't treat the evolution of
civilizations in such a crudely linear fashion. For one thing, anyone
who actually studies ancient history soon realizes that it isn't
diffusionist -- it isn't something that's passed from one superior race
to a lesser, as your diatribe suggests. Nor can you arbitrarily divide
peoples by saying Cretans were "European" whereas "Levantines" were not.
That's just another kind of racism. Civilization has sprung up many
times in many races of man, and the Europeans were neither more nor less
capable of it than any other. The early inhabitants of Britain didn't
derive their stone-circle culture, of which Stonehenge was only a small,
though stunning part, from anyone else -- and they were creating that
when the Egyptians were just getting going. Of course there were very
often mutual influences, but there had to be civilization to accept
those influences in the first place. You are right to say that contact
with Islam and further East had some good influences on European
civilization (pasta!), but the "bronze-age level" and "Sub-Saharan"
business is utter historical and archaeological nonsense, and I can't
imagine where you got it. From the same place, perhaps, as the
caption-writer at a Native American site near the Grand Canyon who tried
to claim that these marginal peoples, scratching out a living with
digging sticks and wood spears in a desert environment, were more
"civilized" than their Anglo-Saxon contemporaries -- because desert
skills were more significant than minor things like houses, stone-built
churches, metal-working, literature, commerce, ships, a Europe-wide
culture etc etc. Of course the NAs were not "inferior", and yes, their
lifestyle did demand great skills -- but even so, I bet they'd sooner
have lived the life of an Anglo-Saxon peasant, well fed and with rights
of his own in a rich society. The Anglo-Saxons and their neighbours,
even the marginal barbarians we call Vikings, were far, far more
sophisticated than the sub-Saharans (who were advanced enough) in
everything from technology to social order.
And you can't dismiss the whole of European culture just because it
hadn't reached some of the more extreme edges. Perhaps that tribe were
still using stone tools in the 13th century; but at precisely the same
time the small church in my village was a living part of an already
ancient intellectual and cultural network that extended across a
continent and was already reaching across Russia and as far as China.
Perhaps it did miss the odd corner along the way; so did Islamic
culture, in the Sahel area, Palestine and elsewhere. And while contact
with Islamic states did indeed have many beneficial effects on European
civilization, very often it was simply giving them back the things that
European civilization -- Greece and Rome -- had originally given the
Middle East. Before the Romans conquered the Middle East, with
spectacular blood and brutality, it was largely tribal and only
marginally civilized. Roman culture had an immense influence -- you can
still see it even in small things like the common Arabic place-name
"Qasr", which is Latin "castra", here meaning a fortified Roman town.
The great Moorish civilization, though naturally its own creation, drew
a great deal from Greece and Rome, as later Turkey did from Byzantium
before and after its conquest. Much of both the Moorish and the Roman
legacy suffered severely -- in Egypt, for example -- in the often brutal
and ignorant conquests by the Arab peoples later on, and in the
increasing narrow-mindedness and illiberalism that afflicted the
culture, leading it to abandon, under religious influence, the civilized
arts it had once been proud of, and creating what we see in the region
today. Europe, on the other hand, moved on to the Renaissance, and
thence to the culture which presently dominates the world. And you won't
do any good by pretending it doesn't or shouldn't, or trying to make it
out as some terribly wicked creation. It's no more evil in its history
than any other successful culture, and a lot better than most; and
unlike many, it has liberalized as it matured. Part of its success today
is the opportunity it now offers the individual, more than any other in
history.
That doesn't make Europeans inherently superior, of course; but those
19th century historians can be forgiven for assuming so. It was no more
than every other civilization before them had assumed about itself (and
often still does, as witness China). And their nearest rivals were not
exactly covering themselves in glory. For example, the Ottoman sultan at
the time was considered to have completed all the education necessary
for governing his empire by taking courses in mathematics, marksmanship
and magic. If you look at the 19th century world dispassionately,
European (including American) civilization *was* streets ahead of
everyone else. The Middle East and China had turned inward, and gone
dormant; Indian culture had been shattered by the Iranians, while Iran
itself declined. Russia was stuck fast in mud, ignorance and feudalism,
Turkey likewise, with drier mud. The fact that this was just another
stage in the cycle didn't occur to them, any more than it did to the
Chinese or the Incas; and at least their mistakes have helped to give us
a previously unequalled perspective on such things.
Laon
And kia ora to Mike, whose characterisation of the British soldiers of
the day, and defence of Western Civilisation, remarks on Carlyle and
sundry other matters I agree with; and I enjoyed the essay very much.
But, being in pacifistic mode today, I also agree with Alberich00
about the land-grabbing motives of the British (as did Mike, come to
that), despite the absolute horror of the "politics" of the Zulu
leadership.
And now I'm going to retreat back to Carlyle for a bit. It's notable
that when Goebbels wanted to raise der Führer's spirits, in the last
days in the Bunker, he didn't turn to no Wagner. Instead he read aloud
to Hitler from Carlyle's biography of Friedrich Barbarossa. In
translation, I assume. But seriously, folks, I don't think that
Carlyle caused the Third Reich.
On the slavery issue, Carlyle was certainly on the wrong side while
Wagner was on the right side. But as Alberich00 and Mike both said,
racism, in the sense of a belief that black people were intellectually
inferior, was then the standard.
And racism was a different issue from slavery/abolitionism. Most of
the abolitionists, including Abraham Lincoln as well as Wagner, were
racist in a modern sense. To them the question was how you should
treat Black people, as a moral issue involving compassion rather than
a belief in equality.
Still, if after condemning Carlyle we surveyed admired 18th and 19th
cultural figures to see who lined up on which side of the slavery
versus abolitionist debate, I expect we'd get a few other nasty
surprises. (I expect that Wagner's anti-slavery stance is also a nasty
surprise, to some of his detractors.)
Something else occurred to me while reading Carlyle's "Novalis" and
"On the Nigger Question" essays and skimming some of his other
writing. Carlyle is a terrible writer, convoluted, over-worded,
clumsy; his sentences run like a knock-kneed adolescent giant hurtling
down a hill, trying to stay upright by flailing his arms about.
But his style started to remind me of someone else. It was the weird
neologisms that clinched it: "daydrudges", "winter-necessaries", and
even "tonepoets". Carlyle was surely the literary model for the worst
writer in human history: Wagner's translator William Ashton Ellis, the
McGonagall of prose!
Which raised a further, horrifying, possibility. Wagner actually liked
Carlyle's writing, perhaps because it sounds more natural to a German
ear than an English one. So it's quite possible that Wagner might have
also liked Ellis' hideous translations, and wondered what we've all
been complaining about, all these years. Just a thought.
Anyway, since I've started on a silly note, and since Tillich is
turning out to be a long topic, I'll deal with a few other side issues
now, and come to Tillich next time.
A correction:
I wrote, "Next stop, Ivan Tillich"! [Slaps forehead.] I manage to
get through a discussion of Isaiah Berlin without once calling him
Irving Berlin, and that took some doing, let me tell you, and then go
and write "Ivan Tillich". I meant Paul Tillich, theologian, and not
Ivan Illich, the pop-philosopher guy from the 1970s.
Another correction:
To be fair to David Brin, I said that his _Salon_ article on LOTR was
"a screed accusing Tolkien of being a fascist", but it would be more
accurate to say that he wrote "a screed accusing Tolkien of holding
and promoting fascist and Nazi values."
To be unfair to David Brin, I'll mention that when I was trying to
navigate back to his Salon article, Google took me to a website of fan
gossip about a science-fiction convention. I was about to move on when
I realised that Google wanted me to read a woman called Jo, who was
explaining why she had found it necessary, during this SF convention,
to tip her drink over David Brin's head. The next page contained a
rebuttal of Jo's account from Brin himself. Having judiciously weighed
up both stories, my conclusion is that if I weren't already spoken
for, I'd offer Jo the Drink-Thrower my hand in marriage, tomorrow or
at the drop of a hat.
A note on science and the romantics
Anyway, while I was looking on David Brin's site for the Salon article
I found an earlier article by him, which also attacked the romantics
for their alleged hostility to science. An oddity was that he chose
to back this claim by contrasting practical Benjamin Franklin, symbol
of the scientific and good, with romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley, symbol
of all that is antiscientific and bad.
That's odd because you don't need to know much about Shelley to know
that he was strongly and practically interested in science, especially
chemistry and electricity, and believed that scientific advance was a
force for political liberation and social equality. And Shelley was a
spectacularly ill-informed choice for the role of the AntiFranklin, as
he admired Franklin and reported to his friend and biographer Thomas
Jefferson Hogg (who witnessed other Shelleyan electrical experiments)
that before coming to Oxford he'd carried out electrical experiments
with kites and thunderstorms.
The funny side is that recent research suggests that Franklin didn't
actually implement his famous kite experiment. Instead, it is
suggested, Franklin carried out a thought experiment, which he wrote
up as if he'd actually done it. However Shelley's Franklinian
experiments seem to have involved a real electrical kite and real
storms. So it's just remotely possible that the first person actually
to try the famous kite-wire-key-thunderstorm experiment was not
practical old Ben in America, but romantic young Percy, in Horsham,
England. Yes, it's _extremely_ unlikely, but I'll enjoy the
possibility for a while longer before I do anything boringly
destructive like fact checking.
On science and the romantics in general, and steering briefly back
on-topic, I'd note Wagner's practical interest in new technology as it
related to stagecraft. Wagner probably also thought that his water
cures and other passing fads were scientific. Their promoters would
have presented them as science; it's just that they were bad science.
Wagner showed better judgement on scientific issues when he accepted
Darwin and rejected Gobineau, and also polygenist theories of
evolution.
Wagner's attitude to science, to the extent that he had one, was more
typical of the romantics generally than Shelley's enthusiasm. It would
be a fair summation to say that most romantics, like Wagner, had no
strong feelings about science, positive or negative. Most were mildly
interested in some issues that could be called scientific, and not in
others.
Brin seems to think the romantics were anti-science on the ground that
many of them deplored the environmental destruction caused by early
industrialisation. For example one aspect of the _Ring_ that has only
recently been getting its due recognition is its environmentalism.
But environmental concern is only evidence of an antiscientific
attitude if you deny that ecology is a science, which is hardly a
position that many scientists would endorse. History has largely
validated the ecological concerns expressed by many (not all)
romantics, and examples of more recent industrialisation in developed
countries demonstrate that careful and sustainable industrial
development is possible without massive environmental destruction.
So some romantics were arguably ahead of their time, from a scientific
perspective, in recognising the practical importance of ecological
issues. I prefer a meadow to a wasteland myself, and if Wordsworth's
poetry helped affect the culture in such a way that the preservation
of meadows was encouraged, then I'm grateful to the reactionary old
sod.
Though even Wordsworth wasn't always a reactionary. He was a young
left-wing romantic before he was an old conservative romantic. The
left-wing Wordsworth, a far better poet than his conservative
successor, observed in the Preface to _Lyrical Ballads_ (1798) that
there was no inherent conflict between science and poetry. Science
would become a more natural topic for poetry as scientific language
became more familiar in ordinary discourse, he argued. And he wrote
this tribute to a great scientist:
"[...] I could behold
The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through the strange seas of Thought, alone."
_The Prelude_ (1799-1805), Book III, ll 59-63.
Anyway, that's enough about romantics and science. (And it's enough
David Brin. I don't know the man, I just read some of his work and had
one of those Dr Fell reactions. The reason why, I cannot tell.)
Next post, really, I'll get to Paul "Don't Call me Ivan" Tillich.
Cheers!
Laon
Mike Scott Rohan
from pra...@presto.net.au (Laon) contains these words:
> Hi Alberich00, and thanks for those comments.
> And kia ora to Mike, whose characterisation of the British soldiers of
> the day, and defence of Western Civilisation, remarks on Carlyle and
> sundry other matters I agree with; and I enjoyed the essay very much.
> But, being in pacifistic mode today, I also agree with Alberich00
> about the land-grabbing motives of the British (as did Mike, come to
> that), despite the absolute horror of the "politics" of the Zulu
> leadership.
Yes, I'm afraid at that time they were a great deal closer to one
another in attitude than they are to us, not least in seeing the world
through the eyes of the autocrat and the warrior. What looks like
land-grabbing to us was natural to them, and even, in the British case
anyway, something of a duty. But anyone who has studied the British
assault on the Indian cotton trade can have no doubt that base profit
was at the bottom of colonialization; and, to be fair, it was attacked
as such by even quite prominent figures at the time.
> And now I'm going to retreat back to Carlyle for a bit. It's notable
> that when Goebbels wanted to raise der Führer's spirits, in the last
> days in the Bunker, he didn't turn to no Wagner. Instead he read aloud
> to Hitler from Carlyle's biography of Friedrich Barbarossa. In
> translation, I assume. But seriously, folks, I don't think that
> Carlyle caused the Third Reich.
With his belief in the hero, I honestly wonder sometimes; he was hugely
influential for a time. Was it Barbarossa, though -- or Frederick the
Great, who was similarly forced back in his wars and made a mighty and
unexpected recovery? I'll look that up when I've a moment.
> On the slavery issue, Carlyle was certainly on the wrong side while
> Wagner was on the right side. But as Alberich00 and Mike both said,
> racism, in the sense of a belief that black people were intellectually
> inferior, was then the standard.
> And racism was a different issue from slavery/abolitionism. Most of
> the abolitionists, including Abraham Lincoln as well as Wagner, were
> racist in a modern sense. To them the question was how you should
> treat Black people, as a moral issue involving compassion rather than
> a belief in equality.
And Lincoln is on record as saying something to the effect that he did
not care about slavery if he could only preserve the Union -- not as
callous as it sounds, perhaps, because he knew well that slavery,
already limited, would become increasingly untenable in such a
situation.
> Still, if after condemning Carlyle we surveyed admired 18th and 19th
> cultural figures to see who lined up on which side of the slavery
> versus abolitionist debate, I expect we'd get a few other nasty
> surprises. (I expect that Wagner's anti-slavery stance is also a nasty
> surprise, to some of his detractors.)
> Something else occurred to me while reading Carlyle's "Novalis" and
> "On the Nigger Question" essays and skimming some of his other
> writing. Carlyle is a terrible writer, convoluted, over-worded,
> clumsy; his sentences run like a knock-kneed adolescent giant hurtling
> down a hill, trying to stay upright by flailing his arms about.
> But his style started to remind me of someone else. It was the weird
> neologisms that clinched it: "daydrudges", "winter-necessaries", and
> even "tonepoets". Carlyle was surely the literary model for the worst
> writer in human history: Wagner's translator William Ashton Ellis, the
> McGonagall of prose!
> Which raised a further, horrifying, possibility. Wagner actually liked
> Carlyle's writing, perhaps because it sounds more natural to a German
> ear than an English one. So it's quite possible that Wagner might have
> also liked Ellis' hideous translations, and wondered what we've all
> been complaining about, all these years. Just a thought.
Given the awful-sounding libretto translations that were approved by
Bayreuth, it's possible. Remember that Carlyle, like many of his
contemporaries, was a Germanist, and I believe knew the language well.
It may be that he was trying to imitate something of contemporary German
academic style, weighty and elaborate, in his own prose. Which Wagner
the autodidact may also have been doing. So the resemblance might start
before Ellis -- whom I agree is a turkey.
> Anyway, since I've started on a silly note, and since Tillich is
> turning out to be a long topic, I'll deal with a few other side issues
> now, and come to Tillich next time.
{snip}
> Another correction:
> To be fair to David Brin, I said that his _Salon_ article on LOTR was
> "a screed accusing Tolkien of being a fascist", but it would be more
> accurate to say that he wrote "a screed accusing Tolkien of holding
> and promoting fascist and Nazi values."
> To be unfair to David Brin, I'll mention that when I was trying to
> navigate back to his Salon article, Google took me to a website of fan
> gossip about a science-fiction convention. I was about to move on when
> I realised that Google wanted me to read a woman called Jo, who was
> explaining why she had found it necessary, during this SF convention,
> to tip her drink over David Brin's head. The next page contained a
> rebuttal of Jo's account from Brin himself. Having judiciously weighed
> up both stories, my conclusion is that if I weren't already spoken
> for, I'd offer Jo the Drink-Thrower my hand in marriage, tomorrow or
> at the drop of a hat.
Oh this, yes -- Jo Walton, already a legend in the field. I wasn't at
that particular con (Boskone, Boston), but I checked the authenticity
with my old friend Dave Langford, SF columnist supreme (who himself once
performed a similar act upon a rampant Scientologist, to universal
applause) and I'd say your judgement is not too far off the mark. She's
quite a well-known Welsh fantasy author, and it appears DB was being
patronizing in much the same way as in print. Sic semper ignoramus!
And had you considered the link between this interest and that
archetypal Romantic but anti-scientific work Frankenstein -- by, of
course, Mary Shelley? She's actually pretty unspecific about the method
of life-creation, if I remember rightly -- none of this lightning-tower
stuff there is in the films, anyway -- but the idea did stem from the
famous Galvanic experiments, which any electricity enthusiast would know
about.
{snip}
> Though even Wordsworth wasn't always a reactionary. He was a young
> left-wing romantic before he was an old conservative romantic. The
> left-wing Wordsworth, a far better poet than his conservative
> successor,
"Two voices are there; one is of the Deep,
The other, of an old half-maddened Sheep.
And Wordsworth, both are thine!"
Cheers,
Mike
Alberich00
Thanks for your stimulating response to my few remarks. I agree with
some of what you said, but you have drawn a hell of a lot more out of
my few remarks than what I intended to convey in them. In other words,
you're setting up a bunch of paper tigers. I don't have time to
respond to the whole, but just a few remarks:
Yes, I know all about the Zulus' violent history, and totalitarian
system set up by Shaka, etc. In blaming the British for using a minor
border dispute (yes, that's what it was!) as a pretext to conquer a
nation (fulfilling plans they had long devised anyway), I was in no
way suggesting British cultural inferiority, or Zulu superiority. You
have incorrectly assumed from my few remarks that I can be type-cast
as part of a typical politically correct "blame the Europeans"
syndrome. What I was saying was simply that the level of cultural
organization of many sub-saharan African states, at the time of
colonialism, was in some respects comparable to that of European
tribal groups and states from the time of the Roman Empire up through
Medieval times. No credible historian disputes the fact that it was
initially the Roman Empire, and later Charlemagne's empire, that
introduced the heritage of the literate civilizations of the Middle
East and Egypt, via the somewhat later classical civilizations of the
European part of the Mediterranean, to most of Europe.
On a minor point, you give as an example of Zulu ruthlessness the fact
that their generals sometimes ordered men in their regiments to allow
the British to shoot them down so the generals could count their guns.
I suspect you got this idea from the film "Zulu" which introduced
Michael Caine to movies. This is a film which I very much love, by the
way, precisely because it provides an incredible showcase of Zulu
choral singing and some of their regimental drills, skills which are
still preserved to this day. But the notion that their soldiers let
themselves be mowed down so generals could count their guns is, I
believe, total nonsense. There is no record of it in any of the many
studies of the Zulus or the war of 1879-1880 which I have studied. The
filmmakers were clearly looking for a pretext to do something very
impressive which would display Zulu prowess to the audience. This was
probably based on accounts that may well be factual, that Shaka had so
disciplined his men (through terror) that he could order them to,
among other things, march over fields of thorns without complaint.
That is in fact on record, I believe by a Mr. Finn who lived among the
Zulus (this does not of course prove it is true, but it may well be).
Now, ask yourself. What possible value could counting guns be to the
Zulu generals? They knew very well that massed guns could mow them
down: they had already suffered grievously from the Boers when
attacking entrenched positions. Just imagine if they had used such a
method at Isandhlwana: they would have lost their entire army within
minutes. The Zulus at Isandhlawana made as much use of ground cover as
they could before massing in front of the British regiments, and for
much of the time they remained laying on the ground to avoid the
withering fire, and only rose en masse when they noted the British
fire was weakening (what they didn't know was that the British hadn't
provided their native regimentals with sufficient firepower and that
their quartermasters were having a devil of a time opening up crates
of bullets to resupply the front lines.
I wouldn't have devoted so much time to this normally, but the Zulu
wars have an endless fascination for me.
By the way, I cannot imagine how you could possibly, even remotely
found justification for racism, or reverse racism, in any thing I said
in my few brief remarks. You go way beyond the pale in drawing so many
false conclusions from so little. Nonetheless, I enjoyed your
rebuttal.
By the way, did you get your copy of my book proposal? Also, I have
just completed an 18 page article introducing many of the main
arguments of my RING interpretation, if you have an interest.
Your friend from Wagnerheim,
Paul alias Alberich00
Mike Scott Rohan <mike.sco...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk> wrote in message news:<200406101...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk>...
Laon
go back to the left hand margin.
Mike said:
> Was it Barbarossa, though -- or Frederick the Great, who was similarly
> forced back in his wars and made a mighty and unexpected recovery?
Yes, I got my Fredericks wrong. It was Carlyle's _History of Friedrich
II of Prussia_, and Hitler was dementedly identifying with Frederick
the Great, not Barbarossa, in his last days. According to Anthony
Bevor, the passage Goebbels read was "the one where Frederick the
great, faced with disaster in the Seven Yeays War, thought of taking
poison. But suddenly news of the death of the Tsarina Elizabeth
arrived. 'The miracle of the House of Brandenburg had come to pass.'
Hitler's eyes had filled with tears at those words." (_Berlin: The
Downfall 1945_, p 204.)
> And had you considered the link between this interest and that
> archetypal Romantic but anti-scientific work Frankenstein -- by, of
> course, Mary Shelley?
Yes. Though _Frankenstein_ the novel is less anti-scientific than the
films. Percy Bysshe helped and encouraged Mary Godwin (as she then
was) throughout, and revised some parts of the book, and he found it
compatible with his pro-science worldview. Some of Shelley's changes
involve a shift from common to heightened diction and aren't
necessarily improvements, but his rewrite of the ending, in the
Antartic ice, definitely improves on Mary Godwin's draft: those final
pages are the best part of the book. (There's a book that argues that
Bysshe Shelley's contribution to _Frankenstein_ was greater than
generally acknowledged, making him a co-author. The writer, I've
forgotten her name, pointed out typically Shelleyan vocabulary and
stylistic turns throughout the book and not just in his known
revisions to the text. But I'd say that's explained by Mary Godwin
having recently made handwritten fair copies of those poems for
publication, and that Shelley's role was closer to editor than
co-author.)
Anyway, _Frankenstein_ presents Shelleyan ideas on the benefits
brought by science, and includes an idealistic, progressive scientist
who tries to persuade Victor to more useful and less dangerous
projects: Henry Clerval, Mary Godwin's thinly-disguised portrait of
Shelley himself. Victor Frankenstein was not based on Shelley, though
that has sometimes been assumed; Victor is based on a historical
personage, plus some attitudes and poses borrowed from Byron. And in
the book the tragedy doesn't result from there being anything
inherently evil about the science or the being that Victor created;
it's only when the poor wretch is rejected from human society, and by
Victor, and his moral education is neglected, that things start to go
wrong.
And Mike cited JK Stephens' Wordsworth criticism/parody:
> "Two voices are there; one is of the Deep,
> The other, of an old half-maddened Sheep.
> And Wordsworth, both are thine!"
Which sent me looking for the rest of JK Stephens criticism/parody on
Wordsworth. It's so good that I'm going to post it in full, but at the
end of this post. First I should stop procrastinating and get on to
Tillich.
I think that Paul Tillich is important for three reasons:
* He is one of the most important and influential theologians of the
20th century;
* His influence is particularly strong on those who are relatively
liberal on theological issues, and left on social and political
issues, so he represents a different aspect of the attack on
romanticism: most of the attacks I've cited so far have come from
right-wing conservatives;
* He has been accorded considerable cultural credit as he was
dismissed from his university post by the Nazis, who also burned his
books. So his views have an inherent cachet of credibility that has
helped their dissemination.
There are some ironies in Tillich's position on romanticism, as some
of its key concepts are borrowed not from the left but from the far
right, from a Catholic ultra-conservative who became a Nazi jurist
whose work is now significantly influential on the circle around
George W Bush. That's probably enough of a hint, for people who've
been reading ALDaily, for example. It took me a while to notice that
the man I was reading about, in books about the 1930s and 1940s, or
published in those years, was the same person with the same name who
is being discussed today in relation to Republican electoral strategy
and the US administration's Iraq policy.
Moreover, the book in which Tillich spelled out his views on
romanticism, _The Socialist Decision_ (1932), actually stopped short
of a complete condemnation of National Socialism. Tillich condemned
Hitler, the antisemitism and the political violence, which by 1932 was
brave, and more than enough to get him into trouble. But he also
suggested that under different leadership the "socialist" trappings of
Nazism could have potential for good. I'll discuss this aspect of
Tillich's perspective on romanticism later. This is not mentioned as
an ad hominem attack on Tillich, whose mistakes about Nazism, in 1932,
were made by many other people who were also honourable and far from
stupid.
Anyway, here's "Paul" Tillich. I've represented other writers with
extended quotes. With Tillich it will be easier to provide an
explanation of his terms and a summary of his ideas, because he
presents a fairly extended, some might say tenuous, argument.
Tillich's terms
Tillich wasn't a wilfully obscure writer like Adorno, say, but some of
the terms he used, in his discussion of "political romanticism" could
just as well have been deliberately chosen to hinder understanding.
"Political romanticism" itself was Tillich's term for the German
right, generally with a specific if coded reference to the National
Socialists in particular.
He argued that political romantics want to return to an "Origin", from
which German life has become estranged due to the twin forces of
"bourgeois society" and "prophetism". "Origin"? "Prophetism?" So
let's look at these terms.
"Origin"
This is the idea of a point in time (always the past) and place, in
which things were natural, where people were themselves, without being
messed around by a lot of ideas, having to make a living, and other
modern inconveniences and unnaturalnesses. Tillich links right-wing
slogans like "return to the soil", and "blood and race" to this idea
of a yearning for "origin".
Rather unhelpfully, Tillich distinguishes "Origin" as a peculiarly
Greek idea, on the ground that the earliest philosophical text to have
come down to us is this fragment from Anaximander: "All things must
pass away into that from which they were born".
"Bourgeois society"
We all know this term, and we usually pass over it without
interrogating it. But since we're focussing on meanings, I'd observe
that this was once a standard Marxist cliché, and Tillich's use of it
reminds us that he was writing from a Marxist perspective, with all
the strengths and limitations that this implies. The term always had
usage more than it had meaning; in the end, all it seemed to mean was,
"Middleclass people who I think are more materialistic, but less
cultured and sophisticated, than me."
"Prophetism"
This term has nothing to do with prophets or prophecy. Instead, it
means a sort of internationalism, the idea that so long as you take
various principles with you (such as capitalism or socialism,
democracy or authoritarianism, theism or atheism, and so on), or go to
a place where similar principles apply, then it doesn't really matter
much where you are, in the sense of "which country, or "homeland", you
are in".
Tillich's choice of the word "prophetism" refers to the Jewish
prophetic tradition, which according to Tillich is in opposition to
the Greek idea of "Origin". Tillich argued that the Jewish prophets
taught that their god was not bounded by geography, and was happy to
have his people scattered from their Origin, but that Jews could still
maintain their relationship with their god wherever they are.
Without even querying whether that really is a central idea of the
Jewish prophetic tradition, I'd have to say that Tillich's decision to
put a label with Jewish connotations onto the idea of non-patriotic
internationalism, in Germany in 1932, seems even more unhelpful than
labelling the "Origin" concept as Greek. As rhetoric it can't have
been remotely helpful to either the Jewish or the internationalist
cause, in a Germany in the process of slipping under Nazi rule.
Today Tillich's term it is merely confusing. Partly because
"internationalist" is not the first meaning you'd think of, when
encountering the word "prophetic". There's another problem. The German
Right disliked internationalism and they disliked Jews, but they did
not necessarily think of anti-nationalism as inherently Jewish. They
would surely have said that they disliked Jewish prophets, if anyone
had asked them, for the same reason that they would have said that
they disliked Jewish shopkeepers or Jewish conductors, but I do not
think that the German right was ever troubled by the thought of the
influence of the Jewish prophetic tradition on German culture. A
rejection of internationalism in favour of a "homeland" concept is not
inherently antisemitic, but in Tillich's terms it is
anti-[Jewish]-Prophetic, which naturally sounds as if it must be a bit
antisemitic. Tillich's terminology makes it harder to distinguish
between nationalism that was antisemitic and nationalism that was not.
(I have a suspicion, which may be wrong, that Tillich's notion of a
deeprooted opposition between two mutually exclusive cultural poles,
one Jewish and one Greek, influenced Immanuel Levinas. And that which
influenced Levinas then influenced Derrida, and then 10,000 American
cultural studies lecturers, all smugly quoting James Joyce [via
Derrida] at each other: "Jewgreek is greekjew: extremes meet." But I
haven't checked the links to be sure; it's just a suspicion. And
another suspicion, come to think of it, is that nobody in their right
mind would care about this. Pomo is no mo'.)
Anyway, that brings us up to speed, and able to read what Tillich said
about the nature of this "political romanticism". But this is a good
place to break, since Tillich is too long for one post.
JK Stephens on Wordsworth after the signoff,
Laon
A Sonnet
TWO voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:
And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times
Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes,
The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst:
At other times--good Lord! I'd rather be
Quite unacquainted with the ABC
Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.
JK Stephens
Which in turn reminded me of Wordsworth's "The Thorn", verse III:
Not five yards from the mountain-path,
This thorn you on your left espy;
And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy pond
Of water, never dry,
I've measured it from side to side:
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.
(1798 version: he later changed it to make it less funny, but no-one
remembers that version.)
So there's Wordsworth clambering round the mountains with his
tapemeasure, carefully surveying the Lake District mudpools before
fitting them into his verse. After an impressive display of empiricism
like that, I don't see how anyone could call the man anti-scientific.
Derrick Everett
<snip>
It is some years since I read Tillich, although I did read a lot of his
writings in my misspent youth. He got more obscure later in life -- the
third volume of "Systematic Theology" is, in parts, oscure and eclectic.
If you are interested in Protestant theology, then the first two volumes
can be recommended as interesting and sometimes even witty.
> "Political romanticism" itself was Tillich's term for the German right,
> generally with a specific if coded reference to the National Socialists
> in particular.
>
> He argued that political romantics want to return to an "Origin", from
> which German life has become estranged due to the twin forces of
> "bourgeois society" and "prophetism". "Origin"? "Prophetism?" So let's
> look at these terms.
>
> "Origin"
> This is the idea of a point in time (always the past) and place, in
> which things were natural, where people were themselves, without being
> messed around by a lot of ideas, having to make a living, and other
> modern inconveniences and unnaturalnesses. Tillich links right-wing
> slogans like "return to the soil", and "blood and race" to this idea of
> a yearning for "origin".
>
> Rather unhelpfully, Tillich distinguishes "Origin" as a peculiarly Greek
> idea, on the ground that the earliest philosophical text to have come
> down to us is this fragment from Anaximander: "All things must pass away
> into that from which they were born".
>
> "Bourgeois society"
> We all know this term, and we usually pass over it without interrogating
> it. But since we're focussing on meanings, I'd observe that this was
> once a standard Marxist cliché, and Tillich's use of it reminds us that
> he was writing from a Marxist perspective,
Not exactly, although Hegel, Marx and Feuerbach are detectable influences
in Tillich's writing.
> with all the strengths and limitations that this implies. The term
> always had usage more than it had meaning; in the end, all it seemed to
> mean was, "Middleclass people who I think are more materialistic, but
> less cultured and sophisticated, than me."
>
> "Prophetism"
> This term has nothing to do with prophets or prophecy. Instead, it means
> a sort of internationalism, the idea that so long as you take various
> principles with you (such as capitalism or socialism, democracy or
> authoritarianism, theism or atheism, and so on), or go to a place where
> similar principles apply, then it doesn't really matter much where you
> are, in the sense of "which country, or "homeland", you are in".
>
> Tillich's choice of the word "prophetism" refers to the Jewish prophetic
> tradition, which according to Tillich is in opposition to the Greek idea
> of "Origin". Tillich argued that the Jewish prophets taught that their
> god was not bounded by geography, and was happy to have his people
> scattered from their Origin, but that Jews could still maintain their
> relationship with their god wherever they are.
>
> Without even querying whether that really is a central idea of the
> Jewish prophetic tradition, I'd have to say that Tillich's decision to
> put a label with Jewish connotations onto the idea of non-patriotic
> internationalism, in Germany in 1932, seems even more unhelpful than
> labelling the "Origin" concept as Greek. As rhetoric it can't have been
> remotely helpful to either the Jewish or the internationalist cause, in
> a Germany in the process of slipping under Nazi rule.
Christian theology has always been a compromise between ideas that
originated in Judaism (and in the Wisdom tradition, which might be seen as
a separate tradition from the cult of Yahweh) and those that derive from
Greek traditions. Tillich's theology is no exception: it has roots in
Greek spirituality and in Jewish spirituality. His approach is
essentially dialectical: Greek religious ideas and Jewish religious ideas
are thesis and anthithesis, Protestant theology should be synthesis.
Here is Tillich on 19th century romanticism:
"The union of the cognitive and aesthetic functions is fully expressed in
mythology, the womb out of which both of them were born and came to
independence and to which they tend to return. The Romanticists of the
early nineteenth century, philosophers and artists, tried to re-establish
the unity of cognitive and aesthetic functions ... They turned away from
cognitive and aesthetic formalism and consequently from the separation of
the two functions. They even tried to unite both in new myth. But in
this they failed. No myth can be created, no unity of the rational
functions can be reached, on the basis of reason in conflict. A new myth
is the expression of the reuniting power of a new revelation, not a
product of formalized reason". (Paul Tillich, "Systematic Theology",
vol.I, pages 91-2, 1951).
He does not mention Wagner but it is likely that Wagner, as an opponent of
formalism and of the separation of "cognitive and aesthetic functions",
was one of the artists whom Tillich had in mind when writing these words.
Mike Scott Rohan
from alber...@operamail.com (Alberich00) contains these words:
> Dear Mike:
> Thanks for your stimulating response to my few remarks. I agree with
> some of what you said, but you have drawn a hell of a lot more out of
> my few remarks than what I intended to convey in them. In other words,
> you're setting up a bunch of paper tigers. I don't have time to
> respond to the whole, but just a few remarks:
Okay, but it was the general standpoint that raised my hackles -- not
least because I've had words with American academics in the past who all
seemed to have studied at the same anti-British source -- maybe some
textbook in black studies or something, I don't know, but it was all
about the fiendish Brits working their evil ways on the poor helpless
Zulus, which I know not to be the case. Your tone very much reflected
that. British colonialism, while I wouldn't defend it from a modern
viewpoint, was seen as perfectly normal and right by the universal
standards of the time -- and by those standards was generally more
enlightened and humane than most, with none of the atrocities committed
by the Belgians or Germans, and much more respect for native culture and
customs than the French. And of course the Americans, in their internal
"ethnic cleansing" of the time, so that high-minded finger-wagging from
that quarter is particularly irritating. As a professor friend of mine
(English, but at St.Louis) put it when he was fed up with PC lectures
about the satanic British in India (based largely on Jewel in the
Crown!) "We left *our* Indians alive, united, independent and advancing
-- none of which they were before us. You left *your* Indians dead!" And
casino owners, admittedly; but it's still a fair point.
Anyhow, I'm glad that you say you don't share that mindset, but your
expressions suggested that you did -- hence my annoyance. And on some
other points:
What I was saying was simply that the level of cultural
> organization of many sub-saharan African states, at the time of
> colonialism, was in some respects comparable to that of European
> tribal groups and states from the time of the Roman Empire up through
> Medieval times.
"In some respects comparable...." But that is as far as I'd go, and for
various reasons -- geographical among them, it being much less fruitful
and productive country -- this didn't last and develop as the European
one did. There, despite misconceptions about the dark ages and
"barbarians", there was considerable cultural continuity from Roman
times.
No credible historian disputes the fact that it was
> initially the Roman Empire, and later Charlemagne's empire, that
> introduced the heritage of the literate civilizations of the Middle
> East and Egypt, via the somewhat later classical civilizations of the
> European part of the Mediterranean, to most of Europe.
But that implies that Rome and Greece were simply transmitting what they
picked up from the Middle East and Egypt, which was not at all the case.
If anything, later Egyptian culture owed more to Greece, from Alexander
and the Seleucids right into the Ptolemaic era. What they transmitted to
Europe was predominantly culture of their own development, with outside
influences, certainly, but nonetheless an entirely European phenomenon,
originating in Europe and developing in Europe. It was partly the
success and widespread influence of those cultures that attracted Middle
Eastern influences, such as the cults of Cybele and Isis -- and for that
matter Christianity. But they became wholly romanized.
> On a minor point, you give as an example of Zulu ruthlessness the fact
> that their generals sometimes ordered men in their regiments to allow
> the British to shoot them down so the generals could count their guns.
> I suspect you got this idea from the film "Zulu" which introduced
> Michael Caine to movies. (snip)
No, I don't get my history from films -- although I also greatly enjoy
Zulu, it's magnificently inaccurate in many ways, very much of the '60s.
I wish it had given the Zulus more characterization of their own, but I
believe there was enough trouble with the South African government as it
was. The "counting guns" bit is probably an over-dramatization, but the
use of standing men as cannon-fodder to draw fire and lead troops into
breaking cover is in accounts of Zulu warfare I've read. But because
they didn't use that tactic at Isandlwhana -- where there was no
fortification, massed fire and if I remember rightly a couple of
gatlings -- doesn't mean they wouldn't use it in sussing out the
available firepower in a fortified position. I'll have to see if I can
track down examples. I'm not a historian of that period -- mine is a lot
earlier! -- but that sounds credible to me. I don't remember the field
of thorns bit specifically, but their training marches were deliberately
over sharp gravel and the like, and there are plenty of horrible
thorn-bushes in that country, I believe -- often used for impromptu
defenses. Tests of bravery were also common, and may have played a part
in this too. (The Brits had their equivalent; in my brief and amateurish
military experience I encountered an officer's mess with an antique
table which had scars from young officers who for a bet would drive a
sabre through their hands. The practice was eventually "discouraged".)
> Now, ask yourself. What possible value could counting guns be to the
> Zulu generals? They knew very well that massed guns could mow them
> down: they had already suffered grievously from the Boers when
> attacking entrenched positions. Just imagine if they had used such a
> method at Isandhlwana: they would have lost their entire army within
> minutes. The Zulus at Isandhlawana made as much use of ground cover as
> they could before massing in front of the British regiments, and for
> much of the time they remained laying on the ground to avoid the
> withering fire, and only rose en masse when they noted the British
> fire was weakening (what they didn't know was that the British hadn't
> provided their native regimentals with sufficient firepower and that
> their quartermasters were having a devil of a time opening up crates
> of bullets to resupply the front lines.
Yes indeed -- there was a shortage of rifles, so naturally the fully
trained British soldiers got them instead of the auxiliaries. And I
can't quote the source of this, but I've heard that someone recently was
excavating at the site and kept finding unspent ammo of the wrong
calibre -- which would, I suppose, jam those single-action bolts, if
nothing worse, and slow down the fire rate. That'd certainly be in
keeping with similarly colossal ordnance cock-ups we managed -- or the
US one, if I remember rightly, that landed Teddy Roosevelt's Rough
Riders in Cuba without their horses...
> I wouldn't have devoted so much time to this normally, but the Zulu
> wars have an endless fascination for me.
They did for me when I was younger, largely due to reading Rider Haggard
as a child, with he and many contemporaries making such a strong case
for the Zulu. (John Buchan's dreadful Prester John also played a part --
now that really is racist, he absorbed much later Boer attitudes, but
it's still romantic!) That was how I got onto Shaka, too -- horrible but
fascinating, one of the last archetypal heroes in the Siegfried mould,
complete with exiled childhood and enchanted weapon. I was startled to
discover that some of the more improbably incidents in "King Solomon's
Mines" were actually literally true accounts of the first white men's
arrival at Shaka's court. He rather took to them, it seems, particularly
when he discovered one of them used pomade to dye his hair -- the
greying Shaka had it applied to him, then announced to his troops that
he had been rejuvenated by the newcomers' magic! Clearly a natural spin
doctor.
> By the way, I cannot imagine how you could possibly, even remotely
> found justification for racism, or reverse racism, in any thing I said
> in my few brief remarks. You go way beyond the pale in drawing so many
> false conclusions from so little. Nonetheless, I enjoyed your
> rebuttal.
I had to go back and look this one up, because I certainly wasn't
calling you a racist per se, and I'm sorry if it read that way to you.
I was simply pointing out that drawing a distinction between "Cretans"
as Europeans receiving their civilization from supposedly non-European
"Levantines" to prove that Europe was civilized from the Middle East, is
entirely artificial, separating out the supposedly lesser race as
Europeans. That is exactly the same false rationalization that
Victorians would employ to "prove" that lesser races had to draw their
civilization from "superior" races -- thus attributing the walls of
so-called "Zimbabwe" or the brasses of Benin to influences from Arabs or
Egyptians -- hence my comparison. In actual fact the Levantine
population of that period had as many "European" links as the Cretans,
if you want to look at it that way. Nobody disputes that the Fertile
Crescent civilizations mostly got there first, in this part of the world
anyhow; but it's a very old-fashioned and fallacious view, the
"diffusionist" line, that they were "responsible" in any significant way
for the later civilizations of Europe. These of course developed in
their own way and in their own place, as did civilizations in more
remote areas of the world. Roman civilization, for example, derived from
the localized Etruscan, and only acquired its Eastern elements later on,
as it spread towards that part of the world and as culture gravitated
towards it. The old-fashioned diffusionist attitude that you implied is
these days chiefly favoured, and misused, by axe-grinders of the "all
civilization started in Africa" variety -- many of them black racists
like Louis Farrahkan, who go to extremes that include co-opting Socrates
as "black" and the ancient Egyptians, who actually had more in common
with other Mediterranean peoples. I can appreciate why this happens, and
even sympathize to some extent; but it is racist to try to interpret
things that way, and create artificial distinctions to suggest such a
point. That's what I read in what *you* were saying -- or perhaps it's
better to say I saw that as inherent in your argument. But no, I don't
think you're a racist, and see nothing to suggest it.
> By the way, did you get your copy of my book proposal? Also, I have
> just completed an 18 page article introducing many of the main
> arguments of my RING interpretation, if you have an interest.
If I have, I haven't read it, for which apologies. I may have put it
aside in the crush of business and never got back to it -- or, if it was
an attachment, it may have fallen foul of my security software. I'll
have a look in the files, when I have a moment. Right now I've spent too
long on this and must rush before my wife turns violent.
Bayete!
Mike
Laon
> It is some years since I read Tillich, although I did read a lot of his
> writings in my misspent youth.
I'm not sure if this is what you mean, about Tillich in particular,
but this reminds me that there are some writers that people should
read, but only when they're young, because somewhere around 20 it'll
be too late. Herman Hesse is an obvious example. I suspect that
Tillich might have been another, at least for some people. I remember
that there were girls in my secular state school who read Tillich:
there seems to have been something about him that was irresistable to
young women and girls, both about the man himself, by all accounts,
and also about his writing. I haven't read enough outside his _The
Socialist Decision_ to know why.
I wrote:
> > "Bourgeois society"
> > We all know this term, and we usually pass over it without interrogating
> > it. But since we're focussing on meanings, I'd observe that this was
> > once a standard Marxist cliché, and Tillich's use of it reminds us that
> > he was writing from a Marxist perspective,
And Derrick wrote:
> Not exactly, although Hegel, Marx and Feuerbach are detectable influences
> in Tillich's writing.
I'm sure that's correct overall, but I was only speaking of _The
Socialist Decision_, which was a relatively early work (1932).
Although it certainly didn't follow a Moscow (or Trotskyite) party
line, it was advocating socialism in what seems to me to be a Marxist
tradition.
Derrick wrote:
> Christian theology has always been a compromise between ideas that
> originated in Judaism (and in the Wisdom tradition, which might be seen as
> a separate tradition from the cult of Yahweh) and those that derive from
> Greek traditions. Tillich's theology is no exception: it has roots in
> Greek spirituality and in Jewish spirituality. His approach is
> essentially dialectical: Greek religious ideas and Jewish religious ideas
> are thesis and anthithesis, Protestant theology should be synthesis.
This seems to be so. The Wisdom tradition, as something that might be
seen as a separate tradition from the YHWH cult, is a fascinating
topic, potentially, that I know nothing at all about except for being
aware of its existence. In the current context I was only thinking of
the likely political impact of Tillich's choice of the term
"prophetism" to mean a non-patriotic internationalism, in a book that
was political in intent, and launched as the German conservatives were
in the process of putting Hitler into power.
Derrick wrote:
> Here is Tillich on 19th century romanticism:
> "The union of the cognitive and aesthetic functions is fully expressed in
> mythology, the womb out of which both of them were born and came to
> independence and to which they tend to return. The Romanticists of the
> early nineteenth century, philosophers and artists, tried to re-establish
> the unity of cognitive and aesthetic functions ... They turned away from
> cognitive and aesthetic formalism and consequently from the separation of
> the two functions. They even tried to unite both in new myth. But in
> this they failed. No myth can be created, no unity of the rational
> functions can be reached, on the basis of reason in conflict. A new myth
> is the expression of the reuniting power of a new revelation, not a
> product of formalized reason". (Paul Tillich, "Systematic Theology",
> vol.I, pages 91-2, 1951).
> He does not mention Wagner but it is likely that Wagner, as an opponent of
> formalism and of the separation of "cognitive and aesthetic functions",
> was one of the artists whom Tillich had in mind when writing these words.
I think so too, since Wagner was the creator of new myths par
excellence. Tillich's statement here is kinder about romanticism than
the view he takes of "political romanticism" in _The Socialist
Decision_, which I'll discuss below. But in this statement Tillich
still considers romanticism inadequate, on the ground that it creates
myths from a mix of cognition, or reason, and aesthetics, when
satisfactory new myths can only come (at least for a Christian
theologician by then living in America) from a new revelation, which I
take to mean a divine revelation.
This is Tillich's characterisation of "political romanticism" in _The
Socialist Decision_:
"Between the origin and the present stands tradition. It is therefore
of decisive importance in every respect for political romanticism to
be able to relate itself to prebourgeois traditions.
"The fact that there has been an almost two-hundred year _break with
tradition_ [Tillich means the French revolution] in most sectors of
life cannot, however, be wished away. Political romanticism, in the
face of this, has only two possibilities: either to defend such
islands of tradition as remain, even though they have become
meaningless in the total structure of existence, or to attempt to
revive the old, lost, traditions."
According to Tillich those who seek to preserve the surviving remnants
of tradition are the "conservative" political romantics, while those
who seek to return to a lost tradition are the "revolutionary"
political romantics, which refers in particular to the Nazis. Tillich
then outlines the qualities common to both strands of political
romanticism.
Tillich said that the ideas that political romantics hold about
tradition are:
"an attack against universal humanistic eduction, against the
levelling of moral standards [Sitten, that is, customs and the ethical
standards embodied in them] and philosophies of life as a result of
the uniform framework of social interchange; against the intellectual
autonomy of the individual and the lack of inwardly authoritative
criteria; against the openness of the professions to everyone and the
lack of established social rankings; against the equalising tendencies
of the metropolis, in which many realms of life interpenetrate one
another, and whose influences, through technical means such as radio
and cinema, draw even the rural areas into this single unit.
"Finally, and chiefly, it is directed against the political autonomy
of the individual, detached from all special traditions. Positively,
the myth of tradition concentrates on the national tradition. It finds
its climax in the demand to maintain this tradition, to strength it
through the creation of a national historical legend, and to free it
from international traditions. Political romanticism demands such a
myth of tradition and sets about creating it."
So that's the nature of political romanticism. It's a damning
indictment, and we can see that its terms have been borrowed and
applied by the writers since.
Three other points before we leave Tillich.
First, Tillich was writing as a socialist addressing other socialists,
which audience he thought of as partially including National
Socialists. He had an agenda for his claim that "political
romanticism", that is, the German right, is focussed on the past. He
wished to make the rhetorical point that his side, the leftwing
socialists, are the movement of the future, while the right is the
movement of the past.
Similarly, his use of the term "prophetic", discussed in the previous
post, allowed Tillich to write: "The socialist principle, so far as
its substance is concerned, is prophetic." In Tillich's jargon that
means that socialism is not atached to "origins", but of course
rhetorically he can expect that people will also feel the more common
meaning of "prophetic", and the implicit claim that socialism has a
clear vision of the future, while the right, of course, does not.
Second, Tillich wrote: "Should political romanticism and warlike
nationalism become victorious, the self destruction of European
peoples is assured." If we accept that "political romanticism" meant
"Nazism", this is an impressively moral and prescient statement. For
this reason it is often singled out as a defining Tillich quotation.
But Tillich's attitude to "revolutionary political romanticism" was
more complex than that quotation alone might suggest. At the end of
his book, _The Social Decision_ he wrote, "It is not mere demagoguery
for the revolutionary movement of the middle classes to call itself
'socialist'. It has [creates?] a real expectation. [...] The movement
is in constant danger of being absorbed by the conservative form of
political romanticism and of being led back into the service of class
rule. This danger is all the greater since the movement's Führer
appears to be working for this end. If this should happen, the
realization of socialism in Germany would be impossible, unless new
movements should arise out of economic or political catastrophes."
That is, as a revolutionary movement, Nazism had socialist potential,
but Tillich deplored the way that Hitler appeared to be leading the
party in a conservative direction. One could argue that Tillich was
trying a desperate rhetorical tactic at the last moment, to woo
National Socialists away from Nazism and to other socialist parties
with a less vicious agenda. Nevertheless, Tillich's analysis of, and
attack on, political romanticism is not without its own political
complexities and compromises.
(I would argue that Tillich's suggestion that Nazism had potential for
good partly derived from his attraction to the "Gemeinschaft" ideal,
which was then espoused by the right and spurned by the left in favour
of "Gesellschaft", for reasons I've never understood. Tillich's
attraction to "Gemeinschaft" broke ranks over what was then considered
a defining distinction between right and left. This is an interesting
topic, which I'll now ignore completely.)
Third, Tillich's analysis of what he called "political romanticism"
has been enormously influential in defining the terms in which the
politics of romanticism are discussed. But the link between Tillich's
"political romanticism" and the actual political and cultural ideas of
the real romantics is extremely tenuous.
Here's Tillich's attempt to establish a link between his term,
"political romanticism", and "romanticism" in its more widely
understood form:
"The attempt to make tradition out of literary remembrances is the
true mark of romanticism, on account of which it is called
romanticism."
Let's say that attempting "to make a tradition out of literary
remembrances" means something like idealising a second-hand notion of
what the medieval period was like, based only on a few literary
sources and ignoring the evidence of (for example) physical culture:
let's say that, since the phrase has to mean _something_.
But can it accurately be said that this was a defining characteristic
of romantics? Not really; Wagner and Tennyson both set works in an
idealised past that could be called Medieval, but so did non-romantics
such as Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, Mozart, Vivaldi, and Poussin, to
name a few. While just as many romantics, or more, showed little or no
interest in any idealised distant pasts: Byron, Hugo, Blake, Chopin,
Berlioz, Delacroix, and so on.
Elsewhere, Tillich defined romanticism as the convergence of the
forces of eros, fate and death, which is surely in itself an extremely
romantic sort of thing to say, in the common meaning of the word.
But there are two objections. First, some people might say that there
is no artistic movement, and no art worthy of the name, that does
_not_ involve a convergence of eros, fate and death.
But I'd rather comment that this is an oracular pronouncement of the
kind that sounds exactly as good as its opposite. Had Tillich said
that "romanticism represents the radical separation of the forces of
eros, fate and death", that too would sound profound, and with a bit
of thought a convincing meaning could easily be found for the phrase,
as can also be done for Tillich's version.
To conclude, I've already commented that although Tillich was not
wilfully obscurantist like, say, Adorno [or, noting Derrick's comment,
at least he wasn't in 1932], his choice of key terms may hinder more
than help understanding. His "Greek" concept of "origin" is not really
Greek. His "Jewish" concept of "prophetism" is neither Jewish nor
about prophets or prophecy. And likewise, his critique of "political
romanticism" has been taken for a critique of romanticism, when it is
not actually about the real, historical, romantics.
That's it, for an outline of the claims made by people who present a
sustained argument linking romanticism ith Nazism, but treat
romanticism as if it were one, unified phenomenon: category (3). I'll
move in the next post to category (4), a survey of arguments about
romanticism that actually distinguish between differences strands and
kinds of romanticism.
Finally, this post has been a little heavier than I like. For a
slightly different perspective on Paul Tillich, Carol Brightman's
_Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and her World_ contains a number
of startling pieces of gossip, including an account of Tillich's
attempted seduction of young Mary, which he blew by revealing his
intense fetishistic interest in her feet a little too early in the
seduction process. But evidence I've read elsewhere suggests that
Tillich got to massage the plump, flower-like, toenail-painted, feet
of many other young American women.
Cheers!
Laon
Sources: all quotes from Tillich's _The Socialist Decision_ are taken
from Johannes Fritsche's _Historical Destiny and National Socialism in
Heidegger's _Being and Time_ _, University of California Press,
Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1999, pp 173-187.
I was also influenced by Franklin Sherman's "Tillich's Social Thought:
New Perspectives", _Christian Century_, 25 February 1976, pp 168-172,
which I read on-line. Though I finished up rejecting almost everything
that Sherman argued, there's still a debt there.
Laon
romanticism are a key to understanding some of the forces behind the
Wagner/Nazi myth.
In John DiGaetano's 1978 anthology of Wagner essays, the book that
should never have been called _Penetrating Wagner's Ring_, someone
called George Windell got to do the obligatory Wagner/Hitler article.
It ran through the topic according to formula, until came to this
question:
"If the Wagner-Hitler relationship is more tenuous than has been
supposed, why has the presumption of a direct intellectual
relationship continued to occur?"
Windell suggested some possible answers, including popular ignorance
of what Wagner's work is actually like, events at Bayreuth especially
after Wagner's death, the fact that Cosima was far more conservative
and more antisemitic than Wagner, and the influence of that English
pair, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Winifred Wagner. Windell
concluded with this:
"Finally, judgements have varied according to a particular author's
position on romanticism. Since, and partly as a result of the First
World War, western intellectuals have generally rejected the romantic
conception of art and existence. To most, National Socialism seemed to
represent a neo-romantic reaction, hence the whole of
nineteenth-century romanticism, and Wagner with whom it culminated,
became suspect."
But that was the last paragraph of his essay, and he didn't develop
this idea.
[Source: Windell, George G, "Hitler, National Socialism, and Richard
Wagner," in _Penetrating Wagner's Ring: an Anthology_, edited by John
Louis DiGaetani, Da Capo Paperback, Cambridge, New York, 1978, pp
230-231.]
Anyhow, that's a degree of corroboration. I've also received a
correction.
I wrote:
> I have a suspicion, which may be wrong, that Tillich's notion of a
> deeprooted opposition between two mutually exclusive cultural poles,
> one Jewish and one Greek, influenced Immanuel Levinas.
A correspondent advises me that there's no "may be wrong" about it; I
am definitely wrong. Levinas adopted his notion of a deeprooted
opposition between two mutually exclusive cultural poles, one Jewish
and one Greek, from Matthew Arnold's essay _Culture and Anarchy_.
Tillich probably also got his version of the idea from Arnold. (My
correspondent allowed that the Joyce-Levinas-Derrida connection I
mentioned is correct. But I thought the Tillich idea was more
interesting; pity it seems to be wrong. And thanks to that
correspondent.)
By the way I read _Culture and Anarchy_ to check this claim is correct
(it is), and that reminded me how much I despise Matthew Arnold. I
wrote something on that, then halved it. Then deleted it. I may stick
it at the end of this post, so that people can ignore it. It included
the relevant passage from _Culture and Anarchy_ plus my Matthew Arnold
rave, which included the words "twee", "snob", "banal" and
"interesting ideas about crowd control".
Anyway, here's category (4):
People arguing that romanticism led to Nazism or that Nazism is a
decadent form or late outgrowth of romanticism, but who are aware that
romanticism is not a single unified phenomenon.
Of people in this category, by far the most common line to take is
that the German romantics were the bad guys. Unexpectedly this is not
a gambit concerning Wagner. And the term "German romantics" doesn't
mean German romantic contemporaries of Wagner like the composers
Brahms, Bruckner or Schumann, the poets Heine, Lenau or Mörike, and so
on.
The target group is the "early German romantics", which means Ludwig
Tieck (1773-1853), Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-1801), Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1845), the brothers August Wilhelm
Schlegel (1767-1845) and Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), Ernst Daniel
Schleiermacher (1767-1834) and Friedrich von Hardenberg, best known by
his pen name of "Novalis" (1772-1801). The group began meeting in
August Schlegel's house in Jena and in salons in Berlin in 1797-1798,
about the time Wordsworth and Coleridge were publishing _Lyrical
Ballads_. At this time the group called themselves the "new school",
or the "new sect". Later they would call themselves "the romantic
school".
Reading through their works, and about their works, it's hard to see
why anyone would seriously try to link this group with Nazism. The
"how" is obvious enough. In general that has involved:
(1) Misrepresenting their views, and
(2) Slipping various persons who were indeed authoritarians,
ultranationalists, ultraconservatives or antisemites into this group
and claiming those ringers-in were also part of the "romantic
movement".
But that's only the "how". The "why" is the more interesting question,
and I'm still considering an answer to that.
I'll start this section with a couple of indicative examples, showing
unquestioning acceptance of the idea that German romanticism is the
source of Nazism. Here's Ian Buruma, a writer I generally respect:
"In fact, the war on modernity, often associated with the Jews, or the
West, or the United States, goes back centuries. German Romanticism,
which later curdled into a murderous ideology, began as a reaction to
the French Enlightenment, whose ideals were promoted with armed force
by Napoleon's Grande Armée."
[Source: Buruma, Ian, "Lost in Translation: The Two Minds of Bernard
Lewis", _New Yorker_, 14-21 June 2004, Review of Bernard Lewis' _From
Babel to Dragomans_.]
And here's Eric Brown:
"German romantics attacked the Enlightenment's greatest
achievements—liberal democracy and modern science—for corrupting the
German soul, and they sought to bring science and technology under the
command of Kultur. [...] Nazism represented a confrontation with
modernity that would redeem the German people. It was seen as the
political consummation of the romantic impulse."
[Source: Brown, Eric, "The Dilemmas of German Bioethics," _The New
Atlantis_, Number 5, Spring 2004, pp. 37-53.]
Those examples show that the idea has made its way into common
discourse, where it's taken as a truism that needs no supporting
argument or evidence. Something that is a little harder to establish
is where the truism came from. In fact, because the claim is
relatively narrow and specific, it can be traced back close to its
sources.
Two of the most important of these sources are:
Viereck, Peter, _Metapolitics_. This was originally published in 1941
with the subtitle "The Roots of the Nazi Mind". It was reprinted in
1961 with a new subtitle "From the Romantics to Hitler". The subtitle
for the 2003 reprint is even more specific: "From Wagner and the
German Romantics to Hitler".
Mosse, George, _The Crisis in German Ideology_, Grosset and Dunlap,
New York, 1964
I suspect that Isaiah Berlin's 1965 lectures _The Roots of
Romanticism_ were also important in providing apparent intellectual
weight for the meme. I discussed Berlin's contribution in the previous
segment, because Berlin did not distinguish what kind of romanticism
he was talking about, instead tarring all romantics with rather vague
strokes of one super-broad brush.
It could be said that Viereck and Mosse provided a kind of double act,
though any suggestion of a connection between Mosse and Viereck would
surely have appalled Mosse. But I think that neither book would have
had the same impact on common discourse if the other book had not also
existed. Viereck was the first to assemble a case against German
romanticism, but his book could never have been enough to spread the
idea on its own. _Metapolitics_ is a disorganised rant, as well as
being a work of startling and fairly obvious dishonesty; Viereck's
fast and loose way with sources is quickly apparent to anyone with
even a passing knowledge of this subject matter. But the book offers a
compelling narrative in the paranoid style; and its 1961 reprint was a
bestseller in US college campuses in the early 60s, influencing the
thinking of the last generation before Woodstock. What Viereck's book
did not have was intellectual respectability, despite Thomas Mann's
generous comments on it. But George Mosse's book, though a much
quieter piece of work with none of the features of a college campus
bestseller (except in that it became a set text on the rise of Nazism
in high schools and universities throughout the English-speaking
world), helped lend respectability to the "romantics led to Nazism"
meme. High chuch needs low church, and low church needs high church,
to propagate a faith.
I'll cover _Metapolitics_ in my next post. A bit of Matthew Arnold
follows, as a PS.
Cheers!
Laon
Here's the relevant quote from _Culture and Anarchy_:
"We may regard this energy driving at practice, this paramount sense
of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this earnestness in
going manfully with the best light we have, as one force. And we may
regard the intelligence driving at those ideas which are, after all,
the basis of right practice, the ardent sense for all the new and
changing combinations of them which man's development brings with it,
the indomitable impulse to know and adjust them perfectly, as another
force. [...] And to give these forces names from the two races of men
who have supplied the most signal and splendid manifestations of them,
we may call them respectively the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism."
(From Chapter 3)
As for Mathew Arnold, I've decided the world doesn't need a rant on
why I loathe the man. For the record "twee" referred to his use of the
term "sweetness and light" and some other things about his prose
style, "snob" meant his division of humanity into philistines,
barbarians and cultured chaps like himself, "banal" meant his poetry,
and "interesting notions on crowd control" referred to his comment
that street marches, particularly though not only by working class
persons, should not be allowed and should be put down with all
firmness, with jocular approval of his father's recommendations along
the line of executions and floggings.
Mike Scott Rohan
from pra...@presto.net.au (Laon) contains these words:
> I've found corroboration of a kind, for the idea that perceptions of
Perception certainly has a lot to do with it. The Nazis attacked most of
what was overtly "modern" and appeared to hark back to earlier fashions
-- which at that point were naturally Romantic. But that doesn't, of
course, mean that the Romantic meant anything to them; it was simply
established, remote, dead and thoroughly defused, its vague and
undogmatic socialism easily reconcilable with theirs. In fact their own
taste in art, exactly like that of the Soviet regime after a brief
flourish of avant-garde experiment, was the commercial and the
chocolate-box, or the empty grandiloquent, the equivalent of today's
garden statuary. Both regimes reacted to art in exactly the same way,
the magnification of a narrow-minded petty-bourgeois viewpoint. Yet does
anyone blame the Soviet regime on Romanticism? Now *that* would be an
original argument -- and one with perhaps more historical justification,
given Marx's intellectual roots.
{snip}
> As for Mathew Arnold, I've decided the world doesn't need a rant on
> why I loathe the man. For the record "twee" referred to his use of the
> term "sweetness and light" and some other things about his prose
> style, "snob" meant his division of humanity into philistines,
> barbarians and cultured chaps like himself, "banal" meant his poetry,
> and "interesting notions on crowd control" referred to his comment
> that street marches, particularly though not only by working class
> persons, should not be allowed and should be put down with all
> firmness, with jocular approval of his father's recommendations along
> the line of executions and floggings.
You would probably enjoy the account of his US lecture tour, at the
height of the spittoon era! But I think you're being a bit unkind to his
poetry -- Dover Beach I find impressive, for example, and The Scholar
Gypsy is very likeable if you know and understand the time (and Oxford).
And the distinction into Philistines and Barbarians, for example, was
not the crude dismissal it sounds like; these were analytical labels for
his rather modern critique of the complacency of the society of his day.
His "Barbarians" were what the Victorians would have considered great
men and statesmen, the power-holding aristocracy; his "Philistines" were
the rising but often ruthless commercial classes who espoused so much
suffering; and his cultured types were -- at present -- failing to do
anything about either. For him they had a duty to educate and enlighten
-- and thus restrain -- the obstinate old and the rapacious new, the
latter in particular, and thus bring about a less brutal and more moral
-- ie humane -- society.
He was a Victorian with all that that implies, but his roots were in the
much rougher and wilder (and potentially revolutionary) period of the
late and post-Regency. In his youth there was still a Mob, in London
especially, of the kind that had fuelled the terrifying Gordon riots and
the like, being only put down by massed infantry fire, and they could
still be called out by one or other political faction to assault their
rivals indiscriminately -- even the Duke of Wellington's house was
smashed. In fact the old Mob was then becoming increasing docile,
suprisingly as its numbers were swelled by immigration from country to
city, and from Ireland even before the Famine; but that wasn't obvious,
and it looked incredibly menacing. The ever-increasing crowding and
squalor of the streets would seem inconceivable to us (a bit like
Calcutta today) and the "great unwashed" appeared to present a very
present threat, not of revolution but of mindless disorder. Victorians
were generally agreed this was dreadful and something had to be done
about it, but -- oversimplifying grossly!-- it was considered to be
simply a temporary social condition which would soon correct itself
under the operation of laissez-faire and a firm hand. When it didn't was
when the great era of Victorian public service and reform got under way
-- led, as Arnold hoped, by an actively reformist educated class to whom
he belonged, the rebuilders and the regulators and the sanitizers, the
public educators, the engineers -- that kind of Victorian.
All oversimplified, of course. But Arnold's views were therefore
inevitable -- to some extent -- in the educated man of his time. You
would find them predominant in Boston, for example; or compare those of
Thomas Love Peacock, liberal and reformist friend of Byron and Shelley,
whose affable characters in one of his novels greet the agricultural
workers' terror campaign "Captain Swing" not with understanding, but
with a massed sword-swinging charge!
Cheers,
Mike
Mike Scott Rohan
from pra...@presto.net.au (Laon) contains these words:
> I've found corroboration of a kind, for the idea that perceptions of
> romanticism are a key to understanding some of the forces behind the
> Wagner/Nazi myth.
I should have added to my comments on this, my thanks for yet more
fascinating stuff. I'm out of my depth with Tillich & Co, so all the
more grateful to see it applied to this.
Cheers,
Mike
Laon
Thanks for your critical as well as positive comments. I'll leave
Matthew Arnold with my expression of irrational loathing and your
perfectly reasoned defence. No, I'll make one clarification. It's not
that I thought that Arnold's notions on crowd control were unusually
unenlightened for his age; it's more that I enjoyed the way they
jarred with his own musings on "sweetness and light". But my overall
reaction to Arnold is quite irrational, I know. Still, on this one
I'll just go with my feelings. An example of Romanticism in action, I
guess.
As I said, the various editions of Peter Viereck's _Metapolitics_ have
been especially influential in casting Romanticism as that villainous
movement behind Nazism and assorted other evils.
Especially the 1941 and 1961 editions. The latest re-issue was in
2003, with an appendix harvesting and presenting the most offensive
antisemitic remarks from the _Diaries_, which weren't available for
Viereck's earlier editions. I tend to doubt that the latest edition
will do so well; a lot of ideas have moved on, including in the debate
about Wagner, since Viereck formed his ideas.
Anyway, here's an outline of Peter Viereck's highly influential work,
_Metapolitics: A Book with Unstable Subtitling_.
Basically _Metapolitics_ is a tooth and claw, no holds barred, attack
on romanticism. To Viereck, romanticism did dirt on his beloved and
essentially imaginary pre-romantic world in which form, order and law
dominated. Viereck seems to think that the romantic period was
dominated by the irrational, by grotesque, violent, authoritarian and
racist notions, while earlier ages were not.
For another perspective on that, let's consider the views of a real
fascist concerning the high tide of romanticism, the 19th century.
Benito Mussolini's views differ from Viereck's, and seem closer to
reality. "If it is admitted that the nineteenth century has been the
century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy," wrote Mussolini, "it
does not follow that the twentieth must also be the century of
Liberalism, Socialism and Democracy. Political doctrines pass; peoples
remain. It is to be expected that this century may be that of
authority, a century of the "Right," a Fascist century. If the
nineteenth was the century of the individual it may be expected that
this one may be the century of "collectivism" and therefore the
century of the State."
[Source: Mussolini, Benito, _The Doctrine of Fascism_, 1932.]
Anyway, Viereck begins with a highly eccentric history of German
philosophical thought, from the 30 Years War through various detours
to Hitler. As well as fingering the early romantics, Viereck dragged
in such other figures as he thought might suit his case, generously
labelling most of these other figures as Romantics as well. For
example Viereck defamed Johann Gottfried von Herder as a nationalist
and a racist, when the real Herder was a liberal democrat, a
"brotherhood of man" internationalist and remarkably advanced, for his
time, in his rejection of racism.
Viereck's comments on Herder are wrong in ways that happen to be close
to what Alfred Rosenberg said about Herder in his _Mythus den 20.
Jahrhunderts_, in which Rosenberg claimed Herder as an ancestor of
Nazism. As we know, claiming Great Dead Germans as ancestors is
something that the Nazis did; they said similar things about
Beethoven, Goethe, an opera-composer, and many others. It seems
possible that Viereck's view of Herder is based on his having read
Rosenberg but not Herder. But it hardly matters that Viereck's account
of Herder is a series of howlers: in any case Herder was very much of
the Enlightenment period, not a Romantic.
Viereck mentions but pays surprisingly little attention to the man who
really can reasonably be claimed as the founder of modern German
nationalism, Johann Gottleib Fichte. Perhaps this is because Fichte
cannot be fitted into Viereck's story. Fichte was alive during the
Romantic period, but was not part of the Romantic movement in any
sense.
Worse, from Viereck's point of view, is if you start your history of
proto-supremacist German nationalism at its real beginning, then you
have to trace it through its actual course through German conservative
circles. And that means you can't credibly trace your lineage through
Richard Wagner, as Wagner showed no interest in Fichte and was never
attracted to or influenced by his philosophy or worldview. If your
agenda is to trace your proto-Nazi lineage through the Romantics and
in particular through Wagner, you have to minimise the attention you
pay Fichte and chase phantoms instead.
The phantom Viereck pursues, for a substantial portion of his book, is
Father Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who was (how to put this fairly?) a
really very important gymnastics teacher and administrator. Jahn
helped set up the Turnverein movement, a series of gymnastics clubs
with the aim of restoring patriotic morale among youth after defeat
and occupation by Napoleon's forces. Jahn was a nationalist and
antisemite, though he was also, in the unhelpful manner of real human
beings, a brave and outspoken advocate of democracy. But the
complexities of real life are no match for a conspiracy theorist:
Viereck simply dismisses the democratic side of the man and focusses
on the bad Jahn.
Viereck then presents the Turnverein as a sort of proto-fascist
conspiracy under Jahn's direction, which finally passed the
proto-fascist torch to Richard Wagner, who passed it to Hitler.
Viereck's trump card is the undoubtedly interesting fact that Jahn
used the word "stormtroopers" of his patriotic young tumblers, which
is of course the same word as was used over a hundred years later by
the Nazi Roehm for a group whose nature, philosophy, purpose,
structure and activities were utterly unlike. Still, the word was the
same.
Unfortunately for Jahn himself, and also unfortunately for Viereck's
thesis, the historical Jahn lost control of the historical Turnverein
movement within a few years of its founding. The movement made a left
turn that Jahn did not follow, and became a centre of liberal activism
amongst young people, and came to attract a significant Jewish
membership, these being things that Jahn, though a proponent of
democracy, did not approve.
If placing such emphasis on Jahn is eccentric, claiming Jahn as a
romantic is even more so. Jahn was about as romantic as any PE
instructor.
As for Jahn's influence on or relationship with the actual German
romantics, they seem to have reacted to Jahn in the same way that any
bunch of pencil-necked or butter-balled poets and intellectuals would
react to a jumped-up pumped-up instructor of physical jerks. I have
found only one instance of a reference to Jahn in the work of any of
the German romantics, and it was not complimentary. In 1823 the
romantic-movement playwright Joseph von Eichendorff wrote a satirical
comedy, _Krieg den Philistern_ [_War on the Philistines_], that "makes
delightfully short work of the patriotic liberalism of Jahn and his
followers, as well as of the Nordic nonsense of Fouqué and the
tea-table aestheticism of the Dresden literati."
[Paulin, Roger, "The Drama", in _The Romantic Period in Germany:
Essays by Members of the London University Institute of Germanic
Studies_, Prawer, Siegbert, editor, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970, p
199.]
Anyway, in Viereck's counterfactual universe, the romantic proto-Nazi
torch passes from Jahn to Wagner. Viereck managed to find a reference
to the Turnverein in _Mein Leben_, and _A Communication to my
Friends_, but not a single reference to Jahn, anywhere. Since Viereck
wrote, the _Diaries_ and more letters have been published, still with
no references to Jahn.
Before claiming that Wagner was influenced by Jahn, Viereck would
probably first need to prove that Wagner had actually heard of the
man, and that can't be done from anything that Wagner ever wrote, or
said, at least in Cosima's presence. We can assume that Wagner had
probably heard of Jahn, in the same way that I assume that most people
here have heard of Baden-Powell; but the record makes it pretty clear
that Wagner never gave Jahn a second's thought.
Viereck's focus on Wagner means that his summing up of Wagner provides
an epitome of his case against romanticism, since he regards Wagner as
the culmination of all romanticism. Aside from Hitler, of course.
Viereck wrote:
"The diabolically clever combination of appeals with which Hitler won
the masses consists of the very same appeals which compose Wagner's
meta-politics. These are: Pan-German nationalism; vague promises of
economic socialism (that 'true', anti-Marxist brand); fanatic
anti-Semitism, both economic and racist; revolt against legalism;
revolt against reason, especially against 'alien' intellectualism; the
Führer principle; yearning for the organic Volk state without class
distinctions; hatred of free speech and parliamentary democracy and of
the international bankers supposed to control democracy; misty Nordic
primitivism of the Siegfried and Nibelungen sagas." (p 134)
Of that list of Wagner's supposed attributes the antisemitism is
accurate, though Wagner's antisemitism was about culture, not finance
or race. It's also probably true that Wagner had once yearned for an
organic Volk state without class distinctions; the young Wagner
probably did, but if he maintained this yearning into middle age and
beyond, he doesn't seem to have mentioned it much in the last 30 or so
years of his life. Still, a lot of people might yearn for something on
those lines and Wagner may have too. The rest of the supposed
Wagnerian ideas are Viereck's inventions. (Wagner liked American
democracy, by the way; he didn't like the Bismarckian "democracy" of
the 1870s and 1880s under a system in which Prussia could override the
wishes of the smaller states, which Wagner thought was a sham. Though
it stands to his lasting discredit that he chose to attack that
structure as a French and Jewish idea.)
Wagner's significance, Viereck wrote, is that "he is the focal point
where all these contradictory doctrines _coalesce_ into one single
program of irresistible demagogic appeal to the mass man."
The source of these appalling ideas is, of course, romanticism.
"Wagner's goals had never really changed from those of the original
romantic school of 1800: anti-French, anti-rational, worshipping
subconscious, lawless 'Life'." (page 125)
Earlier Viereck had written, "Without a century of romantic ideas,
seeping downward to all levels and then outward from books to bullets,
the well-educated and decent German nation would never have become so
uniquely susceptible (gullible) toward a metathug." (p xxvi)
Comment:
I'm going to address the issue of Viereck's textual dishonesties now,
because it's relevant here but would be a detour when I get on to
summarising the themes behind the different attacks on romanticism.
Viereck's book has been influential not only on perceptions of
romanticism in general, but also of Wagner. For example Viereck was,
as far as I have been able to tell, the first Wagner critic to cite
the concluding words of "Judaism in Music" with the key words "for
then we shall be one and indivisible" omitted in order to hide the
fact that Wagner was calling for assimilation. That particular
deception has been much imitated.
Moreover, Viereck took the concluding words from "Judaism in Music"
and inserted them into an essay written 30 years later, falsely
claiming that the resulting hodgepodge was from the late essay
"Heroism and Christianity". (This is a Viereck specialty: taking a few
words from different contexts, sometimes written years or decades
apart, and reassembling the fragments into new statements, which he
then attributed to Wagner.)
Viereck also pioneered the practice of quoting from Wagner's summary
of Gobineau on race, in the opening pages of "Heroism and
Christianity", in order to present Gobineau's views as Wagner's.
Naturally Viereck omitted to mention that Wagner actually concluded
that essay by advocating racial equality under, as Wagner put it, a
"universal moral concord, such as only Christianity can bring about."
An amusing example, which I cannot believe was accidental, was
Viereck's change to the title of "Heroism and Christianity". Viereck
is a right-wing Christian, and "right-wing-ness" and "Christianity"
were both salient features of Nazism. As any sensible person is aware,
the undeniable facts that Nazism was rightwing and included Christian
as well as anti-Christian elements, do not mean that there is anything
intrinsically Nazi about being rightwing or Christian. But Viereck's
basic mode of argument is the smear by association; so he needed to
deny associations that came inconveniently close to his own home.
Thus Viereck's agenda included claiming that Nazism was a left-wing
movement, and glossing over the significant contribution of Christian
doctrines and Christian political figures both to the formation of
Nazi ideas and to the Nazi rise to power. Therefore, in claiming
Wagner as Hitler's teacher, it was necessary to create an
anti-Christian Wagner, unlike the historical Wagner who, by his
Bayreuth days, deeply respected Christianity without quite being a
believer, and attended church with his family. But "Heroism and
Christianity" is unhelpful to Viereck, not only in its content but
even in its title.
So Viereck blithely changed the title of Wagner's essay to "Heroism".
Just "Heroism". The words "and Christianity" were an embarrassment, so
Viereck "disappeared" them.
Here are three other examples. First, Viereck noted that Wagner often
complained about things said about him in the press, and follows that
true statement with the fantasy that therefore Wagner was opposed to
freedom of the press. Unsurprisingly Viereck gave no citation to back
the claim, not even one of his cobbled-together mosaics. In reality
Wagner's response to attacks in the press relied upon the existence of
a free press; he wrote his own attacks and counterattacks, boots and
all. It could get decidedly ugly, but it wasn't about censorship.
Second, Wagner recommended, in his _Revolution_ speech, that the army
should not be controlled by unelected princes, but should instead be
accountable to a democratically elected assembly. As is the case in
most democratic countries. But Viereck claimed that this speech was
the model for Roehm, in setting up the Stormtroopers, a mere
falsification.
Third, Viereck claimed that Wagner invented the Führer-principle.
Obviously, if you search through Wagner's writing you'll find no such
idea, since Wagner was by nature an anarchist, who eventually drifted
as far right as supporting constitutional monarchy. So Viereck
invented the idea of reading Wagner's texts as an arbitrary collection
of secret codes, in which any old thing means whatever Vierek wants it
to mean: this is a staple technique of later hostile Wagner
anti-Wagner exegesists. Viereck' secret code, for proving that Wagner
invented the Führer principle is this: whenever Wagner used the word
"King", or "hero", or mentioned Frederick Barbarossa, he really meant
an absolute political dictatorship, in the 20th century sense.
The question that has to arise, on reading such games of
word-substitution, is whether Viereck believed what he was writing. My
judgement is that Viereck was sure that his big picture was true, but
had the difficulty that the evidence did not support the picture he
saw so clearly in his own mind. So, like a policeman planting
evidence, he thought that a few falsifications were justified in the
service of his true belief. Hence his furtive changes to Wagner texts
and titles.
At other times he probably managed to convince himself of nonsensical
things, for example that 19th century "king" meant 20th century
"Führer", that Wagner's rejection of Gobineau's ideas was really
acceptance, that Wagner was deeply influenced by a gymnastics
administrator he never met or mentioned, and so on.
_Metapolitics_ has been very influential, mainly through indirect
influence on people who have read ideas adopted from Viereck but have
not read Viereck himself. I would have to conclude that although the
book undoubtedly contains self-deception, it is also an unprincipled
and sustained act of academic fraud, and its influence is regrettable.
George Mosse next, also a comment on an on-line piece by a Prof
Gerhard Rempel, and then I'll attempt to sum up the whole case against
romanticism.
Cheers!
Laon
Laon
> Viereck mentions but pays surprisingly little attention to the man who
> really can reasonably be claimed as the founder of modern German
> nationalism, Johann Gottleib Fichte. Perhaps this is because Fichte
> cannot be fitted into Viereck's story. Fichte was alive during the
> Romantic period, but was not part of the Romantic movement in any
> sense.
It's true that Fichte was not part of the Romantic movement. And I
felt pretty good about an absence of any meaningful connection between
Fichte and the early German romantics, based on consulting several
dozen books by or about the German romantics, and finding no
references, or only incidental ones, to Fichte. And also consulting
three recent English-language books on Fichte [not a lot has been
published on or by Fichte in English], and some journal articles, and
finding no mentions of the romantics.
However this afternoon, as the library bells were sounding, in the
actual last two minutes before they lock the doors and throw you out
(or lock you in for the night), I encountered the fact that Fichte was
at the University of Jena from 1793 to 1798, and that quite a few of
the young German romantics had attended his lectures on philology.
Which is damned inconvenient of them, let me tell you.
This means I'll have to read more about Fichte, for whom I have very
little time, and see what connections, if any, exist at a political
level. My impression based on reading to date is that the political
views of the romantics are not influenced by Fichte, but I'll comment
more after digging a little deeper, and probably into German sources.
For what it's worth, the Fichte work that points the way to a
proto-supremacist form of German nationalism is his _Reden an den
deutsche Nation_, based on lectures delivered in Berlin in 1807-1808,
a decade after the Jena period. And Novalis, who was arguably the most
important political thinker of the early German Romantics, certainly
couldn't have been influenced by Fichte's 1807-08 lectures since he
died young, in 1801.
Anyway, it's still true that Fichte wasn't a Romantic, and that there
isn't a path that goes from Fichte to the early German Romantics to
Wagner to Hitler. But a better and more careful note on blasted Fichte
will follow.
Cheers!
Laon
Derrick Everett
> I wrote:
>> Viereck mentions but pays surprisingly little attention to the man who
>> really can reasonably be claimed as the founder of modern German
>> nationalism, Johann Gottleib Fichte. Perhaps this is because Fichte
>> cannot be fitted into Viereck's story. Fichte was alive during the
>> Romantic period, but was not part of the Romantic movement in any
>> sense.
>
> It's true that Fichte was not part of the Romantic movement. And I
> felt pretty good about an absence of any meaningful connection between
> Fichte and the early German romantics, based on consulting several
> dozen books by or about the German romantics, and finding no
> references, or only incidental ones, to Fichte. And also consulting
> three recent English-language books on Fichte [not a lot has been
> published on or by Fichte in English], and some journal articles, and
> finding no mentions of the romantics.
>
One of the "lunatic fringe" writers about Wagner, in discussing the
intellectual currents of his youth, claims a central position for Johann
Gottlieb Fichte. Oddly, since there is no evidence to support the view
that Fichte influenced Wagner.
I have found no references to J.G. Fichte in Wagner's published letters
(although I confess that I have not read all 7000+ of them!) and only two
references to him in Cosima's diaries, both indirect. On one of these
occasions (31 October 1879), Wagner remarked that he understood Goethe's
dislike of Fichte. On the other (14 December 1874), Wagner admired a
letter written by Schiller to Fichte, quoted by Frauenstädt (editor of
Schopenhauer's collected works). There is no mention of Fichte's ideas or
opinions.
There is a copy of Fichte's "Reden an die deutsche Nation" in Wagner's
Bayreuth library. It should not be concluded from this fact that he
ever read it. Probably some of those books were acquired by Cosima, who
would recommend to her husband those that she thought would interest him.
There is no record of either of them recommending Fichte's book, or even
of them referring to its content. The evidence for Fichte as an influence
on Richard Wagner is, therefore, less than overwhelming.
Laon
> One of the "lunatic fringe" writers about Wagner, in discussing the
> intellectual currents of his youth, claims a central position for Johann
> Gottlieb Fichte. Oddly, since there is no evidence to support the view
> that Fichte influenced Wagner.
> these occasions (31 October 1879), Wagner remarked that he understood Goethe's
> dislike of Fichte. On the other (14 December 1874), Wagner admired a
> letter written by Schiller to Fichte, quoted by Frauenstädt (editor of
> Schopenhauer's collected works). There is no mention of Fichte's ideas or
> opinions.
Thanks for that. I've also checked the indexes of the complete Wagner
essays, plus _Mein Leben_, and sure enough there are no mentions of
Fichte there either. So the only thing approximating a comment on
Fichte, by Wagner, is negative. Some "influence". Just out of idle
curiosity, which of the "lunatic fringe" writers was it? Rose, Köhler,
or someone else?
I've done some more reading of Fichte, going to primary sources after
coming unstuck from relying on secondary sources, and I can confirm
that I was talking crap. While Fichte wasn't part of the romantic
movement, he was certainly on close terms with several of the early
Romantics, and there's no question that he exercised influence in
philosophical matters. But the picture is complicated in three ways:
(1) His influence principally concerned questions such as philology
and philosophy of language rather than politics;
(2) Even then, there was at least as much disagreement as agreement
between Fichte and the romantics, so that the "influence" is more a
matter of his indicating that certain areas of philosophical inquiry
were important, rather than a matter of Fichte setting out doctrines
and the likes of Schelling and Hölderin adopting those doctrines
(instead they publically argued with him, though they did so
respectfully);
(3) Fichte's "German nationalism" was not quite what I was led to
expect it to be, from secondary sources. His _Reden an die deutsche
Nation_ were not in any sense racially supremacist, and nor were they
authoritarian. In fact Fichte's libertarianism, as set out in those
addresses, prescribes standards of personal freedom in relation to the
state that are not offered by any of the modern democracies.
The historical context is also important. At the time of the
_Addresses to the German Nation_ Fichte and his audience were under
direct threat from a French-led army under Napoleon, and a critic who
tut-tuts over Fichte's patriotic language, without first alerting the
reader to that relevant fact, is not being quite fair. Just as
Churchill's speeches could be made to sound unpleasantly nationalist,
also racist, if they were quoted without reference to the threat he
and his audience were then facing from a German-led army under Hitler.
But I'll come back to Fichte, once I get to considering how much truth
there might be in the case for romanticism as proto-Fascism.
For now I'd like to move to outlining George Mosse's accusations
against romanticism in his 1964 _The Crisis of German Ideology:
Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich_.
Basically, Mosse's case for romanticism as an ancestor of Nazism was
fairly standard in most respects. So he claimed that German
romanticism (which he tends not to define with any clarity, especially
in chronology, which as we will see slides around all over the place)
was a reaction against the ideas of the Enlightenment, and that it was
a worship of the irrational, a yearning for a Medieval past, and so
on.
Mosse added one important element, which has also been enormously
influential: the idea of "romantic-Volkish thought".
To simplify the argument to its barest outlines, Mosse argued that
"romantic-Volkish thought" was, as he claimed the German Romantics
tend to be, fixated on an ancient, feudal past: therefore
romantic-Volkish thought is highly politically reactionary.
Mosse also postulated the German Romantics as reacting _against_ the
French Revolution, and therefore opposed to ideas of libety, equality
and fraternity.
In reality the German Romantics were enthusiastic initial supporters
of the French Revolution, and most remained supportive of the ideals
of the revolution, but not of the ghastly mess it turned into in
France. Certainly by the time of the Terror, they were disenchanted
with the progress of _that_ revolution. But their political response
was not to become supporters of the _ancien regime_; they became
liberals who looked for ways of preserving liberty against both
monarchist and republican tyrannies.
(Chronological clarification: I am talking about the early German
Romantics and their response to the French Revolution. Some of the
figures in the early German Romantic movement did become Church and
King conservatives late in their lives, decades after the French
Revolution had passed into history. But that slow drift to the right
cannot credibly be claimed as a product of Romanticism, I would
suggest; it's a common result of ageing. Most of their career as
Romantics was spent on the liberal left.)
Living in lands that were being attacked, unprovoked, by Napoleon's
armies would obviously have helped to convince many German Romantics
that the French Revolution had not been an unmitigated success for
humanity. The English progressive left of the early 19th century also
concluded that the French Revolution had been, despite initial
promise, an utter disaster for supporters of democracy. The murderous
French shambles followed by tyranny played into the hands of European
reactionaries by discrediting democratic ideas; it set back the
democratic cause in Europe for decades, at least. In distancing
themselves from the French Revolution, the German Romantic liberals
were not being "reactionary"; they were doing what most of the
non-French left did, throughout Europe.
Anyway, Mosse go on to imply that even the Romantic appreciation of
nature is inherently proto-racist. This is because when a Romantic
sees a meadow, forest or whatever, he or she thinks something like,
"only I and other people who are rooted in this place are able to
appreciate this beauty; someone who came from somewhere else wouldn't
be able to truly feel it."
Not surprisingly, Mosse doesn't give a single example of a romantic
who ever said anything of the kind. I can't suggest a single example
either. Even if a citation can b found somewhere, this is certainly
not a valid generalisation about the Romantic (including the German
Romantic) idea of "Nature".
(I don't think Mosse was deliberately dishonest like Peter Viereck,
with Viereck's changes to texts and titles, but Mosse did indulge in a
number of rhetorical tricks to shore up a case that was light on
evidence. This sort of unsubstantiated generalisation is one.)
Anyway that idea of "rootedness" takes us to the next stage of Mosse's
construction: that the Romantics were "Volkish", and that there was
something darkly sinister in their invocation of the Volk.
Almost the whole of Mosse's discussion of the mysterious and ineffable
meaning that the word "Volk" had, to the early German Romantics, was
written without a single citation from the Romantics themselves.
Which, considering the absurdity of many of Mosse's claims, is hardly
surprising.
For example, Mosse claimed that the Romantics thought of the Volk as
some sort of intermediary between "man and the divine". Which could
only make sense if they thought that the Volk was something that was
not "Man". Moreover, Mosse claimed that the Romantics believed that
the Volk channelled a force that contained a mysterious energy, which
an individual could only partake of if they merged their individuality
into the Volk.
Now, I'm a novice here, but I've recently been reading a lot of the
German romantics, generally with pleasure, and I have an idea of the
kind of people they were. And here what Mosse is saying just doesn't
remotely ring true. It's not just that I haven't found any example of
Novalis or Tieck, say, ever arguing anything remotely like this, it's
that I know that there's no way that any of them would hav thought or
said anything like that. It's just gubbage. It's buttons. It aint da
real shizzit.
So what's going on?
Basically Mosse is making a strange claim about the German language,
that the word "Volk" doesn't mean the same as "people", or "le
peuple", or "la gente"; it has this mysterious, ineffable racist
meaning, not found in other European languages. The "Volk" is a racial
idea; when someone says "das Volk" they mean a race, and when someone
says a decision should be made by "das Volk", they mean tuning into
the desires of the Volk through semi-mystical means, and not through
anything like counting votes.
As a result of this claim, it becomes easy to turn any statement by a
German Romantic writer who was actually writing about rule by the
people into a sinister proto-Nazi statement.
Thus, when Jefferson wrote, "We, the people ... " he is a democrat
because he wrote in English. But if he had been German, then he would
have written, "Wir, das Volk ..." and he would have been a racist
proto-Nazi for saying that.
And when Rousseau wrote, "Le peuple soumis aux lois en doit être
l'auteur", he was lucky that he was not German. Because he was French,
we think that he meant, "The people, being subject to the laws, ought
to be their author."
But if he had been German, he would have written something like: "Weil
es die Gesetze befolgen muss, soll das Volk ihr Autor sein." And so
we'd apply the Mosse test, and know that what Rousseau _really_ meant
was that only racially pure people should be allowed to make laws.
And so on. Using this word-substitution game, Mosse is able to find
that the German romantics didn't believe in democracy, but did have
feelings about Germans as a race that were to have sinister
implications, etc.
Mosse isn't especially interested in Wagner, but other people have
applied this idea to create their own meanings from Wagner texts.
Wagner actually made relatively few uses of the word "Volk"; the word
does turn up in his complete works, but is hardly central or
important. But it is common for people to turn Wagner's call for
political authority to be in the hands of the people, in the
"Revolution" speech, or Hans Sach's suggestion that the song contest
should be judged by the people, from the straighforward pro-democracy
assertions that they actually were, into authoritarian racist
statements instead.
Basically what Mosse has done is focus on a meaning of the word "Volk"
which was first used by a small group of German racist right-wingers
in the 1890s, and then taken up by many more thinkers in the early
20th century. Mosse took this sense of the word, and projected that
meaning back in time, to read texts by much earlier thinkers in this
highly anachronistic way.
There's a bit more to say on how that worked, and I'd also like to
note a bit of backtracking on Mosse's part, that he put in a later
book. But I'm outa steam for now, and dat aint no shizzit.
Cheers!
Laon
Laon
The point of criticising Mosse is not to say that there was not such a
thing as Volkish nationalism, which influenced the Nazis. Of course
there was. The point is about chronology.
The early German Romantic movement started in the mid-1790s and had
petered out by the 1830s, though I've encountered a lot of authorities
who would say the Early German Romantic Movement's cut-off date was
1815. While the Volkish Nationalist movement became recognisable as a
doctrine and perhaps a movement in the 1890s, and florished in the
1920s, or arguably 1930s.
Mosse slurred over the reality that the two movements happened in
different periods, presenting them as hyphenated, practically merged,
contemporaries. Mosse also slurred over other disjunctions: the
German Romantics and the Volkish nationalists had quite different
interests, philosophical outlooks and agenda.
Here's an example of how this chronological slippage worked, in
Mosse's _The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the
Third Reich_.
Mosse argued that the German Romantic Volkish nationalists thought
that "nature" was different from "landscape". Landscape was only
scenery; "nature" was landscape that was appreciated by the people
whose ancestors were native to that land. Mosse claimed that
Romantics believed that people could only truly appreciate the nature
that they were "rooted" in, and this belief this linked them, through
a chain of Mossean assumptions, to racist "Blut und Boden" [blood and
soil] ideology.
In reality the German Romantics never showed any sign of any such
belief. The Romantic movement was attracted to wanderlust and to the
"sublime", and therefore to new rather than familiar vistas, and to
nature in exotic and challenging rather than comfortable forms. But
never mind that Mosse's premise isn't really true of German Romantic
prose or poetry or painting concerning "nature". What's more striking
is Mosse's handling of chronology.
On page 16 Mosse commenced his argument that the Romantics saw nature
in terms of providing localised "roots" for the "Volk".
He wrote:
"The romantics' increased interest in nature had been accompanied by a
revival of the notion that history provided an explanation and a goal
for man's development. In the Volkish interpretation of history the
Volk was a historical unit that had come down to the present from a
far and distant past. As the nostalgia for the medieval past had
played a cardinal role in romanticism, so the Volkish thinkers tended
to contrast the idyllic medieval Volk with the actual modern present.
In giving the Volk roots in the remote past, history also seemed to
endow it with endurance. Napoleon and the European political reaction
which opposed nationalism might be victorious, but only temporarily."
[page 16]
There are two things to note about this passage. The first is the way
the terms "romantic" and "Volkish" were used interchangeably:
"romantics" in the first sentence mutated to "Volkish interpretation"
in the second, and romanticism and Volkish thinkers simply unite in
the third sentence.
Note also that reference to Napoleon, which provided the indication of
the time period: 1799 to 1815. Mosse meant the early German romantics.
A little later he mentioned the 1890s, but the Romantics he was
talking about were clearly the ones who were contemporary with
Napoleon.
On page 17 Mosse provided his first quotation to illustrate this
alleged linkage of Romantic and Volkish thought in this essentially
racist perception of "nature". It's not the quotation itself that's of
interest, but Mosse's introduction to it. He wrote:
"The distinction between nature and landscape was summed up by Otto
Gmelin, a writer of historical novels, in _Die Tat_, at that time one
of the principal organs of romantic-Volkish thought..."
"At that time", wrote Mosse. But Mosse didn't specify what time that
was. So when did Otto Gmelin publish the words that Mosse cited?
April 1925, that's when.
Otto Gmelin was a 20th century German Volkish nationalist who was
sympathetic to Nazi ideas. But as a contemporary of the Nazis, he was
not part of any generation of the German Romantics, and he was a long,
long, way from Napoleon.
There's a little bit more to be said about chronology, but before we
move on let's notice that Mosse cited Napoleon as an opponent of
nationalism. That would surely have been news to Napoleon, also to the
residents of the lands, including German-speaking territories,
conquered and occupied by the French armies under Napoleon. The
rhetorical intent seems to be to whitewash Napoleon so that opposition
to the first "little Corporal" can be presented as an untoward, ugly,
form of nationalism, instead of what it really was: a defensive
response to nationalist military aggression, external and unprovoked.
Anyway, that's not the only example of Mosse using selected texts as
evidence against people who were dead long before the texts were
written. Other citations, supposed to be evidence of proto-Volkish
ideas held by the German Romantics, include such works as Wilhelm von
Polenz's _Der Büttnerbauer_ (1895) and Hermann Löns' _Der Werwolf_,
written in 1910.
Mosse had a problem, in introducing pre-1890 writers into his
argument. The problem is that there was a substantial chronological
gap, as well as an ideological one, between the Volkish nationalists
and the early German Romantics. Mosse's attempt to plug this gap
involved shoving in the names of various writers as supportive
evidence, when some of these writers were Romantics but not Volkish
Nationalists, some were proto-Volkish Nationalists but not Romantics,
and some were neither.
For example Mosse cited the work of "Droste Hülstof" [sic], who I
didn't immediately recognise as Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. She was
cited as an example of continuity from the early German Romantics to
the Volkish Nationalists on the sole ground that she set "most of her
fiction in the Westphalian Heide".
Well, "most of her fiction" isn't much; she wrote one novel, _Das
Judenbuche_, and it was set in the Westphalian Heide. But her
perspective, in that novel, is hardly Volkish nationalist. Rather than
thinking of the Heide and its residents as a unity, Droste-Hülshoff
was more interested in the contrast between the beauty and grace of
Westphalian nature and the savagery and injustice of its residents.
Moreover, Volkish nationalism is almost by definition antisemitic,
while Droste-Hölshoff's _Das Judenbuche_ is strongly anti-antisemitic.
To be fair, Droste-Hülshoff did set some poems, short stories in the
Heide, and wrote an account of its folklore; after all, she lived
there. On the other hand, her major epic poem, _Das Hospiz auf dem
grossen St Bernhard_ was set in Switzerland.
So Droste-Hülshoff was no Volkish nationalist. Nor was she a Romantic.
With her social, political and religious conservatism, together with
an almost total lack of interest in politics, her preference for
domestic subjects, her depiction of the ordinary and the cosy rather
than the extraordinary and the elated, Droste-Hülshoff was a
Biedermeier writer par excellence.
The Biedermeier period is sometimes written of as a form of
Romanticism and sometimes as a reaction against Romanticism. I think
it is more accurate simply to acknowledge that Biedermeier involved
continuity with some aspects of Romanticism and rejection of other
aspects, and was a new and quite distinct Movement. An example of
continuity is that Beidermeier poets, like Romantic poets, tended to
use lyric, less formal, verse forms. And Beidermeier poetry, painting
and music tended to value the representation of nature, whether in
verse, painting or music.
But the differences are more striking. Beidermeier showed no interest
in Romantic "wildness". It valued domesticity over the "sublime". It
favoured cosy home life as a value and as a subject, and showed little
interest in such themes as the emotional struggles of individuals in
conflict with their society. It favoured an apolitical conservatism
over Romanticism's political engagement and tendency to value
rebelliousness. And Beidermeier art tends towards the miniature,
small, intimate structures rather than the grand gestures of romantic
art.
Likewise, Mosse cited Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), on the ground that
"most of his plots" were set in Bohemia. Given that Stifter lived in
Bohemia, and wrote only two novels, _Der Nachsommer_ (1857) and
_Witiko_ (1865-67), plus some short stories, it's perhaps not
surprising that his work didn't cover a lot of geographical ground.
Stifter was another Beidermeier figure, not a proto-Volkish
nationalist, and not a Romantic, either.
Mosse came near Wagnerian territory when he cited Berthold Auerbach,
1812-1882, for "depicting the peasant as a Volk hero as well as an
ideal German". Auerbach did write a successful series of short stories
about idealised peasant life, but his novels (eg _Auf der Höhe_)
tended to concern Jewish life in Europe. Moreover Auerbach was a
pioneering translator into German of the Enlightenment philosopher
Spinoza, which would suggest that he was part of a rather different,
non-Volkish intellectual tradition. These facts, perhaps also the fact
that Auerbach was Jewish, suggest some distance between Auerbach and
Volkish nationalism, and to claim Auerbach for the Volkish
natiionalist team, without mentioning these things, was perhaps
misleading. Auerbach was on friendly terms with Wagner, by the way,
and rebuked him for his antisemitism.
Auerbach as a Romantic but not a Volkish nationalist. On the other
hand, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl was a proto-Volkish nationalist but not a
Romantic. Mosse cited Riehl because of the four volumes of the
_Naturgeschichte des Volkes als Grundlage einer deutschen
Sozial-Politik_ [Natural History of the German People], published
between 1851 and 1869. This is the earliest text to contain ideas that
can fairly and realistically be called proto-Volkish nationalist.
Riehl's contribution was to claim that people were shaped by the
landscape they lived in. Riehl's theory on the link between people and
places was hardly "blood and soil", but Mosse essentially argued that
any sort of suggested link between people and a landscape is a step in
that direction. On the other hand, Riehl's idea that landscape shapes
human development is not logically helpful to racists, especially
master race theorists who believe that genetics rather than
environmental factors are what shape human peoples.
Riehl was an antisemite, it should be said, but this was not important
to his theory. Riehl believed that cities were corrupting of human
values, and no doubt felt that the presence of Jews in the cities
rather than the countryside was one of those corrupting factors. But
no part of his theory hung upon his antisemitism.
Mosse pointed out that Riehl's work was appreciated by the 20th
Century Volkish Nationalists, who established a Riehl Bund in 1920 and
the Riehl Volkskunde Prize in 1935. Mosse did not point out that
Riehl's work was also taken up as a contribution to mainstream
academic disciplines including town planning and sociology. Nor did
Mosse mention that left-wing theorists like Walter Benjamin, who was
anything but a Volkish nationalist, also valued his work. And Riehl's
argument that wildernesses preserved something important that would be
lost without conservation, Riehl indirectly affected the modern
environmentalist movement.
So, Riehl is the earliest figure cited by Mosse, who did actually make
some small contribution to Volkish nationalism. Was he a Romantic? His
life overlapped with the lives of various late Romantics, including
Wagner, but that doesn't make him a romantic. Calling him Romantic
because he lived in the same period as some of the Romantics is like
calling Milton Friedman a post-modernist because his lifespan
significantly overlaps with Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, usw.
In placing Riehl in relation to the aesthetic movements of the 19th
century, I'd note that in 1848, when the Romantics were either
actually on the barricades, like Wagner, or at least sympathetic to
the rebels, like practically all the other Romantics, Riehl was a
conservative journalist writing _against_ the revolt and for the
status quo. Moreover, in pages 75-82 of _Der Naturgeschichte des
Volkes_, Riehl indicates his aesthetic preferences, which are for
small-scale, domestic art, such as might be made in a rural cottage
rather than a city. For example Riehl exalts "domestic and chamber
music" over the grander musical events, such as the symphony or opera,
that are put on in cities. So Riehl, a politically conservative
journalist and appreciator of the cosy, domestic arts, is aligned to
the Beidermeier, not the Romantic Movement.
I've gone to this length with Mosse out of respect rather than
disrespect. Mosse is in a different category from Viereck, for all
that I've argued that Mosse was making a case that is untrue, and that
he did so by putting up evidence that did not quite indicate what
Mosse said it indicated. But I think that Mosse was merely wrong, and
too often a bit careless, because he started with an idea that he felt
had to be true. He was not simply and dishonestly cooking the books in
the Viereck manner.
That's all for now. Summing up of the case against Romanticism next
time.
Cheers!
Laon