Modernism and Weimar

...Gay argues that the literature of early Weimar was often obsessed with the problems of rebellious sons, and that the Expressionists in particular anticipated and later mirrored a rebellion against paternal authority already inherent in the revolution of 1918...

...The hunger for wholeness was awash with hate: the political, and sometimes the private, world of its chief spokesmen was a paranoid world, filled with enemies: the dehumanizing machine, capitalist materialism, godless ration alism, rootless society, cosmopolitan Jews, and that great all-devouring monster, the city...

...Gay is too honest for the first and insufficiently interested (perhaps insufficiently theoretical) for the second...

...But he is not at all clear about the relationship of this metapsychology to metahistory...

...In the face of this conservative power, the existence of Die Weltbiihne and Die Neue Rundschau, and even the friendliness of the Ullstein press for literary men of radical sympathies, give only meager support to Gay's metaphor...

...II FOR ALL ITS BOMBAST and savagery, Nazism represented something immensely appealing to millions of lower-middle-class shopkeepers, artisans, and peasants...

...By the time the revolution occurred, the Mittelstand and the liberal party of progress had evolved diametrically opposed views on the desirability of economic progress, and a pattern of class antagonism was established that was to undercut later efforts to unify the nation socially, both under the Second Empire and the Republic...

...As T. S. Hamerow has convincingly shown, the main thrust of the real German revolution of 1848—not the liberal conclaves in Frankfurt and Berlin but the street fighting that forced the old regimes temporarily to cede power to the liberals—was the artisan's desire for protection from the machine and for a restoration of guild controls...

...One is the sociological subtitle of the book: The Outsider as Insider...

...Max Weber, one of Gay's heroes, also agreed that the machine was dehumanizing, rationalism led to disenchantment, Gesellschaft destroyed roots, and, in concurrence with his friend Simmel, the city had some most unpleasant features...

...The working class, as Guenther Roth has argued, became "negatively integrated" into the imperial structure in the decades before 1914...

...And this is because the French Revolu tion stood in a rather different temporal rela tionship to the dominant historical trend of the modem era, toward the economic and political concentration of power (industrial society and the unified state...

...I would be the last to maintain that Junger, Spengler, and their friends are founts of transcendent Reason...

...This mutual hostility between, on the one side, capitalist, bureaucrat, and free professional, and on the other, artisan, storekeeper, and peasant contributed greatly to the political isolation of the industrial proletariat, once it appeared on the scene...

...At its best (and mainly before the war), it was exemplified in the elitism of Nietzsche's "good European"—a glorified vision of the aristocrat as a naive, yet fully autonomous and self-conscious personality...

...BOOKS WHEN GAY WRITES, in metapsychological language, about the son's revolt and the father's revenge in the decades from 1900 to 1933, this process is his frame of reference...

...But Gay's reputation and stylistic verve, as also the popularity of his subject, assure him a wide audience, and this audience deserves more of an explanation for the demise of the Republic than they will find in Weimar Culture...

...The Freudian interpretation holds up better, but it lacks historical and sociological context...

...Furthermore, because of the disastrous failure of 1848, the Mittelstand lacked potential allies and a tradition of successful revolt...

...For the Mittelstand lacked a firm and psychologically feasible object of attack...

...the army maintains a cool, conservative independence from the fragile Republic...

...But in Germany the destruction of the old corporate order had begun two generations before the revolution of 1848, with the Napoleonic conquest...

...The concept of the fathers' revenge, however, is less clear...

...As myth, this militarism survived in the postwar bands of ultranationalist freebooters, the Freikorps...

...Nor does Gay reveal anything beyond a talent for invective when he comes to the conservative fear of modernity: a desperate need for roots and for com munity, a vehement, often vicious repudiation of reason accompanied by the urge for direct action or for surrender to a charismatic leader...

...it was also a major component both of the Conservative Revolution and National Socialism...

...Moreover, they recoup a shattered corporate status by identifying themselves with the spirit of the nation...

...1914 permitted a wonderful release of bottled-up aggression to all segments of German society, but for the Mittelstand it was also the fulfillment of a historical movement that had begun in 1848...

...The artisanry and the representatives of the Third Estate cooperated at the outset of the French Revolution, when the old economic and social order was still intact and both groups desired its destruction...

...In France, revolution occurred in a state unified for centuries around Paris, a powerful and populous royal city, and it was part of the logic of the revolution that it became indis solubly tied to this metropolis...

...The German bourgeoisie, the erstwhile liber als of Frankfurt, made their peace with Bismarck's Prussian empire in 1870...

...The problem is that once we have left the sphere of the arts, we find that the prewar "outsider" has become not so much an "insider" as a "not-so-far-outsider...

...But so did many of the events of the French Revolution: it was not Christian charity that led the conquerors of the Bastille to impale on pikestaffs the severed heads of the vanquished...

...By virtue of its amorphousness and the absence of a traditional power center, it also lacked any mode of coherent political organization...

...Gay's psychologizing only distracts from the real problem, which is why these phenomena offended sufficient numbers of intellectuals in sufficient degree to produce an ideological Conservative Revolution in Weimar Germany, and why a mass movement that similarly fused nationalism and traditional small-town virtues into a militant loathing for internationalism and modernity should have destroyed the republic with such ease in 1933...

...Despite socialist participation in the governments of the early Weimar years, the reactionary judiciary pronounces ludicrously light sentences for the 354 political assassinations committed by the Right and savagely heavy ones for the 22 traced to the Left...

...Like the rebellious bourgeois intellectuals, this group was unable to struggle openly against the oppressive, though renovated Old Regime that survived until 1918...

...Within the ranks of Germany's Third Estate, the tradition of class conflict was so sharp that the only united front that proved to be practical under the Hohenzollern was between feudal agrarians and industrialists...

...This ecstatic bloodlust waned during the war, but it continued to animate many intellectuals, and most of the shock troops who, as Janger and Salomon have argued, were able to escape the mechanized, dehumanizing, ant-like conditions of trench warfare...

...If we stop, as Gay does, with the brutality of the scene, we are simply permitting our moral and ideological reflexes to obscure our historical understanding...

...After all, contemporary America is hardly unfamiliar with the phenomenon of insecure social strata turning to thoughts of massacre because of their sense of historical obsolescence and impotence, and we cannot formulate political solutions until we have seriously begun the effort of historical and theoretical analysis...

...The model they strove to uphold against this order was aristocratic...

...The third identifies the antirepub lican cultural backlash of the period—"the hunger for wholeness"—with "fear of modern ity," and implies that this was the basis of Nazism...

...His portrayal of the scholarly, literary, and artistic brilliance of the first German republic illuminates much that has been obscure or available only through specialized monographs...

...Its social status in the empire was inferior, but through the mediating structures of the Socialist party and the trade unions, and through the government's social legislation, its social and economic position became secure...

...Revolutionary struggle for the bourgeois intellectual would have involved direct combat against one's parents or their friends...

...The universities, the army and the government bureaucracy, as Gay acknowledges, remain conservative domains...

...The Bauhaus, German Expressionism, the internationally important circles of historians, classical humanists, depth psychologists, and sociologists—all these appear here under the unifying imprint of a master stylist...

...This emulation persists whether the psychology of the challenger is envy, open hatred, or ressentiment...

...To such people, stupefied by national defeat, civil war, inflation and depression, scared out of their wits by cartellized capitalism above them and the organized proletariat below, the Nazis offered the culmination of a revolt against modernity that BOOKS had been brewing for nearly a century...

...This deficiency becomes annoying whenever Gay presents us with his argument on modernity and its discontents...

...In both cases precapitalist classes, excluded from and condemned by the march of economic progress, attempt by an act of political will to defy history...

...In terms of the depth psychology Gay likes to use, the values of traditionally dominant classes represent a cultural superego for the relatively underprivileged groups beneath them...

...The "outsider-insider" metaphor is useful: Gay is perfectly right in pointing out that much of what was accepted in Weimar cul ture had its origins as a marginal phenomenon before World War I. This is above all true for German Expressionism, but is also valid, to a degree, for the one-time marginal politics of German socialism and for the new BOOKS intellectual disciplines of sociology and psychoanalysis...

...This asso ciation with the city in turn reinforced the 284 other relationship which distinguished the French artisan movement from the German: its sporadic affinity with the party of bourgeois liberalism, and its consequent capacity, demonstrated in the 20th century, for joint political action with both capitalist and socialist parties...

...This artisan uprising stands in the same relation to the final revolutionary surge against the German republic in the 1930s as the 1789 –93 revolution of the sans-culottes to the Paris Commune...

...Classes struggling for power tend to emulate the values of the groups whose power and status they wish to inherit...

...This book should be read by all who want to sense the color, mood, and flavor of the modernist culture of Weimar Germany...

...this argument indeed is one of the best in his book...

...For their German equivalents, the mood of civil war became possible only after the reluctant conquest of the state by bourgeois democrats and moderate socialists in 1918 had eliminated the apparent power of the Junker aristocracy and left in its place a government composed of alien spirits: Jews, capitalists, thinly disguised Bolsheviks...

...The source of their disaffection was the overpowering authoritarian rigidity of the half-bourgeois, half-feudal social order of imperial Germany...

...the universities remain hostile to Jews, radicals, and disciplinary innovations...

...This extensive critique is perhaps unfair to Weimar Culture insofar as its author's main purpose, which he fulfills well, is the evocation of Republican Germany's cultural glory...

...The real "outsider" group during the furious onslaught of industrialization between 1870 and 1914 was the Mittelstand...

...These, after all, are the true re-volutions, the turnings back, beside which the elaborate rhetoric of bourgeois revolution appears as little more than ideological frosting on historical inevitability, and appeals to proletarian militance seem absurdly unnecessary...

...In the divided Germany of 1848, no such political center existed: the modern city repre sented only the cult of Mammon—capitalismnot the pride of national unity and the po tentiality of national consciousness...

...We see the revolution of the French artisan ry in a favorable light, that of the German in an unfavorable one, because in France the revolutionary movement was able to mediate its drive toward national mastery by associat ing itself with two features of modern society to which the German Mittelstand (the "estate" of precapitalist townsmen) was uniformly an tagonistic: the haute bourgeoisie (and its cul ture), and the metropolis...

...But responding to these men with an energetic little homily based on the views of Gropius, Bacon, Descartes, and the Enlightenment—"what most Germans did not want to learn was...

...Gay offers three overarching theoretical constructs intended to enable us to compre hend the nature of Weimar culture and the fateful evolution of the Republic...

...Which of these models any individual chose to follow at any particular time depended on a combination of his own psychological development and on the historical moment...

...That this involved a sea of hatred is un questionable...

...And just as the French of the Napoleonic era extended the principles of civil war to international war—with the ultimate goal of liberation and reconciliation determining the mode of conquest—the rebellious, hitherto squashed German Mittelstand and its ideological exponents, the conservative revolutionaries, extended the principle of war to the death between nations, a war whose only possible outcome would be the extermination of the opponent, to the civil war of the 1920's and 1930's...

...At its worst, it expressed a racist nationalism based on the presumably warlike virtues of the German Volk— really a celebration of Junker aggressiveness that carefully screened out the Junker's historic talents for sublimating his aggressiveness into bureaucratic despotism...

...In Weimar Culture, Spengler's notion of Prussian socialism, Hofmannsthal's and others' belief in the Conservative Revolution, and the Brown Bolshevik tendencies of Jiinger and Niekisch are all dismissed as "testimony to a perverse pleasure in paradox and a deliberate, deadly assault on reason...

...Devoid of power, like all other strata under the Empire, the artisanry found an opportunity for heroic identification with the national will in the imperial army, through the medium of the Prussian officer— the embodiment of the old Junker order which Mittelstand nationalism, as Bismarck intuitively understood, wished to devour...

...The struggle to overcome these traditional classes represents a personal as well as a historical mission, an equivalent, for a whole social class, of the process of personal maturing that Freud sees as commencing with the internalization of the parental ego-ideal, or superego, ending in symbolic patricide and a merging with the father's spirit...

...In France too, the artisanry had sought to liberate itself by devouring and thus fully internalizing the aristocratic spirit, but to a far greater extent than in Germany it was the spirit of aristocratic rebellion, the spirit of the RK#XS3 i Fronde, which inspired the mutinous Jacobins of Paris throughout the 19th century...

...For the artisan, the value system of the Empire was so suffused with nostalgia for the Mittelstand that such economists as Sombart and Weber, who argued in the 1890's for the advance of capitalism at whatever the social cost to obsolete classes, were considered dangerous radicals even by their colleagues...

...For there were two rebellious social groups that underwent this experience in 20th-century Germany, and two varieties of cultural superegos on which they modeled themselves...

...The rebellion of bourgeois intellectuals began well before the war, in figures like Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Weber, Sombart, Simmel, and Scheler...

...PETER GAY'S BOOK breathes elegance, wit, and discernment...

...But what gave the myth its power was the psychological reality, perceived astutely by Spengler as an ideologist of the Mittelstand, that the real German revolution took place in 1914...

...Unfortunately, in his effort to go beyond the evocation of a life-style and to penetrate the psychological and sociological significance of Weimar's plunge to disaster, Gay reveals the limitations of the historian as moralist, of the liberal enmeshed in the shibboleths of modernity, of an amateur depth psychologist who is too quick to settle for death wishes and oedipal hostilities as irreducible explanatory principles...

...that one must confront the world and dominate it, that the cure for the ills of modernity is more, and the right kind of modernity"—hardly helps us understand their ideology...

...Hindenburg's election as President in 1925 and Hitler's exploitation of the rootless rebels' yearning for a new and more congenial paternalism may be part of the same phenomenon, but to link them together, as Gay tries, would require either an obscure recourse to the Hegelian Cunning of Reason or a carefully thought-out social psychology of the various strata of the German people...

...In the first years of World War I, almost all the bourgeois intellectuals succumbed to the exalted mood of the Volksgemeinschaft: a nation of aristocratic soldiers for whom war was the only way of life...

...These groups only became aware of their conflicting interests after their joint revolutionary action had dismantled the old order...

...The second is a Freudian theme, an nounced in the titles of the last two chapters: "The Revolt of the Son," and "The Revenge of the Father...