An Eccentric View of History
SCHAPIRO, J. SALWYN
An Eccentric View of History Reviewed by J. Salwyn Schapiro Professor Emeritus of History, CCNY; author, "The World in Crisis" A Cultural History of the Modern Age. By Egon Friedell. Knopf. Vol....
...Rousseau, he declares, was merely a talented pamphleteer, a sensationmonger, whose "whole life was an unpleasant pose and an insistent hypocrisy" and whose Confessions consist of a "sophisticated mixture of obscurity and false humility, of self-glorification combined with a calculated self-depreciation...
...Furthermore, A Cultural History mirrors the mood of Germany after the defeat in the First World War, a mood of bewilderment, rage and expectancy...
...Sometimes, he commits atrocious errors of judgment, as when he describes the nineteenth century as "the inhuman century par excellence," and when he deplores the "Jewish hatred of idealism, of the mysterious, of God...
...And he exhibits a joy of discovery that he communicates to his readers...
...Gambetta was not a Jew, and Lamartine was a badly defeated candidate for the Presidency...
...Psychoanalysis proclaims "the advent of Satan's kingdom," when the whole world will be "neuroticized, sexualized, diabolized...
...He was no trail-blazer, like Lecky telling the story of the steady progress of rationalism, or the late Preserved Smith surveying with meticulous care selected fields of culture...
...therefore, his work lacks the coherence that comes from an historical sense of development and continuity...
...At first, baroque art spread "around its creations the perfume of perpetual yearning and unfulfilment, the charm of enigma and confusion and dissonance...
...French music is exemplified by Gounod's Faust, which is "first-class rubbish" played on "a golden hurdy-gurdy...
...This type of intellectual played no small part in creating a climate of opinion in Europe which welcomed totalitarianism as the dawn of a new civilization...
...More precise and personal is the second part, "Enlightenment and Revolution," which deals with the period from the mid-eighteenth century to 1815...
...In this connection, Friedell makes the provocative assertion that the individual has less freedom under democracy than under absolutism...
...In 1776, it fought because of the duty on tea...
...As the author nears the end of the Modern Age, the process of dissolution becomes evident to him in two dominant movements, Pre-Raphaelism and psychoanalysis...
...Hence, he commits not a few errors of fact, such as that Gambetta was a "Jewish advocate" and that Lamartine declined the Presidency of the Second French Republic...
...The Age of Reason almost disappears in the pages of Friedell...
...Exactly wrong...
...Winckelmann it was, writes Friedell, who first revealed to the world the "cold, pure and unambiguous lines" of Greek art, so much admired since then...
...The French, lacking the religious spirit, become either clericals or atheists, and hence were not and could not be truly Romantic...
...In his professedly cultural history, he devotes considerable space to the wars for German unification...
...and, in the First World War, in order to get back the money loaned to the Allies...
...Instead, he followed paths that wound in and out in all directions, with the result that A Cultural History gives kaleidoscopic, vivid and unexpected views of the cultural landscape...
...Germany dominates this period...
...Because of its religious groundswell, Romanticism, he contends, was profoundly German...
...Once again, a German, Johann Joachim Winckelmaun, emerges as the truly great figure of the period...
...Despite its many shortcomings, A Cultural History is not to be dismissed as the work of an impassioned dabbler in the field of history...
...In his judgment, the Revolution was "blind, aimless and stupid, a merely destructive force" that retarded rather than advanced human freedom...
...With Pre-Raphaelism, the "Botticelli time, galvanically revived, reappeared in life...
...Ill, 489 pp...
...Volume III deals with the period which, according to the author, was the last "act of the Modern Age, which rises with the immorality of the Renaissance and sets with the immorality of Zarathustra...
...Pages and pages are devoted to inconsequential German writers, forgotten or only half-remembered...
...Gifted in some ways with remarkable insight, Friedell often succeeds in illuminating an event, a personality or a movement much as a searchlight illuminates an object but not its surroundings...
...A Cultural History is the story of the decline and fall of a civilization...
...But baroque degenerated into rococo, which, as in the paintings of Watteau, "caught and held fast in color, charmed into magic and immortal slumber" the "delicate, fleeting, pale, expiring character" of the period...
...The field of cultural history is very wide and still largely uncharted, and those who wish to explore it must blaze their own trails...
...With psychoanalysis "begins the Servile Insurrection of Amorality...
...As a result of the pioneer work of Winckelmann, however, another classical revival took place, this time with Greek literature and art in the forefront...
...In the English Romanticism of Byron, "literature becomes poisonous--glittering and seductive, but filled with intoxicating saps that corrode...
...It flourished, he asserts, only from 1750 to 1770, when Voltaire was at the height of his influence...
...To Friedell, the villain of the period was Rousseau, whom he furiously belabors as if he were a personal enemy...
...Spleen is "a permanent ingredient of the Englishman's soul," as exemplified by that "grimacing giant," Dean Swift...
...Then follows an attack in the best Friedellian manner on Freud and his "system of Irrationalism founded by Rationalistic methods...
...6.75 each...
...Friedell points out that the revival of the classics during the Renaissance was really a revival of Latin, with Greek playing a secondary role...
...His descriptions of schools of art, of fashions in dress and speech, of manners of living and dying, and of ways of love keep the reader enthralled...
...America has always gone to war "for money...
...In these volumes, he carries the story begun in Volume I (reviewed in The New Leader of April 27, 1953) up to the end of the First World War, which he regarded as marking the end of the Modern Age...
...Every Frenchman is a Cartesian, logical and thin...
...It deals with all sorts of topics, related and unrelated, but especially with art, which is, according to the author, the truest and best expression of man's attitude toward life...
...The great cultural figure of the period was Nietzsche, "gloomy but bathed in magic light," uttering "prophetic words which came streaming to him from an underground spring...
...Throughout the work, and especially in this volume, Friedell exhibits a marked German bias...
...the "long previous preparations" emphasized by historians are merely a "game of pedants...
...hence, he deals chiefly with the spirit of each period in the Modern Age as expressed in ideas, morals, manners and, above all, in art...
...He repudiated the existing order, completely and violently, but resolutely refused to take the only clear road to a better order, namely democracy...
...Friedell was a good example of the Continental thinker who was radical without being progressive, a familiar phenomenon in pre-1914 Germany...
...It is difficult to review a work like this...
...English culture shows "the relentless superficiality which in its wonderful keenness and vigor becomes almost profundity...
...Egon Friedell--an Austrian Jew who committed suicide a few days after the An-schluss--is concerned with the "crisis of the European soul...
...Each chapter is an adventure into some realm of thought that appeals to him, and often has no connection with the chapters preceding or following...
...The first part of Volume II, entitled "Baroque and Rococo," analyzes the culture of the period from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century...
...Friedell was not a historian, by profession or even by inclination...
...Friedell considers the Romantic movement the Leitmotif of nineteenth-century culture...
...And Goethe was "Goethe...
...The great heroes of this period, in Friedell's opinion, were Frederick the Great and Goethe...
...Many of the chapters are mere intellectual chatter, rambling and roaring through ideas without any awareness of their relation to the social and economic situation...
...Finally, the reader comes to the end of the Modern Age, but he does not know how he got there...
...And Nietzsche's style vibrates with "the sound of that hynotizing and inspiring rhythm of a liquid cadence never before heard in German...
...Friedell has a Nietzschean style of writing which often produces the effect of lightning flashes of insight into historical events...
...Again, because he is not truly an historian, he sometimes lacks a sense of responsibility for what he writes...
...The women lost their bosoms, their hips, their red cheeks, and one saw everywhere dreamy and fragile types whose pale heads mourned for their weary bodies like faded blossoms drooping on over-fine stems...
...Like so many other Continental sophisticates, Friedell had a genius for making political obtuseness sound "intellectual...
...As if there had never been a Chateaubriand or a Hugo...
...Friedell did not build a road, straight and smooth, through the field of intellectual history...
...Decisive historical events, the author contends, are always "abrupt, immediate, explosive...
...Though the development of ideas is Friedell's chief concern, he makes occasional excursions into the field of political history...
...Thus, he regards the French Revolution as an "esthetic phenomenon" because of the theatrical quality given it by the French...
...Out of the North's victory in the Civil War arose industrial America, the "terrible and scurrilous Leviathan" of our time...
...In his strikingly epigrammatic manner, Friedell denigrates the cultural contributions of non-German nations...
...Because democracy, unlike absolutism, has "the organic consciousness of its infallibility, sanctity and complete legitimacy...
...He considers Bismarck "the last hero that the Modern Age has seen," a man whose basic feeling was "the passionate desire to read the true face of all persons, things and occurrences" and whose strength lay in his "profound truthfulness...
...He goes to absurd lengths in idealizing Frederick as tolerant, benevolent and profoundly truthful, as a ruler who hated despotism, and as a general who loathed war...
...II, 457 pp...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 15
