What Shape Germany?
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
What Shape Germany? The Mind of Germany. By Hans Kohn. Scribner. 384 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Columbia Broadcasting System news correspondent ONE OF THE many factors that...
...Had Germany historically been part of the West and had its history been more coherent, their serenity of thought might have had more practical effect...
...Only in recent years have historians, purged by war of bathos and prejudice, helped by spectacular hindsight and stimulated by an unprecedented general interest in German affairs, begun to put the pieces together into a reasonable whole...
...As it happened, the forces of nationalism, stirred to delirious intensity in the War of Liberation against Napoleon, imposed their own standards...
...The average foreigner's picture of Germany has been kaleidoscopic, often to the point of caricature, and shaken into new sudden patterns by feelings of anger, pity, fear, revenge or retribution...
...Voices were raised against it, but there was no substance behind this dissent...
...In consequence, the clinical understanding which gives international relations their best chance of logic and stability has been conspicuously lacking...
...The Holy Roman Empire had been swept away, but the concept of the Reich as the mystic unity of Germans—and more—was revived as a rallying symbol...
...Where the Germans themselves were unable to provide an intellectually satisfying Geschichlsbild, foreign scholars may be pardoned for having failed—or not having bothered—to bring the chronicle of some 150 turbulent, confusing years into comprehensible form...
...The crazy-quilt Germany that emerged from the period of the Enlightenment was torn between the urge toward nationhood and the towering universalism of Goethe, Kant, Schiller and Lessing...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Columbia Broadcasting System news correspondent ONE OF THE many factors that contributed to the German tragedy of modern times was the general ignorance of its origins and development...
...In 1848, the Liberals at Frankfurt were bemused with thoughts of boundaries and national power...
...Friedrich Jahn, who founded the Gymnast and the Student Leagues, expressed the longing for a German nation in terms of Prussia and sought to increase the centripetal force of nationalism by lashing out against the West...
...The Karl Barth-Niemoeller-Heinemann influence in postwar Germany also richly merits Kohn's piercing examination...
...Hegel, who was not a Prussian by birth, proclaimed that absolute reason, the Idea, finds its greatest earthly freedom in the state...
...A reporter asked Thomas Mann if he would visit it...
...From that point on chauvinism, or Germanophilism, grew to dominate cultural life...
...Ernst Moritz Arndt, born on Swedish-held Ruegen and a Rhinelander by choice, sang the praises of German virtue in poetic exaltation...
...Philosophical speculation, poetry and patriotic sentiment defined it in terms of the community, the state, power and authority...
...The Germans and their neighbors have squandered their substance compounding each others' errors...
...Let it be a measure of the scholarly excellence and the readability of this book that one is sorry to see it end...
...The infamous concentration camp at Buchenwald, nearby, was again in operation under Red auspices...
...None has been more successful than Hans Kohn in this brilliant survey of the cultural trends that helped shape modern German affairs...
...To be sure, events which ran the gamut from helpless idealism to monstrous crime did not lend themselves easily to clear, popular analysis...
...In 1866, when Bismarck embarked with blood and iron on the creation of a German Reich, liberals, conservatives, historians, artists, scholars were swept away on an emotional binge from which the country did not awaken until 1945...
...Chapters on Richard Wagner and his time, and on Germanophilism are superb...
...One is reminded of Thomas Mann's shocking political ambivalence, stretching from his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man to the episode, which Kohn does not record, of his trip to Weimar in 1950 to accept the Goethe Prize from the Communist regime...
...Kohn examines the lurid cultural patterns and ideas of this period with a keen, critical eye...
...He replied lamely that he had not come to Germany to inspect concentration camps...
...The state is the ultimate worldly power with the God-given right to demand complete devotion of its citizens...
...One might wish that the author had dealt more extensively with the interwar period, especially with the phenomenon of National Bolshevism and, altogether, with the earlier sentimental interaction between Prussia-Germany and Russia...
...Prussia, the most dynamic of the German states, gravitated into leadership against the influence of Austria, its spartan austerity embellished by the romantic movement as a true expression of selfless devotion...
Vol. 43 • July 1960 • No. 27
