The abrupt and challenging breach with previous standards of morality touched people at their most sensitive point. Marriage, as a book titled Sexual Ethics of Communism (by E. Friedländer) stated, was nothing but the “evil spawn of capitalism”; the revolution would do away with it along with any prohibition against abortion, homosexuality, bigamy, or incest. But many of the members of the respectable middle classes still felt themselves guardians of time-honored morality and took such attacks as personal threats. In their minds marriage as a mere matter of civil registration, as it was understood in the Soviet Union, was just as intolerable as the “glass of water theory” that sexual desire, like thirst, was a natural appetite and should be satisfied without fuss. The fox trot and brief skirts; pleasure seeking in “Berlin, the national sewer”; the “swinish pictures” of Magnus Hirschfeld, the scientific explorer of sexual pathology; or the prototype of the stylish young man about town (“the rubber cavalier with sleeked-back hair, crepe-soled shoes and Charleston trousers”) aroused a shocked resentment in the popular consciousness, which in hindsight is hard to grasp and requires some effort on the historian’s part. The theater during the twenties staged celebrated provocations, treating of parricide, incest, and crime. There was a strong streak of self-mockery, typified by the final scene of the Brecht-Weill opera Mahagonny, where the actors step up to the footlights and raise placards reading “Up with the chaotic state of our cities,” “Up with love for hire,” “Up with honor for assassins,” or “Up with the immortality of vulgarity.”8
In the visual arts the revolutionary breakthrough had already come about before the First World War, though, as we have remarked, both in Vienna and Munich Hitler had paid scant attention to this development. Before the war the new art could be considered the quirk of a handful of visionaries. But against the background images of upheaval, revolution, and disintegration it took on the cast of an assault upon the traditional European conception of humanity. The Fauves, the Blaue Reiter, the Brücke, or Dada seemed to be as great a menace as the revolution, and in fact were branded by the popular phrase “cultural Bolshevism.” The defensive reaction was therefore just as furious; again what was feared was anarchy, arbitrariness, and formlessness. Modern art was “chaotic hack work”; that was the general opinion.
The fashionable pessimism of the time found a formula for all this: “the decline of the West.” It was feared the day would come when all these resentments would fuse and lead to exasperated counteraction. For the Germans, with their conservative temperament, reacted violently to these blithe inroads on familiar social and cultural forms. More than elsewhere, their quickly rising opposition could link up with attitudes and arguments of the end of the nineteenth century. The process of technical and economic modernization had been late in coming to Germany, but for that very reason struck with unusual speed and force. In the abruptness, thoroughness, and extent of her industrial revolution, Germany was unexampled among Western nations, as Thorstein Veblen had noted.9 The pace of change consequently stirred violent anxieties and reactions. Yet in contrast to the usual cliché, the Germany that united achievement with neglect, feudal elements with highly progressive measures, authoritarianism with state socialism, in a unique and variegated pattern, must be considered as probably the most modern industrial state in Europe on the eve of the First World War. In the previous twenty-five years it had more than doubled its gross national product. The proportion of the population earning the minimum income subject to taxation had risen from 30 to 60 per cent. Steel production, for example, which had amounted to only half of British production in 1887, had attained nearly double the British production. Colonies had been conquered, cities built, industrial empires created. The number of corporations had risen from 2,143 to 5,340, and the tonnage handled in the port of Hamburg had moved up to third place in the world, still behind New York and Amsterdam, but ahead of London. Along with this, the country was governed soberly and frugally. Despite certain areas of autocracy, it provided a high degree of domestic freedom, administrative justice, and social security.
There were anachronistic features in the total picture of imperial Germany, but these came from a quarter other than the economic or social reality. Over this hard-working country, seemingly so sure of its future, with rapidly growing metropolises and industrial areas, there arched a peculiarly romantic sky whose darkness was populated by mythic figures, antiquated giants, and ancient deities. Germany’s backwardness was chiefly ideological in nature. A good deal of professorial obscurantism and Teutonic folklorism was involved. So also was the desire for self-improvement on the part of a middle class that longed for “the higher things” even as it so dynamically pursued material goals. Underlying these tendencies on the part of the cultivated middle class was an antagonism to the very modern world it was creating so energetically and successfully. This opposition produced defensive gestures against the new, antipoetic reality, gestures springing not from skepticism but from romantic pessimism. An impulse for counterrevolutionary protest could be detected in these ambivalent attitudes.
Such writers as Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Eugen Dühring became spokesman for a widespread mood hostile to modern civilization. This mood was not confined to Germany. Elsewhere, too, there was a reaction against the unimaginative, life-affirming optimism of the age, and the present was fiercely condemned both from the right and from the left. Around the turn of the century this note was sounded in the United States as well as in the France of the Dreyfus case. It inspired the formation of the Action Française and the manifestos of Maurras and Barrés. Gabriele d’Annunzio, Enrico Corradini, Miguel de Unamuno, Dmitri Merezhkovski and Vladimir Soloviev, Knut Hamsun, Jacob Burckhardt and D. H. Lawrence, for all their individual differences, became spokesmen for similar fears and antagonisms. But the sharpness of the change in Germany, which shot the country so abruptly from Biedermeier to modernity, with all the painful breaches and partings that such precipitation involves, gave to the protest an especially nysterical high pitch in which anxiety and disgust with modern reality mingled with romantic yearnings for a vanished Arcadia.
This tradition, too, went far back. Such pangs at the onslaughts of civilization could be traced back to Rousseau or to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, whose hero had already sensed the mighty force approaching “like a thunderstorm, slowly, slowly, but… it will come and strike.” In Germany the spokesmen for this attitude despised progress and professed themselves, with a good measure of pride, unworldly reactionaries; they preferred to be, in Nietzsche’s phrase, untimely onlookers who, as Lagarde charged, longed for a Germany that had never existed and perhaps never would exist. They treated the facts that were held up to them with haughty contempt and roundly ridiculed “one-eyed reason.” With no regard for logic but with flashes of considerable shrewdness, they opposed the stock exchange and urbanization, compulsory vaccination, the global economy and positivistic science, “communistic” movements and the first attempts at heavier-than-air flight. In brief, they were against the whole concept of modern improvement, and summed up all efforts in that direction as a disastrous “decline of the soul.” As “prophets of enraged tradition,” they invoked the day when the mad whirl would be checked and “the old gods would once more rise out of the waves.”