The values they opposed to the utilitarian ones of the modern age included the sacredness of nature, the loftiness of art, the value of the earthy. They extolled the past, aristocracy, the beauty of death, and the claims of the strong, Caesarean personality. They lamented the decay of German culture while at the same time they were filled with an imperialistic missionary fervor: fear was translated into aggression, and despair sought comfort in the idea.of greatness. The most famous book expressive of this trend, Julius Langbehn’s Rembrandt als Erzieher (“Rembrandt as Educator”) had a spectacular success when it was published in 1890 and went through forty printings within two years. The widespread approval for this curious document, approval deriving from panic, antimodernity, and nationalistic missionary delusions suggests that the book itself was an expression of the crisis it so furiously deplored.
The alliance between these anticivilizational sentiments and nationalism was to have grave consequences. Nearly as portentous was the link between those sentiments and antidemocratic ideas. In opposition to democracy, the anticivilization people joined hands with the theoreticians of Social Darwinism and racism. For both groups saw no good in the liberal Western society which traced its beginnings to the principles of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This antidemocratic current was present, again, in all of Europe but was especially strong in France and Italy. In those countries, as Julien Benda later wrote, the writers around 1890 “realized with astonishing astuteness that the doctrines of arbitrary authority, discipline, tradition, contempt for the spirit of liberty, association of the morality of war and slavery were opportunities for haughty and rigid poses infinitely more likely to strike the imagination of simple souls than the sentimentalities of Liberalism and Humanitarianism.”10 And although all literary successes not withstanding, unhappiness with modernity remained the affair of a sensitive intellectual minority, these attitudes—to revert to Germany—gradually produced a lasting effect. The youth movement particularly was identified with them and gave them a pure and ardent expression. Friedrich Nietzsche described the tendency as follows: “The whole great tendency of the Germans ran counter to the Enlightenment, and to the revolution of society, which, by a crude misunderstanding, was considered its consequence: piety toward everything still in existence sought to transform itself into piety toward everything that has ever existed, only to make heart and spirit full once again and to leave no room for future goals and innovations. The cult of feeling was erected in place of the cult of reason.”11
Finally, the anticivilizational mood of the period struck up an alliance with anti-Semitism. “German anti-Semitism is reactionary,” wrote Hermann Bahr, the Austrian journalist, in 1894, after intensive study of the question. “It is a revolt of the petty bourgeois against industrial development.”12 In fact, the equating of Judaism and modernity, like the thesis, that Jews had a special talent for the capitalistic free-enterprise economy, was not unfounded. And modernity and capitalistic competition were the very things on which anxiety about the future centered. Werner Sombart, the noted economist, actually spoke of “a Jewish mission to promote the transition to capitalism… and to clear away the still preserved remnants of pre-capitalistic organization.”13 Against the background of this economic development, the old hatred of Jews, which had had a religious basis, evolved during the second half of the nineteenth century into an anti-Semitism built on biological and social prejudices. In Germany the philosopher Eugen Diihring and the failed journalist Wilhelm Marr popularized these attitudes. (The latter wrote a pamphlet significantly titled, “The Victory of Judaism over Germanism, Regarded from a Non-denominational Point of View. Vae Victis!”) Anti-Semitism in Germany seemed hardly more intense than in France, let alone in Russia and Austro-Hungary. The anti-Semitic publications of the period repeatedly complained that their ideas, despite their wide dissemination, were not being taken seriously enough. But while irrational nostalgias were skulking about “like masterless dogs,” anti-Semitism served as the vehicle for widespread discontent, precisely because of the half-truths contained in it. With the numerous current theories of a conspiracy of dark powers, or a malignant world-wide disease, the figure of the “Wandering Jew” had a curious credibility. In fact, it was still another embodiment of generalized anxiety. And, on another plane, there were the music dramas of Richard Wagner, which restated the problems of the age in mythic terms. The misgivings about the future, the awareness of the dawning age of gold, racial fears, antimaterialistic impulses, horror of an era of plebeian freedom and leveling, and premonitions of impending doom—all this expressed in highly sensuous art spoke to the cultivated middle classes struggling in the toils of their malaise.
The war unleashed and radicalized these manifold hostilities of the bourgeois age toward itself. Life seemed bogged down in the banalities of civilization. Now once again great exaltations were possible; the war sanctified violence and wrought glories of destruction. As Ernst Jünger wrote, its flame throwers accomplished a “great cleansing by Nothingness.” War was the perfect negation to the liberal and humanitarian ideal of civilization. The tremendous impact of the war experience, felt throughout Europe and recorded by an extensive European literature, came from this liberating sense of renewal by destruction. Those who considered themselves children of the war had learned the worth of swift, solitary decisions, absolute obedience, and the power of large numbers united by a single idea. The compromising temper of parliamentary systems, their feeble capacity for decision making and frequent self-imposed paralysis invalidated them to a generation that had come away from the war with the myth of a perfect military machine operating at peak performance.
This complex of attitudes helps explain the stubborn resistance of the Germans to their newly established democratic republic and the roles which had been assigned it within the Versailles peace-keeping system. Still haunted by their anticivilizational philosophies, they could not see the republic and the Versailles Treaty as mere aspects of an altered political situation. To them all this was a fall from grace, an act of metaphysical treason and profound unfaithfulness to true selfhood. Only treachery could have delivered Germany, romantic, pensive, unpolitical Germany, into servitude to that idea of Western civilization which threatened her very essence. Significantly, the Völkische Beobachter called the Treaty of Versailles a “syphilitic peace,” which, like the disease “born of brief, forbidden lust, beginning with a small hard sore, gradually attacks all the limbs and joints, even all the flesh, down to the heart and brain of the sinner.”14 The passionate opposition to “the system” sprang directly from the refusal to participate in the hated “imperium of civilization” with its blabber about human rights, its progressivistic demagoguery, its craze for enlightenment, its superficiality, its corruption, and its vulgar worship of prosperity. The stern German ideals of loyalty, divine rights, love of country, were, as one of the many pamphlets of the time put it, “extinguished mercilessly in the storms of the revolutionary and postrevolutionary period.” In their place had come “democracy, the nudist movement, arrant naturalism, and companionate marriage.”