England responded too, but in a different way. The colonial expansion of the British empire achieved unprecedented dimensions between 1880 and the First World War, as this table makes clear:
Colonial dependencies (in thousands of square kilometres)
Here are some contemporary comments, quoted at length, to show not only their tenor but how widespread they were. ‘Imperialism has become the very latest and the highest embodiment of our democratic nationalism. It is a conscious expression of our race’ (the Duke of Westminster). ‘The British are the greatest governing race the world has ever seen’ (Joseph Chamberlain.) On seeing the port of Sydney, Charles Darwin wrote ‘My first feeling was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman.’ ‘I claim that we are the leading race in the world, and the more of the world we populate, the better it will be for mankind . . . Since [God] has obviously made the English-speaking race the chosen instrument by which He means to produce a state and society based on justice, freedom and peace, then it is bound to be in keeping with His will if I do everything in my power to provide that race with as much scope and power as possible. I think that, if there is a God, then He would like to see me do one thing, that is, to colour as much of the map of Africa British red as possible’ (Cecil Rhodes).32
The downside to this outbreak of nationalism, which looks inevitable with the benefit of hindsight, was yet more racism. Anti-Semitism was especially virulent in France and Germany. This partly had to do with the envy of Britain33: the French and German empires were so small, compared with the British, that the view formed, as Paul Déroulède, founder of the League of Patriots in France, put it, ‘We cannot hope to achieve anything abroad before we have cured our domestic ills.’34 And there was no doubt who was internal enemy number one – the Jews. In 1886 Edouard Drumont published La France juive, a ‘concoction’ of Jewish life and customs, which, though crude and clumsy, became an instant best-seller. It turned out to be the prelude to a wave of anti-Semitism in that country, culminating in the Dreyfus affair, when a Jewish officer was falsely accused of being a German spy. In Germany, the so-called Kulturkampf, the ‘cultural battle’, though it was waged over the supervision of schools and the appointment of parish priests, was really about the attempt by the Protestant state to make Catholic politicians conform to Prussian policy. In amongst this intolerance, the role of Jews was inevitably discussed.
Nationalism reached its ultimate form at the turn of the century in Maurice Barrés’ trilogy, Le roman de l’énergie nationale (1897–1903). Barrés’ idea was that the cult of the ego was the main cause of the corruption of civilisation. ‘The nation ranked above the ego and had therefore to be regarded as the supreme priority in a man’s life. The individual had no choice but to submit to the function assigned to him by the nation, “the sacred law of his lineage”, and to “hearken to the voices of the soil and the dead”.’35 As Hagen Schulze has rightly pointed out, nationalism, the idea of a nation, which at the turn of the nineteenth century had been seen as a form of utopia, as a natural political and cultural entity, had become by the turn of the twentieth century a polemical factor in domestic politics. ‘It no longer stood above the parties uniting society, but itself turned into a party and divided society.’ The consequences were to be catastrophic.
Once again, we should be careful of exaggeration. Nationalism was catastrophic in many ways, but it also had its positive side. This was nowhere more evident than in regard to the great flowering of German intellectual life in the nineteenth century which, whether or not it was caused by unification of the country, and by the great feeling of nationalism that accompanied the unification, certainly occurred at exactly the same time.
Sigmund Freud, Max Planck, Ernst Mach, Hermann Helmholtz, Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, von Hofmannsthal, Rudolf Clausius, Wilhelm Röntgen, Eduard von Hartmann, . . . all these were German or German-speaking. It sometimes escapes our attention that the period between 1848 and 1933, overlapping the turn of the century, when this book comes to a close, was the high point of the German genius. ‘The twentieth century was supposed to have been the German century.’ These words were written in 1991 by the American historian Norman Cantor. They are echoes of those by Raymond Aron, the French philosopher, talking to the German historian Fritz Stern, when they were in Berlin to visit an exhibition commemorating the centenary of the births of the physicists Albert Einstein, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner. All were born in 1878–79 and this moved Aron to remark: ‘It could have been Germany’s century.’36 What Cantor and Aron meant was that, left to themselves, Germany’s thinkers, artists, writers, philosophers and scientists, who were the best in the world between 1848 and 1933, would have taken the freshly-unified country to new and undreamed-of heights, were in fact in the process of doing so when the disaster that went by the name of Adolf Hitler came along.
Anyone who doubts this claim – that the period 1848–1933 was the German century – need only consult the list of names which follows. One could start almost anywhere, so complete was this dominance, but let’s begin with music: Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Anton Bruckner, Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Fritz Kreisler, Arthur Honegger, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Franz Lehár, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic. Medicine and psychology were not far behind – in addition to Freud, think of Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Wundt, Hermann Rorschach, Emil Kraepelin, Wilhelm Reich, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Ernst Kretschmer, Géza Roheim, Jacob Breuer, Richard Krafft-Ebing, Paul Ehrlich, Robert Koch, Wagner von Jauregg, August von Wassermann, Gregor Mendel, Erich Tschermak, Paul Corremans. In painting there was Max Liebermann, Paul Klee, Max Pechstein, Max Klinger, Gustav Klimt, Franz Marc, Lovis Corinth, Hans Arp, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Slevogt, Max Ernst, Leon Feininger, Max Beckmann, Alex Jawlensky; Wassily Kandinsky was of Russian birth but it was in Munich that he achieved the single most important breakthrough in modern art – abstraction. In philosophy, in addition to Nietzsche, there was Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Franz Brentano, Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Haeckel, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, Ferdinand Tönnies, Martin Buber, Theodore Herzl, Karl Liebknecht, Moritz Schlick.
In scholarship and history there was Julius Meier-Graefe, Leopold von Ranke, Theodor Mommsen, Ludwig Pastor, Wilhelm Bode and Jacob Burckhardt. In literature, in addition to Hugo von Hofmannsthal there was Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig, Gerhard Hauptmann, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, Walter Hasenclever, Franz Werfel, Franz Wedekind, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan George, Berthold Brecht, Karl Kraus, Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Brod, Franz Kafka, Arnold Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque, Carl Zuckmayer. In sociology and economics, there was Werner Sombart, Georg Simmel, Karl Mannheim, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter and Karl Popper. In archaeology and biblical studies, in addition to D. F. Strauss there was Heinrich Schliemann, Ernst Curtius, Peter Horchhammer, Georg Grotefend, Karl Richard Lepsius, Bruno Meissner. Finally (though this could just as easily have come first) in science, mathematics and engineering there were: Ernst Mach, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Heinrich Hertz, Rudolf Diesel, Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Röntgen, Karl von Linde, Ferdinand von Zeppelin, Emil Fischer, Fritz Haber, Herman Geiger, Heinz Junkers, George Cantor, Richard Courant, Arthur Sommerfeld, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Wolfgang Pauli, David Hilbert, Walther Heisenberg, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Alfred Wegener, not to mention the following engineering firms of one kind or another: AEG, Bosch, Benz, Siemens, Hoechst, Krupp, Mercedes, Daimler, Leica, Thyssen.