This still does not do full justice to the German genius. The year 1900, the close of our time-frame, saw the deaths of Nietzsche, Ruskin and Oscar Wilde but it saw three ideas introduced to the world which, it may be said without exaggeration, formed the intellectual backbone of the twentieth century, certainly so far as the sciences were concerned. These ideas were the unconscious, the gene and the quantum. Each of these was of Germanic origin.
In explaining the great and rapid triumph of German ideas, in the period 1848–1933, we need to examine three factors, each special to Germany and German thinking but also to the theme of this chapter. First, we need to understand German ideas about culture, what it was, what it consisted of and what its place was in the life of the nation. For example, in English, ‘culture’ does not normally distinguish sharply between the spiritual and the technological areas of life but, in German, Kultur came to stand for intellectual, spiritual or artistic areas of creative activity but not the social, political, economic or technical-scientific life. As a result, whereas in English the words ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’ are complementary aspects of the same thing, in German that is not the case. In the nineteenth century, Kultur denoted manifestations of spiritual creativity – the arts, religion, philosophy; in contrast, Zivilisation referred to social, political and technical organisation and, most important, these were deemed to be of a lower order. Nietzsche made much of this, and it is a vital distinction, without which a full understanding of German thought in the nineteenth century is impossible.
There was thus in Germany what C. P. Snow would have called a ‘two cultures’ mentality, and with a vengeance. One of the effects of this was to highlight and deepen the divide between the natural sciences, on the one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other. Several of the sciences, by their very nature, formed a natural alliance with engineering, commerce and industry. But, at the same time, and despite their enormous successes, the sciences were looked down upon by artists. Whereas in a country like England, or America, the sciences and the arts were, to a much greater extent, seen as two sides of the same coin, jointly forming the intellectual elite, this was much less true in nineteenth-century Germany. A good example of this is Max Planck, the physicist who (in 1900) discovered the quantum, the idea that all energy comes in very small packets, or quanta. Planck came from a very religious, somewhat academic family, and was himself an excellent pianist. Despite the fact that his discovery of the quantum rates as one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time, in Planck’s own family the humanities were considered a superior form of knowledge to science.37 His cousin, the historian Max Lenz, would jokingly pun that scientists (Naturforscher) were in reality foresters (Naturförster) – or, as we would say, hicks.19
The work of Ernst Mach reinforces this point. Mach (1838–1916) was one of the most impressive and ardent reductionists, with many discoveries to his credit, including the importance of the semicircular canals in the inner ear for bodily equilibrium, and that bodies travelling at more than the speed of sound create two shock waves, one at the front and the other at the rear, as a result of the vacuum their high speed creates (this is why we speak of a ‘Mach number’ on Concorde, or used to). But Mach was implacably opposed to metaphysics of any kind and denounced what he called ‘misapplied concepts’, like God, nature and soul. He regarded Freud’s concept of the ‘ego’ as a ‘useless hypothesis’. He felt that even the concept of the ‘self’ was ‘irretrievable’, that all knowledge could be reduced to sensation and that the task of science was to describe sense data in the simplest and most neutral manner possible. Mach was widely read in his day: both Lenin and his disciples, and the Vienna Circle, were adherents. Mach firmly believed that science had the answers, and that such subjects as philosophy and psychoanalysis were largely useless.38
This profound division – between the sciences on the one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other – had serious consequences. One that is particularly relevant here was that the intuition of artists was given more respect, accorded a far higher status, in Germany than anywhere else at the time. This was reflected in a second division, over and above that between the arts and the sciences, between Kultur and Zivilisation. This was the opposition between Geist and Macht, the realm of intellectual or spiritual endeavour and the realm of power and political control. It is important to say that the relationship between Geist and Macht, whether culture or the state should take precedence, was never satisfactorily resolved in Germany. The consequences were momentous, as a brief excursion into political/social history will show.
In 1848, Germany’s attempt at a bourgeois revolution failed and with it the struggle of the German professional and commercial classes for political and social equality with the ancien regime. In other words, Germany failed to make the socio-political advances that England, Holland, France and North America had achieved, in some cases generations before. German liberalism, or would-be liberalism, was based on middle-class demands for ‘free trade and a constitutional framework to protect their economic and social space in society’. When this attempt at constitutional change failed, to be followed in 1871 by the establishment of the Reich, led by Prussia, a most unusual set of circumstances came into being. In a real sense, and as Gordon Craig has pointed out, the people of Germany had played no part in the creation of the Reich. ‘The new state was a “gift” to the nation on which the recipient had not been consulted.’39 Its constitution had not been earned; it was simply a contract among the princes of the existing German states, who in fact retained their crowns until 1918. To our modern way of thinking, this had some extraordinary consequences. For example, one result was that ‘the Reich had a Parliament without power, political parties without access to governmental responsibility, and elections whose outcome did not determine the composition of the government’. In addition to the Reichstag, there was the Bundesrat, not an elected body at all but a committee of state governments, which shared power with Parliament, but neither of whom could depose the Chancellor. Moreover, the internal arrangements of the individual states were not affected by the events of 1871. The franchise for the Prussian Parliament, for example (and Prussia made up three-fifths of the population), depended on the taxes one paid, meaning that the top 5 per cent of tax-payers had one-third of the votes, the same proportion as the bottom 85 per cent.40 Nor did the Chancellor rule with the aid of a cabinet: the imperial departments, which expanded their influence as time went on, were run by subordinate state secretaries. This was quite unlike – and much more backward than – anything that existed among Germany’s competitors in the West (though this ‘belatedness’ or otherwise of Germany is the subject of lively academic controversy right now). Matters of state remained in the hands of the landed aristocracy, although Germany had become an industrial power. This power was increasingly concentrated in fewer hands for, with urbanisation, the growth of commerce and the expansion of industry, the patchwork of old German states became less and less powerful and the empire more of a reality. The state thus became progressively more authoritarian as it took on a greater role in regulating economic and social issues. In short, as more and more people joined in Germany’s industrial, scientific and intellectual successes, the more it was run by a small coterie of traditional figures – landed aristocrats and military leaders, at the head of which was the emperor himself. This essential dislocation was fundamental to ‘German-ness’ in the run-up to the First World War. It was one of the greatest anachronisms of history.41