Peculiarly German - Romantics, Romanticism, and history

Peculiarly German - Romantics, Romanticism, and history
Book Review   Peculiarly German   Romantics, Romanticism, and history   Feb 9, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 21 • By Thoma A. Kohut Weekly Standard   In his foreword, this book’s excellent translator, Robert E. Goodwin, describes the author, Rüdiger Safranski, as In In his foreword, this book’s excellent translator, Robert E. Goodwin, describes the author, Rüdiger Safranski, as a “raconteur.” This is an apt characterization: Highly intelligent and extraordinarily well-read, Safranski brims with intellectual self-confidence. He is firm in his convictions and in his judgments. He relishes his erudition and delights in conveying it to his readers, which he does with imagination and panache. Indeed, one might even say that Safranski loves the sound of his own voice. It is generally a very enjoyable voice to listen to.     The author distinguishes between “Romanticism” and “Romantics.” The former was a circumscribed historical period beginning (in Safranski’s account) in 1769 with Johann Gottfried von Herder’s voyage from Riga and ending in the 1820s with E. T. A. Hoffmann and Joseph von Eichendorff. The Romantic era is the subject of the first half of the book. The “Romantics,” then, are the individual thinkers who carried on the tradition of Romanticism after the Romantic era was over: Romantics—down to the student rebels of the late 1960s—are the subject of the book’s second half. According to Safranski, the idea animating Romanticism from 1770 until the 1820s, and Romantics to the present day, is “that the beam of our awareness does not illuminate the entirety of our experience, that our consciousness cannot grasp our whole Being, that we have a more intimate connection with the life process than our reason would like to believe.”     Although Romanticism responds to the sense that there is more to the world and to our lives than meets the eye, to the universal human need for meaning and fulfillment, it emerged in specific response to the triumph of Enlightenment rationality and, consequently, the decline of religion in the late 18th century. The Enlightenment’s vision of a rationally functioning, lawful universe created by a deistic God seemed a “monstrous mill” or a “perpetual motion machine” to the Romantics, and they pushed back against the sterility of such a world. In response to the “disenchantment of the world” through secularization and the triumph of empiricism, the Romantics sought to satisfy the “appetite for mystery and wonder” that religion traditionally had satisfied.     Romanticism also reacted against the emergence, in the 19th century, of the modern rationalistic society, with its efficiency, its specialization, its emphasis on economic utility—and its monotony. A world mastered by human reason seemed conventional, prosaic, boring. In sum, the Romantics sought to “banish the wasteland of disenchantment” produced by Enlightenment rationalism and capitalism and, like traditional religions, respond to a yearning for the mysterious, the sublime, the transcendent. In contrast to religion, however, Romanticism discovered these experiences not in the afterlife but in the here and now, within individual human beings. And these experiences were to be recovered not through the institutions or the rituals of the church but through art. As Goodwin neatly puts it in his foreword, Romanticism for Rüdiger Safranski “is essentially the recuperation and reinvigoration of the religious imagination in a secular age by aesthetic means.”     The author is sympathetic to Romanticism, when it remains in the aesthetic realm, as having the potential to enrich and fulfill a life and a world that would otherwise be sterile and superficial, a literal life and a literal world. The problem comes when Romanticism enters the political realm. Whereas the Romantic craves adventure, intense experiences, and extremes, successful politics depends on compromise, rational discourse, consensus, and achievement that is mostly partial and prosaic.   If we fail to realize that the reason of politics and the passions of Romanticism are two separate spheres, which we must know how to keep separate .  .  . we risk the danger of looking to politics for an adventure that we would better find in the sphere of culture—or, vice versa, of demanding from the sphere of culture the same social utility we expect from politics. Neither an adventurous politics nor a politically correct cultural sphere is desirable. [Only misfortune and suffering result when] we seek in politics what we can never find there: redemption, true Being, the answer to the ultimate questions, the realization of dreams, the utopia of the successful life, the God of history, apocalypse, and eschatology.   The contamination of the political sphere with the Romantic impulse has had fateful—indeed, fatal—consequences, particularly in Germany, according to Safranski. Beginning with the French Revolution, Romanticism and politics came together, as “questions of meaning that were formerly the precinct of religion are now aligned with politics. There is a secularizing impulse that transforms the so-called ultimate questions into sociopolitical ones.” Initially inspired by the French Revolution and then opposing it, especially during the period of the wars against Napoleon, Romanticism became politicized in Germany. Already, with Fichte in the early 19th century, Romanticism’s individualism and cosmopolitanism had begun to give way to a demand for national and political renewal: “The Romantic metaphysics of the infinite turns into a metaphysics of history and society, Volksgeist, and nation, and it becomes ever more difficult for the individual to resist the suggestion of the We.”     The fragmented political condition and relative social backwardness of Germany during the first half of the 19th century produced a particularly naïve view of politics, according to Safranski. Because politics in the multitude of small German states appeared to matter so little, Romantics moved away from the real toward the ideal in their political attitudes. They developed an apolitical politics that eschewed the give-and-take, the moderation, of quotidian political engagement, leaving those influenced by Romanticism susceptible, ultimately, to the utopian appeals of the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century.     Surprisingly—and, in my view, mistakenly—Safranski concludes that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were not political Romantics. They were too activist, too modernist, too populist for that: “Certainly, Hitler’s ideas were not in the least bit Romantic. They come out of a vulgarized and morally dissolute conversion of the natural sciences into an ideology: biologism, racism, and anti-Semitism,” he writes. Safranski overlooks the obviously Romantic features of National Socialism, such as its vision of the “community of the people,” as well as the Romanticism underlying Hitler’s racialized Darwinism, with life presented as a dramatic struggle for survival or extinction.     Although he claims the Nazis cannot be described as political Romantics, Safranski traces the susceptibility of the German people to Nazism back to the influence of Romanticism. As a result of that influence, Germans lacked a grounded “political mentality” and proper “political judgment,” and held practical politics in contempt. To the extent they were Romantics, Germans sought “profound meanings,” the “suprapolitical,” even the “sacral” in the political arena, and were attracted to politics “that seemed to promise what religion otherwise offered: an answer to ultimate questions, that is, redemption, apocalypse, eschatology.” This was precisely the sort of “non-political politics” that Hitler seemed to offer.     Although Safranski sees the impact of the 1968 generation in Germany as having been ephemeral, more reflecting than producing social and cultural change, he paints the student rebels, with their desire to transcend the “capitalistic work-and-consumption society” of West Germany through the creation of a counterculture, as political Romantics of a sort.     Thus, the example of the 1968ers makes clear that while Romanticism, as “a brilliant epoch in the history of the German mind .  .  . has passed away .  .  . the Romantic as an attitude” remains very much alive: “It almost always comes into play whenever discontent with reality and convention seeks escape, change, or the possibility of transcendence,” according to Safranski. He believes that we need both Romanticism and a knowledge of its limitations, particularly its incompatibility with political life:   The tension between politics and the Romantic impulse belongs to the larger tension between what can be imagined and what can be lived. The attempt to resolve this tension into a unity that is free of contradictions can lead to the impoverishment or to the devastation of life. Life is impoverished when people no longer dare to imagine anything beyond what they think they can live. And it is devastated when people insist on living an idea at any cost, including destruction and self-destruction, simply because they have imagined it.   From a political perspective, Safranski’s position here would seem to exclude the possibility of any sort of radical politics where people seek to overthrow or transform the political system under which they live. This is fine, perhaps, in relation to functioning, representative, Western democracies. It seems more problematic, though, when applied to dictatorships, or other oppressive, authoritarian, or totalitarian regimes. Would it really have been wrong for people living in the German Democratic Republic (to take one recent German example) to imagine a wholly different polity and society, and for them to attempt to make what they had imagined a political and social reality?     Romanticism: A German Affair can be described as an old-fashioned work of cultural history, with its sweep, its focus on a relatively small number of literati who are seen as changing the course of history, its treatment of ideas largely divorced from their social, political, and wider cultural contexts, and its effort to expose the roots of “the German catastrophe” that was National Socialism. In 376 pages, the author presents, analyzes, and assesses the canonical philosophical and literary ideas of 200 years of German cultural history. He draws succinct thumbnail sketches of the thought (and, frequently, the personalities) of Germany’s cultural luminaries from 1769 to 1969.     Obviously, such a sweeping account runs the risk of superficiality. There were moments when I had the sense that I was being taken on a fast-moving tour of the history of German culture, with Rüdiger Safranski serving as tour guide. Perhaps because I am an American knowledgeable about, but not steeped in, the literary and philosophical classics of modern Germany, I occasionally found myself confused, lost—or harboring the suspicion that there was more that could be said about the ideas being presented and that the author’s presentation of those ideas was somewhat idiosyncratic. As a historian, I had the sense that the philosopher Safranski sometimes underestimated the cultural gap separating readers and author from the thinkers of the past he considers, that he lacked sufficient appreciation of the difficulty in understanding those thinkers on their terms—not ours.     The past seems very much present in this work, with that reduced cultural distance jarringly conveyed by the author’s use of the present tense. Safranski brings these thinkers and writers to life here, both for good and for less good, as he may occasionally make alien ideas seem more familiar than they should be, and he overlooks changes in Romanticism over the course of the 200 years covered in his book. The Romantics of the past, including those of the Romantic era, remain “our contemporaries” for Safranski in that we, like them, feel ourselves bereft of metaphysical support “in our confrontation with infinity. We no longer have the conviction of being borne along by a cosmos that is self-evidently saturated with meaning.” We, like them, have lost the ground under our feet that religion once provided. We, like them, suffer from the boredom of everyday life. Romanticism since the 18th century responds to the contemporary condition captured for Safranski by Rainer Maria Rilke: “We don’t feel very securely at home within our interpreted world.”     Finally, I found myself wondering whether it is possible to distinguish so neatly between the aesthetic (the proper sphere for Romantic ideas) and the political (a realm from which Romantic ideas must be excluded) as Safranski seems to assume. All art has a political dimension, even if it is not overtly political. And all politics have an aesthetic dimension, not least the ways that political ideas are articulated and conveyed. Although one might wish to keep the aesthetic and the political separate from one another, it is important to recognize their inevitable, and often subtle, interpenetration: the political influences exerted by art and the aesthetic attractions exerted by politics. Indeed, even if we could imagine that the aesthetic and the political could be kept separate from one another, an art without politics would be an art divorced from life, and a politics without art would be a politics without appeal.     But these are predictable reservations coming from an academic reviewer. The strength of the book, and much of the pleasure derived from reading it, comes from the fact that Safranski puts scholarly inhibitions aside and effectively “goes for it.” In fact, most of my reservations could be said to come from the very empirical, rationalist perspective that Romanticism reacted against. Indeed, despite the author’s critical distance from Romanticism, this book, with its sweep and its ambition, its desire to go beneath the surface and to present unities of thought across place and time, and its ability to bring people and ideas to life, is, in some essential way, an ｅxpression of the Romantic sensibility it so engagingly describes.       Thomas A. Kohut, the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III professor of history at Williams, is the author, most recently, of A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century.