How is it possible that a culturally eminent people suddenly started running after Adolf Hitler, that fallen corporal without training with his strange ideas? This question has puzzled historians for years. Emiritus professor Frits Boterman now turns the question around in an intriguing way:He argues that the profound German cultural traditions made Hitler and Nazism possible.
In the book 'Culture as Power', Frits Boterman, emeritus professor of modern German history at the University of Amsterdam, states that you cannot understand the success of the Nazis without paying attention to the profound German cultural traditions. Weimar (as the residence of poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a symbol of high German culture) and Buchenwald (symbol of the Holocaust) are therefore closer to each other than people usually think.
In order to explain German history, including its dark sides, politics and culture are usually treated separately. Any "deviations" in German history are always political in nature. Authoritarian traditions, Prussian militarism, the lack of a liberal revolution in the nineteenth century. But next to all the mistakes that were made in the political field was always the pompous German culture. Goethe, the composers Beethoven and Friedrich von Schiller showed that there is also another, better Germany. This is how the eternal, typically German contradiction between culture and politics arose.
'Disenchantment of the world'
But this certainly does not mean that the German intellectuals were apolitical. According to Boterman, this is no more than a myth that needs to be debunked. In 'Culture as Power' Boterman sketches a people struggling with their identity. Due to lack of political power in autocratic Germany, the Gebildete elite are flight into culture. Take for example Friedrich von Schiller, who around 1800 was one of the first to come up with the idea of the German 'culture nation'.
At that time, Germany was still politically fragmented and in danger of being overrun by Napoleon. The German Empire fell, but the German culture, but the real German dignity was in the culture, he wrote in an unfinished poem. Germany was not (yet) a political unity, the cultural unity was closer than ever. That offered the German citizen perspective in difficult times.
In response to the cold, rational Enlightenment thinking of the French Revolution, the "disenchantment of the world," in the words of Max Weber, German intellectuals embraced the ideals of Romanticism. The romantic elite emphasized art, music, literature and the "inner" as a means of shielding themselves from civilization, democracy and politics. Rationalization and industrialization would eventually destroy the 'deeper whole' of life, was the conviction of many intellectuals.
This penchant for romantic values plays a major role in German history. It also helps explain the success of the Third Reich. Hitler's seizure of power was primarily a cultural revolution. Hitler was not a politician but an artist who wanted to make Germany a romantic work of art in which art, literature, architecture all played together in an ideal, late-romantic world. According to Boterman, Nazism is the most drastic response to the 'disenchantment of the world'.
Depraved material culture
Nowhere is culture so adept at politics as in the land of poets and thinkers, says Boterman. In the case of philosophers such as Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger and Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, it may be obvious. But Boterman's work is also full of portraits of lesser-known German intellectuals, writers and philosophers, all of whom in their own way tried to put into action their often romantic, conservative ideas into politics.
Thus, in August 1914, most intellectuals passionately greeted World War I. Germany should fight for its freedom and spiritual independence, they explained. The battle was seen by academics and intellectuals not only as a defensive war to be waged against an enemy that threatened to crush German culture. They also saw it as a liberation war to expel Western depraved material culture from its own country. They did so with arguments that went back to Schiller, the time around 1800 and the war against Napoleon.
Boterman shows clearly and with a pleasant pen that many members of the German cultural elite were much more closely involved in the darker sides of German history than is often thought. After all, it was students and professors who organized the book burnings in Berlin in May 1933. The old spirit had to literally burn, so that from the ashes a new world could emerge, based on the strange romantic and of course anti-Semitic ideals of the Nazis.
Tact with the devil
According to Boterman, the German cultural elite unwittingly entered into a "Faustian pact" - or a pact with the devil - with the evil called Nazism. Many – but by no means all – felt related in one way or another to Hitler's ideas and saw too late where it would lead.
'Culture as Power' may not be the type of book that you just read in between. Boterman brings nothing less than the very first general cultural history of our eastern neighbours. It is of course tempting to read the aspects that you find most interesting from a voluminous, almost 900-page overview. But it is better to let yourself be carried away from 1800 in Boterman's beautifully documented story about the deep-rooted German cultural history. Then you will really understand the country and its history.