In an era when one’s understanding of culture often corresponded to the
views of a specific political party, Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) took an
unusual stance vis-à-vis the so-called German Geist of the times. In
numerous reviews and essays and in such fictional work as the novel
Steppenwolf (1927), he offered insights into the political and cultural
atmosphere of the German-speaking world in the years just before the
Nazi takeover, and, although his concept of Geist did not encompass
mythic Germanic virtues, his language occasionally resembled that of
more radical thinkers of the period. Like Oswald Spengler, discussed in
Chapter Three, he worried that Occidental culture was approaching its
end, and he repeatedly declared the German national Geist sick.
Moreover, Hesse gave positive commentary on the work of writers with
opposing political agendas, an act that won him few friends.
After 1933, writers were increasingly forced to conform to the
restrictions imposed by the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment
and Propaganda in order to create a German Geist along National
Socialist lines. Many who disagreed with the Nazis fled the Reich and
wrote in exile. Because Hesse had left Germany for Switzlerland in 1912
and became a citizen by 1923, he was able to comment on the
developments in the Reich from a position of relative safety. When he
publicly displayed his appreciation of writers on both political sides,
however, National Socialists and exiles came to see him as a common
enemy and scorned him for his unwillingness to draw clear political lines
in a time of extremes.
The differences between the political right and left became
irreconcilable over the first half of the twentieth century, but Hesse’s
work demonstrates that belief in the Geist and Seele of the nation
remained one of the prime commonalities of German speakers. In fact,
his stance becomes more comprehensible, if one considers that even those speakers of German who eventually were denied membership in
the new community under the Nazis spoke and thought in terms of the
national spirit and soul. The work of Sigmund Freud, discussed in the
previous chapter, is a case in point. The Germanist Friedrich Gundolf
(1880-1931) is another example of someone who contributed to the
discourse on the national Geist only to be excluded from the group taking
shape during the Third Reich. In his book Skakespeare und der deutsche
Geist (Shakespeare and the German Geist, 1911), Gundolf explained the
profound influence Shakespeare had had on those Germans who
represented the “essence of German Geist” (vii). As so many before and
after him, he also wrote that Goethe was one of the literary greats who
had “opened up . . . the German Geist” and literally “filled the language
with soul [Beseelung].” Goethe had made it possible to render “every
inner feeling [Stimmung]” into language (246). Gundolf was one of the
literary experts connected to the circle gathered around Stefan George
(1868-1933), but because he was not only German but also Jewish, the
Nazis eventually rejected his ideas (345). Nevertheless, Gundolf’s ideas
relating the spirit of literature to national character underscore just how
widespread the discourse on national Geist was in the twentieth century.
Richard Benz’s Geist und Reich (Spirit and Reich, 1933) provides
another example of the general belief in national Geist. Using the
vocabulary of his day, Benz argued that the concept of German Geist had
been misinterpreted and misused. Indeed, “German” had become a
concept with nearly religious significance over which “minds [Geist]
were divided,” because Germans had realized that they had never been
able to unite under a common national culture (21). When most of
Europe blamed Germany for World War I, Germans had felt a guilt that
later turned into resentment and finally into a form of nationalism based
on the hatred of institutions and other peoples, especially the Jews. Anti-
Semitism had emerged from an already present general antipathy
toward Jews in Europe connected to the myth of race and propounded in
the work of Count Arthur de Gobineau (1816-82), and Houston Stewart
Chamberlain (1855-1927) (10-12).
Benz believed that the true community expressed in Geist had existed
only in the Middle Ages, a time when Germans shared a common
language and culture. The printing press made it easier to disseminate
texts and might have resulted in “a permeation of life with Geist as never
before” and enabled all speakers of German to “have the most intimate
share of everything spiritual [an allem Geistigen],” but it ended the oral tradition and destroyed the community of Geist. Whereas the people
once had gathered around the poet and taken an active part in the
creation of the work of art during its performance, the printing press had
made it possible for the writer to work in solitude and publish for a
public that could not respond in the previously customary way (41).
Benz rejected the notion that the German literary tradition had been
robbed of its German character (entdeutscht) and recalled that even the
ninth-century Hildebrandslied (Lay of Hildebrand) had been influenced by
Christianity and by the twentieth century represented little more than a
series of “mysterious, rhythmically jolting sounds in a language
incomprehensible to most Germans” (51). The German language and
culture that once existed was no more, and Germans could not hope to
reclaim a past that had become foreign to them. To reestablish the
community that once was linked through literature, Benz believed,
people would have to interact with each other and with the artist once
again during the public performance of literary works (125-26).
Benz sensed that the German culture had reached a turning point in
its development. Something big was about to happen, and the
presentiment of an impending cultural transition made people feel
insecure and therefore also open to ideas of a utopia founded on race
(120). Germans had never had a “geistige[n] Führer” (“spiritual leader”)
who could unite them, he argued, no actual “Mittler des Geistes”
(“mediator of Geist”). Instead, Germany had produced geniuses who had
realized their own potential and specialists who had trained other
specialists whose discoveries had never reached the laypeople. A new
German culture was about to take shape, Benz believed, based on the
model of the Christian harmony that had existed during Middle Ages
(128). Seemingly borrowing words from the militaristic lexicon of the
thirties, Benz claimed that his ideas were based on martial spirit: “All
[that I have said] has nothing to do with pacifism. It comes, in the final
analysis, from a warlike spirit: the spirit of the heroic resistance against
the threat of soulless matter—from the highest human warrior [principle]
in existence” (144).