Thoughts on Modernism and the Foundations of German Idealism

Fin-de-siècle Germany was perhaps the greatest propagator of modernism in the European world than any of the established great powers of its time. Berlin was the cultural capital of the progressivist movements; vitalism, futurism, social experimentation, liberation and cultural renovation sprung like flowers on the garden beds of the Unter den Linden and the very air smelled of the musings of the avant-garde. German idealism as a driving force behind this movement and radical transformation of the German lands was in no way a modest contributor. But while one thinks of revolutionary ideology as a thing exclusively of “the Left,” it is in fact important to acknowledge that much of the great reactionary movements of the interwar and post-war periods all find their roots in the pre-World War I Germany. Many of the avant-garde, thinkers, writers and artists desired the Great War. In this war they saw the possibility to bring out of its shell a world that they so longed for. A world where aesthetics was dominant, where intuition dominated against reason, where art existed for art’s sake and life should immitate it. A world where social order was reversed, where liberal bourgeois values and society was destroyed, where the futurist brutality dominated and where Kultur was dominant. But these ideas are no less on the court of the great right-leaning ideologies than they are of the left. What lessons are then there to be learned of these uniquely similar points.

German idealism stands at the very root of the early 20th German left as much as it does of the German right. National Socialism, Reactionary Modernism to quote Herf, German socialism and Centre Christian “conservatism” all trace their origins in some form of German idealism as it was formed in the late 19th century. An interesting case study is an offspring of German idealism which finds itself in expressionism. From the obsession with crudeness and violence then sprung primitivism and the desire to return to more barbaric forms of life. Nolde in fact wrote, “primitive men live in nature, are one with it, and a part of the whole. I sometimes have the feeling that they are the only real human beings left and that we on the other hand are malformed puppers, artificial and full of conceit.” Vitality was at the center of it all, idealism in Germany attempted to bring that yearning for life into a new context. A secular context for certain, where morality becomes subjective and where that subjectivity bears within it all the justification necessary for brutality as expressed in futurism and primitivism. The cult of war and aesthetics, of life outside of the hypocrisy of form and manner, in essence the uprooting of traditional and historical values as they had been bred in European soil for centuries, was at the center of that great German spirit that rose to conquer the world. This was the German Macht, the strength that made it superior and made it separate. “That a Germany absorbed in Macht and technique should decry the English as stolid merchants and the French as Gallic buffoons, Nietzsche for one found profoundly ironic: the Prussian victory over France contained the seeds of defear for German Geist, or spirit, he noted.” explains Eksteins.

World War I, thus so greatly fueled by these sentiments largely was an artist’s war. Germany was at that time, as where its values and standing, a construct; not something born of history and blood, but something crafted out of iron and soil. In this is noted a great justification for its proclivity to revolution and reform, and in this it was perhaps close to America. It’s political system also echoed great change in the Old World, a union of democracy and monarchy, of federalism and centralization. Socialist movements, sexual liberation, female suffrage and the rise of new forms of art and experimentation, along with different ideas of nationalism and spiritual/ mystical esotericism all brought forward the cult of the self into a new context. For these reasons Germany was already given to modernism before the Great War began. Foregone though the conclusion might appear in hindsight, in context it was perhaps necessary that a war of this magnitude erupted. No other event could have brought about the end of the old world so abruptly, nothing would have allowed the monsters to come out, to paraphrase Gramsci.

To say that reactionary political thought is fathered by German idealism is however only but a half-truth. Reactionary-ism was a pan-European phenomenon as much as the revolutions that preceded it. However, never was the former as important, as influential or as developed as it was in Germany. And the reason for that is undoubtedly German idealism. It is hypocritical, crudely phrased, and it is contradictory, in using softer language, what the reactionary masterminds, such as Spengler, Langbehn and others have authored, in that it preaches proximity to traditional and historical ways of life and statehood, but it at the same time evokes and relies on what is directly opposed to them. This is neither written to discredit their writings nor call their conclusions false. On the contrary the movement has produced quite the selection of intellectual titans and volumes of work that are invaluable to political science and philosophy for the West. However, the sustainability or rather viability of these methods and proposals for society is what is in question through the indication of their inherrent contradictions.