In Times of Crisis : Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century relationship between European culture, German history, and the Jewish experience produced some of the West’s most powerful and enduring intellectual creations-and, perhaps in subtly paradoxical and interrelated ways, our century’s darkest genocidal moments. In Times of Crisis explores the flashpoints of this vexed relationship, mapping the coordinates of a complex triangular encounter of immense historical import. In essays that range from the question of Nietzsche’s legacy to the controversy over Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the distinguished historian Steven E. Aschheim presents this encounter as an ongoing dialogue between two evolving cultural identities. He touches on past dimensions of this exchange (such as the politics of Weimar Germany) and on present dilemmas of grasping and representing it (such as the Israeli discourse on the Holocaust). His work inevitably traces the roots and ramifications of Nazism but at the same time brings into focus historical circumstances and contemporary issues often overshadowed or distorted by the Holocaust. These essays reveal the ubiquitous charged inscriptions of Nazi genocide within our own culture and illuminate the projects of some later thinkers and historians-from Hannah Arendt to George Mosse to Saul Friedlander-who have wrestled with its problematics and sought to capture its essence. From the broadly historical to the personal, from the politics of Weimar Germany to the experience of growing up German Jewish in South Africa, the essays expand our understanding of German Jewish history in particular, but also of historical processes in general. In Times of CrisisESSAYS ON EUROPEAN CULTURE, GERMANS, AND JEWSBy Steven E. AschheimTHE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESSCopyright © 2001 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin SystemAll right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-299-16860-5Chapter One Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau, and Degeneration Max Nordau (1849-1923) was a household name to educated late-nineteenth-century Europeans. It is a telling fact that most late-twentieth-century readers will have little or no idea who he was or what he represented. A famous journalist, physician, dramatist, novelist, polemicist and, later, Zionist activist, his thought and work appears today to have achieved widespread popularity among the middle classes precisely because it was so time-bound and tied to the conventions and postures of a positivist outlook that ceased to be relevant after World War I. The hundredth anniversary of the publication of his famous, or rather infamous, work Degeneration (1892)-a veritable diatribe of cultural criticism that characterized virtually every modernist fin-de-si��cle trend as a symptom of exhaustion and inability to adjust to the realities of the modern industrial age-provides an opportunity for reassessment. This can perhaps be most helpfully done through a comparison of Nordau to a thinker whom he despised, yet one whose relevance to and imprint upon twentieth-century intellectual sensibility could not have been greater: Friedrich Nietzsche. Judging by contemporary intellectual fashions and the highly antipositivist cultural tenor of the times, it appears, of course, that Nietzsche has defeated, indeed routed, Nordau. With the possible exception of his later Zionist career, Nordau's work has been accorded a fate worse than neglect: he is typically treated as little more than a "symptom," a textbook example of hopelessly outmoded and misguided cultural and intellectual postures built upon thoroughly discredited psycho-physiological premises. A recent historian of degeneration, for instance, has summarily dismissed Nordau's work as "the best-known instance of bizarre 'social diagnosis.'" The story appears dotted with ironies and tables turned: as, for example, when Nordau predicted that his fin-de-si��cle degenerates would "rave for a season, and then perish," a prediction that apparently applied more to himself than it did, for instance, to the objects of his scorn-Ibsen, Wilde, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and so on. These perceptions notwithstanding, this essay will seek to analyze and reassess the Nietzsche-Nordau relationship in terms of a contemporary perspective. On one level, clearly, it is tempting to regard both thinkers as almost archetypal figures, extreme personifications of an epochal parting of the ways, the point at which an indignant, rather bewildered and uncomprehending, yet aggressively self-assertive European positivism confronted the incipient modernist revolution intent on radically questioning, indeed destroying, all its revered postulates. The clash of the Nordauian and Nietzschean sensibilities can then be taken as historical evidence of a particular cultural turning point. Nevertheless, appearances apart, there were not only differences: there were also certain interesting, if limited, affinities that need to be identified and analyzed. I shall document both the clash and the commonalities and then attempt to evaluate the competing legacies of these two thinkers from our own present historical perspective. We may yet uncover some unsuspected relevancies contained in Nordau's heritage. At the very center of what Max Nordau described as a "severe mental epidemic ... a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria," stands the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche. In Degeneration it is Nietzsche who, more than anyone else, provided the philosophy behind what Nordau described as the prevalent "ego-mania" and who furnished the grounds for an ongoing "deification of filth, ... licentiousness, disease and corruption." 6 Nietzsche represented nothing less than the quintessence of intellectual and moral degeneration. Indeed, Nordau's definition of the ethical climate of the fin-de-si��cle is marked by what appears to be its essentially Nietzschean characteristics: a contempt for traditional views of custom and morality ... a practical emancipation from traditional discipline.... unbridled lewdness, the unchaining of the beast in man ... disdain of all consideration for his fellow-men, the trampling under foot of all barriers which enclose brutal greed of lucre and lust of pleasure ... to all, it means the end of an established order, which for thousands of years has satisfied logic, fettered depravity, and in every art matured something of beauty. Nordau's cultural analysis explicitly extended the Morelian and Lombrosian analyses of psycho-physiological degeneration to an area where, as he stated, it had not yet been applied, "the domain of art and literature." "It is not necessary," he wrote, "to measure the cranium of an author, or to see the lobe of a painter's ear, in order to recognize the fact that he belongs to the class of degenerates." Authors and artists, Nordau proclaimed, as much as criminals, prostitutes, and lunatics (those classical outsiders labeled with the condition), demonstrated all the familiar mental characteristics and very often the somatic features that symptomized the degenerate condition. Critics were, from the beginning, skeptical of and sometimes appalled by Nordau's application of quasi-medical categories to artistic and philosophical matters. Yet in the case of Nietzsche and his well-known illness (his insanity dated from January 1889), it was particularly easy and plausible to frame not only the man but also his thought within a medicopathological frame, a connection that for many of the others that Nordau pilloried-such as Wagner or Zola-seemed forced or at best metaphorical. Linking the craziness of Nietzsche's ideas to his (later) insanity was a general technique of those who, in the history of Nietzsche-reception, sought to defame the philosopher and outlaw his arguments. The fact of Nietzsche's derangement was regularly incorporated into the philosophical critique, explanatory of its "perverted" contents. Nordau phrased it thus: From the first to the last page of Nietzsche's writings the careful reader seems to hear a madman, with flashing eyes, wild gestures, and foaming mouth, spouting forth deafening bombast ... So far as any meaning at all can be extracted from the endless stream of phrases, it shows, as its fundamental elements, a series of constantly reiterated delirious ideas, having their source in illusions of sense and diseased organic processes.... Here and there emerges a distinct idea, which, as is always the case with the insane, assumes the form of an imperious assertion, a sort of despotic command. More than his fellow "degenerates," Nietzsche was not only considered as insanely perverted but, as Sander Gilman has persuasively shown, a thinker uniquely and consistently endowed with almost supernatural potency, a "'dangerous thinker'-not merely that he espoused dangerous thoughts, but that he caused dangerous acts...." In this respect, Nordau's comments fitted into an ongoing tradition, a strategy not only for dealing with Nietzsche himself but for coping with what many contemporaries regarded as even more disturbing phenomena: the remarkable influence that Nietzsche had begun to exert and the perplexing proliferation of Nietzsche cults (often quite contradictory in nature and outlook) that increasingly dotted the cultural landscape of the 1890s. Nietzsche, wrote Nordau, was obviously insane from birth, and his books bear on every page the imprint of insanity. It may be cruel to insist on this fact. It is, however, a painful, yet unavoidable, duty to refer to it anew, because Nietzsche has become the means of raising a mental pestilence, and the only hope of checking its propagation lies in placing Nietzsche's insanity in the clearest light, and in branding his disciples with the marks most suited to them, viz., as hysterical and imbecile. Nordau, like other nineteenth-century liberals, had no doubts about what constituted sanity and the nature of moral standards: these were largely defined through the norms of bourgeois respectability. Moreover, he did not fret about the imperceptible nature of "reality." Survival meant quite simply the adjustment to a clearly accessible reality. That adjustment was attainable through clear observation, rational self-discipline, a lucid sense of right and wrong, and a balanced integration of the faculties of will and judgment. Those who lacked these qualities were degenerates: Nietzsche was perhaps the ultimate incarnation of its egomaniacal form. "The ego-maniac," Nordau confidently proclaimed, "is an invalid who does not see things as they are, does not understand the world, and cannot take up a right attitude towards it." Inexorably it was this incapacity to come to terms with reality that destroyed these degenerates. There would not be much point to rehearsing Nordau's refutation of Nietzsche nor his almost point-by-point analysis of the way madness entered Nietzsche's writings or his logic, thought, and style. What distinguished Nordau's analysis from other anti-Nietzsche tracts of the day, however, was the way he integrated it into a systematic, overarching positivist framework. It is, indeed, as exemplifier of the clash between nineteenth- century positivism and an emerging twentieth-century modernist sensibility that the Nordau-Nietzsche comparison and confrontation retains its historical interest. Nordau was acutely and anxiously aware of the apparently "modern" appeal of the artists and writers he attacked. Though they presented themselves as avant-garde, they were not, he sought to persuade his readers, "heralds of a new era. They do not direct us to the future, but point backwards to times past." Their spurious, irrational modernity had to be distinguished from his own authentic kind: The "freedom" and "modernity," the "progress" and "truth," of these fellows are not ours. We have nothing in common with them. They wish for self-indulgence; we wish for work. They wish to drown consciousness in the unconscious; we wish to strengthen and enrich consciousness. They wish for evasive ideation and babble; we wish for attention, observation and knowledge. The criterion by which true moderns may be recognised and distinguished from impostors calling themselves moderns may be this: Whoever preaches absence of discipline is an enemy of progress; and whoever worships his "I" is an enemy to society. From his perspective Nordau was quite correct to single out Nietzsche as a key articulator of this new modernist current with its assault on the objective foundations of reality, its radical problematization of truth, and its highly developed expressivist sense of subjective consciousness. Nietzsche is today, as we know, almost consensually viewed as foundational to both the modernist and postmodernist projects. Who symbolizes better than Nietzsche-who once scoffed, "All ordered society puts the passions to sleep"-the frontal attack on those values that Nordau held to be most sacred: rationality, discipline, science, and order? Nietzsche, of course, was instrumental in questioning the basic premises of a widespread nineteenth-century liberal faith that Nordau had articulated: the belief in advancement based upon potentialities of the natural sciences. He fundamentally disputed the very idea of "progress." Even more radically, he railed against the presupposition that there was a prior, objective reality "out there." For Nordau and the many others whose views Nordau mirrored, there could be no doubt about reality's existence: the laws of an objective natural and social world could confidently be revealed through clear thinking and patient observation. "Culture and command over the powers of nature are solely the result of attention; all errors, all superstition, the consequence of defective attention. False ideas of the connection between phenomena arise through defective observation of them, and will be rectified by a more exact observation." Only through their "want of attention" did degenerates produce "false judgements respecting the objective universe." While Nordau sought to grasp and then adjust to objective reality, Nietzsche spoke about reality as a construct of the self. It was the will to power that created reality (a reality which, in some of his moods, Nietzsche regarded as wholly fictitious). What could have been further removed from the Nordauian conception of knowledge than Nietzsche's definition of his Dionysus ideal: "the force in all life that wills error; error as the precondition even of thought. Before there is 'thought' there must have been 'invention'; the construction of identical cases, of the appearance of sameness, is more primitive than the knowledge of sameness." Nothing could have been more alien to Nordau's way of thinking than the radical perspectivism of Nietzsche, who denied the validity of any stable, fixed viewpoint and who had written: "The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e. is not a fact but a fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is in 'flux', as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for-there is no 'truth.'" "Truth," he wrote elsewhere, was a "mobile army of metaphors ... illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are." In the confrontation between Nordau and Nietzsche, middle-class sobriety, discipline, and realism encountered its Dionysian opposite. For Nietzsche the withdrawal from positivist reality became a goal, an ideal: "To spend one's life amid delicate and absurd things; a stranger to reality; half an artist, half a bird and metaphysician; with no care for reality, except now and then to acknowledge it in the manner of a good dancer with the tip of one's toes." For Nordau such withdrawal was unequivocal evidence of a clinical condition, what he described as "coenaestheses, or systemic sensations." In Nietzsche's Dionysian world, ecstasy was transformed into a fundamental fructifying force. Under its charm, he wrote, man has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing. His very gestures express enchantment. Just as the animals now talk, and the earth yields milk and honey, supernatural sounds emanate from him, too: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams. He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art. But for Nordau ecstasy was regarded quite simply as "a consequence of the morbid irritability of special brain-centres," and dance and art (those most liberative and expressive of Nietzschean activities) were dismissed as "pure atavisms" to be practiced in the future only "by the most emotional portion of humanity-by women, by the young, perhaps even by children." Where Nietzschean man sought to transform himself into a work of art, then, Nordau more or less banished art from his future order. "Observation ... triumphs ever more and more over imagination and artistic symbolism-i.e., the introduction of erroneous personal interpretations of the universe is more and more driven back by an understanding of the laws of Nature." The alternative to Nietzsche and his ilk was quite evident to Nordau. "The normal man," he wrote, "with his clear mind, logical thought, sound judgement, and strong will, sees, where the degenerate only gropes ... Let us imagine the driveling Zoroaster of Nietzsche, with his cardboard lions, eagles, and serpents, from a toyshop in competition with men who rise early and are not weary before sunset, who have clear heads, solid stomachs and hard muscles: the comparison will provoke our laughter." Yet we need to pause here for, all the obvious differences between Nietzsche and Nordau notwithstanding, it is precisely in their common emphases on "normalcy" and "abnormalcy," "sickness" and "decadence," their common advocacy of the manly ideal, and their desire for healthy, regenerated "men with hard muscles" that certain important underlying affinities may be discovered. What united these apparently diametrically opposed figures was the fact that they were key participants, both as makers and beneficiaries, in a wider nineteenth-century discourse of "degeneration." Here was a highly flexible, politically adjustable tool able simultaneously to locate, diagnose, and resolve a prevalent (if inchoate) sense of social and cultural crisis through an exercise of eugenic labeling and a language of bio-social pathology and potential renewal. The rhetoric of degeneration cut across the ideological spectrum. Linked to the optimistic language of evolutionary naturalism but marked by a belief in imminent breakdown and a search for ever more drastic corrective measures, it was employed by conservatives, liberals (like Nordau), the incipient radical right, and materialist socialists of all kinds. (Continues...) Excerpted from In Times of Crisisby Steven E. Aschheim Copyright © 2001 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. "The nineteenth- and twentieth-century relationship between European culture, German history, and the Jewish experience produced some of the West’s most powerful and enduring intellectual creations—and, perhaps in subtly paradoxical and interrelated ways, our century’s darkest genocidal moments. In Times of Crisis explores the flashpoints of this vexed relationship, mapping the coordinates of a complex triangular encounter of immense historical import. In essays that range from the question of Nietzsche’s legacy to the controversy over Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the distinguished historian Steven E. Aschheim presents this encounter as an ongoing dialogue between two evolving cultural identities. He touches on past dimensions of this exchange (such as the politics of Weimar Germany) and on present dilemmas of grasping and representing it (such as the Israeli discourse on the Holocaust). His work inevitably traces the roots and ramifications of Nazism but at the same time brings into focus historical circumstances and contemporary issues often overshadowed or distorted by the Holocaust. These essays reveal the ubiquitous charged inscriptions of Nazi genocide within our own culture and illuminate the projects of some later thinkers and historians - from Hannah Arendt to George Mosse to Saul Friedlander - who have wrestled with its problematics and sought to capture its essence. From the broadly historical to the personal, from the politics of Weimar Germany to the experience of growing up German Jewish in South Africa, the essays expand our understanding of German Jewish history in particular, but also of historical processes in general."--Amazon.ca Dec.2013 Frontmatter Preface (page ix) PART I: THE CRISIS OF CULTURE—THEN AND NOW 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau, and Degeneration (page 3) 2. Thinking the Nietzsche Legacy Today: A Historian's Perspective (page 13) 3. Against Social Science: Jewish Intellectuals, the Critique of Liberal-Bourgeois Modernity, and the (Ambiguous) Legacy of Radical Weimar Theory (page 24) 4. Nazism and the Holocaust in Contemporary Culture (page 44) PART II: (CON)FUSIONS OF IDENTITY—GERMANS AND JEWS 5. Excursus: Growing Up German Jewish in South Africa (page 59) 6. Assimilation and Its Impossible Discontents: The Case of Moritz Goldstein (page 64) 7. Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (page 73) 8. German History and German Jewry: Junctions, Boundaries, and Interdependencies (page 86) 9. Archetypes and the German Jewish Dialogue: Reflections Occasioned by the Goldhagen Affair (page 93) PART III: UNDERSTANDING NAZISM AND THE HOLOCAUST: COMPETING MODELS AND RADICAL PARADIGMS 10. Nazism, Normalcy, and the German Sonderweg (page 105) 11. Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil (page 122) 12. Post-Holocaust Jewish Mirrorings of Germany: Hannah Arendt and Daniel Goldhagen (page 137) PART IV: HISTORIANS, HISTORY, AND THE HOLOCAUST 13. Reconceiving the Holocaust? Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (page 147) 14. George Mosse at 80: A Critical Laudatio (page 155) 15. On Saul Friedlander (page 171) Notes (page 197) Index (page 265) Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau, And Degeneration -- Thinking The Nietzsche Legacy Today: A Historian's Perspective -- Against Social Science: Jewish Intellectuals, The Critique Of Liberal-bourgeois Modernity, And The (ambiguous) Legacy Of Radical Weimar Theory -- Nazism And The Holocaust In Contemporary Culture -- Excursus: Growing Up German Jewish In South Africa. Assimilation And Its Impossible Discontents: The Case Of Moritz Goldstein -- Hannah Arendt In Jerusalem -- German History And German Jewry: Junctions, Boundaries, And Interdependencies -- Archetypes And The German Jewish Dialogue: Reflections Occasioned By The Goldhagen Affair -- Nazism, Normalcy, And The German Sonderweg -- Nazism, Culture, And The Origins Of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt And The Discourse Of Evil. Post-holocaust Jewish Mirrorings Of Germany: Hannah Arendt And Daniel Goldhagen -- Reconceiving The Holocaust? Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners -- George Mosse At 80: A Critical Laudatio -- On Saul Friedlander. Steven E. Aschheim. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.