Customer Reviews

The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (California Library Reprint Series)

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Stern's book gives us valuable insight into currents of German thinking from the 19th century up to the rise of National Socialism in the 20s and 30s. Stern's books focuses on the writings of Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck.

Paul de Lagarde was a biblical scholar and a master of oriental languages like Aramaic and Persian. He was also a rabid Jew hater who openly called for extermination. He loathed classical Western liberalism, science, and capitalism. For him, these were all spiritless abstractions. For Lagarde, Western liberalism, capitalism, science, and the Jews where the monstrous embodiment of all he hated. He had a romantic notion of a mythical Germanic past, and he believed the Jews and the modern society of the West were conspiring to pollute and corrupt this pure German spirit. He advocated a Great Leader, a "purge the Jew" program, and a divinely inspired expansionist foreign policy to rekindle an authentic and noble Germanic way of life.

Lagarde despised bourgeois 19th century German Christianity, and he called for a "new" German religion that would purge all the Jewish elements of Christianity and become the unifying spiritual basis and justification for the new German state. This new religion would fuse the squabbling German factions and sects into a unified people and nation with one single will .... embodied in the form a "Great Leader."

Lagarde rejected the premise of general education, and instead, he proposed a totally new education system based on social status and intellectual promise. This new, state-run authoritarian education system would mold the leaders of the new German nation.

Julius Langbehn wrote a book that extolled the Dutch artist Rembrandt as an authentic "German man". If this sounds confusing, well ... it is ..., but recall that many years later the Nazis attempted to use Rembrandt as a cultural symbol to force a Dutch-German alliance after they occupied Holland during the war.

Like Lagarde, Langbehn hated the modern liberal society because of its mechanization, realism, bourgeois lifestyle, and commercialism. Like Hitler, Langbehn was an "artist"; he was anti-scientific, anti-Western, and anti-rational. He postulated a "cult of the young" (think Hitler Youth) and a "Hidden Emperor" (think Führer) who would emerge to unite the German people. Again like Lagarde, Langbehn hated the U.S.A because it was the embodiment of all he despised. He warned that Jews were destroying the German "Volk" by "worming" their way into German life. For Langbehn, modernity itself was the ultimate cause of German decay, and the Jews were to blame for bringing this modernity to German society. For Langbehn, the Jews were "democratically inclined; they have an affinity for the mob," and like Lagarde, Langbehn called for extermination of the Jews.

I won't go on about Moeller van den Bruck, because it is similar to Lagarde and Langbehn. One important footnote: The Nazi's got the term "The Third Reich" from one of Moeller's books.

In summary, we find a set of three German intellectual romantics who were alienated by modernism and who abhorred all that was new. They suffered from "cultural despair." For these three, the "Jews" were the immediate agents of corrupting change, and it was America that was the colossal embodiment of all they detested. For them, a pure and authentic German way of life was lost due to the conspiracy and confluence of these horrible forces of modernism. All of the ills and fractiousness and faithlessness of German society were attributable to Jews and liberal modernism (as exemplified by America).

These three sought to annihilate the bourgeois modern society they found themselves in and they sought to replace it with a utopian dream. Their utopia was a unified and harmonious German people -- purged of Jews -- who would be orderly, hierarchical, and authentic. This unified German nation would be led by a strong emperor who would perfectly embody the unified will of the people. They sought a "New German religion", free of Jewish influence, that would provide a unifying framework for this new society. They proposed state-controlled education and propaganda, leadership by a small elite, annexation and conquest of middle Europe, and they called for the extermination of Jews.

In short - these three "culturally despairing" egg heads predicted much of the horror of the Nazis. All three were widely read in German society at various points in time leading up to the rise of National Socialism.

We know that Hitler emphatically read Lagarde. For more on this, see "Hitler's Forgotten Library" in the May 2003 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, by Timothy W. Ryback. On p.295, Stern shows how Lagarde, Langbehn, and van den Bruck influenced other key Nazi ideologists like Alfred Rosenberg.

The book contains extensive footnotes and end notes, a large bibliography, and a good index. I have one gripe with the book. There are several book titles, quotes, and passages that are in German without English translation. I could not work them out with my meager German. I wish translations were provided. I also wish pictures or portraits of Lagarde, Langbehn, and van den Bruck were provided.

Finally, I'd like to add that many of the themes we see having emerged from Lagarde, Langbehn, and van den Bruck are similar to what is found the more recent work of the influential Islamic radical Sayyid Qutb. I strongly recommend the Paul Berman book "Terror and Liberalism" for a very readable and enlightening treatment of Qutb.

Yes I may be a history student, but this book would truly appeal to anyone, especially if you are the least bit bewildered about German history or are seeking to understand it a bit more. Stern does an excellent job examining three 'average' people in Germany spanning 1871-1933 (roughly). 'Cultural despair' is an interesting concept and Stern does an excellent job showing how this was such an issue in modernising Germany and how much it meant to them. In no ways does it fully explain Nazism, but it illustrates how powerful one's 'culture' can be to a person or group of people. Howeverm it isn't just limited to Germans in any sense--it's something we should all understand and Stern's work truly anables the reader to do so.

Stern's book is an excellent study of German anti-semitism and Pan Germanism that ultimately concluded in Hitler and the Nazis. While it's impossible to prove that Hitler read the three authors that Stern studies in this book it's quite likely that Hitler either did read them or someone close to him read them and detailed their contents to him. Many of Hitler's ideas are either directly in the writings of the three men studied in this book or are extensions of their writings. A vastly important book that will lead a reader to the conclusion that Hitler wasn't just an "accident" of German history, he was its ultimate frightening conclusion.

The reviewer ("prenziberg") who complains of "venom dripping from nearly every sentence" has a non-rare ability to extract surprising things from mild-mannered text. In my opinion, what drips from nearly every sentence is clarity. (I know, clarity does not drip. He (she?) started it...)

This is, again IMO, one of the great books of historical reportage and interpretation. Stern wrote the book in the 60's; he could have had no inkling of current goings-on in Muslim land, the relevancy of the book to which other reviewers have commented approvingly on.

I underlined almost every sentence. I have not done that since my mid-twenties. Either, at 65, I'm loosing it, or the book is pretty good. Both are likely.

bill

This fine book is a careful, scholarly analysis of 3 of the thinkers who created the intellectual background for Nazism. None of the three individuals discussed - Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck - are major intellectual figures. All, however, were widely read in their time and contributed to the Volkish ideology that was the intellectual seedbed for Nazism. For each one of these men, Stern presents a nice concise biography, accounts of their major works, and how they influenced their contemporaries and successors. Features common to all of them were resentment and hatred of modern industrial society with its pluralism and cosmopolitanism, rejection of rational and scientific standards of thought, longing for social unity based on a mystic view of German identity, heightened sense of the importance of art, and veneration of a largely imaginary past. Disdaining any actual contact with the real world of politics and policy, these men were cultural critics who wished to be conservative revolutionaries destroying contemporary society in an effort to recreate an imaginary utopian past. Their ideas generally involved vigorous anti-semitism, seeing Jews as the great beneficiaries and mediators of modernization, German imperialism, and in some cases, cultivation of the necessity of violence.

Stern dicusses these men in an objective and unsparing manner, often acknowledging when their criticisms of Wilhelmine society were appropriate. The book includes some interesting comments on the generality of anti-modernist sentiments like these. There is a particularly good summary analytic chapter that concludes the book. I recommend reading this book in conjunction with George Mosse's The Crisis of German Ideology, which covers some of the same ground. The Mosse book is a more general history of Volkish ideology and its consequences with breadth and context lacking in this book. This book, however, provides a deeper view of the Volkish ideology.

If you can subtract out the venom dripping from nearly every sentence, you'll get an insight into a few of the forces that shaped the Nazi tide. If Stern hadn't been so ridiculously hateful towards these long-dead "proto-Nazis" it would have been an excellent read.

But any serious student of the NS time will have to balance this and many other works describing many other lead-up/ins to the '30s. The Nazis and their influences are a study in quantum schizophrenia, with ol' Uncle Adolf (sorta) riding herd. And of course the only thing weirder than the Nazis and all their braided streams of influence is the tangled, overgrown paths back to them through the historical literature.