" Nothing
distinguishes
the human being of an- tiquity from the human being of modernity more than the former's sur- render to a cosmic experience the latter hardly knows.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason
For the rest, those who cannot follow Turel can console themselves with Gershom Scholem's analysis; he knew the author per- sonally and, as early as the twenties, "understood literally not one word" of his utterances (Von Berlin nach Jerusalem, pp.
157-58).
Notes
1. H. Goetz, Erwin Piscator in Selbstzeugnissen undBilddokumenten (Hamburg, 1974), pp. 18f. 2. [Grotaz is an acronym from "grosster Techniker aller Zeiten" and a play on Goring's
megalomaniac, insulting nickname "Grofaz". --Trans. ]
3. [Achternbusch is a German film director. --Trans. ]
Chapter 20
Political Algodicy:
Cynical Cosmologies and the Logic of Pain
What is all this racket from constructions, ships, mines, battles and books seen from outer space: in comparison with the earth's crust, nothing!
Oswald Spengler, Urfragen (Munich, 1965)
Even if the hard Nazi sport subjects proclaimed their sympathies with prosthetic life under the mask of vitalism and in this way sought to counter pain through denial, in the end they, too, could not evade the question of the meaning of pain. Like nothing else, pain, which can announce death, challenges metaphysical meaning. The latter wants to know what the immeasurable suffering of this cen- tury means, who is responsible for it, and to what whole it could contribute.
Everyday understanding, made safe through routine from thoughts that are too deep, does not let itself get caught in such discussions. It thus remains protected from explicit cynicism. Mostly it does not say anything more than "that's life. " But those who take on the question and risk having an "opinion" about suffering are drawn into a region where one has to very sure of one's metaphysical views, or else become cynical.
Algodicy means a metaphyscial interpretation of pain that gives it meaning. In modernity it takes the place of theodicy, as its converse. In the latter, it was asked, How are evil, pain, suffering, and injustice to be reconciled with the exis- tence of God? Now the question is, If there is no God and no higher meaning, how can we still bear the pain? The function of politics as substitute theology im- mediately becomes clear. The nationalists as a rule did not hesitate for a moment to claim that the immeasurable suffering of the war had been meaningful as sac- rifice for the Fatherland. The momentum of such claims was hindered solely by the fact that the lost war and the victors' dictatorship in peacetime, as well as the disappointed revolution, put this nationalist offer of meaning into question. One might consider whether the much-quoted legend of the dagger thrust was a
460
a biological "grand
view" for himself.
Heroes fall
and sons leave their mothers. They are all
simple laws.
The breathing and batting of an eyelid in a colossal happening. (Wailing)
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 461
desperate rescue attempt for the political algodicy of the Right. For to realize that Germany would lose the war could be expected from even the densest nationalist. But to admit that "everything had been for nothing" and that the untold torments had no political meaning at all --for many contemporaries that was unbearable. The legend of the dagger thrust was no naive myth but a willed self-delusion of the Right. Their effort is also witnessed by Hitler's "bitter fortune. "
Those who ask for the meaning of the suffering in the First World War were drawn by the question into a region where politics, natural philosophy, and medi- cal cynicism met. Scarcely any speaker in those years refrained from medical metaphors: sickness, cancerous growths, operations, and healing through crisis. In Mein Kampf, Hitler spoke of the violent catastrophe that was to be preferred to a creeping political tuberculosis. The medical metaphors of the Right were in- tended to eliminate the sickness as well as the enemy within with "steel and radia- tion. " The Left at least registered the double danger of the sickness.
If, however, the revolutionary proletariat wants to be the doctor who has to take on the operation that is recognized as being unavoidable, then it is not allowed to continually soil its hands in the open festering sores of the sickness. For then, during the operation, the surgeon him- self would carry the poisonous substances into the body of the patient again, so vitiating his task of ridding the patient of them. (Erich Miih- sam, Wahrhaftigkeit, in Fanal 2 [1928])
The well-meaning cool gaze of the natural philosopher is superior to that of the doctor, for the former orders human distress into a cosmic functional relation. Before the gaze of the biologist and all the more before that of the astronomer, the miniscule convulsions of humanity melt into insignificance--as if they were only ornaments in the vast game of waxing and waning. Rudolf G. Binding, in his poems Stolz und Trauer (Pride and sadness, 1922), tried to appropriate such
Here, too, is the quintessence of heroic hardening, assent, "pride," a solid- block ego that becomes a heroic, sensible machine-for-itself. Nazi schoolbooks treasured it.
The political algodicies proceed according to an elementary schema: with- drawal from feelings of empathy into a pure, observational coldness. In this exer-
462 ? POLITICAL ALGODICY
? Ernst Jiinger, Steel eroticist, 1930. "The longer the war lasted, the more sharply did it shape sexual love into its form. . . . The spirit of the battle of material . . . produced men the world had never seen before . . . steel natures, put into action in battle in its most horrible form. . . . There, a ready femininity paraded in long rows, the lotus blossoms of asphalt, Brussels. . . . There, only steel-like character could stand without being worn down in the turmoil. These bodies that turned to love were pure function. " Der Kampfals inneres Erlebnis (Struggle as inner experience), 1933, pp. 33-34.
rise, Ernst Jiinger became a complete virtuoso. He is one of the tightrope walkers between fascism and a stoic humanism who elude simple labeling. Nevertheless, Jiinger is unmistakeably one of the master thinkers of modern cynicism, in whom cold posturing and sensitive perception are not mutually exclusive. Ideologically, he practices an aestheticizing political biology, a subtly functionalist termite- philosophy. He, too, can be reckoned among the enthusiasts of the hard subject who can stand the storm of steel. His coldness is the price of staying awake in the middle of the horror. It qualifies him as a precise witness of what has hap- pened in our century by way of modernizing horror. To bury Jiinger under an all too crude suspicion of fascism would thus be an unproductive attitude toward his work. If there exists an author in our century who fits Benjamin's formula of a "secret agent," Jiinger must be it. Like scarcely any other, he took up a listening
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 463
post in the middle of Fascist structures of thinking and feeling. His contemplative hardness combines with a pronounced readiness to speak out as witness of his own experiences. If, on the one hand, Jiinger confesses to pre-Fascist tendencies, then, with his "hunger for experience," he reveals a quality that no other Fascist possessed; in general, this quality represents a spirit of mature openness to the world and liberality with which today a New Left would identify itself.
In the prose sketches of Das Abenteuerliche Herz (The Adventurous Heart), there is a passage that clarifies lunger's biological algodicy:
From the beach plays, 2 Zinnowitz
In the dense brush behind the dunes, in the middle of the swath of reed, I captured a happy picture on my usual walk: the large leaf of a trem- bling poplar into which a circular hole had been broken. From the edge of the hole, a dark green fringe seemed to hang down that, on closer observation, revealed itself to be a row of tiny caterpillars eagerly suck- ing the leaf juice with their mandibles. A short time ago, a deposit of butterfly's eggs must have hatched there; the young brood had expanded like a bushfire on its nourishing soil.
The peculiarity of this sight consisted in the painlessness of the de- struction it mirrored. Thus, the fringe gave the impression of hanging threads of the leaf itself, which seemed to have lost none of its substance. Here it was so open to view how the double bookkeeping of life balances out. I had to think of the solace Conde gave to Mazarin, who was weep- ing over the six thousand dead at the battle of Freiburg: "Bah, in a single
1
night in Paris more people give their lives than this action cost. "
This attitude of the battle leader, which sees the change behind the
burning, has long struck me as the sign of a higher healthiness about life that does not shrink back from the bloody incision. Thus, I ex- perience pleasure when I think of the phrase consumption forte, strong consumption, which so angered Chateaubriand and which Napoleon oc- casionally used to murmur in those moments of the battle when the general was inactive, in which all reserves are on the march, while the front, under attack from mounted squadrons and the fire of artillery that has been moved up, melts as if under a tempest of steel and fire. They are words one does not want to be without, snippets of inner mono- logues at the smelting ovens that glow and vibrate while, in smoldering blood, the spirit distills into the essence of a new century.
This language is founded on a trust in life that knows no empty spaces. The sight of its fullness causes us to forget the secret sign of pain that separates the two sides of the equation--just as here, the gnawing labor of the mandibles separates caterpillar and leaf. (Aben- teuerliches Herz, second version, pp. 61-62)
Junger's general's perspective also resembles that of a biologist. For this rea- son, something of the recognition of the great pulsing of life between procreation
464 ? POLITICAL ALGODICY
and death creeps into his political sentiments. However, he ignores the threshold that separates natural death from a political death by violence. He thus transfers biological observations to the great warring "organisms" that strike out at one an- other in struggles of hegemony and survival. With full consciousness, Jiinger blurs the boundaries between zoology and sociology. The war is, in fact, a phenomenon of the "spiritual animal realm" [Hegel;-Trans. ]. Jiinger thus pro- vokes us as a political entomologist. His psychological sleight of hand consists in simultaneously assuming the standpoint of the insect and the scientist. He thinks himself not only into the devouring caterpillar but also into the devoured leaf. He goes with his sense organs to the front, which melts into fire. With the cold organs of thinking, however, he stands at the same time on the general's hill from which vantage point the battle offers itself as an aesthetic drama. This double ego corresponds to that of a political schizophrenic. "Fear eats up souls. " The hor- rors of the war have eaten away his soul, the shell saves itself on a cold star from where his dead ego observes its own survival.
Gazing at the stars was a typical form of Weimar algodicy. Its main author,
almost forgotten today, is the astronomer Bruno H. Buergel, very popular in his
own time, Weimar celestial authority number one, a Sunday philosopher who,
with humorously melancholy observations on humanity in the universe, had
gathered a congregation of hundreds of thousands of readers about him. In the
political realm, he was an author of "class conciliation," of compromise between
labor and entrepreneurs. For decades, he practiced his astronomy as a kind of
pastoral care for the confused petit-bourgeoisie. His Celestial Science, which was
even reprinted recently, sold a fantastic number of copies. His autobiography,
too, Vom Arbeiter zum Astronomen (From worker to astronomer [1919]) had sold
2
In one part of his Du unddas Weltall. Ein Weltbild von Bruno H. Buergel (You and the universe. A world picture by Bruno H. Buergel [1930]), we find the natural-philosophical confession of the author under the heading "The Great Law. " In the soul-destroying or elevating spaciousness (according to your taste) of astronomical ways of thinking, the political-moral cramps of Weimar "micropolitics" loosen up. The inner desert, however, grows relentlessly. Does Buergel not further, in a humorous chatty tone, the subjects' self-freezing? What Buergel speaks of as the "great law" is the wave phenomenon he attempts to follow from electrical and acoustic vibrations into the transformation of human cultures.
Unrelentingly, wave crest and wave trough follow each other. Now above, now descending to the trough, striving to ascend again, again in the trough and, finally, noiselessly petering out in the sand. The leaf falls, its time has come, its definition has reached its end, it sinks to the great layer of humus from which new life will arise. . . .
a hundred thousand copies by the beginning of the thirties.
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 465
All goings-on vibrate in waves everywhere. In a thousand forces, it swings up and down. Sound waves carry over from the bell tower of the small maritime chapel; . . . light waves whiz in a flight as quick as thought from faraway stars down to the small globe earth; electrical waves surge around me, making their way from high masts, over land and sea, broadcasting human wit and human stupidity as far as the far- thest outposts of civilization.
Waves full of mysterious wonder surge around us. They bring the great law into being in the small ego. . . .
His (W. Fliess's) tireless research uncovered the marvelous law that these two different life substances, these female and male cells, have differing life spans, that the male substance is characterized by a twenty-three day period, the female substance by a twenty-eight day period. This pulsation of changing life energies can be clearly felt withinus. . . .
And out of days comes the year. That too a mighty wave in earthly happenings! . . . But day and year peter out, tiny ripples on the sea of eternity. . . .
Cultures that leave their mark on the globe for centuries are also trains of waves in humanity. Thousands of years ago, the old culture of the Chinese came and went, that of the Indians, that of the Egyp-
tians. . . . Many waves of cultures saw old Mother Earth come roar- ing over them; they came and went like summer and winter. . . . It seems . . . as if the culture of our age, the culture of Europe, is be- ginning to decline. [There follows a footnote that refers to Oswald Spengler's "significant work. "] (pp. 48-51, 53)
Buergel emphasizes that even the "eternal stars" do not represent any exception to the law of waxing and waning. Our sun, too, will be extinguished "so that on this tiny star, earth, everything will sink into night and ice, into the silence of eter- nal death" (p. 65).
In the melancholy spaciousness of astronomical observations, a deep layer of Weimar life feeling is mirrored. The subjects collaborate instinctively with that which annihilates them and makes them insignificant. They train themselves in inhuman perspectives. They flee into the cold and vastness. Their affirmations are directed toward everything that is not them-"selves," toward everything that helps this iced-over ego to forget itself in the great whole.
Who offers resistance to this training in self-forgetting? Did the Weimar Left understand how to stem the impulse of cynical cosmology and political biology? Even today, the historian stands perplexed before the perplexity of leftist slogans of that time. The Left, too, strove as well as it could to become a "solid block. " Here, too, the "line," "character," the "will of iron" dominated. Walter Benjamin was one of the few who systematically sought contact with the experiences, materials, and ways of thinking and reacting of the "other side. " Like scarcely
466 ? POLITICAL ALGODICY
any other, he mastered the art of rethinking--the rescue of experience from the monopoly of reactionary twaddle. The masterpiece of such rethinking is to be found at the end of his book Einbahnstrasse (One-way street; 1928), where he ventured into the lion's den in order to speak of things that otherwise were ap- propriated by the military Right--about war experiences and the blood wedding of human technology and the cosmos. With a small twist, he succeeds in uncover- ing the spiritlessness in bourgeois philosophy of technology: Mastery of nature is not the significance of technology but rather the clever mastery of the relation between humankind and nature.
On the planetarium If, as Hillel once had to do with the Jewish doctrine, one had to express
the doctrine of antiquity very briefly, standing on one leg, the sentence would have to read: "The earth will belong to them alone who live from the forces of the cosmos.
" Nothing distinguishes the human being of an- tiquity from the human being of modernity more than the former's sur- render to a cosmic experience the latter hardly knows. Its disappearance can already be noticed in the blossoming of astronomy at the beginning of modern times. . . . Antiquity's way of dealing with the cosmos was effected differently: in ecstasy. Ecstasy is, indeed, the only experience in which we reassure ourselves about what is nearest to us and what is farthest from us, and never the one without the other. That means, however, that the human being can communicate ecstatically with the cosmos only in a community. It is the threatening error of modernity to regard this experience as irrelevant or avoidable and to leave it to the individual as revelry on beautiful starry nights. No, it becomes due
over and over again, and then peoples and lineages elude it just as little as in the last war, when it made itself felt in the most fearful way, as an attempt at a new, unheard-of wedding with the cosmic powers. Masses of people, gases, electrical forces were set free, high-frequency currents traversed the countryside, new stars lit up in the sky, airspace and the depths of the sea hummed with propellors, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were bored into Mother Earth. This great wooing of the cosmos took place for the first time on a planetary scale, namely, in the spirit of technology. However, because the greed for profit of the ruling class thought of atoning for its will to profit with it, technology betrayed humanity and transformed the bridal setting into a sea of blood. Domination of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the meaning of all technology. But who would want to trust a disciplinary master who explained that the meaning of education is the domination of chil- dren by adults? . . . The thrill of genuine cosmic experience is not bound to that tiny fragment of nature that we are used to calling "na- ture. " In the nights of annihilation during the last war, a feeling shook the frame of humanity that resembled the fortune of epileptics. And the revolts that followed this feeling were the first attempt to bring the new
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 467
body under its control. The power of the proletariat is the measure of its becoming healthy. If its discipline does not grab this body to the marrow, no pacifist reasoning will be able to save it. What is living will only overcome the tumult of annihilation in the ecstasy of creation, (pp. 123-26)
Benjamin succeeds in doing something no mere analyst of struggle, strategist, or ideologue of hardness could do. In the course of his meditation, a piece works itself loose from the hardening cramp of the subject. Ecstasy, the dissolution of the ego, is recognized as the precondition for cosmic communication. At the same time, it provides a presentiment of the reconciliation of human beings with one another. The ambiguity of the topic does not let go of Benjamin either. He speaks of proletarian discipline that has to grab the social body "to the marrow. " The en- tire contradiction lies there openly in a nutshell. From the ecstasy of creation to strict discipline, there is no easy path. Fascism had brought ecstasy and discipline together insofar as it mobilized the tumult of power and ecstasies of destruction in its columns. It organized not only the interests of big capital but also a piece of political mysticism. Benjamin's thought-play tries to rival the Fascist threat by pointing out to the Left the necessity of tearing the ideological weapons and the psychological principle of fascism out of its hands.
Among the few philosophers of the time who did not seek the individual's sal- vation in hardenings, coolings, and solidifications, Max Scheler assumes a spe- cial place. He, too, was a great ambiguist, "double agent," and subversive citizen who took joy in confessing. The war had twisted his head, too, and moved him to horrifying exercises in thinking that affirmed war and Teutonic tumult (Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg [The genius of war and the German war], Leipzig, 1915). Later, as one of few, he expressly moved away from such "armed service with the pen," as Thomas Mann said about his own case. By 1921, in his protest against the German plague-spirit of "fulfillment of duty at any cost," he had long ceased to use martial language: "On the Betrayal of Joy. " There he provides psychological and moral arguments for an annihilating critique of the Nazi doctrine of felicity well in advance of what came later, that is, that lying philosophy of strength through joy with which the populist labor service (Arbeits- dienst) secured domination over unhappy dispositions. The Nazis knew how to mobilize the hunger for something positive that drives unhappy and disoriented individuals to become "involved" and to join ranks, to work together at a "recon- struction. " Scheler sees that all this can lead nowhere. When unhappy people "reconstruct" and get "involved," they only spread their unhappiness. " 'Only happy people are good,' Marie Ebner-Eschenbach once said rightly" (Scheler, Liebe und Erkenntnis, 2nd ed. [1970], p. 72).
As has been shown, a peculiarly ironic or cynically hard affirmation of evils as valid and ineluctable realities is part of the Weimar Zeitgeist. In the Yes, a
468 D POLITICAL ALGODICY
defensive tendency easily comes to the fore: an armoring of the ego against its suffering, a No to what would be subjective truth, No to inner wounds, to weak- ness and neediness. One begins to see this more clearly when one employs Scheler's important algodicy writing of 1916, Vom Sinn des Leidens (On the meaning of suffering) for the purpose of contrast. In this text, Scheler collects ele- ments of another ethics and politics --not hardening against suffering but exten- sion of the Yes and of recognition even to our pain. This, however, according to Scheler, is possible only in a religiously grounded life that, in its deepest spiritual layers feels itself as something indestructibly secure in Being. Scheler refers to this as "blissfulness" {Seligkeit). The secret of such an ability to suffer thus lies not in the hardening of the ego, not in political algodicies of the solid block, strength-through-joy, iron front, shoulder-to-shoulder, steel-ego, recon- struction ego type, but in the buried and forgotten Christian principle that Tolstoy revived: Do not resist evil.
An enormous relaxation of tension that in itself had to have the effect of a redemption, a relaxation through straightforward recognition, through the naive expression of pain and suffering. No longer any ancient arro- gant suffering that glories in suffering because its magnitude measures one's own power. . . . But also no pride in hiding it from oneself or others under an appearance of equanimity or under the rhetorics of suffering and dying "wisemen. " The scream of the suffering creature that was restrained for so long reverberates again freely and harshly through the universe. The deepest suffering, the feeling of being cut off from God, is expressed freely by Jesus on the cross. "Why have you forsaken me? " And no more reconstruction whatsoever: Pain is pain, evil is evil; pleasure is pleasure; and positive blissfulness, not merely "peace" or Buddha's "redemption of the heart," is the good of all goods. Also no blunting, but a soul-assuaging suffering through of the suffering in sympathy for oneself and for others! " (pp. 64-65)
Every polemical subjectivity arises in the final analysis from the struggles of denial of egos against pain, which they inevitably encounter as living beings. They carry on "reconstruction," armament, wall building, fencing in, demarca- tion, and self-hardening in order to protect themselves. However, within them, the fermentation goes on unceasingly. Those who build up and arm will one day "build down" and let loose.
Notes
1. This Gallic cynicism is related also of Napoleon after the battle of Prussian Eylau.
2. On Buergel, see Sloterdijk, Literatur und Lebenserfahrung. Autobiographien der 20er Jahre
(Munich, 1978), pp. 67ff.
Chapter 21
Asking for a Napoleon from Within. Political Cynicisms V: Training for Fact People
We Germans will manage to produce not another Goethe but a caesar.
Oswald Spengler, Pessimism?
For us, the age of warring states began with Napoleon and the violence of his measures. In his mind, the thought of a military and, at the same time, national world domination occurred for the first time. . . . This century is the century of huge stand- ing armies and universal conscription. . . . Since Napoleon, hundreds of thousands, and finally millions stand continually ready to march, enormous fleets lie at anchor that are renewed every ten years. It is a war without war, a war of outdoing the other with armaments and strike capability, a war of numbers, of tempo, of technology. . . . The longer the discharge is
postponed, the more monstrous the means become, the more unbearable the tension becomes.
. . . The great centers of power in the world capitals will dispose of smaller states, their territory, their economy and people according to whim; all that is still only province, ob-
ject, means to an end; its fate is without importance in the great course of things. In a matter of years, we have learned to scarcely notice events that before the war would have
transfixed the world. Who today still thinks seriously of the millions who perish in Russia?
Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich [1922], 1979, pp. 1097-98)
The Napoleonism of the Weimar Republic betrays the convolutions and crises with which petit-bourgeois and cultivated bourgeois people at that time entered into the century of strategy. Today that is called, often with a completely wrong
469
470 D ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
emphasis, the "politicization of the intelligentsia" or the "politicization of the masses. " In reality, the First World War had been the mass politicizer. For years on end, it had transformed the consciousnesses of the entire continent into those of observers of the front. Being schooled through war reports, every individual developed the perspective of a general; the feeling grew that those who were not generals could only be tiny cogs in the war machine. For four long years, reports on the war bombarded public consciousness. Here for the first time, that over- whelming socialization of attention characteristic of modernity took place --and what awoke in individuals and groups as "political consciousness" was the optics of the observer of catastrophes, of the war voyeur.
The so-called politicization proceeds from a more intensive militarization and strategic mobilization of consciousnesses, and that not only on the surface. It penetrates deep into body postures and structures of perception. In 1912, Walther Rathenau had referred to an "education for becoming a politician" when the con- ceptual models of tactics, of the estimation of total situations, etc. , trickled down
1
as far as the shopkeeper. From then on, it took only a short time for
politicization --as strategic cothinking in large-scale catastrophes --to become universal consciousness. More than ever, it became a mass reality in the chaos of the Weimar system of Weltanschauung and political parties. At the same time, however, the collective consciousness displayed a tendency to resist this kind of politicization. Nausea about politics was one of the strongest psychopolitical cur- rents of those years. The populist side in particular profited from it because it recommended itself less as a "party" than as a "movement. "
As the political ego strives for hardness and agility, it is trained in the way of seeing of generals and diplomats: reconnoiter the terrain; coldly consider the given circumstances; survey the numbers; tack as long as necessary; strike as
2
soon as the time is right.
tion emphatically as "thinking in terms of relationships" and claimed that that was the "dialectical" knowledge of the whole. (See my critique in chapter 11. The rela- tionships are those Spengler startingly designated as "war without war. " In this cold romanticism of grand strategic overviews, the political camps of the Left and the Right are quite close to each other. These realpolitik ways of thinking now penetrate down to the person on the street. This "sovereign" thinking, borrowed stateman's optics and general's disposition work on posturingly, even in the minds of the impotent. The principal psychopolitical model of the coming decades is the 'cothinking' cog in the machinery. Those who are infected with the cold intoxica- tion of "thinking in terms of relationships" will more easily let themselves be made into the political tools of the future.
The Napoleon cult in the Weimar Republic belongs in this framework. It marks a phase of inner political colonization. With it, political masochism ascends to new heights. The small ego learns how to deliriously think in parallel with the trains of thought of a great strategic brain, which disposes of the former.
Communist rhetoric referred to these forms of calcula-
ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V D 471
What Ernst Jiinger had previously demonstrated on a high essayistic level (namely, the illusion-trick of being simultaneously general and victim, caterpillar and leaf) is translated onto a mediocre level by innumerable biographies, plays, and articles on Napoleon (and other "men of action" such as Cecil Rhodes and Warren Hastings). Here, educated and "semieducated" everyday sadomasochism finds expression. The leaf dreams of being the master ego of the caterpillar. The communality between the devouring and the devoured arises through the leaf feel- ing into the suffering soul of the caterpillar. Napoleon is portrayed as a demoni- cally driven person, as a sufferer who has to make others suffer. Even Goethe saw
3
Napoleon as a Prometheus figure. The Weimar biographies further reinforce
this. Napoleon races along his gleaming course like a "meteor" (Kircheissen). His glowing illuminates the more somber plight of mediocre individuals who dream themselves into the "great man. "
For Spengler--who mentions Napoleon I about forty times in the two volumes of Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The decline of the West) --the Corsican is the model figure of European fate. His emergence marks a precise moment in the biographical curve of European culture.
Now we have entered the age of enormous struggles, where we find ourselves today. It is the transition from Napoleonism to caesarism, a general stage of development encompassing at least two centuries that can be demonstrated in all cultures, (p. 1081)
In Spengler's style we find the apex of political botany that, even more radi- cally than the writings of Ernst Jiinger, brings together the perspective of the bot- anist with that of the politician, of the historian with that of the strategist in a sadomasochistic unity.
Cultures, living beings of the highest order, grow up in a noble pur- poselessness like flowers in a field. . . .
. . . But what is politics? -The art of the possible; that is an old word and with it, almost everything is said. . . . The great statesman is the gardener of the people. (Ibid. , pp. 29, 1116)
The politician of Napoleon's ilk is the "fact person" par excellence.
The fact person never comes into danger of propagating a program- matic or emotional politics. He does not believe in great words. He continually has the question of Pilate on his lips --truths --the born statesman stands beyond true and false. (Ibid. , p. 1112)
In similar tones, interspersed with liberal, individualist, psychologizing
shades, Emil Ludwig, the most famous Napoleon biographer of the Weimar
years, also painted his picture of the hero. Napoleon (1925) was one of the most
4
widely read books of the decade. It narrates-in the present tense-the epic of
472 ? ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
the modern man of action who is inspired by a "heroic cynicism" (p. 414). Through an inner drive, he burns up his life energy in a fireworks of campaigns and political actions --brilliant, sober, imaginative, positivistic, power-hungry, swayable, full of courage and calculation, and imbued with the "productive lack of conviction" of the born player and shaper who is called on to live out his "amoral act of force. "
The fortune of this man's life exhausted itself in works; he enjoyed nothing other than the completed deed. (p. 645)
Only the "new matter-of-factness" of the postwar era allowed historians and biographers to see the Napoleonic cynicisms --his sober attitude toward success whose ambitionless ambition now, in retrospect, seems to fill itself with the Wei- mar life feeling. In Napoleon one sees reflected how oneself lives, in a self- assertion that, at the same time, lets itself be driven from pillar to post by opportu- nities and circumstances --half-directing subject, half-servile instrument of historical "fate. " It is precisely this alertness in letting oneself be carried along on the stream of the possible, which is well portrayed by Ludwig, that brings the Napoleonic ego into a simultaneity with the moods, self-reflections, dreams, and plans of the Weimar life feeling: wave riding on the harsh Zeitgeist, strategic pres- ence, a cynical affirmation of all the "necessary horrors" of politics and business. Ludwig writes about the still very young Lieutenant Bonaparte in the garrison of Valence on the Rhone.
Before his decisive matter-of-factness, before this gaze of the realist, the most popular author of those years, Rousseau, wilts; the excerpts on Rousseau's origins of the human species are continually interrupted by the resolutely repeated words: I don't believe a word of it. . . . (pp. 19-20)
The biographer succeeds in drawing a fascinating parallel in his description of the famous encounter between Napoleon and Goethe, where the emperor said in reference to the poet:
"Voila un homme! "
. . . It is as if two demons recognized each other in the
vapors. . . . It is a moment in the course of millennia that is compara- ble only to the legend of the encounter between Diogenes and Alex-
5
It is particularly in misfortune, however, that the ironic gambler's nature of Napoleonic realism reveals itself--that capacity of hard egos to withstand the fail- ure of their plans and hopes. In the end, only an agile energy and a will to survive without illusions remain. Ludwig puts the following words into Napoleon's
ander, (p. 325)
ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V D 473
mouth during the retreat from Moscow through Poland, after his Russian cam- paign had sacrificed half a million lives:
That is a grand political drama! He who risks nothing, gains nothing. From the sublime to the ridiculous is only a small step .
Notes
1. H. Goetz, Erwin Piscator in Selbstzeugnissen undBilddokumenten (Hamburg, 1974), pp. 18f. 2. [Grotaz is an acronym from "grosster Techniker aller Zeiten" and a play on Goring's
megalomaniac, insulting nickname "Grofaz". --Trans. ]
3. [Achternbusch is a German film director. --Trans. ]
Chapter 20
Political Algodicy:
Cynical Cosmologies and the Logic of Pain
What is all this racket from constructions, ships, mines, battles and books seen from outer space: in comparison with the earth's crust, nothing!
Oswald Spengler, Urfragen (Munich, 1965)
Even if the hard Nazi sport subjects proclaimed their sympathies with prosthetic life under the mask of vitalism and in this way sought to counter pain through denial, in the end they, too, could not evade the question of the meaning of pain. Like nothing else, pain, which can announce death, challenges metaphysical meaning. The latter wants to know what the immeasurable suffering of this cen- tury means, who is responsible for it, and to what whole it could contribute.
Everyday understanding, made safe through routine from thoughts that are too deep, does not let itself get caught in such discussions. It thus remains protected from explicit cynicism. Mostly it does not say anything more than "that's life. " But those who take on the question and risk having an "opinion" about suffering are drawn into a region where one has to very sure of one's metaphysical views, or else become cynical.
Algodicy means a metaphyscial interpretation of pain that gives it meaning. In modernity it takes the place of theodicy, as its converse. In the latter, it was asked, How are evil, pain, suffering, and injustice to be reconciled with the exis- tence of God? Now the question is, If there is no God and no higher meaning, how can we still bear the pain? The function of politics as substitute theology im- mediately becomes clear. The nationalists as a rule did not hesitate for a moment to claim that the immeasurable suffering of the war had been meaningful as sac- rifice for the Fatherland. The momentum of such claims was hindered solely by the fact that the lost war and the victors' dictatorship in peacetime, as well as the disappointed revolution, put this nationalist offer of meaning into question. One might consider whether the much-quoted legend of the dagger thrust was a
460
a biological "grand
view" for himself.
Heroes fall
and sons leave their mothers. They are all
simple laws.
The breathing and batting of an eyelid in a colossal happening. (Wailing)
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 461
desperate rescue attempt for the political algodicy of the Right. For to realize that Germany would lose the war could be expected from even the densest nationalist. But to admit that "everything had been for nothing" and that the untold torments had no political meaning at all --for many contemporaries that was unbearable. The legend of the dagger thrust was no naive myth but a willed self-delusion of the Right. Their effort is also witnessed by Hitler's "bitter fortune. "
Those who ask for the meaning of the suffering in the First World War were drawn by the question into a region where politics, natural philosophy, and medi- cal cynicism met. Scarcely any speaker in those years refrained from medical metaphors: sickness, cancerous growths, operations, and healing through crisis. In Mein Kampf, Hitler spoke of the violent catastrophe that was to be preferred to a creeping political tuberculosis. The medical metaphors of the Right were in- tended to eliminate the sickness as well as the enemy within with "steel and radia- tion. " The Left at least registered the double danger of the sickness.
If, however, the revolutionary proletariat wants to be the doctor who has to take on the operation that is recognized as being unavoidable, then it is not allowed to continually soil its hands in the open festering sores of the sickness. For then, during the operation, the surgeon him- self would carry the poisonous substances into the body of the patient again, so vitiating his task of ridding the patient of them. (Erich Miih- sam, Wahrhaftigkeit, in Fanal 2 [1928])
The well-meaning cool gaze of the natural philosopher is superior to that of the doctor, for the former orders human distress into a cosmic functional relation. Before the gaze of the biologist and all the more before that of the astronomer, the miniscule convulsions of humanity melt into insignificance--as if they were only ornaments in the vast game of waxing and waning. Rudolf G. Binding, in his poems Stolz und Trauer (Pride and sadness, 1922), tried to appropriate such
Here, too, is the quintessence of heroic hardening, assent, "pride," a solid- block ego that becomes a heroic, sensible machine-for-itself. Nazi schoolbooks treasured it.
The political algodicies proceed according to an elementary schema: with- drawal from feelings of empathy into a pure, observational coldness. In this exer-
462 ? POLITICAL ALGODICY
? Ernst Jiinger, Steel eroticist, 1930. "The longer the war lasted, the more sharply did it shape sexual love into its form. . . . The spirit of the battle of material . . . produced men the world had never seen before . . . steel natures, put into action in battle in its most horrible form. . . . There, a ready femininity paraded in long rows, the lotus blossoms of asphalt, Brussels. . . . There, only steel-like character could stand without being worn down in the turmoil. These bodies that turned to love were pure function. " Der Kampfals inneres Erlebnis (Struggle as inner experience), 1933, pp. 33-34.
rise, Ernst Jiinger became a complete virtuoso. He is one of the tightrope walkers between fascism and a stoic humanism who elude simple labeling. Nevertheless, Jiinger is unmistakeably one of the master thinkers of modern cynicism, in whom cold posturing and sensitive perception are not mutually exclusive. Ideologically, he practices an aestheticizing political biology, a subtly functionalist termite- philosophy. He, too, can be reckoned among the enthusiasts of the hard subject who can stand the storm of steel. His coldness is the price of staying awake in the middle of the horror. It qualifies him as a precise witness of what has hap- pened in our century by way of modernizing horror. To bury Jiinger under an all too crude suspicion of fascism would thus be an unproductive attitude toward his work. If there exists an author in our century who fits Benjamin's formula of a "secret agent," Jiinger must be it. Like scarcely any other, he took up a listening
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 463
post in the middle of Fascist structures of thinking and feeling. His contemplative hardness combines with a pronounced readiness to speak out as witness of his own experiences. If, on the one hand, Jiinger confesses to pre-Fascist tendencies, then, with his "hunger for experience," he reveals a quality that no other Fascist possessed; in general, this quality represents a spirit of mature openness to the world and liberality with which today a New Left would identify itself.
In the prose sketches of Das Abenteuerliche Herz (The Adventurous Heart), there is a passage that clarifies lunger's biological algodicy:
From the beach plays, 2 Zinnowitz
In the dense brush behind the dunes, in the middle of the swath of reed, I captured a happy picture on my usual walk: the large leaf of a trem- bling poplar into which a circular hole had been broken. From the edge of the hole, a dark green fringe seemed to hang down that, on closer observation, revealed itself to be a row of tiny caterpillars eagerly suck- ing the leaf juice with their mandibles. A short time ago, a deposit of butterfly's eggs must have hatched there; the young brood had expanded like a bushfire on its nourishing soil.
The peculiarity of this sight consisted in the painlessness of the de- struction it mirrored. Thus, the fringe gave the impression of hanging threads of the leaf itself, which seemed to have lost none of its substance. Here it was so open to view how the double bookkeeping of life balances out. I had to think of the solace Conde gave to Mazarin, who was weep- ing over the six thousand dead at the battle of Freiburg: "Bah, in a single
1
night in Paris more people give their lives than this action cost. "
This attitude of the battle leader, which sees the change behind the
burning, has long struck me as the sign of a higher healthiness about life that does not shrink back from the bloody incision. Thus, I ex- perience pleasure when I think of the phrase consumption forte, strong consumption, which so angered Chateaubriand and which Napoleon oc- casionally used to murmur in those moments of the battle when the general was inactive, in which all reserves are on the march, while the front, under attack from mounted squadrons and the fire of artillery that has been moved up, melts as if under a tempest of steel and fire. They are words one does not want to be without, snippets of inner mono- logues at the smelting ovens that glow and vibrate while, in smoldering blood, the spirit distills into the essence of a new century.
This language is founded on a trust in life that knows no empty spaces. The sight of its fullness causes us to forget the secret sign of pain that separates the two sides of the equation--just as here, the gnawing labor of the mandibles separates caterpillar and leaf. (Aben- teuerliches Herz, second version, pp. 61-62)
Junger's general's perspective also resembles that of a biologist. For this rea- son, something of the recognition of the great pulsing of life between procreation
464 ? POLITICAL ALGODICY
and death creeps into his political sentiments. However, he ignores the threshold that separates natural death from a political death by violence. He thus transfers biological observations to the great warring "organisms" that strike out at one an- other in struggles of hegemony and survival. With full consciousness, Jiinger blurs the boundaries between zoology and sociology. The war is, in fact, a phenomenon of the "spiritual animal realm" [Hegel;-Trans. ]. Jiinger thus pro- vokes us as a political entomologist. His psychological sleight of hand consists in simultaneously assuming the standpoint of the insect and the scientist. He thinks himself not only into the devouring caterpillar but also into the devoured leaf. He goes with his sense organs to the front, which melts into fire. With the cold organs of thinking, however, he stands at the same time on the general's hill from which vantage point the battle offers itself as an aesthetic drama. This double ego corresponds to that of a political schizophrenic. "Fear eats up souls. " The hor- rors of the war have eaten away his soul, the shell saves itself on a cold star from where his dead ego observes its own survival.
Gazing at the stars was a typical form of Weimar algodicy. Its main author,
almost forgotten today, is the astronomer Bruno H. Buergel, very popular in his
own time, Weimar celestial authority number one, a Sunday philosopher who,
with humorously melancholy observations on humanity in the universe, had
gathered a congregation of hundreds of thousands of readers about him. In the
political realm, he was an author of "class conciliation," of compromise between
labor and entrepreneurs. For decades, he practiced his astronomy as a kind of
pastoral care for the confused petit-bourgeoisie. His Celestial Science, which was
even reprinted recently, sold a fantastic number of copies. His autobiography,
too, Vom Arbeiter zum Astronomen (From worker to astronomer [1919]) had sold
2
In one part of his Du unddas Weltall. Ein Weltbild von Bruno H. Buergel (You and the universe. A world picture by Bruno H. Buergel [1930]), we find the natural-philosophical confession of the author under the heading "The Great Law. " In the soul-destroying or elevating spaciousness (according to your taste) of astronomical ways of thinking, the political-moral cramps of Weimar "micropolitics" loosen up. The inner desert, however, grows relentlessly. Does Buergel not further, in a humorous chatty tone, the subjects' self-freezing? What Buergel speaks of as the "great law" is the wave phenomenon he attempts to follow from electrical and acoustic vibrations into the transformation of human cultures.
Unrelentingly, wave crest and wave trough follow each other. Now above, now descending to the trough, striving to ascend again, again in the trough and, finally, noiselessly petering out in the sand. The leaf falls, its time has come, its definition has reached its end, it sinks to the great layer of humus from which new life will arise. . . .
a hundred thousand copies by the beginning of the thirties.
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 465
All goings-on vibrate in waves everywhere. In a thousand forces, it swings up and down. Sound waves carry over from the bell tower of the small maritime chapel; . . . light waves whiz in a flight as quick as thought from faraway stars down to the small globe earth; electrical waves surge around me, making their way from high masts, over land and sea, broadcasting human wit and human stupidity as far as the far- thest outposts of civilization.
Waves full of mysterious wonder surge around us. They bring the great law into being in the small ego. . . .
His (W. Fliess's) tireless research uncovered the marvelous law that these two different life substances, these female and male cells, have differing life spans, that the male substance is characterized by a twenty-three day period, the female substance by a twenty-eight day period. This pulsation of changing life energies can be clearly felt withinus. . . .
And out of days comes the year. That too a mighty wave in earthly happenings! . . . But day and year peter out, tiny ripples on the sea of eternity. . . .
Cultures that leave their mark on the globe for centuries are also trains of waves in humanity. Thousands of years ago, the old culture of the Chinese came and went, that of the Indians, that of the Egyp-
tians. . . . Many waves of cultures saw old Mother Earth come roar- ing over them; they came and went like summer and winter. . . . It seems . . . as if the culture of our age, the culture of Europe, is be- ginning to decline. [There follows a footnote that refers to Oswald Spengler's "significant work. "] (pp. 48-51, 53)
Buergel emphasizes that even the "eternal stars" do not represent any exception to the law of waxing and waning. Our sun, too, will be extinguished "so that on this tiny star, earth, everything will sink into night and ice, into the silence of eter- nal death" (p. 65).
In the melancholy spaciousness of astronomical observations, a deep layer of Weimar life feeling is mirrored. The subjects collaborate instinctively with that which annihilates them and makes them insignificant. They train themselves in inhuman perspectives. They flee into the cold and vastness. Their affirmations are directed toward everything that is not them-"selves," toward everything that helps this iced-over ego to forget itself in the great whole.
Who offers resistance to this training in self-forgetting? Did the Weimar Left understand how to stem the impulse of cynical cosmology and political biology? Even today, the historian stands perplexed before the perplexity of leftist slogans of that time. The Left, too, strove as well as it could to become a "solid block. " Here, too, the "line," "character," the "will of iron" dominated. Walter Benjamin was one of the few who systematically sought contact with the experiences, materials, and ways of thinking and reacting of the "other side. " Like scarcely
466 ? POLITICAL ALGODICY
any other, he mastered the art of rethinking--the rescue of experience from the monopoly of reactionary twaddle. The masterpiece of such rethinking is to be found at the end of his book Einbahnstrasse (One-way street; 1928), where he ventured into the lion's den in order to speak of things that otherwise were ap- propriated by the military Right--about war experiences and the blood wedding of human technology and the cosmos. With a small twist, he succeeds in uncover- ing the spiritlessness in bourgeois philosophy of technology: Mastery of nature is not the significance of technology but rather the clever mastery of the relation between humankind and nature.
On the planetarium If, as Hillel once had to do with the Jewish doctrine, one had to express
the doctrine of antiquity very briefly, standing on one leg, the sentence would have to read: "The earth will belong to them alone who live from the forces of the cosmos.
" Nothing distinguishes the human being of an- tiquity from the human being of modernity more than the former's sur- render to a cosmic experience the latter hardly knows. Its disappearance can already be noticed in the blossoming of astronomy at the beginning of modern times. . . . Antiquity's way of dealing with the cosmos was effected differently: in ecstasy. Ecstasy is, indeed, the only experience in which we reassure ourselves about what is nearest to us and what is farthest from us, and never the one without the other. That means, however, that the human being can communicate ecstatically with the cosmos only in a community. It is the threatening error of modernity to regard this experience as irrelevant or avoidable and to leave it to the individual as revelry on beautiful starry nights. No, it becomes due
over and over again, and then peoples and lineages elude it just as little as in the last war, when it made itself felt in the most fearful way, as an attempt at a new, unheard-of wedding with the cosmic powers. Masses of people, gases, electrical forces were set free, high-frequency currents traversed the countryside, new stars lit up in the sky, airspace and the depths of the sea hummed with propellors, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were bored into Mother Earth. This great wooing of the cosmos took place for the first time on a planetary scale, namely, in the spirit of technology. However, because the greed for profit of the ruling class thought of atoning for its will to profit with it, technology betrayed humanity and transformed the bridal setting into a sea of blood. Domination of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the meaning of all technology. But who would want to trust a disciplinary master who explained that the meaning of education is the domination of chil- dren by adults? . . . The thrill of genuine cosmic experience is not bound to that tiny fragment of nature that we are used to calling "na- ture. " In the nights of annihilation during the last war, a feeling shook the frame of humanity that resembled the fortune of epileptics. And the revolts that followed this feeling were the first attempt to bring the new
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 467
body under its control. The power of the proletariat is the measure of its becoming healthy. If its discipline does not grab this body to the marrow, no pacifist reasoning will be able to save it. What is living will only overcome the tumult of annihilation in the ecstasy of creation, (pp. 123-26)
Benjamin succeeds in doing something no mere analyst of struggle, strategist, or ideologue of hardness could do. In the course of his meditation, a piece works itself loose from the hardening cramp of the subject. Ecstasy, the dissolution of the ego, is recognized as the precondition for cosmic communication. At the same time, it provides a presentiment of the reconciliation of human beings with one another. The ambiguity of the topic does not let go of Benjamin either. He speaks of proletarian discipline that has to grab the social body "to the marrow. " The en- tire contradiction lies there openly in a nutshell. From the ecstasy of creation to strict discipline, there is no easy path. Fascism had brought ecstasy and discipline together insofar as it mobilized the tumult of power and ecstasies of destruction in its columns. It organized not only the interests of big capital but also a piece of political mysticism. Benjamin's thought-play tries to rival the Fascist threat by pointing out to the Left the necessity of tearing the ideological weapons and the psychological principle of fascism out of its hands.
Among the few philosophers of the time who did not seek the individual's sal- vation in hardenings, coolings, and solidifications, Max Scheler assumes a spe- cial place. He, too, was a great ambiguist, "double agent," and subversive citizen who took joy in confessing. The war had twisted his head, too, and moved him to horrifying exercises in thinking that affirmed war and Teutonic tumult (Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg [The genius of war and the German war], Leipzig, 1915). Later, as one of few, he expressly moved away from such "armed service with the pen," as Thomas Mann said about his own case. By 1921, in his protest against the German plague-spirit of "fulfillment of duty at any cost," he had long ceased to use martial language: "On the Betrayal of Joy. " There he provides psychological and moral arguments for an annihilating critique of the Nazi doctrine of felicity well in advance of what came later, that is, that lying philosophy of strength through joy with which the populist labor service (Arbeits- dienst) secured domination over unhappy dispositions. The Nazis knew how to mobilize the hunger for something positive that drives unhappy and disoriented individuals to become "involved" and to join ranks, to work together at a "recon- struction. " Scheler sees that all this can lead nowhere. When unhappy people "reconstruct" and get "involved," they only spread their unhappiness. " 'Only happy people are good,' Marie Ebner-Eschenbach once said rightly" (Scheler, Liebe und Erkenntnis, 2nd ed. [1970], p. 72).
As has been shown, a peculiarly ironic or cynically hard affirmation of evils as valid and ineluctable realities is part of the Weimar Zeitgeist. In the Yes, a
468 D POLITICAL ALGODICY
defensive tendency easily comes to the fore: an armoring of the ego against its suffering, a No to what would be subjective truth, No to inner wounds, to weak- ness and neediness. One begins to see this more clearly when one employs Scheler's important algodicy writing of 1916, Vom Sinn des Leidens (On the meaning of suffering) for the purpose of contrast. In this text, Scheler collects ele- ments of another ethics and politics --not hardening against suffering but exten- sion of the Yes and of recognition even to our pain. This, however, according to Scheler, is possible only in a religiously grounded life that, in its deepest spiritual layers feels itself as something indestructibly secure in Being. Scheler refers to this as "blissfulness" {Seligkeit). The secret of such an ability to suffer thus lies not in the hardening of the ego, not in political algodicies of the solid block, strength-through-joy, iron front, shoulder-to-shoulder, steel-ego, recon- struction ego type, but in the buried and forgotten Christian principle that Tolstoy revived: Do not resist evil.
An enormous relaxation of tension that in itself had to have the effect of a redemption, a relaxation through straightforward recognition, through the naive expression of pain and suffering. No longer any ancient arro- gant suffering that glories in suffering because its magnitude measures one's own power. . . . But also no pride in hiding it from oneself or others under an appearance of equanimity or under the rhetorics of suffering and dying "wisemen. " The scream of the suffering creature that was restrained for so long reverberates again freely and harshly through the universe. The deepest suffering, the feeling of being cut off from God, is expressed freely by Jesus on the cross. "Why have you forsaken me? " And no more reconstruction whatsoever: Pain is pain, evil is evil; pleasure is pleasure; and positive blissfulness, not merely "peace" or Buddha's "redemption of the heart," is the good of all goods. Also no blunting, but a soul-assuaging suffering through of the suffering in sympathy for oneself and for others! " (pp. 64-65)
Every polemical subjectivity arises in the final analysis from the struggles of denial of egos against pain, which they inevitably encounter as living beings. They carry on "reconstruction," armament, wall building, fencing in, demarca- tion, and self-hardening in order to protect themselves. However, within them, the fermentation goes on unceasingly. Those who build up and arm will one day "build down" and let loose.
Notes
1. This Gallic cynicism is related also of Napoleon after the battle of Prussian Eylau.
2. On Buergel, see Sloterdijk, Literatur und Lebenserfahrung. Autobiographien der 20er Jahre
(Munich, 1978), pp. 67ff.
Chapter 21
Asking for a Napoleon from Within. Political Cynicisms V: Training for Fact People
We Germans will manage to produce not another Goethe but a caesar.
Oswald Spengler, Pessimism?
For us, the age of warring states began with Napoleon and the violence of his measures. In his mind, the thought of a military and, at the same time, national world domination occurred for the first time. . . . This century is the century of huge stand- ing armies and universal conscription. . . . Since Napoleon, hundreds of thousands, and finally millions stand continually ready to march, enormous fleets lie at anchor that are renewed every ten years. It is a war without war, a war of outdoing the other with armaments and strike capability, a war of numbers, of tempo, of technology. . . . The longer the discharge is
postponed, the more monstrous the means become, the more unbearable the tension becomes.
. . . The great centers of power in the world capitals will dispose of smaller states, their territory, their economy and people according to whim; all that is still only province, ob-
ject, means to an end; its fate is without importance in the great course of things. In a matter of years, we have learned to scarcely notice events that before the war would have
transfixed the world. Who today still thinks seriously of the millions who perish in Russia?
Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich [1922], 1979, pp. 1097-98)
The Napoleonism of the Weimar Republic betrays the convolutions and crises with which petit-bourgeois and cultivated bourgeois people at that time entered into the century of strategy. Today that is called, often with a completely wrong
469
470 D ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
emphasis, the "politicization of the intelligentsia" or the "politicization of the masses. " In reality, the First World War had been the mass politicizer. For years on end, it had transformed the consciousnesses of the entire continent into those of observers of the front. Being schooled through war reports, every individual developed the perspective of a general; the feeling grew that those who were not generals could only be tiny cogs in the war machine. For four long years, reports on the war bombarded public consciousness. Here for the first time, that over- whelming socialization of attention characteristic of modernity took place --and what awoke in individuals and groups as "political consciousness" was the optics of the observer of catastrophes, of the war voyeur.
The so-called politicization proceeds from a more intensive militarization and strategic mobilization of consciousnesses, and that not only on the surface. It penetrates deep into body postures and structures of perception. In 1912, Walther Rathenau had referred to an "education for becoming a politician" when the con- ceptual models of tactics, of the estimation of total situations, etc. , trickled down
1
as far as the shopkeeper. From then on, it took only a short time for
politicization --as strategic cothinking in large-scale catastrophes --to become universal consciousness. More than ever, it became a mass reality in the chaos of the Weimar system of Weltanschauung and political parties. At the same time, however, the collective consciousness displayed a tendency to resist this kind of politicization. Nausea about politics was one of the strongest psychopolitical cur- rents of those years. The populist side in particular profited from it because it recommended itself less as a "party" than as a "movement. "
As the political ego strives for hardness and agility, it is trained in the way of seeing of generals and diplomats: reconnoiter the terrain; coldly consider the given circumstances; survey the numbers; tack as long as necessary; strike as
2
soon as the time is right.
tion emphatically as "thinking in terms of relationships" and claimed that that was the "dialectical" knowledge of the whole. (See my critique in chapter 11. The rela- tionships are those Spengler startingly designated as "war without war. " In this cold romanticism of grand strategic overviews, the political camps of the Left and the Right are quite close to each other. These realpolitik ways of thinking now penetrate down to the person on the street. This "sovereign" thinking, borrowed stateman's optics and general's disposition work on posturingly, even in the minds of the impotent. The principal psychopolitical model of the coming decades is the 'cothinking' cog in the machinery. Those who are infected with the cold intoxica- tion of "thinking in terms of relationships" will more easily let themselves be made into the political tools of the future.
The Napoleon cult in the Weimar Republic belongs in this framework. It marks a phase of inner political colonization. With it, political masochism ascends to new heights. The small ego learns how to deliriously think in parallel with the trains of thought of a great strategic brain, which disposes of the former.
Communist rhetoric referred to these forms of calcula-
ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V D 471
What Ernst Jiinger had previously demonstrated on a high essayistic level (namely, the illusion-trick of being simultaneously general and victim, caterpillar and leaf) is translated onto a mediocre level by innumerable biographies, plays, and articles on Napoleon (and other "men of action" such as Cecil Rhodes and Warren Hastings). Here, educated and "semieducated" everyday sadomasochism finds expression. The leaf dreams of being the master ego of the caterpillar. The communality between the devouring and the devoured arises through the leaf feel- ing into the suffering soul of the caterpillar. Napoleon is portrayed as a demoni- cally driven person, as a sufferer who has to make others suffer. Even Goethe saw
3
Napoleon as a Prometheus figure. The Weimar biographies further reinforce
this. Napoleon races along his gleaming course like a "meteor" (Kircheissen). His glowing illuminates the more somber plight of mediocre individuals who dream themselves into the "great man. "
For Spengler--who mentions Napoleon I about forty times in the two volumes of Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The decline of the West) --the Corsican is the model figure of European fate. His emergence marks a precise moment in the biographical curve of European culture.
Now we have entered the age of enormous struggles, where we find ourselves today. It is the transition from Napoleonism to caesarism, a general stage of development encompassing at least two centuries that can be demonstrated in all cultures, (p. 1081)
In Spengler's style we find the apex of political botany that, even more radi- cally than the writings of Ernst Jiinger, brings together the perspective of the bot- anist with that of the politician, of the historian with that of the strategist in a sadomasochistic unity.
Cultures, living beings of the highest order, grow up in a noble pur- poselessness like flowers in a field. . . .
. . . But what is politics? -The art of the possible; that is an old word and with it, almost everything is said. . . . The great statesman is the gardener of the people. (Ibid. , pp. 29, 1116)
The politician of Napoleon's ilk is the "fact person" par excellence.
The fact person never comes into danger of propagating a program- matic or emotional politics. He does not believe in great words. He continually has the question of Pilate on his lips --truths --the born statesman stands beyond true and false. (Ibid. , p. 1112)
In similar tones, interspersed with liberal, individualist, psychologizing
shades, Emil Ludwig, the most famous Napoleon biographer of the Weimar
years, also painted his picture of the hero. Napoleon (1925) was one of the most
4
widely read books of the decade. It narrates-in the present tense-the epic of
472 ? ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
the modern man of action who is inspired by a "heroic cynicism" (p. 414). Through an inner drive, he burns up his life energy in a fireworks of campaigns and political actions --brilliant, sober, imaginative, positivistic, power-hungry, swayable, full of courage and calculation, and imbued with the "productive lack of conviction" of the born player and shaper who is called on to live out his "amoral act of force. "
The fortune of this man's life exhausted itself in works; he enjoyed nothing other than the completed deed. (p. 645)
Only the "new matter-of-factness" of the postwar era allowed historians and biographers to see the Napoleonic cynicisms --his sober attitude toward success whose ambitionless ambition now, in retrospect, seems to fill itself with the Wei- mar life feeling. In Napoleon one sees reflected how oneself lives, in a self- assertion that, at the same time, lets itself be driven from pillar to post by opportu- nities and circumstances --half-directing subject, half-servile instrument of historical "fate. " It is precisely this alertness in letting oneself be carried along on the stream of the possible, which is well portrayed by Ludwig, that brings the Napoleonic ego into a simultaneity with the moods, self-reflections, dreams, and plans of the Weimar life feeling: wave riding on the harsh Zeitgeist, strategic pres- ence, a cynical affirmation of all the "necessary horrors" of politics and business. Ludwig writes about the still very young Lieutenant Bonaparte in the garrison of Valence on the Rhone.
Before his decisive matter-of-factness, before this gaze of the realist, the most popular author of those years, Rousseau, wilts; the excerpts on Rousseau's origins of the human species are continually interrupted by the resolutely repeated words: I don't believe a word of it. . . . (pp. 19-20)
The biographer succeeds in drawing a fascinating parallel in his description of the famous encounter between Napoleon and Goethe, where the emperor said in reference to the poet:
"Voila un homme! "
. . . It is as if two demons recognized each other in the
vapors. . . . It is a moment in the course of millennia that is compara- ble only to the legend of the encounter between Diogenes and Alex-
5
It is particularly in misfortune, however, that the ironic gambler's nature of Napoleonic realism reveals itself--that capacity of hard egos to withstand the fail- ure of their plans and hopes. In the end, only an agile energy and a will to survive without illusions remain. Ludwig puts the following words into Napoleon's
ander, (p. 325)
ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V D 473
mouth during the retreat from Moscow through Poland, after his Russian cam- paign had sacrificed half a million lives:
That is a grand political drama! He who risks nothing, gains nothing. From the sublime to the ridiculous is only a small step .
