National military dictatorship erected against all merely
material
powers by a power of spirit.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason
.
.
.
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 . . . ! Who could have reckoned with the burning of Moscow . . . ! " Napoleon becomes an adventurer. To the Poles he pretended to have an army that had long since perished. . . . In the meantime, he lets historical com- parisons of global expansiveness light up, takes what is happening at the moment as past history, relies on premonitions and repeats four times the cynically grandiose sentence about the sublime and the ridicu- lous, which anticipates any critique. The world and what he does with it begin to become a drama for the great realist, and so, Napoleon slowly ascends the stage of elevated irony as his success descends, (pp. 416-17)
With such psychological sketches, Emil Ludwig shows himself to be far su- perior to Spengler's brutal realism. At the highest point of realism it is revealed how a hard sense for the facts slides over into the fictional, the histrionic, bluff and irony. With this, Ludwig touches on the blind spot in the consciousness of the philosopher of history, Spengler, who was so proud of his hard posture and his Prussian and Roman ethics with which he wanted to cover up just how much vulnerability, softness, and unhappiness, just how many suppressed tears and how much resentment there had been in his life.
He was right in seeing himself as the "congenial" successor of Nietzsche. Spen- gler was driven into the arms of the Right because after his success, he repressed within himself by force the self-experience of doubt and weakness, which for him
6
had been extraordinarily strong before his big breakthrough in 1918. The
Literat, Ludwig, saw a series of traits in the fact person, Napoleon, that escaped Spengler's notice--precisely the con man's element, the factors of seduction and drama, of diplomacy and cynical flight into a false candidness. Spengler should have had every reason to take more notice of such phenomena. His self- observation failed from that moment on when he began to stage the drama of the great theoretician and friend of the powerful. This lie in dealing with himself also tainted his theory of caesarism. With a little more honestly regarding his own psy- chic structure, Spengler could have easily known that the Germans would bring forth not another caesar but a sick, lachrymose actor who, to the applause of con-
7
fused masses, would oblige with a suicidal caesar number.
In these times, only a psychologist or a dramatist has a chance of remaining
a realist. Nietzsche's prognosis of the ascent of the dramatic character type de- grades the "respectable" forms of realism to positivistic, one-dimensional world- views of a premodern type. Those who do not see the histrionics in reality also
474 ? ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
do not see reality. Emil Ludwig, in any case, is on the right track when he describes Napoleon's death scene on St. Helena.
Napoleon's mood swings between pathos and irony. When a servant an- nounces the passage of a comet, the emperor says, "That was the sign before the death of Caesar! " But when the doctor maintained that he found nothing wrong, the patient said, "It can be done without comets, too. " (pp. 649-50)
The year is 1925. It is the year of Reich president Friedrich Ebert's death, with whose name the Social Democratic pseudorealism in the Weimar Republic will always be connected. It is the year in which Hindenburg, "the victor of Tannen- burg," is elected as Ebert's successor. Whether the aged officer ever understood at all the time and the realities in which he was living is questionable. It is the year in which the Communists, by putting up Thalmann, a symbolic candidate with no chance of winning, brought the senile, reactionary Hindenburg into the presidential office because they withdrew their support from the promising oppos-
8 ingcandidate,aCentristpoliticianbythenameofMarx. However,theypursued
a "grand" strategy with hyperrealistic traits that hindered them from correctly un- derstanding their role in these kinds of trivial "surface phenomena. "
Heinrich Mann, too, is connected with this date. He, too, had been named as a symbolic presidential candidate by certain leftist groups and some "intellec- tuals. " In this year, Mann wrote an essay on Napoleon's memoirs. For him, Bonaparte embodies a Utopian dimension. The Corsican is a projection figure for Left-liberal dreams of realpolitik in which the otherwise scarcely thinkable could happen: the union of spirit and deed, ideas and canons. Heinrich Mann looks resolutely past the emperor's "productive cynicism" and his misanthropic traits. Even the fact that Napoleon had contempt for "intellectuals" is no longer a draw- back. In viewing the emperor of the French people, the liberal intelligentsia of Weimar--not at all far removed from Jiinger's sturdiness --got the idea that the "bloody incision" must be consented to if it is executed by a man of this caliber. Under the sign of Napoleon, the liberal horror of Machiavellianisms slackens off when the latter know how to conceal themselves by citing great ideas and hard necessities.
The book to which I return most frequently is Napoleon's memoirs. He wrote them in the third person, which has, and is supposed to have, the effect of divine impersonality. In them, he has not so much glorified himself as honored destiny, which wanted such great things from him and which justified him in everything. From a vantage point that is unique and is called St. Helena, he showed the becoming and consum- mation of the great man.
The great man, whom this writer knew, came into the world like a
ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V D 475
cannonball into a battle. The revolution sent him in this way. In life he was one with his idea, had the same body, the same path. . . .
. . . The liberal idea dies, it no longer exists. But Napoleon grows incessantly. Europe finally approaches the United States, which he had wanted. . . . The genius of Europe begins a hundred years too late to reach what is due him. . . .
The genius of Europe now understands here and there dictatorship as well. His liberal contemporaries only bore it without understanding
it. . . . He was the protector of the property less. What he delayed with his dictatorship was precisely what stormed in after his downfall, the rule of money. . . .
National military dictatorship erected against all merely material powers by a power of spirit. . . .
He himself is the leader of today, the intellectual who reaches for force. Wherever today a kind of leader has a go at the future of human- ity, it is always this kind of leader. His memoirs are our handbook; we automatically are on his side.
It is all too clear that he would hate and overthrow what is now called democracy and which would seem to him like its disfigured mask. (H. Mann, Geist und Tat, Essays [Munich, 1963], pp. 125-29)
Such trains of thought were later referred to by Herbert Marcuse as "self- dissolution of liberalism. " Around 1925, even liberal intellects of high standing
9
were prepared to throw their own traditions of ideas overboard like illusions. Spengler saw before us only a Prussian perseverance in the evening twilight of a civilization with rigor mortis. Heinrich Mann dreamed of a bright future. When the first volume of Untergang des Abendlandes appeared in 1918, Heinrich
Mann caused a French revolutionary to say in a scene he wrote at that time:
"It [the power of reason], however, grows secretly in all of us. Catas- trophes only accelerate its growth. Catastrophes thus bring us closer to happiness. We want the catastrophes basically not because we are de- praved but because we want happiness. " (Geist und Tat, p. 137)
Notes
1. In the same year, Ludwig Rubiner wrote his famous article, "Der Dichter greift in die Politik. " See the collection of Rubiner's writings with the same title, 1908-19 (Leipzig, 1976), pp. 251ff. Der Dichter als Sprengmeister, Vitalisator, Erzeuger von Erschiltterungen: "What counts now is move- ment, intensity and the will to catastrophe. "
2. This concerns the spectacular main aspect of politics. That at the same time politics turned more and more into administration, remained largely alien to those politicians who had been stamped by military ways. They count on "mass movements," and they would rather form a "front" than a "coali- tion. " They also would rather give commands than laws. They prefer to go onto the streets than into parliament and the ministries.
3. See Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt, 1979), pp. 504ff. 4. In 1931, the publisher organized a special edition of 100,000 copies.
476 D ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
5. The Goethe-Diogenes parallel is as bold as it is apposite. See my earlier remarks on Goethe's role in the bourgeois neokynicism of Sturm und Drang, chapter 5.
6. See A. M. Koktanek, Oswald Spengler in seiner Zeit (Munich, 1968).
7. Thomas Mann called Spengler a "detestable Nietzsche parodist"; Mann, Briefe 1889-1936 (Frankfurt, 1962), p. 321.
8. This is not to say that the deplorableness of SPD politicians in this election should be played down.
9. Ten years later-Hitler was already in power-Thomas Mann wrote in a letter (1935): "But can one still have many objections today to an enlightened dictator? " Mann, Briefe 1889-1936, pp. 397ff.
Chapter 22
"Bright Hour": Great Confessions of a Split Consciousness
Do you live today? No, you don't--you wander like a ghost. I have only seldom met an intellectual who would not have ad- mitted this in a bright hour. Only a few have acted on this knowledge. They went on wandering hauntingly, thrown hither and thither, defenseless victims of an insoluble contradiction.
Johannes R. Becher, Der Weg zur Masse in Die Rote Fahne Oct. 4, 1927
In the twilight of the cynical structure, confessions often anticipate possible ex- posures. They are the rides of bravado of an irritated consciousness that now and then violently seeks out "confession" (T. Reik's "compulsion to confess") in order to find an excuse and achieve a catharsis and an inner equalization of pressure. Those who live with their times are acquainted with such cynical confessions -- which also do not alter anything. Perhaps they are the most prominent element in what today we can call Zeitgeist. Unhappy consciousness too knows its most developed and most typical outgrowths that bear the color of the decade more than anything else.
The phenomenon of the "bright hour" strikes the eye of the historian who reads the traces. In several ways, Weimar is a nudist era, an era of exposure: politi- cally, sexually, in sport, psychologically, morally. The nudist and confessional urge is the obverse side of all the sophisticated inconsequentialities, strenuous pseudorealisms, and artificially construed ideologies. The best authors were ac- tive even at that time as phenomenologists of cynicism--Brecht, Toller, Kastner, Roth, Doblin, T. Mann, Feuchtwanger, von Horvath, Broch, to name a few. To the present day, they maintain a lead in this area over professional philosophy.
The "brightest" hour was described by Erich Kastner in his Fabian (1931). The scene takes place in the editorial office of a Berlin newspaper (see chapter 9, "School of Arbitrariness"). Kastner possessed an intimate first-hand knowledge of the milieu. The participants are Doctor Fabian, Germanist, moralist; Munzer, the political editor; Malmy, the economics editor--both dyed-in-the-wool cynics; as well as Doctor Irrgang [literally, erring walk;-Trans. ], unsalaried clerk, a
477
478 ? "BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS
young man too unstable for the milieu; later, Strom, the theater critic, joins in. It begins with a search for a news item to be printed in place of five lines that have been struck out of a speech by the chancellor. Nothing suitable can be found in the brushproofs. Irrgang thinks that something appropriate could perhaps still come in.
"You should have become a stylite," said Miinzer. "Or a person de- tained by the police, or some other kind of person with lots of time. When you need a report and you don't have one, you invent it. Pay at- tention. " He sat down, quickly wrote a couple of lines, without think- ing, and gave the young man the sheet of paper. "Now, get along with you, column-filler. If it's not enough, a strip of slug. "
Herr Irrgang read what Miinzer had written and said very softly: "Almighty God" and sat down, as if he suddenly felt ill, on the chaise longue, in the middle of a crackling mountain of foreign newspapers.
Fabian bent over the sheet of paper that quivered in Irrgang's hands and read: "In Calcutta there was street fighting between Mohammedans and Hindus. Although the police soon brought the situation under con- trol, there were fourteen dead and twenty-two wounded. Order has been completely restored. "
"But in Calcutta there have been no disturbances at all," Irrgang re- plied resistingly.
"The disturbances did not happen? " Miinzer asked incensed. Would you like to prove that to me? In Calcutta, there are disturbances hap- pening all the time. Perhaps we should report that the Loch Ness mon- ster has been sighted again in the Pacific Ocean? Note the following: reports whose falsity cannot be established, or can only be established after weeks, are true. And now, get yourself out of here in a hurry, otherwise I will have you set out a matrix and add something to the lo- cal edition. "
The young man left.
"And someone like that wants to become a journalist? " sighed Miin- zer. . . . "What can you do? " he said. "By the way, why the sympathy with the people? After all, they're alive, all thirty-six, and are perfectly healthy. Believe me, my dear, what we compose in addition is not as bad as what we omit. " And with that, he struck another half a page out of the text of the chancellor's speech. . . .
. . . "You mustn't take anything to heart," said the commercial edi- tor to Fabian. "He has been a journalist for twenty years and already believes what he lies. . . "
"You disapprove of your colleague's indolence? " Fabian asked Herr Malmy. "What do you do besides that? "
The commercial editor smiled, of course only with his mouth. "I lie too," he replied. "But I know it. I know that the system is false. With us in the economy, a blind man can see that. But I serve the false sys-
"BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS ? 479
tern with devotion. For in the framework of the false system at whose disposal I place my moderate talent, the false measures are correct in the nature of things, and the correct measures are, understandably, false. I am a devotee of strict consistency, and in addition, I am . . . "
"A cynic," Miinzer threw in, without looking up.
Malmy shrugged his shoulders. "I wanted to say, a coward. That hits the mark more exactly. My character is in no way the equal of my un- derstanding. I regret that uprightly, but I no longer do anything against it. "
[Afterwards, they sat in a small wine bar. ]
"I help in doing the wrong thing consistently. Everything that as- sumes gigantic forms can impress, even stupidity. "
Miinzer sat on the sofa and suddenly wept. "I am a swine," he murmured.
"A typically Russian atmosphere," observed Strom. "Alcohol, self- torture, grown men weeping. " He was touched and stroked the politi- cian's bald head.
"I am a swine," the other murmured. He said nothing more.
Malmy smiled at Fabian: "The state supports unprofitable large com- panies. The state supports heavy industry. Industry markets its products abroad below cost, but it sells them within our borders above the world market price. . . . The state accelerates the dwindling of the buying power of the masses through taxes it doesn't dare lay on the propertied classes; in any case capital flees in billions over the borders. Is that not consistent? Doesn't madness have method? There, every connoisseur's mouth waters! "
"I am a swine," murmured Miinzer, and, with his pouting lower lip', caught the tears.
"You overestimate yourself, honorable sir," said the commercial edi- tor. " (Fabian, chapter 3)
These cynical egos are appendages of their cancer-ridden consciousness of reality, which obeys the rules of the game in the capitalist world without resis- tance. In it, there is no misery that does not reflect itself, double itself, and ironi- cally mirror itself in tormented confessions and aggressive consent. The signi- ficant writers of the time behave toward these phenomena as minute-takers. They know that the people at the center of things know what they are doing. * Journalists in particular cannot appeal to any form of ignorance. That a commercial editor makes such a confession about capitalism as the false system that he serves with lies and devotion belongs to the great moments of truth in Weimar culture. With- out insight into the reflective constitution of the cynical structure, a concept of truth for these kinds of situations can no longer be defined. Discreetly disin-
hibited, to the present day it is people of this kind who have grasped the unity
of madness and method and who will say so among friends.
2
480 ? "BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS
In the "bright hour," the masks of integrated cynics crumble. Where private confidences and alcohol have helped things along, the decomposition presses threateningly and garrulously out into the open. A manufacturer's monologue from Joseph Roth's novel of 1927, Die Flucht ohne Ende. Ein Bericht (Flight without end. A report), runs along the same lines. The scene takes place at a party in a Rhenish town. People are talking about fashion, the latest models in hats from "Femina," about the workers and the "decline of Marxism," about politics and the League of Nations, about art and Max Reinhardt. The manufacturer, in a conver- sation with Tunda, the hero of the novel, loosens the laces in his patent leather shoes, undoes his collar, and stretches out on a "broad sofa. " In free association, he turns his companion into a witness of his self-analysis.
"Earlier on, I understood you perfectly, Herr Tunda. . . . As far as I am concerned, I posed my questions for a quite definite, egoistic rea- son. In a certain way, I was obliged to do this. You don't understand that yet. First, you will have to live amongst us a little longer. Then you will also have to pose certain questions and give certain answers. Everyone here lives according to eternal laws and against his will. Of course, when they began here, everyone . . . had his own will. He ar- ranged his life completely freely, nobody tried to interfere. But after some time, he did not even notice that what he had set up through a free decision became, if not written, then holy law. . . .
You don't yet know how frightfully open eyes it has.
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 . . . ! Who could have reckoned with the burning of Moscow . . . ! " Napoleon becomes an adventurer. To the Poles he pretended to have an army that had long since perished. . . . In the meantime, he lets historical com- parisons of global expansiveness light up, takes what is happening at the moment as past history, relies on premonitions and repeats four times the cynically grandiose sentence about the sublime and the ridicu- lous, which anticipates any critique. The world and what he does with it begin to become a drama for the great realist, and so, Napoleon slowly ascends the stage of elevated irony as his success descends, (pp. 416-17)
With such psychological sketches, Emil Ludwig shows himself to be far su- perior to Spengler's brutal realism. At the highest point of realism it is revealed how a hard sense for the facts slides over into the fictional, the histrionic, bluff and irony. With this, Ludwig touches on the blind spot in the consciousness of the philosopher of history, Spengler, who was so proud of his hard posture and his Prussian and Roman ethics with which he wanted to cover up just how much vulnerability, softness, and unhappiness, just how many suppressed tears and how much resentment there had been in his life.
He was right in seeing himself as the "congenial" successor of Nietzsche. Spen- gler was driven into the arms of the Right because after his success, he repressed within himself by force the self-experience of doubt and weakness, which for him
6
had been extraordinarily strong before his big breakthrough in 1918. The
Literat, Ludwig, saw a series of traits in the fact person, Napoleon, that escaped Spengler's notice--precisely the con man's element, the factors of seduction and drama, of diplomacy and cynical flight into a false candidness. Spengler should have had every reason to take more notice of such phenomena. His self- observation failed from that moment on when he began to stage the drama of the great theoretician and friend of the powerful. This lie in dealing with himself also tainted his theory of caesarism. With a little more honestly regarding his own psy- chic structure, Spengler could have easily known that the Germans would bring forth not another caesar but a sick, lachrymose actor who, to the applause of con-
7
fused masses, would oblige with a suicidal caesar number.
In these times, only a psychologist or a dramatist has a chance of remaining
a realist. Nietzsche's prognosis of the ascent of the dramatic character type de- grades the "respectable" forms of realism to positivistic, one-dimensional world- views of a premodern type. Those who do not see the histrionics in reality also
474 ? ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
do not see reality. Emil Ludwig, in any case, is on the right track when he describes Napoleon's death scene on St. Helena.
Napoleon's mood swings between pathos and irony. When a servant an- nounces the passage of a comet, the emperor says, "That was the sign before the death of Caesar! " But when the doctor maintained that he found nothing wrong, the patient said, "It can be done without comets, too. " (pp. 649-50)
The year is 1925. It is the year of Reich president Friedrich Ebert's death, with whose name the Social Democratic pseudorealism in the Weimar Republic will always be connected. It is the year in which Hindenburg, "the victor of Tannen- burg," is elected as Ebert's successor. Whether the aged officer ever understood at all the time and the realities in which he was living is questionable. It is the year in which the Communists, by putting up Thalmann, a symbolic candidate with no chance of winning, brought the senile, reactionary Hindenburg into the presidential office because they withdrew their support from the promising oppos-
8 ingcandidate,aCentristpoliticianbythenameofMarx. However,theypursued
a "grand" strategy with hyperrealistic traits that hindered them from correctly un- derstanding their role in these kinds of trivial "surface phenomena. "
Heinrich Mann, too, is connected with this date. He, too, had been named as a symbolic presidential candidate by certain leftist groups and some "intellec- tuals. " In this year, Mann wrote an essay on Napoleon's memoirs. For him, Bonaparte embodies a Utopian dimension. The Corsican is a projection figure for Left-liberal dreams of realpolitik in which the otherwise scarcely thinkable could happen: the union of spirit and deed, ideas and canons. Heinrich Mann looks resolutely past the emperor's "productive cynicism" and his misanthropic traits. Even the fact that Napoleon had contempt for "intellectuals" is no longer a draw- back. In viewing the emperor of the French people, the liberal intelligentsia of Weimar--not at all far removed from Jiinger's sturdiness --got the idea that the "bloody incision" must be consented to if it is executed by a man of this caliber. Under the sign of Napoleon, the liberal horror of Machiavellianisms slackens off when the latter know how to conceal themselves by citing great ideas and hard necessities.
The book to which I return most frequently is Napoleon's memoirs. He wrote them in the third person, which has, and is supposed to have, the effect of divine impersonality. In them, he has not so much glorified himself as honored destiny, which wanted such great things from him and which justified him in everything. From a vantage point that is unique and is called St. Helena, he showed the becoming and consum- mation of the great man.
The great man, whom this writer knew, came into the world like a
ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V D 475
cannonball into a battle. The revolution sent him in this way. In life he was one with his idea, had the same body, the same path. . . .
. . . The liberal idea dies, it no longer exists. But Napoleon grows incessantly. Europe finally approaches the United States, which he had wanted. . . . The genius of Europe begins a hundred years too late to reach what is due him. . . .
The genius of Europe now understands here and there dictatorship as well. His liberal contemporaries only bore it without understanding
it. . . . He was the protector of the property less. What he delayed with his dictatorship was precisely what stormed in after his downfall, the rule of money. . . .
National military dictatorship erected against all merely material powers by a power of spirit. . . .
He himself is the leader of today, the intellectual who reaches for force. Wherever today a kind of leader has a go at the future of human- ity, it is always this kind of leader. His memoirs are our handbook; we automatically are on his side.
It is all too clear that he would hate and overthrow what is now called democracy and which would seem to him like its disfigured mask. (H. Mann, Geist und Tat, Essays [Munich, 1963], pp. 125-29)
Such trains of thought were later referred to by Herbert Marcuse as "self- dissolution of liberalism. " Around 1925, even liberal intellects of high standing
9
were prepared to throw their own traditions of ideas overboard like illusions. Spengler saw before us only a Prussian perseverance in the evening twilight of a civilization with rigor mortis. Heinrich Mann dreamed of a bright future. When the first volume of Untergang des Abendlandes appeared in 1918, Heinrich
Mann caused a French revolutionary to say in a scene he wrote at that time:
"It [the power of reason], however, grows secretly in all of us. Catas- trophes only accelerate its growth. Catastrophes thus bring us closer to happiness. We want the catastrophes basically not because we are de- praved but because we want happiness. " (Geist und Tat, p. 137)
Notes
1. In the same year, Ludwig Rubiner wrote his famous article, "Der Dichter greift in die Politik. " See the collection of Rubiner's writings with the same title, 1908-19 (Leipzig, 1976), pp. 251ff. Der Dichter als Sprengmeister, Vitalisator, Erzeuger von Erschiltterungen: "What counts now is move- ment, intensity and the will to catastrophe. "
2. This concerns the spectacular main aspect of politics. That at the same time politics turned more and more into administration, remained largely alien to those politicians who had been stamped by military ways. They count on "mass movements," and they would rather form a "front" than a "coali- tion. " They also would rather give commands than laws. They prefer to go onto the streets than into parliament and the ministries.
3. See Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt, 1979), pp. 504ff. 4. In 1931, the publisher organized a special edition of 100,000 copies.
476 D ASKING FOR A NAPOLEON FROM WITHIN. POLITICAL CYNICISMS V
5. The Goethe-Diogenes parallel is as bold as it is apposite. See my earlier remarks on Goethe's role in the bourgeois neokynicism of Sturm und Drang, chapter 5.
6. See A. M. Koktanek, Oswald Spengler in seiner Zeit (Munich, 1968).
7. Thomas Mann called Spengler a "detestable Nietzsche parodist"; Mann, Briefe 1889-1936 (Frankfurt, 1962), p. 321.
8. This is not to say that the deplorableness of SPD politicians in this election should be played down.
9. Ten years later-Hitler was already in power-Thomas Mann wrote in a letter (1935): "But can one still have many objections today to an enlightened dictator? " Mann, Briefe 1889-1936, pp. 397ff.
Chapter 22
"Bright Hour": Great Confessions of a Split Consciousness
Do you live today? No, you don't--you wander like a ghost. I have only seldom met an intellectual who would not have ad- mitted this in a bright hour. Only a few have acted on this knowledge. They went on wandering hauntingly, thrown hither and thither, defenseless victims of an insoluble contradiction.
Johannes R. Becher, Der Weg zur Masse in Die Rote Fahne Oct. 4, 1927
In the twilight of the cynical structure, confessions often anticipate possible ex- posures. They are the rides of bravado of an irritated consciousness that now and then violently seeks out "confession" (T. Reik's "compulsion to confess") in order to find an excuse and achieve a catharsis and an inner equalization of pressure. Those who live with their times are acquainted with such cynical confessions -- which also do not alter anything. Perhaps they are the most prominent element in what today we can call Zeitgeist. Unhappy consciousness too knows its most developed and most typical outgrowths that bear the color of the decade more than anything else.
The phenomenon of the "bright hour" strikes the eye of the historian who reads the traces. In several ways, Weimar is a nudist era, an era of exposure: politi- cally, sexually, in sport, psychologically, morally. The nudist and confessional urge is the obverse side of all the sophisticated inconsequentialities, strenuous pseudorealisms, and artificially construed ideologies. The best authors were ac- tive even at that time as phenomenologists of cynicism--Brecht, Toller, Kastner, Roth, Doblin, T. Mann, Feuchtwanger, von Horvath, Broch, to name a few. To the present day, they maintain a lead in this area over professional philosophy.
The "brightest" hour was described by Erich Kastner in his Fabian (1931). The scene takes place in the editorial office of a Berlin newspaper (see chapter 9, "School of Arbitrariness"). Kastner possessed an intimate first-hand knowledge of the milieu. The participants are Doctor Fabian, Germanist, moralist; Munzer, the political editor; Malmy, the economics editor--both dyed-in-the-wool cynics; as well as Doctor Irrgang [literally, erring walk;-Trans. ], unsalaried clerk, a
477
478 ? "BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS
young man too unstable for the milieu; later, Strom, the theater critic, joins in. It begins with a search for a news item to be printed in place of five lines that have been struck out of a speech by the chancellor. Nothing suitable can be found in the brushproofs. Irrgang thinks that something appropriate could perhaps still come in.
"You should have become a stylite," said Miinzer. "Or a person de- tained by the police, or some other kind of person with lots of time. When you need a report and you don't have one, you invent it. Pay at- tention. " He sat down, quickly wrote a couple of lines, without think- ing, and gave the young man the sheet of paper. "Now, get along with you, column-filler. If it's not enough, a strip of slug. "
Herr Irrgang read what Miinzer had written and said very softly: "Almighty God" and sat down, as if he suddenly felt ill, on the chaise longue, in the middle of a crackling mountain of foreign newspapers.
Fabian bent over the sheet of paper that quivered in Irrgang's hands and read: "In Calcutta there was street fighting between Mohammedans and Hindus. Although the police soon brought the situation under con- trol, there were fourteen dead and twenty-two wounded. Order has been completely restored. "
"But in Calcutta there have been no disturbances at all," Irrgang re- plied resistingly.
"The disturbances did not happen? " Miinzer asked incensed. Would you like to prove that to me? In Calcutta, there are disturbances hap- pening all the time. Perhaps we should report that the Loch Ness mon- ster has been sighted again in the Pacific Ocean? Note the following: reports whose falsity cannot be established, or can only be established after weeks, are true. And now, get yourself out of here in a hurry, otherwise I will have you set out a matrix and add something to the lo- cal edition. "
The young man left.
"And someone like that wants to become a journalist? " sighed Miin- zer. . . . "What can you do? " he said. "By the way, why the sympathy with the people? After all, they're alive, all thirty-six, and are perfectly healthy. Believe me, my dear, what we compose in addition is not as bad as what we omit. " And with that, he struck another half a page out of the text of the chancellor's speech. . . .
. . . "You mustn't take anything to heart," said the commercial edi- tor to Fabian. "He has been a journalist for twenty years and already believes what he lies. . . "
"You disapprove of your colleague's indolence? " Fabian asked Herr Malmy. "What do you do besides that? "
The commercial editor smiled, of course only with his mouth. "I lie too," he replied. "But I know it. I know that the system is false. With us in the economy, a blind man can see that. But I serve the false sys-
"BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS ? 479
tern with devotion. For in the framework of the false system at whose disposal I place my moderate talent, the false measures are correct in the nature of things, and the correct measures are, understandably, false. I am a devotee of strict consistency, and in addition, I am . . . "
"A cynic," Miinzer threw in, without looking up.
Malmy shrugged his shoulders. "I wanted to say, a coward. That hits the mark more exactly. My character is in no way the equal of my un- derstanding. I regret that uprightly, but I no longer do anything against it. "
[Afterwards, they sat in a small wine bar. ]
"I help in doing the wrong thing consistently. Everything that as- sumes gigantic forms can impress, even stupidity. "
Miinzer sat on the sofa and suddenly wept. "I am a swine," he murmured.
"A typically Russian atmosphere," observed Strom. "Alcohol, self- torture, grown men weeping. " He was touched and stroked the politi- cian's bald head.
"I am a swine," the other murmured. He said nothing more.
Malmy smiled at Fabian: "The state supports unprofitable large com- panies. The state supports heavy industry. Industry markets its products abroad below cost, but it sells them within our borders above the world market price. . . . The state accelerates the dwindling of the buying power of the masses through taxes it doesn't dare lay on the propertied classes; in any case capital flees in billions over the borders. Is that not consistent? Doesn't madness have method? There, every connoisseur's mouth waters! "
"I am a swine," murmured Miinzer, and, with his pouting lower lip', caught the tears.
"You overestimate yourself, honorable sir," said the commercial edi- tor. " (Fabian, chapter 3)
These cynical egos are appendages of their cancer-ridden consciousness of reality, which obeys the rules of the game in the capitalist world without resis- tance. In it, there is no misery that does not reflect itself, double itself, and ironi- cally mirror itself in tormented confessions and aggressive consent. The signi- ficant writers of the time behave toward these phenomena as minute-takers. They know that the people at the center of things know what they are doing. * Journalists in particular cannot appeal to any form of ignorance. That a commercial editor makes such a confession about capitalism as the false system that he serves with lies and devotion belongs to the great moments of truth in Weimar culture. With- out insight into the reflective constitution of the cynical structure, a concept of truth for these kinds of situations can no longer be defined. Discreetly disin-
hibited, to the present day it is people of this kind who have grasped the unity
of madness and method and who will say so among friends.
2
480 ? "BRIGHT HOUR": GREAT CONFESSIONS OF A SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS
In the "bright hour," the masks of integrated cynics crumble. Where private confidences and alcohol have helped things along, the decomposition presses threateningly and garrulously out into the open. A manufacturer's monologue from Joseph Roth's novel of 1927, Die Flucht ohne Ende. Ein Bericht (Flight without end. A report), runs along the same lines. The scene takes place at a party in a Rhenish town. People are talking about fashion, the latest models in hats from "Femina," about the workers and the "decline of Marxism," about politics and the League of Nations, about art and Max Reinhardt. The manufacturer, in a conver- sation with Tunda, the hero of the novel, loosens the laces in his patent leather shoes, undoes his collar, and stretches out on a "broad sofa. " In free association, he turns his companion into a witness of his self-analysis.
"Earlier on, I understood you perfectly, Herr Tunda. . . . As far as I am concerned, I posed my questions for a quite definite, egoistic rea- son. In a certain way, I was obliged to do this. You don't understand that yet. First, you will have to live amongst us a little longer. Then you will also have to pose certain questions and give certain answers. Everyone here lives according to eternal laws and against his will. Of course, when they began here, everyone . . . had his own will. He ar- ranged his life completely freely, nobody tried to interfere. But after some time, he did not even notice that what he had set up through a free decision became, if not written, then holy law. . . .
You don't yet know how frightfully open eyes it has.
