fightening for art

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When Allied bombs poured down on Germany, people close to Adolf Hitler realized that he was emotionally more disturbed by the destruction of historic buildings than by the deaths of his fellow Germans. Nazi propagandists, rather than attempting to hide his reaction, did all they could to make it known. They believed Germans would interpret Hitler's feelings not as proof of heartlessness but as evidence of an elevated artistic sensibility that even total war had not been able to destroy.
Possibly that's the way many Germans saw it. Every country values whatever it considers high culture. The Germans recently reacted with commendable fury when the Deutsche Oper in Berlin cancelled performances of Mozart's Idomeneo on the grounds that it might incite Muslims to violence; the severed heads of Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad appear in one scene and, as the director of the company noted, "We live in a very sensitive time." Public outrage has since forced the company to announce that it may reschedule the production if the authorities can make certain security guarantees.
But at times German cultural pride has become so obsessive that it's distorted the development of society. In an audacious new book, The Seduction of Culture in German History (Princeton University Press), Wolf Lepenies blames the catastrophes of 20th-century German politics on a tendency to overrate culture at the expense of politics.
A sociologist with a wide-ranging literary intelligence, Lepenies is among Germany's leading intellectuals. Tomorrow, at the close of the Frankfurt Book Fair, he'll accept the $36,000 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, joining a list of laureates that includes Martin Buber, Susan Sontag, Vaclav Havel, Amos Oz and Orhan Pamuk.
For generations, German high culture was the great national achievement. In many fields, from music to universities, it set standards that the rest of the world tried in vain to emulate. But in Germany it was so admired that it made politics look shabby and irrelevant. Political accomplishments could be given an aura of legitimacy only if they were compared to art. The admirers of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who unified Germany in 1871, liked to call him a political sculptor or the Rembrandt of German politics. In the summer of 1870, with Germany going to war against France, even the 26-year-old Friedrich Nietzsche, no one's idea of a patriot, applied for leave from the University of Basel so that he could enlist; he wrote to his mother that France was attacking German culture.
Early in the 20th century, Germans refused to take politics seriously; the idea of compromise to create consensus was not on the German list of virtues. Politics was left to descend into blood-and-iron demagoguery or bogus imitations of high culture. Lepenies points out that the stirring rallies, charisma and soaring ambitions of the Nazis appealed to the public on aesthetic grounds. After the Second World War, when the Allies imposed democracy on Germany and the regime of Konrad Adenauer made it work, intellectuals and artists usually depicted his muted, comprising, humdrum government with lofty disdain.
Lepenies places near the core of his book Thomas Mann's famous 1918 essay, "Reflections of a Non-political Man." Mann argued that democracy was alien to Germans; they were interested in philosophy and music, not voting rights. In fact, they preferred an authoritarian state. He later changed his views (so did most of his fellow citizens) but his essay remains a touchstone in German history.
Culture-obsession produced many preposterous statements from various articulate Germans, but perhaps the most bizarre was a manifesto, "To the Civilized World," issued over the names of 93 well-known German intellectuals and artists in October, 1914, not long after the start of the First World War. They defended Germany's actions as innocent and necessary. For instance, Germany, being a peace-loving nation, had not violated Belgium's neutrality but had simply anticipated the invasion of Belgium by the French and British.
Most important, they said, foreign nations were making war not on German militarism but on German culture. The intellectuals solemnly promised to fight for the legacy of Goethe, Beethoven and Kant, which was as sacred to them as German soil.
Tragic history later added a powerful overlay of irony to their words. The 1914 statement was drafted by Ludwig Fulda, a playwright whose work reached as far as Hollywood (and provided Greta Garbo's last vehicle, Two-Faced Woman). A passionate German nationalist in 1914, he became nationalism's victim when it took a new form under Hitler. He was a Jew who committed suicide in 1939.