Brunnhilde's Act

Abstract

It is popular to assert that there are two Germanies, the ascetic-military “Prussian” Germany, focused on ruthless discipline and dedicated service to the State, and the more friendly, southern Austrian-Bavarian-Schwabian Germany focused on Kultur, on art, and spiritualized joie de vivre. When, in his late years, Goethe witnessed the retreat in Germany of Kultur and the rise of German political nationalism, he was horrified by the prospect of dangers that this engendered. (One can claim that the very duality of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic in the second half of the twentieth century expresses this opposition. The “Prussian” character of the GDR was often noted.) From this perspective, Nazism predictably appears as the climactic point of “Prussian” Germany. Might Goethe have presciently perceived the shadow of the Nazi threat at its very source? One should reject this conclusion. It is not an accident that in the finale of his Meistersinger, Wagner, whom the Nazis perceived as their predecessor, celebrated the survival of German art following the decline of the German Reich; it is no accident that Hitler was Austrian, fanatically devoted to Wagner, and in thrall to German Kultur much more than to Prussian militarism; and it is no accident that the dominant motif of the conservative defense of Germany in World War I (starting with Thomas Mann's “Reflections of an Unpolitical Man” in 1918) was the defense of German Kultur against French and Anglo-Saxon civilization. (This, incidentally, allows us to propose a succinct definition of barbarism which covers Nazism as well as today's Islamic and Christian fundamentalisms: barbarism is not the opposite of culture, but rather, it is pure culture—culture without civilization.) Nazism was not “Prussian.” Rather, it enacted the synthesis of two Germanies: the full appropriation of the “Prussian” Germany by the Germany of Kultur. Here, one might follow Phillip Lacoue-Labarthe, who detected the source of Nazism in the post-Kantian aestheticization of the political, which began with Schiller and the conservative Romantics.