Complicit Filmmakers, Self-Made Women, and the Weltgeist on Horseback: The Year in Germany

Abstract

Complicit Filmmakers, Self-Made Women, and the Weltgeist on HorsebackThe Year in Germany Tobias Heinrich (bio) In two books appearing on the 250th birthday of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), the world takes a prominent place. In Hegels Welt, Jürgen Kaube, editor-at-large of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and in this role responsible for one of Germany's most influential feuilletons, takes advantage of the ambiguity of the German genitive in the title of his book, implying the historical condition that Hegel inhabited, but also the global, all-encompassing aspiration that Hegel asserted in his philosophical thinking. Sebastian Ostritsch achieves something similar through the use of a compound noun: Hegel: Der Weltphilosoph—the world and the philosopher conflate into one. The third comprehensive biography to celebrate Hegel's milestone birthday, Klaus Vieweg's Hegel: Der Philosoph der Freiheit, introduces freedom, one of Hegel's key concepts, into the debate. Indeed, it is justified to call Hegel a philosopher of freedom, in legal but also in ethical and intellectual terms. Given the popularity of loanwords like Zeitgeist or Volksgeist, it is surprising that the most prominent concept associated with Hegel, the notion of Geist, did not make it into the title of any of the three books. Geist, according to Vieweg, can only be inadequately translated with the English words "spirit" or "mind." As an example of a typically Hegelian dialectic relationship, Geist can be defined as the identity of subjectivity and objectivity, the simultaneity of Vorfinden (finding/perceiving) and Erzeugen (creating) of the world through the human subject (589). Depicting a life not only as a series of events but also as a journey of the Geist is therefore probably one of the key challenges in writing the biography of a philosopher like Hegel. Hegel's life unfolds on the brink of modernity, an era that the German historian Reinhart Koselleck termed Sattelzeit—the saddle period. From a contemporary perspective, Hegel's philosophy is at once timely, but also deeply anachronistic. In an age that strove to emancipate itself from the restraints of religious belief, it was Hegel's ambition to construct a new unifying system, based on reason rather than metaphysics, and yet still capable of capturing the world as a whole. At first glance, [End Page 73] the complexity of Hegel's philosophy and its universal claim might seem to disagree with the empirical nature of biography and its focus on the individual life. However, it is yet another reincarnation of Hegel's concept of the mind, and a popular anecdote surrounding the term helps to illustrate how the individual does indeed have a place in Hegel's thinking. In October 1806, on the day before one of Napoleon's most significant victories and the epochal defeat of the Prussian army, Hegel witnessed the French emperor entering the city of Jena, where the philosopher was lecturing at the local university. In a letter to his friend Immanuel Niethammer, Hegel famously described Napoleon as the "Weltseele zu Pferde" the world-soul—later often quoted as the Weltgeist—on horseback. The structural dynamics of history culminating in a specific individual: that is where biography and the world intersect. It is therefore not surprising that Napoleon's advance on Jena and the city's subsequent sacking by the French soldiers features as one of the pivotal moments in Kaube's biography of Hegel. While the world around him is turned upside down by war and conflict, Hegel struggles to complete his Phänomenologie des Geistes, in which he aims to trace the development of the mind on its way to absolute knowledge—a book as monumental in its ambition as it is challenging for any reader. Kaube minutely describes how the manuscript keeps on growing under Hegel's pen, while his publisher urges him to finish and Hegel finally delivers it only days before the French troops arrive in Jena. While all three biographies attempt to tell Hegel's life alongside an interpretation of his major writings, Jürgen Kaube is particularly successful in bringing both into a fruitful dialogue. Sebastian Ostritsch's book on the other hand, about half of the length of Kaube's and...