Tragic thought: Romantic nationalism in the german tradition

Abstract

Thus I came among the Germans... It is a severe word, but I will say it, because it is true. I can think of no people more torn than the Germans. You see craftsmen, but no human beings, xhinkers, but no human beings, priests, but no human beings, masters and slaves, youths and elders, but no human beings--is it not like a battle field where hands and arms and all severed limbs lie about while the life blood flows into the sand? --from Hrlderlin's Hyperion And all this at a time when the German mind, which, not so very long ago, had shown itself capable of European leadership, was definitely ready to relinquish any aspirations of this sort and to effect the transition to mediocrity, democracy, and modern ideas--in the pompous guise, to be sure, of empire building. The intervening years have certainly taught me one thing if they have taught me nothing else: to adopt a hopeless and merciless view toward that 'German temper', ditto toward German music, which I now recognize for what it really is: a thoroughgoing romanticism, the least Greek of all art forms and, over and above that, a drug of the worst sort, especially dangerous to a nation given to hard drinking and one that vaunts intellectual ferment for its power both to intoxicate the mind and to befog. --from Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy Why, in the context of an epistolary novel from the late 18th century, does Hrlderlin inscribe his tirade against the Germans? Or, more specifically, why does he set up the opposition between Greeks and Germans? Why are the Greeks the 'opposite' of the Germans? The novel, Hyperion, in conjunction with the 'Vaterl~indlische Hymne', set up the opposition between Greek and German art that Hrlderlin tries to reconcile. Hegel contemplates the relationship between aesthetic education and the responsibility of the 'citizen' in the state. Later, at perhaps the culmination of romantic thought, Nietzsche, in the ruminations about tragedy, feels compelled to excoriate German music and statehood together. To answer the questions that relate the aesthetics of romanticism to the roots of German nationalism, one must take into account a tradition of philosophical speculation about the relationship between the self and the other, if it is indeed a relationship at all, and the totalising power of the dialectic that gained full force during the period we refer to as German romanticism. The reception of romanticism for nationalistic purposes has become notorious since World War II, when the Nazis exploited the obsession with German roots. The later condemnation of romanticism in the G.D.R. for its rampant