PARTISAN REVIEW
Society.... The Goethe societies would have the mission of penetrating
the hearts of listeners with well-modulated recitals of Germany's nobles t
music and poetry ... perhaps every week, on a late Saturday afternoon,
wherever possible in church.... Poetry and literature are to constitute
the inner center of such ceremonial hours. . . . " This is nothing less
than planned, institutionalized
Innerlichkeit.
One only wants to say to all this, with Goethe (the Goethe Society
permitting), "Oh, this wretched nation, it will not end well, for it will
not understand itself!" Meinecke himself offers in his book a hopeless
jumble of an analysis. He sees Nazism as a synthesis of the two great
dynamics of the nineteenth century, namely nationalism and socialism,
and the synthesis was only wrecked by Hitler's lack of moderation. Hitler
apparently lacked that harmony of "might and mind" which were
Bismarck's greatest virtues. He yearns for a new "spiritual upsurge" and
recalls the splendid August days of 1914; there seems to be a note of
sadness to his confession that Germany is a "burnt-out crater of great
power-politics." But perhaps we had better leave Meinecke
in
his church
on late Saturday Afternoon singing
Lieder :
the professor is a very old
man. The younger men, for the most part, make a more decisive break
with the imperial tradition of the German past and the theory of
national-socialism. But their faults, on an intellectual level, are even
worse. There is, as you can well imagine, no end to shoddy Spenglerianism.
One "analysis of German destiny" suggests that Germany owes its down–
fall not so much to "the political immaturity of the German people as
to their biological overripeness." The author sees society growing and
decaying with the seasonality of vegetables: and he concludes, "it has
often happened that
one
man, luminous with the light of a shining idea,
showed dull-minded humanity the way. We should learn to pray for his
coming...." That church of Meinecke's might, at that, do a flourishing
business! But then where would we put one German who has cried for
"another great Jew" now that Jesus, Marx, Freud are gone? The few
on the outside scarcely seem to be setting up a better camp. "Whether
God is a heavenly being, vested with total power," writes young Borelius
(a former soldier who now finds that the Bible constitutes as great
a metaphysical threat to the free soul as
M ein Kampf),
"whether he walks
the earth and is called Hitler-the difference is ridiculously small. The
principle of the godlike quality, the irrational principle, remains the
same." There is, in addition to all of this, a good deal of Nietzscheanism, a
substantial amount of Kantianism, some Marxified Christianity, but I
won't bore you with samples of these effusions. They are all very de-
64
