462
MARSHALL BERMAN
But the melodrama is not original with Loewith: it has been running
for at least a
century,
and has been played by some of the most dis–
tinguished men in German intellectual life. It is based on a dualistic
interpretation of German history, in which an historical and political
tradition (symbolized, as Meinecke put it, by Frederick the Great's
"Potsdam"), which worships power for power's sake alone, and is bad,
struggles against an ahistorical, antipolitical tradition (epitomized in the
Goethean "Weimar")' which guards the absolute values of culture and
morality, and is good.
A fatal innocence taints Loewith's treatment of Nietzsche. Here he
accepts, with only parenthetical reservations, the Nazis' equation of
Nietzsche with themselves. His dualism of Nietzsche versus Goethe is
exploded by some of his most brilliant passages, which show how
profoundly close Goethe's universal
arnOT fati
comes to Nietzsche's
"Dionysian justification for life," how they share a common perspective
of tolerance and irony "beyond good and evil." But this insight raises
some basic questions about Loewith's thesis as a whole: perhaps the
German
Geist
did not fall so far after all? Indeed, perhaps the seeds of
the whirlwind that has flung Loewith across the world were sown in
the lost world of Weimar that he loves. It is clear that the ultimate
practical consequences of nihilism depend not on the nihilistic
Geist
as
such, but .on the social and economic
Weft
in which it finds itself.
We must explain why nihilism, an idea and an attitude which was
current in Europe for over half a
century,
should have had such
disastrous consequences in Germany alone.
Although he is a victim of this catastrophe, Loewith is innocent of
what's hit him. Thus, in order to understand the true meaning of world
history, he says, we must "come back from it to ourselves and what is
nearest to us."
If
this means only that Loewith, writing from Sendai,
Japan, in the Spring of 1939, refuses to accept as final the verdict of
world history on his life, we cannot help but sympathize.
If,
however,
as we suspect, it is another restatement of his pervasive dualism of
"ourselves and what is nearest to us" versus "world history," we must
conclude that he has learned nothing at all: that his way out of the hole
into which his self-deception has led him is only to dig in more deeply.
But if recent history has taught us anything, it is that, as intellectuals,
we must do all we can to seize the day, or else it will-as it may in any
case-seize us. We have learned to apply more generally the profound
remark Trotsky once made about the dialectic: you may not
be
interested in history, but history is interested in
you.
Marshall
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