Conversations with Isaiah Berlin by Ramin Jahanbegloo

Author:Ramin Jahanbegloo [Ramin Jahanbegloo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781905559329
Publisher: Halban
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE HUMILIATION OF THE GERMANS

R. J. In your essay on Herder, you describe him as “an early and passionate champion of variety” and “one of the earliest opponents of uniformity”. Can you clarify this idea?

I. B. I’ll try. The central idea of Herder’s doctrine is the wide variety of national and cultural traditions. He is not a nationalist, although he has been accused of, and praised for, nationalism. This is a mistake. When he says national and Nationalgeist one must understand national culture, not political self-assertion. Even that is a reaction to the patronizing attitude to the Germans by the French. I believe that the Romantic Movement which begins in Germany was influenced by the systematic humiliation of the Germans, the de haut en bas view of them in Paris. I have an idée fixe about this which might be untrue, like most idées fixes. My view is that the Germans did not have a true Renaissance. I don’t think you’ll find that in books by German historians, but I think that it is true. Let me give you an example of what I mean. If you had travelled across Europe from, let us say, Lyon, to, for example, Vienna in, say, 1500, you would have found that in France there was a high culture even in the southern provinces. There were poets and painters at that time in France. Italy was in the full glory of the High Renaissance. In Germany you would have found Dürer, Grünewald and other excellent painters and splendid scholars like Reuchlin and his friends. Now supposing you performed this journey around 1600. In France the Parnassiens, the Libertins, the readers of Montaigne and Rabelais. In the Low Countries, painters of the highest genius. In England Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon and a great flowering. In Spain Cervantes, El Greco, Velazquez, Lope de Vega, in Italy Mannerists, Galileo, poor Giordano Bruno burnt in that year as a heretic. New stirrings in Sweden and Poland. But what went on at that time in Vienna or Germany? Scarcely anything to be remembered. There was one original genius—Kepler in Denmark and Munich. Who had ever heard of him then? Or of Jakob Boehme, a Silesian cobbler? The first admired German was Heinrich Schütz, a gifted composer. And possibly Althusius (Althaus). The real rise was with Leibniz in the later seventeenth century. In between only Simplicissimus. Usually the real reason for this decline is given as the Thirty Years War. But the Italians were also invaded by the French, and still a rich Italian culture continued. Defeats don’t necessarily stop cultures. Of course there were poets in Germany, but Germany was very much not a top nation at that time, as were France, above all, and Spain, England and Italy.

R. J. What role do you think was played by the Reformation in the rise of German culture?

I. B. I wonder. I am not a historian, but I have the impression that it did something to abort the Renaissance in Germany. There

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