The Crisis of Reason by J. W. Burrow

Author:J. W. Burrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0300083904
Publisher: Yale University Press

3.5 Nationalism and the Critique of Modernity: Myth and Charisma

Nationalism had, of course, social as well as international implications. In both Germany and France after 1870 it could be critical and radical; in the latter it came close to destabilizing the parliamentary republican regime. In Germany the achievement, in the new Reich, of something like the nation-state, though with Austria excluded, was necessarily disillusioning to many of the hopes of national cultural and moral regeneration invested in it. The period of struggle for unification came, on the contrary, to seem like an heroic age, contrasted with a mundane and materialistic contemporary reality. To those, in particular, who cherished a nostalgic, Romantic, volkish conception of the nation, the accelerated pace of modernization, as industrialization, class division and administrative rationalization, was dismaying. Political unification was manifestly not matched by spiritual unity. Social divisions and tensions even intensified; one symptom of this was a greatly heightened anti-Semitism, in which peasants, artisans, petty-bourgeoisie, Catholics and Protestants could for once find a common cause. Nationalists of a radically nostalgic, volkish kind found that a nation-state still possessed the attributes of the state: impersonal, apart from the somewhat disconcerting figure-head of Kaiser Wilhelm II, rationalistic, bureaucratic, it seemed still the antithesis of the spontaneous, unifying, vitalizing cultural and spiritual life of the Volk, to which the official class, the money-making capitalists and the proletarian urban masses all seemed equally indifferent. The concept of a Volksstaat seemed merely an oxymoron. One consequence was a search for an essentially religious revival of Germanic myth and ancient German values. The Wagner circle at Bayreuth was one centre for such aspirations, which we shall have to consider in Chapter 6.

Wagner, to the disgust of his former disciple Nietzsche, embraced his honoured position in the Reich. Others were more intractable. Perhaps the most striking instance of this antagonism, apart from Tönnies, was the Romantic nationalist and volkish critic of modern culture and Bismarckian Germany, Paul de Lagarde (1827–91). Lagarde’s preoccupation too was an essentially religious one which we shall have to consider later (see below, pp. 213–14ff); God revealed himself in the unfolding history of the nations. One feature of the radical nationalism of the nineteenth century, stemming originally from Herder, was the concept of national mission. Each ‘world historical’ people, to use Hegel’s phrase, was charged with its unique mission to humanity. It was an idea eagerly taken up by Mazzini, and by the Slavophiles; it became widely assumed that the fact that the Russian people had not yet spoken its word to humanity only afforded reason for thinking it must be about to do so, an idea also encouraged by Herzen. The idea of mission could foster a kind of nationalist radicalism because the mission, whatever it was in the particular case – democracy and rights of man, the values of community, spirituality, Kultur – was a trust and a responsibility, a duty to be worthy of and to fulfil. It was in that respect rather like – and was compared by Lagarde to – the relation of the ancient Hebrews to monotheism.

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