The Germans by Gordon Alexander Craig

Author:Gordon Alexander Craig [Craig, Gordon Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Germany (West) -- History.
Publisher: Meridian
Published: 1991-05-14T21:00:00+00:00

For Riehl, such values were to be found in the life of the peasantry. This was not a new idea, being rooted in the belief of many of the early Romantics that the peasantry, because of its intimate connection with nature, was the most genuine embodiment of native German culture, that is, of a culture free of artificiality and foreign derivatives and rooted in the life of the people. Riehl, the first scholar to elevate folklore to the level of a social science, made the idea of a Volkskultur the basis of a cultural philosophy and a program of conservative social policy. As early as the 1850s, in an essay on the structure of German society, he was declaring that "the peasant is the German nation's future," and he later amplified this in language that was replete with Romantic antagonism to modernity. He wrote:

In the peasants the practical statesman can mobilize living history against an educated younger generation that has lost its historical sense; he can mobilize a living realism against the abstract ideas of the litterateurs; he can mobilize the last elements of nature against an artificial world; in the peasantry he can bring the power of community and mass to bear against a cultivated society that is distracted to the point of being without objective and, as individuals, denatured and degenerate.

It is to Riehl's writings, which were prolific and widely read, that we can trace the origins of that Volkisch strain in German thought that became increasingly strong in the last years of the nineteenth century, as well as the beginning of the antiurban prejudice that was associated with it. Romanticization of the peasantry and hatred of the city were constant ingredients in the writing of publicists like Heinrich Sohnrey, who saw in the shift of population from country to town a symptom of national degeneration and wrote:

Bauernfaust und Bauerngeist Ob auch selten man sie preist Sind des Staates Quell und Macht Sind die Sieger in der Schlacht Wohl dem Staat, der das bedacht.

[Peasant fist and peasant spirit,

Although one rarely praises them,

Are the State's health and power,

Are the victors on the battlefield.

Health to the State that keeps that in mind!]

Novelists like Emil Strauss, Hans Friedrich Blunck, Ludwig Ganghof-er, and Ernst Wiechert elaborated on the same theme, as did the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose Book of Hours [Stundenbuch] (1899-1903) portrayed the city as the center of materialism and depravity, whose inhabitants

nennen Fortschritt ihre Schneckenspuren, und fahren rascher, wo sie langsam fuhren, und fiihlen sich und funkeln wie die Huren und larmen lauter mit Metall und Glas

[name their snails slime progress, and travel more quickly where they carry slowly, and feel themselves and sparkle like whores and make louder noises with metal and glass]

and expressed the conviction that the guardians of the values that could make Germany great and powerful again were to be found in the fields and the villages

und in den Talern, stark und vielgestaltig, ein Volk von Hirten und von Ackerbauern.

[and in the valleys, strong and many-formed, a people of herds and farmers.

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