The Seduction of Culture in German History by Lepenies Wolf;

Author:Lepenies, Wolf;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

German Culture at Home: A Moral Failure Turned to Intellectual Advantage

The German Catastrophe

In 1949 Leo Strauss complained that German thinking had become indistinguishable from Western thought in general. In retrospect, one must see this complaint of a German émigré as the prophecy of one of the great political success stories of the twentieth century. After the end of the Third Reich, first the Federal Republic and then a reunited Germany became part of the West. Germany’s special path eventually flowed into the mainstream of parliamentary democracy, the market, and the rule of law. Playing off culture against civilization no longer made sense. It also no longer made much sense to think of culture as a substitute for politics. Immediately after the war, however, things had looked different.

On August 17, 1946, Hannah Arendt apologized to her teacher, the philosopher Karl Jaspers, for not responding to his last letter for over a month. She could not yet write back because she had immersed herself in reading his book Die Schuldfrage (The question of German guilt), which had been published in the same year. She was troubled by the book, because Jaspers was speaking of Nazi crimes as if they could be dealt with in court: “Your definition of Nazi policy as a crime (‘criminal guilt’) strikes me as questionable. The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough. It may well be essential to hang Goring, but it is totally inadequate. That is, this guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems. That is the reason why the Nazis in Nuremberg are so smug.”1 When Hannah Arendt wrote her letter, verdicts in the Nuremberg trials had not yet been reached. Goring committed suicide by poisoning himself on October 15, 1946, two hours before his scheduled hanging.

Hannah Arendt’s objections to Jaspers’s book were raised in a firm but friendly way. Heinrich Blucher, her husband, had been much more appalled by it. Rather than brood about their metaphysical guilt, the Germans should be ashamed of what they had done and try to act accordingly, he wrote to his wife. It was preposterous to invite the world, once again, to ponder the specifics of the German national character. The task of the time was not to find out what was typically “German” in the Nazi crimes, but what was right and what was wrong in the behavior of the German people. Karl Jaspers was a scholar without the slightest talent for political insight, Blücher fumed. The philosopher’s lofty ethical speculations were of no practical value or political consequence whatsoever.2 Given this harsh rejection of Jaspers’s book, it must have come as a surprise to Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher that his reply was not lofty at all. It was rather pragmatic and a sensible refutation of what Jaspers regarded as Arendt’s poetic view of the Nazi crimes.

Jaspers too did not react immediately to his former student’s letter, which was written in August.

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