Vanguard News Network

[From Telos, Fall 2005]

By Helgard Mahrdt

The “Ideas of 1914”

Arendt never systematically developed her thoughts about the intellectuals who propounded the so-called “Ideas of 1914.”[1] Yet we do find critical comments on them scattered throughout her work, where they figure as an element in her theory of totalitarianism as a radical break with tradition that renders all former political categories useless.[2] In her letter to Karl Jaspers on March 4, 1951, she points to a relation between the drive to render human beings superfluous and the drive toward total power.[3] She insists that neither a state nor a nation nor a people can or should be seen as one and total, as embodying all power. In contrast, we find anticipations of such thinking the “all-powerful one” in “the ideas of 1914,” e.g. in Ernst Troeltsch’s, Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit and in Paul Natorp’s Deutscher Weltberuf.[4]

Troeltsch seeks to distinguish between the cultures of central and western Europe. In his 1916 volume, he associates the West wit hthe ideas of 1789. He understands the “great principle of political freedom” as one of the “greatest and most radical achievements of the modern world. It is a principle that, on the one hand, guarantees an inviolable sphere of personal rights to the individual, and, on the other hand, locates the power of the state in the unity of individual selves.”[5] Germany joined the West but only with certain restrictions. It is precisely these restrictions to Western ideas of freedom that constitute the real character of the German spirit and German state. According to Troeltsch, the German difference derives from two elements: Germany’s “backwardness in political development and in education” and the necessity of a “strong centralized authority.”[6] The latter results from “history and geographical location.” That is why the “German idea of freedom carries particular Germanic traits.”

It is true that the idea of freedom had been stimulated and fuelled by the French Revolution, but Kantand Hegel shaped its realization as well as its philosophical interpretatin. Furthermore, among contemporary idealists, the idea underwent such a profound change that freedom itself took on a new meaning, i.e., “the free, conscious, and dutiful devotion to the already existing whole of history, the state, and the nation.”[7] Troeltsch thus points to a new combination of “aristocratic and democratic elements” in which “everyone has a right to the whole and every part is grounded in the measure of solid achievements.” This is why the “equal regard given to each individual member of the people and likewise to the need for strong leadership becomes a compelling combination.”[8] This idea of freedom differs from both the “English idea of individualism as well as the enthusiastic ideal of equality of human rights.” For it is at once the “freedom of a voluntary commitment to the whole as well as a personal living originality of each individual within that whole. It is at once the freedom of the public spirit and its discipline, both grounded in a self-devotion to the ideas.”[9] In other words, the individuals do not make up the collective whole, but identify with it. Freedom is not equality but rather “the individual’s service to and for the whole, a service that he renders from the place to which he has an organic right.”[10] That is what constitutes the “dignity and active involvement of each single individual, but it also involves being bound and being ranked.” In Troeltsch, it can be called the “secularization of the religious feeling of duty and in fact its augmentation and intensification by way of active involvedment in shaping the world.”[11]

Paul Natorp justified the war in 1914 in the following terms: Germany is convinced of the legitimacy of her struggle not only because she is defending her very existence but also for the sake of the integrity and freedom of the whole civilized world. “Her conscience is clear” because it was obvious from the start that the “existence of Austria as well as the existence of Germany is at stake.”[12] Germany has not only to defend “its own existence,” but it also “must fulfill a mission in the world.”[13] It has to fulfill this task bevcause it is precisely in Germany where a “consciousness of the inadequacy of merely formal legislation and the clear-cut demand for a higher justice intrinsically grounded in the life of the people is more strongly developed than in any other people.”[14] Natorp understood “the war as an event which millions of Germans and Austrian-Hungarians experienced as the moment when they all arose as one, vowing that thtey would stand united in this very bitter existential struggle, where they all — from the Kaiser to the last Social Democrat — no longer knew any party or class, nor any confession or race. Instead all, one as well as the other, bonded with the beloved fatherland, and bonded with every countryman regardless of confession.”[15] Because loyalty to the community is chosen voluntarily, phrases like equality and fraternity, the mottos of the French Revolution, are no longer necessary, for they have become self-evident. By claiming her particulra cultural idenitity in this war, Germany “not only preserves her unique characteristics,” but also “rises up against the leveling uniformity of global ‘civilization,’ which in the name of a ‘global culture’ imposes its culture upon all others.”[16] Over against “civilization,” Natorp juxtaposees a sense of “culture” that grows out of the “inner roots of a unique people.”[17] What he has in mind is both the “cultivation of each unique individual” and thereby of the “unique community.” Freedom as a goal is not understood as an “un-binding,” a release from all bonds, but as an “inner self-binding.” Related to this understanding of freedom is Natorp’s concept of education, where authentic individuality does not mean isolation and detachment from the community. On the contrary, individuals “voluntarily relate themselves to a rich and endlessly variegated relationship to everything they come in touch with. The individual and the community are no longer opposed in restrictive ways; they are in fact reciprocally related.”[18] If we transpose this idea to a political level, Natorp is clearly describing a very specific political culture: the Germans do not understand a people as a “manifold realizing its social energy throughmechanical summation and making its dominant will decisive,” but instead as the “Allheit der Volksgenossen,” a wholeness that is not yet whole but is becoming whole.”[19] Such a “people” then will be something “totally different from the Gallic, British, or even North American concept of democracy.” In other words, while the other Western people know “individuality as singularity” and “community as plurality,”[20] the spirit of 1914 constructs thte relation between the individual and the community as identification with the totality.

The Front Generation

For Heidegger, freedom is the “original understanding or the primal projection of that which it itself makes possible. In projecting open the for-the-sake-of-which [end, goal] as such, Dasein gives itself the original bond of commitment.”[21] Heidegger aims at understanding freedom as spontaneity, to begin something by oneself. Heidegger specifies this “by oneself” by understanding Being as the ability “to be with others.” Heidegger does not examine Being-in-the-world as “individual I-ness,” but as metaphysical “Ichheit,” for which he uses the expression “selfness” (p. 243). Being does not mean thte “common isolated, egoistic subject.” Instead this Being is always already with others: “Only because Dasein as constituted by the for-the-sake-of exists in selfness, is something like a human community possible” (p. 245). “Selfness” in itself “freely bears a binding obligation for and to itself.” Dasein, as a free projection of the world, “sketches and prefigures the world such that the voluntary hold on it is a binding hold, i.e. this projection places Dasein in a playing field of choices. This binding commitment holds freedom over against itself. The world is in this freedom held over against this freedom” (p. 248). Therefore “being-in-the-world is nothing other than freedom” (p. 248).

This binding character of freedom plays a role in preparing the National Socialist revolution.[22] What Heidegger had in mind was a particular form of comradeship which he called “Gefolgschaft.” “To follow,” Heidegger wrote, “demands the ability to listen and to obey. Only the one who can listen truly, can also lead.” “The new spirit of community as comradeship carries in it as a grounding structure the living relation of Gefolgschaft (following) and Führerschaft (leadership).”[23] This is the spirit of the front as the new spirit of the German people, a spirit that became more and more pervasive after the war during the aimless drift of the rudderless state in the decade of the Weimar Republic.

Arendt attempts to provide a psychological explanation for the same phenomenon. In the winter of 1945, the Partisan Review published her article, “Approaches to the German Problem,” which was an early attempt to understand totalitarianism. Here, Arendt pointed to many early indications of what was going to happen. She mentions WWI, which revealed the looming catastrophe in the form of the greatest destructin that the peoples of Europe had ever undergone, a destruction thast worsened after the war in the form of massive inflation and unemployment. A feeling of helplessness and inertia prevailed. It is this mood of impotence and “rootlessness” among the masses to which the propaganda of the Nazis could successfully appeal, for it not only re-awakened a nostalgia for the “Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) of the trenches,” but also brought back “sweet recollections of a time of extraordinary activity and power of destruction enjoyed by the individual.”[25] Arendt does not glorify the experiences atthe front as a “new spirit of community”; instead she seeks a psychological explanation, thereby attempting to understand the willingness of human beings to accept forms of total domination. Becaues of the fear associated with inflation and unemployment, the “destructive power of the front experience” did not simply disappear as a temporary phenomenon, but could be kept alive and instrumentalized by the National Socialists.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt describes a “selflessness:” a desire for anonymity, for pure functioning, for disappearing into a larger whole. Her paradigmatic example is Lawrence of Arabia, who was “seduced into becoming a secret agent in Arabia because of his strong desire to leave the world of dulll respectability, whose continuity had become simply meaningless, because of his disgust with the world as well as with himself” (OT, p. 218).[26] The postwar elite, only slightly younger than his generation, shared with him the “yearning for losing their selves” and “the violent disgust with all existing standards, with every power that be.” According to Arendt, the “‘front generation,’ in marked contrast to their own chosen spiritual fathers, was completely absorbed by their desire to see the ruin of this whole world of fake security, fake culture, and fake life” (OT, p. 328). The main difference between them and the “imperialist generation” was that they had no exotic countries left to which to escape.

In addition, Arendt saw no real difference among the nations when it came to their loss of national feelings as a result of WWI. She did however see a difference in the völkisch character of German nationalism. Its roots lay in the romantic conception of the “innate personality” (OT, p. 169) insofar as this concept includes distancing oneself from others, thus paving the way for twentieth-century anti-Semitism.[27] This is the context for “race-thinking” and “race unity as a substitute for national emancipation” (OT, p. 165). Arendt named as particularly German the völkisch national feeling, i.e. grounding the people not in a state or a national territorial conscience, but instead in what she named an “enlarged tribal consciousness” (OT, p. 232). She relates this to the particular demographic condition of a lack of a clear territory. In other words, rootlessness, lack of demographic borders, and abstract thinking are linked.

The völkisch national feeling was intitially not yet “actual racism.” It had much more to do with the “long frustrated attempts to unite the numerous German states” (OT, p. 165). National sentiments before 1814 were harmless; statements by nationalist liberals like Ernst Moritz Arndt or F. L. Jahn that Germans had the good fortune to be of “pure, unmixed stock,” a “genuine people,” derived from a “frustrated nationalism.” Although these men spoke in racial terms, they still upheld the “central pillar of genuine nationhood, the equality of all peoples” (OT, p. 166). We find this thought clearly expressed in Arendt’s 1946 review of Delos’ La Nation. Delos obviously made a deep impression on her, still fresh from the experience of being a stateless refugee and homeless person stripped of all rights, and thus virtually of all identity and humanity. Delos’ preference for the sate over the nation stems from the seeds of racism and totalitarianism that he finds in the very idea of a “nation.” “A people becomes a nation when ‘it takes consciousness of itself according to its history’; as such it is attached to th soil which is the product of past labor adn where history has left its traces.” Thus the national soil bears the traces of a people’s history, its sweat and tears. “It represents the ‘milieu’ into which man is born,” the natality of nationality, “a closed society to which one belongs [only] by right of birth,” by being a native. In contrast, a state is “an open society, ruling over a territory where its power protects and makes the law”; it is “a legal institution” which recognizes “citizens no matter of what nationality; its legal order is open to all who happen to live on its territory.”[28] A “state, far from being identical with the nation, is the supreme protector of a law which guarantees man his rights as man, his rights as citizen and [even] his rights as a national.”[29]

Early German race-doctrine functioned as a weapon for internal national unity: as long as the defenders of organic nationalistic definitions of peoples insisted on the genuine “equal plurality of peoples in whose complete multitude alone mankind can be realized” (OT, p. 167), it is harmless. What is of greater importance is that those “first modern intellectuals” prepared the “general mentality of modern German scholars,” i.e. their “concept of romantic personality-worship” included an “element of cynicism.” For Arendt, German intellectuals are prepared to submit willingly to any ideology, whenever their position is at stake. In other words: they lack an understanding of themselves as citizens. The roots for this lack lie in the fact that “the conflict between the nobility and the rising middle class was never fought out on the political scene” (OT, p. 168). Instead “personality” worship developed as the only means to gain at least some minimal social emancipation.” As one knows from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, the growing middle class had considerable difficulties in winning self-respect. Arendt stated: “In order to enter into competition with rights and qualities of birth, they formulated the new concept of the ‘innate personality’ which was to win general approval within bourgeois society” (OT, p. 169). This concept of “innate personality” shared wit hthe heir of an old family “that it was given by birth and not acquired by merit”. The central point Arendt makes is that the lack in the political as well as in the social sphere both “had been artificially overcome”, the first by the “naturalistic concept of organic development,” the latter by nature itself that was “supposed to supply a title when political reality had refused it” (OT, p. 169). The only problem is that natural privileges like “force or genius” cannot be “retraced to any human deed.” This social concept contains a “discriminatory point”, i.e., the “lack of ‘innate personality'” cannot be overcome. Additionally this concept was affirmed during the long period of social anti-Semitism with the “discovery of Jew-hating [sic] as a political weapon” (OT, p. 169). To summarize: the insistence on a tribal common origin as an essential element of nationhood, “formulated by German nationalists during and after the war of 1814, and the emphasis laid by the romantics on the innate personality and natural nobility prepared the way intellectually for race-thinking in Germany” (OT, p. 170).

A Tribal Nationalism

Paradoxically enough, WWI had already virtually eliminated genuine national feelings throughout Europe. During the period between the two World Wars, it was “more important to have belonged to the generation of the trenches, no matter on which side, than to be a German or a Frenchman” (OT, p. 329). It was this “‘community of fate'” that the Nazi propagnda addressed to gain the support and sympathy of “a great number of veterans associations in all European countries” (OT, p. 330). The particularity of German nationalism, i.e., that it had always been a mixture of genuine national feelings and racial terms, could be mobilized for national wars. The specifically German element of “innate personality” gave birth to the idea “of the grotesque homunculus of the superman whose natural destiny it is to rule the world” (OT, p. 170). The other specifically German element is the lack of a historically grounded national conscience and clear territorial borders. The Prussian patriots tried instead to fill this lack with a surrogate, i.e., blood, in order to define a people. These ideas became politically relevant for the “Pan-German League” before and during WWI. They confronted the state and the national feelings with their concept of an “enlarged tribal consciousness” which should include every member of the same people independent of language, history, and place of settlement. This is important because tribal nationalism has little in common with the nationalism of the “fully developed Western nation-state with its claims to popular representation and national sovereignty, as it had developed since the French Revolution through the nineteenth century” (OT, p. 229). “Tribal nationalism grew out of (the) atmosphere of rootlessnes” (OT, p. 232). In political terms, tribal nationalism claimed the uniqueness of its own people and the impossibility of the equality of other peoples. Arendt’s general conclusion is that völkisch consciousness theoretically denied the possibility of humankind as a regulative idea long before its use, or misuse, in practice.

Distinguishing between völkisch and national perspectives is important: while nationalism — at least as long as it was authentic — helped to stabilize the always endangered “balance between nation and state on the one hand, between the nationals of an atomized society on the other” (OT, p. 231), it changed completely with a people that had no territory in common, who knew national identity only as their personal quality, i.e. not as a quality of a world they had in common and lost when they left the territory, but as a national feeling that they carried with themselves wherever they went. Whenever a clear border is missing, whenever the triumvirate of people, state, and territory is missing, the masses do not have the possibility to experience what “patria and patriotism” (OT, p. 232) or nationhood really mean.[30] In other words, they have no possibility to assume political responsibility for a common and clearly limited geographical community. It is this kind of rootlessness which provides the conditions for the völkisch nationalism or “enlarged tribal consciousness.” Members of peoples who lack a guaranteed home on earth therefore feel “at home wherever other members of their ‘tribe’ happen to live” (OT, p. 232). Rootlessness, surmounting borders, and abstract thinking (Weltanschauung) are intertwined.

Arendt’s Understanding of Freedom

For Arendt, the basic political desideratum is “the right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged according to actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organzied community.”[31] In the light of the political events of the 20th century, Arendt redefines the concept of human rights. The “eternal Rights of Man” can no longer be considered “independent of citizenship and nationality.” Instead they “materialize only within a given political community, they depend on our fellow-men and on a tacit guarantee that the members of a community give to each other” (RM, p. 34). Human beings need “government protection”, they need to have a guaranteed public space in which they can appear through their actions and speech. Putting the same conclusion in other words, “the emergence of mankind as one political entity”, means for “man as man” that he has “only one right that transcends his various rights as a citizen: the right never to be excluded from the rights granted by his community (an exclusion which occurs not when he is put into jail, but when he is sent to a concentration camp) and never to be deprived of his citizenship (RM, p. 36).” Human beings have to be protected against homelessness, against having no space in which they belong, against lacking status as a citizen. For Arendt, having the chance to experience freedom is understood as a “state of being [that is] manifest in action and not as a free will independent from others” (HC, p. 180).[32] Freedom is the greatest gift human beings have, but it comes into being only by being performed. This performance happens only in the sphere which Arendt names the “in-between of human beings”. “Freedom as virtuosity” needs a space in which to appear. Like performing artists, “acting men need the presence of others before whom they can appear; both need a publicly organized space for their ‘work.'”[33] It is a space that has to be secured by borders and based on a constitution that structures the public life of being together and provides human beings wtih a relative stability.[34] It is only then that they can gather and act in freedom. Whenever a people loses this guaranteed space, “it loses its political reality despite its physical survival.”[35] Arendt agrees with Montesquieu that in the absence of a public realm of effective law, the only barrier against political evil are patterns of moral behavior which are nothing but customs, and “every incident can destroy customs and morality which no longer have their foundation in lawfulness, every contingency must threaten a society which is no longer guaranteed by citizens.”[36]

It is true that Arendt maintains the importance of the presence of others, and she extended this perspective in the Human Condition into a double perspective, where the presence of the others secures both the identity of oneself and the reality of the world: “The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear, assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves” (HC, p. 50). But it would be misunderstanding Arendt to conclude that she was a friend of any form of global society. On the contrary, she objected to all kinds of world government. In her speech for Karl Jaspers, she maintained that “nobody can be a citizen of the world as he is the citizen of his country.”[37]

_______________

1. For more infomration about the “Ideas of 1914,” see Klemens von Klemperer, Konservative Bewegungen. Zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Munich: 1957), esp. pp. 55-80.

2. See Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Hannah Arendt – Essays in Understanding 1930-1954 (New York: Harcourt, 1994), pp. 307-327 (originally published in Partisan Review, XX/4, July-August 1953, 377-392).

3. Hannah Arendt – Karl Jaspers. Briefwechsel 1926-1969, ed. by Lotte Kühler and Hans Saner (Munich: Piper: 1993), p. 202.

4. Ernst Troeltsch, “Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit” (1916), in Deutscher Geist und Westeuropa. Gesammelte kulturphilosophische Aufsätze und Reden, ed. by Hans Baron (Tübingen: Siebeck, 1925), p. 81.

5. Ibid., p. 81.

6. Ibid., p. 83.

7. Ibid., p. 93f.

8. Ibid., p. 44.

9. Ibid., p. 48.

10. Ibid., p. 94.

11. Ibid., p. 96.

12. Paul Natorp, “Uber den gegenwäartigen Krieg. Brief enies deutschen Universitäatsprofessors an einen amerikanischen Kollegen,” in Der Tag des Deutschen. Vier Kriegsaufsätze (Hagen i. W.: Verlag Otto Rippel, 1915), p. 22.

13. Paul Natorp, “Von der Gerechtigkeit unserer Sache. Ein Wort an unsere Brüder im Felde,” in Der Tag des Deutschen, op. cit., p. 76.

14. Ibid.

15. Paul Natorp, “Die grosse Stunde – was sie der Jugend kündet,” in Der Tag des Deutschen, op. cit., p. 40f.

16. Paul Natorp, Deutscher Weltberuf. Erstes Buch: Die Weltalter des Geistes (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1918), p. 2.

17. Ibid., p. 55.

18. Ibid., p. 95.

19. Ibid., p. 131.

20. Ibid., p. 20.

21. Martin Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz. Marburger Vorlesung Sommersemester 1928 [Collected Works, vol. 26], ed. Klaus Held (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), p. 247. In the following cited as MA in the text. For the translation of the Heidegger quotations I am indebted to Theodore Kisiel.

22. See Theodore Kisiel, “Wie nahm Heidegger die philosophischen Kriegsschriften 1914-1918 auf?” Paper presented at the Conference, Zeitanalyse und Kulturkritik in der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts: I. Die Jahre 1900-1918. Inter-University Centre Dubrovnik, Croatia (June 29, 2001).

23. Martin Heidegger, “Die deutsche Universität (Zwei Vorträge in den Ausländerkursen der Freiburger Universität, 15. und 16. August 1934)” in Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges 1910-1976 [Collected Works, vol. 16], ed. by Hermann Heidegger (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), p. 300.

24. Other such early stages of the totalitarianism theory include her review of David Dallin’s and Boris I. Nicolaevsky’s, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, in The Review of Politics 11/1 (January, 1949), pp. 112-115; “Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps,” in Jewish Social Studies 12/1 (1950), pp. 49-64; “Race-Thinking Before Racism,” in The Review of Politics VI (January, 1944), pp. 36-7; and “Imperialism: Road to Suicide. The Political Origins and Use of Racism,” in Commentary 1/4, 1945-46, pp. 27-35.

25. Arendt, “Approaches to the ‘German Problem,'” p. 110.

26. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1985). In the following cited as OT.

27. See also Hannah Arendt, “Race-Thinking Before Racism,” in The Review of Politics, VI/1 (January, 1944), especially pp. 50-54.

28. Hannah Arendt, “The Nation”, in Hannah Arendt. Essays in Understanding 1930-1954, 208 (originally published in The Review of Politics, VIII/1 (January, 1946), pp. 138-141.

29. Ibid., p. 210.

30. For Arendt’s understanding of the concept of the nation and its decline, see her “Imperialism, Nationalism, Chauvinism,” in The Review of Politics, VII/4 (Oct. 1945), pp. 441-463.

31. Hannah Arendt, “The Rights of Man,” in Modern Review 3 (Summer 1949-1950), p. 24. In the following cited as RM.

32. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). In the following cited as HC.

33. Ibid., p. 154.

34. For the importance of laws and institutions to guarantee a minimum of security in the realm of the “fragility of human affairs,” see Peg Birmingham, “Holes of Oblivion: the Banality of Radical Evil,” Hypatia, 18/1 (Winter 2003), pp. 80-103.

35. Hannah Arendt, Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, ed. by Ursula Ludz, with an Introduction by Kurt Sontheimer (Munich: Piper, 1993), p. 89.

36. Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” p. 315.

37. Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” op. cit., p. 81.