The Importance of Being Germany

dThe far-right Allianz für Deutschland, which has had seats in the Bundestag for a while now, has won some new local elections. At 20 per cent support, it is the second-most popular party in the former East German lands, not far behind Kanzler Scholz’s Socialists (SPD), who lead an awkward GroKo with the Greens and FDP (fiscal conservatives). The main Conservatives (CDU) once swore never to co-operate with AfD but, out of office, are alternately mulling and denying such plans. Berlin’s political classes, possibly the world’s most educated, are taking notice.¹

Events faintly recall Germany’s last “traffic light” coalition, which also made a U-turn on defence spending. The Chancellor then was Gerhart Schröder; environment was Angela Merkel; and foreign affairs Joschka Fischer. The “red-black-green” Groko was a first with Greens, first to cut welfare, first to send troops out of Germany (to the Balkans). “Never yet,” mused the Austrian novelist Robert Musil last century, was there “an opposition that didn’t change its tune when it took over the helm”.²

Germany nonetheless ended the Kohl/Schröder/Merkel era a prosperous, modern democratic republic. Kohl’s appointment with destiny secured German re-unification over fierce opposition from France, England and his fellow citizens in West Germany, with support or acquiescence from those whose business it was to decide, America and Russia.³ Living between two worlds, East and West, Merkel was afterwards virulent on principles, ruthless on political attack and with rare exceptions reticent on further experiment. She made it her job to ensure Germany held serve and kept the advantage, not only over the French.⁴

German advantage was and still is top-class scientific and technological research, serving clusters of small or medium size firms—Mittelstand—more numerous and evenly spread here than anywhere else, twice as many as France, a quarter more than Italy, many or most with an export vocation. This Germany is liberal, not neo-liberal; workers share in management. And contrary to Kissinger, Germany has not proven too large but just right for Europe in crisis and big enough for the world, or at least for the Chinese car market, the world’s biggest. Democratic succession is slow but secure and orderly—nothing to be sniffed at when threats to democracy arise in Western democratic heartlands, even coming to be a little feared in parts of Germany today. Yet constitution and court in Karlsruhe have held firm when tried by populist far-right abuses. In 2022, Germany was voted the world’s most popular country for the fourth year in a row. Heinrich Winkler, a modern German historian, judged that Kohl and Merkel had left Germany a stable nation anchored to the West.⁵

It was not always thus. When asked about Germany, Goethe and Schiller both responded, “Where’s Germany?”⁶ The country has not always been part of the West nor for most of history a democracy, or even Germany, but a magic lantern of secular or religious rulers conceding authority to none, serial empire builders inside and outside Germany. Kaiser or König; chivalrous or robber Knecht; devout or lawless Kreuzfahrer; free Bürger; Mönch devout or not; or university professor; all saw nationhood a tale of sound and fury signifying second-best. Empire was all. These Germans saw no importance in being Germany.

How came things so? Thomas Nipperdy’s vast three-tome Deutsche Geschichte says that in the beginning was Napoleon.⁷ But this is not true. In the beginning was ice.

Mile-deep sheets of it covered the Northern European Plains until 20,000 years ago. Along the melt-lines formed rich soils, forests and meadows, thinning in the north to sand, bog and waste. Out of the Caucasus-Crimea basin, home of Indo-European affairs for Ice Age aeons, waves of longheads, shortheads and other heads swept onto the plains, blessed by the All-Good Creator God Djêus—Wôdan/Odhin came later. Volatilising all in their path, they killed off the mammoth, bred wolves into dogs, oxen into manual labourers, pigs into larders, and sitting astride horses, declared unilateral victory over all other animals.⁸ Heidelberg Man long gone, invaders put paid to Neanderthal Man, resisted the Romans, put paid to Rome and—there was no alternative—overran England, Italy, France … America. Latinised, they spawned the nations, United Nations, European Union, Davos Man, Man on the Moon … Gothic, Langobard, Jute, Frisian … the importance of being German was the same as being English, Italian, French … all are mixed peoples or, as the English can let slip, bastards.⁹

It should be noted in passing here that the rise of Homo sapiens sapiens in Eurasia ran broadly parallel elsewhere, in Iran and India (“Eastern” Indo-Europeans), and also in Egypt, Turkey and China. Easterners evolved continuous civilisations based on cities, mathematics, science and literacy; Europe alone had a thousand-year Dark Age gap in civilisation following Rome’s collapse, a catastrophe (for Europe) that left China the world’s leading power until 1800—perhaps again sometime, they hope. African and Pacific peoples, living in Ice Age isolation outside this rim, rarely or never developed maths, science and literacy. Pre-Bronze Age cultures, they evolved that well-observed “communal”—less individual—worldview expressed in lives of ease in the slow lane, the giving and forgiving tropical or sub-tropical vegetative belt that stretches across Africa, South Asia, Australasia, the Pacific and Latin America.¹⁰

Affairs yet have unintended consequences. DNA is keenly researched and astonishing among the mixed, less researched, even dull, in the pure.¹¹ Another is differential cultural history. After millennia of poverty, then the collapse of Rome, Europeans revived to invent what is actually a “tertiary” civilisation built on, and partly from, the ruins of earlier Graeco-Romans and Assyro-Egyptians. The “West” is not of single cloth but a patchwork of Graeco-Latin, Indo-Germanic, Indo-Iranian, Arabic, North African and even older elements; that is its strength. Civilisations of the pure are “primary” with parts stamped in the same tropical womb; that is their weakness. A Wallace Line of non-elective affinities divides history’s post-Bronze Age cultures from the rest. Energy, hubris and a race to far horizons mark the historical West; an “eternal present”—the sacral spell of old age, communal myth, language and religion—typifies the latter. The currents surge again today. The clash of civilisations revives as millions in search of strange gods walk the line, cross and fragment it.¹²

Back in Europe, German exceptionalism—the Sonderweg—appeared early. The first map of Germania, named by Tacitus, a Roman historian, showed slim strips of colonies on the Rhine and Danube then a flat white blank north-east to the Elbe, the edge (not Tacitus’s words) of “Good Germany”. In an age of walls, like our own, the Romans built a 600-kilometre line of forts from Cologne to Ravensburg, still visible today, to keep out “Bad Germany” in the east. Wild things hunted and killed there, so the stories told. True or not, vasty white spaces to the Urals were flat: Romans thus knew where Germania began but not where Germania ended.¹³ Defeated by the tribes at Teuton Berg forest, the battle to end all battles, Romans lost interest in knowing. Those who do not believe geography is fate must change their belief.

Colonisers are always re-colonised. The Iranian King of Kings did it to Greeks before they did it to him, a wisdom overlooked by Romans, and later Britain and France. Huns from the East began to hunt and kill German tribes—stories were true—driving them south to Rome, where they sought help, were refused, and sacked Rome. In the ruins, Germans found and kept the Eagle of Empire and Emperor—“Protector of the Christian World Mission”—a Janus-faced raptor looking both East and West. Russians later found the same symbol in Constantinople, and also kept it. Germans and Russians both inherited “Caesarism”, universal power beyond and above all laws, including their own, an idea revived recently if briefly in America, today in Russia.¹⁴ The Carolingian empire (which was run by British monastics) was less anchor than cradle of the West: humanism, as Petrarch recognised, spread first from France to Italy.

“Empire First”, good for the cult of empire, is bad for the cult of nation. It led Germany to a thousand years of war in Italy and to repress cries of “Spain First”, “France First” and “England First” in the West, the same for Czechs, Poles and Hungarians in the East. At the same time—and down to quite modern times—calls for “Germany First” (which one?) were smothered by calls of “Mine First” from independent princes, crusading knights, lay and clerical nobles, monasteries, free towns, burghers, moneymen, guilds and trading houses.

Meanwhile, outside Germany, remnants of the Knights Templar re-awakened in Prussia’s Far East. Their early mission had been war in the white eastern spaces to convert Slavs (an early dry run at globalisation, also followed by Pope Alexander VI when he divided the world’s other white spaces between Spain and Portugal). Mongols and Russians pushed back. Mission dwindled, turned into war to defend the West, then fizzled. Prussian remnants in Königsberg (Russian Kaliningrad today) then re-fired, raced West to the Oder, and on to the Elbe.¹⁵ Napoleon stamped out flames in Berlin but failed to douse the embers, a mistake of Napoleonic dimensions. Reigniting, flames ran on, consumed the Latin Rhineland, Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, parts of Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Italy and French vintages laid down in cellars at Versailles. In the chateaus, eyes shot out of noble wall portraits then flickered anew; sometimes you see these places as Prussian, sometimes you don’t. The Allies, narrow victors in 1945, abolished Prussia and set Germany back on the Elbe, like Tacitus and Petrarch millennia ago. Eastern mission all but destroyed the West. Those who do not believe in the laws of Eternal Return must change their belief.¹⁶

Germany’s political status shifted with borders. To Tacitus, Germany was a colony of unknown (to Tacitus) ever-moving Germanic tribes—Franks, Angles, Jutes, Goths, Frisians … A thousand years ago, Germany was the Carolingian Frankish empire, “Germans”, as the French south of Lyons and west of Rennes still sometimes say of northern French, also Scots of the English. Seven centuries ago, Germany was the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation”, its main court in sunny Italy, as far as possible from Germany, and strategic half-way mark to Byzantium and Jerusalem. Four centuries ago, in the Thirty Years War, Germany was the politico-religious battlefield of choice for German and non-German princes of the realm.

Germany then dissolved into hundreds of mutually suspicious duchies, some no bigger than a modern lifestyle block. Most or all were bitter enemies of Prussia, which overran them from the north at the same time the Austrian empire withdrew from the south. Prussia “grew into Germany” as Austria “grew out of Germany”, says Heinrich Winkler, meaning Germany “became Prussian but could have become Austrian”. Beaten in the First World War, Prussian Germany ceded to Weimar Germany, an isolated lifestyle block, and for a time became a democratic republic with a wider suffrage than France or England. It was destroyed in 1933 when Hitler and remnants of the old Prussian elite set up the Third Reich. Divided after the Second World War, West Germany became a post-national “body-part” inside a “post-national” European Union body (Habermas); East Germany was even less in the communist zone.¹⁷

Losing your state once may be reckoned misfortune but losing it twice begins to look like carelessness. Reunited in 1990, the Fatherland became a nation for the third time and has since acted with more caution, realism and perhaps wisdom than everyone in Europe and America has always liked.

So much for life the Sonderweg fast lane. What about the inside lane? What was that like?

The ascent of the authoritarian mind in Germany and Europe is a tale often told through the rise and fall of Luther, Frederick the Great, Bismarck and other “Great Men” of history. But Hegel and Tolstoy rated the “Spirit of the Times” and “Spirit of the People” more important than Great Men. Both wrote tomes proving great men were not great.

The Twin Spirits had made something of a comeback in medieval mysticism, again marking an internal Wallace Line between Western, Central and Eastern Europe. Ideas of mystic “pneumatic” personal communion with the deity trace back to the early Middle Eastern sects, heretical to both Eastern and Latin churches. Amid charges of official church corruption, sects fed off new bouts of Europe-wide social malaise—think Wycliffe, Ball and Hus. New Latin humanism tempered these forces in northern France, the Low Countries, Rhinelands and Britain but not eastern Germany, further east or in Russia. Eckhart, Tauler, Deutsche Theologie channelled Eastern “pietism”—passivity even in the face of corrupt rule and brutal repression from princes secular and religious, and many (though not all) city authorities. In one of history’s great ironies, Luther, an Augustinian monk who absorbed mysticism with his orthodox learning, rejected all earthly authority, secular and religious, but unleashed so much anarchy he was forced to gift absolute secular powers to rulers. Henry VIII, Louis XIV, Frederick the Great, tsars ancient and modern, accepted the gift without irony. In Germany—as in Russia—earthly rule was kept to a tiny ruling caste, driving peoples into an “inner migration” of prayer and/or “Nicodemism” (studied duplicity) when questioned by authorities. German folk introspection, docility and conformity are rooted here.

Excesses of authoritarianism led the Spirit of Reason to impose her rule until excesses of reason in revolutionary America and France restored authority, in England called “progressive conservatism”. Masking their Latin sources, Blackstone and Burke defined this as English national genius as revealed to the English folk in common law and democracy.¹⁸

National genius was then discovered outside England, not something England had meant at all. Blackstone’s eighteenth-century Commentary on English Laws was authority in America, that most Anglo-Teutonic of countries, as late as Lincoln’s day. European neo-conservative genius led straight to “authoritarian progressivism” in Robespierre and Hegel, and on to yet another revival of German mysticism in Herder, Schiller, Fichte, Savigny and Treitschke.

Herder, a well-educated Romantic, blended folk mysticism and high culture. He founded an early version of nationalism based on language and descent, unlike, say, the sceptical French who founded theirs on rivers and mountains, believing them far more real than culture. Hegel, a philosophy professor, inverted English ideas of “community, custom and law”. These were real, granted, but the Prime Mover (he claimed) was not the folk but the “World Spirit” yearning to “perfect” itself in a “Nation-State”. Fichte altered “community” of the folk to mean “patriotism in a closed state”. Schopenhauer dismissed the law professors as Windbeutel (windbags) and Scharlatan. He replaced the World Spirit with his personal Spirit of Pessimism, and authoritarianism with English ideas of limited open government and rule of law. This last was disingenuous. He was not a liberal but a seventeenth-century libertarian.

Law professors defended themselves by not reading Schopenhauer. Savigny, founder of the German “historical” school of jurisprudence, kept the English idea of “tradition and progress” as intuited by national genius without the parts about “democracy”, which he thought not likely to have the right intuitions, and “common law”, feckless compared to “positive sovereign commands”. Treitschke, another law professor, agreed with intuitions, orders and laws provided they were his. In his tenured Berlin University study, he made decisions about Prussia for decades, had access to Potsdam and visited often. His Politics was to Bismarck what Machiavelli’s Prince was to the Borgias. These professors had truly colossal egos; all came from the white spaces east of the Elbe (Hegel from “superstitious” Swabia). Treitschke was a trial model of the police state shortly mechanised by Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler.¹⁹

World Spirit might explain the character of peoples living at different times and the National Spirit that of different peoples living at the same time. But does National Character change?

Schopenhauer, who once claimed all thought lay in the art of saying no, said no. For him, the character of peoples, individuals too for that matter, was a priori, an enduring and immutable given. That was why, he said, individuals as well as nations were ineducable. “Despite all changes in external fortune, each people bears its own invariable character and in this sense performs only a series of variations upon a theme. None can step out of his character.” Nor, as Goethe put it, presumably his “luck” or “personality”. A hundred years on, the Chair of the German Science Advisory seems to have agreed; he told Werner Heisenberg, a nuclear physicist, “we cannot hope to alter the character of the German people”.²⁰ All this may be bad news for Jared Diamond, who today wants the nations to take political therapy sessions with each other, seemingly unaware or deterred that was Napoleon’s idea.

Evidence for Diamond and Napoleon is mixed. Treitschke held Germans “more independent of the French and the British than they were 700 years ago” but this was plainly untrue.

About 1230, Bartholomew, an English Minorite (Franciscan), found Germany unusually independent, “rich in towns and mines, and the people tall, fair, fierce and warlike” while the French found them “wild, uncouth warriors”. This friendly jousting caught on. Germans mocked French “vanity of appearance”; Anna Comnena, a Greek princess who knew French crusaders well, called the French “barbarians” and Friar Salimbene of Ferrara was on the side of Germans—French, he said, were pleasant enough if praised but, if not, haughty and apt to despise the English and—unkind this—Italians. Freidank, a Swabian minstrel, let on Italians hated Germans so much they preferred Jerusalem in infidel to German hands. Snarkily, he hinted the coming Antichrist would find “many followers” among German nobility. Alexander of Roes (actually from Cologne), a cleric, tried to resolve conflict with diplomacy: Germans were “noble warriors”, Italians were astute capitalists and the French fine scholars. Honeyed peace is always short. Conrad of Megenburg (a Franconian—that is, a Bavarian), broke out that Germans were men of deeds, not words, unlike French who were superior only in “feminine” matters of chivalry, luxury and vanity—a view of the French revived by America in 2003. By the 1400s, Conrad Keyser, a military engineer, was taking his steer from Cologne. He praised English wealth, French manners, Italian craftiness (a backhander this), brave German soldiers, German engineering (Gutenberg) and Hanseatic free trade. By Renaissance times Germany was richer and more liberal than England. Pius II (Piccolomini, a child prodigy) extolled the order and rule in German towns, duchies and monasteries (“German Particularism”), which made Germany a liberal trader—and cash cow for his Papacy.

This German liberalism, however, was driven by notions of empire among rulers, self-protection among traders, and the passivity or “inner migration” of common folk, who prized real private independence over illusory public rights. Folk and rulers alike misread the times. These very preferences kept Germany out of the mercantilist rush for global markets sparked voyages of discovery in the Renaissance—the true date History ended as the pendulum has ever since swung between liberalism and mercantilism. Status and morale in Germany worsened in the brutal civil disorder of the Thirty Years War of Religion. Ancient rivalries also show national identity was neither a Renaissance nor a nineteenth-century invention, and that Germany was more independent of France and England 700 years ago.²¹

National history can mislead. Golo Mann thought Germans docile and easily led because the Thirty Years War of Religion had imprinted horror upon the national psyche, a view Arthur Schlesinger re-popularised in the 1960s Anglosphere. The war was horrific. Doubters may see thirty years of mass murder, rape and pillage depicted in Callot’s contemporary etchings. But this does not accord with the nature of the human spirit. Enlightenment Germany was a land of progress and optimism spot-lit by first-rate science, historiography, philosophy, literature and music—with German Jews, incidentally, to the fore. This was in a full-blown “police state” in the original sense of the term, that is, a land ruled by science-based laws of public order as were France and England (largely). The German nineteenth century was a repeat show. Discoveries and inventions by Humboldt, Liebig, Benz and Diesel led global technology. This can, though, be misleading. Only a minority shared in the gains; poor folk left for America in their millions, and persons of German descent are still America’s single biggest ethnic group (English are second). History alone cannot explain differences of worldview between nations of the same kind—or even within the same family, think Uncle Teddy and nevvie Willy, the riddle at Germany’s heart.²²

Can first-rate science, philosophy and literature do the job? Germaine (Mme) de Stael, daughter of the Swiss Baron Necker, Louis XVI’s finance minister, and an important figure in the history of ideas, thought so: “to get an idea of any national character, it is necessary to study their key literary and cultural works”. De l’Allemagne is a tour de force, acute, generous and probably still the best single analysis of the German mind. German Men Sit Down to Pee is funnier but likely to fade faster than de Stael (who omits this detail).²³

Over 650 densely reasoned pages, de Stael reviews and on the evidence proves Germany’s “startling originality”, shown in Luther, Kant, Herder, Goethe and Schiller among many others. None was from a “school”, all were “individuals”, judging all things boldly by their own “impression of the thing” independently of any law and not according to social codes like the French, or practical codes like the English (nor, one may add, did any judge by steely Spanish codes of honour). Germans had vast reserves of intellectual drive. They were physically striking, as Dürer’s raw-boned self-portrait shows, some men seven feet tall. In songs and tales German women carry heavier loads than men, whose musical gifts yet allow them to play graceful music while women work. But, concluded de Stael, practical results were lacking. Germany was a land of “individual excellences where each individual excellence was larger than the sum”. She hoped for results “commensurate with gifts” but found this not so. She found Germans matchlessly bold in theory, crude in criticism and far more cautious and even realistic in practice than she wanted.²⁴ Dazzling individual achievements came at the cost of national ego, pride and vanity.

Schopenhauer and his heretical disciple, Nietzsche, the Spirit of Optimism, dismissed de Stael. For Schopenhauer, she was too generous and underestimated German duplicity: a genius can never have an original idea, only show old ideas in a new or “strange” light, a view Schopenhauer’s older friend Goethe also expressed without, moreover, claiming originality.²⁵

Nietzsche said studying ideas and culture won’t work for Germany: Luther was “misinformed”; “poor, surprising Schiller” wrote for dreamy youths; Kant and Hegel were delusive, pursued by ghosts of Christianity past. (Goethe Schiller once thought of helping Hegel, whose prose is notoriously complex, write more clearly but gave up when they realised they might not understand his reply.)

Goethe, Nietzsche added, was a “Universal Genius” but that didn’t make him “German”.²⁶ Mozart belonged at Louis XIV’s court. Beethoven, the reactionary’s reactionary, passed muster but, “Who’d listen that sort of stuff in ten years?”²⁶

Germans were too diverse to be summed up, said Nietzsche. Berliners were open, good-humoured teases, a quality hated by Süddies, who prefer warm home comforts— Rindsrouladen mit Spätzle and Gemütlichkeit are still on offer there. Swabians flirt, fall in love, often—think Goethe—in immoral love. East German Thüringen and Saxony produced dangerous free-thinkers (Copernicus, Luther, Kant, Nietzsche …), Hamburg invented Anglomania. Swabia and Mecklenburg, very different regions, have a long history of intermarriage. Close links to Russia exist. Germany once sent Russia generals, department chiefs, professors, noble wives, business managers, while Russians responded by colonising East German towns, much as depicted in Smoke by Turgenev. Today’s multikulti Germany may be still more difficult to sum up. Migrants crossing the Wallace Line form sub-cultures in towns, cities and regions and fragment the fragments of the Heimat. Yet Turks, many now with entire lives spent in Germany, look, speak and sound German. A few years on from 2016, two thirds of a million Syrian refugees are “autonom”—full German-speakers in jobs freed up by Germany’s demographic crisis. Some brilliant graduates are starting their rise through Germany’s higher research institutions. Ukrainian refugees are next in line. The riddle remains.²⁷

So, where is Germany? Start with the national character which, like all character, has its inner and outer dimensions. Everyone, as Jung (following Schopenhauer) showed, is “competent” in both directions but “prefers” one or the other. The outer-oriented character, subject of a famous book by David Riesman on Americans last century, actually takes similar forms everywhere: individuals are driven or overdriven by the same joys, fears and daily scheduling problems.²⁸ If he is right, Anglo-American outer-directed and German inner-directed ones exist in both countries. Proof would take a Riesman-size book and might in the end show the idea of nations to be irrelevant, or as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer thought, “illusions”. But people, if wise, added Nietzsche, would surely play along with the idea. A couple of examples favourable to the idea of national spirit may serve, while the jury decides.

Evidence of Germany’s war crimes is preserved in public monuments—open to tourists—to prompt national reflection on how Sonderwege can afford Sondererlaubnisse (exceptional licence). No other country has reflected as much.

France has begun facing its Second World War Jewish record; Spain has barely started with Fascism, Italy not at all. Russia rehabilitates Stalin with a vengeance; China, Mao; Japan, war shrines; America is silent on Hiroshima; nationalist India can raze Muslim shrines. German public mood still rejects Nationalismus, a tarnished word there, but minds are now turning toward Nation and to the “meaning of history”.²⁹ Writers who today rate Germany a “grown-up” country may see no role there for counselling by Diamond.

Again, new Big Bang theory has its roots in German mysticism. Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Einstein read Kant and Schopenhauer, and said they were taught by them to think differently about the nature of reality, physical laws and the Universe—stranger than we know, stranger than we can know.³⁰ Having grown up in a folk atmosphere drenched in Eastern mysticism linking them to Eckhart and disciples, Kant and Schopenhauer in effect lived between East and West. Quantum physics replaced (Aristotle’s) literary questions—Who are we? Where did we come from? and Where are we going?—with the arguably more crucial, Where are we? Goethe didn’t know, but it got worse. Nietzsche couldn’t find the Universe:

Who gave us the sponge to rub out the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this Earth from its Sun? Where is Earth now moving to? Where are we moving to? … Are we not continually falling? … Are we not straying through an unending nothing? ³¹

The English joke that Germans see more deeply into reality than anyone else. But the English are perhaps more often right than wrong.

Ultimately, the roots of German exceptionalism lie in different habits of language, thought and manners. The Romanised West—Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and the British Isles—has a dense Latinate layer (disguised in English) worn smooth by centuries of use. Germany was never fully Romanised, Russia not at all. Rough-hewn Ancient Greek shows through a thin Latin layer in German; German harshness contrasts with lush Latin or Russian. German thought was once anchored to the East, open to inflows of Eastern mysticism, Slavs, Russians and centuries of refugees from political or Eastern Orthodox Church persecution, or both. The German mind has always looked East as well as West, a power-broker in engineering, physics and metaphysics, probing the line between conceptual and ineffable (Wittgenstein). In the “Great Conversation” of ideas in the West, this is the importance of being Germany.

So don’t close the file. From Geneva’s CERN, once headed by Heisenberg, comes word that in the beginning was the sub-atomic particle, emerging from mist, living a fraction, then vanishing. The international Space Station Mir reports a Universe without Borders and Infinity with no more a beginning than an end.³² The European Union’s new map of the Universe shows mainly black spaces, claims yet to be staked, judicial appeals yet to be made. In 700 years, we may still be hazy where the Universe is but down there on or East of the Elbe will be Germany, marking, crossing or transcending the East-West line, likely enough.

John Goodman is a former New Zealand diplomat and Visiting Scholar, Auckland University School of Law.

Endnotes

1 “Schwerpunkt, Nachrichten”, Deutschlandfunk ARD, 9 29 (UT), 28 July, 2023. The issues have been repeatedly analysed and commented upon as major news in successive days, as has the AfD’s choice of Maximilien Krah as their Spitzenkandidat for forthcoming European Parliament elections. Beside Krah, who wishes to abolish most or all EU institutions, Boris Johnson may eventually be rated a relative enthusiast for the EU.

2 Man Without Qualities Two, The Like of it Now Happens, II, (1932), Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser trans., London, 1954, p.415. Stereotypes of English and German mentalities have deep historical roots: James Hawes, Englanders and Huns, The Culture Clash Which Led to the First World War, London, 2014. Stereotypes were popularized early last century in the best-seller spy yarn The Riddle of the Sands, (1903) Penguin, 1952, by Erskine Childers, an Irishman who, ironically, was later executed as a traitor by the new Irish Republic. Ulrich Rauff (ed), Mentalitäten-Geschichten, Zur historischen Rekonstruktion geistiger Prozessse, Berlin, 1987, includes an essay by Peter Burke, an English historian, on the history of mentalities and its strengths and weaknesses.

3 Stereotypes of statesmen also run deep. In Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, (1818), (3rd edn 1859), Frankfurt am Main, 1998, II, 366, Schopenhaiuer observed that to be really liked a statesman must be “inferior in intellect or feign it” as nobody forgives the “crime of intellectual superiority” and will bring offenders down by any and all means. (Schopenhauer favoured small government and has been called a “pessimistic liberal” but he was really a libertarian, as in seventeenth century England.) G P Gooch, in Diplomacy and Statecraft, London, 1942, surveys founts of vanity, jealousy and naivety that he saw driving dubious ploys in diplomacy, such as ensuring proposals were both easy for leaders to understand and appear to be their own thoughts – a ploy untarnished by time, possibly. Benedetto Croce, a Liberal and anti-Fascist who played a key role in the restoration of post WWII Italian democracy, encountered the same thing; Croce, the King & the Allies, trans. Sylvia Sprigge, London 1950. Looking into statesmen’s diaries, Maurice Paléologue, a French ambassador, found conference times, dates and places often set according to imperatives of statesmen’s mistresses; Profils des femmes, Paris, 1895; Romanticisme et Diplomatie, Talleyrand, Metternich, Chateaubriand, Hachette, 1928. Charges of feigning may nevertheless be unjust: Frederick Gentz was openly Metternich’s right-hand man, did his thinking and wrote his papers, according to Raphael Cahen, Friedrich Gentz, 1764-1832, Penseur post-Lumières et acteur du nouvel ordre européen, Berlin/Boston, 2017. In a minor key, “Secret Counsellor Goethe” was known and called such in public – literary fame aside, he was in fact a government minister (of Roads and War) in Weimar. Much earlier, Theophrastus found a statesman “less real than his title”; in John Earle, Microcosmographie, (1628), London, 1849, p.104. like Seneca: Problemata, 30,1; Epistulae, 79, 17, cited by Schopenhauer.

4 In C‘était Merkel, Paris, 2021, Marion Van Renterghem emphasises Merkel’s life between two worlds, East and West, and highly original in Machiavellian political attack. In Die Kanzlerin, Porträt einer Epoche, Berlin, 2021, Ursula Weidenfeld’s line is not too dissimilar: for a start, she says, consider how Merkel gave up office of her own freewill, a conduct unvorstellbar (unimaginable) in any previous German chancellor. Robin Alexander also rates her highly, Macht Verfall, Merkels Ende und das Drama Deutschen Politik: ein Report, München, 2021. Katrin Bernholt reports, Olaf Scholz, Socialist leader of the new Ampel (traffic-light) coalition of Socialists, Greens and Liberals, knows he has big shoes to fill, and is making a start by imitating her mannerisms – modestly folded hands etc – in public; “He convinced voters he would be like Angela Merkel. But who is Olaf Scholz?”, NYT, 25 Nov 2021.

5 Heinrich August Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, Deutsche Geschichte, Band I 1806-1833, Bonn, 2002; Bd II Vom „Dritten Reich“ bis wur Wiedervereinigung“, München, 2002; Geschichte des Westens, Bd I, Von den Anfängen in der Antike bis zum 20. Jahhrhundert, München, 2009; Bd III Die Zeit der Gegenwart, München, 2015; Zerreissproben, Deutschland, Europa und der Western, Interventionen 1990-2015, München, 2015. „Democratie und Nation in der deutschen Geschichte“, in Streitfragen der deutschen Geschichte, München, 1997; David Blackbourn, History of Germany 1780-1918, The Long Nineteenth Century, Oxford, 1997; Wolfgang Hardtwig et al (ed), Deutsche Entfremdung, Zum Befinden in Ost und West, München, 1994; Gordon Craig, Germany 1866-1945, Oxford, 1978. “Waking Europe’s Sleeping Giant, Reunified Germany 30 years on”, The Economist, October 3^rd, 2020, pp.43-44.

6 “Deutschland? Aber wo liegt es?/Ich weiss das Land nicht zu finden”, Goethe and Schiller, Xenien.

7 Deutsche Geschichte 1866-1918, Band I, Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist; Band II, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie; Band III, Bürgerwelt und starker Staat; München, 1998.

8 Jessica Serra, La Bête en nous, Paris, 2021. The “Supream Creator” later said to Man “you ought to be Lord of all Creatures, and not a Slave to them, they ought to follow you, and not you be attracted by them” but this caution was not then in force; in Balthasar Gracian, The Spanish Critick (1651), London, trans.1681, p13. Scientific books on the continuity between human and animal species continue to pour off the presses: Eva Meijer, Animal Languages (2016), Laura Watkinson (trans.) London, 2019. These mainly report new experiments confirming centuries-old observations, going back to Buffon and beyond to Aristotle.

9 The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. I, Pts I, 2A & 2B, Cambridge, Third Edition, 1970. Conjecture is that the Indo-Germanics divided into their separate tribes, languages and cultures in Europe about 3,000 BCE. H A L Fisher says early Europe came to be dominated by “new combinations” of Indo-European invaders, whose collective memory of culture and religions was shared with Iranians and Indians, and archaic Mediterranean peoples of different memory: “Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels”, A History of Europe, London, 1936. p.12. Apart from large brain-size, there seems no full explanation for distinctive mental energy, but according to anthropologists, one factor may be meat-eating – not a significant feature of other cultures until recently as, unlike Indo-European carnivores, ancient Mexican and other cannibalistic societies had few or no domestic animals, and satisfied meat craving by wars to entrap and eat other humans, of whom there was ever only limited supply. There was never a single Indo-European “race’” or even language as such, a conclusion reached first (ironically in view of Hitlers’ later absurdities) by scholarship in Germany: Paul Kretschmer, Einleitung in die Geschichte der griechischen Sprache, Göttingen, 1896. Indo-European peoples are associated merely because European, Iranian and Sanskrit language, culture and religion are cognate, explicable simply by originally close geographical proximity; for example, Zeus (Greek), Jupiter (Latin), Tiwaz (Germany), Tir (England), and Freyer (Nordics) are parallel gestalts of the Indo-European, Djêus, an All-Wise, Creator God, like all Sky-Gods, an ethical construct correlative with the psychological dependency of all humans. On inter-relations between Indo-Iranian-European, Turkish, Arabic and Semitic language stems, cultures and religions: Herman Hirt, Die Indogermanen, 2 Bde, Strassburg, 1905-1907; Harold Bender, The Home of the Indo-Europeans, An Investigation Based on Language and History (1922), 2018. On the linguistics – where there is no people, there is no language – Otto Jespersen, Language, its Nature, Development and Origin, London, 1923; R B Onians, The Origins of European Thought (1940), Cambridge, 1951, consider the traditional evidence along with links to Old Norse, Celtic, Jewish, Indian and Chinese sources (some Ancient Greek is helpful for reading this book as Onians uses the Greek alphabet for key concepts throughout his text). Languages are short-lived: Classical Greek and Classical Latin for example lasted roughly 500 years; modern English, nudging 400 years, bears little or no relation to Old English, a mix of invaders’ Old Frisian and Jutish, or even Middle English, repressed by the Norman invaders’ Old French; linguists regard English today as breaking up into regional forms, like Latin at the end of the Middle Ages. In Göttingen, down to the nineteenth century, an annual swordfight among students wearing their tribal colours re-enacted the ancient “Great Migration of the Nations” – Vandals, Frisians, Goths, Saxons, Teutons etc – a real life-threatening test entailing severe injuries for life; in Three Men on a Bummel, Jerome K Jerome notes savage duelling in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century still. Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language, the Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, Penguin, 1987, broadens the origins of Europeans, including Mediterranean Europeans, to the Anatolian Plateau and Kurgan Steppe. Recent illustrative and specialist research is vast: Barry Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, 9000BC- AD 1000, New Haven and London, 2008, Chs 4-6, and bibliography.

10 Marvin Harris, Our Kind, The Evolution of Human Life and Culture; New York, 1989; Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, The Riddles of Culture, New York, 1974; Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Vol I Primitive Mythology New York, 1962; Vol II Oriental Mythology, New York, 1962; C G Jung „Über die Archetypen des kollektiven Unbewußten” (1934), in Archetypen, München, 2001, s.7-44.

11 Sophie Bernard, « Les groupes sanguins des hommes préhistoriques dévoilés » France Inter, 29 juillet 2021, 05 19 UT. Vera Pache, „Die Genie der Barbaren”, Deutschlandfunk Kutur, 25 Juli 2021, 16 30 UT; Volker Wildermuth, „ Es gibt keine nationale DNA“, DLF (Archiv), 27 Juli 2120; Dirk Lorenzen, „Was stimmt nicht mit der Expansion des Universums?“, DLF Wissenschaft (Archiv), 6 Juni 2021. Luuk Van Middelaar, The Passage to Europe How a Continent became a Union, (Liz Waters trans.) New Haven, (2013), 2020.

12 Schopenhauer summarizes the basic archaeological and textual scholarship on religions in “Über Religion”, Parerga und Paralipomena, (1850), II, Band V/I, Frankfurt am Main, 1986, pp. 382- 466; and “Über die Grundlage der Moral,” 1840, Kleinere Schriften, Band III, Frankfurt am Main, 1986, pp.776-780; he criticizes Hebrew religions for creating an unbridgeable gulf between humanity and other living beings, a distinction not present, he claims, in the Indo-European Vedic, and dismissed by comparative zoology and anatomy science from the eighteenth century on (also today, see for example footnote 10). In original Vedic, he reports that the roots of religions – and their transmission to Iranians and Egyptians – thence to the Hebrews – did not assert this gap. (Schopenhauer’s neighbour in Dresden was a leading Sanskrit scholar, but Schopenhauer, never in India, seems unaware of the sequence of historical change in Vedic which enabled Brahmanism, initially defeated by Buddhism, to win in the end; today, despite laws to the contrary, Brahminism with unbridgeable, at times cruel, lines of “caste” still rules in India (just as Vedic is the root of the paler European “class” system). Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood, Religion and the History of Violence, London, 2014, includes modern research on the circulation of these religious ideas in the Indo/Euro-sphere and Asia. On the origins of civilization and transfers between them: Jack Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many, Cambridge, 2010, makes clear backward Europe’s vast indebtedness to Turkey, Islam, Iran, India and China, and Jean Pruvost, Nos ancêtres les arabes, 2017 for Arabia; Richard E Nisbett, The Geography of Thought, London, 2003; Hayden V White, The Greco-Roman Tradition, New York, 1973; John B Christopher, The Islamic Tradition, New York, 1972; J H Hexter, The Judeo-Christian Tradition, New York, 1966; Milton Covensky, The Ancient Near East Tradition, New York, 1966; Robert Anchor, The Enlightenment Tradition, Berkeley, 1979; Martin Bernal, Black Athena, the Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, New Brunswick, 1987; Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization, (1955, 1967); (ed. and trans. Mercer Cook), Chicago, 1974. The older Oxford “Heritage” series, eg The Heritage of Persia etc, is still useful, and like most older books, has the advantage of not being written to prove post-modern theories. In civilization and culture studies, confusions seeded by old studies promoting myths of race, such as the Nazi myth of Nordic origins need to be avoided, as well as new myths putting genetic science to work in the culture wars, such as Angela Saini, Superior, The Return of Race Science, London, 2020; Robert Weld Sussman, The Myth of Race. The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Concept, Harvard, 2016. Genetics relates to population and related sciences; it may confirm linguistic, archaeological, anthropological etc evidence but in cultural studies is just one analytic tool.

13 Tim Marshall, Divided, Why We’re Living in an Age of Walls, London, 2018.

14 The idea of “Protector” or Katechon derives from a misunderstanding of II Thessalonians 2, where Paul relates that as long as power – the Empire – endures, the Antichrist cannot prevail, and the “last days” before Christ’s return will not occur. Medieval kings of Spain, France and England accepted the Kaiser as primus inter pares arbitrating international war and peace but objected to his claims inside their countries, and by Renaissance times, rejected it entirely. The idea survived in the Christian Mission of the German Knights Templar, a crusading diaspora, which founded the Prussian Empire of Kaisers and military castes in the East, in what is now northern Poland/Lithuania. They answered the West’s catch-cry of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” with their own “Order, Inheritance and Fortitude”. Austro-German Hitler side-lined Prussian elites but kept a (perverted) idea of Mission alive until his defeat in 1945. The idea is also at the base of Eastern Christianity; “Absolutism, Order and Orthodoxy” still informs Russian ideas of government, laws and courts as subordinate to the Ruler – as do similar autocratic ideas elsewhere in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, most recently in Trump’s America. Scholars sometimes joke the “Holy Roman Empire” was neither holy, Roman nor an empire but the full title – “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” – is even finer irony as it was neither German nor a nation. Frederick Hertz, The Development of the German Public Mind, London, 1957. In Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Paris, (1882), 1997, Ernst Renan famously claimed an overarching “purpose” greater than any individual or culture was needed to form a nation (like France); but Germany’s “purpose” was historically international.

15 Hertz, op. cit, p.203ff. The Knights Templar were a Gnostic order, a fact usually omitted or unevaluated in accounts written from England’s Latin humanistic tradition, but this defect makes the profile of Prussia in Germany next to incomprehensible: despite regional antagonisms, Prussian asceticism and discipline stemming from Gnosticism were widely admired in Germany. In German today, the word Reise just means “travel” but in Old High German it meant an expedition of nobles to hunt and kill peasants. This custom persisted in France and Germany until the eighteenth century, died out however much earlier in England when peace, order and citizens’ rights were secured there, if not in Scotland, at least for English rulers; see Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian (1818), London, nd, pp.88-89.

16 Karin Friedrich, Brandenburg-Prussia 1466-1806, London, 2012; Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom, the Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1917, London, 2006; On portraits as target sport, Guy de Maupassant, “Mademoiselle Fifi,” 1884. The Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494, between Spain and Portugal, enshrined the Pope’s decision.

17 An account of Weimar is in Volker Wiedemann’s Dreamers, When the Writers took Power, Germany, 1919, Ruth Martin (trans,) London 2017; many of the events that followed were, alas, foreseen by Hermann Broch, Gedanken zur Politik, (1918, 1937) Frankfurt am Main, 1970, and in former Czechoslovakia, by Jaroslav Hasek, Die Partei des maßvollen Fortschritts, (1911, 1963), Frankfurt am Main, 1971. Jürgen Habermas, Die postnationale Konstellation, Politische Essays, Frankfurt am Main, 1998.

18 On authoritarianism: reporting to Frederick after his South Sea travels, Reinhold Forster, a naturalist, is said to have remarked, ambiguously, he had seen five Kings in his life, “three wild, and two tame, but never yet one like Your Majesty” (writer’s trans). Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History, New York, 2008; Mary Fulbrook, Piety and Politics, Religion and the Rise of Absolutism in England, Württemburg and Prussia, Cambridge, 1983; William Montgomery McGovern, From Luther to Hitler, London, 1938; Koppel S Pinson, Pietism as Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism, London, 1934; Daniel J Boorstin, The Mysterious Science of the Law, Chicago, 1996; Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, (1757). In England, the 1688 “Glorious Revolution” signalled victory of the Commons over the Lords (aristocracy and monarch) and, so far, remains the outstanding success story of a stable settlement between competing class interests. On mysticism, Deutsche Theologie’s mass following actually arose in the Rheinlands, but like Catharism and Waldensians, its origins lay in early Christian sects, which the official Eastern Church tried but failed to suppress, and which circulated in the Mediterranean world and Northwards in the medieval Europe. Their significance in the history of ideas is: (1) independence of mind against officialdom, religious or secular; (2) the impossibility of suppress any idea once formed; (3) the validity of subjective perception and reasoning modes. Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche drew on these typically German forms of knowledge for their ideas on the role of mind in perception, if not creation, of reality. Their ideas were in turn drawn upon by (1) Freud and Jung – neither German, both Germanic – to plumb the unconscious mind, and (2) by the Germanic new physicists everywhere to explore the nature of sub-atomic physics. Schopenahauer, incidentally, thought the English habitually told fewer lies than other nations because early political settlement removed the need, and that Nicodemism – lies justified to protect persons and property from malicious inquiry – entrenched the habit early in Germany and again in the Thirty Years War, where frequent changes of ruler forced folk to change religion (at times fortnightly). Shakespeare, on the other hand, rather admired his fellow countrymen and women for adept lying: the “Retort Courteous; the Quip Modest; the Reply Churlish; the Reproof Valiant; the Countercheck Quarrelsome; the Lie with Circumstance; and the Lie Direct”; and Horace famously thought the Romans “lie more than the Parthians”.

19 The Klassikerstraße, which circles through deepest Thüringen, is perhaps the cultural road most travelled in Germany. Key mysticism extracts are in Eckhart, Tauler, Seuse, Ernesto Grassi (ed), Hamburg, 1958, (once a school textbook). G W F Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophy des Rechts, (1821), Frankfurt am Main, 1968; Vorlesungen über die Philosphie der Geschichte, (1822/23), Frankfurt an Main, 1970; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, „Der geschloßene Handelsstaat“, in Ausgewählte Politische Schrifte, Frankfurt, 1977; „Reden an die Deutschen Nation“ (1807), in Fichte, Ausgewählt und vorgestellt von Günter Schulte, Hamburg, 1996, pp 448-463. Friedrich Karl von Savigny, Vom Beruf unsrer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft, Heidelberg, 1840; Heinrich von Treitschke, Politics, (Eng. trans.) 2 Vols., New York, 1916. Their successor in the Hitler era was Carl Schmitt – Legalität und Legitimät, 1932, (Eng. Trans.) Legality and Legitimacy, Durham, 2004; The Concept of the Political, (1932), Georg Schwab (trans.), Chicago, 1976; Friedrich Gentz, op. cit. also played a key role in what became European-wide conservative authoritarianism; G P Gooch, Germany and the French Revolution, London, 1920; Reinhold Aris, History of Political Thought in Germany, 1789-1815, London 1965; Frederick Hertz, The Development of the German Public Mind, London, 1957; and Nationalgeist und Politik, Zürich, 1937. Carlo Antoni, Der Kampf wider die Vernunft, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Deutschen Freiheitsdankens, Stuttgart, 1951. “Modern democracy or dictatorship?” is still a live topic of debate in Sachsen-Anhalt today – „Wie tickt Sachsen-Anhalt?“ Interview mit Matthias Brenner, Deutschlandfunk (DLF), 4 June, 2021, 08 11 UT. In the 2021 elections, thirty years after re-unification, the single most popular party in Sachsen and Thüringen was the far-right AfD, which for the first time grew its constituency from the old cities to rural areas, “Das Wahlergebnis der AfD in Sachsen und Thüringen. Ein gesamtdeutsches Problem,” Magdalena Neubig, DLF, 3/10/212, 06 05 UT. The spread of historical German ideas of nation fabricated by Herder and Romantic successors such as Heine and Novalis to poor countries and minorities proved a snare and a delusion for them during the era of de-colonization, still in part reflected in their malice and resentment where these recur today; Rudiger Safranski, Romantik, eine deutsche Affäre, Frankfurt am Main, 2009, traces the descent of these ideas. “Novalis” is actually the pen-name for Friedrich von Hardenberg, a salt mining engineer from an area proximate to Weimar and its then literary fashions.

20 Parerga und Paralipomena, II, Band VI/I pp.380-1. Werner Heisenberg, Der Teil und der Ganze, Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik, München, 1969, p.278; Jared Diamond, Upheaval, Turning Points for Nations in Crisis, New York, 2019. Writers at the time of last century’s crises also diverged in their views: in Essays on Nationality, New York, 1926, Carlton Hayes argued no national spirit was static, while, in On Nationality and History, London , 1944, Frederick Hertz gave a key role to cycles of progress and regression; Henri Lichtenberg also found a correlation in nineteenth-century Germany between Schopenhauer-style pessimism in the first half, when early industrialization led to worker poverty, and the second half, when industry and Bismarck spread wealth, optimism and national unity; Germany and its Evolution in Modern Times, A M Ludovici (trans.), London 1913. In fact, failure of revolution in Germany and France in 1848 is a moment like the success of it in England in 1688: both dates divide the pre-modern from the modern nations, still with us today. The 1848 failures heralded the End of Theory, ie Hegelianism, and turned public minds toward “Utopia Now”, new philosophies of change said to be practical like those of Marx (yet another man from the East), positivists, materialists and so on.

21 Frederick Hertz, op. cit. pp136-7ff. McGovern, op. cit. p.366. Folk myth in Germany has it that the Emperor Frederick II never died but lives in a mountain cave from whence he will return in the Last Days to restore the Empire – shades of Nietzsche in his Zarathustra. The German towns were first to assert primary duty of a state was to protect commerce, but Hegel, whose comfortable university salary was paid independent of commerce, felt the ultimate purpose of human life on Earth was the State.

22 Golo Mann, A History of Germany since 1789, (1958), Marion Jackson (trans.), London, 1968. Richard Bassett’s Last Days of Old Europe, Penguin, 2019, p.149, considers aggression had been “bred out” of the German military by the late eighties last century. Heisenberg judges the usual historical narrative presents a “hopeless paradox”, op. cit., p.79, perhaps because he nowhere shows awareness of the antecedents of his own preferred philosophers. It should also be noted that, until Bismarck, the German populace was poor; Henry Mayhew, famous for his accounts of London slums, described wide-spread poverty, also rites of student duelling with its life-long mutilations; German Life and Manners, as seen in Saxony at The Present Day, London, 1865. On Jews, Germany was first to grant them full civic rights, long before England or France; first generation to benefit was Mendelssohn, father, the second, the Sohn. Jewish inventiveness over the next two centuries contributed to the strange views of the universe formed by modern physicists today. On emigration: Klaus J Bade, Europa in Bewegngug, Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, München, 2000. Donatella Di Cesare, Stranieri residenti. Una filosofia della migrazione, Turin, 2017, Daniel Creutz (trans.), Philosophie der Migration, Berlin, 2021. Among many books on science and technology, Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, London 2003; without Liebig and Diesel, modern Australasian agriculture would not exist.

23 Paris (1815), n.d. p.88.

24 op. cit.p.118; p.104. Albrecht Dürer, “Portrait of a Young Man,” 1500, Alte Pinakotek, München; his technique is Renaissance but his emotional tone still lies in the Middle Ages.

25 Parerga und Paralipomena, op cit., V/1, p.94. Goethe, “The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources. … What have I done? I have collected and turned to account all that I have seen, heard and observed …. Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand different things … often they have sowed the harvest which I have reaped.” And, “Who can think wise or stupid things at all/That were not thought already in the past?” Among much more, “If I should declare for how much I am indebted to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would not be a great deal left.” In Claud Field (ed), A little Book of German Wisdom, London, n.d, pp. 33-34; 37; 38. “Originality”, like ideas of “Single Cause” or “Pure Truth”, is an idea from yesterday, claims Peter Sloterdijk in Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals, (2005), Frankfurt am Main, 2017; he sees creatives today as either craft workers or workers in the “intertextual”, ie what has been left unsaid or implied by previous thinkers.

26 Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, München, 1988, #227. Figures born too late for de Stael to know but in time for Nietzsche, included Schopenhauer, seen by him as a typical “gloomy post-adolescent riding the Schiller market”; and Schleiermacher and the Schlegel brothers, late-Romantics scanning the human soul for signs of “vanished religion”. Empirical scientists were not Romantics but as mere materialists, were still worthless. It might be noted in passing that Berlin, surrounded by sandy desert, has never been a capital city concentrating a national culture in the sense of Paris or London. Germany is sometimes called an “archipelago” of centres – much as the Pacific is – and Weimar’s role for example is that of a South Sea Island.

27 “Der Heimat” DLF series, 2021. Historians may like to see parallels for the Syrian migration in the sixteenth century French expulsion of Huguenots which hurt France but helped German, Low Countries’ and English industry and innovation; or in the periodic expulsions of Jews from European countries, which retarded European finance and trade.

28 C G Jung, „Allgemeine Bescreibung der Typen“ (1921), and related writings, collected in Typologie, op. cit. David Riesman et al, The Lonely Crowd, New York, 1953.

29 A torrent of new books marks the change, including Andreas Fahrmeir (ed.), Deutschland, Globalgeschichte einer Nation, München, 2021; John Kampfner, Why Germans do it Better, Notes from a Grown-Up Country, London, 2020; Aleida Assmann, Die Wiederfinduung der Nation, Warum wir sie fürchten und warum wir sie brauchen, München, 2020; Hedwig Richter, Demokratie, Eine Deutsche Affäre, München 2020; Andreas Reckwitz, Das Ende der Illusionen, Politik, Ökonomie, und Kultur in der Spätmoderne, Berlin 2019; Michel Bröning, Lob der Nation, Warum wir den Nationalstaat nicht den Rechtspopulisten überlassen dürfen, Bonn, 2018; Neil MacGregor, Germany, Memories of a Nation, Penguin, 2014. On Truth and Reconciliation: Walther L Bernecker et al, Kampf der Erinnerungen, Der Spanische Bürgerkrieg in Politik und Gesellschaft, 1936-2008, Nettersheim, 2008. According to reports, chants of “Duce! Duce!” are heard today at extreme-right Roman football stadia. On possible change in America on Guantanamo: Carol Rosenberg, “For the first time in public, a prisoner describes torture at post 9/11 CIA black sites,” New York Times, 2 November 2021. On accepting the Leo Baech Medal in New York, November, 2021, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier affirmed German government policy – to accept “full responsibility” for German war crimes “without relativization”.

30 Heisenberg, op. cit., pp.95, 155. Einstein may have got ideas on relativity of time and space from Schopenhauer’s „Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde“, (1813) (1847), in Kleinere Schriften, Sämtliche Werke, Band III, Stuttgart/Frankfurt am Main, 1986, s158, where precisely this is stated. Contrary to post-modernist scholars, it should be said Einstein’s relativity theory – like Schopenhauer’s – means only that space, time and objects are always relative to each other, not that reality itself is relative; Einstein tried all his life to correct popular misunderstanding, asserting endlessly, even tediously, “God does not play dice”. It is later principles of “indeterminacy” (Heisenberg) and “complementarity” (Schrödinger) that suggest reality itself may be relative – both principles fiercely opposed by Einstein but without success (by then yesterday’s man). Werner Heisenberg, op. cit.; Physics and Philosophy, Penguin, 1958; Etienne Klein, Le Goût du Vrai, Paris, 2020. Wolfgang Hardtwig et al (ed), Deutsche Entfremdung, Zum Befinden in Ost und West, München, 1994.

31 A glance at literary writers early last century, when the Third Scientific Revolution stormed the fortress of classical physics, highlights the gap to naïve empiricism. Much or any word of these epochal scientific changes in, say, Bloom’s Dublin idylls, Orwell down and out in Paris or Sartre chain-smoking in the Metropole might be hard to find; even Thomas Mann in the Davos sanitorium refers only to radical nineteenth century discoveries. Die Frohliche Wissenschaft, München, #125 (writer’s trans.). Asked in Paris if he knew how to get to Dublin, Samuel Beckett gave a Nietzschean answer, “yes, but you can’t start from here”. Muriel Spark, evoking ‘thirties Edinburgh, noted it was politically incorrect to say Einstein’s name, learn German or know anything of Europe – a spirit not different from George Eliot’s England – so war-bereaved and liberated spinsters like Jean Brodie took to all three with energy and enthusiasm; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, London, 1961. Like all love-hate relations, perhaps, the East-West axis in Germany has its dark side: Rainer Jensenberger, Der Kalte Krieg gegen Russland und der deutsche Untertan, Leigzig, 2018. Modern nationalism, according to Hayes, is less a political idea with its own history than an emotional fusion of far earlier ideas, nationality and patriotism, op. cit., p.6. Finally, the Irish may be contenders along with the Germans: their proverb says, more or less, if you peer into the dark long enough you’re sure to find something.

32 Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher, pointed out that the languages we use to refer to things “outside” have their own rules which permit internal “play” or “make-believe” alongside the function of referential meaning, thus giving rise to the problem of deciding what is “outside” language and what is merely “inside” it: Tractatus logico-philosophicus, London, 1961. Schopenhauer: „Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde“, op.cit. ss198-200. Carl Zimmer, a prize-winning science journalist, reviews recent research in Life’s Edge, the Search for What it Means to Be Alive, New York, 2021, p.288. His title is misleading: Zimmer shows no awareness of the analytic gap between what “is” and what “ought to be”, a distinction made clear by Hume long ago and – basing themselves on Hume – by Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Science, meaning and value are each separate realms of discourse with separate rules in Wittgenstein’s sense: science measures objects and forces, a process that produces measurements of objects and forces, not meaning or values. Erwin Schrödinger’s title What is Life? (1944), Cambridge, 1976, is another misleading title in the same sense but his text is at least modest and makes no claim to be other than speculation – even if useful speculation that led his later readers, Crick and Watson, to find, describe and measure what is a biological “is” – the fact of the Double Helix. Most or all scientists quoted and reviewed by Zimmer equally fail to make this elementary distinction, suggesting basic errors of thought may be dangerously widespread in today’s vast and philosophically instructed scientific establishment.