Beyond Good and Evil: Germany, 1914

Mesmerised by their teacher’s nationalistic eloquence, the high school students rose as one and marched off to enlist in the army as Germany declared war in August 1914. It was a pivotal scene in Erich Maria Remarque’s war novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), and was brilliantly realised in Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film version. Faces flushed with idealism, their eyes aglow with patriotic fervour, the entire class embraced the war and the trials and triumphs that it promised.

Such students were inspired by the “Germanic Ideology”, promoted through the universities, schools and numerous youth groups, and pervasive across German society, as Hans Kohn showed in The Mind of Germany: The Education of a Nation (1960). A Weltanschauung fundamentally opposed to liberal democracy, it evolved in an age characterised by “the intellectual organisation of political hatreds”, as Julien Benda observed in The Treason of the Intellectuals (1927); and the widespread “cultural…