110. Return of the Volksgeist

In den NPQ (New Perspectives Quarterly) ein interessantes Gespräch mit Isaiah Berlin, der Parallelen zwischen dem „backlash“ in der deutschen Geschichte nach Demütigungen durch Frankreich zwischen 1670 und 1919 und nationalistischen Bewegungen nach dem Zusammenbruch des Ostblocks zieht. Einleitung und Ausschnitt:

Sir Isaiah Berlin, who died in 1997, was a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. One of the West’s foremost political philosophers, he authored several seminal works, including Karl Marx, The Age of Enlightenment, Four Essays on Liberty, Vico and Herder and The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas.

We sat down for several rambling hours of conversation at a cafe in the small harbor in Portofino, Italy, at the end of the summer in 1991.

Gardels | And yet, Herder’s Volksgeist became the Third Reich. And today, the Serbian Volksgeist is at war with the Croation Volksgeist, and the Bosnian Muslim way of life. The Armenians and the Azeris have long been at it, and, among the Georgians and Russians—and even the Ukrainians and the Russians—passions are stirring.

What transforms the aspiration of cultural self-determination into nationalist aggression?

Berlin | I have written elsewhere that a wounded Volksgeist, so to speak, is like a bent twig, forced down so severely that when released, it lashes back with fury. Nationalism, at least in the West, is created by wounds inflicted by stress. As for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet empire, they seem today to be one vast, open wound. After years of oppression and humiliation, there is liable to occur a violent counterreaction, an outburst of national pride, often aggressive self-assertion, by liberated nations and their leaders.

Although I am not allowed to say this to German historians, I believe that Louis XIV was principally responsible for the beginnings of German nationalism in the 17th century. While the rest of Europe- Italy, England, Spain, the Low Countries, above all France—experienced a magnificent renaissance in art and thought, and political and military power, Germany, after the age of Durer, Frundwald, Reuchlin, became (with the exception of architecture) a relative backwater. The Germans tended to be looked down upon by the French as provincials, as simple, slightly comical, beer-drinking yokels, literate but ungifted.

At first, there was naturally much imitation of the French, but later, as always, there was a reaction. The pietists asked, “Why not be ourselves? Why imitate foreigners? Let the French have their royal courts, their salons, worldly abbés, soldiers, poets, painters, their empty glory. It’s all dross. Nothing matters save a man’s relation to his own soul, to God, to true values, which are of the spirit, the inner life, Christian truth.”