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Edited on Tue Oct-20-09 09:51 PM by scholarsOrAcademics
The Seduction of Culture in German History, Wolf Lepenies. 2006 The book came to my attention in the May / June issue of New Left Review, an article by Perry Anderson “A New Germany?”. The prime concept is “the vital spirit”. Culture or Civilization. “German tradition, famously, tended to separate the world of culture from that of power, as a compensation or sphere superior to it. In his recent study of The Seduction of Culture in German History, Wolfgang Lepenies convicts this inclination of a significant share of blame for the country’s surrender to authoritarianism, from the Second to the Third Reich, pointing in particular to the failure of so many German thinkers and writers to defend Weimar democracy; indeed, their often outright hostility or contempt towards it. Page 25 The “vital spirit” Lepenies identifies is that of Johann Wofgang Goethe, primarily through the work of Thomas Mann. “In Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, America was hailed as the antidote to European misery. In verses dedicated ‘To the United States,’ Goethe envied America not only for its lack of ruined castles but also for the absence of useless memories and fruitless brooding over its own identity that haunted Europe. It was a distinctly German mind-set that Goethe applied to the whole of Europe. Thomas Mann, writing two hundred years later, said as much: Europe suffered from a chronic illness, a self-inflicted headache.”(Page 191) A few pages later (193) when closing the theme Hamlet and Fortinbras in the chapter IRONY AND POLITICS the irony is the aggressive missionary zeal of the French and critical Old Europe after 9/11 “With the unfolding of the invasion, American-European differences of opinion were once more portrayed, on both sides of the Atlantic, as a clash of civilizations.” The discussion of war guilt, collective guilt ends on a wise note. “In Berlin, the city of monuments, many small memorials can be found that reflect the same attitude as that of Grass’s diary and the diaries of Victor von Klemperer. They recall the Nazi period and the persecution of the Jews as a daily ordeal. . . .The passerby looks into a mirror and sees himself: Tua res agitur—this too is your concern. “These small memorials—there are others—disturbingly recall that the Nazis could commit their heinous crimes only because normal Germans showed too little civil courage in their daily affairs. Such remembrances hold up a mirror to each citizen. They remind us that human decency begins in everyday life. In comparison with these small memorials, the great monuments have been given too much attention. They convey another message: the crimes committed were so big that they are beyond reach and understanding. Memory politics thus runs the danger of creating an unbridgeable distance between itself and the citizen by retreating into awe-inspiring aesthetics. The plea for decency is neglected in favor of monumental but distant and abstract guilt. Once more, politics finds its welcome substitute in culture; the moral masterpiece.” Page 208
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