History 513, European Cultural History 1880-1920 - Summary

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Lecture #9 - October 10, 1979 - 50:11 min (mp3)
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Mosse starts by talking about the film “The Blue Angel” which the class had watched the day before. Prof. Unrath is a typical bourgeois, the tyrant-teacher who disintegrates when he follows his nature. He is a very un-Nietzschean figure because he fails; he does not dominate Marlene Dietrich, rather Marlene dominates him. Nietzsche’s influence on the literary and artistic imagination was very great. His influence became pervasive only after 1900 mostly because of his sister, who edited his works according to her own nationalistic ideas, a process that undermined his impact. The “true” Nietzsche was revived only in the 1950s. A whole generation of young artists was influenced by him that included Andre Gide who in the “Immoralist” portrays struggle between holiness and following your nature. This “struggle” is evident in a whole series of books.  In  D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ” the by LC   for a real virility cannot be met by her husband, since men of her time and place are scared by life. In that young generation of writers active at the beginning of the twentieth century, we encounter a longing for virility and leadership, an urge towards action. The fact that there are no images of positive women in expressionist literature also shows Nietzsche’s influence; yet their longing to break out of the Jenny-Treibel society always had a Nietzschean element.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra hungers for true experience, experience outside of bourgeois society. These ideas influenced the generation of young men who enthusiastically welcomed the First World War which promised to give them an outlet for their virility. The element of cruelty, the tendency towards inflicting pain, towards domination that is also found in Nietzsche influenced Wedekind and other artists of his time. Niceness was regarded as false and hypocritical. The longing for the genuine means the acceptance of “the war of all against all.” This importance of cruelty in the search for the genuine would later become hatred directed at the “other”.

[The questions in the now following Q&A are hardly audible; therefore I include the essence of Mosse’s answers.]

 

-Mosse points out that Nietzsche himself was hardly a Nietzschean figure.

-Zarathustra wants disciples, not equals. The elite he thought of was not an elite of Germans but an elite of Jews, identified with the patriarchs. The interesting question is, what would Nietzsche have thought of WWI?

-The taming of Nietzsche by Nationalism was almost inevitable. The greater tolerance in our society is not due to him, though he contributed to it to a certain extent. Nietzsche directly played into the hands of those people who wanted an anti-bourgeois bourgeois revolution, a “revolution of the spirit,” most importantly, the Nationalists. This revolution is the revolution that never ends: we find it again in the 1960s, and it repeats itself again and again. Nietzsche and Freud have in common that they make personal liberation without Socialism possible, which is why Socialists don’t like them.
 
How important are manners and morals? If they collapse, does that mean a basic change in society? This is an open question. If you answer in the affirmative, you are with Nietzsche and the Expressionists. Is it a symptom, or is it something else? Economic change in communism did not bring about personal liberation and a change of manners and morals. Such a claim is crude Marxist determinism. Nothing is more petty bourgeois than Soviet morals. The revolution we are talking about today was in the arts and letters, but is has not affected the basic life style. A cultural revolution cannot change society; no minority can change society without making alliances. You must get away from the simple crudity of historical analysis, which is new kind of positivism. “That’s for American meshuggas.”

You will never perceive how people perceived their society when you come from the outside. The Germans had a choice 1933. There isn’t a time when people don’t have some choice. The interesting question is why people made the choices they made. There is no proletariat, except as symbol: Lifestyle is more important.
When Nietzsche talked about “the chaos of life” he believed that the life force was evolutionary and that it constantly changes: This shows Darwin’s influence.
Mosse considers Nietzsche cruel, or that he had a cruel edge. This is apparent already in the way he writes, his choice of vocabulary. This cruelty had a literary influence on later writers, especially the notion than virility is domination over the earth and over women. It also included a certain kind of egoism and narcissism without scruples. The literary imagination is integrated with the idea of revolt. But, revolts against life style are easily corrupted: All the student leaders who wanted to tear down Bascom Hall on the UW campus are now professors or business people with families like the rest of us.

Mosse closes by talking about the upcoming exam and reassures the students that though he does not have great hope for humanity, he applies 18th-century Enlightenment standards when grading, “for some idiotic reason.”

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