Meike G. Werner - Modern Jena as a Model of Cultural Regeneration in Wilhelmine Germany

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Modern Jena as a Model of Cultural Regeneration in Wilhelmine

Germany

Meike G. Werner

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 74, Number 2, April 2013, pp.

267-288 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: 10.1353/jhi.2013.0016

For additional information about this article

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Modern Jena as a Model of Cultural

Regeneration in Wilhelmine Germany

Meike G. Werner

The city is, rather, a state of mind, a body of customs and tradi-

tions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in

these customs and are transmitted with this tradition. The city isnot, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial

construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who

compose it.

Robert Park, The City (1925)

The German Kaiserreich, circa 1900, was marked by a significant degree

of social, cultural and political segmentation. In the struggle for cultural

prominence, a number of cities in Germany profiled themselves as incuba-tors for the generation of a new German culture, among them Berlin,

Munich, and Hamburg, but also Darmstadt and Dresden-Hellerau, Wei-

mar, andmy focusJena.1

Since Carl Schorskes Pulitzer Prize-winning Fin-de-Siecle Vienna ap-

peared in 1980, with its fine sense for the heterogeneity of political, cul-

tural, and intellectual innovations in one of the great turn-of-the-century

1

This essay is partly based on my book Moderne in der Provinz. Kulturelle Experimenteim Fin de Siecle Jena (Go ttingen: Wallstein, 2003), 63193. For a critical overview of

Diederichs scholarship, see the editors introduction to Romantik, Revolution & Reform.Der Eugen Diederichs Verlag im Epochenkontext 19001949, ed. Justus H. Ulbricht andMeike G. Werner (Go ttingen: Wallstein, 1999), esp. 1018.

Copyright by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 74, Number 2 (April 2013)

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JO URNA L OF THE HISTOR Y OF IDEAS APRIL 2013

cities in Europe, it has found many admirers, and some critics.2 In fact,

Schorskes work became a model in intellectual history for the inter-

disciplinary exploration of the highly fragmented culture and politics of

modernism. Since modernism, as Schorske also presumed, is generally asso-

ciated with major urban centers, his study inspired a great many investiga-

tions into the multiple forms of modernism in Europes great cities. From

Petersburg to Barcelona, Budapest to Paris, Berlin to Prague, Hamburg to

Cracow, and London to Munich, we now know a great deal more about

the patterns of urban modernism.3 However, the smaller cities, which espe-

cially for Central and Eastern Europe were tremendously important, are

only slowly being discovered as laboratories of modern movements. Trieste

is one of those cities, Turin and Czernowitz are others.4 For Switzerland,

one might add Zurich, Basel and Geneva.5 In Imperial Germany, this diver-

sity had deep roots in a history of decentralized cultural production,

whether the humanist imperial cities of the sixteenth century, such as

Nuremberg and Augsburg; or the various eighteenth-century courts, such

as Anhalt, Weimar, and Braunschweig, where Lessing served as curator of

the court library; or Germanys many university towns, like Halle, Heidel-

berg, Tu bingen, and Go ttingen.6 If the nation-state prejudices of the nine-

teenth century, when it was assumed that culture mainly flourished in the

2 Maybe most notably in Steven Beller, ed., Rethinking Vienna 1900 (New York: Berg-hahn, 2001).3 Among the many examples are Peter Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity:Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siecle Hamburg (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 2003); John Lukacs, Budapest 1900 (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988); CristinaMendoza and Eduardo Mendoza, Barcelona modernista (Barcelona: Planeta, 1989); KarlSchlo gel, Jenseits des Groen Oktober. Das Laboratorium der Moderne. Petersburg19091921 (Berlin: Siedler, 1988); Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflictand Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafkas Fin de Siecle (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2000).4 Claudio Magris and Angelo Ara, Trieste. Unidentita di frontiera (Torino: G. Einaudi,1982); Maike Albath, Der Geist von Turin. Pavese, Ginzburg, Einaudi und die Wieder-

geburt Italiens nach 1943 (Berlin: Berenberg, 2010); Harald Heppner, Czernowitz. DieGeschichte einer ungewohnlichen Stadt(Ko ln: Bo hlau, 2000).5 Nicolas Bouvier, Gordon E. Craig, and Lionel Gossman, Geneva, Zurich, Basel: His-tory, Culture, and National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); LionelGossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2002).6

For example Peter Merseburger, Mythos Weimar. Zwischen Geist und Macht(Stuttgart:Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1998); Hans Ju rgen Sarfert, Hellerau. Die Gartenstadt und Kunst-lerkolonie (Dresden: Hellerau, 1993); Hubert Treiber and Karol Sauerland, eds., Heidel-berg im Schnittpunkt intellektueller Kreise. Zur Topographie der geistigen Geselligkeiteines Weltdorfes, 18501950 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1995).

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Werner Ideas and the City

capitals of strong states, have tended to obscure this tradition, it neverthe-

less remained a distinguishing fact of German cultural life before World

War I. Moreover, while it helps to recall that the large cities experienced

the highest rates of population growth in these years, it was still the case in

1910 that only twenty-one percent of the German population lived in cities

of over 100,000, and that the rest of the people, nearly eighty percent, lived

in smaller communities, with thirteen percent residing in medium-sized

cities (such as Jena) with populations between 20,000 and 100,000.7 When

we focus just on Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich (or in the Austrian case, on

Vienna), a great deal about modernity is missed.

This seems obvious in the case of writers and intellectuals. After all,

Thomas Mann was from Lu beck; Nietzsche, from Naumburg, lived inBasel; Rilke, born in Prague, wandered across Europe; and Heidegger, even

as he taught in Freiburg, never completely left the mental world of rural

Mekirch. Although less apparent, publishing was also a part of this decen-

tralized modernity, with major publishers not only in Berlin, Leipzig, Stutt-

gart, Munich, and Frankfurt am Main, but also in Dresden, Freiburg im

Breisgau, and in a string of university cities.8 The focus on publishers is

particularly revealing, since they consciously marketed their books and thus

served as a seismograph of cultural developments. Advertising, a paratext

that remains an underdeveloped aspect of cultural studies for the late nine-

teenth century, had become by the outbreak of the war a central aspect

of the publishers work. Along with the exploitation of new technological

developments in bookmaking and distribution, advertising became a cen-

tral way for publishers to both shape and take account of the protean form

of modern literary and cultural movements.

Jena, in this sense too, represents a remarkable laboratory. Although

there are many aspects to Jena as a site of modern social and cultural exper-

imentationlike the Carl Zeiss Foundations model of humane industrial-ization, the Jena Kunstverein with its support for the avant-garde, or the

Free Student Movement attempting to create new forms of sociability9I

7 Gerd Hohorst, Ju rgen Kocka, and Gerhard A. Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch.Materialien zur Statistik des Kaiserreichs 18701914 (Munich: Beck, 1975), 52. In 1905

Jena counted 26,360 people, and in 1914, partially due to the absorption of surrounding

towns and villages, 48,659.8 Dieter Langewiesche, Entwicklungsbedingungen im Kaiserreich, in Geschichte desDeutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Das Kaiserreich 18701918. Teil

1, ed. Georg Ja ger in connection with Langewiesche and Wolfram Siemann (Frankfurt:Buchha ndler-Vereinigung, 2001), 65.9 For a detailed history of the Free Student Movement, see Hans-Ulrich Wipf, Student-ische Politik und Kulturreform. Geschichte der Freistudenten-Bewegung 18961918(Schwalbach: Wochenschau, 2004).

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will in this essay focus on the publisher Eugen Diederichs and his branding

and promoting of Jena as a center, if not the center, for the shaping of a

new German culture. If the role of the publisher in modernist movements

was not considered in Schorskes classic study, it has become central to a

patterned sense of the relationship of place to European modernism. In

2010, for example, Maike Albath focused on this dimension of cultural

production in Der Geist von Turin. At the center of her elegantly written

study is the unique constellation of a publisher (Giulio Einaudi); a writer,

translator and editor (Cesare Pavese); and two intellectuals (Leone and

Natalia Ginzburg) in Turin of the 1930s and 1940s. Though very different

in their programmatic orientation, the leftist publisher Einaudi and the

nationalist Diederichs were shaped by and in turn shaped the cities theylived in. They also helped give these cities a specific stamp, or brand, and

this has become a subject of recent work. In The Spirit of Cities: Why the

Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age (2011), Daniel E. Bell and Avner

de-Shalit have examined the specific ethos and set of values of nine world

capitals, pairing Jerusalem and religion, Montreal and language, Berlin and

(in)tolerance, New York and ambition and Hong Kong and materialism as

a useful antidote to the threat of global homogenization. While hardly

standing pars pro toto in regard to Jenas modernist experiment, the pub-

lisher Eugen Diederichs nevertheless was an important engine of this experi-

mentation. As much as the university itself, his publishing program defined

the brand of modernism associated with Jena at the fin de siecle.

I. EUGEN DIEDERICHS: THE PUBLISHER AS EDUCATOR

In 1904 Eugen Diederichs and his relatively young but successful publishing

house settled in Jena. Diederichss idea was to instrumentalize the literary

traditions of Jena, especially classicism and romanticism, for a Nietzsche-inspired invention of a new German culture.10 In the process, he would

10 Eugen Diederichs, Ziele des Verlages, in Eugen Diederichs Jena in Thuringen. Verlags-katalog. Jena 1904, n.p. For the most important recent scholarship on Diederichs, whichthis chapter engages, see Gangolf Hu binger, ed., Versammlungsort moderner Geister. DerEugen Diederichs Verlag. Aufbruch ins Jahrhundert der Extreme (Munich: Diederichs,1996); Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Die Wiederkehr der Gotter. Religion in der ModernenKultur (Munich: Beck, 2004); and Graf, Das Laboratorium der Moderne. Zur Verlags-religion des Eugen Diederichs Verlags, in Hu binger, ed., Versamlungsort moderner

Geister, 24398. See also the profound studies of the late Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner,Romantische Denken in der entzauberten Welt, in ibid., 486504, and id., Die Stufen

der Moderne, in Wir werden gelebt. Formprobleme der Moderne (Hamburg: Philo,2006), 2558. Stefan Breuer, Kulturpessimist, Antimodernist, konservativer Revolu-

tiona r? Zur Position von Eugen Diederichs im Ideologiespektrum der wilhelminischen

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make his Jena-based publishing house into a central collection point for

modern intellectuals. In the competition among cultural (not political)

groups and movements in Germany, Diederichs conceived of Jena as a

cipher, as a source of energy [Kraft], as a program for modern lifestyles,

new ways of thinking and writing, and as a place where Germanys own,

related, and foreign cultural traditions could be assimilated in such a way

as to provide a more modern, more radical alternative to the concepts of

German national culture in the metropolitan seat of power. As Diederichs

put it in an advertisement for his program, Berlin requires the contrary

rhythm, the creative break, that can only come from the province.11 The

emphasis on the periphery, on modernity in the province, can be read on

the one hand as a defensive gesture of a civic culture threatened by the lossof meaning.12 This has been its traditional reading.13 On the other hand, it

can be interpreted as the conscious formation of an alternative avant-garde.

This is what Diederichs had in mind. As I argue in what follows, his attempt

was intimately bound up with a conception of the localor as Diederichs

put it, the genius loci of Jena.

In the late 1880s Eugen Diederichs, a passionate reader, almost ten

years younger than the Berlin-based publisher of modernist literature Sam-

uel Fischer, changed his vocation from farming to the professional world of

books by becoming a book dealer. When in September 1896, at the ageof twenty-nine, Diederichs founded his own publishing house, he had one

overriding idea: to create a place for modern thinkers [ein Versammlung-

sort moderner Geister].14 Unlike with Fischer, the direction of his publish-

A ra, in Ulbricht and Werner, eds., Romantik, Revolution & Reform, 3659, likewisesees Diederichs as anything but conservative. Along with Werner, Moderne in der Pro-vinz, these authors have argued that Diederichss publishing program was modern (Hu b-inger) and even radical (Kittsteiner, Graf) in the context of its time.11 Response to an inquiry about Was haben Sie gegen Berlin? Deutsche AllgemeineZeitung, January 1, 1927 (Diederichs Papers, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach).12 See Georg Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur. Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungs-musters (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), 22588; and for more detail in respect to Jenasprovincial modernism see Meike G. Werner, Provincial Modernism: Jena as Publishing

Program, Germanic Review 76, no. 4 (2001): 31934.13 In the case of scholarship on Diederichs, see for example Gary D. Stark, Entrepreneursof Ideology: Neoconservative Publishers in Germany, 18901933 (Chapel Hill: Univer-sity of North Carolina Press, 1981), esp. 58110.14 Diederichs in a letter to Ferdinand Avenarius, Venice, September 1, 1896, in EugenDiederichs. Leben und Werk. Ausgewahlte Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, ed. Lulu von

Strau und Torney-Diederichs (Jena: Diederichs, 1936), 40. Also see the publications incelebration of the hundredth anniversary in Hu binger, ed., Versammlungsort modernerGeister, as well as the catalogue for the exhibit about Diederichss first decade in Jena,Versammlungsort moderner Geister. Der Kulturverleger Eugen Diederichs und seineAnfange in Jena 19041914 (Munich: Diederichs, 1996), with contributions by Peer

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ing enterprise would not be purely literary, but interdisciplinary and univer-

sal, stretching across, as the first official proclamation of the new venture

stated, modern endeavors in literature, social science, natural science, and

theosophy.15 From the start, Diederichs evinced a sharp sense for market-

ing. He gave his publishing house a cosmopolitan double home in Florence

and Leipzig, for which in Germany there was no previous model, and he

used modern advertising methods, such as artistically wrapped brochures,

posters, advertising bands placed around the books themselves, and exten-

sively commented publishing catalogues. He wanted to call attention to his

books and at the same time shape the reception of his cultural program. In

short, Diederichs conceived of himself as an educator16 of modern Ger-

man society.

When in 1904 Diederichs transferred his publishing house to Jena, he

already had a reputation among young intellectuals as an antipode to Sam-

uel Fischer in Berlin and the modern publisher of the future.17 Diederichs

thought of himself as an organizer of a new German culture18 that

started, according to his own account, from a romantic universality.

Herder, Fichte, Nietzsche, and increasingly Lagarde determined Dieder-

ichss universalistic grasp of the world,19 and with it his relation to Ger-

man culture and to what he perceived as related and foreign cultures.

Diederichs reached the zenith of his public recognition in 1914, when

the Jena publisher was invited by the historian Karl Lamprecht to display

his universalistic program at the International Book and Graphics Exhibit

in Leipzig (a kind of world exhibit with a focus on print media). Dieder-

ichss publishing program took pride of place as the crowning moment in

the central Hall of Culture. In the official catalogue of the Book and

Graphics Exhibit, one could read about Diederichss Kulturverlagsraum:

The whole previous development chimes in this room again, from the old-

Ko ling, Justus H. Ulbricht and Meike G. Werner. For a detailed history of the publishing

house see Irmgard Heidler, Der Verleger Eugen Diederichs und seine Welt (Wiesbaden:Harrassowitz, 1998).15 Borsenblatt fur den deutschen Buchhandel, September 15, 1896.16 See Eugen Diederichs, Verlegerische Aufgaben, Der Volkserzieher 16 (1911): 193;and Erich Vieho fer, Der Verleger als Organisator. Eugen Diederichs und die burgerlichenReformbewegungen der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt: Buchha ndler-Vereinigung, 1988).17 Helmut von den Steinen, Das moderne Buch (Heidelberg: Unger, 1912), 2630; as

well as Celsuss [Carl von Ossietzkys] obituary, Eugen Diederichs, Die Weltbuhne,September 16, 1930.18 Diederichs, Verlegerische Aufgaben, 193.19 Eugen Diederichs, Selbstdarstellung, in Der deutsche Buchhandel der Gegenwart inSelbstdarstellungen, ed. Gerhard Menz (Leipzig: Meiner, 1927), 19.

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est Orient until todaya portrait of an organized publishing work that at

the same time points to the future cultural development of Germany.20

Suffice it for now to note the temporal sweep and future-orientedness of

the Kulturverlagsraum, as well as its simultaneous provincialism and uni-

versalism.

By 1914 Diederichs had published nearly a thousand books. At the

International Book and Graphics Exhibit, he presented books from his rap-

idly expanding, thoroughly international list. The span of this list was

impressively wide, including life reform, modern dance, body culture (more

commonly known in English as the nudist movement), the arts and crafts

movement, the Werkbund (the German Work Federation and precursor to

the Bauhaus), the garden city and land reform movements, the youth move-

ment, and reform pedagogy.21 In literature, too, Diederichss program was

nothing short of ambitious. He exhibited pathbreaking new editions of

Plato, Novalis, and Friedrich Ho lderlin. He published translations of

authors who we now consider at the center of world literature, including

John Ruskin, So ren Kierkegaard, Henri Bergson, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Leo

Tolstoy, Maxim Gorki, Anton Chekhov, Maurice Maeterlinck, Ralph

Waldo Emerson, and Stendhal. He also promoted authors who at the time

were de rigueur for modern intellectuals: the Swiss author Carl Spitteler,the Czech philosopher and later statesman Thomas Masaryk, the Flemish

writer Charles de Coster, the Polish man of letters Wladyslaw Stanislaw

Reymont, and the Danes Henrik Pontoppidan and Karl Gjellerup. Dieder-

ichs published as well the English Fabians, such as Graham Wallace, Ram-

say MacDonald, and Beatrice and Sydney Webb.

Influenced by Goethes understanding of the relation between world

literature and world culture, Diederichs especially after 1910 buttressed his

phalanx of books with broadly conceived publishing series.22

Theseincluded among others Das Zeitalter der Renaissance, Die deutschen Volks-

bucher, Politische Bibliothek, Religion und Philosophie Chinas, Sammlung

Thule, Marchen der Weltliteratur, and Religiose Stimmen der Volker. Died-

erichs managed to engage the leading scholars in their respective fieldsbe

20 Eugen Diederichs, Raum 48/Kulturverlagsraum, in Halle der Kultur. InternationaleAusstellung fur Buchgewerbe und Graphik. Amtlicher Fuhrer (Leipzig: Gu nther,Kirstein & Wendler, 1914), 248 49.21

For excellent overview see Die Lebensreform. Entwurfe zur Neugestaltung von Lebenund Kunst um 1900, ed. Kai Buchholz et al., 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Ha usser, 2001).22 Diederichs very early on pursued the idea of publishing in series. In 1899 he started the

Monographien zur deutschen Kulturgeschichte (18991905, 12 vols.); in 1904 Erzieherzu deutscher Bildung(19047, 9 vols.); and in 1909 Kunst in Bildern (190921, 6 vols.).

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it in Scandinavian and Old Norse, in religious or German studies, in art

history, in philosophy or political thoughtas editors, translators and

advisers. Some of the series, like Felix Niedners Sammlung Thule or Marie

Herzfelds Zeitalter der Renaissance, had a lasting impact on their disci-

plines, and some are unsurpassed to the present day, like the Sammlung

Thule, Marchen der Weltliteratur or Richard Wilhelms translations of clas-

sic Chinese texts such as the I Chingand Secret of the Golden Flower.

However, at this point the question should be raised as to how this

world-embracing program related to its stated goal: the creation of an

original German culture. For this we must return to Jena, Diederichss

site of cultural regeneration, and to Nietzsche.

II . JENA AS A MODERN KRAFTZENTRUM:

A CENTER OF TRANSGRESSIVE ENERGIES

Diederichs shared the enthusiasm of his contemporaries for Nietzsche. At

the turn of the century, young intellectuals, and especially many of Dieder-

ichss authors, advisors and readers, concurred with Nietzsche that the aca-

demic elite as well as the poets and the politicians of the day represented

a race of eunuchs.23 Modern man, Nietzsche wrote, suffers from a

weakened personality.24 Like Nietzsche, they placed the blame for the lack

of culture-creating energy on the surplus of historical knowledge. A purely

historical-scholarly education rendered the individual vacillating and

unsure, sinking, as Nietzsche put it, into the heaped-up chaos of knowl-

edge without external effect, of teaching which does not become life.25

From this prison of unproductive knowledge, lies, and alienated interiority,

it was, according to Nietzsches argument, necessary to liberate the plasticpotential of the sovereign individual.26 In short, only strong personali-

ties could create culture. Howeverif one follows Nietzsches argument

furtherthe transhistorical powers of art and religion could be the true

helpers, for against lifeless scholarship they together planted a culture

23 Friedrich Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie fu r das Leben, in Samt-liche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 1(Munich: dtv, 1999), 281.24

Ibid., 279.25 Ibid., 280.26 For the context of this concept see Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner, Nietzsches souvera nes

Individuum in seiner plastischen Kraft, Internationale Zeitschrift fur Philosophie 2(1993): 294316.

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adequate for real necessity.27 Applied to Diederichss Jena program of a

modern German culture, this meant that modern man had to become more

artistic and more religious in order to obtain the power necessary to form

culture.

When Diederichs moved his publishing house to Jena, he planned, as

he put it, to give the genius loci its due, for in the name of Jena an

intellectual tradition already exists.28 In his pursuit of an ideal topography

for the foundation of a specific German cultural identity, Jenas proximity

to German classicism and romanticism in the middle of a humane, modern

industrial city with a diverse intellectual culture was more promising than

Florence or Leipzig, or even Berlin. At the University of Jena, the faculty

included the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, the philosopher Rudolf Eucken, and

the pedagogue Wilhelm Rein. In the world of scholarship they enjoyed an

international reputation, if in the case of Haeckel and Eucken a disputed

one. Haeckel (author of the 1899 bestseller Die Weltrathsel) and Eucken

(winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1908) were famous in Germany

and abroad not in the first place as scholars of zoology or philosophy but

as successful producers of holistic Weltanschauungen.29 Haeckel was the

founder and promoter of the influential Monistenbund, while Eucken had

developed a positivist variation of neo-idealism influenced by life philoso-phy.30 While these achievements are largely passed over today, it was not

by accident that in 1913 the British newspaper The Independent counted

Eucken and Haeckel among the Twelve Major Prophets of Today,31

27 Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie, 281.28 Eugen Diederichs to Karl Joel, September 16, 1903, cited in Ulf Diederichs, Jena und

Weimar als verlegerisches Programm. U ber die Anfa nge des Eugen Diederichs Verlages in

Jena, Aus dem Antiquariat7 (1994): A241.29 See Volker Drehsen and Helmut Zander, Rationale Weltvera nderung durch naturwis-

senschaftliche Weltinterpretation?Der Monistenbundeine Religion der Fortschrittsgla u-

bigkeit, in Vom Weltbildwandel zur Weltanschauungsanalyse, ed. Volker Drehsen andWalter Sparn (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), 21738; Gangolf Hu binger, Die monist-

ische Bewegung. Sozialingenieure und Kulturprediger, in Kultur und Kulturwissenschaf-ten um 1900, vol. 2, Idealismus und Positivismus, ed. Gangolf Hu binger, Ru diger vomBruch and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997), 24659; Uwe Dathe,

Rudolf Euckenein Gegner des Monismus und Freund des Monisten, in Monismusum 1900. Wissenschaftskultur und Weltanschauung, ed. Paul Ziche (Berlin: VWB, 2000),4159.30 See Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Die Positivita t des Geistigen. Rudolf Euckens Programm

neoidealistischer Universalintegration, in Hu binger, vom Bruch and Graf, eds., Ideal-ismus und Positivismus, 5385.31 Edwin Slosson, Rudolf Eucken, The Independent, February 27, 1913; cited in UweDathe, Der Philosoph bestreitet den Krieg. Rudolf Euckens politische Publizistik wa h-

rend des Ersten Weltkrieges, in Zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik. Studien zur Jenaer

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reshaping of the world in order to be able to endure it,35 as Nietzsche

once formulated it, was associated with the dethroning of the Christian

God and the Hegelian world spirit in favor of youth and the culture-

creating new man.36 Max Weber, by contrast, advocated that one become

resigned to the fact of living in a godless and prophetless time.37

As publisher, collector, and translator, Diederichss grasp of modernity

was defined by the liberation of transgressive energies in an attempt to dis-

solve what in the modern world had become the differentiated spheres of

science, morality, and art. In this program, the knowledge of experts, schol-

ars, politicians, and intellectuals would again be placed in the service of

disoriented man. There were, I argue, three kinds of transgressive dis-

courses: (1) the transgression of the individual through art, through the

creation of a new culture of sociability, and through modern religion; (2)

the transgression of time through the forced invention of traditions (mainly

Romantic versions of antiquity, renaissance, and romanticism inflected

through his conception of Jena); and (3) the transgression of space through

the assimilatory grasp of related and foreign cultures.

It should be pointed out that in the course of the first decade in Jena

(the years from 1904 to 1914), Diederichss focus shifted more and more

from art to religion (in the sense of Nietzsche that art and religion are thetrue helpers for creating a modern culture). However, Diederichss

approach remained eclectic, gathering in his publishing house the mystics

and heretics in history and in contemporary life, including religious dissi-

dents, outsiders and contrarians, whether of the left or the right, whether

from Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, or from the new paganism.

Important was not the denomination but the authenticity of the (religious)

struggle, and, as Diederichs put it, the potential to breach the calcified

structures of the established church.38

The perception of ossification wasnot limited to the institution of the church; it also encompassed the institu-

35 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 18841885, in Samtliche Werke.Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 11 (Munich:dtv, 1999), 33; cited in Breuer, Kulturpessimist, 41.36 For the context of the concept see Gottfried Ku enzlen, Der neue Mensch. Eine Untersu-chung zur sakularen Religionsgeschichte der Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997).37 Max Weber, Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, vol. 17, Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917/19, ed.Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter (Tu bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992), 106.

Webers famous essay was in part a response to the intellectual tendencies represented bythe Diederichs program. For more context see also Detlev J. K. Peukert, Max WebersDiagnose der Moderne (Go ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), 1626.38 Diederichs to a reader, November 23, 1903, in von Strau und Torney-Diederichs, ed.,

Eugen Diederichs, 94.

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tions of school, university and scholarship. Diederichs goal was, as he

stated in 1904, not in the first order to present polemical books against

the calcification of the three powerschurch, scholarship, and schoolbut

books that at the same time build positively and supply nourishment to the

energy that lies deep inside people.39 In search of the appropriate sources

of energy, Diederichss handling of tradition washere too betraying

Nietzsches influence on him and his authorscritical, anti-classical, and

opposed to the academic establishment. This occurred in full accord with

many of the younger scholars. The art historian Heinrich Wo lfflin, whom

Diederichs invited to Jena in 1906, expressed this stance when he wrote

that classical art seemed like permanent death or a permanent old age

that grew out of the conceptual glibness of academies and abstract theory.By contrast, the modern person thirsts, according to Wo lfflin, for the color-

ful, lively fullness of the world, for reality, for something graspable, for

people of flesh and blood.40

In his attempt to create a publishing tradition in Jena, Diederichs

hoped to make good on this hunger for rejuvenation. From Romanticism,

the Renaissance, and the literature of the classical period, he would ignite

the potential for modern renewal. His vision was that Jena should be an

energy center, an intellectual areopagus.41

The fact that less than tenyears later reviews about Diederichs and his vision of Jena could be found

in leading cultural magazines reveals his success in positioning himself and

his program within the German cultural landscape.42

III. ANTIQUITY

Jena is also a city which once lay in Greece,43 wrote Diederichs in his

memoirsa somewhat enigmatic utterance, which can, however, be read

as an expression of his Jena-specific appropriation of antiquity. This antiq-

uity was anti-classical; its leitmotif was more Dionysus than Apollo.44

39 Diederichs, Ziele des Verlages, n.p.40 Heinrich Wo lfflin, Die klassische Kunst. Eine Einfuhrung in die italienische Renais-sance, 3rd ed. (Munich: Bruckmann, 1904), 1.41 Diederichs, Verlegerische Aufgaben, 193.42 See excerpts in Eugen Diederichs. Selbstzeugnisse und Briefe von Zeitgenossen, ed. Ulf

Diederichs (Du sseldorf: Diederichs, 1967), 7186.43 Diederichs, Lebensaufbau, 277.44 See the introduction and many contributions in Achim Aurnhammer and Thomas Pit-

trof, eds., Mehr Dionysos als Apoll. Antiklassizistische Antike-Rezeption um 1900(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2002).

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Considered modern by contemporaries, the rediscovery of the archaic

epochs of the sixth and fifth centuries before Christ had been inspired by

the influential interpretations of Burckhardt, Bachofen, Rohde, and Nietz-

sche. The latter was also the source of Diederichss interest in archaic an-

tiquity. Following Nietzsche, Diederichs and many of his contemporaries

interpreted this period not as a preparation for its classical successor,

but against classical Athens and therefore against the fundamentals of

nineteenth-century, neo-humanist Bildung.45 In contrast to Winckelmanns

conception of the classical period, marked by noble simplicity and silent

greatness (with Parthenon and Phidias, Socrates and democracy), the

archaic period seemed to Diederichss turn-of-the-century contemporar-

ies as primeval, Dionysian, vital, and violent, and therefore in the highest

measure creative. Moreover, if one follows Nietzsches construction of the

archaic period, the unity of a pan-Hellenic consciousness among the com-

peting autonomous city-states was not produced politically through a

centralized state, but rather through culture, festivals, competitions, and

rituals. Diederichss concept of a modern German culture state bore obvi-

ous affinities to Nietzsches model of the archaic cultural states. This was

especially true of the central importance that Diederichs accorded in his

Jena model to the unifying function of art, religion, and festival. The syncre-tism of his concept of tradition was not, however, limited by reference to

Nietzsches understanding of the archaic period. Diederichs anti-classical

discourse of antiquity aimed in a more encompassing way at the revitaliza-

tion of what Hugo von Hofmannsthal called the dark underground of the

Greek soul.46 The periods Diederichs privileged, the early and late phases

of the classical era, were, like his own epoch, periods of transition. Since

the task of modern man was to re-experience, and still more to build

upon, it was not necessary to engage in a philological-historical under-standing of antiquity, as the German gymnasium and university taught, but

rather, in the words of the Diederichs author Otto Kiefer, to advance the

German renaissance of the Hellenic world.47 Pre-Socratics, Plato in

Rudolf Kassners new translation, the Stoics and Plotinus:these were the

most important of the new editions of his classical program. Diederichs

45 Here and the following: Hubert Cancik, Nietzsches Antike, rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler,2000), 3536. In detail about Nietzsches Konstruktion der Archaik als Antiklassik,

3549.46 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Griechenland, in Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben.Prosa IV, ed. Herbert Steiner (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1966), 153.47 Here and the following: Otto Kiefer, Zur griechischen Kultur, in Eugen Diederichs

Jena in Thuringen, 7.

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also consciously distanced these editions from a more scholarly undertaking

by including books about the classical period by outsiders to the academic

guild, such as Walter Pater, Heinrich Gomperz, Arthur Drews und Karl

Joel. The publisher repeatedly emphasized that he wanted to publish not

just books for reading [Lesebucher], but books for living [Lebens-

bucher] that inspired to action. He therefore insisted on as direct a connec-

tion to the anti-classical heritage of antiquity as possible. Immersion, in this

world, presented as directly related to the modern predicament, should be

eased with artistically done editions with a minimum of philological ballast.

By producing in this way a proximity to the distant archaic period, he

believed it was possible to draw upon the Dionysian alterity of antiquity as

a transformative source of energy.

IV. RENAISSANCE

Florence is for me a second home, almost as if I had already lived there

in the time of Medici,48 insisted Diederichs in retrospect. For Diederichs,

enthusiasm for the Renaissance reached back to his bookseller days, when,

after reading Jacob Burckhardts Kultur der Renaissance, as well as hisCicerone, he journeyed in 189697 through Italy on foot. In his identifica-

tion with the heretic and the powerful man above the masses, in particular

the condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta, the young publisher revealed himself

as completely caught up in the Renaissance cult of his time. Wilhelmine

poets, artists, and intellectuals valorized the great individuals, who often

distinguished themselves by the paucity of their scruples, and sought to

appropriate the Renaissance as a pagan, strong, personal and healthy

power lacking in modernity.49 This interest motivated Diederichss styliza-

tion of the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini as the site of his publishing

houses foundation, as well as the selection of Florence together with Leip-

zig as its first homes.

Three strategies can be identified in Diederichss revitalization of the

Renaissance. He followed the tracks of Nietzsche and Burckhardt, added

contemporary interpretations, and expanded the understanding of the Ital-

ian Renaissance so as to include the German humanists, foremost among

48

Eugen Diederichs, Perso nliche Aufzeichnungen, in von Strau und Torney-Diederichs, ed., Eugen Diederichs, 35.49 Walter Rehm, Der Renaissancekult um 1900 und seine U berwindung, in Der Dichterund die neue Einsamkeit. Aufsatze zur Literatur um 1900, ed. Reinhardt Habel (Go t-tingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969), 44.

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them Du rer, but also Hans Holbein und Hans Sachs, Paracelsus and Eras-

mus. In the commentary to Ernst Borkowskys Aus der Zeit des Human-

ismus, the publisher announced: German scholars and artists are not

constricted copyists of their Italian predecessors, but hearty, earthy natures.

What is magnificent about the German Renaissance is at all times Ger-

man.50 Parallel to the efforts to legitimize a German Renaissance, Died-

erichs published in 1902 the first translation of the third epoch-making

portrayal of the Renaissance (after Burckhardt und Gobineau), namely

Walter Paters The Renaissance. Not a textbook, but a life book and as

such an unalloyed source of beauty51this is how the publishers catalog

of 1906 described the fundamental work of the British aesthetic movement.

Literary modernism was, however, absent from Diederichss Jena program.The psychological and subjectively differentiated interpretations of the

Renaissance by writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler,

or Thomas Mann were at cross purposes with Diederichss dominant urge

to render contemporaneous the Renaissance as a source of power for a still-

to-be-formed German culture.

The energy-seeking appropriation of history was much more akin to

Burckhardts injunction to read the sources themselves. In 1910, Diederichs

followed this call, and with a new series he sought to establish the basis foran intensive engagement with the Renaissance: Das Zeitalter der Renais-

sance. Ausgewahlte Quellen zur Geschichte der italienischen Kultur. In

cooperation with Marie Herzfeld as chief editor, he planned three series

comprising a total of seventy to a hundred volumes. But because of the

outbreak of the war, the series, which nevertheless became important in the

field of art history, was cut off, with only ten volumes appearing by 1914.

The approach gains still other contours when placed against the mod-

ern project of Aby Warburg. As is well known, Warburg insisted on strict

contextualization, both in a philological and cultural-historical sense,

which he intended as a counter-position to a sentimental appropriation of

the Renaissance. Diederichs, as we have seen, saw previous epochs, includ-

ing the Renaissance, primarily as a source of energy for the present, as a

direct refreshment of the sentiment and will.52 Warburgs researches into

the survival of antiquity [das Nachleben der Antike] in the Renaissance

50 Wege zu deutscher Kultur. Eine Einfuhrung in die Bucher des Verlages Eugen Dieder-

ichs in Jena, Jena 1908, 62.51 Review in Neue Hamburger Zeitung. Partly reprinted in Zur Kultur der Seele 18961906. Verlagsbericht von Eugen Diederichs Jena. Jena 1906, 25.52 Advertisement in Neuerscheinungen, Politik, Antike und Renaissance. Jena. Oktober1911, 4445.

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were partly driven by a never explicitly formulated question of the origins

of animosity towards Jews.53 He had conceived of his lifes work, the Kul-

turwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg [Warburg Library], in Hamburg

and then later in London, as a bulwark against antisemitism. By contrast,

Diederichs, who in his appropriation of the Renaissance so clearly favored

the heroic men of power, the great evildoers, the heretics, condottieri,

and tyrants, worked in his Jena interpretive scheme towards enthroning a

discourse that was at first critical of democracy and then became explicitly

antidemocratic. Modernity, according to this view, required strong individ-

uals, more precisely men, for history-shaping deeds. The path to this poli-

tics still lay through an intellectual politics [Politik des Geistes, as he

titled one of his programmatic essay collections]54 that could break through

and reshape encrusted political, religious, social, and scholarly institutions.

This path involved an interpretive syncretism: the coexistence of differ-

ent ways of reading the Renaissancethe aestheticization of Pater, the

hyper-individualistic Burckhardt, and even the racism of such Gobineau

and Chamberlain followers as Heinrich Driesmans, Ludwig Kuhlenbeck,

and Ludwig Woltmann. These all figured into Diederichss search for

energy, and in one publishing catalogue after the next, these energy sources,

as he called them, were configured in ever newer constellations as buildingblocks of a German culture that was to surpass all other European cultures.

At the same time, by also taking pseudoscientific and even fantastic racial

theories in his respected publishing house, he contributed to their social

acceptance among educated circles. Nolens volens, he also provided intel-

lectual ammunition for those who intensified cultural nationalism into an

exclusive, aggressive political nationalism. In 1915, he even published the

attack of Richard Benz, a long-standing associate of the publishing house,

on the Renaissance as the doom of German culture. The national shift,accelerated during the war, was evident. If the German Renaissance of

the Kulturhistorische Monographien, published at the beginning of the

career of an Italy-enthused Diederichs, still stood in the European context

of Florence and Leipzig, the influence of the war engendered the gradual

extraction of the Renaissance from its European context. This is also what

Diederichss Jena program came to stand for.

53 This is the convincingly argued thesis of Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg und derAntisemitismus. Kulturwissenschaft als Geistespolitik (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999).54 Programmatic title of a collection of essays written by Diederichs between 1914 and

1919 and published in 1920.

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V. ROMANTICISM

When Diederichs moved his publishing house from Leipzig to Jena, he alsointended with this something like the documentation of a centennial cele-

bration of the Romantics.55 Jena as the birthplace of Romanticism was to

be brought back into the consciousness of contemporaries. More even than

that, Diederichs claimed that he was working to complete the endeavors of

the Romantics. In 1908 he wrote,

With great fervor the old Romantics became involved in resurrect-

ing the old poetic treasures of our people, bringing us closer to

the art of the medieval, and revealing the emotional world of the

Germanic tribes. But their desire [Wollen] was never fulfilled.56

Moreover, Germany had become an industrial country, and therefore the

conditions of the Romantic quest had become more difficult. Germans had

learned how to master reality, Diederichs averred, but public festivals and

hurrah-patriotism had taken the place of a deeper subjectivity.

The Jena start of Diederichss search for inner power in the depth of

German culture was constituted by the new series Erzieher zu deutscherBildung[Educators for German Bildung], which was to consist of manage-

able, short, carefully selected texts from the writings of Herder, Friedrich

Schlegel, Fichte, Schiller, and Hamann (Novalis and Ho lderlin had already

been published in new editions of their collected works). The publisher

hoped to offer the Erzieher volumes as new, as yet undiscovered reserves of

intellectual force. The texts would revitalize qualities, as one endorsement

put it, which seemed to have gotten lost in the pressure of modern special-

ization, namely universal Bildung, the crucial nexus between the scholarlydisciplines, the sense of the commonality of life and scholarship, the cre-

ative understanding of the scholar, and ones own, independent worldview,

achieved through scholarship and philosophy, in short: inner intellectual

freedom.57 What the publisher sought to bring into modern mass society,

55 Diederichs to Martin Rade, October 26, in von Strau und Torney-Diederichs, ed.,

Eugen Diederichs, 88.56 Here and the following: Eugen Diederichs, Deutsches Wesen, in Wege zu deutscherKultur, 69. For a fascinating analysis of romantic thinking and modernity see Kittsteiner,Romantisches Denken in der entzauberten Welt, in Hu binger, ed., Versammlungsortmoderner Geister, 486504.57 Advertisement in Eugen Diederichs Jena in Turingen. Jena 1904, 35.

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he in other places conveyed with the concept of the individual independent

thinker [Selbstdenker].58 Contrary to the intellectualist worldview of the

urban dweller, as sketched by Georg Simmel as a positive strategy of the

individual against the leveling of modern life, the so-called Selbstdenker

formed by this Jena understanding of tradition was distinguished by the

cultivation of inner resources and calm demeanor. One works, one amuses

oneself, but one does not live, the publisher wrote with respect to the

urban centers. Real culture, as contemporaries believed they had learned

from Nietzsche, can only grow from life. This way of thinking, which held

the culture-regenerating depth of the small town against the life-threatening

surface culture of the big city, allowed Diederichs to assert Jenas superi-

ority.

The appeal to the Romantic legitimized, then, not just a heroic ideal

of life within modernity; it also motivated the publisher to search for the

empowering substance of Germanys own national tradition. We must

return to the sources of our culture, in order from there to create something

new,59 he demanded in a publishing brochure, indirectly citing Herder. In

other words, in order to give form to modernity, the self-proclaimed lead-

ers without a people [Fuhrer ohne Volk]60 had to find the people, perhaps

even create them. The path led for Diederichs and his authors and editorsagain to art, whose fostering soil was Volkstum, thus fairy tales, peasant

novels, legends, old-German art, and folk songs. In order to lend shaping

force to his Jena program, Diederichs focused on large series, with Herders

commixing of the international and the national defining, if in more assimi-

lationist terms than Herder would have countenanced, the agenda. In 1912,

on the hundredth anniversary ofGrimms Fairy Tales, Diederichs began his

Marchen der Weltliteratur series. The beautifully presented yet scholarly

books were to reveal to the reader in their color, richness, and vitalizingfreshness the popular world of the fairy tales of Europe, the Orient, and the

so-called primitive peoples. Eternal and always young, as one publishing

announcement put it, the fairy tales would lead humanity back to its ori-

gins.61

58 Here and the following: Eugen Diederichs, Wo stehen wir? in Die deutsche Kulturbe-wegung im Jahre 1913. Jena 1913, 3.59 Prospectus Renaissance, Thule, Kierkegaard, Tolstoi, Politik, Neovitalismus, Bergson,

Ma rchen, April 1912 (Diederichs Papers, Thu ringische Universita ts- und Landesbiblio-thek, Jena).60 Here and the following: Diederichs, Wo stehen wir? 2.61 Advertisement for the series in Die Neuerscheinungen des Verlages Eugen Diederichsim Jahre 1912. Jena, Oktober 1912, 28.

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Another Romanticism-inspired project involved Diederichss search for

the Nordic man.62 Preceded by a five-week trip in the summer of 1910 to

Iceland, now idealized as once Italy had been, Diederichs published the first

volume of the series, Thule: Altnordische Dichtung und Prosa in 1911. The

best known Scandinavian experts of German academia, especially the

younger among them like Felix Niedner and Andreas Heusler, worked on

this series, which for the discipline as well as the popular perception of

Old Norse literature was exceptionally important.63 Through the calculated

selection of texts, the manner of translation and annotation, and in the case

of the Edda through the retracing of the textual transmission back to an

original, the readers of the Thule texts were supposed to get the sense of

a lost homogeneous culture in the north of Europe. The editors presented

this culture as uninfluenced by other sources of European civilization, the

Orient and Greece,64 and saw in the pre-Christian, Old Norse literature of

medieval Iceland an unalloyed Germanness.65 In the tradition of a

Romantic myth of the North, the Scandinavian medieval period thus

became a source of an original, un-falsified Germanentum, a central

building-block of German identity.66 By rendering deutsch and german-

isch as equivalent, they legitimized an assimilationist method whose aim

was to recollect our essential selves.67

Diederichss publishing engagement for the assimilation of foreign cul-

tures remained consistent with the national impetus of his Jena-inspired

program. The cultural fire [Kulturfeuer] for the forging of a new German

culture was to arise from mixing, inspiration, and friction, as he insisted

with especial vehemence against the countervailing claims of the growing

62 Diederichs, Lebensaufbau, 163. For the historical context see Klaus von See,

Deutsche Germanen-Ideologie.Vom Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart (Frankfurt: Athe-na um, 1970).63 On the history and the context of the Thule series see Kurt Schier, Die Literaturendes Nordens, in Hu binger, ed., Versammlungsort moderner Geister, esp. 426; and JuliaZernack, Der Mythos vom Norden und die Krise der Moderne. Skandinavische Litera-

tur im Programm des Eugen Diederichs Verlags, in Ulbricht and Werner, eds., Romantik,Revolution & Reform, 20823.64 A detailed presentation of the series is to be found in Neuerscheinungen, Politik, Antikeund Renaissance, 22.65 Here and the following: see the advertisement for the series in Die deutsche Kulturbe-wegung im Jahre 1913, 12.66

See Zernack, Der Mythos vom Norden und die Krise der Moderne. The conceptwas coined by Karl Heinz Bohrer, Der Mythos vom Norden. Studien zur romantischen

Geschichtsprophetie (Ph.D. diss., Heidelberg, 1961).67 Adverstisement for the Thule series in Neuerscheinungen, Politik, Antike und Renais-sance, 22.

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volkisch movement.68 Philosophy was to be taken from France, politics

from England, and religion from China and India. But Diederichss interna-

tionalism had a foundation in the tradition of German nation-thinking. We

can see this both in his belief that it fell to the Germans to bring the cultures

of the world together, and in his pronounced tendency to treat foreign cul-

tures in a superficial sense. For example, in his autobiography Diederichs

devoted a chapter to each of the non-European cultures of Asia, Africa and

America, under the general heading of world culture. The culture of

Asia, he wrote in the introduction to the chapter that dealt with the Far

East, is closely tied with our religious thinking; it represents as it were the

feminine passive side, the limit as against the European and Faustian sense

of endless possibilities.69

In this estimation, Diederichs partook of anenduring conceit of world history, derived from the Enlightenment, in

which, as Ju rgen Osterhammel has put it, humanity is divided into those

capable of making history and the passive rest without history.70 Yet this

is precisely what drew Diederichss interest to, for example, Asian religion,

though not just in the negative sense, but also in the positive sense that

Nietzsche intended when he argued in his essay The Advantages and Dis-

advantages of History for Life that religion and art alone constituted

transhistorical forces capable of resisting a withered culture buttressed by

lifeless scholarship. Diederichss impulse to collect and translate the sources

of the worlds religions spoke to a certain limited openness, but this open-

ness, which must always be conceived against the background of volkisch

nationalism with a very different agenda, also served the ends of the nation.

A widened reservoir of vitality for a culture that had been drained of vital-

ity; a source of energy, in the Nietzschean sense of the word Kraft, for a

hollowed-out culture: this is what Diederichs and many of his contempo-

raries hoped for from the East. In the end, of course, a cultural-imperial

moment inhered in all of this, because much like Fichte, Diederichs believedthat only the Germans could give ultimate form to world literature and

culture.

68 Diederichs to H. Erdmann, April 19, 1913. Very similar also is Diederichss letter to

the editors of the Deutsches Lehrerblatt, the Berliner Tageblatt, the Berliner NeuesteNachrichten, and others, February 14, 1913 (Diederichs Papers, Deutsches Literaturar-chiv Marbach). The concept of being inspired by foreign cultures was formulated in

Fichtes Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808; Hamburg: Meiner, 1978), 1067. On theFichte renaissance in Germany after 1900 see Jens Nordalm, Fichte und der Geist von

1914. Kulturgeschichtliche Aspekte eines Beispiels politischer Wirkung philosophischerIdeen in Deutschland, Fichte-Studien 15 (1999): 21132.69 Diederichs, Lebensaufbau, 147.70Ju rgen Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens. Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im18. Jahrhundert(Munich: Beck, 1998), 394.

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And like Fichte, Diederichs and many of his contemporaries felt them-

selves in the years after 1900 to be in a period of transition. In his Addresses

to the German Nation, Fichte described his period as one in which the

nation is stimulated only, and the creative act which is to be the result has

not yet forced its way through.71 This was the moment of collection; it

was a moment of weakness, or perceived weakness, and it is this weakness

that generated a more open modernity, with the form of creativity not yet

given, and the provenance of culture not yet clear. For the Berlin-based

publisher Samuel Fischer, the way forward seemed more obvious, with a

direct route from the revolutionaries in the literature of his day to their

enthronement as the classic figures of literature tomorrow. Looking back,

we tend to ascribe to Fischer the greater foresight, the surer aesthetic sense.

But it was Diederichs who more accurately measured the pulse of the Nietz-

schean modernity, the collapse before the renewal that would, in fact, chart

the odyssey, if not the final destination, of the European modern.

Was the form provincial? Certainly, it was conceived in a provincial

town: Jena. Would it have looked different had Diederichs remained in

Leipzig and Florence? About this one can only speculate. Provincialsin

the sense of not being intellectuals of the metropolitan centerswere also

the lodestars of Diederichs program: Herder, from East Prussia, via Riga,

Strasbourg, and Weimar, detested Paris; Fichte ended in Berlin, but his deci-

sive intellectual workthe Wissenschaftslehrehe composed in Jena; and

Nietzsche, as is well known, disdained the asphalt world of Berlin, prefer-

ring the distant and alas provincial Basel. Perhaps in any neo-Romantic

program of cultural renewal an anti-urban, anti-industrial bias inheres.

From this standpoint, a provincial city like Jena was both program and

incubator, enabler of renewal and a limiter of its possibilities. The compari-

son need not only be with Berlin or Vienna. One could also consider Ham-

burg, a city of important openings in art, especially with regard to

impressionism and the collections of Alfred Lichtwark.72 In Hamburg, one

was at least more self-evidently confronted with the world. This is the

whole point of port cities, which, as Osterhammel points out, were in the

nineteenth century the most important transaction points between coun-

71 Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation, 106.72

On this aspect of Hamburgs cultural life, see especially Carolyn H. Kay, Art and theGerman Bourgeoisie: Alfred Lichtwark and Modern Painting in Hamburg, 18861914(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); and Jenkins, Provincial Modernity, which,however, tries to see Hamburgs modernity as primarily contextualized by local politics

and not by transnational connections.

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tries and continents,73 akin to international airports in the late twentieth

century. Here the governing image is contact. For Diederichs, and by exten-

sion Jena, the ruling metaphor was not contact but, instead, assimilation:

principally the assimilation of the world to his neo-Romantic and in this

sense provincial program. He favored artistic translation and preferred

smooth-edged characterizations of foreign cultures, which he could then

instrumentalize for his own national renewal. Through a conception of the

national, refracted in the local, his publishing program blunted the shock

of the strange. He rendered the world familiar, much as a late medieval

devotional panel might render Biblical places in Palestine with idealized

Swabian towns. But of course we may ask ourselves whether making-

familiar is as important to globalization as the encounter with strangeness.Our answer, I would venture, will tell us something about the place of pro-

vincial modernism in a larger transnational narrative.

Vanderbilt University.

73Ju rgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts(Munich: Beck, 2009), 403.

288

Meike G. Werner - Modern Jena as a Model of Cultural Regeneration in Wilhelmine Germany

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