Why German History is Different

foreign thinking about how Germany changed the course of history no not that history before that Germany gave us some of our most influential thinkers people like can't Hagel schoppenhauer Heidegger Nietzsche Marx why was that [Music] in fact for good door for bad many of the ideas and problems of modern life are focus on the individual a concern with industrialism an emphasis on Nations and national identity even the idea of a rebellious Spirit arose out of the small area in the middle of a yet to be unified Germany [Music] in this small area a Crucible of modernity and a reaction to it emerged I've come here to explore all of this and it starts with the enlightenment because during those tumultuous years Germany became a great critic of the dominant cultures that surrounded it British and French culture in particular [Music] I want to look at how that critical culture emerged look at some of the romanticists and irrationalist philosophies It produced asked what it gave us ask how it might help us why it's still an important model of human behavior for us that we can learn from today [Music] whereas England and France have a claim to having a single coherent National narrative and National story of A Sort Germany's is much more fragmented as it was a loose collection of Germanic principalities and States until it was unified only in 1871. [Music] Goethe Germany's answer to Shakespeare wrote Germany where is it I do not know where to find such a country the bavarians fought with the French for example during the Napoleonic Wars and before that the Germanic people had been traumatized by the widespread Devastation of the 30 Years War which largely took place on German soil included every major European power and complex alliances of different states and monarchies leagues Empires and principalities and around 20 percent of Europe's population died during that war in some areas that was as high as 60 percent okay so Germany was fractured but it's real modern history begins with a reaction a reaction against the French with their enlightened dominant Enlightenment rationalist culture and against the British with its empiricists and scientists and its great Empire what did the Germans have [Music] it had an inferiority complex and it was invaded by Napoleon an occupied in totality by 1812. the Germans were forced to fight for the French in Russia but it was a complicated situation many young radicals were supporters of the revolution in France Liberty equality for eternity was the cool of the day then Napoleon came many went from celebrating Napoleon to hating him from wanting to be French to want him to be rid of the French [Music] this complex resentment of the French philosophs and French Authority led to a flourishing of German ideas that emerged as a reaction to the enlightenment which many German thinkers characterized as overbearing condescending a building of systems of domination it wasn't rejected Kant of course was German but modern theories of philosophy began taking on a different shape in Germany but the shape the response took needed its own fertile soil some ideas that were well German and where better to look for those ideas inside and in the soil the ideas of the Enlightenment whether in Emmanuel kant's system of rationality Newton's scientific laws of gravity and motion or spinozas all regulating metaphysics were felt by many German thinkers to be distant abstract cold theories they seem to be completely void of the Vitality of ordinary life too concerned with mathematics or technical language than with the felt immediacy of everyday routines the vicissitudes the colors the passions of human existence and so German thinkers began to look both to their close surroundings and inwards towards themselves [Music] the ideas first took roots in two places German landscape and German language and went on to include other close immediate phenomenon that they thought that the enlightenment philosophers had neglected things like the everyday in the ordinary emotion sentiment the undecidable mystery the irrational and spirituality foreign of the Reformation Martin Luther first translated the Bible into German in 1534 he'd focused on everyday German vernacular a bold move at a time when the church had been dominated by an exclusive High Latin his new Bible became an instant bestseller setting off a revolution in reading and a flourishing of the German language in many ways Germany's inferiority complex with no colonies no centralized States no National newspapers lots of small towns and villages in isolation led to an insatiable appetite for books Germans took refuge in the imagination more than anywhere else in Europe Goethe said that the honorable public knows the extraordinary only through the novel and Ludwig teak translated the Great Adventure novel Don Quixote into German books of course have this miraculous effect of turning yourself and your attention inwards towards the imagination and the self in isolation from the world and outward to other people's lives other worlds other people's imaginations simultaneously Germans had also long instilled great significance in the landscape around them in particular the forest the forests were powerful and life-giving and beautiful and dangerous and contradictory all at the same time they were pregnant with mystery they were Midwife to history they were a symbol of Nature and everything that nature gives and also a symbol of danger and and and fear at the same time it's no surprise then that many if not almost all in some sense of Grimm's Fairy Tales came from in a very real way these fairy forests in 1822 Casper David Frederick painted a solitary figure a simple landscape that's become one of Germany's most famous National paintings the tree signifies so much Roots stability but also hardship survival that Roman defeat it's both heroic and lonely it's even been used as a symbol on German coins the Germanic tribes beat the Romans from the cover of the German forests the First Act of resistance in the cultural memory and national identity forming event the German Romantics later idealized folk poetry and bucolic stories in which the landscape took a central role the feeling of nature symbolized something reason could not quite capture the contradictions and Mysteries and traditions that seem to arise out of it seemingly from everywhere and nowhere developed not from rational Consciousness but given by Mother Earth herself The Brothers Grimm didn't write their fairy tales Rapunzel Hansel and Gretel the Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White among them they went typed like anthropologists collecting them from locals Jacob Grimm wrote nothing remains more perverse than the presumption inherent in writing or fabricating epic poetry since it can only write itself the Grimms also spent their lives creating the first German dictionary [Music] okay I'm in Marburg a place where the Grimm Brothers raped and collected a lot of their fairy tales and that there is the Rapunzel Tower maybe I'll try and go up there I'm gonna sit and read Rapunzel under the Rapunzel Tower thankfully they're all about two pages short as hundreds of them they're all a lot darker in the Grim version the prince falls from the tower into a bush of thorns and blinds himself but they do live happily ever after it's in this context of language folk tales and Landscapes that Germany began fermenting its own genre its own distinctive type of critique culture and philosophy and it's for this reason of immediacy of experience of feeling and seeing and being immersed in place that I wanted to come to Germany too because the central thinkers of this period in the late 18th century also felt this they wanted Adventure Escape growth experience while also emphasizing the domestic the people and language they acknowledge the contradiction of life being far and near simultaneously Goethe longed for the Mediterranean he wrote in some of the most famous lines in German poetry do you know the land where the lemon trees grow in darkened leaves the gold oranges glow a soft Wind Blows from the pale blue sky the Myrtle stands mute and the Bay Tree high do you know it well it's there I've begun in 1769 a young writer had set off on a voyage to an unknown destination Johann godfreed Von herder wrote I go forth into the world as untroubled as an apostle or a philosopher in order to see it he anticipated Nietzsche when he later said to the ships you philosophers he wanted to leave behind the static texts of his study and live Goethe was so enamored when he met herder that he wrote Alas and still confined to prison restricted by this great mass of books you must escape from this confining world he took images and Journeys and language instead of abstract ideas he said what a wide scope for thought a ship suspended between sky and sea provides everything here adds Wings to one's thoughts gives the motion and an ample sphere the fluttering sail the ever-rolling ship the Rippling waves the flying clouds the broad infinite atmosphere on land one is chained to a fixed point and restricted to the narrow limits of a situation herder wanted to go out and explore what he called living reason he wanted to leave the dusty abstract theories and deductions of his study and go out and explore and record the cultures and peoples and languages of the world it's for this reason that he's a forerunner to today's anthropologists he set off to explore the culture of the earth of all regions times and peoples forces mingling forms Asiatic religion and chronology and polity and philosophy Greek everything Rome and everything Northern religion law Customs Warfare honor the popish age monks our addition the politics of China and Japan the natural science of a new world American Customs Etc a universal history of world culture he wanted to collect folk songs and record culture in what he called testimonia he said that each Nation develops its own foundational documents according to its religions and traditions and Concepts and they appear in Poetic language with poetic ornamentation and Rhythm a National Heritage of Mythic songs and you had to study the origin of the nation's oldest and most noteworthy features in studying how cultures had particular points developed in distinctive ways he anticipated thinkers like Hegel and Nietzsche run Foucault and his focus on national identity at a very early stage made him the first real theorist of nationalism in other words herder set off a difficult threat in history the enlightenment was a period of creation self-creation Nation creation the creation of new models of behavior of machines Sciences theories of constructing rational replacements for traditional ways of doing things that many were seeing as defunct privileges replaced with politics Superstition replaced with science religion replaced with ethics an age of revolutions the philosophical question of importance was how these new ideas new systems were formed kant's influential response was that we order the world through our reason [Music] one of kant's disciples Johan Godley feature took Camp's idea that we construct the world ourselves through our reason and argued that camp didn't go far enough he said that philosophers before had thought that the world was given to us but there's no proof that that's the case at all instead we construct the world ourselves as an eye full of irrepressible energy full of self-activity that the world has created not in the image of God or the image of science but in the image of ourselves Goethe wrote famously that I turned back into myself and I find a world that within us were forces more powerful more mysterious more voluminous than anything we find outside of us philosopher rudiger sifransky writes that fitchter wanted to spread among his listeners the desire to be an eye not a complacent sentimental passive eye however but one that was Dynamic World grinding world creating we've just been into yina where Romanticism was born where the first romantic philosophers and novelists and Poets all lived Bohemian controversial scandalous lives they lived together writing and teaching and partying and walking up into the Foothills that surround this beautiful little town and it's where feature before the romantics talked and his house is now a romantic Museum and it's full of wonderful books and artifacts and there's a great anecdote in there where apparently fidget would say to his students gentlemen I want you to think the wall and they'd all stare at the wall and then he'd say Have you thought the wall and they'd all nod and he'd say well that was what you think of the person that was thinking the wall in other words there's only ever you thinking the wall there's no real proof that the wall exists at all of this emphasis on the eye on immediacy on local culture and language and Landscape built up into a thunderous movement in the 1790s a movement that became romanticism in all of this we see something so often misunderstood its significance understated the effects of which Define us today the invention of a modern self an eye at the center of a complex experience of the world an eye that feels like it's self-determining free desirous torn between nature and City between work and pleasure between rootedness and wonderlust what the romantics called the finite the everyday the ordinary and the infinite the imagination the spiritual the universal the Glorious the Eternal that something that feels bigger than ourselves the Romantic Theologian Frederick schliermacher wrote that imagination is the highest and most original element in us it's your imagination that creates the world for you schlemaker believed that our imagination could imagine the infinite in everything the what if the why can't I that what happens when it's the Superhuman the thing that taught us to fly to build castles that rise into the air the magic that preserves life itself it's the wonderous Story the creation of new Fantastical fictional Worlds the thing that imagines political Utopias and destroys them the imagination is infinite but our lives are finite the poet and philosopher Frederick Schlegel believed this too he thought that while we were always trying to pursue or grasp the absolute as a kind of regulative Ideal something to move towards whether that be absolute truth and knowledge absolute security or friendship because we're fallible because we're insecure because we're contradictory creatures with no real secure foundations for our knowledge for our beliefs that we're always stumbling around in the dark we were doomed to never reach it the human story wasn't just about science logic reason industry but it had to be holistic philosophies had to contain both these things and the imagination sentiments had to combine Grand National and Global narratives with everyday life a total story novalis wrote that by endowing the commonplace with a higher meaning the ordinary with a mysterious respect the known with the Dignity of the unknown the finite with the appearance of the infinite I'm making it romantic and it's for all these reasons that the romantics like to focus on the ordinary the simple the everyday the seemingly mundane because with the right Outlook the right tools and instruments even a single word a single glance a single Speck of dirt contains something of the infinite of the absolute absolute wisdom or truth can tell us something about the world wisdom is found everywhere and it's for this same reason that The Brothers Grimm went all around this area collecting hundreds of folk tales and fairy tales they applied the enlightenment ideal of organizing and interpreting and studying the world like Deidre had done in his encyclopedia to local myths and stories because they knew that these things passed down from generation to generation were just as important the Romantic Movement continued to develop through the early 19th century it was the first to recognize some of the now common criticisms of Modern Life alienation treating the world like a machine disregarding our emotions and the environment it focused on the eye at the center of life in a relationship with the world popularizing new ways of telling stories about our lives giving support to the idea that each person mattered all of this a contextual precondition maybe for the slow Democratic reforms in Europe that followed but many have also criticized Romanticism for leading to Nazism its focus on national identity on blood and soil for legitimizing emotion which can include obsessive passion anger or Pride but the Grimms and Gerta might respond turning into yourself and finding a world doesn't mean accepting all of that world for what it is the romantics grappled with the contradictions of Life instead of attempting to flatten them out into a one-dimensional experience that reduces everything to logical calculation all of this set emotion a kind of a rational Trend not anti-rational but a rational in philosophy that focused on other things rather than just reason and it led to people like Nietzsche and schopenhauer and Heidegger and many other romantic movements that we're used to today without it we wouldn't have people like Beethoven and we wouldn't have the kind of emotional orchestral music that we're so used to hearing in Hollywood films and we wouldn't have people like Wordsworth who focused on poetry through Tales of everyday lives so Democratic and new for the time while all of this seems quite inevitable to us today we have to remember that it's not history is never inevitable [Music] thank you as always for watching and a huge thanks of course as always to my patreons without which this just wouldn't be possible so if you want to see scripts if you want to chat in the Discord server if you want your name in the credits but most of all if you just want to help support make this content then click the link in the description below if not you can like you can share you can leave a comment to all those things that help the algorithm thank you so much and I'll see you next time foreign [Music]

Channel: Then & Now

Views: 598,632

Keywords: germany, history, german, fichte, herder, schlegel, romanticism, romantic, philosophy, kant

Id: Pnl7Mc2U7F0

Length: 27min 9sec (1629 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 10 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Thurii1]

The idea of how Germany and Germans fit into the world can be hard to put in a box.