Dialectics of Classicism: The birth of Nazism from the spirit of Classicism

II

It all began with a Classical revival in the mid-18th century which, as already mentioned, took an idiosyncratic and unusual form in Germany that was very different from those in the other European countries. Firstly, because for the very first time it was a Hellenic revival that excluded the Romans; and secondly, because it evinced a peculiar intensity of self-identification with the ancient Greeks that eventually verged on self-delusion, even mania.

Perhaps this was due to the belated nature of the Renaissance in Germany. The original Renaissance in Italy largely passed by Germany as it was pre-empted there by the Reformation. Luther, its initiator and main exponent, was hostile to what he took to be the pagan influences coming from Rome. A century later the Thirty Years religious wars reinforced this hostility among the Protestants. When humanistic and artistic culture began to recover in Germany, it did so under the aegis of French Augustan neo-Classical fashions coming from Versailles, which every local German ruler, both grand and petty, sought to imitate. During the 18th century this was termed the Zivilization against which the exponents of Kultur rebelled. Instead of the Latinate culture of Rome, they went further back to the more authentic origins in Greece. Instead of imitating the imitators they would emulate the original themselves.

Just as Blake sought to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, so the German Dichter und Denker sought to recreate Athens in Weimar, situating it spiritually as far away from Jerusalem as their nominal Christianity allowed. What they in fact established went through at least three distinct moments in Hegel’s sense, which I have called the dialectics of Classicism. It begins as simple and naïve Grecophilia or Philhellenism; in the second stage this develops into a much more fraught and delusive Grecomania; and in the third stage this turns into a full blown Grecogermania as it becomes nationalistic and aggressive. In accordance with Hegel’s conception of the dialectic, the earlier stages are aufgehoben or sublated in the later ones.

The dialectics begins with the Grecophiliac thesis of love and admiration for the ancient Greeks and the desire to imitate them. Despite the fact that both geographically and historically the Germans were further removed from Greece than almost any other European nation – they had next to no classical ruins for example – they came to believe themselves to be closer in language and race to classical Greece than any other people. Hence, they developed a special affinity for the ancient Greeks, while remaining utterly indifferent to the modern ones. This led them to the delusion that they could become like the ancient Greeks and identify themselves with them, which brought on the next stage of Grecomania. This was eccentric but harmless as long as it remained in the ideal domain of art and thought. However, when it took a practical and political turn in the attempt to transform Germany into a modern reincarnation of Greece, it became dangerous. For German nationalists came to believe that they could not only reconstitute the Reich, but invest it with the qualities of the polis, which they took to be a Volksgemeinschaft. Because of their evident kinship with the Greeks, they alone of all the European nations had the capacity and will to recreate the Greek achievement in Germany. This was when Grecogermania ensued. They set about building a capital, Berlin, in the classical style. The culmination of this was to have been a capital for all of Europe of gigantesque classical proportions to be called Germania, which Hitler and Speer would erect after the victorious war. Fortunately it was not to be.

Winckelmann started it all off with a book published in 1755, Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks. It needs to be said that he never saw any real Greek paintings and few Greek sculptures apart from inferior Roman copies. One of the few was the Hellenistic masterpiece Laocoon, which he interpreting in his own idealistic way. This set off an intense debate in Germany as Lessing disputed this interpretation in his book Laocoon of 1766. From then on what was taken to be Hellenic Classicism became all the rage in German artistic and literary circles. Many undoubtedly great works, such as Goethe’s play in imitation of Euripides, Iphigenia auf Tauris, and Schiller’s heathenish poem, ‘The Gods of Greece’, emerged from it. But Goethe was wise to concentrate his energies on the German Romantic Faust, rather than on the Homeric-style epic or the Odyssean drama Nausicaa, on which he worked desultorily at various times in his career. Schiller, too, did not persevere with Classicism, though he paid it due regard in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man of 1795. This was the highpoint of Grecophilia.

Grecomania ensued when Hölderlin, who had fallen under Schiller’s spell, thought that he could not merely evoke the gods of Greece poetically but bring them down to earth to dwell in Germany. Neither Schiller nor Goethe could take this seriously since for them Greece was an ideal, not a reality; they laughed at Hölderlin behind his back. However, his two school mates, Hegel and Schelling, were on his side at this stage. In their joint declaration, called ‘The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism’, published in the appropriately named Jena journal Athenäum in 1800, they outlined a political aesthetic based on Hellenic harmony, which Roberts summarized as follows:

The state with its constitutions, government, law and priesthood is a machine, which must give way to the organic community, united in and through the idea that combines all the ideas – the idea of beauty. The highest unifying act of reason is accordingly an aesthetic act, which synthesized truth and goodness and beauty. From this highest act flows the necessity for the philosophy of the spirit to become aesthetic, thereby completing philosophy through the restoration of poetry to its original dignity as the teacher of humanity…(Roberts, 2011: 21)

Schelling maintained his belief in art and mythology even after Hölderlin’s insanity. But Hegel distanced himself from such rampant Grecomania in his later work, which took a much more rational developmental course.

To what extent Grecomania was responsible for Hölderlin’s real mania can perhaps be gauged from the view of his carer, a simple carpenter called Zimmer, who replied when he was asked what drove Hölderlin mad that ‘it is nothing but enthusiasm for those blasted heathens that sent him off his head’ (Butler, 1958: 238). There is more than a grain of truth in this explanation, for as E.M. Butler puts it, ‘he began to believe in his mission as a prophet of the returning gods’ (Butler, 1958: 228). He tried to reconcile this with his own and Germany’s Christianity and came up with the ingenious identification of Christ with Dionysus, both gods of bread and wine. Poetically this is wonderful, a little like Blake’s visionary classical renditions of mythology, but intellectually it is threadbare.

Hölderlin is undoubtedly an inspired poet. His poems were almost lost until they were largely rediscovered by Stefan George and his literary Kreis of Grecomaniacs. The latter were still harmless dreamers, though one of their dreams of a third Reich and a coming Führer would be realized in a nightmarish way. Hölderlin’s poems would also be utilized for nefarious political purposes, as when Heidegger much later latched onto them and gave them a Nazi spin. What with titles like ‘Germania’, ‘Rhine’ and ‘Ister’ (Danube), the sacred German rivers, it seemed as if Grecogermania was already at hand, though Hölderlin was most probably looking back to Tacitus rather than forward to Hitler, as Heidegger contends. I shall return to Heidegger’s Hölderlin interpretations later.

Hegel did not entertain such Grecomaniac dreams of poetry and art for very long. As Roberts asserts,

between ‘The Oldest Systematic Program’ and the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel reversed his estimation of Greek religion and Christianity and placed the beautiful religion of the Greeks in the historical perspective of the progression of the absolute spirit. Beauty must yield its privilege as the highest act of reason to philosophy. (Roberts 2011: 50)

Hegel took the Classic-Romantic opposition of his own time and anachronistically projected it backwards onto the history of art. As with everything else, he adopted a dialectical or developmental approach to art. First there came the Symbolic art of the Orientals, then there was the Classical art of the Greeks, and finally the history of art concludes with the Romantic art of the Germans. Perfection or ideal beauty lies in the middle with Classical art. Symbolic art is deficient and faulty, reflecting the monstrous gods of Egyptian, Hindu and Chinese religion. Christian art moves beyond the sphere of the aesthetic altogether, that of mere sensuous appearance, to represent the spiritual truths of the highest religion. Its art has the ‘beauty of inwardness’. Only the gods of Greece in human shape express the ideal unity and harmony of the religion of beauty of a polis society, where art, religion and politics are perfectly in accordance with each other. As Hegel puts it:

It is thus that Classical Art constitutes the absolutely perfect representation of the ideal, the final completeness of the realm of Beauty. There neither is nor can be anything more beautiful. (Hegel 1953: 351).

With Hegel Grecomania remains, but it is restricted to art. But in his rival Idealists, Fichte and Schopenhauer, Grecomania takes a further turn to the extreme and becomes the much more nationalistic Grecogermania. The hatred of Jews that both of these distinguished philosophers evince is an anticipation of the coming anti-Semitism that usually accompanies Grecogermania.

This became first apparent in Fichte’s Address to the German Nation on the eve of the war of liberation in which some of the main themes of Grecogermania are sounded, though not yet as well developed as they would become in Wagner’s music of ideas. Nevertheless, a beginning was made when Fichte sought to divorce Christianity from its traditional relation to Judaism, as Donatella di Cesare reports:

…identifying Christianity as a natural religion, Fichte placed in doubt the concept that Jesus was a Jew, and condemned Saint Paul for having ‘injected’ into Christianity elements of Judaism that prepared the way for the ‘ruin of Christianity’. In his Address to the German Nation Fichte accused Christianity, which had ‘originated in Asia’, of having become ‘properly Asiatic’. Here, for the first time, there emerged the disquieting idea of an Aryan Christ; Fichte spoke of an ‘original Christianity’ that was authentic and pure. He justified the right of Germans to reclaim their original Christianity and their duty to Aryanise it, translating it into a political mission. (Di Cesare, 2018: 32)

III

Wagner has not perhaps received sufficient recognition as a great conservative revolutionary thinker of the far-right, almost on par with Marx and Bakunin on the far-left. His fame as an artist has somewhat overshadowed his reputation as a political ideologue. But art and politics are one and the same for the Grecogermaniacs. His aesthetic-political essays that preceded the composition of the Ring and the other later operas cannot be divorced from these musical compositions. As Robert’s book makes clear, Wagner’s conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, is also the anticipation of a future utopian totalitarian politics.

The Greeks are the key to these ideas (Foster, 2010). Wagner’s project is to recreate Greek origins in Germany, both in art and politics at once: to create a new art form that would serve as a model for a newly rejuvenated society of the German people, a Volksgemeinschaft such as Athens had supposedly once been. Resurrecting the ancient Greeks in the course of a modern national rebirth would infuse the old spirit into a new body in a process of cultural reincarnation. Thus the Germans will reach across the gulf of the ages to their own precursors, bypassing and ignoring everything that had occurred in the intervening times, above all the detested ‘Jewish’ religion, Christianity. The Germanic gods modelled on their Greek originals would walk on stage as well as in the corridors of power, as Roberts notes:

The return to the sacred origins of theatre, to the Greek Gesamtkunswerk and the Greek art religion, amounted to the end of the history of European decadence – artistic, religious, and political – since the downfall of Athens. Wagner’s social myth of history, the myth of the loss of the regenerating power of myth, was strangely silent about the place of Christianity. Between Athens and the nineteenth century, Wagner registers, and Nietzsche in his wake, nothing but Socratic-Alexandrian enlightenment. (Roberts, 2011: 105)

There was more than a touch of calculated prudence in Wagner’s silence about Christianity; but he could not keep quiet about its detestable Jewish origins.

He called the Jew ‘the plastic demon of decomposition’ and made him the surrogate target that stood in for the Christian whom Wagner dared not attack openly. Thus the Jew assumed his age-old scapegoating role, though this time in the context of a modern racial anti-Semitism. For Wagner, identifying with the Greek meant rejecting whatever was Jewish in the German. In time this would lead him to attempt to remake Christianity freed of all its Jewish encumbrances – and so he composed Parsifal. Like Fichte before him, Wagner fell into a version of the old Marcionite heresy. Sacrilegiously, he began to entertain the blasphemous idea that Jesus was fathered by a Roman, for only an Aryan could have sired such an historical prodigy, a view later popularized by Chamberlain.

Following the racial theory of Arthur Comte de Gobineau, whom he befriended in Rome in 1876, Wagner believed that everything worthwhile in civilization and human history in general was owing to the Aryans. Among the Aryans, the Germans were the most outstanding – next to the Greeks, of course. But a special kinship of language and race joined these two geographically and historically separated people. The Germans were destined to recover and repeat what the Greeks had achieved which had been lost in the long history of decline and decadence. Thus the Origin would come back at the End of Time to redeem Time.

The only threat to the fulfilment of this German destiny was race mixing, the great danger represented by the Jews living in the very midst of Germany. The only solution to this problem was to isolate and, if possible, expel these Asiatic interlopers. The Final Solution was not yet on the cards, though Wagner dropped occasional hints in that direction. In exceptional cases – rare Jews who were devoted and loyal Wagnerians – it might be possible to save such individuals by freeing them from the curse of their race so as to attain a true humanity. But as Jacob Katz shows, Wagner was not altogether consistent on this score (see Katz, 1986).

Coming closer to the Greeks meant not only departing from the Jews but also distancing oneself from the Romans or their latter-day descendants, the French and Italians. These were Aryans but of a mixed and therefore inferior species. For Wagner, this was of particular significance in music, the highest of all the arts, and explained why their music was inferior to German music and why the operas of their composers, especially those of the Jews among them like Meyerbeer, could not stand comparison to his music dramas. In fact, they were mere entertainment, a different and vastly inferior species of art. Only Germans are capable of producing true music in the sense of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which Wagner discovered in 1855. Only Wagner’s music will fully measure up to the demands of his philosophy of music, as Deathridge summarized it:

The guarantee of the Wagnerian Artwork of the Future is therefore threefold: it will enable the individual through a heroic dramatic art based in part on the Greek ideal and borne on the wings of German music; it will stimulate the creation of a purified and hence unified culture of the kind once supposedly possessed by the Greeks; and it will guarantee to underwrite the integration of the German race, not with debilitating criticism or scientific reasoning, but with a mystical belief in the supremacy of the racially pure but as-yet-to-be-created German nation state. (Deathridge, 2008: 106)

In his first published book all the elements of Grecogermania are better expressed than ever before. All that is missing is anti-Semitism, which he most probably excluded because it was inopportune for Wagner at this crucial moment in the creation of the Bayreuth theatre when Wagner needed financial help from wherever he could get it – even Jewish money could not be scorned. Apart from that tactical omission all the rest of the Grecogermaniac themes are sounded there, for as Nietzsche puts it, the future ‘promises a rebirth of tragedy and who knows what other fair hopes for Germany’ (Nietzsche, 1956: 96). We must not forget that the book was written during and immediately after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, in which Nietzsche took part, and as a consequence of which the Reich was founded. This event presaged fair hopes not only for Germany but for Wagner and his festivals at Bayreuth as well.

The Latins had been defeated not only on the field of battle but also on stage where Italian and French operas had ‘divested music of its grand Dionysian meanings’ (Nietzsche, 1956: 119). But now, ‘out of the Dionysian recesses of the German soul has sprung a power which has nothing in common with the presuppositions of Socratic culture and which that culture can neither explain nor justify’ (Nietzsche, 1956: 119).

What Nietzsche means by ‘Socratic culture’ is the whole course of rational thought in philosophy and science since Athenian tragedy. Once philosophy and science took the place of myth, this marked the end of Dionysian culture. Later Nietzsche would call it Nihilism. However, there is a supreme remedy to this epochal decline of the ages and it lies in the music dramas of Wagner through which the ancient Greek tragic art will be reborn in a new German guise: ‘No one shall wither our faith in the immanent rebirth of Greek antiquity, for here alone do we see a hope for the rejuvenation and purification of the German spirit through the fire-magic of music’ (Nietzsche, 1956: 122). And, not coincidentally, with the rejuvenation of music comes the restoration of the German nation to its rightful political place, ‘for consider how inextricably bound up with one another are art and people, myth and custom, tragedy and commonwealth’ (Nietzsche, 1956: 138).

Wagner placed all his hopes for succession on his adoptive foster son and presumptive intellectual heir, and so was bitterly disappointed when Nietzsche broke with him. He did not live to see it as Cosima cultivated a second successor in her son-in-law Chamberlain, whom she had arranged should marry her daughter Eva. Chamberlain collated and synthesized all the Grecogermanic ideas from Wagner’s various scattered writings and issued them in two handy tomes in 1899 entitled The Foundation of the Nineteenth Century. In the Germany of Wilhelm II, this became an instant best-seller, for by this stage Grecogermanic ideology had become commonplace in Germany and Germanophile circles throughout Europe. Chamberlain even gained the ear of the Kaiser himself as well as a little later, unbeknownst to him, that of a down-at-heel vagrant painter in Vienna. Much later when they met, Chamberlain hailed him as ‘Germany’s Saviour’.

It is hardly necessary to read Chamberlain’s book to know what it contains. It became a compulsory textbook in schools and universities once Hitler came to power. It profoundly influenced Hitler’s mentors, Dietrich Eckhardt and Alfred Rosenberg, who wrote The Myth of the Twentieth Century along the same lines, a book Hitler could not publicly endorse because of the complaints it stirred up among Catholics. But Chamberlain influenced a number of more respectable thinkers, among them Spengler and Heidegger, as well as the renegade Jew Otto Weininger, who in turn played a key role in Wittgenstein’s thinking. Thus Grecogermania became widespread throughout the German intellectual milieu and its sympathizers.

Chamberlain’s marriage to Wagner’s daughter Eva was highly symbolic of the drama of the Wagnerian legacy. Eva was named after the character in the Meistersinger von Nürnberg who is the prize offered to the winner in the music contest. She is the German bride-to-be and potential mother bearing the name of the mother of humankind. Hence, it is of critical importance to the nation that she should not fall into the hands of the Jew Beckmesser but be wedded and bedded by Walther von Stolzing, a proud and noble German. Hans Sachs, who stands in for Wagner in the play, is fully aware of what is at stake and makes sure through his interventions that the right outcome eventuates.

In this seemingly inconsequential, genial and quaint German comedy, Wagner has in fact written many of his cruel Grecogermaniac ideas in code. To decipher them one has only to remember that this is a comic German version of Greek tragedy, a sort of satyr play. The musical contest in late medieval Nürnberg is a parody of the dramatic contest of the Dionysia in Athens; just as Nürnberg is a petty German version of a Greek polis. The chorus represents the people, as in Greek drama, and here the Volksgemeinschaft. The exposure of Beckmesser as a plagiarist and thief who has no musical ideas of his own is a symbolic rendering of Wagner’s own strictures against Jewish composers and critics. Beckmesser’s ridicule and expulsion from the Volk is thus an early premonition of what would eventually be done to the Jews in general.

The whole tragic history of Germans and Jews can be epitomized in five vignettes or views of Nürnberg. Firstly, there is the real town of Dürer and Sachs, a free city in the Reich. Secondly, there is Wagner’s operatic Nürnberg, a fine Gesamtkunstwerk opera somewhat spoiled by its tendentious ending. Thirdly, there is the Nazi Nürnberg of the Party rallies, a joint political work of Hitler and Speer. Fourthly, there is Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the Nürnberg rally of 1934 utilizing all the resources of montage which she had learned from the Soviet Jew Eisenstein. In fifth and final place, there is the Nürnberg of the Allied War Crimes Tribunal where a reckoning was made of the previous Nürnbergs.

Wagner was, of course, not guilty of any crimes, though he was indirectly responsible for what ensued from his political influence. At the same time, it must be noted that he also had a profound artistic influence on the whole course of art in the late 19th and 20th centuries. As Roberts’ work attests, he inspired a number of aesthetic movements, such as Symbolism and Expressionism, and his Gesamtkunstwerk idea had wide-ranging repercussions throughout all the arts. It is tragic to reflect that had he been a lesser artist his Grecogermaniac ideas might also have had a lesser impact in politics. But this is a counterfactual matter, which it is notoriously difficult to establish.

IV

With or without Wagner, Grecogermania would have remained a potent force in German thought; though how the dialectics of Classicism would have played itself out is, of course, unpredictable. Apart from the usual suspects, such as Marxists, Positivists, Liberals and Progressivists in general, most German thinkers remained wedded to one or another version of Grecogermania. Another more unusual exception was Nietzsche after he broke with Wagner. He tried hard to distance himself from Grecogermania under the influence of his new friends, Paul Rhée, a Jew, and Lou Andreas Salomé, a Russian, with whom for a brief period he lived in a ménage a trois. He was not altogether successful: he did manage to disabuse himself of the Germania aspects, though not of the Grecomania ones.

Despite this evident incongruity, the Nazis continued to treat him as one of their own and turned a blind eye to what went contrary to their ideology. The more honest among them, such as the philosopher Ernst Kriek, made a joke of this, as when he said that ‘Nietzsche was an opponent of socialism, he objected to nationalism, but apart from these tendencies he would have made an excellent Nazi’. Such humour was too much for his rival within the Nazi academic establishment, Heidegger, who could not allow himself such merriment and continued to read Nietzsche as a good Grecogermaniac.

Interpreting Nietzsche has by now become a vast hermeneutic industry as almost everyone with a say has a view on this matter. I, too, must plead guilty to this thought-crime since I have written extensively on Nietzsche. I do not wish to repeat myself here, so all I will do is point out that Nietzsche could not overcome the dialectics of Classicism or the binary opposites that govern it: Kultur–Zivilization, Classic–Romantic and Aryan–Semite. Hence, no matter how critical he is of Wagner and his Grecogermania he could not free himself from its basic conceptual structure, and this becomes more prominent in his last works, the closer he comes to mental breakdown.

Nietzsche persists to the end in identifying Kultur with the Hellenic Greeks and Zivilization with their Hellenistic and Roman successors. In later European history Kultur only recurs briefly during the Renaissance; but with the Reformation it is Zivilization all the way, especially after the French Revolution; though another exceptional episode of Kultur is Weimar Classicism. In the battle between Classicism and Romanticism, Nietzsche stood on the side of the former; the latter he treated as decadence. He sought to assign Wagner the role of late Romantic decadent.

Nietzsche traces decadence into the very heart of Hellenic origins after what he calls the tragic age. Euripides in drama and Socrates in philosophy were already decadents. The metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle was even more so. Christianity, which he regarded as Platonism for the people, was decadent through and through, especially as it purveyed the Jewish slave-morality of meekness and turning the other cheek. A new master-morality is what the future must bring if there is to be any hope of overcoming Nihilism. This has reached its slough of despond during the late 19th century due to the levelling and equalizing tendencies of democracy, socialism, humanitarianism, feminism, and all the other so-called progressive movements. All we can do is wait for the barbarians, a new master race of the future. Even a cursory survey of his late works will substantiate these brief assertions. Is Nietzsche’s madness, like Hölderlin’s, also a case of Grecomania turning into mania?

Heidegger, especially after he became a Nazi, largely followed Nietzsche and Hölderlin, though not into certifiable madness, except for one brief episode when he broke down soon after the war, for it looked as if he might be purged and stood down by the de-Nazification authorities. As a Nazi he was much more of a Grecogermaniac than either Nietzsche or Hölderlin, who were hardly that at all. But he interpreted them in these terms and made them available for consumption by the Nazis. He saw them as the German philosopher and German poet who stood above all others – except for himself, of course.

In his voluminous lectures on Nietzsche he basically undertook an eschatological reading which fitted in with his own Grecogermaniac view of Western history and the history of philosophy. At the Origin were the pre-Socratic philosophers of the original age of Being. With the post-Socratics there ensued a Fall or fault when the ontological difference between Being and beings was forgotten and Being entered into the stage of self-concealment, that is, metaphysics. Metaphysics works itself out throughout the history of philosophy as a process of Decline, especially so after Descartes and the rise of modern science. This reaches its culmination in Nietzsche’s Nihilism when technology enframes the world. Nietzsche marks the overturning of metaphysics but not its overcoming, for Nietzsche himself is the last of the metaphysicians, one who stands at the end of metaphysics yet not beyond it. Only Heidegger can attain to a new dawn of Being, which will be a return of the Origin in the guise of a German revival simultaneously carried out by Hitler and the Nazi Party movement. That alone can save Europe and the West.

Heidegger’s Grecogermania in philosophical form comes out even more in his reading of Hölderlin’s poems, which he undertook at various stages during the Nazi period. He held Hölderlin in some respects even higher than Nietzsche, as a poet who was closer to Being and closer to the Origin in the Greeks and thus all the more German. As Emmanuel Faye comments on Heidegger’s utilization of Hölderlin for political purposes: ‘In this respect, the course Heidegger devoted for the first time to Hölderlin during the winter semester of 1934–5 is perhaps the most radically Nazi of all’ (Faye, 2009: 103). This course, addressing the two poems Germania and der Rhein, has recently appeared after a long delay, having obviously been held back because it reveals too clearly Heidegger’s blatant Nazism. Heidegger goes so far as to identify Being with Germany, as Faye notes:

Indeed, all the courses on Germania are directed toward the goal of identifying the German fatherland with being (Sein), henceforth written with a y (Seyn). Heidegger goes so far as to maintain, in underlining it, that ‘the “fatherland” is being itself’. (Faye, 2009: 109)

According to this conception, it seems that there is no being in the true sense outside Germany.

All the doctrinaire features of Grecogermania are anachronistically read by Heidegger back into Hölderlin, who was still largely innocent of such things. As Faye puts it:

Using Hölderlin as his springboard, Heidegger evokes ‘the German race’ (das deutsche Geschlecht), supposedly originating in the East, somewhere in the neighbourhood of a mythic Caucasia. Marking the ‘German race’, Heidegger conceives of the Greeks as ‘a people of related race’ (ein stammverwandtes Volk). (Faye, 2009: 109)

The Greeks stood at the Origin of Being and the Germans stand at its End, out of which will come a new Origin which will more than make up for all that was lost in the preceding period of the forgetfulness of Being.

According to Di Cesare, Heidegger maintains that

only the German people were the custodians of Being, because, in the wake of Hölderlin: ‘Someone who is German can in an originary new way poeticize Being and say Being’. This is why the German people had been awaited for so long on the stage of the history of the world. (Di Cesare, 2018: 81)

Murphy and Roberts take a much kinder view of Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, in their comments on another book written at about the same time as the first of the Hölderlin lectures:

Behind Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art…stands the question of Germany’s Greek mission, which sets Hölderlin’s originality not only against Hegel but also against the Aesthetics of Wagner and Nietzsche and their Nazi instrumentation. Hölderlin’s poetic opening of the space-time of the advent places German Dasein, and with it the politics of national aesthetics, at the very centre of the History of Being. With Hölderlin’s poetic politics, Heidegger contests the ground he shares with National Socialism…in the name of the Nazi movement’s ‘inner truth’. (Murphy and Roberts, 2004: 18)

It goes without saying that opposition to Grecogermania and critique of the dialectics of Classicism of which it is the outcome does not entail the converse of its main premises or the negative of its conclusions. Of course it is true that the Greek origin was of decisive importance to the whole history of the West and thereby also to the present history of the world. It is also true that German Grecophilia resulted in Weimar culture to which ‘there is linked a great phase of European civilization’, as the quote from Magris right at the very start affirms. German music in particular was second to none and Wagner’s operas are some of its culminating achievements. Nobody with the least historical awareness or sense is likely to dispute this, except sadly for those wedded to the latest shibboleths of political correctness and allied trends and fads in academia.

However, singling out the Greek origin does not mean that it was the only origin of the higher civilizations. Karl Jaspers’ thesis of the Axial Age – significantly published after the war as an implicit counter to Grecogermania – identifies at least four other crucial origins: the Israelite, Indian, Chinese and Persian. All these originary developments interacted with each other in the course of history, none remained isolated or pure, and out of these encounters came all the later civilizational achievements, such as Christianity and Buddhism in the sphere of religion, or the foundations of modern science and technology, or the various great eclectic styles in the arts. It must not be assumed that what came at the origin is necessarily superior to what developed later; the original and authentic is not always the best.

Those who are confirmed Grecophiliacs can argue with some justification that the Greek origin was the most important, and this is certainly true as far as philosophy or democratic politics are concerned. But this must not be taken to Grecomaniac or even less so Grecogermaniac conclusions, such as are inherent in the dialectics of Classicism. This does not preclude the espousal of the Classicist tradition such as Murphy and Roberts argue for in the second part of their book. Under the general rubric of conserving culture that I have elsewhere advocated, it would be essential to maintain Classicism, but also Romanticism and the other major Western traditions (Redner, 2013). And something similar holds for the other civilizations as well.

However, I must warn such Classicists that the unappeased ghost of the recently deceased Grecogermania is hovering around waiting to be reincarnated. It is marching with the neo-Nazis on the streets, and in the academic corridors it has a potential following in the many neo-Heideggerians who have turned his philosophy into a respectable subject. Sad to say, Jews, such as Arendt and Derrida, have played a large role in this. Is the same old story to repeat itself again?