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Critique of German intellectuals
Written by Hugo Barr and translated by Cao Yang
Life, Reading, New Knowledge Joint Bookstore 2024-4ISBN: 97871080775486 Price: 79.00 yuan
【Brief Introduction】
A "battle document" that starts from the question of war guilt and comprehensively reflects on Germany's history, reality, national concept, and national spirit. With his sharp writing and dialectical thinking, Hugo Barr traced Germany's crimes in the First World War to the Reformation initiated by Luther in the 16th century, and on this basis, he ruthlessly criticized and exposed the shortcomings of German intellectuals and their thoughts, including Luther, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, and pointed out that it was Protestantism founded by Luther that made Germany conceptually break away from the universal spirit of Christianity, and embark on an internal autocracy at the height of secular rule and theocracy. militaristic path of foreign expansion, and eventually became the "sinner of Europe" in the First World War. At the same time, it also demonstrates the intellectual merits of Christian theologians such as Müntzel, Ba'ad, and Weitling, as well as the anarchist Bakunin.
【About the Author】
Hugo Barr (1886-1927) was a German writer and poet, the initiator of the Dadaist movement, a pioneer experimenter in sound poetry, and was considered a traitor during the First World War because of his opposition to Germany's war policy and his belief in anarchism, and went into exile in Switzerland. In 1916, he published the Dada Manifesto, and in 1919, he published the Critique of German Intellectuals.
【Contents】
Explanation of the Chinese translation
preface
Introduction On the Partisan Principles of Intellectuals: Freedom and Sanctification
Chapter 1: Münzel Anti-Luther
Chapter 2 Protestant Philosophy and the French Revolution's Concept of Liberty
Chapter 3: Ba'ad and the Christian Revival in France and Russia
Chapter 4: The German Jews Conspiracy to Destroy Morality
postscript
Imprint in German
Book reviews of contemporaries
Editor's note to the German edition
Postscript
【Excerpts】
Explanation of the Chinese translation
Liu Xiaofeng
In 1924, in the turmoil of the nascent Republic of Germany, Hugo Barr published an article in the Catholic cultural journal Plateau, commenting on the four works of Schmitt, who had just emerged in the academic world. In the late '90s, I read that Schmitt, in his later years, said, "It was a brilliant article, and I have hardly seen a better article in my life." I immediately came up with this article, and it turned out to be wonderful. When I learned that Barr was known as an avant-garde poet, I couldn't help but be amazed at how he had such a wide range of academic experience, not to mention that he was also a pianist. Schmitt called Barr "the poet of a broken age" in which he lived "so divided, so paradoxical, so fragmented" and in which he "experienced it with a gifted conscience" (The Poet, pp. 301-302). Barr died young in 1927 (at the age of 41), not living in a time when Germany was completely "broken". At the outbreak of World War I in Europe, Barr was 28 years old. The war is said to have taken place inexplicably, but the outbreak of World War II in Europe had obvious causes. Of course, historians have reason to look at these two European wars together and call them the German Thirty Years' War of the 20th century, which has a historical connection with the German Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) in the 17th century. Europe's political growth began in the 16th century, and over the next 500 years, the two Thirty Years' Wars were particularly devastating.
At the beginning of the war, Barr rejoiced. But he soon became an anti-war pacifist and moved to Switzerland with his wife, Emmy Hennings, where he founded the "Dada" group with a group of anti-war poets and artists at the "Tavern Voltaire" in Zurich. At that time, someone stabbed a random French-German dictionary with a knife, and the tip of the knife happened to poke the word Dada, which means "toy trojan horse" in French, and also refers to an onomatopoeia that has no meaning. As a result, it was chosen to characterize the political views of this group of poets and artists:
Dada understands everything. Dada despises everything. Dada said "understand things", Dada has no fixed concept. Dada doesn't catch flies. Dada ridicules all successful, sacralized ...... Dada was never right...... No more painters, no more writers, no more religions, no more royalists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more police, no more airplanes, no more urinals...... , like everything in life, Dada is useless, everything happens in a stupid way......
We can't take any subject seriously, let alone this one: ourselves.
"Dada" poets and artists advocate apolitical politics by creating meaningless words or "toy horses" that shake back and forth. In fact, the anarchist Bakunin (1814-1876) was their spiritual godfather. During his lifetime, Barr left behind nine literary works (poems, novels, plays) and three volumes of letters, most of which were compiled and published by his wife. Among his previous works, the most famous of which is the Critique of German Intellectuals, a historical treatise on political thought published in early 1919. Barr asserted that the Protestant kingdom of Prussia was historically responsible for World War I, and that the religious schism caused by Luther was the ultimate cause of the war, just as it was the direct cause of the German Thirty Years' War in the 17th century. Can one regard this magnum opus as meaningless words or as a "toy horse"? The self-criticism of the German intellectuals is most conspicuous among the major cultural nations of Europe, and this has to do with the delay in the cohesion of the German nation into a unified body politic—one need only think of the German critiques of Marx and Nietzsche. At the time of writing the Critique, Barr had just converted from Catholicism to Protestantism. Only a year later (in the summer of 1920), he returned to the bosom of Catholicism. Two years later (1922), Barr turned to early Eastern Christian mysticism, and the following year published Byzantine Christianity: A Biography of the Three Saints, in which he criticized Western Christianity from the standpoint of Eastern Christianity. In one note, he called the book "an addition to my first book":
At that time I believed in a "church of intellectuals" on which all the sanctification of freedom and vitality was based, and I still hold this belief today. But I don't look at this theory beyond dogma and regulations...... I don't look at it outside of the big church tradition anymore. (Quoted in The Poet, pp. 250-251)
Romano Guardini (1885-1968), an authoritative scholar of Catholic scholarship, warns that Barr's recommendation of an amateur theology in the radical rhetoric of the poet does not bode well:
The book is a fierce and fierce attack on the idea of free thought, and it runs through nothing more than one idea: to shatter the absolute in the finite and dissolve the supernatural in nature through mentalism and historicism. He [Barr] believed that all finitude fell apart in absolute despotism. (Quoted in The Poet, p. 253)
It is evident how "broken" Baal's mind has been in such a short period of time. Still, Barr's relentless critique of Luther is neither a meaningless phrase nor a "toy Trojan horse." In the late autumn of 1924, Barr published an abridged version of the Critique of German Intellectuals, The Consequences of the Reformation. As Schmitt puts it, "three-quarters" of the Critique was "relegated under the table" by Barr. While writing The Consequences of the Reformation, Bal wrote to his wife:
I started to look at my Critique, but my progress wasn't obvious. This book unsettled me so much that I couldn't think through every sentence. I'll have to let myself pretend to be quiet. Otherwise I wouldn't have understood, and I'm very surprised at that. I just want to take a hard look at my article, but my pulse is restless. Even now, I'm still thinking. I cut out 80-100 pages. The fate of this book must have been unusual. Now, my heart is beating wildly. (Quoted in The Poet, p. 229)
Barr was at a loss for what to do with his broken heart, a soul that had hoped to understand the history of the growth of the soul of the German intellectuals, but who no longer knew himself, but who still "went through this age with a gifted conscience." Barr decided that the Reformation had done no cure for the spiritual upbringing of the Germans, and turned to the balance between early Eastern Christianity and ancient Greek ideas, which became his only spiritual outlet. Byzantine Christianity, which appears to be religious-historical, is in fact an expression of Barr's utter disappointment with the political growth of Europe – the Consequences of the Reformation and Byzantine Christianity, as he himself admitted, "echo each other":
My Byzantine Christianity is a harsher and more thorough attack on Protestantism. Sooner or later, people will see. What is not written in "Consequences" is written there. In this sense, the two books are one with each other. The two auxiliary vehicles depend on each other and explain each other. (The Poet, p. 252)
Before his death, Barr selected a part of his diary from 1914 to 1921 that involved his mental journey and published it as "Escape from the Times". There is a passage written in 1921 that explains the origin of the book's title:
Escape from the times, already achieved with Nietzsche (out of the taste of the mockers and atheists). There was a more determined escape, which must have been consistent with the Christian monastic system. So that it is possible to oppose a hopeless mad world. ...... Ever since the country man had become a poet, a philosopher, a rebel, and a playboy, the time sequence had given him voluntary poverty, the strictest abstinence, if not the disappearance he wanted—in which he saw the highest miracles. (Quoted in The Poet, p. 245)
When Barr wrote about Schmitt's political theology, he was already interested in early Eastern Christian mysticism, which did not contradict his belief in anarchism. It is puzzling why he admired Schmitt, who was seriously concerned about political order? Commenting on The Romantics of Politics, Barr praised:
Schmitt's way of thinking points to things that make people feel serious, to political affairs, and to things that make things that are foggy suddenly unattractive.
Schmitt sees Bakunin as a "despotic hostile to dictatorship," and therefore "whatever Bakunin denies in the name of Satan," he "affirms in the name of God." Equally puzzling, then, is how he was "privately acquainted" with Barr (The Poet, p. 208). How to understand the historical experience of the minds of European intellectuals is still a major problem in the humanities circles of the mainland. Today's Germans seem to be rich and happy, but the German intellectuals with sensitive hearts still ask: Is the fragmented German soul really happy in the depths of the broken soul after an era of division and paradox? The question for us is: Are our souls mentally ready to understand the broken history of Europe and the resulting sense of soul brokenness? Barr's Critique of German Intellectuals Let us realize that unless we re-examine the major events in European history with European scholars, it will be difficult for us to understand European literature thoroughly by mere literary hobbies. That's the significance of publishing the translation in this book.
Dr. Cao Yang's German is good, and the Chinese translation is better. Thanks to his translators.
October 2023 Workshop on Classical Civilization Studies
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