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Schmitt called Hugo Barr "the poet of a broken age" in which he lived in an era that was "so divided, so paradoxical, so fragmented" that he "experienced with a gifted conscience." 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.
Hugo Barr's published works are most famous for his Critique of German Intellectuals, a historiography of political thought published in early 1919. With his sharp writing and dialectical thinking, Barr traces Germany's crimes in the First World War back to the Reformation initiated by Luther in the 16th century, and on this basis, he mercilessly criticizes and exposes the shortcomings of German intellectuals and their thoughts, including Luther, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, and points 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.
*The article is excerpted from "Critique of German Intellectuals" (by Hugo Barr, translated by Cao Yang, Joint Publishing 2024-4)
A still from the movie "1917".
On the Partisan Principle of Intellectuals: Freedom and Canonization | Hugo Barr1
Someone once called the Germans a people who protested, but did not make it clear what they were protesting for. Although Dostoevsky was a Russian, he did not believe that the Germans had a mysterious mission that had been supposedly revealed over the course of centuries. Nietzsche, who had spent his whole life trying to transform the Germans with a deep, tragic consciousness and feeling (Sinn), finally lost patience and cried out [in "Look, this man": "All the great cultural crimes of four centuries have their responsibility!" Nietzsche tried to prove that the Germans, out of cowardice with reality, out of dishonesty that had become in their nature, out of "idealism", had destroyed the fruits and values of Europe at all the key turning points of European history.
They protested, they invented an "ethical world order" that they claimed would be defended and saved by them, they claimed to be the chosen people, God's people, but they couldn't say why, they distorted their values, they were pretentious but not justified, they were so heroic that the whole world laughed at their swagger. They boast of all their weaknesses, even vices and crimes, and ridicule the morals of others when they think they are superior to them. They have never been friendly and polite in their dealings with others, and they themselves cannot agree on the same mind. When others touch their twisted and rigid habits, they see it as a provocation, as an insult to the individual. They never know how to conform to the wishes of others, and they never know how to respond to the love of others. They are ignorant, and they remain intimidating forever. In the face of enthusiasm and love, they dispatched the police and expanded their armaments. Fascinated by the medieval medieval memento mori admonition and the conscientious fervor it caused, they were born to see the world with black eyes, and among them were the darkest monks, Berthold, who invented gunpowder, and Martin, the servant of God, who led people to reverently bow down, and whose vaguely disturbed conscience was full of pedantry. They never loved other peoples, and always thought of themselves as judges, avengers, and guardians. Their principle is not to trust others because they don't know what others will do, and the world is vicious, wanton, and predatory. It's best to always frown, keep the bullets loaded, watch warily in all directions, and raise your stiff nutcrackers with your head held high to show off your muscles. A true Baroque people, with a tendon brain and a brute force, and a terrifying ghost wrapped in a steel wire with fake curly hair, not human at all. There has never been a time when they will truly relax.
In 1914, German volunteers preparing for the First World War cheered on the streets of Berlin
2
The so-called Mentalität has become notorious as a sad proof of the lack of principles and conscience, of the lack of logic and rigor and, above all, of moral intuition. In 1914, there was hardly a public figure who was not discredited. Patriots and poets, politicians and scholars compete to spread the most despicable notion of the nation. A hodgepodge of interests and values, orders and ideas, moving and hysterically defending Potsdam with Weimar and Weimar with Potsdam. The black and white letters left a permanent mark, and 93 intellectuals proved with a pompous manifesto that they no longer deserved to be counted as intellectuals. A group of "Hannelley" poets showed their original form and ran to the tabloids to make noise.
Just as the eagle, the national bird of Germany, hovers high above all the animals of the earth, so the Germans must be aware of their nobility, standing above all the races around them, and looking down on them from the bottomless abyss.
Mentalitätler from all regions competed to discuss the general trend of the world, but the general trend of the world did not go their way. They broke their bones and crooked their eyes before they got up from the bed of Proclustes. Dozens of philistines and nerds quietly disappeared. I won't go into what everyone is familiar with. Now is not the time to point the fingers, we know it's time to learn the lessons. Who wonders that patriots indulge in bloodthirsty desires? Haven't they always danced around Golgotha, who sacrificed to mankind? Who wonders that the German scholars were so ignorant and arrogant that they had to vote even on questions that they knew nothing about? People would say of the Balkan peoples that a long time ago it was the place where Poseidon, the god of the sea, and Bacchus, the god of wine, roamed like stallions and rams: but did this solve the Serbian question?
This book is about German intellectuals, not German fools, and I cannot try to exhaust all the outrageousness, arrogance, and ridiculousness of my countrymen. Of course, if someone does a personality analysis of them, this work is grateful. Even ordinary everyday life has a spiritual counterpart. Klaus knew this, and he was a sworn enemy of the "tabloids" (Journaille) until the end of the world. If you are Austrian or German, read his work and laugh, cry or feel ashamed. The issues I have discussed have made me have no intention of laughing and scolding, and a series of ironic events require me to use a faster and more effective form than the prose. The task before us is to study the German spiritual quest for emancipation or the opposite of emancipation, and to show the trajectory of spiritual adherence and its consequences.
A still from the movie "All Quiet on the Western Front".
3
The German spirit (Geist), the German intellectuals - the French listened, and even the Germans laughed when they listened. Does this thing exist? Isn't it an adjective contradiction? But it has a serious meaning here. What is the intellectuals of a country? It is the spiritual elite, a very small number of people, who have put their experience and its results into a higher reason; that is the spiritual societies and parties, in whom the higher reason urges them to serve their whole nation with their knowledge, ideas, and experiences; Speaking in public places, such as in the streets or in parliaments, to set goals, show the way, and clear the way for humanity, they foresaw the day when all rational beings would be united under one law according to the Wort des Origines.
What is the difference between the masses of a country and the intellectuals of that country? The former lack conviction, lack objectivity, do not know the goals given by history, and lack a sense of responsibility. Above all, the masses do not participate in the noble conspiracy of the spirit, which seems to me to be the church of the intellectuals, and the masses do not participate in the community of the elect, who are free and sacred, who guard humanity and the model of humanity, who have defended the original image of the Creator against apparitions, monsters, imps and demons for centuries.
The mass mind is a mixture of aimless and restless, desperate and uneasy, opportunistic and weak, pretentious sentimentality and excessive arrogance. The public's mentality is that they have lost their conscience, they falsify and tamper with, they expose and whistleblower "for many years", they are sitting on probes and litigants, they blow the conch, fan the flames, and chatter. What a farce that is incurable! A revelry of perversion and confusion rarely seen in the world! How pathetic is such a state when such a mind overrides the spirit; such a state is three times more miserable when such a mind dominates one side and considers itself spiritual! Coldness, division, and corruption destroy the scales and norms, and mania and rage are all the rage. The country is lost and unaware.
Rudolf Hitler in World War I (front row, first from left)4
One of the most important responsibilities of intellectuals is to lead the nation to pay attention to the places where great ideas originate, to open up space for great ideas, and to follow the footsteps of history with an open mind. There was a spirit that promised to shape Germany, and their philosophy was like musical scores, and they were the great musicians who wrote the canons of the norms, and there were not many of them. They felt that their task was difficult and onerous, that they did not have the support of those around them from the outset, that they were subjected to slander and ridicule, and that their mission was thwarted. The idea of the Imperium Romanum [Roman Empire] continued throughout the Middle Ages, and the alliances and conflicts between emperors and popes made Germany a great power in the world. The Holy Roman Empire of the German nation and the coat of arms of the Gothic Emperor shaped the consciousness of the nation, which made them regard conquest, court, gallows, torture, and force as worship and preaching. Neither the Reformation nor the French Revolution had removed that consciousness from such a crucial national experience. Germany still considers itself both a "war genius" and the "moral heart" of the world, and it has long been the Pope's executioner, drunken servant, and obtuse mercenary. At that time, the clergy also taught it earnestly, saying that simplicity of mind is a soldier's virtue. The resurrection of the self-centered delirium of pride and boastfulness in the writings of Treitschke and Chamberlain was already evident in the emperors of the Middle Ages.
It was very late that the promise to shape the heart of Germany appeared. Italy, Spain, and France had already flourished in culture, but Germany was unwavering in its brutality as an alcoholic barbarian, crusades and endless military service made it rude and dull, and Junkers and the clergy made it servile and ruthless. Shakespeare's comedies portray Germans as coarse and drunkards, and Bloy even invokes Luther to prove the brutality and corruption of Germans in history. The great Enlightenment did not make any breakthrough here, and the Vox humana [voice of humanity] in neighboring countries was slow to hear back. Today we still lack a human conscience, and the spirit and the nation are still oscillating in the contradictions of various cultural concepts. At one time, the common divisor of religion, morality, aesthetics, and politics was determined, but no one succeeded in achieving unity, and they fought one after another. There are still people today who are trying to rebuild the world empire of the imperial power, the clerical power, but the responsibility for the war crimes committed by a brutal and cunning powerful class will sweep away this dangerous atavismen. The call for the inclusion of Germany in the union of European nationalities has become overwhelming, rising wave after wave. But the nation itself was too sluggish, and its spirit was not strong enough to save Germany from the isolation it was about to fall into. Now, the neighbouring peoples must work together to eradicate this age-old scourge of militarism.
The integration of Germany into the Union of European Peoples is, in the final analysis, a unified ideal of redemption, nobility and humility. The German nation should open its eyes. The pain, misfortune and sacrifice it has experienced as a blow will be its wealth. In this way it will find in itself the power of destruction and rebirth. We demand democracy. The spirit of politics is the spirit of rectifying order. Empty words and clichés should be abolished immediately. Germany is guilty, and to complete the construction of Europe, Germany must repent. The new Declaration on the Rights of Man and Peoples put an end to the war. It is no longer a question of metaphysics, but of land and what people do with land in order to live together. Even if politicians don't have the final say, they already have a sketch of the edifice of the new humanity in their heads. The utopian visions and fragments that have hitherto survived in the minds of a few will coalesce into an organism. It was only after the collapse of the Christian ideal of the European Commonwealth that Germany experienced for the first time in death, poverty and decay the experience of full political freedom. But it was not until the wall collapsed that the people enthusiastically smashed the shackles – even though the wall still keeps the German nation in quarantine today, and the shackles still bind their humanity today. In this way, the great spirit will also appear and show them what the great feat of human nature is. There are now Germans who talk about the great feats of humanity but are actually ignorant of it. It will be up to knowledge to establish the norms: what is to be proud of, and what is to be ashamed of.
A still from the movie "All Quiet on the Western Front".
5
The above has already denied the claim that there was and may have even existed a "German intellectual". This nation has had some fragments, sprouts, and attempts, but it has not been completely successful and completely illuminated. There were great men in Germany, but the contradictions between them and the nation as a whole, the self-satisfaction peculiar to this nation, turned the love of these great men into hatred, and the joy into despair. They are surrounded by vulgarity, intrigues, and pedantry, and they see their most beautiful blueprints come to naught. Their creations were not met with enthusiasm, they became their own suffering, and their lives became the path of suffering. By the time they found that there was no way out, it was already too late.
Müntzel, the great fanatic, bore every layer of suffering with his own body. He disappeared into the nation, and almost no one knew his name anymore. Friedrich Hölderlin lamented:
The barbarians of antiquity, barbarous by diligence and science, and even by religion, devoid of any divine emotion, have been corrupted to the marrow in the face of divine and beautiful happiness, and are arrogant and despicable at every moment, defiling every contemplative and exalted heart, dull and noisy, like a broken earthen pot—my people of Beila!
Goethe, on the other hand, resigned himself to fate:
We Germans are outdated. Although we have been culturally trained for a century, it will be a few more centuries before we Germans will have enough and universal spirituality and a high level of culture before one can say that the Germans are no longer barbarians.
Goethe also said the desperate proverb of sauve qui peut, which he cried out helplessly to the spirits of his time:
It's hard to be perfect,
Act cautiously,
Peaceful living is also careful,
Standing squares do not fall.
He was forever entrenched in the nation, the students dissected him, and the linguists flocked to him like leeches, but he is still not universally understood today. His most important and delicate decisions, which people turn a deaf ear to, he will always be a miracle that has been misunderstood. Heine fled to Paris. The Goncourt brothers say that Heine and two other non-Parisians embody the essence of the Parisian spirit, but in Germany he is still treated roughly. Nietzsche's remarks about the Germans were the worst a nation could make, saying:
The Germans have gone down in the history of knowledge under the name of pure ambiguity, and they have often produced only unconscious counterfeiters.
He also said:
Psychology is almost a quasi-...... of whether a race is pure or impure How can there be depth if people can't even talk about purity? In the case of the Germans, almost like in women, they never reach the foundation, they have no foundation at all: that's all. However, in this way, they are not even superficial. – The so-called "profound" in Germany is precisely the kind of instinctive uncleanness I just said about themselves: they don't want to figure themselves out.
But even Nietzsche had envisioned a spiritual unity, a heroic ideal of Germany, and Germany would be the cradle of all noble Europeans. This people made him disgusted and turned into a Germanophobie. At the end of his life, he regretted not writing in French and wished to die as a Pole. Read the reckoning with the German mentality, written on the eve of his nervous breakdown, and the shocking "Look, this man", and you will know how frustrated a noble and nervous will is in the face of his people's scheming, betraying of ideas, and covetousness of pleasure. Listen also to Schopenhauer's will, which says:
If I die unexpectedly without leaving a political will, and leave people in doubt, then I will tell you that I am ashamed to be a German, and that I am in communion with all the true greats of this people.
I have listed the best men of the nation, and the depth of their despair gives a glimpse of the high aspirations of their first place. They feel that their work is in vain, and the later they see this, the more extreme their rejection of this national community becomes. We cannot help but agree with the sad inscription of Heinrich Mann's novel Der Untertan, which was interrupted by the war: "There is no hope for this nation." "What can be done when the strongest and most human spirits declare their opposition to their own people?
Where in Germany can we see such fervent reverence and tenderness in the spirit of France, which we call "Our Lady" and "Ladouce France"? Mauraes once proposed to revere France as if it were a goddess. Bloy, one of the most fierce debaters in French history, also felt entitled to write:
France is the noblest of all nations, and all other peoples, whoever they are, should be honored if they are allowed to eat French dog food.
The spirit of religion (espritreligieux) has reached a height and depth in France in the last fifty years that no other people can match. The church of intellectuals laid the cornerstone here. The spirits of Renant, Baudelaire, Elo, Dolveli, Bloy, Pecki, etc., seem to foresee this terrible and chaotic century, creating a limbuspatrum, curing the blasphemous bestiality of our time, and ridiculing the hopelessly shallow rationalism of this age of journalists and diplomats. Like the future European fathers, who developed the most subtle sacraments from the Middle Ages and Christianity, they were the pivot and the measure of the new world. Their writings contain more than just French consciences, repeatedly defending the same subject, Pietas et paupertas sancta [piety and poverty]. Peggy writes:
At that time, our enemies were talking about the state justifications (Staatsräson), that is, the well-being of a people, a race, for a certain period of time. We in France are deeply influenced by Christianity, but the revolutionary ideology is generally traditional Christianization, and our concern is the eternal salvation of our nation, reaching the height of the Passion of Christ. We do not want to put France in a sinful situation.
Romain Rolland wanted to be a staunch defender of this declaration, rather than mediating back and forth between his martyred homeland and a hellish Germany. Romain Rolland adds:
Writers, listen to the heroic words of the French conscience and be vigilant to the German conscience.
Where is the spirit of freedom that has violently flapped the conscience of the Russian nation since 1825 to be found in Germany? Determined to make within a hundred years a peoples whose language and customs are so different from those of European life that they should rise to the top of Europe, even with the Bolsheviks and the Jews of terror and revenge, will attract the bewildered and astonished nations to look eastward. Where is such a firm belief in the great cause of the future to be found in Germany? How many heroic feats of extraordinary dedication and courage have left in the 100-year history of the Russian Revolution that have risen like stars and silently burned down in prisons, fortresses, and hard labor in Siberia? Where is the courage to stand up for resistance, the fanaticism of devotion to spiritual interests and the Spiritual Communion (Kommunion), the decisiveness of action, the agility of political cunning, the qualities that have elevated Russia to the status of a free power, are to be found in Germany? Serno-Solovievich and Nechaev and other conspirators to Kropotkin, Tolstoy, and Lenin—how great the political energy, what a great national conscience, and how desperate and even crazy spirit they had for the tiniest and most vague ideals! Is the moral will of the nation completely numb and ignorant? Does it really feel that its mission is to destroy and fight all that is great, and not to lay down its arms and raise its hands in shame and humility?
The Decembrists revolted
6
Freedom and canonization (Heiligung) – these are the two major ideas that shake the world today. Freedom was not the kind of unbridled and unchecked freedom sought by the Prussian princes and the Hungarian aristocracy. Canonization is not the kind of canonization that teaches people to swallow holy bread, recite scriptures, and believe in a dead God so that they think they are freed from the obligations of the simplest of human beings, nor is it the kind of canonization that declares that "the most distinctive feature of our German thought is that it has achieved oneness with the divine nature on earth". That argument also promotes:
We are a nation of warriors, militarism is the heroic spirit that rises to the spirit of war, and Potsdam and Weimar achieve the highest unity. Walking into the trenches are "Faust", "Zarathustra" and Beethoven's scores.
Alas, Mr. Sombart, what do they know about being one with the Divine!
Freedom and canonization – it means sacrifice, sacrifice again, sacrifice of property, sacrifice of blood if necessary, but in another place, on another stage, and not in today's turbulent war drama! When Bakunin appeared at the Bern Peace and Freedom Congress after ten years of imprisonment and exile, he was surrounded by friends of the 1848 generation and asked him to write a memoir, about his plots and barricades, about his death sentence, exile and escape. "Is it necessary to talk about myself?" he said. He believes that there are more important things to do than talking about himself personally. Bloy has a quote that has been forgotten by many, but perhaps the most religious of our time:
After all, who knows if the most positive form of worship is not the blasphemous, outcast prayer committed by love?
From this, can people understand what freedom and sanctification are?
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
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.
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