Divine Fury (43 page)

The creative man was the constructor of values, the self-legislating being who in following the higher law of his own making might well look like “evil” in a more conventional sense. In a revealing passage of his
Human, All Too Human
, Nietzsche poses a question: What would be the nature of a “genius of culture”? “He would manipulate falsehood, force, the most ruthless self-interest as his instruments so skillfully he could only be called an evil, demonic being,” even though his ultimate goals would be “great and good.” Such cryptic statements were open to a variety of interpretations and appropriations. But despite the fact that Nietzsche himself could be insightful about the psychological processes at work in the creation of the genius as a “miraculous” being, he contributed enormously to the resonance and reception of the genius cult. Above all, his frequent coupling of creativity and cruelty, and his oracular pronouncements about the higher men of the future who would redeem through their creation, gave sanction to key tenets of the genius religion, for which Nietzsche himself became an object of reverence and veneration at the end of his life. Was he not a prophet of redemption and renewal? A martyr to his own creation? A man who, unappreciated in his career, was driven to insanity by the great burden of his mind? These, at least, were the enthusiastic claims, and they were given credence by Nietzsche’s genuine descent into madness in the 1890s. Incoherent and incapacitated by strokes, the prophet spent his final years in the house of his sister in Weimar, which served simultaneously as the site of the Nietzsche Archive and a place of pilgrimage, replete with votive offerings, icons, and an altar to the great man and his work. Here was the place where genius had suffered for the creation of genius. Amply justifying Nietzsche’s own fear that “one day I shall be pronounced ‘holy,’” the site continued to function as a shrine after his death in 1900, in counterpoint to the residence of Wagner in Bayreuth, and in complement to the houses of Goethe and Schiller just down the road. Whatever the reasons for Zilsel’s neglect of the burgeoning cult of Nietzsche, it only confirmed his larger point regarding the special prominence of the genius religion in the German-speaking lands and his concerns about the uses to which it might be put there.
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The extraordinary importance of
Kultur
in the creation of German identity is a phenomenon well-attested. But although commentators have not insisted on the point as often as they might, the genius, as
Kultur
’s bearer and embodiment, played a critical role in the process of imagining the German nation. Already in 1839, the composer Robert Schumann captured this nascent role nicely when he observed that Beethoven was to German culture what Napoleon was to France. “With Beethoven,” he claimed, “every German imagines that he has reversed the fortunes of the battles that he lost to Napoleon.” The music of Beethoven justified the past and beckoned to the possibilities of the future, highlighting the unique place of music and musicians in the genesis of the genius cult in Germany and their role in the creation of German national identity. Schumann, whose unhappy descent into madness only enhanced his own “genial” reputation, contributed to this union in his own right. But after Beethoven, it was undoubtedly Wagner, another of Zilsel’s central “genius enthusiasts” and “priests,” who did the most to couple genius and German nationalism in the nineteenth century. For the degeneration theorist Max Nordau, Wagner was the very embodiment of the degenerate genius, and the “Wagner cult” a sign that modern society was in thrall to its disease. But to the composer’s countless admirers, he was the annunciation of new life, a German savior, whose art promised to fulfill the task of redemption demanded of the true genius. When the genius enthusiast Houston Stewart Chamberlain—British by birth but German by election—married Wagner’s daughter, Eva, in 1908, he not only assumed a leading role among the guardians of the temple at Bayreuth, but also effected a proximity to genius that he preached in his many popular writings on the subject. Chamberlain’s tremendously influential
Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts
(
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
), first published in German in 1899 but reprinted extensively in the first third of the twentieth century, selling nearly a quarter of a million copies by 1938, was among the genius religion’s most important tracts. “Genius is like God,” Chamberlain enthused, “in its essence it is free from conditions; . . . it rises out of time and time’s death-shadow, and passes in all the glow of life into eternity.” He suggested giving thanks of praise, “thanks above all to the advent of men of great genius who alone give life.” Chamberlain’s book was itself a hymn and a prayer, drawing attention to the special connection “between the lonely genius and the masses,” and asserting, like Carlyle, the genius’s privileged place as the great mover of peoples. “With what reverence must we look up to the greatest phenomenon that nature presents to us—Genius!”
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The critic and writer Otto Weininger, the third of Zilsel’s central genius enthusiasts, wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment. Jewish born (though he converted to Christianity in the year before his death), Weininger shared Chamberlain’s passion for Wagner and even made a pilgrimage to Bayreuth. But when he sought his own proximity to genius, he preferred Beethoven, taking his own life in 1903 in the house in Vienna where the German composer had died. In doing so, the man Hitler later infamously described as “the only good Jew” transformed himself into a martyr to the genius faith at the age of twenty-three, while transforming his sole published work, the sprawling
Sex and Character
, into an instant cult-classic. Preaching a deeply misogynist reverence for the emphatically male genius, the work went through eighteen editions in German alone by 1919. In it, Weininger insisted, like Chamberlain in the
Foundations
, that the great man could gather in himself the many, and make of them one. “A man is to be called all the more of a genius the more people he unites in himself,” Weininger stressed. It was the “very ideal of the artistic genius” to live in the plurality, to lose himself in others, and to reabsorb them in his expansive personality in a unity of his own making. The true genius fashioned his original vision through the medium of other human beings.
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Wagner, Chamberlain, and Weininger were all anti-Semites—in Weininger’s case of the Jewish variety. Anti-Semitism would prove of crucial significance to the subsequent development of the genius religion. But what is striking is just how widely received that religion was at the time of Zilsel’s writing. Zilsel surely exaggerated when he claimed that virtually no one in the German-speaking world perceived the genius religion as a threat. And yet it was undeniably the case that the genius religion extended far beyond the sect of anti-Semites and right-wing nationalists who sought to make it their own. The critic and cabaret performer Egon Friedell provides an instructive example. Like Zilsel a left-leaning humanist and an Austrian of Jewish descent, Friedell cultivated the genius religion with an enthusiasm that knew few restraints. As he argued in his
Cultural History of the Modern Age
, a popular three-volume work published between 1927 and 1931, the genius embodied the spirit of the times, both shaping his epoch and speaking for it. Socrates in Greece, Voltaire in France, the philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Germany, Shakespeare in Renaissance England, “in our time Nietzsche”—in such men “the whole age became objective in itself.” The genius was the “intensified expression of each nation,” the “concentrated formula” revealing the “desires and achievements of all his contemporaries.” But at the same time, the genius was the “great
solitary,” a “completely unrelated and unrepeated singular,” part of the “particular race of men who differ from the rest of their species in being creative.” “No-one can resist these wizards,” Friedell insisted. “They give us wings and they cripple us, intoxicate and sober us.” They move mountains; they stir up “wars, revolutions, social earthquakes”; and they “behead kings, prepare battlefields, and sting nations to duels.” At once beautiful and majestic, terrible and sublime, geniuses revealed the awesome power of God. “The genius makes it visible—that is the function of genius,” Friedell wrote. To draw forth the divinity and the devil that “every man bears within him” was the genius’s special calling.
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The fervency of Friedell’s faith did not save him in the end from those fanatics who shared a surprising number of its tenets. He committed suicide in Vienna in 1938 rather than fall into the Gestapo’s hands, making him, no less than Weininger, though for very different reasons, a martyr to the genius cult. That odd concurrence highlights just how catholic the religion of genius could be—in Germany and Austria, especially, but elsewhere, too. “It has been forgotten,” Croce lamented in his native Italy, that genius is “not fallen from heaven.” The noted Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset made a similar point, warning in the 1920s that “one should beware of notions like genius and inspiration,” for they were a sort of “magic wand” that mystified more than they made clear. From Germany, finally, the psychiatrist Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum explained in
The Problem of Genius
in 1931, “among modern civilized beings a reverence for genius has become a substitute for the lost dogmatic religions of the past.” Lange-Eichbaum regretted the fact, but he was insistent that “the notion, or rather the emotionally-tinged conviction, that genius has a peculiar sanctity is widely diffused throughout the modern world.” The claim held even to the East, where at the very moment that Zilsel was publishing his account of the religion of genius, the Russian Revolution was giving rise to a heterodox faith of its own.
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I
N
F
EBRUARY 1925, THE
G
ERMA
n neurologist Oskar Vogt traveled to Moscow with his French wife and research partner, Cécile, at the invitation of the Soviet government. Vogt was a world-renowned brain specialist, the founding director of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Brain Research in Berlin, and an expert in the evaluation of elite brains. He was also a eugenicist, believing that his research could be used to establish criteria for the breeding of superior brains. Though he had been to the Soviet Union before, continuing a long tradition of German-Russian collaboration in the sciences, the circumstances of his visit on this occasion were unique. Vogt had been asked to confirm,
on neuro-anatomical grounds, the “genius” of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who had died the previous month. After a preliminary meeting with a high-ranking commission of Soviet physicians, Vogt and his Russian colleagues agreed that, by employing Vogt’s techniques, it would be possible to “provide information on the material substrate of Lenin’s genius.”
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Just why the representatives of the newly constituted Soviet Union should entrust this delicate task to a foreigner, seeking scientific confirmation of what, to their comrades in Russia, was already palpably clear, is not immediately apparent. Vogt was a recognized expert, the “best and only possible choice,” in the opinion of the committee that recommended him. And though Vogt was not a member of the Communist Party, he was broadly sympathetic to the Left and had been active in the German Independent Social Democratic Party of the Weimar Republic, which had replaced the Hohenzollern monarchy at the end of World War I. But the most important reason for Vogt’s invitation was likely his personal connections to important party officials, and, in particular, to the social hygienist Nikolai Alexandrovich Semashko, the “people’s commissar for health” and one of the Soviet Union’s leading advocates of eugenics. Semashko had met, and had been impressed by, Vogt on an earlier visit, and part of the lure in attracting him to Russia was the prospect not only of studying a brain of Lenin’s stature, but, more ambitiously, of heading a brain institute with the explicit design of furthering the eugenic understanding of genius.
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Eugenicists had long found important advocates among utopians of the Left, who looked forward to building better human beings to inhabit better human worlds. The French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, for example, waxed ecstatic in the nineteenth century about the untapped potential of the human mind, looking forward to a future when the earth would teem with “37 million poets equal to Homer, 37 million geometricians equal to Newton, 37 million dramatists equal to Molière, and so on through all the talents imaginable.” Although Fourier placed greater emphasis on social conditioning than he did upon altering human biology, his belief that knowledge of the “seeds” of human talent might be of service to those who would develop it along socialist lines was indicative of a basic willingness to put science to the task of improving humanity. In the Russian case, that willingness was very much a part of a broader fascination with genius that the educated population shared with (and frequently borrowed from) its counterparts in Europe. A subject of intense public interest—with leading exemplars, such as Alexander Pushkin, memorialized as national heroes, and others, such as Leo Tolstoy, sought out in their homes—genius was
also the object of scientific scrutiny. Russian psychologists and physicians read widely in the works of their European colleagues, absorbing the teachings of Moreau and Lombroso, while noting the use they made of Russian examples of genius in their case studies of
dégénérescence
. Crafting their own pathographies, in turn, Russians detailed the manias of Gogol, the epileptic fits of Dostoyevsky, and the neuroses of Tolstoy while debating the extent to which genius was the consequence of a broader degeneration, whose adverse effects might be treated and cured. Others argued that, far from being the product of illness, genius was the sign of robust health, biological evidence of what the noted psychiatrist Nikolai Bazhenov described at the very end of the nineteenth century as “progeneration.” In this conception, the genius was the prototype of the perfect man of the future, an early annunciation of a higher human being, whose biological mysteries scientists would one day solve. By the time of the Russian Revolution, such hopes were perfectly explicit. Leon Trotsky looked forward in the year of Lenin’s death to a future in which “the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.” The new communist man would be a “super human,” and all might be geniuses, bred to a “higher social-biological” type. The physician G. V. Segalin even proposed establishing an “Institute of Genius” to carry out research on the bodies and brains of deceased men of talent, who would be required by law to donate their remains for dissection. His aim was the cultivation of geniuses through eugenics and what he termed “ingeniology” (the study of creative work). Segalin claimed to have detected a “gene” for creativity, and, in what he described as the “biogenetic law of genius,” explained how this gene required illness for its full expression. It was thus incumbent on the state, he argued, to establish clinics to provide special care for geniuses and
Wunderkinder
, alleviating their adverse symptoms while harnessing their power.
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