Divine Fury (67 page)

15
. Otto Weininger,
Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung
(Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1920), 130.

16
. Zilsel,
Geniereligion
, 52; Egon Friedell,
A Cultural History of the Modern Age
, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 3 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1931), 1:25–27, 65, 169, 229.

17
. Croce, “Intuition and Art,” 15–16; José Ortega y Gasset, “Ideas sobre la novela” (1925), in
Obras completas
, 12 vols. (Madrid: Alianza, 1983), 3:388; Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum,
The Problem of Genius
, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Macmillan, 1932), xvii–xviii. The original German edition was published in 1931. See, as well, Albert Solomon, “Zur Soziologie des Geniebegriffs,”
Die Gesellschaft: Internationale Revue für Sozialismus und Politik
3, no. 2 (1926): 504–513.

18
. The Soviet commission is cited in Jochen Richter, “Pantheon of Brains: The Moscow Brain Research Institute, 1925–1936,”
Journal of the History of Neuroscience
16 (2007): 138–149 (citation on 140). On the Vogts, see Igor Klatzo and Gabriele Zu Rhein,
Cécile and Oskar Vogt: The Visionaries of Modern Neuroscience
(New York: Springer, 2002).

19
. Richter, “Pantheon of Brains,” 140. On Vogt’s Russian episode and the analysis of Lenin’s brain, see the detailed account in Michael Hagner,
Geniale Gehirne: Zur Geschichte der Elitegehirnforschung
(Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 2007), 249–264.

20
. Charles Fourier,
The Theory of the Four Movements
, trans. Ian Patterson, eds. Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 87; Irina Sirotkina,
Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880–1930
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 71–73. Already in his 1872 novel
The Possessed
, Fyodor Dostoyevsky saw fit to ridicule the widespread pretension among the leftist intelligentsia that higher men could be bred, placing chilling lines in the mouth of the nihilist Kirilov, who declares that with the coming death of God, “there will be a new life, a new man, everything will be new. Man will be God. He’ll be physically transformed.” Equally chilling are the lines of the raving Verkhovensky, who observes that in a reign of absolute equality, “men of the highest ability” will have to be “either banished or executed,” because they cannot help being despots: “A Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes gouged out, a Shakespeare will be stoned.” Fyodor Dostoevsky,
The Possessed
, trans. David Magarshack (London: Penguin, 1971), 126, 418. See also Leon Trotsky,
Literature and Revolution
, trans. Rose Strunsky, ed. William Keach (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 207–208. On Segalin and the project for the Institute of Genius, see Sirotkina,
Diagnosing Literary Genius
, 145–180.

21
. Paul Gregory,
Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives
(Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2008), 27; Michael Hagner, “The Pantheon of Brains,” in
Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy
, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 126–131.

22
. Richter, “Pantheon of Brains,” 143–144.

23
. Evdokimov and Zinoviev are cited in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal,
New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 184. For descriptions of Lenin, see Nina Tumarkin,
Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Culture
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 89, 218. Mayakovsky is cited in Rosenthal,
New Myth, New World
, 185–186.

24
. Nicolas Berdyaev,
The Meaning of the Creative Act
, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (New York: Harper, 1955), 172–174.

25
. Comte expounded his entire religious system, including the calendar, in the
Catéchisme positiviste
, first published in 1852, and recently republished in a fine English translation as
The Catechism of Positive Religion
, trans. Richard Congreaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

26
. Lenin is cited in Tumarkin,
Lenin Lives
, 84, 90. For Marx’s comments, see Karl Marx, “Review of
Latter-Day Pamphlets
, ed. Thomas Carlyle, no. 1,
The Present Time
, no. 2,
Model Prisons
,” first published in the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-ökonomische Revue
, no. 4, April 1850, available at
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/03/carlyle.htm
. See also Jan Plamper, “Modern Personality Cults,” in
Personality Cults in Stalinism—Personenkulte im Stalinismus
, eds. Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 2004), 28.

27
. Loren R. Graham, “The Eugenics Movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920s,”
American Historical Review
82, no. 5 (1977): 1133–1164 (citation on 1150).

28
. H. J. Muller to Comrade Joseph Stalin, May 5, 1936, printed in
The Mankind Quarterly
34, no. 3 (2003): 305–319. On the life of Muller, see Elof Alex Carlson,
Genes, Radiation, and Society: The Life and Work of H. J. Muller
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); Mark B. Adam, “Eugenics in Russia,” in
The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia
, ed. Mark B. Adam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 153–216.

29
. Gregory,
Lenin’s Brain
, 31; Richter, “Pantheon of Brains,” 147.

30
. Semashko is cited in Hagner,
Geniale Gehirne
, 249. See also Gregory,
Lenin’s Brain
, 34. Gregory points out that the Central Committee’s secret files pertaining to Lenin’s brain were later deposited by Russian archivists working during the Yeltsin years in a collection labeled “The Communist Party on Trial.” The “crime” in this case was the “extreme elitism” of the Soviet regime. Trotsky is cited in Gregory,
Lenin’s Brain
, 34.

31
. Engels’s comment on Marx’s genius was included as a footnote in the 1888 edition of Engels’s
Ludwig Feurbach and the Outcome of German Philosophy
(New York: International Publishers, 2009), 43. See also Engels, “Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx,” March 17, 1883, available at
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/burial.htm
.

32
. J. V. Stalin, “Lenin,” speech delivered at a Memorial Meeting of the Kremlin Military School, January 28, 1924, and printed in
Pravda
, no. 34, February 12, 1924, in J. V. Stalin,
Works
, 13 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1954–1955), 6:63. Dzhabaev is cited in Turmarkin,
Lenin Lives
, 253.

33
. As Irina Paperno aptly remarks, “Stalin’s contemporaries felt that their lives had been crossed by a world-historical genius, akin to Napoleon on horseback.” See her “Intimacy with Power: Soviet Memoirists Remembering Stalin,” in
Personality Cults in Stalinism
, eds. Heller and Plamper, 360. For the Mikhail Gorbachev quotation, see his
On My Country and the World
, trans. George Shriver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 32.

34
. Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, trans. Alvin Johnson, eds. John Chamberlain et al. (New York: Reynal and Hitchock, 1941), 402–403 (translation altered slightly). Although I have used this version of the text, freely available at
www.archive.org
, as the basis for my own translations, I have consulted the German original throughout and have frequently made changes. On the complicated publishing history of
Mein Kampf
and its many foreign translations, see Othmar Plöckinger,
Geschichte eines Buches: Adolf Hitlers “Mein Kampf,” 1922–1945
(Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2006).

35
. A notable exception to the earlier tendency to discount Hitler’s artistic interests was Joachim C. Fest,
Hitler
, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). The play on Clausewitz’s famous observation that politics is “war by other means” is that of Hans Rudolf Vaget, whose article “Wagnerian Self-Fashioning: The Case of Adolf Hitler,”
New German Critique 101
34, no. 2 (2007): 95–114, is itself an important contribution to the new literature recognizing the importance of aesthetic concerns to Hitler and the Nazis. In addition, see Richard A. Etlin, ed.,
Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Eric Michaud,
The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany
, trans. Janet Lloyd (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Jonathan Petrapoulos,
Art as Politics in the Third Reich
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Frederick Spotts,
Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics
(New York: Overlook, 2003); Birgit Schwarz,
Geniewahn: Hitler und die Kunst
(Vienna: Bohlau, 2009); Otto W. Werckmeister, “Hitler the Artist,”
Critical Inquiry
23 (1997): 270–297. For all its richness, this body of work pays surprisingly little attention to the subject of genius.

36
. Thomas Mann,
Pro and Contra Wagner
, ed. Allen Blunden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 210. Hitler is cited in Vaget, “Wagnerian Self-Fashioning,” 100–101, 103. Hitler repeated the allusion to the Wagnerian sword of Siegfried in
Mein Kampf
.

37
. Hitler is cited in Ian Kershaw,
Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 151. See also Houston Stewart Chamberlain to Adolf Hitler, October 7, 1923, in Chamberlain,
Briefe 1882–1924 und Briefwechsel mit Kaiser Wilhelm
, 2 vols. (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1926), 2:124–126. The encounter is described in Vaget, “Wagnerian Self-Fashioning,” 105–106. The reference to Goethe is from
Faust
II, 2,
Am untern Peneios
.

38
. Georg Schott,
Das Volksbuch vom Hitler
(Munich: Hermann Weichmann, 1924), 48–54. Goebbels is cited in Kershaw,
Hitler, 1889–1936
, 283–284; Robert Gellately,
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe
(New York: Knopf, 2007), 127. Hitler is cited in Kershaw,
Hitler, 1889–1936
, 289.

39
. Haller and Müller are cited in Klaus Schreiner, “Messianism in the Political Culture of the Weimar Republic,” in
Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco
, eds. Peter Schäfer and Mark Cohen (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 327. On political messianism more generally in this period, see Lilla,
The Stillborn God
, esp. chap. 6.

40
. Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, 479, 403, 396–398. The importance of genius to Hitler’s appeal is a point that surprisingly few scholars have emphasized. A notable exception is Jochen Schmidt,
Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik, 1750–1945
, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2004), 2:194–195.

41
. John S. White, “Taine on Race and Genius,”
Social Research
10, no. 1 (1943): 76–100; Gustave Le Bon, “Recherches anatomique et mathématique sur les lois des variations du volume du cerveau,”
Revue d’anthropologie
, 2nd ser., 2 (1879): 27–104; Gustave Le Bon,
La psychologie des foules
(1895). Though there are numerous more recent works on the question, George L. Mosse’s
Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), remains a fine introduction. See also Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, 417–418.