The aristocratic ideal in Munich: rereading Politics as a Vocation in its social context

It was Alfred Rosenberg’s wife Hilda, a dancer from Reval who had trained in Paris, who wanted to move to Munich in 1918 because of the city’s reputation as one of the centres of modern dance. One of the Munich-based dance teachers was Edith von Schrenck, whom Rosenberg’s wife knew from her studies at the Dalcroze Institute in St Petersburg, an institute of modern dance and eurythmics run by Prince Volkonsky, who had been educated at Hellerau near Dresden. Also in Munich, the choreographer Rudolf von Laban formulated his first ideas about dance, which laid the foundation for his work as a prominent figure in Goebbels’s culture industry, before he moved to England.

Intellectuals and politicians who had passed through Munich between the 1900s and the 1920s had different social, geographic, and political trajectories. This mixture produced new political visions that reached far beyond the borders of the German Empire. A year before the revolution of 1905 in Russia, for instance, Leon Trotsky settled there to edit his revolutionary newspaper Iskra (Spark). Helphand, alias Parvus, an entrepreneur from Odessa who ended up organizing Lenin’s passage to Russia, lived there around the same time. But most people who arrived in Munich did not choose the city for political reasons; in fact, they were all attracted by the city’s promise of alternative lifestyles, particularly, in the visual arts, in theatre, and in modern dance.

The crowd that flocked to Munich in the last months of the First World War and the early years of the republic was still inspired by a search for alternative life forms, as those earlier generations had been. Munich’s Suresnes Palace, an eighteenth-century residence for the Wittelsbachs, became available for rent as an artists’ space, where Paul Klee had a studio in 1918, and where expressionist poet Ernst Toller was hiding after the failure of the Eisner government in 1919. During the war, another Wittelsbach palace, the Prince Georg Palais, had become the site of charitable activities sponsored by the Bruckmanns, publishers with wide-reaching connections, who organized a series of much-attended lectures in the series ‘War relief for intellectual professions’. Lectures on poetry and on antiquity were particularly prominent. Renting an apartment at Villa Alberti, poet Rainer Maria Rilke was among those both attending and giving talks on Roman antiquity to Munich’s elites, before he left the city in 1919. As Munich became of Europe’s first socialist republics, along with Hungary, it attracted particularly intellectuals of the radical left, who came here from Vienna. Anarchists, revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, they all gathered at places such as the Café Stefanie to discuss the crisis of modern life.

Like Laban, whose family name, De la Banne, denoted a French familial origin, many of the Bohemians in Munich were men and women of high nobility who sought an escape from traditional society. A significant number of them came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Munich’s official institutions, such as the Academy of Art and the University, were the first point of entry for many who flocked to the city for its art, but these soon found smaller and more informal circles. Munich’s Fine Arts Academy around 1900 was more progressive than both Vienna’s Academy and that of Berlin. But in addition to Munich’s traditionalists like Franz von Lenbach, it also had a group of more radical painters whose association, the Secession, mirrored an eponymous organization in Vienna and promoted internationalism in art since the turn of the century. This tension attracted independent artists like the Slovenian painter Anton Ažbe, who would in turn draw affluent students from across Europe to the city. Thus by the beginning of the twentieth century, the city had established a charisma of its own, which distinguished it from other German cities. It was more remote from government affairs than Berlin but also less provincial than cities like Weimar or Darmstadt. The city provided something for artists and intellectuals of high society as well as lower- and middle-class representatives. In his memoirs, written shortly before his execution at Nuremberg, Rosenberg recalled arriving in Munich with a sketchbook of watercolours drafted in Reval and in Skhodnya near Moscow, which he was trying to turn into sellable pieces of work on Munich’s art market,

With the end of the First World War, the period of cultural radicalism in Munich was followed by ten years of radicalism, in which the conflict of forces struggling for Germany’s future was particularly palpable. On 7 November 1918, the Wittelsbach King Ludwig III, who had only reigned since 1913, fled to the Austrian castle of Anif near Salzburg, where on 13 November he typed a declaration releasing all civil and military servants of his state from their duties, without formally resigning himself. The Bavarian king was one in a small group of five German heads of state who, like the Habsburg Emperor Karl I, had refused to abdicate; the majority, seventeen monarchs and princes, resigned on behalf of themselves and their families. Like all of them, Ludwig too feared for his life; he moved between castles in Hungary and Austria before returning to Bavaria, where he died in 1921.Footnote ¹⁷ The socialist leader Kurt Eisner had already declared Bavaria a Republic on 7 November, two days before Scheidemann and Ebert would do so in Berlin. Eisner interpreted Ludwig’s declaration as a form of resignation. In this period of upheaval, another intellectual to move to Munich was the Viennese philosopher of science and economist Otto Neurath, who was appointed head of the Central Planning Office of the Munich Council Republic. In May 1919, some 600 people were shot during clashes on Munich’s streets, and others were imprisoned.

Among the moderate intellectuals who also settled in Munich in the years of revolution was the sociologist Max Weber. Having recently recovered from a nervous breakdown, he favoured the Bavarian capital over offers of professorial positions at universities in Vienna, Bonn, Berlin, and Frankfurt. His choice of Munich as the place to revive his academic career after a break of twenty years was informed by personal and professional connections, some of which established ties to the heart of the republican socialist government. In the winter of 1918/19, Weber published a series of programmatic works in a set of special pamphlets published by the nationally renowned Frankfurter Zeitung under the series title ‘On the German Revolution’, through which he wanted to establish the theoretical foundations for a republican order in Germany from a liberal standpoint.Footnote ¹⁸ Not only would the foreign powers not allow Germany to be restored in her previous, dynastic order, Weber argued; this was not in Germany’s interests either. Instead, Weber advocated a solution for Greater Germany, whereby Prussian sovereignty would be crushed in favour of a federal system of nearly equal states.

Only a year after the revolution had begun, Eisner was assassinated, and Neurath, the economist Edgar Jaffé, as well as other leading members of Eisner’s socialist government were put on trial for treason. Max Weber, who did not share their radicalism, nonetheless appeared as a defendant in court: although a more outspoken critic of the left, in his actions he was far more sympathetic to the socialists and anarchists than he admitted in print. He did not live to see this, having died in 1920, but it quickly became apparent that the threat of violence was at least as great, if not greater, from the right as it had been from the now declining communist left. In March 1920, Wolfgang Kapp, a leading member of the All-German Union, and General Walter von Lüttwitz, then used one of the disbanded military corps, the Marine brigade Ehrhardt, in an attempt to seize power. The putsch was thwarted by a general strike of the trade unions and a form of passive resistance by the military bureaucracy. In 1923, Adolf Hitler, who chose to settle in Bavaria having been released from the Bavarian infantry, which he had joined as a volunteer, undertook a putsch in Munich’s Beer Hall, during which he proclaimed himself Reich chancellor, again with support from former generals such as Ludendorff. After it failed, one of his leading supporters, Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, was shot at the scene, while Hitler was taken prisoner for one year. This period of imprisonment not only gave him time to write his main ideological treatise, Mein Kampf, but it also provided him with the right status for becoming a celebrity in Munich. While in the short term unsuccessful, these Munich-based attempts at destabilizing the republican regime paved the way for the foundation of the Third Reich merely ten years later in Berlin.

Much political action in Munich occurred not only on the streets but in the private circles and salons, as well as in artistic associations that ranged from public to exclusive. While men clearly dominated radical street politics, behind the front doors, but still very much in public, women were very influential. Once again, among Munich’s high-society ladies, members of high nobility were particularly prominent: salonière Elsa Bruckmann, née Princess Cantacuzène, emerged as a hostess of a series of lectures in support of the German war effort during the war and continued to bring together representatives of different political and social groups at her home in Nymphenburger Str. Other ladies of high nobility included the Prussians Else Jaffé, née von Richthofen, and Franziska ‘Fanny’ von Reventlow, who was a celebrity of experimental life. She lived in a prominent cooperative Wohngemeinschaft with the art connoisseur Bohdan von Suchocki and Franz Hessel, a novelist, in Munich’s Kaulbachstrasse. Subsequently celebrated as one of the lead protagonists of the film Jules et Jim, based on Hessel’s memoirs, her aura, just as the city’s, was the birthplace of a new type of human being: the ‘homme curieux’.Footnote ¹⁹ Members of these circles made the practice of experimental life forms into the content of their political message. Experimental communities with prominent Munich connections included the society of the Eranos circle, a loose group of intellectuals of high society interested in psychoanalysis, social cooperative movements, and alternative forms of spirituality, which gathered for regular conferences at Ascona’s Monte Verita, a Swiss commune, between the 1900s and the 1930s. Two other circles of intellectuals, philosophers, and poets, who sought to establish a secret society or even a state within German society in transition between states, which had a base in Munich, were the Cosmics around writer Ludwig Klages and Bachofen, and the circle of young men around poet Stefan George. Though overwhelmingly masculine, these circles included some of the more radical attempts to revisit the sources of antiquity in search of new conceptions of masculinity and sexuality; they also shared with their more left-leaning fellow residents an interest in challenging bourgeois conceptions of marriage and such like.

It was in these circles that sociologist Max Weber observed the social types which he described as ‘charismatic’: a form of social power which individuals exercise, and which transcends the apparently significant differences between premodern and modern societies.Footnote ²⁰ The themes of their gatherings were often very broad: to define European identity and to broaden cultural connections; to pursue interests in various kinds of Orientalisms; to discuss the potential threats posed to Europe by the non-European world and the Soviet Union; to discuss the differences between the ‘Latin’ and the ‘Germanic’ peoples of Europe, of Catholics and Protestants, and the place of non-Christians in Europe; to discuss the character and, in some cases, the danger of National Socialism and fascism.Footnote ²¹ French historians describe the activities of these social circles as ‘européisme’, a meta-ideology in which many otherwise conflicting parties met and mingled. What connected these societies was their shared admiration of sacred and secular medieval orders associated with chivalry and monastic knighthood. Somewhat related to these associations, albeit less socially exclusive, was the neo-medieval Thule society, which met at Hotel Vierjahreszeiten. Thule was the ancient Greek word for the northernmost known corner of Europe. Its membership was mixed; alongside some members of nobility, such as Prince Gustav von Thurn und Taxis and Rudolf von Sebottendorf, most members came from lower middle-class backgrounds. One of the authors connected to the circle was the playwright Dietrich Eckart, a Frankonian, who had moved to Munich from Berlin to become the editor of an anti-republican journal, Auf gut Deutsch. In 1921, he introduced Rosenberg to another outsider to Bavaria, Adolf Hitler, who, despite being a subject of the Austro-Hungarian army, volunteered to join the Bavarian army during the First World War and thereafter returned to Munich, rather than Vienna, in the hopes of resuming a more successful career than his failed attempts at art and architecture in Vienna had intimated. Both ended up working for Eckart’s journal. Eckart, a failed lawyer and a somewhat more successful playwright, returned to Bavaria after a brief stint in Berlin, where he was befriended by a member of Wilhelm II entourage, Georg von Hülsen-Haeseler; his theatrical experience subsequently was used to coach Adolf Hitler in public speaking. Other members included Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, and Alfred Rosenberg. The ideological orientation of this society was not only anti-republican, but in general directed against the ideals associated with the Enlightenment.

The New Order State that Rosenberg began projecting first on paper and in public speeches during the Russian Civil War was a pastiche from the medieval history of the Baltic region, the Italian city states, and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. This broad ideological structure, for which Alfred Rosenberg was one of the chief contributors, was then further supplemented by other, more modern ideas: the association of a modern, unified press, as well as the creation of one, streamlined workers’ organization and the commitment to modernization and technological progress.

By studying the ideas of individuals whose actions eventually shaped an entire generation, we can turn individual biographies into group biographies, a way of seeing the past in the shape and the scope of human lives. But to understand more how their ideas intersected, and how exactly the ideas of some individuals gained more traction, we also need to investigate settings in which their speech acts are being received. One such setting is official congresses and conferences. Other settings are private dinner parties and reunions, insofar as they have been rendered into textual forms in diaries and memoirs. The case study in this chapter focuses on an international congress on the future of Europe, which the fascist government convened in 1932. It united representatives of a wide range of views on Europe’s future in Rome.

Vanguards for a noble race? Nazi ideology in transnational context

The neo-medieval ideal as a factor in the formation of Nazi ideology has been a recurrent theme of some of the genealogies and intellectual biographies of leading Nazis: from the esoteric readings of Hitler and some of his followers from their early days in Vienna and Munich to the foundation of their own new orders such as the SS.Footnote ²² Historians have recently highlighted the seriousness with which the Nazis thought of their project not only in terms of nationalist and socialist paradigms, but also in terms of empire building.Footnote ²³ In the choice of orientation between traditional and modern, between restoration, reform, and revolution, the idea of chivalry appealed as a timeless alternative: like charisma, it promised to infuse the best of the traditional against the worst of the modern.

Munich in the period from the November Revolution until 1923 provides a microhistory of a milieu in which National Socialism became socially acceptable. They were also settings in which the combinations of chivalric and modern were tried and tested, often in a way that confronted old elites like Prince Rohan with the newcomers and outsiders like Rosenberg. Mixed couples of high nobility and bourgeoisie, like the Bruckmanns, were as important in creating new connections between recent migrants to the city, as were lower middle-class figures like Dietrich Eckart, who had come to Munich from not quite so far; intellectuals like the circle of Stefan George played as important a role as the anti-intellectual Russian monarchists who had come here after the collapse of the White Army in the Russian civil war.Footnote ²⁴ One of the things that united these people was a shared myth of a lost historical past, which many associated with an aristocratic ideal: the image of the chivalric past in eastern Europe and Russia, where organizations such as the Teutonic Order, elite merchant unions, and German colonists, all believed to raise levels of civilization in what they thought of as a backward part of Europe. While Munich was not the birthplace of Nazi ideology, it was certainly the place where its leading ideologues and supporters met and where, based on their mutual attachment, its different strands became amalgamated.

Many in the circle surrounding the publisher Hugo Bruckmann and his wife Elsa perceived the abdication of figures like the Wittelsbach King Ludwig III as a tragic event. Hugo Bruckmann, the publisher who since the beginning of the First World War began actively to promote literature of pan-Germanic ideology by H.S. Chamberlain and others, endorsed a cult of chivalry and aristocracy, as did many in their circle, such as Stefan George and his circle of followers. Elsa Bruckmann was believed to be the direct descendant of Byzantine Emperor John VI Cantacuzenus; her nephew, Norbert von Hellingrath, was a member of Stefan George’s circle and an editor of the first complete works of Hölderlin, whose romantic poeticization of Germany tied it to the ancient world of the pre-Socratics. All Wagnerians, this circle also cultivated their ties to Wagner’s neo-medieval estate at Bayreuth. One of the commonly seen figures in their salon was Karl Alexander Müller, the historian who became the editor of Süddeutsche Monatshefte, an increasingly völkisch magazine. From 1930 to 1936, he served as director of the Institute for the Study of the German People in the South and the South East (Institut zur Erforschung des Deutschen Volkstums im Süden und Südosten), whose aim was to establish a comprehensive analysis of the impact of German culture on European civilization. It continued the ethnographic work of Baron August von Haxthausen, paving the ground for historically founded claims of legitimacy for Nazi expansion in the East. By the time Hitler had begun composing Mein Kampf, in 1923, his recent acquaintance Rosenberg had already developed in a nutshell his idea about the importance of the medieval nobility in creating the ideal type of the Aryan. Both interacted at Elsa Bruckmann’s salon with its emphasis on the need for the rejuvenation on the old nobility.

Their joint project, the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte [the National Socialist Monthly] was the main platform for debating the cornerstones of a new ideology. At the beginning, one of the unifying themes was a critique of the old national bourgeoisie, a point of connection for rising social groups of which Rosenberg and Hitler were representative, with old elites. In the first issue from 1930, one of the paper’s ‘pedigreed’ contributors, Count Ernst von Reventlow, spoke of the ‘nemesis’ of the bourgeoisie.Footnote ²⁵ Goebbels echoed in the same issue, speaking of the anaemic and subservient psychology of Germany’s bourgeoisie.Footnote ²⁶ By 1933, Goebbels was ready to declare that the Nazi seizure of power, and not the end of its monarchy, was Germany’s real revolution, which pointed to a third way beyond Right and Left.Footnote ²⁷

In this process, nobles of old lineage, as well as people of lower social backgrounds and those who aspired towards nobility by adopting a noble surname – such as the ideologue Josef Lanz von Liebenfels – all played slightly different roles. Visibility, which, as social theorist Georg Simmel insisted, was one of the key sources of aristocratic privilege, was not only given through symbolic markers such as having the right particle. Nobility was traditionally also performed socially, one had to ‘pass’ in order to be accepted as noble.

Paying attention to the intellectual genealogy of this ideal does not provide an explanation for all the aspects of the Nazis’ appeal, such as why certain groups or residents of certain regions were more likely to vote for the Nazis. But what it can explain is how the Nazis succeeded in ultimately reaching such a diverse population. In explaining Nazi appeal, scholars pay particular attention to the years from 1928, when the Nazi party only had a support base of 800,000 voters, to the Reichstag elections of 1930, when six million voted for the party.Footnote ²⁸ Another focus of interest is the growth of the Nazi propaganda machine following the seizure of power in 1933, with its powerful synaesthetic impact through radio, film, and public exhibitions. But by this point, its influence already had a snowball effect. Far more open-ended, and therefore more interesting, is the question how the Nazis became the Nazis as the world got to know them in the first place, and for this, we need to look in more detail at the intellectual atmosphere and social circles in which the chief ideologues – Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler – mingled.

Political ideals have not only an intellectual genealogy such as the ‘palingenetic myth’ which underpins the idea of racial superiority in Nazi ideology. They also have a social one. The social milieus of cities in transition, like Vienna, as described by Brigitte Hamann, and Munich, described by Richard Evans, and more recently, Wolfgang Martynkewicz, provided the material that forged these disparate images together.Footnote ²⁹ The image of declining dynasties and the ideals of a rejuvenated nobility was a dominant paradigm of discourse in these circles, one that was promoted not only by poets of bourgeois origin like Rilke but also by nobles themselves, particularly hostesses and Bohemians such as Elsa Bruckmann, Fanny von Reventlow, and the von Richthofen sisters.

One of the last issues of Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte before the Nazis took power in Germany was devoted to the Crisis of Europe.Footnote ³⁰ At the heart of the paper was coverage of Alfred Rosenberg’s recent visit to Rome, where he was one among many venerable speakers from different European countries. In his editorial to this issue, Adolf Hitler noted that the congress organizers had refrained from inviting leading politicians of their time, opting instead for the most noteworthy ‘intellectuals’, writers, and politicians who had once occupied an important role and felt a vocation to do so again in the future. This explains the combination of ‘outstanding historians’ with ‘renowned politicians’ such as Count Apponyi, Rennell Rodd, former British ambassador to Italy, and others. The aim was not to turn this into a discussion of ‘diluted internationalism’ of a League of Nations but to create instead a firm ‘sentiment of national socialism’. In this spirit, the paper noted four attempts to create a united Europe: in the Middle Ages, through the Holy Roman Empire; in the modern era, under Napoleon; after the Great War, through the League of Nations; and in the same period, in the form of the Bolshevik revolution. All four attempts failed for different reasons, and it was the task of the gathering at the renowned Renaissance villa Farnesina to find the resources for Europe’s true regeneration. It was particularly important for this endeavour, Hitler emphasized, to stay away both from Bolshevism and from the Paneuropean utopianism of a Coudenhove-Kalergi.

Ten years prior to the Nazi monthly, Count Ernst von Reventlow founded the Reichswart [Imperial Herald], a party-independent magazine, which favoured Austro-German unity, demanded a revision of the Versailles treaty and a new colonial policy for Germany. Reventlow himself was a member of the German National People’s Party (DNVP) until 1927, when he joined the Nazi party.Footnote ³¹ The paper retained a curious combination of being committed to a systematic and institutional anti-Semitism in Germany, whilst regularly picking up on reports of anti-Semitic purges in the Soviet Union, as early as in 1930.Footnote ³² Ernst’s younger sister, Fanny von Reventlow, was, by contrast, at the heart of the Schwabing Bohemians, which included a different kind of fascination with the aristocratic and an internationalist anti-bourgeois community: the circle around artists such as the exiles of minor Russian gentry, Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky, the Cosmic circle and the community that would travel regularly to Ascona’s Monte Verita gatherings. This small network of associations shows the ambivalence of neo-aristocratic anti-bourgeois sentiment in post-war Munich and simultaneously the personal interconnectedness between intellectuals of quite opposing political views.

The chivalric ideal acted as an ideational glue for a very disparate community in interwar Munich. Above all, it gave general recognition to newcomers from the periphery, such as Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler, who came out of the Great War with a great sense of disorientation. Their radicalization was shared by an entire generation, but not all of its representatives felt the need to form actual alternative social and ideological networks for the rebuilding of a future empire. To the detriment of European society, of many neo-aristocratic dream projects born in Munich in the 1920s, it was their project of a Third Reich and their idea of a neo-medieval order – the SS – that succeeded in the subsequent decade. Later, Rosenberg’s appointment as a special Commissioner for the Eastern Territories in 1941 gave him further opportunities to put his mythology of a reformed eastern European colony governed by a Teutonic Order into practice. Alongside mass deportations of the Jews, Rosenberg was in charge of resettling the population of Baltic nobility in the formerly Polish area of the Wartheland.

As soon as 1935, Germany, unlike most other central European states with the exception of Hungary, revived the old status of nobility, even though the Nuremberg laws of 1935 required nobles of known old lineage to provide proof of racial purity until 1800. At the same time, leading members of the Nazi party sought to regain the cooperation of nobles in their project of national renewal, which was done both at the level of reintroducing new forms of rank to the army and at the level of co-opting nobles who had held possessions in what was now no longer Germany into projects of re-colonization of these territories under the Nazi aegis. As recent historians have argued, such attempts were partially successful, particularly when it came to establishing partnerships between the Nazi party and those associations of noblemen that had already moved to the political right before the Weimar Republic had been conceived. The primary organization to cooperate with the attempts by the Nazi party to reinstitute the nobility was the Deutsche Adelsgenossenschaft.Footnote ³³ Indeed, throughout its time in power, the Nazi government in Germany redefined both its concept of nobility based on race and its policies towards organized nobles’ organizations such as the DAG.Footnote ³⁴

The authority in the party who oversaw the reform of the existing nobility in Germany was Hans Guenther, minister of health. In some sense, Guenther sought to reverse the radicalism of Weimar constitutional attempts to remove the institution altogether.Footnote ³⁵ Already in his time as a constitutional lawyer in the Weimar Republic, the jurist Carl Schmitt had called the movement to abolish the nobility a form of ‘Jacobinism’.Footnote ³⁶ In Austria and Germany, the first constitutional assemblies of the new republics implemented decrees abolishing all forms of noble status in 1919. The nobility was abolished, along with ‘its external privileges and titles awarded as a sign of distinction associated with civil service, profession, or a scientific or artistic capacity’. Nobles were to become ‘German Austrian citizens’, equal before the law in all respects.Footnote ³⁷ In republican Germany, nobles were allowed to continue using their titles as part of their name, without the right to inherit them.Footnote ³⁸ Nazi law partially reversed these changes.

Nobility of Blood and Soil

Another author to be inspired by Rosenberg, albeit already during the period of Nazi rule, was Walther Darré. His Neuadel aus Blut und Boden [New Nobility from Blood and Soil] cast the peasant as a bearer of Germanic customs in the centre of attention. Frequently referring back to the architecture and history of the Ostsee provinces, Rosenberg continuously emphasized the achievement of the Teutonic Order as a civilizing force in eastern Europe. Visiting Westphalia, Rosenberg was reminded not only of the connections between the old families of the Teutonic Orders that had moved from here to East Prussia and the Baltic but also of the entourage of Widukind, the ancient Saxon knight, whose descendants still honoured him in the form of the Seppelmeier Hof, a traditional residence of ten families or so in Westphalia and Lower Saxony who were thought of as Widukind’s descendants.

The aristocratic ideals of exclusivity, military prowess, and cultural patronage were eventually divided among different offices. Alfred Rosenberg became the chief of an eponymous cultural department, which collected artworks from across Europe and established a network of museums of racial culture as well as exhibitions on the history and future of Europe across Nazi-occupied territories and the new empire’s German heartlands. In the meantime, another newcomer, Heinrich Himmler, founded the neo-chivalric Schutzstaffel SS, where, likewise, ideas of ‘fidelity’ and ‘honour’ were applied to the Fuehrer.Footnote ³⁹

Government correspondence from the Nazi period reveals an internal debate about whether or not to acknowledge that some families had a ‘higher significance for the state than other families’, – the internal definition of nobility depending on other than racial purity – implying also ‘higher tasks and duties’ for nobles in return. ‘In this connection’, one minister argued, ‘we will also have to determine whether we should grant such a special status exclusively to families of former nobility, or also consider admitting new families’. One means of helping to make this determination was to work with anti-Semitic groups within aristocratic organizations, resulting in a follow-up to the Gotha Almanach of nobility and listing all ennobled Jews in a separate edition called the Semi-Gotha. In its occupied territories, the Nazi government even commissioned book-length studies on how to distinguish, for instance, Polish nobility of Slavic origin from those of Jewish origin by looking at surnames.Footnote ⁴⁰ The idea of the nobility as a superior group within the general population contradicted Nazi ideas about the racial superiority of the Aryan race, all members of which were supposed to be mutually equal.

The Nazi government had particular difficulties in addressing the issue of aristocratic privilege. On the one hand, the ideal of the Teutonic conqueror of eastern Europe was important for the ideology of recolonizing the East. Hitler and Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg had discussed both the Teutonic Knights in East Prussia and the Baltic as a model for the Nazi takeover of eastern Europe. In Mein Kampf, the nobility remained a more ambivalent concept than in Rosenberg’s work, in which the nobility appears first as an example of racial degeneration, based on examples of dynastic incest among families such as the Habsburgs. Hitler’s distaste for the Habsburg dynasty was balanced by his acceptance of Franz Josef’s authority when he was emperor, as well as an outright admiration of the Hohenzollerns. Likewise, Hitler’s emphasis on the nobility’s history of degeneration and racial mixture with Jews was counterweighed by his idealization of the medieval chivalric orders. Further, nobles are condemned for introducing Jews to European high society.Footnote ⁴¹ Only the Teutonic Order, which had colonized the Baltic littoral and some parts of eastern Europe beginning in the thirteenth century, receives a positive treatment from Hitler. In his so-called Second Book, though not published in his lifetime, Hitler was concerned with the National Socialist concept of a new empire in which an Aryan nobility plays a leading role.Footnote ⁴²

Following this logic, the Nazi government partially reinstated some noble privileges after 1935, and indeed managed to create attractive positions of power for nobles such as Gottfried von Bismarck and the von Hessen family, while also maintaining its image as a revolutionary and socialist party.Footnote ⁴³ Thus, in keeping with republican legislation, noble titles under the Nazis continued to be seen as part of the family name. Nobles were mere ‘members of families with a noble name’, although the regime itself provided more exclusive opportunities for nobles than the Weimar Republic.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nobles were recruited for active collaboration with the regime in connection with the conquest of eastern Europe. Following the Hitler–Stalin pact of 1939, as Hitler’s chief ideologue for Eastern colonization, Rosenberg invited nobles from the Baltic region to lead the colonization of parts of Poland and Ukraine and to employ their knowledge of agricultural organization since feudal times for a new development of the region, using Polish forced labourers. For this purpose, the Nazis even briefly reinstated the Teutonic Knights. On the other hand, the ideology of the Aryan race had no room for an exclusive group within the community of Aryans.

Subsequently, western European and North American historians of modernity have constructed ‘special paths’ in establishing separate genealogies of Nazi and later, Soviet totalitarianism, which were quite different from the idea of a more normal, more humane modernity that led from empires to modern nation states. With greater distance and more documentary evidence at their disposal, it is only since the end of the Cold War that historians have gradually become aware how many of these representatives of different national and political regimes had come from a shared ideational and social background. Totalitarian and democratic states had the same genealogy, even though historical accounts like Hannah Arendt’s Origins used this genealogy to draw out contrasting lineages. The phrase ‘Iron Curtain’, which many attributed to Winston Churchill, we now know, had been traced back to a speech by Joseph Goebbels and perhaps even further back.Footnote ⁴⁵ The image of a Europe containing separate genealogies, with one leading from ancient Greece via Rome to modern Europe, and two rogue branches leading to Bolshevik Russia and the capitalist United States, was first printed in a Nazi propaganda brochure distributed in Vichy France in the 1940s.Footnote ⁴⁶ Not only the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which signed a pact of non-aggression in 1939, but also informal representatives of western European and American societies and the Soviet Union were much more connected than the public discourses of these states conveyed. In fact, these Europeans who contributed to mass civilian destruction had a common past in the system of imperial rule, which the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanoff dynasties had overseen for many generations.

Rome as a shared capital of imperial nostalgia

‘Duce, Eccelenze, Signore, Signori!’ With these words, the venerable Italian inventor of the radio, Guglielmo Marconi, opened the Congress on Europe at Rome’s Capitol in November 1932. In what would be his last public role, Marconi now served as honourable president of the Royal Academy, which had recently been reconstituted under Mussolini’s tightening control.Footnote ⁴⁷ A resurrected institution of the Enlightenment in a resurrected city, the Academia had invited a wide range of leading intellectuals and politicians to debate the future of Europe. Mussolini himself, a new Cesare Borgia or perhaps a new Caesar himself, was present at the opening, as was the king, Vittorio Emmanuele III, and other royalty. Among the list of Excellencies, only one was markedly absent: Pope Pius XI. Relations between the rising Mussolini entourage and that of the papacy had reached their lowest point around that year.

The ideal of debating Europe in its oldest capitals was at the heart of a new internationalism that struggled to find its own voice against the Catholic internationalism of the Vatican, on one side, and the Protestant internationalism of Wilson’s Geneva-based League of Nations, on the other. In this project, the congress fulfilled the function of consolidating a transnational group of politicians, academics, industrialists, and writers. It combined archaic and modern, a fascination with the past and the search for modernity that was so characteristic of the political generation that formed this period. The congresses were also exclusively masculine; no women were invited, and those who attended were the wives, secretaries, and daughters of delegates.

The beginning of the Volta Congresses went back to the year 1925, when a group of intellectuals under Mussolini began working on a new philosophy of Europe.Footnote ⁴⁸ One of them, Francesco Orestano, a Kant and Nietzsche scholar and a lawyer, had studied in Germany and belonged to the first generation of Nietzsche followers. Their plan was to use an international congress across nations and disciplines in order to discuss what the identity of Europe would be: its unity; its unique concept of civilization; the nature and causes of its current crises; the relationship between Europe and the non-European world, and particularly, the colonial question. The latter was the subject of an additional congress on Africa. The congress attracted an illustrious crowd of academics, journalists, and former diplomats. The organizers worked under the auspices of the Mussolini-controlled Roman Senate. Even the conference programme was printed at the Senate’s own publishing house. The financial backing came from the Volta foundation associated with Edison Electric corporations.

The most obvious beneficiaries were the newcomers on the political scene, and those who travelled to Rome for the first time. On a group level, it was of far greater significance to representatives of those nations which either did not exist prior to the First World War or had significantly changed their constitution, such as Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the host country itself. This was also reflected in the disproportionately declining number of participants from other countries that survived the Great War more or less intact, such as Britain. It was particularly noteworthy that one new state was conspicuously absent because it had not received an invitation: the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁴⁹

The meeting also brought together what could be called the Captains of Industry with the Captains of Science, eminent diplomats working for former empires such as Austria-Hungary, such as Count Albert Apponyi, as well as former diplomats working for still-existent empires, like the retired British ambassador to Italy, Baron Rennell Rodd. Events like these were not only a validation for Italy as the host country, and the Duce personally as leader of a neo-Roman Empire; it was also a validation for some of its participants.Footnote ⁵⁰

Many of the more affluent representatives of the generation that gathered here in 1932 had witnessed the first major excavations of antiquity in their childhood. From the 1880s to the 1890s, hidden ruins of the Forum in Rome and the patrician houses in Pompeii were dug up. By the mid-1920s, archaeologists also discovered residential multistorey houses in Ostia. Now, in the 1920s, a new building boom in Rome underlined the classical heritage of the city with new representative buildings in neo-classical style.Footnote ⁵¹ Rome was to be a capital of the twentieth century. Excursions to the city were an integral part of the congress on Europe. A further congress on the future and colonial administration of Africa, held in Rome in 1939, after the Italian conquest of Lybia, included a special treat: a scheduled flight for delegates to the ruins of antiquity at Tripoli.

Events like the Volta Congress on Europe, and a follow-up congress on Africa, highlighted the international connections between what seemed rather different models of imperial attachment. Of 120 participants in the Europe congress, an overwhelming majority had served in leading diplomatic or military posts by the time the Great War broke out. These included military leaders like the Duke of Abruzzi, an ex-Hungarian minister of Austria-Hungary, the president of the French diplomatic academy, former diplomatic staff of the British Empire, and members of the League of Nations staff. Among the cultural figures were established intellectuals in their fields and nations, such as the archaeologist Charles Petrie, the sociologist Alfred Weber (brother of Max), the writer and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga. But a smaller group of men were the rising stars of a new generation of politicians and intellectuals. Chief among them were new political leaders and ideologues, like Mussolini and Alfred Rosenberg.

Among the scholars and writers invited to the congresses on Europe and Africa, there were also other authors whose fame had crystallized in the 1920s out of a similar mood of European decline and quest for a new political vision: Stefan Zweig, who sent his paper but did not attend in person; the historian Christopher Dawson; Tomasi Marinetti, who attended the Africa congress; Bronislaw Malinowski, the anthropologist, who at the Africa congress represented the British Anthropological Association; Prince Karl Anton Rohan, editor of Europäische Revue.

Moments like this congress can provide us with some insights on how different ideology-drafters mutually perceived each other’s ideas of the past in the light of the future. It is significant to see these men of different social standing, a different relationship to the former empires, and varying age be located on the same page of a congress staged with such symbolic panache. Rome was everybody’s capital, but many of the people who had arrived there had their own post-imperial projects on their mind. Prince Rohan attempted to recover the place of Vienna as Europe’s cultural capital. Count Apponyi and other representatives of the more disenchanted elites of the Habsburg era had been seeking to widen audiences by appealing to European expatriates in the United States. The British intellectuals saw London as a new Rome. For the representatives of the Soviet Union, who were not invited to the Volta congresses on Europe and Africa but were welcome at a special congress on theatre and the arts, the Fourth Rome was Moscow.Footnote ⁵² The German representative, legal internationalist Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, was a proponent of a new Germany based on the neo-classical foundations in Weimar, while others favoured Munich, capital of the secessionist Bohème. Finally, and most crucially for Europe, for the Nazis, represented by Alfred Rosenberg, the real capital of a new Third Reich was Nuremberg. Instead of Berlin, Vienna, or Weimar, the Nazi party chose this city, the former seat of the imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire, as a symbol of its power. Architect Albert Speer soon had it redesigned for the purpose of mass public rallies, and it was here where, three years after the congress in Rome, the party would pass its most significant piece of legislation, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.Footnote ⁵³

For the old elites, the congress made clear that their sense of self was still tied to the old empires. This was particularly true of the Habsburg nobility. The contrast between old and new elites became most marked in a clash over the historical roots of European identity that emerged in the speeches between Prince Rohan and Alfred Rosenberg. Rohan, who chose to publish his works in Berlin rather than in Vienna, pointing out that in Vienna ‘there is no Prince Rohan any more, only Karl Anton Rohan’, thought that the old ‘nobility’ now had the task ‘to transform the old values in a conservative way, according to its tradition, using the new impulses of the revolution’.Footnote ⁵⁴ He wanted to create ‘unified Europe’ instead of an ‘ideological brotherhood of mankind’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The new Europe, saved from Spenglerian decline, as well as the threats of Bolshevism and fascism, would be a fusion of aristocratic leadership and collective action by workers who, as he put it, were not mere ‘prols’ but conscious of belonging to a collective. The bourgeoisie, by contrast, ‘today already rare, will probably slowly disappear altogether’.Footnote ⁵⁶

The Nazis’ effectively Prussianized account of European history was at odds with Rohan’s own continued espousal of the Habsburg Empire as a model of Catholic universalism, which was in a sense ironic, as the Rohan family itself had a glorious prehistory in the Protestant struggle of the Duc Henri de Rohan during the Reformation in France. In light of subsequent events, the rise of the Nazi party, another World War, and a much more significant collaboration between international parties in its aftermath, the congresses of the 1930s in Rome might seem peripheral to world politics. Yet for anyone who wants to understand the language in which an entire generation exchanged ideas about Europe before this exchange escalated in unprecedented levels of destruction, they are a rich field of study. What the congresses highlighted was the extraordinary degree of commonality that these different men shared, and the fact that those lines which divided them did not run along the political borders of Europe in their day. Instead, they were rooted in classical texts of the past, above all, Tacitus’s Germania. The contrast between them was between multiple ideas of Europe: a Latin and a German model of Europe’s greatness, modelled either after the great patrician aristocracy of the Roman past or after the ‘barbarian’; and a Nordic racial ideal. This was a generation of secularized Christians in which the conflict between Protestant and Catholic Europe had been transformed into the believed opposition between races: Nordic, Latin, and Slavic. Another commonality was their shared rejection of the Soviet experiment and the Bolshevik party. In this climate, it turned out that their conversation revolved around the question what kind of aristocratic past, what kind of patrician or chivalric, Romance or Latin, Nordic or Southern, was going to win.Footnote ⁵⁷

This Volta Congress on Europe of 1932 served the purpose not only of identifying the crisis of Europe but also of giving legitimacy to a new, imperial vision of Italy that Mussolini and his circle were trying to establish. It was a moment of glory for Mussolini but also for the National Socialists, whose internal political triumph was yet to come. One of the key figures of the future, it turns out, was Alfred Rosenberg, by the beginning of the congress still a marginal figure.

Most speakers were forgers of new ideologies, of a new outlook on European identity and future, and most began their intervention with references to the crisis of the League of Nations, and the dangers of economic and political instability. One notable feature was the emphasis on an ecumenical and international project of rebuilding empire, which featured Protestant, Catholic, and, though to a much less prominent extent, Jewish intellectuals, but noticeably excluded Muslim and Russian Orthodox representatives. There were no representatives of Europe’s political Left. Likewise, there was not a single female delegate; women were only welcome as secretaries, wives, or daughters of delegates. In fact in the correspondence, a special point was made in emphasizing the distinction between wives and partners. A special translation service, the office of Dr Giuseppe Milandri, was drawn upon to help during the congress, although many of the delegates spoke at least two languages.

The press reports ranged from dispassionate accounts of how Europe’s dignitaries had gathered on the Tiber to angry voices arguing that ‘Europe had been robbed by fascists dressed in academic uniforms’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Journal de Genève reported that the atmosphere in Rome that year was one of euphoria over the new regime, which celebrated its first ten-year anniversary that year.Footnote ⁵⁹ ‘Nothing could be less aristocratic, less conservative, than the fascist regime’, the journalist signed W.M. concluded, listing the new aqueducts, railways, and other innovations introduced under Mussolini’s rule. And yet, it was a noticeable feature of the Europe congress, as part of this year of festivities, that it included a noticeable number of delegates of old European nobility who had been public figures of Europe’s defunct continental empires. These individuals included especially families loyal to the Habsburg Empire, such as the Rohans, the Apponyis, and also Spanish and Swiss Catholic nobility. What they had in common was a particular espousal of Catholicism – the universalist, but not the socialist message – with an imperial form of internationalism. These residents of cities, no longer imperial subjects, and not yet national citizens, were now above all burghers: patricians in Rome, dandies in London, and consumers of culture in Paris.Footnote ⁶⁰ They looked at these cultural capitals for guidance of the future. And yet it turned out that the most influential politicians of the twentieth century were not Romans, Parisians, or Londoners. They were men who had grown up in Europe’s lesser cities, places like Reval, Linz, and Tbilisi. Here, the aristocratic and chivalric ideals and neo-imperialist aspirations had a particular, more colonial inflection.

In the European cities suspended in the 1930s between old and new empires and new nation states, such as Munich, Rome, Reval, Königsberg, Geneva, and the Vatican, ideals of chivalry were quickly turned into programmes for new types of post-imperial orders. Here, new charismatic personalities saw politics as their vocation. They presented themselves to their public in the international language of a new aristocracy of the future. Liberals like Weber had high hopes in the capacity of cities to regenerate the European bourgeoisie through the production of democratic forms of charismatic empowerment.Footnote ⁶¹ But these less established former imperial subjects were not citizens of a democratic republic. Many of these transient burghers were looking at the old elites of continental Europe for guidance on how to revive empires.

Germany and the builders of international society

Raymond Williams has used the case of the Bloomsbury group to identify ‘fractions of a class’ as a social phenomenon distinct from classes or groups as such.Footnote ⁴ The Bloomsbury circle, a group that, as a saying goes, ‘lived in squares’ (an allusion to the squares of Bloomsbury in London, where they lived) and ‘loved in triangles’, were an association of friends from Cambridge University, as well as their siblings, partners in marriage, and lovers. Unlike the Apostles, an exclusively male secret society in Cambridge, their circle in London was conspicuous by greater intellectual as well as sexual openness, even though it remained socially exclusive. This constellation is famed for having produced a creative environment in which individual authors also achieved great distinction. People like John Maynard Keynes, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, the Strachey brothers, as well as Roger Fry were each in their own right highly successful members of the British Edwardian elite. But what Williams did not remark on in that essay is the fact that such fractions always had connections to like-minded configurations across imperial and national boundaries. In fact, in transnational perspective, such communities appeared even more significant in their role as shapers of public opinion in spheres such as literature and the arts, and increasingly, also politics. In the late nineteenth century, they had started entire fashions such as impressionism among Europe’s educated elites; in the twentieth century, their interest shifted to literature. But what remains invisible is the whole of which that fraction is a part: that whole, to the extent that any society is a whole, was not national but continental.

‘We were in the van of the builders of a new society.’Footnote ⁵ Leonard Woolf, in one of the most quoted passages of his work, thus announced what held the multi-vocal activities of the Bloomsbury circle together. Contemporaries of the aesthetic avant-gardes and of political vanguards, these builders gave themselves a different kind of nobility by indicating that their aesthetic genealogy was older.Footnote ⁶ They proceeded from engineering a revolution in aesthetic taste to what they hoped would be a social, political, and economic transformation. Vanity, though not a word that is obviously related to the families of vanguards, was another component of their work. Much of it involved the cultivation of different pursuits of self-representation, including bibliophile handwriting, self-portraits in front of hand-designed interiors, and publications of smaller and larger works of memoirs. This body of work has been influential both as a group and individually, especially the economic theory of ‘Keynesianism’.Footnote ⁷

A key element in Bloomsbury’s capacity to furnish relationships, personal as well as political, were their global connections. These former Victorians were also Wagnerians, Nietzscheans, and admirers of modern impressionist art. The Bloomsbury fraction was simultaneously influenced by the cultural impulses associated with Bolshevik radicalism, the ‘white émigré’ culture’ of people like Anrep and, indirectly, the ‘internal exile’ of like-minded elites like Anna Akhmatova, who occupied a former palace in the heart of Leningrad. Among these connections, however, their German network has been forgotten.

Thinking without headmasters: from the age of bad taste to a new society

One of the key figures whose life and thought allows us to reconstruct this connection was Count Harry Kessler, the Prussian count who had travelled to Mexico as a young man, then became a promoter of post-impressionist art in Germany, served as an officer in the Prussian army, and then advocated an alternative League of Nations. Like Roger Fry, Count Kessler in Germany identified ‘bad taste’ as a chiffre and perspective for his critical stance towards Wilhelm II. As Kessler admitted, the source of his irritation with the establishment of the Reich was the Kaiser’s uniform ‘lack of taste’ in almost all spheres of life, in ‘the choice of his friends and advisors, in art, in literature, in lifestyle, in politics’.Footnote ⁸ Wilhelm II, he argued in 1931, was in fact the very ‘opposite of the German nobleman or the English gentleman’ and made the German people more ‘barbarian’. His interest in secessionist art movements and his open criticism of Wilhelm II himself made him susceptible to a search for political alternatives. Just like the Bloomsbury group, particularly, Leonard Woolf and John Maynard Keynes, Kessler turned his taste in art and literature, for which he was renowned in the European intellectual circles of his time, into the foundation of his political activism. For him as for them, the project of a bibliophile press combined aesthetic with political activism on an exclusive scale.

Having inherited a vast fortune from his father in 1892, Kessler became a patron for artists and writers and built an important collection of impressionist and neo-impressionist art. He was one of the first European patrons of Edvard Munch and Aristide Maillol.Footnote ⁹ By 1905, Kessler thought that ‘no one else in Germany’ enjoyed such high ‘means of influence’ on his contemporaries – especially in the sphere of cultural politics – as he did at that point.Footnote ¹⁰ His roles included his position on the directorial board of the German Artists’ Union, co-founded by Kessler in 1903; his role as Artistic Director of the Weimar museums, a post he held since 1902; his connections with the modernist theatre of Max Reinhardt; his relations with the Nietzsche Archive, which he helped to found in 1894; his personal friendships with great artistic personalities in Europe like the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, with whom he collaborated on his opera Der Rosenkavalier and other works, and the Belgian designer Henry van de Velde, whose work he promoted in Germany; the progressive press, including Die Zukunft and Die Neue Rundschau; as well as ‘Berlin society, the Harrachs, Richters, […], the Regiment’; and finally, he added, his ‘personal standing’.Footnote ¹¹ Kessler sought to use this unique social position for a ‘renewal of German culture’ and to become nothing less than a princeps juventutis.Footnote ¹² Weimar’s classical age was one historical model for this endeavour, Nietzsche’s utopia of a revived European culture another.

Kessler, who, as we saw, worked as cultural attache for the German Foreign Office during the war, responded to the war similarly to the Bloomsbury group in other ways, too. He used German funds to sponsor the Comintern-funded Malik Publishing House, which had a very similar publishing programme in German to the Hogarth Press. One of its founders, the poet Else Lasker-Schüler, chose this name from the Hebrew term melek, which means King, but was also reminiscent of the Moloch, the false idol who demands large sacrifices.Footnote ¹³

Historians of political thought have paid little attention to Kessler as a political thinker and, indeed, compared to contemporaries like Max Weber, whom he knew personally, he was hardly a significant writer. Yet, Kessler’s political works – the essay on Nationality (1906, 1919, 1921), the manifesto Guidelines for a True League of Nations (1919–21), and the book Germany and Europe (1923) – represent a novel aspect of interwar German political thought.Footnote ¹⁴

Discrediting old authorities and a commitment to a new internationalism was a key characteristic, which the Bloomsbury group shared with their wider European network, which included Kessler. For the Bloomsbury group, this idea was most clearly represented in one of the portraits of Eminent Victorians, the critical account of the Rugby school left by the influential Victorian Matthew Arnold.Footnote ¹⁵ This sense of dissidence towards received forms of authority was associated with a positive figure, namely, Friedrich Nietzsche. But they also shared many common influences. Among them was the work of Oscar Wilde, and the bibliophile press movement with its intellectual origins in the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement such as William Morris’s Kelmscott Press.Footnote ¹⁶ Kessler belonged to the core of the first interpreters of Nietzsche who attempted to combine his aristocratic radicalism and his ‘good Europeanism’ into a political programme.Footnote ¹⁷ But he was also intimately familiar with the world of the English schoolmasters and those who rebelled against them, having attended St George’s School in Ascot as a boy.

The case of Kessler and his circle highlights the transnational significance of new cult authorities invoked to dismantle old beliefs. Kessler used the abbreviation ‘Marx+Nietzsche’, sometimes adding Kant, in this list.Footnote ¹⁸ This implied a middle ground between the violent political revolutionary action of the Spartakists (which they rejected) and ‘formal’ or ‘bourgeois democracy’ with its strong emphasis on the role of the state through party representatives. In addition to the more radical November Club, Kessler was also involved in the foundation of the more patriotic and centrist Union for a New Fatherland.Footnote ¹⁹

Like Sidney and Beatrice Webb of the Fabians, and Leonard Woolf with his 1917 Club, the members of Kessler’s November Club were also influenced by Saint-Simonean and Cobdean ideas of the modern as a technique of industrial as well as social organization. The emphasis of the November group on a foreign policy that emphasized national integration together with internationalist projects which involved the integration of labour and industry in Europe, and a domestic policy focusing on the social question and the nationalization of industry, marked not only the identity of the Weimar coalition. It was also a sign of the left and liberal policy that the Fabians were trying to find a kind of third way between the Comintern and the League.

From candour to new diplomacy

In 1929, Kessler was in London preparing for a radio conversation at the BBC about Germany’s role in the present world, with the editor of the observer, the Irish intellectual James Louis Garvin. At this time, Virginia Woolf was engrossed in reading Kessler’s biography of Walther Rathenau, the German finance minister who had been assassinated by right-wing extremists in 1922. ‘You know, you have been spoiling my sleep this last week, by my husband insisting on reading to me passages of Your book’, Virginia confessed to Harry over tea in her Bloomsbury home, soon after the book had been translated into English.Footnote ²⁰ The work was an example of ‘new diplomacy’, an idea that captivated both the German and British disenchanted elites who saw in it a polite response to the post-imperial frankness of the Bolshevik Red Archives publication of formerly classified imperial documents.

The biography was written in the sprit of the Bloomsbury group’s shared passion for personal memoirs. The Memoir Club gathered at the Woolfs’ house regularly since the early 1920s. About sixty meetings are reported to have taken place in the forty-five years of the club’s existence.Footnote ²¹ One occasion was particularly emblematic, when Leonard Woolf read a piece about his Ceylon civil service, E.M. Forster on difficulties with a landlord in Surrey, and Duncan Grant on the Cambridge Apostles. Woolf recalled that it was ‘composed of old friends and family who were thoroughly familiar with the lives, characters and personalities of each memoirist’.Footnote ²² Kessler’s Rathenau book and his work as a memoirist for the Deutsche Nation were thus not only socially but also formally complementary. They were all in search of a common phantom, the ‘character’ of the modern: not only their own, but also of others. Rathenau was a famously elusive and difficult character, and a model for Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Peculiarly for this age, his murderer, Ernst von Salomon, not only outlived him but also published memoirs in later years.Footnote ²³

The new post-war memoirists made use of the interest in ‘new diplomacy’ as a vehicle of political communication, which included literature and literary exchange. At the same time as ‘diplomacy by conference’ continued a long tradition of international affairs established since the Holy Alliance, this generation of intellectuals acted as a collective ‘social conscience’ and a check on the politicians.Footnote ²⁴ As Felix Gilbert remarked in 1951, repeating the experience of the United States and France in the eighteenth century, the twentieth-century idea of a ‘new diplomacy’ was once again developed by authors writing on behalf of states, which found themselves in an isolated position. This explains why the concept became attractive to Russia and post-war Germany.Footnote ²⁵ The case of Kessler reflects this perspective. He wanted Germany to regain the status of a world power. He also wanted to show that out of its very defeat it generated new ideas that other states could learn from.

It had become common to speak of a new age of foreign affairs, when the old ‘cabinet diplomacy’ would be replaced with new forms of ‘mass diplomacy’.Footnote ²⁶ Like the League of Nations project, this notion of a ‘new diplomacy’ was associated with Woodrow Wilson, who proclaimed that in the future the world needed ‘open covenants of peace, openly arrived at’.Footnote ²⁷ Wilson’s ‘new diplomacy’ responded to the Bolshevik declaration of a new diplomacy, developed around the same year. Kessler’s circle, the November Club, espoused this notion programmatically.Footnote ²⁸ Kessler considered the League of Nations to play a fundamental role in this new diplomatic turn. In an article on ‘A New Method of Diplomacy’, he argued that Europe and the world needed to establish institutions and regular conferences that would ensure the status of war as ‘ultima ratio’ in conflict.Footnote ²⁹

Queer sexuality and political dissidence

The link between sexual openness and the Bloomsbury fraction is often presented as a unique case both within British culture and of this particular configuration. But in some respect, this feature was one of the transnational features of its mentality. According to Florence Tamagne, there was a strong connection in interwar Europe between sexual deviance, aesthetic counter-culture, and political dissidence.Footnote ³⁰ This was also true of queer identities in Germany, Austria, and Soviet Russia.Footnote ³¹ At the same time, Weimar Germany and republican Austria functioned for British Edwardians like John Lehman and the wider circle of poets and intellectuals like Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood like the Maghreb did for André Gide: as sites where colonial and post-imperial situations of instability enabled new forms of sexual experimentation despite the nominal persistence of repressive laws.Footnote ³²

Like members of the Bloomsbury circle, Kessler was known as a prominent dandy. He not only enjoyed what we now call Weimar culture in the company of male sexual partners but also enabled new forms of gender performance in general, for instance, by sponsoring private performances of Josephine Baker. When in 1906, Maximilian Harden, the editor of the journal Die Zukunft, started a public scandal by arguing that the so-called Liebenberg circle of advisors for Wilhelm II formed a ‘homosexual conspiracy’, Kessler faced a difficult choice.Footnote ³³ As a homosexual himself, he nonetheless shared much of Harden’s criticism of the Wilhelmine court.Footnote ³⁴

Thus, the most productive period of intellectual exchange between the disenchanted elites of Wilhelmine Germany and Victorian Britain was the interwar period. A number of key members who got involved in his project ‘Third Weimar’, such as André Gide, formed part of a kind of sexual dissident elite in France who formed a network of anti-fascist intellectuals. These networks obtained existential importance when they helped each other escape the Nazis.Footnote ³⁵ Many of this group shared Virginia Woolf’s belief that rather than being a deviant minority, their more pluralistic conception of gender and sexuality signalled the changing nature of ‘human character’ itself which had changed in this period.Footnote ³⁶ In searching for an adequate form for this new character, they naturally gravitated towards a new kind of poetry.

The age of new internationalism was not to be confused with the practice of foreign military conscription in imperial Europe, Then, as Bernard Shaw had written, ‘the Englishman’ was forced to ‘fight as a pressed man for Russia, though his father was slain by the Russians at Inkerman, and at France, though his grandfather fell at Waterloo charging shoulder to shoulder with Blücher’s Prussians. The German is compelled by the Prussian, whom he loathes, to die for Turkey and for the Crescent as against Anglo-Saxon Christendom.’Footnote ³⁷ Only Germany, Shaw predicted, would come out of this victorious process of post-imperial conversion.

When the League of Nations was founded, the Fabians, just like their German analogues, did not like the form that the League eventually took. They all proposed their own ideas for a League of Peoples, a model where the nation would be far less prominent. For Leonard Woolf, the solution lay in an international organization of heavy industry as well as workers. Because trusts in industry were becoming increasingly international, they were using the opportunity to break strike by virtue of their employees’ divisions.Footnote ³⁸ The task was to create structures that, in addition to these passions, would also represent ‘group interests’ which are not national.Footnote ³⁹ As Daniel Laqua, Patricia Clavin, and others have shown, the institutional landscape associated with the International Labour Organization and similar associations has in fact indeed been greater than previously thought.Footnote ⁴⁰ It remains one of the unjustly forgotten innovations of the interwar period, particularly in the age when the concept of sovereignty again applies more to corporations than it does to states.

The Emperors of Elegy

In the intellectual networks of the European queer community, some texts, including Virgil’s Eclogues, served as key nodes of cultural identification. Kessler’s Cranach Press also published a bibliophile edition of this text.Footnote ⁴¹ But after 1920, these ancient poets were eclipsed by new voices. To this disenchanted fraction, T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land, which Leonard and Virginia Woolf first published in their journal Criterion, conveyed most clearly the ambivalent sense of loss associated with imperial decline.Footnote ⁴² One of the main voices of this multilingual poem calls out in German: Bin gar keine Russin. Stamme aus Litauen. Echt Deutsch! This polyglot swan song of European culture gave a subjective form to what was a geopolitical crisis. Out of the territorial fragments of the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanoff empires, two generations of politicians shaped parliamentary republics or smaller kingdoms along new principles of political legitimacy, such as national self-determination and the referendum. For some groups of people who inhabited these regions, the conversion of their former imperial identities into a national form of status was less straightforward than for others, and it is those polyglot subjectivities that Eliot’s stylized poem evokes most poignantly.

The woman’s words in T.S. Eliot’s polyphonic vision of the Waste Land belonged to a person who is ‘not a Russian’, ‘from Lithuania’, but ‘truly German’. In his recollection of past seasons spent in Europe, ‘mixing memory and desire’, T.S. Eliot conjured up the memory of summers spent on Munich’s Starnberg Lake.Footnote ⁴³ Embedded in the author’s memory of summer is another person’s memory of a winter, recollected by a woman called Marie: ‘And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,/ My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,/ And I was frightened./ He said, Marie,/ Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.’Footnote ⁴⁴ The reference to Lithuania, to a family of noble background (the archduke), and the notion of a nostalgic kind of memory suggests that one of the voices in his patchwork of European decline belongs to that of German settlers from the Baltic littoral, probably of aristocratic descent.

Another poet who was extremely popular in both British and German social circles in the 1920s and 1930s was Rainer Maria Rilke. He wrote elegies that appealed to a new generation of disenchanted educated elites in continental Europe because of his evocative sense of loss. He spoke like an oracle for that in-between generation of people who no longer belonged to the past and yet did not feel at home in the present. He called them the ‘disinherited’, or ‘those who used to be’, because they had never come into their own in the post-imperial world. To behold and to lament the world that they believed has been lost forever was all they could do. As Rilke put it:

The Adriatic castle of Duino, which elicited Rilke’s elegiac lament on decline, became a glue that connected this disparate yet related community of intellectuals who had been critics of empire yet mourned its decline.Footnote ⁴⁶ In actual fact, the Rilke fans were the very opposite of a ‘disinherited’ community. Heirs of imperial wealth, derived from projects such as Anglo-German railway construction, banking, the British sugar trade, or the benefits of abolition, which resulted in compensation payments to a number of Bloomsbury families in the mid-nineteenth century, they were a rather well-to-do community of intellectuals who had made a point of converting this financial capital into symbolic values. Their influence consisted in their distinctive elite mentality, a sense of exclusivity and anti-herd sentiment.Footnote ⁴⁷ Rilke with his elegiac evocation of imperial decline as an irrevocable fact of modern life provided one of the affective bonds between these former dissidents of Wilhelmine Germany and the renegade establishment of Victorian Britain and Austria-Hungary, which formed between the 1890s and reached an apogee at the beginning of the 1930s. These links demonstrate the social and emotional genealogy of a very distinctive European internationalism that was politically neither on the Left nor on the Right. Politically, they could be called the global Fabians due to their espousal of an aristocratic form of socialism; aesthetically, their tastes evolved from post-impressionism and the visual arts towards an espousal of lyrical modernism, best represented in Rilke’s work, towards Soviet and anti-colonial socialist realism. By pursuing the social network behind the literary fashion of decline, we can also reconstruct the structure and function of what was a transnational affective community. This reconstruction takes us back to the late nineteenth century, when Kessler and the Bloomsbury people alike formed the vanguard of Europe’s art connoisseurs and the first collectors of artists like Manet.

Rilke himself was rather familiar with these elite contexts and enjoyed the patronage of a number of such figures in his lifetime. Often without a permanent residence, Rilke often stayed for extensive periods at the palazzos and houses of his many patrons and, more often, patronesses: owners of palaces on the Adriatic, in the Swiss Alps, apartments in Venice and in Paris. One of Rilke’s most spectacular hosts was the Duchess of Thurn and Taxis, owner of the Castle of Duino at the edges of the Adriatic Coast, which was not far from Emperor Maximilian’s romantic castle of Miramar. Rilke had spent time there in 1912. The Adriatic Littoral and its cosmopolitan owners shaped a cultural zone between pan-Slavic and Italian nationalism under Habsburg hegemony, which was under threat as a result of war. Heavily destroyed in 1915 after bombing from Italian dirigible balloons and clashes between Italian and the remaining Austrian imperial army, after the Great War it became part of the new Italian state.Footnote ⁴⁸ Occupied by fascist leaders of the Saló Republic and later by the Gestapo, in 1945, the joint Anglo-British allied command that took control over the Adriatic after the defeat of the Axis powers would choose Duino as its headquarters.Footnote ⁴⁹

On 2 November 1917, the war not over yet, Rilke was having breakfast with Kessler in Berlin’s fashionable Hotel Adlon. He had briefly served in Austria-Hungary’s propaganda department. After abandoning this office, he was stateless out of necessity and homeless out of choice.Footnote ⁵⁰ Rilke is often thought of either as a German poet, by which people primarily mean the language in which he wrote but often imply the state, or as a poet of modernity without further specification.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet in fact, both Rilke and Kessler formed part of a specific cosmopolitan community. Their way of thinking was geographical but not in a static way; they remembered the past in terms of symbolic events connected to symbolic places, experiences, and works of art that they considered canonical.

The encounter between the poet and reluctant propagandist for Austria-Hungary, and Kessler, the Maecenas, officer, and head German propaganda, was symptomatic of a particular circle of disenchanted imperial elites. Rilke admitted that the ongoing war made him confused. ‘Where do I belong?’ he asked. Kessler explained his sentiment with the fact that the war had undermined the ‘entire foundation of his former life, of every poem that he had written’. His individual ‘drive towards form’, Kessler surmised, contradicted the ‘force of the state’, especially an Austrian state.Footnote ⁵² Rilke’s highly stylized sonnets and hexameters were particularly suited to the German language, and yet, Kessler thought, not to a particular state. At this time, his main publisher and supporter, Anton Kippenberg of the Insel publishing house, was leading propaganda efforts on Germany’s western front, in Belgium; under his aegis, the image of the Leipzig Battle of the Peoples memorial, completed as a warning for peace in 1913, became the symbol of another war as it had been turned into the design for the censorship of the German army.

Rilke had been among a close circle of people who would receive Kessler’s diary-like reports on the war from the eastern front. But like Kessler, he saw the war in a Tolstoyan light, as a social universe rather than as a frontline where Russia, Germany, and Britain were on opposite sides. He praised Kessler for writing about war in the spirit of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.Footnote ⁵³ Rilke himself had been a Tolstoyan before the war. Rilke’s lover at the time, Lou Andreas Salome, a former passion of Nietzsche and a student of Freud, had introduced Rilke to Tolstoy on their trip to Russia.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the 1920s, he immersed himself in translations of a historical epic poem from medieval Russia, the Song of Igor, about the decline of princely power and the Time of Troubles in the thirteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Bloomsbury group was also attracted to these plots.

The kind of conversation that Rilke and Kessler were having was both a product and a contribution to the process of a sentimental education. In their conversations and in writing, they developed an emotional code whose function is to reflect on the loss of a beloved object: the life of Europe in the past.Footnote ⁵⁶ When in England, Kessler frequented meetings of the Fabian Society, who influenced much of his political and economic thought. He was particularly drawn to intellectual circles which promoted new artistic movements, such as impressionism and neo-impressionism, across national boundaries. As a member of the artistic union Pan around the art historian Julius Meier-Graefe, he had introduced impressionist and neo-impressionist art to Germany, stirring resistance from nationalist circles. In Germany, Kessler also formed part of the first generation of German youths attracted to the cult of Friedrich Nietzsche, and began to play a prominent role in these circles. He closed Nietzsche’s eyes on his deathbed in August 1900.Footnote ⁵⁷

Rilke’s elegiac sense of threat to this way of life, expressed in his Duino Elegies, a cycle of poems that he composed between 1912 and 1922, brought him world fame. It found echoes in his social circle, which comprised educated Europeans of higher social background. Most of them came from Germany, Russia, France, and Austria-Hungary. In translation, he would also become famous among English-speaking readers, but this fame would grow primarily after the Second World War.

Lovers of Rilke ranged from the Bloomsbury group in Britain to former admirers of neo-impressionist art in Germany, to a wider circle of European Nietzscheans.Footnote ⁵⁸ A closer look at the transnational dimension of this community of taste raises the question as to what extent we should consider them ‘fractions’ of their class within any one nation or empire, or if we should consider them representatives of one ‘fraction’ of the same class across national boundaries. I would suggest that it is at least as valid to speak of a transnational emotional community of lovers of modernist art whose taste, however, ceased to evolve in some respects after the mid-1920s. To use an expression coined by Barbara Rosenwein, these emotional communities also contributed to a political sentiment or political regime, which has very real political repercussions.Footnote ⁵⁹

After Rilke’s untimely death in 1926, Count Kessler collaborated with Germany’s Kippenberg publishing house, as well as Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, to bring out the Duino Elegies in English translation.Footnote ⁶⁰ The illustrations were designed by the British sculptor Eric Gill, who made woodcuts for the book, and the paper was made by the Maillol brothers; the printer was Kessler’s long-time lover Max Goertz.Footnote ⁶¹ The Woolfs also published Rilke’s Notebooks, and the Hogarth executive John Lehmann later oversaw the English translation rights for Rilke in the British Empire in negotiation with US publishers.Footnote ⁶² The taste for Rilke shared by this small circle of British and German intellectuals was echoed by other contemporary literary cults, such as the growing fascination with the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the prose of Marcel Proust, and, in Germany, the poetry of Stefan George.Footnote ⁶³

The European social network of Rilke lovers had evolved from similar roots. For people such as Kessler and the Woolfs, this path began with an aesthetic and spiritual disenchantment with the political ideology into which they were born, which was Victorian Britain and Wilhelmine Germany. It led them through a period of aesthetic innovation, during which – around the 1900s – they began promoting neo-impressionist French art in Germany and Britain, respectively, and took on Ruskinian ideas in promoting an elite kind of socialism. Finally, politically, it culminated with a sincere attempt to contribute to a new European internationalism through the institutional framework of the League of Nations and international labour organizations.

As Heinrich Simon of the Fischer publishing house said of Count Kessler, he formed the centre of a social circle that constituted the aristocratic Fronde against the conservative milieu around Wilhelm II. It was this Fronde that eventually shaped the transition of the Kaiserreich into a ‘republic’.Footnote ⁶⁴ This group had long delegitimized Wihelm II and his entourage. While critical of the Versailles settlement, they nonetheless saw in Germany’s peace settlement a unique opportunity for a revolution from above. The parallel with the original Fronde implied in this reference worked on two levels. Firstly, labelling them a ‘Fronde’ was appropriate because it referred to the seventeenth-century resistance of the French nobility against the encroachment of its liberties by a corrupt monarch and his counsellor Cardinal Mazarin; secondly, it indicated that, just as in seventeenth-century France, a civil war mounted between the nobility and the monarch eventually culminated in a European war of a much larger scale.Footnote ⁶⁵

Mixing memory and desire: in search of a post-imperial character

From questions of aesthetic modernism and the education of a public, the community of British Fabians and German republican dissidents turned easily to the subject of international order. Leonard Woolf began compiling a series of works on war and peace with significant contributions from Russia during the war, along with a memorandum on international government that was given to the British delegation in Versailles.Footnote ⁶⁶ With the help of poets like T.S. Eliot and Rilke, post-imperial melancholy became an affective glue for an international community of intellectuals located on the left-liberal spectrum, whose lives span both the interwar period and Europe’s second post-war.Footnote ⁶⁷ Leonard Woolf’s International Government (1916) was in many ways a British forerunner to Kessler’s Guidelines for a True League of Nations (1919–21).Footnote ⁶⁸ Both author-publishers significantly transformed their patronage of other people’s writing in the interwar period. In Woolf’s case, he began promoting anticolonial writing such as the work of C.L.R. James, while Kessler published a collection of war poems with illustrations by the communist artist George Grosz. Both were sensitive to the ambiguity of empires between cultural pluralism and economic hierarchy, they devoted a significant amount of time to the League of Nations, and particularly to drafting its reforms. Moreover, both did so by considering the possibility of a synthesis between spiritual internationalism, industrial and workers’ councils, and parliamentary democracy. They also forged ties between Russian socialists and Western liberals, something Kessler was very much part of during his time in Switzerland.Footnote ⁶⁹

In the American preface to his novel about Ceylon, one of Britain’s first experiments of imperial devolution in which Woolf served as a civil servant, Woolf provided an allegory of civilization and barbarism through the lens of the village and its surrounding jungle. His main fascination was with tracing ‘vanished’ villages in the midst of desolation. One particular village

The effect of post-imperial mourning among this transnational fraction of an imperial elite was varied. On the one hand, it produced highly articulate accounts of international government and justifications for supranational organizations for labour as well as producers and, in the case of Kessler’s plan, of spiritual organizations. On the other hand, these circles retained some serious limitations, from being almost exclusively masculine to having their origins in secret or closed associations. They originated in student fraternities and secret societies such as the Cambridge Apostles or the Canitz fraternity in the case of Kessler. The biographical and autobiographical genres provided them with a means to express contradictory feelings of nostalgia for imperial multiculturalism and sympathy for the new revolutions.

Within this genre, they engaged in detailed phenomenologies of cosmopolitan identity in the age of empire. As Leonard Woolf put it, ‘When I try to look objectively into my own mind, I detect feelings of loyalty to: my family; “race” (Jews), my country, England in particular, and the British Empire generally, places with which I have been connected, such as Kensington and London (born and bred), counties, Middlesex and Sussex, where I have lived, Ceylon, Greece; school; Trinity and Cambridge.’Footnote ⁷¹

There is a painting by Vanessa Bell, which illustrates how memory functioned at both a personal and a social level in the Bloomsbury circle. In 1920, the group, including the Woolfs, the Bells, the Keynes, and others, started a series of gatherings they called ‘The Memoir Club’. It persisted into the early 1960s. On the painting itself, from 1943, we see twelve members of the Bloomsbury circle, mostly men like Leonard Woolf and Maynard Keynes, and some women like Lydia Lopokova, Keynes’s wife, surrounded by portraits of deceased members, including, by this point in time, Virginia Woolf herself.Footnote ⁷²

The purpose of sharing such diverse memories was to identify their place in the present in relation to a common account of the past. As Leonard Woolf put it,

He then gives another test to his divided identities by suggesting that in a game or sport he is distinctly happy if one of the following wins: St. Paul’s, his school, Cambridge University, his university, followed by England, and the British Empire, followed by Sussex and Middlesex in county cricket. In the autobiographic remarks of this ‘born and bred’ Londoner, we can sense a greater multiplicity of consciousness than in the pages of the colonial subject C.L.R. James, who is at home in the great literary genres, in the game of cricket, and in the national idea of the West Indies.

Figure 27 Vanessa Bell, The Memoir Club (ca. 1943).

© estate of Vanessa Bell. Reproduced by kind permission of Henrietta Garnett

In a contribution to an earlier gathering, the Society of Heretics, in 1924, Virginia Woolf suggested that the character of the British imperial self was changing in their lifetime. She compared this process to the way an imaginary train moved from Richmond to Waterloo. The works of the age of transition are full of ‘incompleteness and dissatisfaction’ because they fail in the primary expectation which people have from literature, namely to turn ‘phantoms’ into the actual characters of an age. Imagining a classic scene of literary modernism, a conversation in a train, she thought how a Frenchman, an Englishman, and a Russian would narrate it, before concluding that great novels, ‘clumsy and verbose’ as well as ‘rich and elastic’, would betray their calling if they praised the ‘glories of the British empire’ or any doctrine instead of being sincere expressions of the characters of their time.Footnote ⁷⁴ The challenge was that in the 1920s, imperial dissolution itself had become manifest in the characters of particular individuals, and it is from the crisis of that character that the crisis of forms, in her view, also derived.

The international thought of this combined fraction of post-Victorians and the post-Wilhelmians could be described as the theoretical equivalent to this aesthetic search. Insofar as they acknowledged the need to disarticulate forms of privilege and geopolitics typical for empires, experimentation with genres for this community was inseparable from their experimentation with theories of social organization. The Hogarth Press was the virtual location that brought all of these strands together: alternative diasporic identities for Jewish and Caribbean intellectuals, personal memoirs and biographies, internationalist political treatise, and poetry reflecting on Europe as a wasteland. Here was the link between a form of exclusive print production in the era of print capitalism, a voluntary demodernization of an intellectual elite. The connection between decolonization and psychoanalysis, as Said perceptively noted, was not only a connection that later scholars would impose on the past. It was also rooted in the corporate history of the European presses of the interwar period, their collaborations with each other, and with their authors.

Bell’s painting of the Memoir Club can be compared to another room with portraits we last encountered in the context of Pan-Europeanism. In the photograph of the opening of Coudenhove’s Paneuropa Congress, we saw a very different public space. Yet, in some essential way, it is a space that is very similar to the private intimacy of the Memoir Club. The photograph of the congress of 1926 is emblematic of the enthusiasm with which European internationalists set out to build better post-imperial foundations for a new and better European Empire. The painting from 1943 – even the fact that it is a painting is significant – indicates a retreat into the private realm of introspection and memoirs. In this juxtaposition, we have the arc of development that the social history of ‘European civilization’ had taken from the end of the First World War until the outbreak of the Second World War.Footnote ⁷⁵

The oceanic feeling for empire

While Leonard Woolf and the Fabians primarily meant the working classes when speaking about non-national interests, there were also two more functions of the Hogarth Press that their press ended up fulfilling. They served as a bridge for two social groups that at first sight do not have a lot in common. They were the Jewish community of refugees from Nazi Germany and Europe, who settled in London after 1933, and the community of intellectuals who came to London or other parts of Britain to study from the Caribbean. For all these communities, imperial memory provided a secular analogy to the ‘oceanic feeling’ that they, together with Freud, criticized among the religious fundamentalism of the Victorian ‘headmasters’.Footnote ⁷⁶

An interest in reading against the grain of dominant historical narrative was another commonality of this circle. In this respect, James’s interest in Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black Caribbean double to Europe’s continental revolutionaries, can be compared to Freud’s interest in Habsburg philosemitism and in Moses’s non-European, Egyptian roots. In his essay on anti-Semitism from 1938, which he published in the émigré journal Die Zukunft, co-edited by Arthur Koestler and others, Freud recalled an author whose name he had forgotten, and who had written a text that celebrated the contributions of the Jews to European cultural life. He invited his readers to help: ‘Perhaps one of the readers of this periodical will be able to come to my help?’ But then, Freud interjected:

To those authors who mourned the Habsburg past, this mourning was often expressed with reference to the dynasty itself, or to other noble families.Footnote ⁷⁸ Habsburg’s decline and that of other high nobility became an allegorical narrative for the loss of a cultural system. Sigmund Freud’s work provided a guide for viewing geography psychologically. His amateur studies of Roman archaeology and the multilayered archaeological memory of the city of Rome served to him and the international following of his Psychoanalytic Society as a metaphor for grasping the decline of more than one empire. If, by a ‘flight of imagination’, Freud urged his readers, we supposed that the city of Rome was a ‘psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past’, what we would find would be a multi-layered presence of all its epochs at once. The ruins of the city made visible to visitors of Rome the absence of the past, which for many people looked different. Some longed for Rome of Antiquity in the republican period; the fascists around Mussolini, undoubtedly, looked for the Roman Empire’s expansion under the Caesars as their model. For others again, the model of Roman greatness lay in the Renaissance, when the city had actually shared its importance with other cultural centres, such as Florence. The city became an object of different kinds of political mourning, the suffering of a loss not of a ‘beloved person’ but of ‘an abstraction’ with which one could be enamoured, such as the ‘fatherland, freedom, an ideal, etc.’Footnote ⁷⁹

The Hogarth Press not only first introduced Freud to English readers. It also did the same for another intellectual outsider, the West Indian aesthete C.L.R. James, who had arrived in England first to accompany a cricketer and who ended up becoming a theorist of West Indian self-government with the help of the Woolfs. His Case for West Indian Self-Government effectively extrapolated the Wilsonian logic of nation states devised for post-imperial Europe for the colonies of the British Empire in the Caribbean.

At a time when other British publishers were reluctant to publish critiques of empire, such as Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery, the Woolfs seemed to be happy to take the risk. C.L.R. James can be rightly counted as a belated member of the Bloomsbury group. He had even adopted their manner of writing memoirs and biographies – the subjects of a regular club formed by the original Bloomsbury circle – and ended up writing further books in a much more biographical fashion. His masterpiece remains his cricket autobiography Beyond a Boundary, a book in which he argued that the British art of cricket was an imperial art form. A reluctant Trotskyist, James eventually gave up his identity as a diasporic theorist for the case of West India in favour of a more universalist espousal of socialist realism. Leonard Woolf was concerned with the British mandate system and was a very active member of the League of Nations Union.Footnote ⁸⁰ These imperial elites’ previous complicity in colonial violence, wrote John Strachey in 1959, gave Europeans the task to resist turning the ‘sword of empire’ into a ‘stone of indifference’ to the plight of the formerly colonized.Footnote ⁸¹

More recently, new British history has challenged previously existing ideas of the ‘national’ character to which such groups contribute by extending Bloomsbury to the British Empire. But these directions of research have not yet challenged the image of the club as distinctly national, rather than internationalist, in character. In this way, Anrep’s mosaics could be compared to the selected ‘scraps of talk’ and fragments which dropped German and other cultures from this selectively cosmopolitan memory of empire.

On 23 July 1940, three years after Kessler had passed away in exile in Lyon, the Hogarth Press was trying to locate his heirs in order to transfer payments for royalties from the book. In response, they received these words passed on from a renowned British calligrapher who knew William Rothenstein, who had gone to the same British school as the German Count: ‘Kessler was a good man who lost, not only a fortune, but practically everything he valued in life.’Footnote ⁸²

Financial ruin, suicides, on one end, and radicalization towards the Soviet Left or fascist right on the other end were the most visible markers of this dissolution. This elite had been most at home in the opposition to imperial governments with bad taste, those associated with Wilhelm II or high Victorianism. But in the absence of these institutions, they were no longer the angriest of the angry young men. In fact, their aesthetic tastes had evolved in a rather similar direction to the international modernism which the new empires, the Nazis and the Soviet Union, demonstrated in Paris. This, as Kessler remarked, was particularly awkward as they had been used to associating good taste with ideas for a good government.

This generation of internationalists provided other Europeans and non-European contemporaries of their class with a vocabulary for grasping multiple forms of political decline and social disintegration. Between the year 1937, the year of the Great Exposition in Paris, and 1941, the year when the Blitz war destroyed large parts of Bloomsbury, this group disintegrated. As Europe’s imperial frontiers had moved more aggressively into Africa in the nineteenth century, terms like ‘hinterland’ and ‘borderland’ began to be used closer to home and applied metaphorically to the unconscious.Footnote ⁸³ After the Second World War, it became particularly common to compare the internal frontiers of eastern Europe with the uncharted lands of Africa.Footnote ⁸⁴

This transnational social fraction of an old imperial elite had a significant impact on the way Europeans imagined Europe in the interwar period and on the formation of the concept of a European civilization that was to survive even such atrocities as the Holocaust. Its impact beyond Europe was to provide a framework for thinking postcolonially. But in Europe these ‘civilizers’ never decolonized themselves. Even the sceptical fraction of a self-doubting European imperial class remained, to adopt the title of Leonard Woolf’s book, a small village in the jungle. Its intellectual exclusivity and its narcissistic parochialism were two sides of the same coin.