Читать книгу Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893 - 1933 - Bernd Bocian - Страница 15

After the founding of the empire, Berlin experienced an industrial upswing along with enormous population growth, particularly in the working classes. The majority of the blue-collar masses lived in dark, dank, overcrowded tenements under inhumane conditions. The birth rate was high, as was child mortality. The average workday consisted of eleven hours; people worked six days a week with two or three vacation days per year. Naturally, member ship in labor unions rose under such conditions as did the social democratic percentage of the vote.

At the end of the 19^th century, the Jews in Berlin were predominantly merchants and independent proprietors of mid-sized businesses. A smaller number of them had already belonged to the upper, in part aristocratic, social circles for generations. Many of them held prominent positions in society as factory owners, publishers and bankers, members of parliament, lawyers, doctors, patrons of the arts, and journalists. They availed themselves of the opportunities for economic growth and advancement offered through legal emancipation in the Prussian-German empire, and in a certain sense they were representatives of the new bourgeois-capitalistic society that was constantly evolving and ever changing people’s lives. One of the consequences of this was the admixture of an anti-materialistic, anti-modernist and anti-capitalist element in the new racist anti-Semitism which continued the pre-bourgeois Christian hatred of the Jews.

The Jews who rose economically and socially became part of the bourgeoisie and adopted its social norms, educational ideas, and cultural values. The central focus was an orientation based on the liberal German enlightenment and classical, 18^th century German literature and philosophy. In particular Lessing, who had memorialized his friend Moses Mendelsohn in a play entitled »Nathan the Wise,« stood as the »Platonic ideal« of a German (see Heer 1997, 34). The German Goethe-cult came about with robust support from German Jews, and Friedrich Schiller, who was viewed as the »spokesman of pure humanity« (Scholem 1995, 30), was immensely important in that capacity to Jews from both West and East. Additional representatives of German culture also enjoyed great esteem, such as Humboldt, Herder, Jean Paul, Kant, and others.

As a result of the French Revolution and the emancipation movements spurred by the Enlightenment, a number of Germany’s Jews had set out in search of an identity and homeland that were independent of race and religion. They were willing to surrender their old identity as members of a Jewish people. In German-speaking countries, increasing numbers of them adopted an orientation based on the humanistic view of mankind and the educational ideals of the German Enlightenment which at the time were still characterized by tolerance, rationality, and liberal-mindedness. In the spirit of Lessing, the focus was on the education of humankind and the process of self-education that transformed traditional hereditary class distinctions. Here, it depended on what individuals made of themselves and what enabled them to »educate« their personalities as holistically as possible. For those who were adopting an orientation based on this tradition and, as of the first half of the 18^th century, had begun to leave the ghetto, that centuries-old compulsory yet simultaneously self-chosen housing of their identity, Germany was essentially a cultural nation. Assimilation took place through education; becoming a German was a question of one’s mentality and not one’s blood or ethnic origin.

Based on information about the escalating revolutionary terror in France and subsequent disappointment over the behavior of French revolutionary troops, who often acted like a conquering army, liberal and even pro-revolutionary German democrats increasingly distanced themselves from the French model. The disappointment experienced by Schiller and Hölderlin over Napoleon’s self-coronation as Emperor is well known, as is Beethoven’s outrage. As history unfolded, a further segment of the German population renounced its initial alignment with the libertarian ideals of the French Revolution and increasingly began to reject everything that was French, democratic, and came from the West. We also must not forget that armed missionaries who attempt to force a republic, or freedom and democracy, upon another people are seldom met with love.

The ideal of a democratic German republic culminated a second time in the revolutionary attempts of 1848. It was brutally quashed and unleashed on the USA the mass immigration of the so-called »Forty-Eighters« who would make major contributions to the nation’s development.⁹ After the founding of the empire in 1871, the majority of the bourgeoisie turned away from the ideal of democratic unity and began once again to lean more toward the norms and values of the aristocracy and the military. There was a decisive shift away from the cosmopolitan sentiment of the Enlightenment in the direction of nationalism and racist volkish ideas. Corresponding to that, the classical figures mentioned above were nationalized, re-interpreted in nationalistic terms, and thereby transformed into German heroes, so to speak. Particularly disastrous was the progressive unraveling of the early-bourgeois unity of education and humaneness, so that professors, judges, pastors, and officers now viewed human qualities as un-German and an expression of spinelessness (see Glaser 1985, 172). Hermann Glaser also spoke of a »departure from the universalhumanistic frame of mind and a move into nationalistic thinking« (Glaser 1993, 112), calling it the destruction of the German mind in the 19^th and 20^th centuries and describing it in vivid detail several times. Glaser refers to the pattern of mentality that came into being in those years as the »petty bourgeois ideology.« Culture became a façade, mythos no longer counterbalanced logos but instead replaced it, and »repression and complexes replaced emancipation and autonomy« (Glaser 1993, 150). Goethe, for whom the distinguishing qualities of German character were openness and tolerance, as for example in his play »Hermann und Dorothea,« was stripped of his humanism and transformed into a national hero. The dialectical world view of the early Romantic period, which had made an attempt to synthesize mind-body dualism into a higher holistic concept, was reduced to an either-or. The idealistic educational élan in the language of Schiller perished in hollow pathos that was turgid, aggressively nationalistic, and ubiquitous, although it was particularly prevalent among university professors. Friedrich Nietzsche – loved by the Nazis solely for his individualistic, anti-Christian, misogynous, and antisocialist philosophy of disinhibition, and yet thereby stripped of his ambivalence¹⁰ – had looked ahead and spoken early on of the destruction, »the defeat, if not the eradication of the German spirit by the German Reich.« Nietzsche saw clearly that it was the German culture discussed here, which had in the interim become the »former German culture,« (Nietzsche 1992, 363) that had made Germany interesting for the other peoples of Europe. After the founding of the empire, these traditions were »cast off with blind zeal« (ibid.), and the Germans »could find nothing better with which to replace them than political and national insanity« (ibid.).

The shift from bourgeois humanism to bourgeois nationalism created one of the prerequisites for the subsequent rise of National Socialism. When the Nazis later referred to human kindness as nothing more than »humanistic mumbo jumbo,« they were expanding and radicalizing something pre-existing in this respect as well.

Naturally, the outcome of this transformation within the culture of the bourgeoisie was as yet unforeseeable. Many German Jews either did not notice the process or chose to look the other way for the sake of the hopes they held. It was simply inconsistent with their identity as important citizens of the cultural nation of Germany, where they felt thoroughly comfortable notwithstanding all of the discrepancies and setbacks. Even after the Nazis gained power in 1933, men like Martin Buber, philosopher and founder of cultural Zionism, and Leo Baeck, Chief Rabbi of Berlin, were still discussing how rooted Jews were in Germany; they experienced and described what loomed ahead as a »rending of organic ties« (Traverso 1993, 23).

As German Jews assimilated, they adopted early bourgeois-humanist views on education and mankind. As a consequence, many of the émigrés viewed themselves as representatives of the true German identity and a better Germany, which they defended against volkish distortion. They clung to the »idealized images of Schiller, Lessing, Goethe, ¹¹ Kant, and Herder« whom they »treated with reverence previously accorded only to the Old Testament patriarchs« (Bauman 1995, 126). Even in his old age, Fritz Perls continued to view Goethe as the personification of his ideal personality, the integrated personality, and in his youth he associated a thought of Schiller’s with a »peak experience« (Perls 1977, 45).

With respect to the history of German Jewry, its optimism about integration, and its love of a cultural Germany that was in part only imaginary, one can today speak of the »pursuit of a noble illusion« (Mosse 1992, 33). Or, tak ing the Auschwitz perspective, one could also speak of a grave abandonment of self and »emotional confusion« (Scholem 1995, 28). Nevertheless, I would like to discuss the positive implications of the humanistic view of mankind and its educational ideals for the development of Gestalt therapy.