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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
GERMAN HISTORY

Volume 37

THE CULTURAL ROOTS OF

NATIONAL SOCIALISM
 THE CULTURAL ROOTS OF
NATIONAL SOCIALISM

HERMANN GLASER
TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
AND NOTES BY ERNEST A. MENZE

i~~?io~;~~n~~~up
NEW YORK AND LONDON
First published in 1978 by Croom Helm Ltd.
This edition first published in 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 1978 Hermann Glaser
© 1978 English Translation Ernest Menze
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-367-02813-8 (Set)

ISBN: 978-0-429-27806-8 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-24839-0 (Volume 37) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-28462-5 (Volume 37) (ebk)

Publisher’s Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but
points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.
Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome
correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.
The Cultural Roots of
National Socialism
HERMANN GLASER

Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by

ERNEST A. MENZE

CROOM HELM LONDON

© 1978 Hermann Glaser
Translation© 1978 Ernest A. Menze
Croom Helm Ltd, 2·10 St John's Road, London SWl 1

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Glaser, Hermann
The cultural roots of national socialism.
1. National socialism 2. Germany -
Civilization
I. Title II. Menze, Ernest August
335.6'0943 DD256.5
ISBN 0-85664-587-7

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

REDWOOD BURN LIMITED
Trowbridge & Esher
CONTENTS

Preface 9
Introduction Ernest A. Menze 17

Cultureas Fa~de
1. Master Goethe 38
2. Potsdam is Weimar 41
3. Naked and Beautiful 44
4. Beautiful, Clean, Clear 51
5. The Pathos of Schiller 58
6. Spiesser Romanticism 77
7. In the Arbour 82
8. Of Trashy Tunes and Colportage 86
9. Sentiment at Home 94

MythosagainstLogos
1. Repulsive Intellectuals 98
2. Western Decadence 101
3. Professors and Heroes 106
4. Heroes, Hawkers and Democrats 111
5. Socialist Traitors 121
6. German Conservatism 126
7. Leadership 130
8. Man as Predator 136
9. A Gilded Race of Germans 142
10. Of Blood and Race 151
11. Blood and Soil 154
12. National Exaltation 163
13. The Word 'German' 171

Repressionand Complex
1. The German Maid 178
2. The Maid's Hero 193
3. Beer-MugMystique 200
 4. Mob Romanticism 208
S. The Enigma of the Orient 211
6. Anti-Semitism 220
7. The Ghastly Idyll 231
8. Ossified Churches 246

Bibliography 258
Index 282
Still trembling, I laughed and laughed and said with uncertain heart:
Here dwell all impostors. With blotted faces and limbs there you sit
and amaze me, you men of the day! Surrounded by fifty-odd echoes
which tickle your fancy and ape your airs! Truly, no better mask
than your own face could conceal your fraud. Who can know -you!
From those who deign to know you you hide behind the runes of
the past and more recent scars. And even those who see the core fail
to grasp it: for who would believe that there is one!
Fa<;:adeand plaster seem your substance.
Your bearing flimsily reflects all ages and nations. Remove your
veils and cloaks, your paint and pose, and what is left but a
scarecrow. Truly, I am the feathered victim who saw you raw and
bare; and I flew away as the skeleton beckoned me with love.

Friedrich Nietzsche
PREFACE

It is characteristic of the paradoxical nature of this study that

Nietzsche's words appear as its epigraph; for these are the words of a
philosopher some of whose thought, in so far as it was confused and
confusing, substantially aided in imperilling and destroying the German
intellect, morality and culture. On the other hand, it was particularly
this thinker who, faced by the perennial abyss, fearlessly gazed
downward and began to survey its depth. A third factor makes his
fate exemplary: his life and work were subjected to a misinterpretation
which·bordered on deliberate distortion. This was a tendency found
time and again in the intellectual and cultural history of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. 'Nietzsche's case', therefore, may well serve to
illustrate the reflections contained in the following chapters.
The past century and a half was a period of intellectual confusion,
many instances of which will be shown in this study. Yet they will only
amount to a small selection from the monstrous catalogue of
Weltanschauungenthat were prevalent during the recent and more
remote past. Buchner had already grasped this terror when he reminded
us in Woyzeck that 'everyman is an abyss and it is dizzying to
contemplate the chasm'.
Misinterpretation and distortion play important roles in all these
examinations of the past. German culture, regardless of the period in
question, whether it be the Classical age, the Romantic, or the Age of
Enlightenment, cannot be made responsible for the year 1933.
Neither the Romantic age, the Classical age, nor any other time were
'tragic' periods in German history; true culture ca.'1never be a disaster!
It must also be remembered that the Classical and Romantic ages were
no more susceptible to misinterpretation than any other period. They
were victimized because they were nearer in time. The concluding
phase of the Romantic age actually parallelled the rise of its earliest
unimaginative imitators. But the Classical and the Romantic periods
were also victimized because, as extremely fruitful epochs of German
intellectual and cultural life, they were most flagrantly abused as
fa9ades of culture. The national tragedy rests on the fact that prime
elements of German culture, especially Classicism and Romanticism,
were perverted, distorted, twisted into opposites and yet nominally
retained. What remained were lifeless, resentful words deprived of their

9
10 Preface

meaning. Culture became fac,:ade,and Logos (the word; meaningful

speech and reason per se) was destroyed and replaced by a confused
myth, which in itself was a distortion of the word Mythos. This
repression of intellect, reason and truth brought about emotional
attitudes which must be interpreted on the basis of a psycho-
pathological examination; we encounter a conglomeration of complexes
which again produced a host of disparate and deranged ideas.
The Nietzschean epigraph can be related to the intellectual intent in
every aspect of this study; methodological as well as textual
introductory remarks, therefore, are best included in the framework of
this ad hoc exegesis.

Still trembling, I laughed and laughed and said with uncertain heart:
Here dwell all imposi rs. With blotted faces and limbs there you sit
and amaze me, you men of the day! Surrounded by fifty-odd echoes
which tickle your fancy and ape your airs!

Whoever explores the manifestations of the 'official' German mentality

of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries finds himself enmeshed in a
cabaret of culture, verse and thought that seems to have no end; he
stands transfixed, gaping in the face of Weltanschauungen that were
'conceived on Victorian velvet and realized in the gas ovens of
Auschwitz and Theresienstadt' (Htihnerfeld).
The concept of Weltanschauung must be parenthesized and used
with care: at best it represents a melange. Nietzsche speaks of blotted
faces, and such is the Spiesser's 1 plumage today and yesterday. The
concept Spiesser must not be understood sociologically as relating to
profession, income or standard of living; rather, it is meant to portray
a psychological and anthropological condition. The term petit bourgeois
signifies ~ quite specific form of spiritual and intellectual behaviour, a
mode of conduct which is called Spiesser-ideology here; the
description and documentation of its manifold aspects will be attempted
in this study. On the whole the petitbourgeois is mediocre and
provincial, fanatical and brutal, narrow-minded and full of resentment;
but he is also 'sensitive' and given to 'sentiment'. Heis very much a part
of everyone's environment. The separate strands of his make-up
permeate the texture of our 'great society': Victorian velvet in the
neon age, Hitler still alive in us. Some of the speeches quoted could
well be given today, and some still are. This study is limited to the past
for reasons of methodological convenience. Contemporary culture
therefore will not be taken into account.
Preface 11

Truly, no better mask than your own face could conceal your fraud!
Who can know - you! From those who deign to know you you hide
behind the runes of the past and more recent scars. And even those
who see the core fail to grasp it: for who would believe that there is
one! Fa9ade and plaster seem your substance.

It is not an easy task to penetrate and unmask the petit-bourgeois

attitude to life. Even among the petit-bourgeois elite, mediocrity is not
a pretence like a propagandistic gesture: it is reality. Their mediocrity is
existential, not acci,dental. Only rarely will one be able to raise the
charge of hypocrisy. Lying, vulgarity and crime, preposterously
pretentious art appreciation and ominously idyllic 'inwardness', all
these traits are most genuine. Whoever interprets them is bound to err
here and there, to over- or even underestimate their importance. The
origin of the slogans and streamers which characterize or envelop these
petit-bourgeois beings (unwrap them and search in vain for a core or
substance: 'For who would believe that there is one!') is disputable, and
considerably varying opinions may be held about them. The provocative
nature of this study should, therefore, be understood by the reader to be
a challenge to discussion.

All times and nations are reflected in your many-hued veils; and
mores and faiths speak animatedly in your gestures.

The determining of the specific characteristics of the petit-bourgeois

species is not just a concern of German anthropology. The reasons for
concentrating oil Germany are primarily methodological in nature: a
manageable area of investigation was chosen which is especially relevant
to Germans. Besides, if the petit-bourgeois were treated as a supra-
national anthropological concept, the peculiarly chauvinistic nature of
the petit-bourgeois mentality could not be properly valued. Most
importantly, it should not be forgotten that in other nations petit-
bourgeois character and behaviour never assumed the proportions they
did in Germany. We must face the fact that the massesj0yfully trod
the path to 'cultural despair' - a flock of sheep following an ass, as
one might pointedly phrase it. We must face the fact that the German
people have never been effectively divided over questions of political
ideology, but instead found themselves more or less united in their
assent to political perversions of the most varied kinds. The opposition
to this 'official' trend was isolat~d in small groups in self-imposed exile
at home or abroad. Viewed typologically and anthropologically, as
12 Preface

modes of being rather than as historical periodization, such great

counter-currents as Realism, Naturalism, Expressionism and Surrealism
were repressed, not acknowledged and then ridiculed. The exile of
Biichner,2 Marx, Heine, 3 the withdrawal of Stifter, 4 Grillparzer, 5 or
Fontane/ the proscription of Hauptmann, 7 the despair of Trakl, 8 all
these are symptomatic. Theodor Mommsen 9 asserted in his political
testament:

In my innermost being, and by that I mean with the best I have

within me, I have always been an animal politicum, and wanted to
be a good citizen. This is not possible in our nation, where the
individual, even tJ-e best, never transcends service in the rank and file
of political idolatry. This internal alienation from the people to
whom I belong has determined me to refrain as far as possible from
appearing in person before a German public which I do not respect.

That should make it clear that this volume is not concerned with the
real German intellect and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, a culture and intellect that could be denied only by fanatical
Germanophobes. This is not an exercise in self-denigration; rather, it is
a lament that the self was not nurtured and that it was permitted to fall
from culture into barbarism. In other words, the outstanding and truly
great performances and accomplishments of the German artistic and
political genius were 'officially' unacknowledged. Worse yet, it is part
of the perversion of culture that one can hardly use words such as great,
exalted, or other justifiable words of praise any longer in good
conscience. 'Official', as used here and elsewhere, means the taste of the
masses as it was guided, supported, promoted or - on account of the
lack of opportunity to choose or to make comparisons, that is, because
of the suppression of pluralistic taste - created in the first place by state
authority. It is precisely in this connection that one can speak of the
enormous guilt of those responsible. They cannot excuse themselves by
claiming to be the victims of an unfortunate historical constellation or
captives of a one-way street. They consciously turned the highway signs
in the wrong direction and twisted the guideposts of the German spirit.
The 'submissive' 10 judges, clerics, officers, bureaucrats, professors,
teachers and journalists who thus became 'pillars of society' are the
accused.
Why did all this happen? Why were the ideas of democracy and
liberality, of evolutionary socialism and cosmopolitanism, of an
intellectual and spiritual culture unable to make much impression,
Preface 13

even though so many Germans were their creators, advocates and

representatives? Various answers will be advanced in the course of this
study. In the final analysis an answer without recourse to metaphysics
will not be possible; but the present writer will not hazard an excursion
into this field. Our principal concern is in the realm of phenomenology
Phainomenon means that which manifests itself, that which appears,
and manifestations will be described here. An inventory of this kind
must, of course, give rise to moral impulses; Nietzsche demanded these
when he said: 'I will make up to my children that I am the child of my
fathers: and this day shall be eternity!'
This study should not be mistaken for a historical work, a
Geistesgeschichte bound by the principle of chronology. Recognized
traits will be compared frequently without regard to chronology and
repeatedly portrayed from various points of view. This study asserts
and attempts to substantiate the thesis that the history of 'official'
German culture during the last 150 years was not marked by
development, but resembled a monotonous rotation around unchanging
ideological distortions and perversions of reality; thus Fichte 11 appears
as a Nazi professor, Menzel12 as a 'new-German' student leader, Jahn 13
as the national sports administrator, Hitler as an author of the
Gartenlaube 14 or a racist Ganghofer, 15 Rosenberg is emulating Wagner,
and Goebbels is a kind of Wilhelm II. What may now appear as a
journalistic gag will be substantiated in the course of the study.

Truly, I am the feathered victim who saw you raw and bare; and
I flew away as the skeleton beckoned me with love.

Camus tells us in L 'Etat de siege that profanity revolts, while stupidity

disheartens. Reflection on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
revolts, disheartens, even terrifies the beholder. The author cannot
remain neutral. He cannot reject German warmth, German spirit and
German culture. He cannot deny those two great Germans, Goethe
and Schiller, He still believes in the idyll that was the sentimental
Biedermeier period and the moonlight madness of Romanticism with
its delightful and perceptive irony. But when these things beckon the
beholder as 'skeletons' he must 'fly away'. Today it is impossible to
accept any of these values without qualms of conscience. We have not
lost this culture, it is true; but we have lost our joy in it. Before we can
claim it again, we must clear away the ideological rubble or must wade
thwugh the watershed of intellectual catharsis.
After all that had happened, National Socialism was not an accident
14 Preface

of German history. Rather, it was the terminus of a broad and invitingly

laid-out path; alternative paths were travelled only by a few. Hitler's
rise to power did not initiate the crisis; it made it apparent - visible to
one and all and favoured by the politico-economic situation. It is
therefore wrong to make the political and economic conditions of the
Weimar Republic responsible for the development and success of
National Socialism. They destroyed the forces of resistance, it is true,
and thus enabled the disease (whose long incubation period will be
described in this volume) to spread so speedily and with such
devastating results. The crisis would have come to a head even without
Hitler, or else it would have taken prolonged therapy to neutralize the
poisonous seeds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which had
already caused widespread contamination. A victorious war would not
have freed the forces necessary for this process; it would only have
meant the continuation of Wilhelminian autocracy. But in this case the
existing anti-democratic and anti-humanitarian currents would probably
not have assumed the degree of brutality they developed under Hitler's
National Socialism.
Hitler was a petit bourgeois surrounded by petit-bourgeois paladins.

These were not demons who struggled fiercely to reach the top and
ultimately succeeded; they were more or less average citizens. They
succeeded not because they were different, but because of their
conformity .. .It is not only men of character .who make history;
hooligans do too, because they can sense the desires and cravings of
the masses and set them in motion with dynamic and epoch-making
power. It takes only a small pebble to create mighty waves [Reiber].

The National S::icialistview of the world was, in the final analysis,

Spiesser ideology. Frequent examples from the national Socialist era,
especially from Mein Kampf, therefore fit well into the context of this
study and assist our analysis. A commentary on Hitler's Mein Kampf,
an examination of its anthropological, sociological and psychological
contents show that this book was nothing but a reservoir of currents
arising chiefly from the misinterpretation of Classicism and
Romanticism during the nineteenth century. These currents of thought
had long been paving the way fotGermany's doom; they culminated in
the destruction of German culture, morality and politics. It has been
said that the importance and influence of Mein Kampf should not be
over-estimated, since the book, though widely distributed, was rarely
read. That may be true; but from this observation one could draw a
Preface 15

conclusion which may, at first sight, seem paradoxical: the book did
not have to be read to become a success. The consciousness and outlook
of most Germans were reflected in Hitler's book. Its contents,
propagated in thousands of pamphlets, newspapers and journals,
reflected the Spiesser'sheart and soul: abysmal vulgarity, overworked
verbal blancmange, resentments couched in oblique metaphors, endless
tirades, rhetorically painted platitudes and shallow, 'arty' dilettantism.
Mein Kampf thus appears as the Spiesser'smirror par excellence. Hitler
possessed the genius of mediocrity. His 'Averageness' was above average;
so it was his mediocrity that became the destiny of a nation, a nation
that permitted itself to be led, step by step, away from the theory and
practice of humanity.

Notes
l. For a definition of the term Spiesser see Ernest A. Menze's Introduction.
2. Georg B·iichner (1813-37), revolutionary dramatist of major talent to whom
maturity came early and whose incomplete work was rediscovered by later
generations; it anticipated modern developments in the drama.
3. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), major poet and writer of Jewish descent whose
life and work were dedicated to mediation between German and French
intellectual life and whose tragic death in exile was an omen of Germany's
future alienation from the West.
4. Adalbert Stifter (1805-68), Austrian poe~, painter.and school official who
attempted a synthesis of German Romanticism and Classicism; he sought to
master the tensions of the age by emphasizing Christian-humanist themes.
5. Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), major Austrian writer and dramatist.
6. Theodor Fontane (1819-98), major German poet and novelist.
7. Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946), German poet and dramatist, one of the
principal figures of modern German literature whose work combined stylistic
innovation with powerful themes of social criticism.
8. Georg Trakl (1887-1914), poet of the pre-First World War period who matured
while still young and whose work reflects t)l.e art}(iety of impending doom.
9. Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), the dean of historians of Roman antiquity,
an outstanding individual of far-ranging influence.
10. German untertlinig, prone to a subject mentality.
11. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), one of the major German idealist
philosophers, whose work was of world-wide significance in its influence on
Romanticism and the theory of knowledge; his political writings reflect strong
nationalist tendencies.
12. Wolfgang Menzel (1798-1873), writer, editor and historian who was jailed
for his involvement in the German student movement of the post-Napoleonic
period and who stressed moral and political convictions as standards in the
evaluation of achievement in art and literature.
13. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778-1852). Berlin high-school teacher and German
patriot active in the liberation movement against Napoleon; he advocated
sound minds in sound bodies in the struggle for the fatherland and to this end
he organized gymnastics courses. Jahn's ideas were instrumental in the
16 Preface

nation-wide Turner movement, which was also taken to America by German

immigrants.
14. The Gartenlaube, German weekly family journal established at Leipzig in
1853; initially liberal, it followed the trend of increasing vulgarization of
culture and politics and eventually became the reflection of the lowest
common denominator of the propertied middle class.
15. Ludwig Ganghofer (1855-1920), Austrian writer and editor who moved to
Munich in 1895 and became famous for his romantic stories of country life
and the mountains - popular idealizations of the naivete, warmth and piety
of life.
INTRODUCTION

Ernest A. Menze

Mr Glaser's pointed and pitiless indictment of the forces he deems

responsible for the destruction of German Kultur speaks for itself.
The impact of Glaser's words at the time of publication may be
measured by the intensity of the immediate response in the press.
Spiesser-Ideologie, the title of the German original, has meanwhile
become a widely accepted term designating the particular attitude of
mind that is the subject of this work. The long-term validity of Glaser's
analysis will be determined by the judgement of history. But one
conclusion can already be drawn. More than thirty years after Hitler's
Gotterdiimmerung and many years after their composition the sting of
his words has not abated and new aspects of their comparative
applicability to other societies are constantly becoming apparent.
To be sure, Glaser's work is not addressed to other societies, nor
does its content permit facile analogies. It was and is an invitation to
discuss the causes and consequences of cultural developments that
made the most tragic period of German history possible. The scholar
and student of German history will find much food for thought, but
also a good deal of provocation in Glaser's challenge to his countrymen.
By focusing his analysis on Germany, Glaser did not imply that the
phenomena of cultural decay so prominent in Germany do not manifest
themselves in other societies. Though his remarks concerning Germany
do not need an introduction, their relevance to situations elsewhere
might benefit from one.
These introductory remarks, then, aside from serving to define the
Spiesser in his German setting and to discuss the critical reaction to
Glaser's book, are principally concerned with drawing analogies
between problems which afflicted Germany and are being repeated in
America. America serves as a model only - the list of societies subject
to the crises examined by Glaser is limited only by the relative stage
of their development. An excursion into comparative analysis is
undertaken in full awareness of the limitations of that method in
relation to something so uniquely German as the Spiessertum and its
historical consequences. If the comparative method is applied here, it
is done not least to counteract the 'reverse' type of historicism which
has insisted on the uniqueness of the 'German problem'. The specific

17
18 Introduction

conditions that render some aspects of a nation's culture so different

from all others are legitimately stressed in the study of history. But
their significance can become truly apparent only when they are judged
in the context of broader perspectives and when their ever-present
common human undercurrents are revealed in the process.
The term Spiesser itself is not rendered easily in English. The
dictionary version of 'philistine' is a 'loan'.from the past rather than an
adequate translation. No doubt the Spiesser shares some traits with the
philistines of myth and history. Like Webster's philistine he is
'temperamentally inaccessible to' or 'afraid of new ideas, esp. of ideas
whose acceptance would involve change' ;1he is actively or passively
opposed to progress or progressive ideas, 'antagonistic to those of
artistic or poetic temperament', in short, again with Webster, 'a prosaic
person'. The modern academic usage of the term as opprobrium -
dating from the seventeenth century - and alternately conceiving of the
philistine as a former student confined to bourgeois life or simply as the
'unacademic' person had its genesis as much in biblical allusions as did
the uncomplimentary references to him in Origen, Abelard and others.
The negative characteristics of the philistine are largely the fruit of
myth. But even myth does not suffice as a synonym for the German
Spiesser.
The German Spiesser, as Glaser depicts him, is a product of the
nineteenth century whose roots lie deep in German social history. The
'everyman' of the swiftly expanding middle class, his domicile is not to
be sought in one particular income group. His kind of middle-class
mentality extended from the ranks of workers climbing the social
ladder to the footsteps of the throne. Conceiving of himself as the
representative of his nation's culture, he was not aware of the fact that
his understanding of cultur_ewas a perversion, his representation of it
an empty and distorted shell. Caught in the midst of rapid change, the
average middle-class man found his own limited cultural resources taxed
by the increasing demands of his environment. Lacking the leisure,
education and often the perception to make the cultural heritage
of mankind part of his own life, he substituted nationalist catch-phrases
made readily available by the advocates of 'national culture', the
modern apostles of mediocrity.
Rather than raising the eye of the uninitiated to the humanity of the
representatives of classical German culture, these apostles of mediocrity
cheapened the Classicists until they were on a level with the masses.
They helped to throw up cultural fa9ades where genuine culture might
gradually have been fostered. The Spiesser was encouraged to confiscate
Introduction 19

the legacy of Goethe, the cosmopolitan, to serve his nationalistic needs.

The removal in thought from the age of Goethe was matched by the
political transformation of the people into a nation. The ideals of the
past had to be reinterpreted to become the new idols. In the end, it was
because of a profound misunderstanding of the values which alone can
lay claim to German greatness, that the cultural Weimar of Goethe was
divorced from the political Weimar of the 'November criminals' of
1918 and linked with the 'noble heritage' of Potsdam. In other words,
the Weimar Republic, the sole political creation of modern German
history truly consonant with the tenor of the Western world, conceived
and called.into existence in immediate reference to the classical and
humanistic Weimar of old, was relegated to the garbage heap of liberal
illusions and replaced by the 'positive' memory of the Prussian kings.
Defenceless, 'classical' Weimar - now even more deprived of its inner
content - continued in the Spiesser's possessive embrace. When the
drama of national power and glory were defeated on the battlefield, he
needed the consoling image of his nation's splendid past even more.
Eventually a synthesis with a new tomorrow would be forged. Hitler's
'thousand-year Reich' was to be the fulfilment of collective memories
and aspirations for the Spiesser. At each stage of this journey he was
sincere in his commitment to a better and greater Germany as he
understood it.
·Here rests one of the principal problems in an evaluation of the
Spiesserand his kind. The very genuineness of his commitment, his
unswerving adherence to 'values', the touch of righteousness in all his
doings make it difficult to ascribe villainy to him. The demands for
the portrayal of 'healthy' motifs of art, for 'clean lines' and 'clarity' in
art and literature find echoes everywhere. Glaser's association of the
idyllic with the murderous in SS figures such as Rudolf Hoss, the
Commandant of Auschwitz, and Eichmann only spells out the most
abhorrent of these uncomfortable truths. It is the Spiesser's touching
ignorance as much as his demonstrative sense of order that makes him
invulnerable to the charge of villainy. How could the nation's most
loyal servants be called the destroyers of its culture? How can one
whom Schiller's 'sacred words' caused breathless shudders be accused
of their perversion? Schiller's language lends itself so well to the
expression of the most sublime dreams; but is not this very quality also
often abused, to cheat by fancy's flights the sober troops of reason?
Glaser's striking array of quotations serves better than any summary
definition as a display of the Spiesser'sidiom.
The stern and persistent indictment contained within Glaser's
20 Introduction

treatise tends to present the process of cultural decay as a series of acts,

but the actors were victims rather than executors of destiny. As the
'people's attorney' of a generation of betrayed heirs he is compelled to
identify the sources of the Germany tragedy. A thorough reading of his
book, however, shows that he is well aware of the ground-swells of
history that impelled the actors, and the effect of their actions in the
world at large. If the author remained true to his task as prosecutor of
the German case to the end, he did not thereby discharge his readers
from the duty of seeing the broader perspective. The German Spiesser's
romanticism, his prettying of life's dimensions, his escape into myth
and his envious degrading of intelligence have almost international
application. 'Decadent', 'professor', 'liberal democrat', 'socialist criminal'
and 'shopkeeper mentality' easily form chains of words that roll in
ready reproof from many tongues. The bigot's pride of race and nation,
the firm commitment to the destiny of the fittest, insistence on the
scapegoat's guilt and yearning for the 'great synthesis' are traits of the
upright bourgeois everywhere. His image - mirrored in the German
Spiesser's fate - deserves a closer look. To begin with, however, the
accuracy of Glaser's indictment should be measured against the critical
reaction of his countrymen.
The critical reaction to Glaser's book has been intense from the
beginning and the discussion is not over yet. The many positive voices
stress first of all its value as a stimulant to self-critique and discussion.
To Wolfgang Bartsch in the Frankfurter Rundschau (13 June 1964) it
was proof that Hitler was no accident. It is a book that 'does not only
belong in teachers' libraries'. To write it, Bartsch continues, Glaser
must have read enormous amounts of material, but he must also possess
a strong stomach to resist the sickening effects of wading for years
through the ghastly muck of German 'literary' efforts. Depressing as it
is, the book must be read, said Ernst Johann in the Frankfurter Zeitung
(30 June 1964) 'because the Spiesser-Ideologie of the German past
remains the enemy of the German future'. The reviewer made the
important distinction - not acknowledged by many critics - that
Glaser writes as a critic of culture, not as a historian. Disregarding
chronology, Glaser links those strands of German culture which in his
view formed the destructive pattern. Further, by the use of judicious
contrast and comparison, he shows clearly - if in briefer passages -
those elements of genuine greatness in German culture which were not
part of the Spiesser's world.
With all its flaws, Harry Pross concludes in ah article in the
Suddeutsche Zeitung (27 /28 June 1964), that Glaser's book is a must
 Introduction 21

because of the material it contains. 'Not for a moment does the reader
lose the conviction that this is the work of a man who really wants to
know, who has the courage to see the uncomfortable perspective. Such
virtue is rare.'
One of the principal contentions of Glaser's critics is that he has
failed to present the developmental aspects of the issues he raises. Glaser's
purposeful and yet seemingly arbitrary crossing of chronological
barriers to show that there was no significant development of German
culture and psyche during the past 150 years irritates them. Glaser's
'phenomenological' approach does not fit into the historian's
framework of reference. With refreshing disrespect for the traditional
frontiers of Academe his work is a tour de force in interdisciplinary
research.
Glaser's main thesis, that National Socialism in Germany was not an
accident of history, but 'the terminus of a broad and invitingly laid-out
path' ('Preface', p.14) and that 'the history of "official" German culture
during the last 150 years was not marked by development, but
resembled a monotonous rotation around unchanging ideological
distortions and perversions of reality' ('Preface', p.13), are borne out
throughout the ·book. Glaser's insistence that his book is not intended
to be an intellectual history or an exercise in metaphysics, but a
'phenomenology' - that is, the listing of symptoms without observance
of chronology - should have disarmed his critics; but some of them
insist on castigating as serious oversight what is serious method to him.
A recurrent charge of Glaser's.critics deals with the 'arrangement of
his evidence'. One of th~m saw it as no more than a staged 'carnival
display of terror in perverted thought'. 2 To be sure, the evidence is
arranged, but it is arranged as a multitude of examples drawn from
. related occurrences which - space permitting - could be documented
ad infinitum. The juxtaposition of related phenomena - even if they
were separated in time by years or centuries - carried out within the
context of clearly defined methodological and substantive limits of
comparative analysis need not - as some of the reviewers thought -
lead to a static, unhistorical result, but adds dimensions to historical
understanding unattainable in the confines of traditional Historismus.
A serious and substantial shortcoming of Glaser's book compared
with traditional scholarly monographs is in the absence of exhaustive
and fully documented background studies of the principal figures and
issues discussed. Such research, it is felt, would have revealed the
complex motivation behind the work of authors vacillating between
the rational and irrational. More extensive probing into the motives of
22 Introduction

the individuals dis.cussed by Glaser would indeed make fascinating

intellectual fare: Glaser himself would welcome it heartily. But the
point of the matter is that the scope of the book was limited to the
raising of issues and tentative hypotheses. That it has done. However,
this limitation of scope should not be construed as a conspiracy to
deceive the reader. Rather, the whole book is an invitation to others
to continue the investigation. Glaser challenged his countrymen to
help him remove the rubble of the past. His exemplary work in doing
just that has earned him the opprobrium of one 'who fouls his nest'
(Nestbeschmutzer ).
An evaluation of the thought of those who are frustrated by the
attempts of Glaser and others to 'overcome' the past can easily lead
to unnecessary insinuations. Glaser's tone and method do not spare
the already strained sensitivities of German nationalists. Agonized by
the tragic ideological and physical division of their land and nervously
over-reacting to the ever-present charge of association with the
Hitlerian past, they lash out wildly at those who find fault with
pre-Hitlerian Germany. It seems unbearable to them that not only the
aberrations of the twentieth century, but aberrations throughout the
long trail of German history have contained elements that funnelled
national energies in the direction of self-destruction. Surprisingly, they
overlook the clear insistence of the Vergangenheitsbewaltiger 3 that
this development was by no means inevitable, that it was its very
'evitability' which forms the substance of the tragedy. The maligned
conservative insists that his opponent is fundamentally alien to the
'national tradition', that his 'negativism' makes him constitutionally
incapable of recognizing the 'organic' and 'positive' values of society
and forces him to 'foul his nest' by attributing to 'his own kind'
hereditary and inescapable character flaws.
The intellectual acuteness of some liberal critics and their somewhat
cynical 'stripping' of national myths probably arouses anti-
intellectualism in most societies. More about this will have to be said
later. In the German context and, specifically with reference to the
issues raised in this book and other works by Glaser, these
irreconcilable animosities, fomented by both sides, should not be
overlooked. On the political left they deteriorate into hysterical
polemics and violence of the mosfextreme order - unfortunately
causing a backlash where society can least afford it. On the right they
find full-throated expression in the paladins of the eternal yesterday.
Glaser emphasizes that right~wing irrationalism and its consequences
were dictated by the course of German history. However, there can be
Introduction 23

no mistaking that his message applies to irrationalism wherever it raises

its head. That the autnor has found the mark is borne out by the
reaction of his critics.
The application of Glaser's analysis to other societies is made
difficult because of the specifically German milieu from which all his
evidence is drawn. Careful comparative analysis of phenomena relating
to the complex of questions raised by Glaser is, however, possible. The
United States of America is only one - but a surprisingly revealing -
example of the many societies with which this comparative analysis can
be undertaken. Fate has been kind to America in sparing it the kind of
predicaments that twisted the course of German history; Clio has been
kind to Americans by helping to foster the illusion that their country is
'God's country'. They have difficulty in realizing that they are not
immune to the diseases of others. The comparability of German and
American phenomena within Glaser's terms of reference is perhaps best
brought out if they are analysed in line with the contextual sequence of
this book. 'True culture can never be a disaster', Glaser observed as he
set out to define the purpose of his work ('Preface', p.9). His attack,
then, is directed against the misinterpretations and perversions of
German culture during the past century and a half. 'Culture as fai;ade',
consists of a nostalgic appeal to a yesterday that never was. The
Spiesser equipped the great men in German culture with characteristics
fitting his own mediocrity, but he instinctively avoided the painful
necessity of coming to grips with the contradictions and conflicts that
are the attributes of greatness.
To the 'silent American' there is a majestic consistency in the
character and works of his founding fathers. Blasphemous indeed is the
man who dares to question their motives. When the 'national monument'
of the Constitution was attacked by Charles Beard and others as the
product of partisan interest, it seemed an incredible charge to make; to
the majority it never made sense. Historians have not ceased to debate
the issue. Much has been done in the interests of clarification and
partisan simplicity on this level is no longer possible. But the myth of
the Constitution and its pristine qualities continues to exist
undiminished in the hearts of Americans; the widespread conviction of
America's uniqueness depends a good deal on it.
Just as the Germans derive their boundless confidence in the
uniqueness of their Kultur from the German Klassik and its masters,
Americans see the roots of their heritage in a chronologically parallel
classical period of great achievements.
In a land overwhelmingly protestant in its formative years, with
24 Introduction

widespread Messianic overtones in religious life, the cultural fa¢ade of

America's mainstream was bound to have a strong veneer of righteous
religiosity. Divorced from the 'decadence' of the Old World, the New
erected a cultural fa~ade that claimed a purity all its own. The real
achievements that formed the pillars of this creed, the steady advance
of democratic processes and social equality, served to deepen the
conviction that it was unique. As the Germans burrowed deeper into
cultural chauvinism, proudly pronouncing how different they were
from the merely civilized traditions of the West, the Americans, so
deeply in the 'cultural tow' of Western Europe, began to embrace their
own distinctiveness with passion. Critics of this cultural fetishism
remained prophets in the wilderness there as well as here in Europe.
Henry Adams, 'an emigre de l'interieur', 'a born critic rather than a
born leader', was just such a prophet in the wilderness in the estimation
of D.W. Brogan. 4 When the catharsis of the Civil War - the great
attempt at purification and national synthesis - was followed by the
vulgarity of the Gilded Age, his idealism turned into 'cultural despair'.
Adams, who had 'hitched his wagon', in Emerson's words, 'to the star
of reform'

... fresh from the cynicism of European diplomacy, had expected

to enter an honorable career in the press as the champion and
confidant of a new Washington, and already he foresaw a life of
wasted energy, sweeping the stables of American society clean of
the endless corruption which his second Washington was quite
certain to breed.

'The country might outlive' what he then called 'one dirty cesspool of
vulgar corruption ... but not he'. 5
'Society laughed a vacant and meaningless derision over its own
failure', and shrouded itself in the myth of success. 6 If even at Harvard
the craving for conformity was already so strong that 'no irregularity
shocked the intellectual atmosphere so much as contradiction or
competition between teachers', how hopeless must the rest of American
society have looked to Adams. 7

The American character showed singular limitations which sometimes

drove the student of civilized man to despair. Crushed by his own
ignorance - lost in the darkness of his own gropings - the scholar
finds himself jostled of a sudden by a crowd of men who seem to
him ignorant that there is a thing called ignorance; who have
Introduction 25

forgotten to amuse themselves; who cannot even understand that

they are bored. 8

Doomed to go on amidst the 'mental inertia of sixty or eighty million

people' ,9 he would have liked to escape to the east, 'if it were only to
sleep forever in the tradewinds under the southern stars', 10 for he was
tired of a world he no longer understood. 'Since 1871 nothing had
ruffled the surface of the American world', all was 'busyness' and
contentment, but this unruffled fac;ade troubled the American
visionary. 11
Richard Hofstadter's association of Adams's ' .. .indictment of
post-Civil War America as a coarse, materialistic society' with the
alienation of the post-First World War intellectuals highlights the
universality of the estrangement between the thinking critics and their
society. 12
Based on firmer foundations and feeding on deeper springs of
reason than the precarious 'borrowed' Enlightenment (Aufklarung) in
Germany, the American critique of thoughtless conformity stimulated
a correspondingly massive anti-intellectual response, which drew on
powerful traditions of its own. It is in this response to criticism rather
than in the idylls sketched in the first part of Glaser's work that the
American equivalent of the Spiesser mentality reveals itself. Whereas
the intellect in Germany - as in Europe generally - enjoyed abstract
respect except where its 'negative', i.e. 'decadent-critical', aspects were
concerned, in America it was subject to a much more sweeping
rejection. 13 This rejection - though modified by the sobering demands
of modern technology - extends into our day; from President Nixon's
disgust with the 'self-appointed intellectual elite' 14 to the numb
resentment of the man in the street. Broadly based and uniquely
American though it is, this anti-inteUectualism clearly corresponds to
some of Glaser's categories summarized under the heading 'Mythos and
Logos', The myth as a weapon against the discomfort of reason has
universal application. Glaser makes a strong case for its fatal power in
German history. But its webs were also finely spun in America's past.
Glaser's references to German indictments of intellect as 'the adversary
of the soul', of rationalism as the product of 'nervous perspiration', and
of - generally Jewish - 'disgusting intellectuals with long hair, horn-
rimmed glasses and a 5 o'clock shadow' strikes familiar cords in those
conversant with the vocabulary of American anti-intellectualism. The
'effete snobs' of the present - though racially castigated only in the
most extreme cases - are the objects of the same frustrated and
26 Introduction

deriding contempt that beset their counterparts (and not infrequently

their fathers) in Germany.
One does not have to go far in America to encounter the word
'decadence' as the ultimate in the derogatory exchanges of contending
sides. Glaser shows the cost of this arrogance in the alienation of
German society from Western values. His allusion to the quarrel
between Thomas and Heinrich Mann as an elevated example of the
problem is heavy ammunition indeed. But his catalogue of the blows
inflicted by the 'judges of decadence' on the memory of Heine's free
spirit cuts to the core. Those who refuse to conform are decadent.
Those who are critical of and wish to segregate themselves from society
must be decadent. The American 'Yippie' was not allowed to withdraw
from the tyranny of the majority; and de Tocqueville had already given
warning about this overbearing majority in the nineteenth century . 15
The Yippie was, of course, only an extreme example whose fate is not
likely to evoke much sympathy even among the most liberal of the
conglomerate majority. For the point of the matter is just that: the
charge of decadence comes from society at large, not just from the
political right.
'Compromise with power' is the key phrase in Glaser's critique of
the conduct of German professors after the failure of the revolution of
1848. The corrupting influence of the consciousness of increasing
national power of the German professoriate, from the initial
endorsement of Bismarck's methods over the wholehearted approval of
their results to the subsequent rationalization of and eventual surrender
to the excesses of the twentieth century, is well documented. In view
of the present alienation of the academic community from the sources
of political power in America, it may seem fatuous to draw an analogy
to the liaison German Academe entertained with power. However, the
progressive interweaving of public funds and university research and
the trend to increased governmental supervision and financing of
education in general have created submerged dependencies in relation
to which the surface alienation is only the tip of the iceberg. Here it
should not be forgotten that the substance of power in American higher
education still rests with the boards of trustees, and their relationship
to established authority does not need to be belaboured. Though the
Ameri(:an academic community on the whole has been infinitely more
critical of society than its German counterpart, its secondary school
substructure has been, and to a large degree still is, subservient to the
mandates of national power. If that national power has so far largely
been used to ends that compare favourably to its abuse in Germany,
Another random document with
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sequins. He found time while there for the preparation of translations
of the Rhetoric of Aristotle, and of a number of other Greek works.
Filelfo’s arrogance and bad temper, and his fondness for invective
and satire, soon brought him into trouble with the literary circle of
Florence, and finally with the Medici, and he was compelled to
withdraw to Siena, where he remained four years with a stipend of
350 florins. From there, after a brief visit to Bologna, he removed to
Milan, where his emoluments were much larger than any heretofore
received, and where, in the absence of any other scholars of equal
attainments or assumptions, he had the satisfaction of being the
accepted literary leader of the capital. In addition to his professional
salary, he received large sums and presents for addresses, orations,
and commemorative poems, which he was always ready to prepare.
Such a combination of rhetoric and literature was peculiarly
characteristic of the Italy of the time, and may be said to constitute a
distinct phase in the history of compensation for intellectual
productions. Filelfo published, in two ponderous volumes, his
Satires, Odes, and other fugitive pieces, under the title of Convivia
Mediolanensia.
Notwithstanding the considerable sums which Filelfo earned
through his lectures and through his various rhetorical productions,
he seems always to have been in need of money. His tastes were
expensive, while his three wives had borne him no less than twenty-
four children. In his later years he gained the reputation of being very
greedy of gold and of making impudent demands which bore very
much the character of blackmail. Gregorio Lollio, writing (in 1452) to
the Cardinal of Pavia, describes Filelfo in the following words: “He is
calumnious, envious, vain, and so greedy of gold that he metes out
praise or blame according to the gifts he gets, both despicable as
proceeding from a tainted source.”[419]
From Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, he received a liberal
stipend. Pope Nicholas V., after reading some of his Satires (which
Symonds characterises as “infamous”) presented him with 500
ducats. Travelling from Rome to Naples, Filelfo received more
presents from Alfonso, who dubbed him a knight. Continuing his
journey, he secured honours and rewards in Ferrara from Duke
Borso, in Mantua from Marchese Gonzaga, and in Rimini from
Gismondo Malatesta. After the death of Sforza, he accepted, in
1475, from Pope Sixtus IV., a professional Chair in Rome, with a
salary of 600 florins. He soon, however, quarrelled with the Pope,
and withdrew to Florence, where Lorenzo de’ Medici provided a post
for him as Professor of Greek Literature.
Filelfo died in Florence in his eighty-third year. He had probably
received larger emoluments for his work as an instructor, as a
rhetorician, and as a man of letters, than any man of his generation,
but he died without any means, and was buried by the charity of the
Florentines. His career, in its activities, vicissitudes, controversies,
successes, and bitternesses, was very typical of the lives of the
Italian scholars of the period.
At the time of Filelfo’s death, while in many other cities the
influence of the Renaissance was bringing together collections of
books and circles of scholars, and literary productiveness was
increasing throughout Italy, Florence still remained the capital of
learning and of refined culture. Lorenzo de’ Medici had, in 1469,
succeeded to Pietro, and of all the Medici it was Lorenzo whose
influence was the most important in furthering the intellectual and
artistic movements of the time. Symonds speaks of him as “a man of
marvellous variety and range of mental power, in whom ... the
versatility of the Renaissance found its fullest incarnation.”
Lorenzo attracted to his villa the greatest scholars and most
brilliant men of the time, a circle which included Poliziano, Landino,
Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Alberti, Pulci, and Michael Angelo. The
interests of this circle, as of all similar Italian circles of the time, were
largely absorbed in the philosophy and literature of Greece, and
special attention was devoted to the teachings of Plato. Plato’s
writings were translated into Latin by Ficino, and the translation was
printed in 1482, at the cost of Filippo Valvio. Ficino was too poor
himself to undertake the publication of his works, and this was the
case with not a few of the distinguished authors of the age. The
presentation of books to the public required at this time what might
be called the endowment of literature, an endowment which was
supplied by the liberality of wealthy patrons possessed of literary
appreciation or public-spirited ambition, or of both. As Symonds
expresses it, “Great literary undertakings involved in that century the
substantial assistance of wealthy men, whose liberality was
rewarded by a notice in the colophon or in the title-page.” The formal
dedication was an invention of a somewhat later date.
The Ficino edition of Plotinus, printed at the expense of Lorenzo
de’ Medici, and published a few weeks after his death, bears the
inscription, Magnifici sumptu Laurentii patriæ servatoris. The edition
of Homer of Lorenzo Alopa, issued in 1488, was printed at the
expense of either Bernardo Nerli or Giovanni Acciajuoli. These
examples of printed publications belong, however, to a later chapter.
Ficino followed up his translation of Plato’s work with a Life of Plato,
and an essay on the Platonic Doctrine of Immortality.
In 1484, appeared in the Florentine circle the beautiful and brilliant
Pico della Mirandola, a man who through his exceptional gifts, his
varied learning, and the charm of his personality, exercised a very
wide influence over his generation, and who may possibly be
accepted as at once the type and the flower of the Renaissance.
Pico studied at Bologna, and later at Paris. He printed, in 1489, in
defence of his philosophical theories, certain theses which were
condemned as heretical by Innocent VIII. In 1493, the ban of
heterodoxy was renewed by a brief of Alexander VI. Pico’s enquiring
mind and scholarly ardour covered a wide range of research,
including the philosophy of the Platonists, the mysteries of the
Cabbala, and the system and theories of Aquinas, Scotus, Albertus
Magnus, and Averrhoes, and he proposed to devote his learning and
his life to the task of reconciling classical traditions with the Christian
creeds. Didot quotes the following characteristic sentence from a
letter written by Pico, February 11, 1491, to Aldus Manutius:
“Philosophia veritatem quærit, theologia invenit, religio possidet.”
(Philosophy seeks truth, theology discovers it, religion possesses it.)
Pico died at the age of thirty-one, before the book had been
written in which he proposed to demonstrate these positions. He was
able, however, to render a great service to Italy and to Europe in
securing for his friend Aldus the aid required for the establishment of
the Aldine Press in Venice. The details of the relations of the two
men are given in the chapter on Aldus.
Other noteworthy members of the literary circle which surrounded
Lorenzo de’ Medici, were Christoforo Landino, Leo Battista Alberti,
and Angelo Poliziano. Landino edited Horace and Virgil and
translated Pliny’s Natural History, and in 1481 published an edition of
Dante, and Battista Alberti, (whose comedy of Philodoxius, which
passed for an antique, was published by the Aldi, in 1588, as the
work of Lepidus Comicus), wrote three treatises on painting, and
several volumes on architecture. Alberti was more distinguished as
an artist, architect, and musician, than as an author. It was
characteristic, however, of the men of this group to be universal in
their genius.
Symonds speaks of Poliziano as emphatically the representative
of the highest achievements of the age in scholarship, and as the
first Italian to combine perfect mastery over Latin and a correct
sense of Greek, with splendid genius for his native literature. His
published works included annotated editions of Ovid, Suetonius,
Statius, Pliny, and Quintilian, translations of Epictetus, Galen, and
Hippocrates, a series of Miscellanea, and most important of all, the
edition, printed from the famous Amalfi manuscript, of the Pandects
of Justinian.
Among the smaller cities in which the Humanistic movement
influenced literature and furthered the development of learning, may
be mentioned Carpi, afterwards the home of Musurus and Aldus;
Mirandola, the birthplace of the brilliant Pico; Pesaro, where
Alessandro and Constanzo Sforza brought together a library rivalling
that of the Medici; Rimini, where Sigismondo Malatesta gathered
about his fortress a circle of scholars; and Urbino, where the good
Duke Frederick brought together one of the finest collections of
manuscripts which Europe had known, a collection valued at over
30,000 ducats. Vespasiano, who served for some time as librarian,
says that for fourteen years the Duke kept from thirty to forty copyists
employed in transcribing Greek and Latin Manuscripts. The work of
these copyists went on for some years after the introduction of
printing into Italy, for Frederick, in common with not a few other of
the scholarly nobles who were collectors of manuscripts, distrusted
and looked down upon the new art, and had no interest in books
which were merely mechanical reproductions.
Vespasiano da Bisticci, whose aid Frederick had secured in the
preparation of his library, was noted as an author, as a scribe, and as
a bookseller. Symonds speaks of the “rare merit” of the biographical
work in Vespasiano’s Lives of Illustrious Men, the memoirs of which
Symonds utilised largely in the preparation of his Renaissance.
Vespasiano’s literary work must have been done “in the intervals of
business,” for his business undertakings were important. He was the
largest dealer in manuscripts of his time. His purchasing agents and
correspondents were armed with instructions to secure authenticated
codices wherever these were obtainable, and the monasteries not
only of Italy but of Switzerland, South Germany, Hungary,
Transylvania, and the East were carefully searched for possible
literary treasures. He employed a large force of skilled copyists in the
production of copies of famous works, which copies were distributed
through correspondents and customers in the different scholarly
centres of Europe. Possessing himself a wide and exact scholarship,
he gave his personal attention to the selection of his texts, the
training of his copyists and the supervision of their work, so that a
manuscript coming from Vespasiano carried with it the prestige of
accuracy and completeness.
Vespasiano’s scholarly knowledge and his special experience in
palæography were utilised by such clients as Nicholas V., Cosimo
de’ Medici, Frederick of Urbino, and other lovers of literature, in the
formation of and development of their libraries. Vespasiano united,
therefore, the functions of a scholarly editor and commentator, a
collector, a book-manufacturer, a publisher and a bookseller, a series
of responsibilities which called for a wide range of learning,
accomplishments, and executive ability. It is evident from his career
and from the testimony of his friends and clients (terms in this case
practically identical) that he was devoted to literature for its own
sake. He accepted the rewards secured by his skill and enterprise,
and promptly expended these in fresh efforts for the development
and extension of liberal scholarship. Vespasiano may be called the
last, as he was probably the greatest of the book-dealers of the
manuscript period. Born in 1421 and living until 1498, he witnessed
the introduction of printing into Italy, and may easily have had
opportunities of handling the earlier productions of the Venetian
printing-press. Vespasiano was a fitting successor of Atticus and a
worthy precursor of Aldus, whose work in the distribution of scholarly
literature was, in fact, a direct continuation of his own.
As before mentioned, the trade in the production of manuscript
copies went on for a number of years after the introduction of
printing. The noblemen and wealthy scholars who had inherited, or
who had themselves brought together, collections of famous works in
manuscript, were for some time, not unnaturally, unwilling to believe
that ordinary people could, by means of the new invention, with a
comparatively trifling expenditure secure perfect and beautiful copies
of the same works. Before the death of Vespasiano, in 1498,
however, the work of the printing-press had come to be understood
and cordially appreciated by book-buyers and students of all classes,
and the trade of the copyists and of the manuscript-dealers had,
excepting for newly discovered texts, practically come to an end. The
career of Vespasiano belongs strictly to the chapter on the
publishers of manuscripts, of whom he was the most important. The
man himself, however, through his character and services, belongs
essentially to the movement of the Renaissance, of which movement
he was at once a product and a leader.
During the reigns of Pope Innocent VIII., 1484-1492, and of
Alexander VI. (Borgia), 1492-1503, little or nothing was done in
Rome to further the development of literature. To the latter was in
fact due the initiating of the system of the subjection of the press to
ecclesiastical censorship, a system which for centuries to come was
to exercise the most baneful influence over literature and intellectual
activities and to interfere enormously with the establishment of any
assured foundation for property in literature. Some account of the
long contests carried on by the publishers of Venice against this
claim for ecclesiastical control of the productions of their presses, is
given in a later chapter.
 Venice stood almost alone among the cities of Italy in resisting the
censorship of the Church, and even in Venice, the Church in the end
succeeded in the more important of its contentions. In Spain, the
ecclesiastical control was hardly questioned. In France, it was, after
a century of contest, practically merged in the censorship exercised
by the Crown, a control which was in itself fully as much as the
publishing trade could bear and continue to exist. In Austria and
South Germany, after the crushing out of the various reformation
movements, the Church and State worked in practical accord in
keeping a close supervision of the printing-presses. In North
Germany, on the other hand, ecclesiastical censorship never
became important. The evils produced by it were, however, serious
and long enduring throughout a large portion of the territory of
Europe, and the papal Borgia, though by no means a considerable
personage, is responsible for bringing into existence an evil which
assumed enormous proportions in the intellectual history of Europe.
Towards the close of the fifteenth century begins in Italy the age of
academies, associations of scholars and littérateurs for the furthering
of scholarly pursuits and of literary undertakings. One of the earlier
of these Academies was instituted in Rome, in 1468, by Julius
Pomponius Lætus (a pupil of Valla), for the special purpose of
promoting the study of Latin literature and Latin antiquities.
Comedies of Plautus and of other Latin dramatists were revived, and
the attempt was made to make Latin, at least for the scholarly circle,
again a living language. The Academy was suspected by Pope Paul
II. to have some political purpose, and it was for a time suppressed,
but resumed its activities some years later under the papacy of
Alexander VI.
The Academy of Naples was instituted in 1470, under the
leadership of Beccadelli and Juvianus Pontanus, and with a
membership comprising a number of the brilliant scholars whom
Alphonso the Magnanimous had attracted to his Court. This society
also devoted itself particularly to the revival of an interest in Latin
literature, and not a few of the members became better known under
the Latinised names there adopted by them than by their Italian
cognomens. Pomponius had written little and hoped to be
remembered through his pupils. Pontanus on the other hand, wrote
on many subjects, using for the purpose Latin, of which he was a
master. Symonds says that he chiefly deserves to be remembered
for his ethical treatises, but he seems himself to have attached
special importance to his amatory elegiacs and to a series of
astronomical hexameters entitled Urania.
In Florence, the Platonic Academy continued to flourish under the
auspices of the Rucellai family. It was suppressed in 1522, at the
time of the conspiracy against Giulio de’ Medici, but again revived in
1540. In 1572, was organised in Florence the famous academy
called Della Crusca, which secured for itself a European reputation.
In Bologna, in 1504, the society of the Viridario was instituted, with
the purpose of studying printed texts and of furthering the art of
printing. Bologna had a considerable number of other literary
societies, for the study of jurisprudence, chivalry, and other subjects.
Throughout Italy at this period academies multiplied, but the greater
number exercised no continued influence.
It is probable, however, that they all proved of service in preparing
the way for the printed literature which the Italian presses were, after
1490, beginning to distribute, and that in widening the range of
popular interest in scholarship and in books generally, they did not a
little to render possible the work of Aldus and other early Italian
publishers. The academy founded by Aldus in Venice, for the
prosecution of Greek studies, will be referred to in the chapter on
Aldus.
“The fifteenth century rediscovered antiquity; the sixteenth was
absorbed in slowly deciphering it. In the fifteenth century ‘educated
Europe’ is but a synonym for Italy. What literature there was north of
the Alps was in great part derived from, or was largely dependent
upon, the Italian movement. The fact that the movement originated in
the Latin peninsula, was decisive of the character of the first age of
classical learning (1400-1550). It was a revival of Latin as opposed
to Greek literature. It is now well understood that the fall of
Constantinople, though an influential incident of the movement,
ranks for little among the causes of the Renaissance. What was
revived in Italy in the fifteenth century was the interest of the Schools
of the early Empire—of the second and third century.... But in one
decisive feature, the literary sentiment of the fifteenth century was a
reproduction of that of the Empire. It was rhetorical, not scientific.
Latin literature as a whole is rhetorical.... The divorce of the literature
of knowledge and the literature of form which characterised the
epoch of decay under the early empire, characterised equally the
epoch of revival in the Italy of the Popes.... The knowledge and
wisdom buried in the Greek writers presented a striking contrast to
the barren sophistic which formed the curriculum of the Latin
schools. It became the task of the scholars of the second period of
the classical revival to disinter this knowledge.... Philology had
meant composition and verbal emendation; it now meant the
apprehension of the ideas and usages of the ancient world. Scholars
had exerted themselves to write, they now bent all their effort to
know.... There came now into existence what has ever since been
known as ‘learning,’ in the special sense of the term. The first period
of humanism in which the words of the ancient authors had been
studied, was thus the preparatory school for the humanism of the
second period, in which the matter was the object of attention.
As Italy had been the home of classical taste in the first period,
France became the home of classical learning in the second. Single
names can be mentioned, such as Victorius or Sigonius in Italy,
Mursius or Vulcanius in the Low Countries, who were distinguished
representatives of ‘learning,’ but in Bulæus, Turnebus, Lambrinus,
Scaliger, Casaubon, and Saumaise, France produced a constellation
of humanists whose fame justly eclipsed that of all their
contemporaries.
If we ask why Italy did not continue to be the centre of the
humanist movement, which she had so brilliantly inaugurated, the
answer is that the intelligence was crushed by the reviviscence of
ecclesiastical ideas. Learning is the result of research, and research
must be free and cannot coexist with the claim of the Catholic clergy
to be superior to enquiry. The French school, it will be observed, is
wholly in fact or in intention Protestant. As soon as it was decided
(as it was before 1600) that France was to be a Catholic country, and
the University of Paris a Catholic university, learning was
extinguished in France. France saw without regret and without
repentance the expatriation of her unrivalled scholars. With Scaliger
and Saumaise, the seat of learning was transferred from France to
Holland. The third period of classical learning thus coincides with the
Dutch school. From 1593, the date of Scaliger’s removal to Leyden,
the supremacy in the republic of learning was possessed by the
Dutch. In the course of the eighteenth century, the Dutch school was
gradually supplanted by the North German, which from that time
forward has taken, and still possesses, the lead in philological
science.”[420]
 CHAPTER II.
THE INVENTION OF PRINTING AND THE WORK OF THE
FIRST PRINTERS OF HOLLAND AND GERMANY.
1440-1528.
“
FOUR men, Gutenberg, Columbus, Luther, and Copernicus,
stand at the dividing line of the Middle Ages, and serve as boundary
stones marking the entrance of mankind into a higher and finer
epoch of its development.”[421]
It would be difficult to say which one of the four has made the
largest contribution to this development or has done the most to lift
up the spirit of mankind and to open for men the doors to the new
realms that were in readiness. The Genoese seaman and discoverer
opens new realms to our knowledge and imagination, leads Europe
from the narrow restrictions of the Middle Ages out into the vast
space of Western oceans, and in adding to the material realms
controlled by civilisation, widens still more largely the range of its
thought and fancy. The Reformer of Wittenberg, in breaking the
bonds which had chained the spirits of his fellow-men and in
securing for them again their rights as individual Christians,
conquers for them a spiritual realm and brings them into renewed
relations with their Creator. The great astronomer shatters, through
his discoveries, the fixed and petty conceptions of the universe
which had ruled the minds of mankind, and in bringing to them fresh
light on the nature and extent of created things, widens at the same
time their whole understanding of themselves and of duty. The
citizen of Mayence may claim to have unchained intelligence and
given to it wings. He utilised lead no longer as a death-bringing ball,
but in the form of life-quickening letters which were to bring before
thousands of minds the teachings of the world’s thinkers. Each one
of the four had his part in bringing to the world light, knowledge, and
development.
At the time when the art of printing finally took shape in the mind of
Gutenberg, the direction of literary and intellectual interests of
Germany rested, as we have seen, largely with Italy. The fact,
however, that the new art had its birthplace, not in Florence, which
was at that time the centre of the literary activities of Europe, but in
Mayence, heretofore a town which had hardly been connected at all
with literature, and the further fact that the printing-presses were
carrying on their work in Germany for nearly fifteen years before two
printers, themselves Germans, set up the first press in Italy,
exercised, of necessity, an important influence in inciting literary
activities throughout Germany and in the relations borne by
Germany to the scholarship of the world.
The details of the life and early work of Gutenberg are at best but
fragmentary, and have been a subject of much discussion. It is not
necessary, for the purpose of this treatise, to give detailed
consideration to the long series of controversies as to the respective
claims of Gutenberg of Mayence, of Koster of Haarlem, or of other
competitors, as to the measure of credit to be assigned to each in
the original discovery or of the practical development of the the
printing-press. It seems in any case evident that whatever minds
elsewhere were at that time puzzling over the same problem, it was
the good fortune of Gutenberg to make the first practical application
of the printing-press to the production of impressions from movable
type, while it was certainly from Mayence that the art spread
throughout the cities, first of Germany, and later of Italy and France.
It is to be borne in mind (and I speak here for the non-technical
reader) that, as indicated in the above reference, the distinction and
important part of the invention of Gutenberg was, not the production
of a press for the multiplication of impressions, but the use of
movable type and the preparation of the form from which the
impressions were struck off. The art of printing from blocks, since
classified as xylographic printing, had been practised in certain
quarters of Europe for fifty years or more before the time of
Gutenberg, and if Europe had had communication with China,
xylography might have been introduced four or five centuries earlier.
With the block-books, the essential thing was the illustrations, and
what text or letterpress accompanied these was usually limited to a
few explanatory or descriptive words engraved on the block, above,
beneath or around the picture. Occasionally, however, as in the Ars
Moriendi, there were entire pages of text engraved, like the designs,
on the solid block. The earlier engraving was done on hard wood,
but, later, copper was also employed. It is probable that the block-
books originated in the Netherlands, and it is certain that in such
towns as Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, the art was developed
more rapidly than elsewhere, so that during the first half of the
fifteenth century, the production of wood engravings and of books
made up of engravings (printed only on one side, and accompanied
by a few words of text), began to form an important article of trade.
The subjects of these designs were for the most part Biblical, or at
least religious. One of the earlier of the block-book publications and
probably the most characteristic specimen of the class, is the volume
known as the Biblia Pauperum. This was a close imitation of a
manuscript book that had for five or six centuries been popular as a
work of religious instruction. It had been composed about 850, by S.
Ausgarius, a monk of Corbie, who afterwards became Bishop of
Hamburg. The scriptorium established by him at Corbie was said to
have been the means of preserving from destruction a number of
classics, including the Annals of Tacitus.[422] The use, five centuries
later, as one of the first productions of the printing-press, of the
monk’s own composition, may be considered as a fitting
acknowledgement of the service thus rendered by him to the world’s
literature. Examples of manuscript copies of the Biblia Pauperum are
in existence in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, in Munich, in the
British Museum, and elsewhere, and there is no difficulty in
comparing these with the printed copies produced in the
Netherlands, which are also represented in these collections.
It is probable that Laurence Koster of Haarlem, whose name is,
later, associated with printing from movable type, was himself an
engraver of block-books. Humphreys is, in fact, inclined to believe
that the first block-book edition of the Biblia Pauperum was actually
Koster’s work, basing this opinion on the similarity of the
compositions and of their arrangement to those of the Speculum
Humanæ Salvationis, which was the first work printed from movable
type, and the production of which is now generally credited to
Koster.[423] The Biblia Pauperum was printed from blocks in
Germany as late as 1475, but before that date an edition had been
printed from movable type by Pfister in Bamberg.
As has been pointed out by many of the writers on the subject, the
so-called invention of printing was not so much the result of an
individual inspiration, as the almost inevitable consequence of a long
series of experiments and of partial processes which had been
conducted in various places where the community was interesting
itself in the multiplication of literature.
If, as is probably the case, the first book printed from movable type
is to be credited to Koster, it remains none the less the case that
Gutenberg’s process must have been worked out for itself, and that
the German possessed, what the Hollander appears to have lacked,
not merely the persistence and the practical understanding required
to produce a single book, but the power to overcome obstacles and
to instruct others, and was thus able to establish the new art on a
lasting foundation.
The claims of the Hollanders under which Koster is to be regarded
as the first printer, or at least (bearing in mind the Chinese
precedents in the tenth century) the first European printer, from
movable type, claims which Humphreys accepts as well founded, are
in substance as follows: Laurence Koster was born, somewhere in
Holland, about 1370, and died in Haarlem about 1440. He is
believed to have made his first experiments with movable wooden
types about 1426, and to have worked with metal types about ten
years later. The principal of the earlier authorities concerning
Koster’s career is a certain Hadrian Junius, who completed, in 1569,
a history of Holland, which was published in 1588. He speaks of
Koster as being a man of an honourable family, in which the office of
Sacristan (custos, Coster or Koster) was hereditary, and he
describes in detail the development of the invention of type, from the
cutting of pieces of beech-bark into the form of letters, to the final
production of the metal fonts. Junius goes on to relate the method
under which Koster’s first book (from type), Speculum Humanæ
Salvationis, was printed, in 1430. This book, the origin of which is not
known, had for many years been popular among the Benedictines,
and few of their monasteries were without a copy. As a result of this
popularity, many examples of the manuscript copies have been
preserved, some of which are in the Arundel collection in the British
Museum. Zani says that the Speculum was compiled for the
assistance of poor preachers, and in support of this view he quotes
certain lines, which may serve also as an example of Latinity and of
the general style:

Predictum prohemium hujus libri de contentis compilavi

Et propter pauperes predicatores hoc opponere curavi.[424]

Koster appears to have produced, about 1428, an edition of a portion

of the Speculum in which the entire pages (presenting on the upper
half two designs, and on the lower two columns of text) are printed
from solid wooden blocks. Humphreys gives examples of these
pages. The cutting of the text, all the letters of which had, of course,
to be cut in reverse, is a wonderful piece of work. About 1430, was
completed the first issue printed from movable types. The
arrangement of the pages is the same, the upper half is occupied
with two designs (printed in brown ink, from wooden blocks), and the
lower half is given to the text, printed in black ink, from the metal
type. The first typographic edition contains a number of xylographic
pages. In the type-pages, the block-illustration was printed first, and
the sheet was then imposed again for the printing of the text. Both
the designs and the text were modelled to follow very closely the
character of the manuscripts of the period. The volume is
undoubtedly the earliest European example of printing from type,
and the evidence that it was the work of Koster, and that it was
produced not later than 1430, or about twenty years earlier than the
Bible of Gutenberg, is, I understand, now accepted by the best
authorities as practically conclusive. Three editions of the book were
printed by Koster before his death in 1440, the third being printed in
Dutch (instead of Latin), and being entirely typographic. This is the
edition seen and described (128 years later) by Junius. After
specifying the method employed by Koster (according to his own
views concerning movable type), Junius goes on to say, “It was by
this method that he produced impressions of engraved plates, to
which he added ‘separate’ letters. I have seen a book of this kind,
the first rude effort of his invention, printed by him on one side only;
this book was entitled the Mirror of Our Salvation.” While this
evidence of Junius comes first into record one hundred and twenty-
eight years after the time assigned to the printing of Koster’s first
book, it is the conclusion of Humphreys, Blades, and other historians
that, in consideration of the circumstances under which Junius wrote,
and the nature of the information which was evidently at that time
available for him, his testimony may safely be accepted as
conclusive. Junius goes on to say that Koster, having perfected his
system, and finding a rapidly increasing demand for his printed
books, was unable to manage the work with the aid of the members
of his own family. He took foreign workmen into his employ, which
eventually led to the abstraction of his secret and caused the credit
of his invention to be given to others.[425] Junius gives further details
concerning the channels through which he secured the record of the
work of Koster. He refers to a certain Nicholas Galius who had been
his first preceptor, and who remembered having heard the facts
connected with Koster’s discovery from a certain Cornelius when the
latter was over eighty years of age. Cornelius testified that he had
himself been a binder in the establishment of Koster, and the Dutch
historian, Meerman, has discovered in the records of the church of
Haarlem a memorandum dated 1474, which is evidence that there
was at that date a binder in the town called Cornelius.[426]
In claiming for Holland the prestige of inventing the several
distinctive processes connected with the printing of books,
Humphreys sums up as follows: It is beyond dispute that the Dutch
were the first to produce block-books, and thus were virtually the first
printers of books. It is also a matter of record that it was the printers
of Holland who first devised the art of stereotyping, a process which
was applied by John Miller of Amsterdam towards the close of the
seventeenth century. There is, therefore, apart from the details
above specified and from the evidence of tradition, a strong natural
presumption in favour of the development in Holland of the
intervening step of substituting movable types for carved pages of
letters. Humphreys points out that there are other references to the
production in the Netherlands of books from movable metal types,
before the date at which Gutenberg’s first volume was completed in
Mayence. In a record of accounts of Jean Robert, Abbé of Cambrai,
the manuscript of which has been preserved in the archives of the
city of Lille, appears the entry: “Item, for a printed (getté en molle)
Doctrinal that I sent for to Bruges by Macquart, who is a writer at
Valenciennes, in the month of January, 1445, for Jacquet, twenty
sous, Tournois. Little Alexander had one the same, that the church
paid for.” It is stated later in the record that one of these books
proved to be so “full of faults” that it had to be replaced by a written
copy.[427] The purport of the term getté en molle (which might
possibly have been written jetté or guetté) was first elucidated by M.
Besuard, who pointed out that it evidently stood for “cast in a mould,”
the reference being to the metallic types, which were so cast. In the
letters of naturalisation accorded, in 1474, to the first printers with
movable types established in Paris, the term used is escritoire en
molle, or writing by means of moulds or moulded letters. Humphreys
is inclined to give credit to the theory, which is presented by many of
the advocates of Koster, that the first suggestion of the new art was
brought to Gutenberg in Strasburg by a workman who had been
employed by Koster in Haarlem, but he admits that this theory is
supported by practically nothing that can be called evidence, and
depends for its authority simply upon the sequence of events, and
upon the surmises and probabilities suggested by Junius. It remains
the case that after the death of Koster, which occurred either in 1440
or in 1439, the production of books from type came to an end in
Holland, and that for instruction in the new art Europe was indebted
not to Haarlem but to Mayence. We may accept as conclusive the
evidence which gives to Koster the credit of producing the first book
printed (outside of China) from movable type, without lessening the
value of the service rendered by Gutenberg. The shores of our
Western Continent were undoubtedly visited by Eric and his
Northmen, but it was Columbus who gave to Europe the New World.
The production of printed books, which changed the whole
condition of literary production and of literary ownership, is to be
traced directly to the operations of Gutenberg and Fust. Kapp
mentions that if it were not for the records of certain court processes
of Strasburg and of Mayence, we should have hardly any trustworthy
references whatsoever to the work or the relations of Gutenberg
prior to 1450.
By means of these court records, however, it has proved possible
to secure some data concerning various undertakings in which
Gutenberg was engaged before he devoted himself to his printing-
office. He belonged to a noble family of Mayence, the family name of
which was originally Gensfleisch, a name Latinised by some writers
of the time as Ansicarus. For more than a century, the Gensfleische
stood at the head of the nobility of the city in the long series of
contests carried on with the guilds and citizens.
Until the sacking of the city, after the outbreak of October, 1462,
Mayence was the most important of the free cities and of the
commercial centres of the middle Rhine district, and was an
important competitor for the general trade of central Europe with
Strasburg on the upper river and with Cologne in the region below.
The citizens felt themselves strong enough, with the beginning of the
fifteenth century, to make a sturdy fight against the old-time control
claimed by the nobility, and as early as 1420, they had overcome the
patricians in a contest which turned upon the reception of the newly
chosen Elector, Conrad III. As one result of this struggle, a number
of the Gensfleische found themselves among the exiles.
Gutenberg’s father, whose name was Frilo, had held the office of
Tax Receiver or General Accountant in the city, and was among
those who were banished in 1420. Gutenberg himself was born
either in 1397 or 1398. He appears to have passed a portion of his
youth at the little village of Eltville, and from there went to Strasburg.
In the year 1433, an entry in the tax record of Mayence speaks of
Henne Gensfleisch, called Gutenberg, who was an uncle of the
printer. About the year 1440, Gutenberg was engaged in Strasburg
in the manufacture of looking-glasses, and is already referred to as a
man of scientific attainments and learned in inventions.
One of the court records above referred to gives the details of a
suit brought by the brothers Dritzehn against Gutenberg, in
connection with this first manufacturing business. Another Dritzehn,
a brother or a cousin of the above, had as early as 1437 applied to
Gutenberg to be instructed (in consideration of the payment of an
honorarium) in a “certain art” (in etlicher kunst). Shortly thereafter
Gutenberg entered into an arrangement with a certain Hans Riffe of
Lichtenau, and instructed him in the trade of manufacturing mirrors,
Riffe making an investment in the business and sharing the profits.
Dritzehn made in all, three contracts with Gutenberg; under the
first, he was instructed in the art of stone-polishing, and took some
interest in this branch of Gutenberg’s business; under the second, he
interested himself in the manufacturing of mirrors; while the third
contract refers to certain arts and undertakings (kunste und afentur)
in which Dritzehn also received instruction, and to the carrying on of
which he also contributed an investment.
It is the opinion of some of the students on the subject that the
researches of Gutenberg, which resulted in 1450 in the production of
a working printing-press, had begun at least ten years back, and
that, in connection with these researches, he had been obliged to
borrow money or to accept investments from Dritzehn and from other
associates. The vague terms used in referring to the undertakings
which were associated with or which followed the mirror
manufacturing business (“a certain art”) indicate that these
associates had been cautioned to give no information as to the
precise nature of the work in which Gutenberg was experimenting.
Humphreys is of opinion that the term “manufacture of looking-
glasses” was used partly as a blind and partly as a joke, and that
Gutenberg was actually engaged in the production (with the aid of
one of Koster’s assistants) of copies of the Speculum (Mirror).
Against this view is the fact that Gutenberg did not print the
Speculum at all. If Gutenberg were already working over the printing-
press invention at the time of his association with Dritzehn and with