Mit Dank an GvC für die vielfältige Anregung...
(Photos from Stambolis and Reulecke 2015: 29, 31)
At an open-air countercultural festival lasting several days, thousands assemble to celebrate nature, youth, and hope for the future, setting out a conscious alternative to the war-mongering nationalism of the establishment and the stifling conformity of the older generation. Long-haired, sandal-clad prophets wander through the crowd; guitars are strummed around camp fires; dancers circle, hands clasped. Even if the participants cannot agree much by way of a political manifesto of their common commitment, they share a common atmosphere, one that many will look back on decades later as decisive for the course of their lives. Older members give heartfelt addresses, which will soon be published. One of them is so radical, so excoriating in its critique of the ecological problems of Western civilisation that it makes a unique and lasting impression on its recipients. It catalogues the unstoppable destruction of primal forests, the mass death of birds, the global massacre of wild animals, the industrialisation of whaling, modern agriculture’s wholesale transformation of landscapes, devastating chemical pollution of rivers, and yet also – for its theme is ‘man’ as well as the ‘earth’ – the genocide of indigenous peoples, cultural homogenisation on a planetary scale, the dangerous hubris of Western science, and the deadly victory being won by capitalism over the values of life. Its author will go on to influence a number of fashionable theorists taught in university humanities departments, but will never recover the particular energy of this moment or the broad and urgent appeal of the text to which it gave rise.
This might sound like a scene from late 1960s California. It actually all took place in central Germany one year before the outbreak of the First World War. The gathering was that of the Freideutsche Jugend (Free German Youth) at the Hoher Meissner in Hesse; the author was the philosopher Ludwig Klages, and his text “Mensch und Erde – ein Denkanstoss”, which has been republished a number of times in Germany (most recently at its centenary by Matthes & Seitz Berlin), receives what I believe to be its first reliable, critical English translation at the end of this introductory essay.
Why highlight this moment, and this text? A number of reasons stand out. “If we look for the origins of the modern environmental movement”, writes Joachim Radkau in his monumental Age of Ecology, these “tend to cluster in the decades around 1900”; “indeed in many areas, one has the impression that something like the environmental movement of the 1970s would have developed after 1900 if the early beginnings had not been interrupted by war and postwar emergencies” (Radkau 2014: 28, 31). Even in the absence of a unified movement one can still discern an international coalescence of popularized scientific-ecological awareness, lifestyle reform (Lebensreform), various kinds of conservation initiatives, and a critique of capitalism from both sides of the political spectrum. During the belle époque, as today, there was no rival to capitalism, only marginal challenges to it. Then as now, charges laid against broader tendencies and mechanisms of Western civilization (industrialism, centralized power hierarchies, blind beliefs in technology and progress) tended to be channelled through attacks on capitalism, and the “green” critique of Klages’ text is no exception. The youth groups of the so-called Wandervogel (lit. ‘migrating bird(s)’) to whom it was delivered had pioneered the symbolic use of green as a marker of their identification with Nature: they changed the famous black, red and gold colours of German republicanism into green, red and gold, declaring “green is the colour of nature…green is our colour” (Linse 1986: 7) – decades before any “Green Party” constituted itself in the West. And “Man and Earth” itself has been read in similarly prophetic terms, as “nothing less than the first ecological manifesto in the German language”, its author a “forerunner of modern environmental consciousness” (Jan Robert Weber, in Klages 2013: 50, 40) who “anticipated just about all of the themes of the contemporary ecology movement” (Biel and Staudenmeier 2011: 17) right down to the details – reading the close of the text’s fourth paragraph, “there already is Rachel Carson’s vision of ‘silent spring’ which so alarmed the American public half a century later” (Radkau 2014: 31).
Perhaps the most decisive indicator of the essay’s far-sightedness comes from reading the sort of response that dismisses the rhetorical ferocity of Klages’ prose as the wailing of a neurasthenic Cassandra in the face of inevitable and beneficent progress, a progress marred only by a few perfectly calculable risks. “The jeremiads became ever bolder”, wrote a 1976 reviewer for Der Spiegel looking back from Herbert Gruhl’s seminal Ein Planet wird geplündert to Klages, “and yet proved already within a short time (as far as they could be checked) to be fantastically exaggerated…the new apocalyptic writers, like the old, follow their own internal laws that stand in a more imaginative than causal relationship to reality”. For “with the exception of total atomic war, none of the catastrophes predicted by the prophets can be worse than what Europeans had to endure between the late Middle Ages and the victory of technology” – perhaps a bit of pollution, the odd resource crisis, nothing really that we aren’t equipped to deal with. Almost fifty years later, surrounded by mass extinction, runaway global warming, and imminent ecological and climatic tipping points, such complacency has not aged well.
Is Klages at times rather too much in love with his own doomsaying, though – and are there reasons to be cautious when reading him? Undoubtedly. The reasons are biographical, only truly evident to someone who has acquainted themselves with his wider intellectual career – yet they are also symptomatic of the ambiguous politics of ecology and environmentalism, and of the overriding concern for “life” that necessarily must underpin both. For Klages would go on to become one of the leading philosophers in Nazi Germany. Even if he eventually fell into official disfavour, he maintained his public profile under the regime for much longer than Heidegger, and the traces of racist “biopolitics” in his philosophy are that much more evident. The existing published English translation of Klages’ “Mensch und Erde” emerged from an extreme-right-wing context: Joseph Pryce’s inclusion of the text in a collection of Klages’ essays for Arktos Media (Klages 2013b), described by the New Yorker as the world’s largest distributor of far-right literature. The book’s preface pointedly refuses to condemn Klages’ anti-Semitism, while the English version of “Man and Earth” that it offers contains so many inaccuracies, wilful infidelities and simple misunderstandings of Klages’ (admittedly complex) German that it is worthless as a reference text for the Anglophone reader, whatever their political persuasion. It also misses the opportunity to add references to Klages’ sources, and to fact-check some of his statistical claims, not all of which are trustworthy.
Despite the essay’s appropriations, and the forecasts it contains of Klages’ later and more egregious views, “Man and Earth” does not thematize race at any point: Nitzan Lebovic’s claim that it incorporates the phrase “a foreign race occupying Germany in the name of progress”, an “implicit racial slur” (Lebovic 2013: 72), is not borne out by the versions of the text available to me, and Lebovic’s only reference at this point is to a secondary source (Lebovic 2013: 229, n93). That said, it may not be so easy to “leave [Klages’] main work of philosophy [Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 1929-32] in the back-rooms of second-hand book stores and turn our attention to…‘Man and Earth’” as if it were a wholly separate affair (Jan Robert Weber, in Klages 2013a: 50). For the polemical structure of concepts that pervades his mature philosophy is already there in nuce in the 1913 text. This is a structural tendency one can fairly call “anti-intellectualism”, attacking as it does the pernicious influence on life and Nature of Geist (mostly translated below as “intellect”, though the Christian and Hegelian overtones that would be captured by the translation “spirit” are intended, and combatted, by Klages too).
The uses of such anti-intellectualism for both broadly conservative and Nazi thought were, and are, manifold. They overlap with the uses of “biocentrism” – the opposite of anthropocentrism, and almost a synonym for a “deep ecological” position – and the principled denial of progress, two other features of Klages’ philosophy. A good deal of literature has attempted to frame the conjunction of these tendencies as in some way foreordained, and inescapably embedded in a far-right political matrix. To take the opposition to reason and progress first: one finds a number of authors writing in the decades after World War II who attempted to locate the ideological origins of the Third Reich in various forms of German “irrationalism” reaching back to the Romantics, and like them, infused with skepticism towards liberal ideologies of progress. György Lukács’ two-volume survey of the “destruction of Reason” was the most sweeping such thesis, with Klages placed near the end of “the path of Germany toward Hitler in the domain of philosophy” that began with Schelling (Lukács 1973: I, 10). Fritz Stern and George Mosse documented with greater philological care the debt – acknowledged by Nazi propagandists themselves – of National Socialism to the writings of Paul de Lagarde (Deutsche Schriften, 1878-81) and Julius Langbehn (Rembrandt als Erzieher, 1890), both writers distinguished more by the stimulation they gave to German public debate than by the coherence of their ideas (Stern 1974; Mosse 1981). The secondary literature on Klages has apparently not given much attention to the attitudes he shared with (and possibly took from) Lagarde and Langbehn, which reach from anti-Semitism and opposition to modernity to a denunciation of science (Wissenschaft). For Langbehn, anticipating Klages’ dichotomy between the dry precision of Geist (intellect) and the fertile intuition of the Seele (soul), “the culture of our modern era…is scientific and wants to be scientific; but the more scientific it becomes, the more uncreative it becomes” (Langbehn 1891: 1). The apothegm is underlined by a ritual citation of Goethe – one which however exposes Langbehn’s chosen posture of the “anti-intellectual intellectual” (Stern 1974: 276) as nothing more than the dull-witted resentment of the schoolyard bully: “Goethe…could not stand people in spectacles; and yet Germany today is full of literal and conceptual spectacle-wearers; when will it return to Goethe’s point of view?” (Langbehn 1891: 1).
Lagarde and Langbehn undoubtedly contributed currents of feeling to the Jugendbewegung (youth movement) for whom Klages wrote in 1913. Eugen Diederichs, the right-wing publisher who helped organise the Hoher Meissner gathering, “believed that the development of Germany could only progress in opposition to rationalism”, through “an intuition which was close to nature” (Mosse 1961: 82). It is easy to mock the excesses of any self-confessedly “irrationalistic” philosophy, and the scholars quoted do not hold back. But it is also worth considering what those scholars were trying to defend as they created their critical genealogies of Nazism, and what alternative potential the thinkers and movements they attacked might have held. Lukács wrote The Destruction of Reason at the height of his identification with GDR orthodoxy, for which virtually anything was fascist that was not Marxist; Stern and Mosse as Jewish emigrants to the USA identified themselves enthusiastically with the liberalism of their adopted country, as well as with the standards of rational thought upheld by its universities. Having witnessed the upheavals of the 1960s counter-culture, Stern added a preface to his book in 1974 that gives one some insight into his programme, as it lays out direct parallels between proto-fascism and the New Left:
In the thirteen years of affluence since this book first appeared, the attack on modernity has once again become a dominant theme of our culture. The rebellion of the young—and not only of the young—against the emptiness of a materialist age, against the hypocrisy of bourgeois life and the estrangement from nature, against spiritual impoverishment amidst plenty, against the whole “liberal-capitalist system,” has echoed many of the laments of the three critics here discussed. More, the present generation longs for a new communal existence, for a new faith, for wholeness… In all realms, the voices denigrating reason and elevating feeling were heard again, as they have been periodically in our civilization. And once again, implicit in the attack on modernity has been the repudiation, the hatred of the West. At times we seemed to witness analogues to that descent from idealism to nihilism that is suggested in the last chapter of this book (Stern 1974: ix).
The clear implication is that the traits of the Nazis’ intellectual forebears that one ought to be most vigilant toward, and to combat on the least sign of their resurfacing in contemporary politics and philosophy, were not the most obviously fascist-sounding ones – anti-Semitism, biological racism, rabid nationalism, imperialist expansion, the embrace of violence. Of greater concern was a set of more insidiously appealing ideas, many of them Romantic, which stemmed from a rejection of (over-)civilized rationality: the elevation of feeling, the longing for community, the desire for a “new faith”. Mosse saw the foundation of the “Germanic ideology” in “Nature-romanticism and the mystical” (Mosse 1961: 82), defined by “a belief in Nature’s cosmic life-force…whose mysteries could be understood, not through science, but through the occult” (81). And this brings us onto the question of how a concern for Nature, and its expression in a mystical philosophy of “vitalism”, fitted into this whole ideological matrix: in other words, the debate over “ecofascism” and the supposedly right-wing roots of Green politics.
Such affinities are not merely grist to the mill of liberal capitalism’s defenders: they must be taken into account in any serious look at either Nazism or the history of the environmental movement. Jonathan Glazer’s much-discussed recent film The Zone of Interest (2023) shows us Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Höss lavishing caresses on his horse, pointing out the bounties of nature during canoe tours with his children, and being exhorted by his wife (whom he met through the ruralist and racist Artamanen-Gesellschaft) to respect the Lebensraum that they have established together as agricultural pioneers on Eastern soil. Back-to-the-land, Blut und Boden ideology sits directly alongside the industry of mass murder. George Monbiot has lately drawn attention to work on the connections between the birth and development of “biodynamic” organic farming and right-wing occultism, chiefly manifested in the career of Rudolf Steiner. Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmeier’s Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience (1995, 2nd ed. 2011) is the most detailed scholarly polemic against the threat named in its title, aiming to show how its history continues up to the present: “Tenets of ‘New Age’ eco-ideology that seem benign to most people in England and the United States—specifically, its mystical and antirational strains—are being intertwined with ecofascism in Germany today” (Biehl and Staudenmeier 2011: 8). The historical analysis is openly indebted to Stern and Mosse (ibid. 127 n318): ecological philosophy is needed, but it must be rational, modern, socially responsible, technologically informed. Romantic longings, cultural nostalgia and mystical “life-forces” are so much baggage from the past that the environmental movement ought to jettison.
And yet there are plenty of contemporary thinkers on the radical left who would disagree. Vitalism, formerly known in the German tradition as Lebensphilosophie (Albert 2017) but more recently reworked as “vital materialism” (Bennett 2010), and the critique of Western rationality and “anthropocentric” humanism (e.g. Braidotti 2013) are highly popular strands within contemporary critical theory. Many of their sources are also Klages’ sources: the intuition-centred philosophy of Henri Bergson, first published in German translation by Diederichs, later revived for generations of French and Anglo-American theory by Deleuze; the concept and critique of “logocentrism”, theorized by Klages from the work of Bachofen and subsequently disseminated by Derrida. One could of course try and use this as proof of the reactionary and authoritarian core of (most) modern critical theory, as writers such as Richard Wolin have done (2004). But that would oversimplify the stakes. To bring things back to ecology: what it does perhaps more effectively than any other area of contemporary thinking is force a confrontation with the entwined intellectual histories of “right” and “left”, and the impossibility of achieving an ideologically pure and radical thought that does justice to such a dauntingly complex object as “Nature”. It is also impossible to ascribe all the past failures and political seductions of environmentalism to “mysticism” or irrational aesthetic nostalgia, as if one were to say: keep things sane and scientific, and we’ll be OK. For there is plenty of evidence that we won’t be – unless we do acknowledge and work through some of the passions that inform a text such as “Man and Earth”.
Klages’ attack on the destructiveness of human illusions in the last part of his essay is certainly passionate, but one could identify the target of his polemic as a different kind of passion, a passion for intellectual control, a kind of insanity of Reason, a fanatic belief that everything ought to be not just comprehensible, but calculable, and that the more it becomes so, the more “progress” (in life as in understanding) humanity will have made. We do not need to judge that claim in its general form; instead we can look at historical instances of it, including one named by Klages that is unlikely to be familiar to most readers – the philosophy of Monism (para 26). Klages calls it “garrulous” (geschwätzig) on account of the sheer quantity of publications it produced, beginning with the popularizations of Darwinism offered by the biologist Ernst Haeckel – the first to coin “ecology” (Oecologie) as a term. A movement so vast and manifold is hard to characterize in unified terms, but even partial characterizations are enough to demolish some common idées reçues. “Trust the science” – or the scientists: well Haeckel ought to have been trustworthy given his rigorous scientific training, but he sacrificed it to what even a sympathetic biographer calls a “programmatically totalitarian” mindset, determined to find harmonious order and consistent meaning in Nature (Di Gregorio 2005: 490). For Haeckel in his earlier works and for some of his Social Darwinist contemporaries, that meaning was that of a blind, violent “struggle for existence”, as Klages alleges (para 27), one that embraced the human as well as the animal world: Haeckel’s collaborator Friedrich von Hellwald used such imagery to justify “might is right”, racism, war, torture, slavery, and infanticide (Di Gregorio 2005: 379-84). On the other hand, a “moral” reading of natural selection could lead Gandhi – a keen reader of Haeckel who planned a translation of him into Gujarati – to interpret the law of nature as one of ethical purity, chastity and non-violence (Richards 2008: 2-3). Lines have frequently been drawn between Haeckel and Nazism on account of their common naturalistic ethics, the shared Social Darwinist error of supposing that a human “must” could be derived from a natural “is”. Biehl and Staudenmeier cite Haeckel in support of their claim that the “notion of ‘natural laws’ or ‘natural order’ has long been a mainstay of reactionary thought” (2011: 14). For Hitler, God was only “the dominion of natural laws throughout the whole universe” and the “will of Nature” was fully comprehended by the “völkisch philosophy of life” (cit. Hawkins 1997: 276-7). But are we as willing to condemn Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence for implementing the same fallacy? Are we willing to similarly discount Peter Kropotkin’s anarcho-socialist philosophy of “mutual aid” – expounded in a book bearing the subtitle “A Factor of Evolution”, and commencing with chapters on cooperation in the animal world that drew on his own field research in Siberia (Kropotkin 1902: chaps 1-2)? More controversially perhaps, to pick a bone with Adam Curtis’s highly stimulating episode on ecology (“The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts”) from the 2011 documentary series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, should we use the fact that recent research has undermined concepts of “natural” ecosystem equilibrium and interdependence in order to disparage social experiments in communal living that justified themselves with reference to such concepts (especially given that the history of communes is much longer, more ideologically varied and politically promising than Curtis acknowledges)? Is this intellectual fallacy – and I believe it is one, just to be clear – not, rather, ethically and politically neutral – and evidently indulged by scientists and non-scientists alike? Klages even suggests at one point that it is ineradicable. “Man always interprets the world according to the image of his own condition” (para 26) – while claiming that his own condition just reflects the way of the world. There were Monists such as Wilhelm Bölsche (see Hermand 1991: 74-5), focussing on sexual life in nature, who were more aware that they were humanizing the natural world as they attempted to popularize and philosophize contemporary science. In the process Bölsche created work that would perhaps have satisfied even Klages with his romantic invocation of “the world-creating motive power of all-uniting love” (para 37). But there were others, such as chemist Wilhelm Ostwald and botanist Raoul Francé, whose ruthlessly rationalist, technocratic modernist conception of natural functionality fitted Klages’ “anti-intellectual” charge-sheet to the letter. For Ostwald, culture, politics, and society should all aim at the most efficient management of energy, and the interpretive subtleties of the humanities scholar could comfortably be abolished (e.g. Ostwald 1912). “Physical and intellectual mastery of our environment”, not “mystical feelings”, were the order of the day (ibid., 40). Biehl and Staudenmeier meanwhile mention Francé only on account of his demand for racial purity and the inspiration he provides to “contemporary ecofascists” (2011: 15), as if he were purely a “reactionary” figure. They do not mention his positivism, his idea of “biotechnics” or the inspiration that he gave to the Bauhaus – all issuing from a resolute modernism and metaphysical reductionism that could ask, without irony, “When will the whole of culture finally attain its own Taylor system?” (Francé 1921: II, 252). How can we make poetry more energy-efficient?
If the uncritical embrace of modernity deserves mistrust, so too does the idea that conservatism and “reaction” can be expunged without loss from the historical legacy of the environmental movement. Klages’ essay clearly takes up a number of conservative – pro-“conservation” – themes, such as that aspects of “natural” cultures possess a variety, beauty and adaptation to their environment that are under threat from modernization (paras 14-15, 23). Both the culture and Nature of a given area might therefore need “protection”, an idea summed up in the so-called Heimatschutzbewegung (movement for the protection of the homeland). All of which sounds very German and politically suspect, until one thinks of the National Trust – also founded in the 1890s to protect “places of historic interest or natural beauty”. Of course, what such movements miss is the far greater conservational imperative that should apply to cultures within modernity’s peripheric “sacrifice zones”, to use a term of Naomi Klein, as compared to those located comfortably inside centres of colonial power. Klages’ implicit equation of “Germanic” culture, its religion and cultural traditions, its “homeland” with those of indigenous peoples from other continents whose identity and existence are critically threatened in the present is both naïve and dangerous – and the pessimistic rhetoric (para 18) that regards such peoples as having already effectively “disappeared” does not help. The disappearance of folk songs and customs, prominent in European cultural debate at the time, prompts sharp regret and alarm (paras 22-23); but the disappearance of languages elsewhere on the planet receives no mention.
Eurocentrism notwithstanding, the awareness this period succeeded in raising about the “casualty list” of capitalist progress (para 21) demands due credit. German left-wing scholars of the environmental movement’s history – Jost Hermand, Ulrich Linse, Rolf-Peter Sieferle – are united in the recognition that “bourgeois” movements for conservation played a role, and frequently showed a courage, that should not be belittled: “it would be false to understand the conservative critique of capitalism, which took aim with the Heimatschutzbewegung at the destruction of ‘romantic’ landscape, as only a ‘reactionary’ defence of a social status quo; it stood in a thoroughly polemical relationship to social reality”, and was often counter-attacked by industrialist factions (Sieferle 1985: 40); the radical Weimar-era eco-socialist Paul Robien meanwhile declared, “it needs to be said: the bourgeoisie is the vehicle of the idea of nature-protection” (cit. Linse 1986: 101). He went on to point out that this was often carried through in a tokenistic fashion, one that did not challenge the destructive logic of economic growth. But the fact that “nature-revolutionaries” such as he could combine socialism and ecological consciousness more consistently does not mean there were not “reactionary” elements to their own programme – and necessarily so. The whole contemporary idea of the rural commune (Landkommune) – exemplified by settlements such as the Dusseldorf anarcho-syndicalist community “Freie Erde” (1921-2) – was a challenge to the social-democratic idea of linear social progress, in 1920s Germany just as in 1960s California. Instead of increased material abundance the keynotes were renunciation and simplification – of clothes (naturism), diet (vegetarianism), medicine (naturopathy), religion (Nature-worship), the economy and property (communalism), sex (free love instead of marriage) – all tried first by Lebensreformer in Germany before the “Amis” made them globally famous. Pioneers such as Gusto Gräser, visible in the second photo reproduced at the start of this piece, even looked like hippies; and the links between the counter-cultures of Germany and California are concrete and biographical, winding through figures such as “Nature Boy” William Pester, “raw fooder” John Theophilus Richter and his wife Vera, and American-born eden ahbez and Robert Bootzin. (This fortunately archived webpage is a treasure-trove of information on the connections.) If Stern thought the American counter-culture reminded him of the Jugendbewegung, he was not wrong: he only erred in trying to fix their politics. What seem in retrospect to be socially (as well as environmentally) “progressive” ideas at the fin de siècle often rejected out of hand any rhetoric of progress: over in England, Edward Carpenter, the utopian democratic socialist, gay rights activist, and friend of Rabindranath Tagore and Walt Whitman, wrote a book entitled Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (1889) in which he openly hoped for a restoration of the “healthy” aspects of “barbarism”, a “return to nature and community of human life” (35). Carpenter’s resistant, alternative life was in many respects heroic, and the same can be said of figures described by Linse such as Robien, Ferdinand Huber, and the German Gandhian Willy Ackermann (centre in the photo below).
(from Linse 1986: 145)
Most of us would be likely to dismiss such alternative paths the moment they take a stand against science and scientific method – as Klages does (paras 30-32). Surely there can be no more pernicious version of “irrationalism” than that which renounces the achievements of modern empirical research. Klages even performatively contradicts himself, relying on statistics to make the first part of his argument before inveighing against the mathematization of Nature in the second. And yet here as elsewhere, Klages’ exaggeration does not destroy the fundamental insight: “the replacement of all qualitative properties by the mere relationship of quantities” was precisely what worried Edmund Husserl in The Crisis of the European Sciences twenty years later. Klages’ striking claim about the historical interrelationship of capitalism and scientific research – “For the progressive [scientific] researches of modernity to commence, that large-scale change in attitudes had first to be completed whose mode of exercise we call capitalism” (para 31) – has been richly evidenced by historians of science, who have traced its various drawn-out stages from the rise of a money economy in the late Middle Ages hastening the decay of Aristotelianism (Kaye 1998) to the social feedback loops between Newtonian science and mercantile innovation in eighteenth-century Britain (Jacob 1997).
If scientific-technical rationality is so closely tied into the entire history of Western thought and social practice, how can we hope to challenge its priorities – quantification, knowledge as power, the reduction of living nature to a set of useful substances to be processed? Naomi Klein has argued quite reasonably that moving “beyond extractivism” – the view of the earth as a “bottomless vending machine” of resources (Klein 2014: 183) – can only take place through “challenges…from outside” the Western capitalist-colonialist complex, from peasants rebelling against enclosure to Indigenous peoples resisting exploitation of the earth right up to the present day (ibid., 177). But one ought to at least qualify her assertion that “post-Enlightenment Western culture” offers nothing but “an extractivist, nonreciprocal relationship with nature” (ibid., 178). The Western alternatives to such a relationship lie in fact precisely in the “occultism” and Romantic tendencies castigated by our above-cited historians of (eco)fascism (on occult rivals to the Scientific Revolution see Merchant 1990; on Romantic Naturphilosophie see Miller 2005, and the 700-page survey by Georges Gusdorf 1993). It has become steadily more evident that the “roots of Romanticism” do not lie in an “irrational” rejection of the Enlightenment (q.v. Berlin 1999 [1965]) but in a probing development of its non-mechanistic, non-reductionist, holist and pantheist aspects (Kondylis 2001) – tendencies which formed part of its most politically radical wing and were long suppressed for that very reason (Jacob 1981; Israel 2001). Rather than a resolute “demythologization” of our cultural ideals (for debate on the validity of this concept in ecology see Weiner 1992: 407-11), we may require a more complex combination of nature-positive myths and something more critical, not so much sovereign Reason as what Douglas Weiner calls “self-awareness” (ibid., 410) and the German Romantics called Besonnenheit. Indigenous cultures’ harnessing of myth and religion in a modern context – as exemplified by Bolivia and Ecuador’s mobilization of Andean religious concepts of pachamama or “Mother Earth” within a modern framework of legal rights – shows that these can have a positive role to play in the environmental struggle. Klages clearly approves of what he calls – in typically unfortunate language reflecting contemporary tropes – “the sacred customs of childlike peoples” (para 33), while he attacks Christianity on both metaphysical and ecological grounds (paras 33-35). Its problem, as Feuerbach had argued in the 1840s, is that Christian monotheism is a thinly-veiled anthropocentrism, and in fostering “the singular divinity of the spirit [Geist] declared war on the innumerable multiplicity of gods” (para 33). In other words, Christianity paved the way for capitalism precisely by not being authentically religious enough: it exercised sway over the spiritual realm, unified but dematerialized and denatured, while leaving the realm of material action in Nature to the free exercise of utilitarian motives. Pagan religions’ “piety” towards landscapes and living creatures was abandoned, along with the imaginative plurality that sustained such feeling – what Klages obscurely calls “interpretive phantasms” (para 37) and “the souls of the world of the senses” (para 34). From its attacks on Teutonic tree-worship in the 8th century down to Protestantism in the 16th, Christianity for Klages bears witness to the dangers of iconoclasm.
Though science and Christianity share the conceptual blame to a degree, Klages’ main target remains capitalism. But his is not a Marxist critique, and is worth attending to precisely because it is not. Marxist teleology sees the fulfilment of history in the transference of ownership of the means of production – in other words, modern technology in its latest, capital-forged guise – into the hands of the proletariat. The ultimate necessity for a transformation of those means of production themselves is not at question – despite occasional acknowledgement by both himself and Engels that advanced industrial technology had “alienating” and unforeseeable effects on man, nature, and their interrelationship. And those on the radical left who continue to pursue Marx’s pro-technological line of argument – sometimes rebranded “accelerationism” – continue to set aside the complexity of the ecological problems in which industrial civilization has embroiled itself, merely in order to claim a revolutionary transfer of ownership as the sole precondition for utopia. Aaron Bastani lists five crises which he believes will lead to the collapse of capitalism and its hopeful replacement by “fully automated luxury communism” (Bastani 2019: 22-3). Only two of them are environmental (global warming and resource scarcity), and none of them are fully ecological in the sense of directly implicating a living web of nature. No mass extinction, no pandemics, no antimicrobial resistance, no biohazards from pollution or waste, no acknowledgement that the human rationalization of nature often has dangerous unintended consequences. Just get big business off our backs; then humanity can solve all its problems and maintain itself in the lifestyle to which it has become accustomed.
To see that this kind of anti-capitalism falls short does not require certainty about the future so much as due regard to the twentieth-century past. The fact that the Soviet Union was also responsible for widespread environmental damage should certainly not be taken as proof that capitalism was (or is now) irrelevant to the ecological emergency: it was capitalist economies that set the global pace for Soviet growth, and furnished the base of “materialist” science and industrial technology used under Lenin and Stalin. The statement so often brandished as a cheap dismissal of communism or socialism – “that’s been tried, it didn’t work” – is incorrect not merely because Soviet communism wasn’t per se communist enough, but because the supposedly conclusive “experiment” never took place in a vacuum. Its conditions were those of intense competition with the West: “We are fifty to one hundred years behind the most advanced countries”, opined Stalin, “and we must close this gap in the span of ten years. Either we do that or they will sweep us away” (cit. in Weiner 2000: 168). The kind of short-termism and obsession with growth that are capitalism’s most prominent structural, ecological flaws were thus rapidly absorbed into the Soviet system.
Nevertheless, the combination of economics and geopolitics offers only half of the explanation for really-existing socialism’s environmental failure. The other, “ideological” half again concerns patterns of thought with a much longer, mythical-religious history – as indicated by the longstanding debate over Marx’s so-called “Prometheanism” (e.g. Sheasby 1999, and the work of John Bellamy Foster). Marx himself may not have been a “Promethean”, glorifying human freedom from natural bonds, but certainly many of his Soviet descendants were. The ideological shift from late Leninism to Stalinism ultimately replaced one unhelpfully reductionist model of the relationship between human agency and systemic wholes (whether economic or ecological) with another that was downright destructive. Raymond Bauer calls them the “spontaneous” and the “purposive” or the “genetic” and the “teleological”, the latter essentially little more than a “can-do” bout of Stakhanovite heroics – “We are bound by no laws; there are no fortresses that the Bolsheviks cannot storm” (cit. Bauer 1952: 22) – so that under Stalinism “the dominant conception of man became that of an increasingly purposeful being, who was more and more the master of his own fate, and less and less the creature of his environment” (ibid., 7). Weiner’s survey of early Soviet ecology (2000) charts the dismal results for science: they included the rise of a wholly erroneous theory, Lysenkoism, that denied the role of genes in inheritance. Even before the “Stalinist revolution”, the 1920s Cultural Revolution “wanted science to contract to the narrow limits of handmaiden to technology” (Weiner 2000: 125), and a faction of biologists under Lenin, dubbed the “Mechanists” by Weiner, endorsed Ostwald’s reductive hypothesis that “one day all biological and social phenomena would be reducible to particular instances of the law of the conservation and transformation of matter and energy” (ibid., 126). A “cultural-aesthetic-ethical” justification for the study and protection of Nature had existed earlier, having been imported from Germany and Switzerland along with its characteristic “philosophically idealist elements” (ibid., 10-11), and it was championed by the Humboldt pupil Alexander Semyonov-Tyan-shansky and the engineer-turned-ecological-critic Vsevolod Timonov, whose critique of industrialism contains remarkable echoes of “Man and Earth”. But by 1923 this strain of ecological thought was permanently sidelined (ibid., 34-9). Utility and mechanical explanation reigned supreme. Given the immediate precedents offered by Western science and philosophy, another outcome was hardly to be expected. Soviet communism was not the innere Lebenswende, the turning-point or inner conversion invoked by Klages, but another phase in the all-engulfing crisis of Western civilization – a crisis which Klages’ 1913 text reveals, in answer to the rhetorical dilemma of my title, to be simultaneously a crisis of capitalism and of a dangerously one-sided image of human reason.
Literature
Albert, Karl. 2017. Lebensphilosophie: Von den Anfängen bei Nietzsche bis zu ihrer Kritik bei Lukács. Freiburg: Karl Alber.
Bastani, Aaron. 2019. Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. London: Verso.
Bauer, Raymond A. 1952. The New Man in Soviet Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.
Berlin, Isaiah. 1999. The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Biehl, Janet and Peter Staudenmeier. 2011 [1995]. Ecofascism Revisited: Lessons from the German Experience. Porsgrunn, Norway: New Compass.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity.
Carpenter, Edward. 1916 [1889]. Civilization: Its Cause and Cure. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Di Gregorio, Mario. 2005. From Here to Eternity: Ernst Haeckel and Scientific Faith. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Dominick, Raymond. The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871-1971.
Francé, Raoul. 1921. Bios. Munich: Franz Hanfstaengl.
Gusdorf, Georges. 1993. Le romantisme II: L’homme et la nature. Paris: Payot.
Hawkins, Mike. 1997. Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hermand, Jost. 1991. Grüne Utopien in Deutschland: Eine Geschichte des ökologischen Bewusstseins. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch.
Israel, Jonathan. 2001. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jacob, Margaret C. 1981. Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Jacob, Margaret C. 1997. Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kaye, Joel. 1998. Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Klages, Ludwig. 2013a [1913]. Mensch und Erde – ein Denkanstoβ. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.
Klages, Ludwig. 2013b. The Biocentric Worldview: Selected Poems and Essays, trans. Joseph D. Pryce, ed. John B. Morgan. Arktos Media: London.
Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. London: Allen Lane.
Kondylis, Panajotis. 2002 [1981]. Die Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
[Langbehn, Julius]. 1891 [1890]. Rembrandt als Erzieher. Leipzig: C. L. Hirschfeld.
Lebovic, Nitzan. 2013. The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Linse, Ulrich. 1986. Ökopax und Anarchie. Eine Geschichte der ökologischen Bewegungen in Deutschland. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.
Lukács, Georg. Die Zerstörung der Vernunft. 2 vols. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1973 [1954].
Merchant, Carolyn. 1990 [1980]. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Miller, Elaine P. 2005. “ʻThe World Must be Romanticised ...ʼ: The (Environmental) Ethical Implications of Schellingʼs Organic Worldview”, in Environmental Values 14, pp. 295–316.
Mosse, George L. 1961. “The Mystical Origins of National Socialism”, Journal of the History of Ideas 22:1, pp. 81-96.
Mosse, George L. 1981 [1964]. The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. New York: Schocken.
Ostwald, Wilhelm. 1912. Der energetische Imperativ. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft.
Radkau, Joachim. 2014. The Age of Ecology: A Global History. Trans. Patrick Camiller. Cambridge: Polity.
Richards, Robert J. 2008. The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Sheasby, Walt. 1999. “Anti-Prometheus, Post-Marx: The Real and the Myth in Green Theory.” Organization & Environment 12:1, pp. 5–44.
Sieferle, Rolf-Peter. 1985. “Heimatschutz und das Ende der romantischen Utopie”, in Arch+ 81, pp. 38-42.
Stambolis, Barbara and Jürgen Reulecke, eds. 2015. 100 Jahre Hoher Meißner (1913-2013): Quellen zur Geschichte der Jugendbewegung. Göttingen: V&R unipress.
Stern, Fritz. 1974 [1961]. The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Weiner, Douglas R. 1992. “Demythologizing Environmentalism”, in Journal of the History of Biology 25:3, pp. 385–411.
Weiner, Douglas R. 2000 [1988]. Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Wolin, Richard. 2004. The Seduction of Unreason. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ludwig Klages: “Man and Earth – a provocation”
[1] Every age, and especially ours, has its catchwords, with which it proclaims its tendencies as with drum-rolls, deafening the voice of doubt in the ranks of its followers and from the non-partisans rallying ever fresh recruits around its banner. The three strongest of the present are “progress”, “culture” and “personality”, so arrayed however that the idea of progress, as the only one peculiar to the present, carries the other two and lends them its characteristic tint within mainstream thought. The present therefore believes itself to be superior to primitive peoples as well as to the periods of history that preceded it, and to the question of what it bases this on, it has a ready answer: science stands at an unprecedented height, technology dominates Nature before which every previous human race had recoiled helplessly, from the inexhaustible resources of the earth it methodically sustains the general welfare, the intellect [Geist] permeates space and time in transmitting speech across the airwaves, and even the boundless sea of air has now finally been “conquered” by its own inventive genius. We shall attempt – not for convinced believers in this faith, who will die with it, but for a younger generation that still inquires – to lift the veil at least in one place and reveal the threatening self-deception that it conceals.
[2] Even those who are still unfamiliar with the terrible consequences of the guiding principle of “progress” should be perplexed by the above rationale. To the ancient Hellene the highest thing one could wish for was kalokagathia, that is, the inner and outer beauty of man, which he saw in the image of the Olympians; to the Middle Ages it was the “salvation of the soul”, by which they understood spiritual elevation to God; to Goethean man, perfection of attitude, self-mastery in the midst of changing fortunes; and, however different such goals may be, we readily understand the profound happiness [Glück] in the achievement of each. But what the “progressive” [Fortschrittler] is proud of are mere successes, are increases in the power of mankind, which he thoughtlessly confuses with increases in value, and we must doubt whether he is capable of appreciating happiness and does not rather know only the empty satisfaction which the consciousness of dominion provides. Power alone is blind to all values, blind to truth and justice and, where it still allows these, certainly blind to beauty and life. We begin with our counter-argument by relaying well-known truths.
[3] The stature of science may be admitted, however open it remains to any challenge; that of technology is beyond doubt. But what are the fruits by which we should measure the value of all human activity, according to a wise Bible passage? Let us begin with those manifestations of life whose vitality has never been disputed, with plants and animals. The ancient peoples dreamed of a lost “golden age” or paradise, where the lion dwelt peacefully with the lamb, the serpent as a prophetic guardian spirit with man. These were not just dreams, as we are led to believe by the false doctrine that only ever read one thing out of nature, the boundless “struggle for existence”.
[4] Polar explorers tell us of the fearless trustfulness of penguins, reindeer, sea lions, seals and even seagulls at the first appearance of humans. Pioneers of the tropics never tire of astonishing us with images of barely trodden steppes, where wild geese, cranes, ibises, flamingos, herons, storks, marabous, giraffes, zebras, wildebeests, antelopes and gazelles swarm together in peaceful companionship. Of the actual symbioses we know that they are spread throughout the entire animal kingdom and over the whole earth. But wherever the man of progress [Fortschrittsmensch] has assumed that dominion of which he boasts, he has sown murder and the horror of death all around him. What, for example, remained of the animal world of Germania? Bear and wolf, lynx and wildcat, bison, elk and aurochs, eagle and vulture, crane and falcon, swan and eagle owl had become fables even before the modern war of extermination began. The latter however made a cleaner sweep. Under the most moronic of pretexts, that countless animal species are “harmful”, it has wiped out almost everything that is not a hare, partridge, roe deer, pheasant, or at the outside a wild pig. Boar, ibex, fox, marten, weasel, badger and otter, animals to each of which legend attaches ancient memories, have melted away, if not completely disappeared; herring gull, tern, cormorant, diver, heron, kingfisher, kingbird, owl are ruthlessly persecuted, the seal banks of the Baltic and North Sea abandoned to extermination. More than two hundred names of German towns and villages are known to originate from the beaver, proof of the spread of the industrious rodent in earlier times; today there are still a few remaining colonies in the Elbe between Torgau and Wittenberg, which would have already disappeared without legal protection! And who does not perceive with secret fear the decline of our lovely songsters, the migratory birds, accelerating from year to year! Barely a lifetime ago, even in the cities at summertime, the blue air was full of the whir of swallows and swifts, a sound through which the distance and the spirit of all roving seemed to pass. At that time one counted around three hundred inhabited nests in a suburb of Munich; today there are only four or five. Even in the countryside it has become eerily quiet, and the “countless larks” no longer sing as they did on every dew-fresh morning in the jubilant poems of Eichendorff. One must indeed reckon it a stroke of luck to hear, on a remote forest path through a sunny meadow, the light and foreboding call of the quail, which once filled the German valleys by the thousands and lives on in the songs of the people and the poets. Magpie, woodpecker, oriole, titmouse, red-tailed shrike, grass chickadee, nightingale, they all seem to be disappearing inexorably.
[5] The majority of contemporaries, cooped up in big cities and accustomed from their youth to smoking chimneys, the roar of street noise and nights as bright as day, no longer have a standard for the beauty of the landscape, believe they see Nature at the sight of a potato field, and find even higher expectations satisfied when a few starlings and sparrows chirp in the gaunt trees lining the avenues. But if a breath of the sound and scent of the German countryside, as it was some seventy years ago, emerges from the words and images of those days to touch these desolate souls, there are straightaway sufficient impermeable phrases on hand – “economic development”, requirements of “utility”, unavoidable necessities of the cultural process – to banish the admonishing reproach once again. It is therefore necessary for us to widen somewhat the circle of our considerations.
[6] We leave the question open where arid utility obtains the right to make itself the supreme principle of all action and to justify the most sombre depredations. Nor shall we repeat what will soon be common knowledge, that in no case, absolutely none, has man been able to correct nature successfully. Where songbirds disappear, blood-sucking insects and harmful caterpillars multiply exorbitantly, often stripping vineyards and forests bare in just a few days; where buzzards are shot down and adders exterminated, plagues of mice come and, by destroying the bumblebee nests, blight the clover, which depends on this insect species for its fertilization; the larger predators used to take care of selection among the game, which degenerates by reproducing diseased specimens where its natural enemies are missing; and so it goes on until the dire reactions of stricken Nature in exotic countries assume the form of those terrible plagues that trail at the heels of the “civilizing” European. The East Asian plague, for example, arose largely from the mass circulation of germ-laden pelts of local rodents such as the Siberian marmot.[1] We will leave all this aside in order to illustrate with a few examples only the one decisive point, that the usefulness insisted on has nothing to do with material need.
[7] What the modern German calls high forest is a young reforested timber stand; but the real high forest, which has become a pious legend among us, is coming to an end all over the world. North America, the most densely wooded of all the continents in the times of the Indians, must now cover its timber requirements by import; and the only countries still exporting, Hungary, Russia, Scandinavia and Canada, will soon be deprived of their surpluses. The “advanced” [fortgeschrittene] nations, taken as a whole, need about three hundred and fifty thousand tons of wood every year for the provision of paper, in order that a book may be published on average every two minutes and a newspaper at least every second – so large, approximately, is the production of these articles within the ambit of “civilization”.[2] Prove to us the necessity of inundating mankind with billions of bad newspapers, lampoons, horror novels; if it cannot be done, then the clearing of the primeval forests is naked sacrilege.
[8] The Italians catch and murder in cruel fashion every year millions of exhausted migratory birds that arrive on their shores; and what they do not consume themselves fills their purses through export to England and France.[3] Since numbers speak more clearly: in 1909 a single ship, for example, brought seventy-two thousand live quails, crammed into narrow cages, to England, where the poor animals were slaughtered in miserable conditions for their connoisseurs.[4] On the Sorrentine peninsula they are caught alive year after year at a rate of up to five hundred thousand. The average death toll for Egypt comes to about three million, not counting the countless larks, ortolans, warblers, swallows and nightingales![5] It is to luxury and commerce, not to hunger, that the feathered songsters fall victim.
[9] Still more gruesome havoc is wrought by fashion, that is, the lust for profit of some tailors and traders whose miserable inventiveness seems to have been suggested by Satan himself. Here is an excerpt from the Cri de Paris:
The Parisian milliners process up to forty thousand terns and gulls every year. Last year a London dealer sold thirty-two thousand hummingbirds, eighty thousand different seabirds, and eight hundred thousand pairs of bird wings of the most varied kinds. It can be assumed that no less than three hundred million birds are sacrificed every year for women's fashion. There are countries that have completely lost certain bird species that were a special feature of the regions concerned. In order to preserve the lustre of their wing or downy feathers, only live birds may be plucked; the poor animals are therefore not hunted with a shotgun, but with a net. The inhuman “hunter” tears the feathers off the captured birds, and the innocent victims of fashion have to endure the greatest agonies before they die in the midst of frantic convulsions.[6]
Such things are mindlessly permitted to occur by a human race which calls itself “civilized”, and while an outrageous slaughter rolls around the earth, women thoughtlessly flaunt their sad trophies.[7] Needless to say, all the species mentioned and many others, including the colourful bird of paradise and the broad-pinioned albatross, are close to extinction. And the same fate threatens all animal species sooner or later, as long as they have not been bred or domesticated by man.
[10] The billions of fur-bearing animals of North America, the countless Arctic foxes, sables and stoats of Siberia are succumbing to the excesses of fashion.
[11] Since 1908, when a public limited company was established in Copenhagen “for the purpose of whaling on a large scale and according to a new method”, namely with floating factories that immediately process the slain animals, around five hundred thousand of the largest mammals on earth were slaughtered in the course of the following two years, and the day is near when the whale belongs to history and museums.[8]
[12] For thousands of years, millions of American buffalo, the Indian's favourite hunting game, roamed the prairies. But no sooner had the “advanced” European set foot on the land than a horrific and senseless killing began, and today the bison is over and done with.[9] The same tragedy is currently being repeated in Africa. “According to the latest calculations by the Parisian researcher Tournier, eight hundred thousand kilograms of ivory are processed annually to provide the so-called cultured races with billiard balls, walking stick handles, fine combs and fans and similar incredibly useful objects. This is equivalent to the slaughter of fifty thousand of the world's most powerful animals. According to the latest reports, from the moment the Congo [Free] State gave up administration of the Lado enclave, an English hunting party surrounded and slaughtered a herd of eight thousand elephants, including the females and young.”[10]
[13] In the same style, antelopes, rhinos, wild horses, kangaroos, giraffes, ostriches, wildebeests in the tropics, polar bears, musk oxen, Arctic foxes, walruses and seals in the Arctic zones are mercilessly massacred.[11] An unparalleled orgy of devastation has gripped mankind, “civilization” bears the traits of unchained bloodlust, and the bounty of the earth withers before its poisonous breath. This is what the fruits of “progress” look like!
[14] They are, as mentioned, well known. Well-meaning and warm-hearted men have raised their warning voices again and again over the last ten years and are trying to control the problem through associations for the protection of Nature and the homeland [Natur- und Heimatschutzbünde]; what is not known, however, is the deepest cause and the full extent of the calamity. Before we go into this, however, let us proceed with our indictment.
[15] We need not decide whether life extends beyond the world of individual beings or not, whether the earth, as the belief of the ancients would have it, is a living being or (according to the view of the moderns) an insensible lump of “dead matter”; for this much is certain, that the terrain, the play of clouds, the waters, the covering of plants, and the activity of animals, produce out of every landscape a deeply stimulating whole, which embraces the individual living being as in an ark, weaving it into the great process of the universe. The sublime bleakness of the desert, the solemnity of the high mountains, the haunting melancholy of wide heaths, the mysterious motion of the high forest, the pulse of the ocean’s glittering coastline are indispensable chords in the storm of planetary sounds. The original works of man embedded themselves in them or were merged with them as if in dreamy contemplation. Whether we look at the admonishing profundity of the pyramids, sphinxes, and lotus-headed columns of Egypt, the apparent daintiness of Chinese bell towers, the structured clarity of Hellenic temples, or at the warm homeliness of the Low German farmhouse, the steppe freedom of the Tartar tent – they all breathe in and reveal the soul of the landscape from which they have grown. Just as the earlier peoples liked to call themselves “sprouted from the earth”, so everything they created is sprouted from the earth in form and colour, from dwellings to weapons and household utensils, the daggers, spears, arrows, axes, swords, the chains, clasps and rings, the beautifully shaped and richly ornamental vessels, the gourds and copper bowls, the thousand kinds of braid and textile.
[16] More terrible than what we have heard so far, although perhaps not quite as irreparable, are the effects of “progress” on the appearance of populated regions. Broken the connection between human creation and the earth, shattered for centuries – perhaps permanently – the primordial song of the landscape. The same railroad tracks, telegraph lines, and high-voltage power cables cut with brutal directness through the contours of forest and mountain, whether in Europe or in India, Egypt, Australia, America; the same grey, multi-storey apartment blocks line up monotonously wherever the civilized man pursues his “beneficent” activities; here as elsewhere the rural fields are “combined” [verkoppelt] or cut into rectangular plots, ditches filled, flourishing hedges cut down, reed-bordered ponds dried up, and the flourishing forested wilderness of yesteryear is forced to yield to homogeneous stands of trees arrayed in rows like soldiers, without the old thickets of “noxious” undergrowth; the winding rivers which once glided in labyrinthine curves between voluptuous slopes must now become perfectly straight canals; the rapids and waterfalls – even Niagara – must now feed electric power-plants; ever-expanding forests of smoke-stacks spring up along their shores; and the polluting effluents of factories transform nature's pristine waters into slurry – in short, the face of the earth will be transformed into a gigantic Chicago, pocked with a few patches of agriculture! “My God”, exclaimed the noble Achim von Arnim a hundred years ago, “where are the old trees under which we still rested yesterday, the primordial signs of firm borders, what has happened to them, what is happening? They are almost forgotten among the people, we painfully stumble against their roots. If the top of high mountains is once completely deforested, no wood will grow there again; let it be our care that Germany will not be squandered in this way!”[12] Nature had been grabbed by the throat so that its blood spurted from every pore – so Lenau summarized his impressions of the German landscape, our homeland. What would these men say today! Today they would perhaps prefer, like Heinrich von Kleist, to leave behind an earth that its degenerate son, man, has thus desecrated. “The devastation of the Thirty Years' War did not do away with the legacy of the past in town and country as thoroughly as the encroachments of modern life, with its ruthlessly one-sided pursuit of practical ends”.[13]
[17] Meanwhile as far as the hypocritical feeling for nature of so-called tourism is concerned, we hardly need to point out the devastation that the “development” of innocently remote coasts and mountain valleys brought in its wake. All of this has been said again and again, albeit in vain, exemplarily as early as 1880 by the excellent Rudorff, to whose essay “On the Relationship of Modern Life to Nature” (reprinted in the Zeitschrift für Heimatschutz 1910, issue 1) we would like to draw every reader’s attention emphatically.
[18] But as if all this were not enough, the rage of extermination has also cut its bloody furrow through humanity. The primitive peoples have disappeared completely or almost completely, for they have either been destroyed and starved to death or condemned to hopeless infirmity by the gifts of “progress”: brandy, opium, syphilis. It is over for the American Indians, over for the original inhabitants of Australia, over for all the best of the Polynesian tribes; the bravest Negro peoples resist and succumb to “civilization”; and we have just seen Europe watch indifferently as its last original people, the Albanians, the “sons of eagles”, who trace their tribe back to the legendary “Pelasgians”, were systematically killed by the Serbs in their thousands upon thousands.[14]
[19] We did not deceive ourselves in suspecting in “progress” the empty craving for power, and we can see that there is method in its destructive madness. Utilizing such pretexts as “utility”, “economic development”, and “culture”, its aim is nothing less than the destruction of life. It attacks it in all its forms of appearance, levelling forests, exterminating animal species, extinguishing indigenous peoples, pasting over and distorting the landscape with the varnish of industrialism, and debasing the organic life that still survives, like livestock, to the status of mere commodity, the defenceless object of a boundless lust for plunder. In its service however stands the whole of technology, and in its service the far larger domain of science.
[20] Let us pause here for a moment. Somehow man also belongs to nature; some even think that he belongs to it completely, which, as we shall see, is a mistake; but at any rate he lives, too, and if something in him quarrels with life, it would then quarrel not least with himself. Our chain of evidence would lack the most important link if we did not also offer examples of the self-dissolution of humanity.
[21] The casualty list that would have to be inserted here would, to include only the most important, still far exceed that of the animals, and so it may suffice to pick out haphazardly a few principal facts.
[22] Where have the folk festivals and sacred customs gone, this spring of myth and poetry that has been inexhaustible for thousands of years: the ride around the fields to help the crops thrive, the procession of the Whitsun bride, the torchlight procession through the cornfields! Where is the bewildering wealth of traditional costumes, in which each people expressed its nature, adapted to the image of the landscape! In return for rich pendants, colourful bodices, embroidered vests, belts heavy with metal, light sandals, or toga-like throws, crinkled turbans, flowing kimonos, “civilization” all over the world bestows upon men the grey of the lounge suit, and upon women – the latest Parisian fashion!
[23] Where, finally, is the folk song, the ancient, eternally new treasure trove of songs which soothingly concealed as in silver gossamer all human growth and decay! Weddings and funeral celebrations, revenge, war and downfall, revellers’ wantonness and the wanderer’s urge, the rider’s audacity, childlike feeling and motherly love breathed and flowed in inexhaustible songs, sometimes kindling to ardent deed, sometimes lulling into the slumber of oblivion. People wrote and sang at the dance, in their cups, at farewells and returns, at consecrations and incantations, in the twilight of the spinning room, before battle, at the bier of the fallen; they goaded each other with satirical songs, fought out quarrels in singing matches, wove darkly radiant poetry around mountain, spring and bush, animals domestic and wild, around plant, cloud-drift and rain shower. And – as almost eludes our attempts to feel the same today – even work became a celebration. Not only while wandering and at convivial feasts – people also sang when winding the anchor, to the rhythm of the oar-stroke, carrying heavy loads and towing ships, coopering casks, to the beat of the blacksmith's hammer, while scattering the seed, mowing, threshing and grinding the grain, breaking, weaving and braiding the flax.[15] Not only did “progress” make life grey, it also made it mute. But no, we forget that it followed the dead primal song with the street ditty, the operetta melody, and the cloying tunes of the cabaret, that it has replaced the original tools of music such as the Spanish guitar, Italian mandolin, Finnish kantele, South Slavic gusle, and Russian balalaika with piano and gramophone![16] Thus we have, gathered together, the fruits of “progress”! It swept over the earth like a devouring fire, and once it has thoroughly burned a place bare, nothing will thrive there, as long as there are still people! Exterminated animal and plant species do not renew themselves, the secret warmth of humanity's heart has been drunk up, the inner spring is buried that nourished the blossoms of song and sacred festival, and what remains is a sullen cold working day, attired in the false tinsel of noisy pleasures. Without doubt, we are in the age of the soul’s downfall.
[24] How would there still be great personalities under such circumstances! We certainly do not fail to recognize the value of ingenuity in the masters of technology, nor of the talent for arithmetic among the princes of big business; but even if such things were raised to the same level as living creativity, it remains certain that they would never be in a position to enrich life. The most ingenious machine has meaning only in the service of a purpose, not in itself, and the most extensive industrial organization of the present day will be nothing in a thousand years, while the songs of Homer, the words of wisdom of Heraclitus, the musical works of Beethoven belong to life’s never-aging treasure. But how sad appears our thinking and poetry now, which we were once rightly praised for![17] Who do we have left since the veterans of spirit and action in all fields have departed from us: Burckhardt, Böcklin, Bachofen, Mommsen, Bismarck, Keller, since Nietzsche too, like a last flare-up of old embers, passed away without a trace and without a successor! Parnassus is empty, likewise politics and philosophy, not to mention art in its utter decay.
[25] If we descend further to the level of everyday life, the catchwords of “personality” and “culture” reveal themselves in all their inanity.
[26] Most people do not live, but merely exist, be it as slaves of their “profession”, wearing themselves out like machines in the service of large companies, be it as slaves of money, senselessly abandoned to the numerical delirium of shares and flotations, be it finally as slaves of the metropolitan whirl of distraction; just as many, however, dully feel a sense of disintegration and growing joylessness. In no other time has discontent been greater or more poisonous. Groups and factions unite ruthlessly around special interests; in the tough struggle for self-preservation, trades, classes, peoples, races, confessions, and, within each association, individuals full of selfishness and ambition all clash with one another. And since man always interprets the world according to the image of his own condition, he believes he sees a fierce struggle for power in nature too, believes he is in the right if he alone survives in the “struggle for existence”, paints the world in the likeness of a great machine, where the pistons always have to pound, the wheels have to purr, so that “energy” – to what end we cannot see – should be converted; and, with a garrulous so-called monism, manages to falsify the trillion-fold life of all the heavenly bodies and downgrade it to the mere pedestal of the human ego. Just as one used to praise love or renunciation or God-drunken rapture, so today a one practices a kind of religion of success, and proclaims on the grave of the previous world that petit bourgeois faith which Nietzsche's glowing mockery anticipated when he had his “last man” say, with a twinkle in his eye: “We have invented happiness!”[18]
[27] Of course, the shallow errors of all these systems, sects and trends will not last long. Nature does not know a “struggle for existence”, but only the struggle which comes from solicitude for life. Many insects die after mating, so little importance does nature attach to preservation, as long as the wave of life rolls on in similar forms. What makes one animal hunt and kill another is the need of hunger, not acquisitiveness, ambition, lust for power. Here opens a gulf that no developmental logic will ever bridge. For species have never been wiped out by other species, since every excess on the one hand is immediately followed by a reaction, as the predator runs out of food due to a greater thinning-out of the prey; rather, their fluctuation took place across gigantic periods of time for planetary reasons and led to a constant multiplication of sub-forms. The extermination of hundreds of species in a few human lifetimes cannot be compared with the extinction of the dinosaurs or the mammoth.
[28] To apply physical laws such as the conservation of force to questions of life is meanwhile completely empty-headed. The retort has not yet produced a living cell, and if it did, it would not be through a combination of “forces”, but because chemical substances also already contained life. Life is a form capable of continual self-renewal; if we extinguish this form by destroying the species, the earth will be impoverished for all time, regardless of the so-called conservation of forces.
[29] Such false doctrines will, as mentioned earlier, disappear, but not the consequences of the real course of events, of which all theoretical concepts are only the shadow in thought. Nothing supports the opinion of those who consider the destruction that has occurred to be the side effect of temporary conditions, which will be followed by rebuilding activity. This brings us to the inner sense of a sequence of processes that is usually called “world history”.
[30] One misses this sense completely if one searches for it in the achievements of the “pure understanding”. We must learn to free ourselves from the all-too naïve view that knowledge grows from itself, handed down through scholars, of whom each successive generation only augments in knowledge and ability the inheritance of all those past. The fact that the Greeks could not telegraph, cable and use radio is explained, in habitual prejudice, by their lack of physical science. But they built temples, carved statues, cut gems of a beauty and delicacy that is no longer granted to us, we who assemble the most artificial instruments! Without making any experiments and based on everyday observations, they left behind philosophical systems that conditioned the thinking of Western humanity completely for a millennium and a half, and still influence it to a great extent today. The teachable virtue of Socrates returns somewhat more meagrely in Kant’s “categorical imperative”, the Platonic theory of ideas in Schopenhauer's aesthetics, and the conceptual framework of chemical atomism comes from Democritus! In view of this, is it more likely that they did not pursue physics because of inability, or because they simply did not wish to, and might their mysticism not contain many insights that we have forgotten?! Another example: all modern inventions would today still be foreign to the age-old civilisation of China, if we had not forced them upon it. But if we open a work by one of their great philosophers who flourished three and a half millennia ago, a Laozi or Liezi, we are struck by such a profundity of wisdom that even a Goethe becomes a bungler in comparison.[19] If they did not have the science with which one can build cannons, blow up mountains, and make artificial butter, it is reasonable to assume that they had no interest in such matters. Behind the endeavour of knowledge are the demanding and guiding purposes of humanity, and we can only understand the former from the direction of the latter.
[31] For the progressive [scientific] researches of modernity to commence, that large-scale change in attitudes had first to be completed whose mode of exercise we call capitalism.
[32] There is no longer any doubt among thinking minds today that the brilliant [practical] achievements of physics and chemistry only served capital; but it would not even be difficult to prove the same tendency in the prevailing theories themselves. The distinctively special achievement of modern science, the replacement of all qualitative properties by the mere relationship of quantities, only repeats on the level of knowledge-formation the basic law of a regime of the will which has sacrificed the shimmering palette of spiritual values – those of blood, beauty, dignity, ardour, grace, warmth, motherliness – to the fraudulent value of an imaginary power, that which is measurably embodied in the possession of money. For this the term “mammonism” was coined. However, only a few have become aware that this mammon is a real being that takes possession of humanity as a tool in order to wipe out life on earth. Let one further indication on this topic be permitted here.
[33] If “progress”, “civilization”, and “capitalism” only signify different sides of a single tendency of the will, we should remember that their bearers are exclusively the peoples of Christendom. Invention was piled upon invention, “exact”, that is to say numerical, science flourished, and the urge to expand, to enslave the non-Christian races and exploit all of nature, stirred only within its domain. The immediate causes of world-historical “progress” must therefore lie in Christianity. Now Christianity has always preached love, but if we look at this love more closely, we will find that it basically only gilds with persuasive words an unconditional “Thou shalt” of respect, and more precisely only of man, of man in deified opposition to all of nature. With human dignity or humaneness [Humanität] Christianity veils its real meaning: that all other life is worthless unless it serves man! Its “love” did not heretofore prevent it from persecuting the pagan’s worship of Nature with deadly hatred, and does not prevent it today from contemptuously dismissing the sacred customs of childlike peoples. As is well known, Buddhism prohibits the killing of animals because the animal is of the same nature as us; the Italian, to whom one would come with such an objection if he tortured animals to death, answers “senza anima” [soulless] and “non è christiano” [it is not Christian], because for the faithful Christian the right to exist belongs only to human beings. The ancient sense of piety which once accompanied this doctrine, and which still germinates in the lowly dwellings of the people, was denied to its standard-bearers; by contrast [this doctrine itself] awakened and fostered into a world-eclipsing power that fearsome megalomania which believed the bloodiest offense to life permissible, and even imperative, as long as it only promoted human “utility”. Capitalism, together with its trailblazer, science, is in reality a fulfilment of Christianity, the church like it is only an interest group, and the monon [One] of a deified morality means the very same One of the ego that is hostile to life, which in the name of the singular divinity of the spirit [Geist] declared war on the innumerable multiplicity of gods, today only coupling with a blind concept of the universe that which previously – and honestly, at least – confronted the universe with a menacing gesture of judgement.
All those blossoms had to fall
Blown by shuddering Northern gale
To enrich one among all
This world of gods was doomed to fail.[20]
[34] The one, however, who thought himself enriched when he trod the blossoms into the dust is, as has now become clear, man as the bearer of the will to acquisition, underpinned by computational reasoning, and the gods whom he severed from the tree of life are the ever-metamorphosing souls of the world of the senses, from which he tore himself away. The hostility to images, which the Middle Ages in its self-flagellating fashion nurtured inwardly, had to step forth into the open as soon as it achieved its goal: to eliminate the connection between man and the soul of the earth. In his bloody coups against all his fellow creatures, he only completes the deed he had previously done to himself: sacrificing his embeddedness in the image-laden multifariousness and inexhaustible plenitude of life for the expatriate eminence of a world-rejecting intellectuality [Geistigkeit]. He has fallen out with the planet that gave him birth and that nourishes him, indeed with the cycle of evolution of all the heavenly bodies, for he is possessed by a vampiric power that interrupts the “music of the spheres” like a piercing discord. At this point, however, it becomes clear that Christianity only represents an epoch in a much older history of development, a stage at which something that had begun long before suddenly attained its conclusion and, in Europe above all, its most persuasive form.
[35] For the force that makes man rebel against the world is just as old as “world history”! The process of development called “history”, which leads out of the circular path of events and which henceforth cannot be compared to the fate of other living beings, begins at the very moment when man loses the state of “paradise” and all of a sudden with alienated gaze stands outside in the sober light, torn from the unconscious harmony with plants and animals, water and clouds, rocks, winds and stars. The legends of almost all the world’s peoples suggest the existence of bloody battles in prehistoric times between the “sun heroes” who bring a new order and the chthonic forces of fate, who subsequently must disappear below into an underworld deserted by light. In a strange but instructive reversal of the facts, a Jesuit charged the Greek legend of the Labours of Heracles with anticipatory plagiarism of the Christian Saviour’s biography! But everywhere this is the self-same meaning of the new order with which “history” begins: that above the soul there should rise the intellect [Geist], above the dream, comprehending wakefulness, above life, which arises and passes away, an operation aimed at permanence. In the trajectory of the intellect’s unfolding, initiated thousands of years before, Christianity was only the final and decisive phase, according to which a development emerging from the state of still powerless knowledge – the state of “Prometheus bound”, whom Heracles set free! – now penetrated the will too, and, in the murderous deeds with which the history of humanity has continuously resounded since then, revealed to everyone who was not completely blind the fact that an otherworldly power was breaking into the sphere of life.
[36] Opening our eyes to this is the only thing we can do. We should finally cease confounding two powers divided in their deepest essence: those of life and the soul, and those of the understanding and will. We should realize that it is part of the essence of the “rational” will to tear the “veil of Maya” to pieces, and that a humanity that has yielded itself up to such a will must, in blind rage, devastate its own mother, the earth, until all life and finally humanity itself is consigned to oblivion.
[37] No theory can bring back to us what has been lost. The only thing that can help us to change course is a turning-point in our inner life [innere Lebenswende], one that humans are not capable of effecting. We said above that the ancient peoples had no interest in spying on nature, in pressing it into servitude in machines so that it could cunningly be used to defeat itself; we should add now that they would have abhorred it as άσέβεια, impiety. For them, forests and springs, rocks and grottos were full of holy life; blowing from the tops of high mountains came the showers of the gods (it was for this reason, not for lack of a feeling for nature, that they refused to climb them), while tempest and hailstorm intervened menacingly or auspiciously in the to-and-fro of battle. When the Greeks bridged a stream, they asked the river god to forgive man’s exercise of his own power, and performed libations; damage to trees in ancient Germania was atoned for in blood. Estranged from the planet’s currents, man today sees in all this only childish superstition. He forgets that these interpretive phantasms were blossoms shed from the tree of an inner life that contained deeper knowledge than all his science: the knowledge of the world-creating motive power of all-uniting love. Only if it grew again in humanity would the wounds inflicted on it by the matricidal intellect perhaps be able to heal.
[38] It has hardly been a hundred years since that love, as if it had truly bubbled up anew from deep secret wells in many hearts, carried the unforgettable dreams of those youthful wise men and poets who are uncomprehendingly termed the “Romantics”. Their hopes are dashed, the storm is gone, their knowledge is buried, the flood ebbs and “the desert grows”.[21] But ready, like them, to believe in miracles, we want to consider it possible that a future generation will still see that [world] whose birth pangs Eichendorff described in Ahnung und Gegenwart in the words of the seer:
It seems to me our epoch resembles this expansive, uncertain twilight! Light and shadow, still undivided, struggle powerfully with one another in wonderful masses, dark clouds move fate-laden between them, uncertain whether they lead to death or blessing, the world lies spread below in dully muffled expectation. Comets and miraculous celestial signs appear again, ghosts walk anew through these nights, the sirens of fable reappear above the ocean’s surface as if at the sign of approaching thunderstorms and sing, everything points as if with a bloody finger warning of a great, unavoidable catastrophe. Our youth finds no delight in carefree, easy games or in blithe repose as our fathers did; the seriousness of life soon took hold of us. We were born in struggle and in struggle we will perish, vanquished or triumphant.
For from the enchanted fumes of our culture shall coalesce a spectre of war, armoured, with a pale, deathly face and bloody hair; whoever has trained their eye in solitude can already see its lineaments striving upward in steaming eddies and quietly forming themselves together. He who Time catches unprepared and unarmed is lost; and many a man who, soft and inclined to pleasure and cheerful poetry, would like so much to live in harmony, will, like Prince Hamlet, say to himself of the world: “O cursed spite/ That I was ever born to set it right!” Because one day the time will come out of joint again, an unheard-of battle will begin between the old and the new, the passions that are now creeping in disguise will throw away their masks, and flaming madness will plunge into the fray with blazing torches as if all hell had been let loose, justice and injustice will both mistake the other party in blind rage.
For the sake of the just there shall be miracles, and at last the new and yet eternally old sun shall break through the horrors; now the thunder only rolls far away on the mountains, the white dove comes flying through the blue air, and like a liberated beauty the tearstained earth raises herself up in new splendour”.
[1] The reference here is to the Manchurian pneumonic plague of 1910-11, caused by foreign hunting of tarbagan marmots for their fur (though not spread primarily by distribution of the infected furs themselves, as Klages alleges) – v. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9448316/.
[2] Here Klages’ statistic appears to be a massive underestimate: the real global annual consumption of wood pulp for paper in the years around 1900 according to the UN FAO was 24 million m3 or around 14 million tons (see Horst Schulz, “The development of wood utilization in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries” in Forestry Chronicle 69:4 (1993), 413-18 (p. 416, Table 1), at https://pubs.cif-ifc.org/doi/pdf/10.5558/tfc69413-4). These “inconceivable quantities” (ibid.) have only multiplied over the last century and show no sign of sinking due to replacement by digital technology: the equivalent figure for 2022 was 195 million tons (https://www.statista.com/statistics/240570/consumption-and-production-of-fibrous-material-worldwide/).
[3] The practice continues in Italy and across the Mediterranean, with a 2015 study estimating between 11 and 36 million migratory birds killed in the region annually by shooting, poisoning and trapping – http://datazone.birdlife.org/sowb/spotkilling.
[4] While I have not been able to find confirmation of this specific shipment, it is absolutely in line with the enormous size and rapid expansion of the quail trade in the years before WWI – the Globe reported a single delivery of 100,000 live quail in 1909, and over 2 million birds were exported from Egypt to London in 1897 (cf. Klages’ claim of 3 million for a decade or so later). See Thomas Spain and David A. Turner, “Food for thought: Transport within the food supply chain”, in Journal of Transport History 43:2 (2022), 194-213 (p. 205). The trade “was not…sustainable” and had adverse ecological consequences including insect plagues in North Africa (ibid., 205-6).
[5] Cf. [Konrad] Guenther, Der Naturschutz [Stuttgart: Franckh, 1919; orig. Freiburg: F. E. Fehsenfeld, 1910], p. 103 [LK].
[6] Cit. in [Ludwig] Ankenbrand, Naturschutz und Naturschutzparke [Munich: Kupferschmid, 1911] [LK]. Neither the report from the Cri de Paris nor Ankenbrand’s book were accessible to me, but the Feuille d’Avis de Neuchâtel for 7.12.1898 (“Protection des oiseaux”, p. 4) contains the exact same figures from a London dealership as are cited here, along with an estimate of 180 million birds killed annually for the European fashion market alone.
[7] The international popularity of hats incorporating bird feathers reached a peak around the 1890s, and had already led in England to criticism and concern, provoking the establishment of the RSPB (1891) and a Plumage Act banning the trade in feathers, which was eventually passed into law in 1921. For a popular recent account see Tessa Boase, Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved the Birds (London: Aurum, 2021).
[8] Klages‘ reference seems to correspond to the 1908 establishment of a floating (though moored) whale factory on South Georgia (east of the Falklands) by a Norwegian, rather than Danish, company, Bryde and Dahl: see https://www.falklandsbiographies.org/biographies/bryde_ingvald. The figure of half a million whales Klages quotes appears hugely over-inflated for the early period in question, but global whale catches over the course of a decade would indeed reach almost this level by the mid-twentieth century: see https://spo.nmfs.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/pdf-content/MFR/mfr764/mfr7643.pdf .
[9] Numbers of American bison fell from an estimated 30-60 million in the late eighteenth century to a few hundred by 1890, due in large part to systematic slaughter by US armed forces – see Tasha Hubbard, “Buffalo Genocide in Nineteenth-Century North America: ‘Kill, Skin and Sell’”, in Andrew Woolford et al., ed., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham: Duke University Press 2014), 292-305 (pp. 292, 297).
[10] Deutsche Tageszeitung [LK].
[11] For an exactly contemporary assessment of threats to some of these (and many other) animal species, see William T. Hornaday, Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation (New York: Charles Scribner, 1913), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13249/13249-h/13249-h.htm#Page_1.
[12] Achim von Arnim, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, vol. 1, http://www.lyriktheorie.uni-wuppertal.de/texte/1806_arnim.html.
[13] From the foundational proclamation (Gründungsaufruf) of the Bund für Heimatschutz [1904] [LK].
[14] In the First Balkan War of 1912-13.
[15] Klages may have in mind here the classic work of Ludwig Bücher, Arbeit und Rhythmus, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1899 [1897]) – pp. 77-88 e.g. describe the rich variety of songs connected to the processing of flax.
[16] We would like to commend to whoever still has a sense for the folk song the warmly-felt book by [Otto] Böckel, Psychologie der Volksdichtung [Leipzig: Teuber, 1906] [LK].
[17] “Denken- und Dichtertum”, citing the famous nineteenth-century cliché of Germany as the Land der Dichter und Denker (land of poets and thinkers).
[18] Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Vorrede V, in Werke II, ed. Karl Schlechta (Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein: 1976), 284.
[19] Klages’ dates are off by a millenium: Laozi’s Tao te Ching and the text known as Liezi (attr. Lie Yukou) both date from the 5th century B.C.
[20] Friedrich Schiller, “Die Götter Griechenlands” [The Gods of Greece], first version 1788 (my translation).
[21] Nietzsche, Dionysos-Dithyramben, in Werke III, ed. Schlechta, 1247.
