The Romantics: Wagner, Techno and Additive-Free Tobacco
What do Wagner, techno and American Spirit tobacco have in common? Apart from the fact that they should all come with a health warning. Their continued popularity and appeal throughout the years flies in the face of logic, defies all explanation. It has been taunting my - admittedly scant - rational self for some time. Where is this famed Teutonic rationale? And why would it willingly subject itself to an 18-hour opera, which libretto reads like some turgid fan fiction concocted by a 17-year-old feverishly chaste Evangelical with a worrying Dungeons and Dragons habit? Why is techno, electro, minimal or whatever name this many headed yet monotone musical hydra now goes by, still so omnipresent in Berlin? Why is a 90s fad still styled as the the soundtrack of a brave new urban utopia? Every other country left the party a long time ago. They even left the after-party. And finally, why do health stores in Germany sell tobacco? Maybe they favour a holistic approach and offer all sorts of health states, including very poor ones. Maybe some people equate “additive-free” with “addictive-free”. Maybe the carbon monoxide produced by smoking tobacco, all tobacco, has finally affected their oxygen-deprived brains, and they are now under the illusion that nothing “natural” could possibly harm them. Arsenic is a natural ingredient. Maybe they pour arsenic into their daily latte of delusion. I add two heaped teaspoons of sarcasm.
But why should Germans be exempt from the whims and fancies of irrationality? Why do we insist on placing them into the technology-worshipping-automaton box, the one into which Germany has recently been shoving Japan? I think it is about time that we inducted Germans into the Hall of Irrationality where they can join every other nation on earth. I myself have been a proud member ever since I discovered that eating fair-trade chocolate increases my karma but not my waistline.
Not all German are engineers. In fact, the country is facing a shortage. Germany, a byword for engineering excellence throughout the world, had 70,000 unfilled engineering posts in 2008. To address this gap, the Chancellor has been in talks with other European countries, such as stereotypically passionate Spain, where engineers are plentiful. What the poet quota in Germany currently is, I cannot say, but once upon a time, when Berlin was capital of Prussia, the kingdom excelled in exalted bards and balladists. Few people would describe the Germans as romantics, but that’s precisely what they were famed as at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, where the Romantic movement with a capital “R” thrived in the country. A reaction to the Enlightenment and its systematic thinking, Romantics rebelled against this reverence for reason, which they saw as a straightjacket that stifled spontaneity and everything creative. German Romantic literature’s main ingredients include an exaltation of the individual, particularly of the Genius, an undefined longing or Sehnsucht for something sensed but not known, and that characteristic German Innerlichkeit or “sense of inwardness, or remoteness from reality, of intimate community between self and the mysterious forces of nature and God.”* Goethe, who was later to label Romanticism as positively unhealthy, spearheaded the Romantic revolt with his seminal novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship about a young man that abandons his comfortable life to travel the world, returning changed. Goethe’s book kickstarted the concept of Bildung (education), where people travel not to educate themselves about the world or learn new skills, but to ultimately discover themselves. That’s right, Goethe is indirectly responsible for Eat, Pray, Love and plastered gap year students in full moon parties in Thailand. Which means that by the time he wrote Faust he already had experience in giving his soul to the devil.
Germans were the Romantics of Europe. The French were fascinated by their neighbours’ eccentricity and erratic behaviour, so different from the cold rationality that characterised Gallic literature at the time. To them it was refreshing and charming that Germans would abandon the strict symmetry of French landscaping, as epitomised by Versailles (originally Baroque), in favour of the undomesticated and mysterious German forests. So now you know, fellow Ausländer, forests have been the natural habitat of Germans for at least 200 years, but have only been their premium barbecue spot for half a century. Germans kept flocking to forests despite their reputation in German fairytales as the setting of sinister events. Just ask Hansel or Gretel. The fairytale with its fantastic tales and folksy roots captured the public imagination and were collected by people such as the Grimm Brothers (also famous for being the founding fathers of Germanic philology and German studies). Fairytales appealed for their “unspoiled nature” and “innocence”, traditionally the literary medium of the peasants, who were regarded as the true embodiment of German culture, free of artificiality, foreign intrusions and the trappings of modern city life.
Yet anybody who has read the unfiltered stories, before Disney sugarcoated them, will be familiar with the violent imagery that pervades them. Hansel and Gretel evade their fate by shoving the old lady into the oven, the hunter saves Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother by chopping open the wolf and Cinderella’s stepsisters, in a desperate bid to fit into the dainty glass shoe, mutilate their feet. Foreigners might be amused by German Romantic sensibility and their camp Schwärmerei, but in typical Romantic fashion, something sinister lurked under the movement. Already Heinrich Heine was warning about Romanticism’s dangerous obsession with death and destruction. Many Romantics, preoccupied with a higher spiritual realm, were unconcerned with such earthly matters as politics. Often conservative, they mourned the passing of a golden - yet never discerned - utopia, and were rather vague about how to return to this prelapsarian state. Most disturbingly was the recurrence of total annihilation or obliteration as spiritual cleansing found in the writings of some of these Romantics. While there was no precise cure to be found for the social malaise and decadence in their often cryptic and esoteric prose, the idea of the phoenix rising from the ashes would have devastating consequences. Inevitably, Hitler was a Romantic. The connection was evident to the German novelist Thomas Mann who, shortly after the National Socialism Party rose to power, wrote:
It may seem daring to associate the nationalism of today with the ideas of a romanticizing philosophy, and yet the connection is there…[and serves] to support…the National Socialist movement from the spiritual side…We find here a certain ideology of philologists, a romanticism of professional Germanists, a superstitious faith in the Nordic - all emanating from the academic professional class, and the Germans of 1930 are harangued in an idiom of mystical philistinism and high-flown tastelessness with vocables like “racist”, “völkish, bündish”, “heroic”, which give the movement an ingredient of cultured barbarism more dangerous and more remote from reality, flooding and clotting the brain more grievously, than the Weltfremdheit and political romanticism that led us into [WW1]”
This is not to argue that a penchant for fairytales and forests led to Nazism. The rise of fascism in Europe in the 30s (Germany was not the only country so affected) was due to a toxic and complex combination of social, economical and political factors. But it did not help that many of these new Romantics had been heavily criticising the political efforts of the troubled and short-lived Weimar Republic. Not that they themselves offered any practical solutions to the young republic, disdainful as they were of the mundanity of politics, which they regarded as a pedestrian occupation. The Führer was also mocked despite them indirectly having helped created a political climate open to escapism and vague affirmations about a lost German golden age.
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The Romantic impulse knows no hues or political affiliation. It was later strongly to reemerge in the student revolt of the 60s, whose participants had a characteristically vague goal besides the dismantling of the old order and the creation of an intuitive new society. It took once again a more sinister turn in the 70s with the Baader-Meinhof Group, led by Andreas Baader, who was seemingly of the conviction that burning down department stores would somehow incite a sexual and anti-capitalist revolution in Germany.
Berlin’s actual anti-imperialist urban guerilla factions show less propensity towards violence and prefer to express their Weltschmerz through the medium of Photoshop and electro music. The turntable has, it seems, superseded Wagner as the primary source of musical escapism among the disenchanted German bourgeoisie. Romanticism was from its inception a middle-class pursuit. Factory workers during the Industrial Revolution rarely got the chance to experience longing or ennui. So it was up to the children of the bourgeoisie to campaign on behalf of the ungrateful proletariat. But I digress and it’s taking me longer to get to the point than Wagner’s Ring Cycle or a Ricardo Villalobos track. What do these two musical genres have in common and what so Romantic about them? Well both last an eternity and have a relentless insistence to them. You will be familiar with techno’s repetitive hypnotic beat but perhaps less with opera so I will give you an example. In his prelude to The Rhine Gold, Wagner (according to Gordon A. Craig) at some points extends the figurations on the chord of E flat for a whole 136 bars, so as to mimic the slumber of a river. Proto-trance music! Throw in a couple of dragons and vikings and you get the Love Parade. Both musical styles appeal to this German Innerlickheit or inwardness. Both disconnect you from your immediate surroundings and plug you into a higher but more diffuse reality. Next time you go to the opera or a club, notice how often German Romantics close their eyes. Particularly when they are dancing. They are not there. They are back in the woods!
It is in these woods, their spiritual home, where they can commute with nature by smoking. Like that nice Indian American chap on the packet of American Spirit tobacco. Winnetou (created by the pathologically sentimental Karl May) and all the other tribe members live to an old ripe age despite communicating through smoke signals. Apart from all the ones that were directly or indirectly exterminated by white pioneers. Which is actually the majority. But German Romantics are already know that American Imperialists are bad for your health.
* Quote taken from Gordon A. Craig The Germans. In fact the chapter Romantics was the main inspiration for this entry. All brilliant insights are his, all bad jokes and accidental insults are mine.
