Transcript Slide 1

Individualist vs. Community
th
Ethic in 20 century Germany
David Pan
Humanities Core Course
Lecture 5, Winter Quarter
20th century German culture is dominated
by the conflict between an individualist
ethic and a concern for community.
• The ethic of individual striving of Goethe’s
Faust replaced a Christian ethic to establish
a new type of morality in German culture.
• Franz Kafka reacted to the deterioration of
community life that accompanied the rise of the
individualist ethic.
• “In the Penal Colony” presents in the officer and
the explorer an intractable conflict between a
primitive Eastern Jewish culture and a civilized
Western Jewish culture.
19th century reactions condemned
Goethe’s Faust for its anti-Christian
tendencies.
from Joseph von Eichendorff’s History of
German Literature (1857)
„...Goethe summed up the idea of
humanity, not just as the cultivation of a
sense of beauty through art, but the
harmonious development of all human
powers and capacities through life itself.
He does not at all want to „follow an ideal“
but to allow his feelings to develop into
capacities through struggle and play. [...]
Clearly such an absolute focus on natural
development makes all positive religion
impossible, or at the very least superfluous
(1052-53).
Eichendorff sees Goethe’s Faust
as central to the development of
an individualist, humanist ethic.
But this new ethic undermines
religion.
Eichendorff, Joseph von. Werke in sechs Bänden. Ed. Wolfgang Frühwald, Brigitte
Schillbach and Hartwig Schultz. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag,
1985-1993.
Beginning with German unification in 1871,
critics began to see Faust as a model for
German identity.
Gustav von Loeper (1871)
„Faust‘s true guilt and at the same time his true
greatness lies in the struggle against the limits of
human nature“ (XIV).
Loeper describes Faust’s
guilt as part of his
“greatness.”
Kuno Fischer (1878)
„Faust‘s pleasure lies in the fruit of his labor, the
view upon the great and blessed sphere of influence
that he has created and upon the land that he has
wrung from the elements, settled, and transformed
into a human world and into an arena for striving
generations after his own image“ (3:55-56,
emphasis in original).
Fischer sees Faust’s
ideal of striving as the
basis of activity for future
generations.
Loeper, Gustav. Goethes Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 13. Ed. Gustav von Loeper. Berlin: Hempel, 1871. Fischer, Kuno. Goethe’s
Faust. Ueber die Entstehung und Composition des Gedichts. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1878. Cited in Karl Robert Mandelkow, Goethe
im Urteil seiner Kritiker : Dokumente zur Wirkungsgeschichte Goethes in Deutschland. 4 vols. Munich: Beck, 1989.
The individualist ethic of Goethe’s Faust
reaches the peak of its influence amongst
established Goethe scholars in the Nazi period.
Hermann August Korff
Professor, University of Leipzig (1925-1954)
Visiting Professor, Harvard University (1934)
Visiting Professor, Columbia University (1938)
“The contrast between good and evil is not thereby dissolved. Faust
feels deeply what in an elementary sense is good and what is evil.
But though he always participates in the two as he participates in the
play of pleasure and pain, elementary morality does not have final
power over him. It becomes a preserved moment within a more total
ideal that has a hyper-moral character because morality is only one
value next to other values and is no longer the highest value.”
“For that which is placed above morality is the personality, whose
fulfillment is the true goal of such a life.”
“Great personalities consume the smaller ones. That is the law of
nature. And their unethical behavior only consists in the way in which
they must obey their natural law without allowing themselves to be
hindered by their still existing moral affects.” (161-63)
Morality is subordinated to
the personality of the
individual.
What seems unethical is
actually the individual’s
adherence to a natural law
without allowing moral
feelings to get in the way.
Korff, Hermann August. Faustischer Glaube: Versuch über das Problem humaner Lebenshaltung. Leipzig: J. J. Weber,
1938. My translation.
Nazi Goethe critics repeated the arguments
of scholars like Korff.
“Faust is the ingenious man who cannot be
content with having and possessing either
material or spiritual possessions. In this man
there lives a drive to become a genius of the
world and of the deed. The paltry contentment
and the merely pleasurable that are the
essence of the philistine are foreign to him, at
least to the truly Faustian man. […] Yet, we
must express this more clearly and more
powerfully: here in the Faustian man there
lives a passionate will that surges from the
primal depths and does not shy away from
any means of fulfilling the numerous tasks
with which life confronts him – even to the
point of allying himself with the devil!” (12).
Schott promotes a focus
on the world and deed.
Schott refers to the
Faustian man as someone
who should not shy away
from devilish means for
fulfilling his goals.
Goethe’s Faust provides a justification for the violence that
accompanies the goal of developmental striving.
Schott, Georg. Goethes Faust in heutiger Schau. Stuttgart: Tazzelwurm Verlag, 1940. My translation.
20th century German culture is dominated
by the conflict between an individualist
ethic and a concern for community.
• The ethic of individual striving of Goethe’s Faust
replaced a Christian ethic to establish a new
type of morality in German culture.
• Franz Kafka reacted to the deterioration of
community life that accompanied the rise of
the individualist ethic.
• “In the Penal Colony” presents in the officer and
the explorer an intractable conflict between a
primitive Eastern Jewish culture and a civilized
Western Jewish culture.
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka. No date. National Library of Israel. Reproduced in Batuman, Elif. “Kafka’s Last Trial.” New York Times
Magazine. 22 September 2010. Web. 18 January 2011.
Though born into an assimilated Jewish family,
Kafka became interested in Czech anarchism
and Jewish traditions.
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•
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•
•
•
•
•
•
1883 Born July 3 in Prague to Julie Loewy and Hermann Kafka, a
merchant who grew up in a Jewish ghetto but rejected this past in
order to assimilate into the society of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
1889 Though living in Czech-speaking Prague and born into a
Jewish family whose ancestors spoke Yiddish, he is sent to
elementary school at the Deutsche Knabenschule and in 1893 to
the Altstaedter Deutsches Gymnasium.
1902 Meets Max Brod, who becomes a life-long collaborator and
friend and who eventually oversees the publication of Kafka’s
posthumous works.
1906 Receives a doctorate in law and begins career in the
insurance industry, first with Assicurazioni Generali and then at the
Workers Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia.
1910 Begins friendship with Czech anarchist, Michal Mareš, with
whom Kafka attends anarchist gatherings of Klub Mladych.
1911-12 Attends meetings of the Zionist group, Bar Kochba, and
visits the Yiddish theater. Meets Felice Bauer, with whom he is
engaged twice, but never marries.
1914-17 Writes “In the Penal Colony.”
1917 Tuberculosis forces Kafka to take a leave of absence from
his insurance job.
1922 Retires with pension due to illness.
1924 Dies June 3 of tuberculosis in Kierling, near Vienna, Austria.
Born and educated
in an assimilated
Jewish family.
Combines writing
with “day job” as
an insurance
executive.
Interested in
anarchism, Zionism,
and Yiddish culture.
Wagenbach, Klaus. Franz Kafka: eine Biographie seiner Jugend 1883-1912. Bern: Franke Verlag, 1958. 270-271.
Kafka was interested in a Zionism that
promoted community over individualism and
“life” over concepts and arguments.
“Today there is a general tendency amongst a
few people to go beyond the individual and
integrate it into super-individual contexts.
Several signs suggest that a shift is taking
place in our time, not just for Judaism, but for
humanity, which manifests itself externally in
the West as a struggle against a mechanizing,
de-spiritualizing functionalism and in the East
as a reawakening of old cultural realms and
the European attempt to appropriate Asian
culture” (VI).
“Zionism is not a science nor a logical system
of concepts, and it has nothing to do with
racial theories and definitions of the folk. It is
impossible to teach someone Zionism through
arguments, and all the discoveries of racial
and sociological research do not touch us.
Zionism lies in another dimension of being. It
is not knowledge, but life (VIII)”.
Individual-oriented rationality of
Western Judaism
vs.
Community-oriented traditionalism
of Eastern Judaism.
Arguments, science, concepts, and
research
vs.
Life
Kohn, Hans. “Geleitwort.” Vom Judentum. Ed. Verein jüdischer Hochschüler Bar Kochba in Prag. Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1913.
My translation. This book was part of Kafka’s personal library.
Baioni, Guiliano. “Zionism, Literature, and the Yiddish Theater.” Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the “Fin de Siècle.”
Ed. Mark Anderson. New York: Schocken Books, 1989. 97-102.
Kafka notes a contradiction between the
alienation of the intellectual and the
vitality of Yiddish folk culture.
“Folksong evening: Dr. Nathan Birnbaum is
the lecturer. Jewish habit of inserting ‘my dear
ladies and gentlemen’ or just ‘my dear’ at
every pause in the talk. Was repeated at the
beginning of Birnbaum’s talk to the point of
being ridiculous. But from what I know of
Löwy I think that these recurrent expressions,
which are frequently found in ordinary Yiddish
conversations too, such as ‘Weh ist mir’ or
‘S’ist nischt,’ or ‘S’ist viel zu reden,’ are not
intended to cover up embarrassment but are
rather intended, like ever-fresh springs, to stir
up the sluggish stream of speech that is never
fluent enough for the Jewish temperament”
(173).
Alienated gesture of
the Western
intellectual, attesting to
a contradiction
between intention and
execution
vs.
Expressive gesture of
Eastern Jewish
communities, that still
has a vital spirit.
Kafka, Franz. The Diaries 1910-1923. Ed. Max Brod. New York: Schocken Books, 1988.
The opposition between Western and
Eastern Jews dominates his conception
of himself.
“After all, we both know numerous examples of the Western
Jew; as far as I know I’m the most Western-Jewish of them all.
In other words, to exaggerate, not one second of calm has been
granted me; nothing has been granted me, everything must be
earned, not only the present and future, but the past as well —
something which is, perhaps, given every human being — this
too must be earned, and this probably entails the hardest work
of all” (Letters to Milena 217).
Two figures in the Yiddish theater: “people who are Jews in an
especially pure form because they live only in the religion, but
live in it without effort, understanding, or distress. They seem to
make a fool of everyone, laugh immediately after the murder of a
noble Jew, sell themselves to an apostate, dance with their
hands on their earlocks in delight when the unmasked murderer
poisons himself and calls upon God, and yet all this only
because they are as light as a feather, sink to the ground under
the slightest pressure, are sensitive, cry easily with dry faces
(they cry themselves out in grimaces), but as soon as the
pressure is removed haven’t the slightest specific gravity but
must bounce right back up in the air” (Diaries 64-65).
Kafka, Franz. Letters to Milena. Tr. Philip Boehm. New York: Schocken Books, 1990.
Kafka describes himself
as an alienated
Western Jew,
but is fascinated by the
lightness and
immediacy of the
Eastern Jew in the
Yiddish theater.
Kafka describes Western Judaism as a
community in decline.
“Today when I heard the moule’s assistant say the
grace after meals and those present, aside from the
two grandfathers, spent the time in dreams or
boredom with a complete lack of understanding of
the prayer, I saw Western European Judaism before
me in a transition whose end is clearly unpredictable
and about which those most closely affected are not
concerned, but like all people truly in transition, bear
what is imposed upon them. It is so indisputable that
these religious forms which have reached their final
end have merely a historical character, even as they
are practised today, that only a short time was
needed this very morning to interest the people
present in the obsolete custom of circumcision and
its half-sung prayers by describing it to them as
something out of history” (Diaries 147-48, 24 Dec
1911).
Circumcision has
lost its meaning for
Western European
Jews.
For Kafka, Eastern European Jews still
have a living and active community life.
“Circumcision in Russia: […] On the day before the circumcision
the evil spirits are at their wildest. Therefore the night before is a
watch night, and they spend it awake until the morning with the
mother. The circumcision occurs often in the presence of over
100 relatives and friends. The most honored of the guests is
allowed to hold the child. The circumciser, who carries out his
office without compensation, is usually a drunkard, as he is so
busy that he cannot attend the feasts and only has time to drink
some schnaps. All of these circumcisers therefore have a red
nose and have bad breath. It is thus not very appetizing when,
after the cut has been completed, this mouth is used to suck on
the bloody member, as is required. The member is then covered
with sawdust and heals in 3 days. […] so it is even more
peculiar to the Jews that they come together at every possible
opportunity, whether to pray or to study or to discuss divine
matters or to eat holiday meals whose basis is usually a
religious one and at which alcohol is drunk only very moderately.
They flee to one another, so to speak” (Diaries 152, 25 Dec
1911).
Kafka describes
circumcision for
Eastern
European Jews
as a bizarre but
vital community
ritual.
Kafka describes the barrier of
incomprehension that separates the
Eastern from the Western Jews.
“The Eastern Jews’ contempt for the Jews here. Justification
for this contempt. The way the Eastern Jews know the
reason for their contempt, but the Western Jews do not. For
example, the appalling notions, beyond all ridicule, by which
Mother tries to comprehend them. Even Max, the
inadequacy and feebleness of his speech, unbuttoning and
buttoning his jacket. And after all, he is full of the best good
will. In contrast a certain Wiesenfeld, buttoned into a shabby
little jacket, a collar that it would have been impossible to
make filthier worn as his holiday best, braying yes and no,
yes and no. A diabolically unpleasant smile around his
mouth, wrinkles in his young face, wild and embarrassed
movements of his arms. But the best one is a little fellow, a
walking argument, with a sharp voice impossible to
modulate, one hand in his pocket, boring towards the
listeners with the other, constantly asking questions and
immediately proving what he sets out to prove. Canary
voice. Tosses his head. I, as if made of wood, a clothes-rack
pushed into the middle of the room. And yet hope” (Diaries
332, 11 Mar 1915).
Though he is a Western
Jew, Kafka sides with the
Eastern Jews.
He describes the
gestures that reveal how
the Western Jews’ cannot
understand the Eastern
Jews.
Kafka feels himself to be
helpless in the midst of the
conflict.
Kafka attempts to dissolve the barrier between
Eastern and Western Judaism in his
engagement with Yiddish theater and
language.
Kafka organizes a set of dramatic readings by
the Yiddish actor, Yitzhak Löwy, for the Bar
Kochba Society in which he
•convinces the members to put on the event
•drafts the program and sets up the stage
•numbers the seats and sells the tickets
•writes and presents an “Introductory Talk on the
Yiddish Language” that precedes the
performance (Diaries 180-81).
Kafka seeks to create, not an understanding,
but a temporary intuition of Yiddish culture in
his Western Jewish audience.
“no explanation on the spur of the moment can be of any help to
you”
[there are] “active in yourselves forces and associations with
forces that enable you to understand Yiddish intuitively.”
•The entrance into the Yiddish
language cannot be based on
explanation, but an intuitive
communion with forces of the self.
“many of you are so frightened of Yiddish that one can almost
see it in your faces.”
•Western alienation creates a fear
of the Yiddish language.
“once Yiddish has taken hold of you and moved you […], you will
come to feel the true unity of Yiddish, and so strongly that it will
frighten you, yet it will no longer be fear of Yiddish but of
yourselves. You would not be capable of bearing this fear on its
own, but Yiddish instantly gives you, besides, a self-confidence
that can stand up to this fear and is even stronger than it is.”
•Immersion in Yiddish creates an
intuition of the frightening power of
forces already in oneself that also
offer self-confidence.
“Enjoy this self-confidence as much as you can! but then, when it
fades out, tomorrow and later — for how could it last, fed only on
the memory of a single evening’s recitations! — then my wish for
you is that you may also have forgotten the fear. For we did not
set out to punish you.”
•Participation in the power of
Yiddish culture is limited by the
fundamental estrangement of
Western Judaism from an active
cultural tradition.
Kafka, Franz. “Talk on the Yiddish Language.” In Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the “Fin de Siècle.” Ed. Mark
Anderson. New York: Schocken Books, 1989. 263-66.
Max Brod dates Kafka’s view that the Western and the
Eastern aspects of Judaism were incompatible to the
period preceding the writing of “In the Penal Colony.”
• Kafka’s insistence on his own Western Jewish
separation from the community spirit of Eastern
Judaism leads in 1913 to the only serious
quarrel between the two during their long
friendship.
• Brod saw this conflict to be the result of their
differing ideas as to whether Western Jewish
individualistic attitudes might be reconciled with
an Eastern Jewish community spirit (Brod
112-113).
Brod, Max. Franz Kafka: A Biography. Tr. G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston. New York: Schocken Books, l960.
20th century German culture is dominated
by the conflict between an individualist
ethic and a concern for community.
• The ethic of individual striving of Goethe’s Faust
replaced a Christian ethic to establish a new
type of morality in German culture.
• Franz Kafka reacted to the deterioration of
community life that accompanied the rise of the
individualist ethic.
• “In the Penal Colony” presents in the officer
and the explorer an intractable conflict
between a primitive Eastern Jewish culture
and a civilized Western Jewish culture.
Though the narrator is in a similar position of knowledge
about the colony as the explorer, the narrator still has a
distinct perspective.
Opening Lines of “In the Penal Colony”
The third-person
narrator voices the
same bemusement
as the explorer
would have about
the officer’s “air of
admiration” for what
must be familiar to
him and the
emptiness of the
valley.
“It’s a remarkable piece of
apparatus,” said the officer to the
explorer and surveyed with a certain
air of admiration the apparatus which
was after all quite familiar to him. The
explorer seemed to have accepted
merely out of politeness the
Commandant’s invitation to witness
the execution of a soldier condemned
to death for disobedience and
insulting behavior to a superior. Nor
did the colony itself betray much
interest in this execution. At least, in
the small sandy valley, a deep hollow
surrounded on all sides by naked
crags, there was no one present save
the officer, the explorer, the
condemned man… (213).
Yet, the narrator is
not in the mind of
the explorer
because the
narrator can only
make conjectures
about the explorer’s
intentions.
Kafka, Franz. “In the Penal Colony.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. The Complete Stories. New York: Schocken, 1971.
Reprinted in The Human and Its Others: Divinity, Society, Nature. Humanities Core Course Guide and Reader. Ed. David T.
Pan. Boston: Pearson Learning Solutions, 2010. 213-229.
The narrator has the same bewilderment and
poses the same kind of questions as the
explorer.
the condemned man, who was a stupidlooking, wide-mouthed creature with
bewildered hair and face, and the soldier
who held the heavy chain controlling the
small chains locked on the prisoner’s
ankles, wrists, and neck, chains that were
themselves attached to each other by
communicating links (213).
The narrator:
•points out that the chains seem to
have an ornamental as well as a
practical function.
•reproduces with this remark the
explorer’s attention to this anomaly.
These were tasks that might well have
been left to a mechanic, but the officer
performed them with great zeal,
whether because he was a devoted
admirer of the apparatus or because of
other reasons the work could be
entrusted to no one else (213).
The narrator:
•has no insight into the inner
motives of the officer.
•makes conjectures similar to the
ones the explorer must be making.
The narrator’s perspective shifts
after the death of the officer.
…through the forehead went the point of the
great iron spike.
*
*
*
As the explorer, with the soldier and the
condemned man behind him, reached the
first houses of the colony, the soldier point to
one of them and said: “There is the
teahouse.” (228-29)
•After the death of the
officer, the story could end.
•But instead the gaze of the
narrator shifts and the
explorer suddenly becomes
the focus of the narrator’s
attention.
In the original German
edition, these three stars
were inserted in the text
here as a separation (In der
Strafkolonie 246).
Kafka, Franz. In der Strafkolonie. Franz Kafka Kritische Ausgabe. Ed. Juergen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and
Jost Schillemeit. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982-94. Kafkas Werke im WWW. Web. 18 January 2011.
The officer and explorer have diverging
presuppositions about the process of
judgment.
The explorer
expects that
the sentence
is part of a
discursive
process in
which the
prisoner
•understands
the sentence
conceptually
•presents
arguments in
his defense.
“Does he know his sentence?” “No,” said the officer, eager
to go on with his exposition, but the explorer interrupted
him: “He doesn’t know the sentence that has been passed
on him?” “No,” said the officer again, pausing a moment as
if to let the explorer elaborate his question, and then said:
“There would be no point in telling him. He’ll learn it on his
body.” The explorer intended to make no answer, but he
felt the prisoner’s gaze turned on him; it seemed to ask if
he approved such goings-on. So he bent forward again,
having already leaned back in his chair, and put another
question: “But surely he know that he has been
sentenced?” “Nor that either,” said the officer, smiling at
the explorer as if expecting him to make further surprising
remarks. “No,” said the explorer, wiping his forehead, “then
he can’t know either whether his defense was effective?”
“He has had no chance of putting up a defense,” said the
officer, turning his eyes away as if speaking to himself and
so sparing the explorer the shame of hearing self-evident
matters explained. “But he must have had some chance of
defending himself,” said the explorer, and rose from his
seat. (215-16)
The officer
rejects the
discursive
understanding
of justice and
•sees the
judgment as a
bodily
experience
•considers his
view to be
self-evident
and not
needing
explanation
The explorer focuses on the content of
the sentence while the officer focuses on
the form.
“And the harrow is the instrument for the actual
execution of the sentence.”
“And how does the sentence run?” asked the
explorer.
“that such an important visitor should not even
be told about the kind of sentence we pass is
a new development, which—”
“Our sentence does not sound severe.
Whatever commandment the prisoner has
disobeyed is written upon his body by the
Harrow. This prisoner, for instance,”—the officer
indicated the man—”will have written on his
body: HONOR THY SUPERIORS!” (215)
The explorer is interested in the
content of the sentence.
The officer is interested in the form
of the sentence.
20th century German culture is dominated
by the conflict between an individualist
ethic and a concern for community.
•
The ethic of individual striving of Goethe’s Faust replaced a Christian ethic to establish a new type of morality in
German culture.
–
–
–
19th century reactions condemned Goethe’s Faust for its anti-Christian tendencies.
Beginning with German unification in 1871, critics began to see Faust as a model for German identity.
The individualist ethic of Goethe’s Faust reaches its peak in the Nazi period
•
•
•
Franz Kafka’s work presents a reaction to the deterioration of community life that accompanied the rise of the
individualist ethic.
–
Kafka’s work thematizes the conflict between an individual-focused culture and a community-based culture.
•
•
•
–
–
Though born into an assimilated Jewish family, Kafka became interested in Czech anarchism and Jewish traditions.
Kafka was interested in a Zionism that promoted community over individualism and “life” over concepts and arguments.
Kafka notes a contradiction between the alienation of the intellectual and the vitality of Yiddish folk culture.
The opposition between Western and Eastern Jews dominates Kafka’s conception of himself.
•
•
Kafka describes Western Judaism as a community in decline.
For Kafka, Eastern European Jews still have a living and active community life.
Kafka describes the barrier of incomprehension that separates the Eastern from the Western Jews.
•
•
•
•
amongst established Goethe scholars in the Nazi period.
and amongst Nazi Goethe critics who repeated the arguments of earlier scholars.
Kafka attempts to dissolve the barrier between Eastern and Western Judaism in his engagement with Yiddish theater and language.
Kafka seeks to create, not an understanding, but a temporary intuition of Yiddish culture in his Western Jewish audience.
Max Brod dates Kafka’s view that the Western and the Eastern aspects of Judaism were incompatible to the period preceding the writing
of “In the Penal Colony.”
“In the Penal Colony” presents in the officer and the explorer an intractable conflict between a primitive Eastern
Jewish culture and a civilized Western Jewish culture.
–
The narrator shifts between the perspective of the officer and the perspective of the explorer.
•
•
•
–
Though the narrator is in a similar position of knowledge about the colony as the explorer, the narrator still has a distinct perspective.
The narrator has the same bewilderment and poses the same kind of questions as the explorer.
The narrator’s perspective shifts after the death of the officer.
The officer and explorer have diverging presuppositions about the process of judgment.
•
•
The explorer expects a discursive process and the officer expects a bodily experience.
The explorer focuses on the content of the sentence while the officer focuses on the form.