Engelke, Stadler, Trakl — Wartime Poets, But Not War Poets

Scholars refer to a group of writers as “war poets,” yet there is no strict definition of who is, or is not, a “war poet.” Among the English-language writers of WW1, John McCrae and Wilfred Owen are often cited as war poets. From WW2, Randall Jarrell produced famous war poetry. But were these men war poets, or poets who happened to find themselves in war?

Randall Jarrell, for example, saw the war as a small part of his literary career, and was dismayed when the fame of his war poetry threatened to overshadow his much longer peacetime career.

Some of these authors had established themselves as poets prior to the war; others began serious writing during the war. For some, especially those who died in the war, the war was a large part, or even the entirety, of their careers; for others, the war was a brief period in their careers.

Ultimately, categories like “war poets” and “war poetry” are constructs, and like all constructs, tend to disintegrate under careful inspection. More reliable might be categories like “poets who wrote during a war” or “poets who wrote in a war” or “poets who wrote about a war” or some combination of these.

Likewise, it remains to be investigated which distinctions might exist between “war poetry,” “poetry about the war,” and “poetry written during the war.”

WW1 seems to have generated a larger amount of poetry than WW2 or other wars. There are several common hypotheses about the cause of this phenomenon. WW1 may have inspired more poetry because it was the first, or one of the first, mechanized and industrialized wars, with trench warfare, weapons capable of quick large-scale killing, and equipment produced in huge numbers. Both the poets and the readers needed to revise their mental concept of war, which was based on the slower and less lethal combat of the nineteenth century. The shock and horror of WW1 combat was new, and the war poets communicated this to their audiences.

There are a number of other hypotheses about why WW1 yielded more war poetry than WW2. The investigation of those hypotheses will be left as an exercise for the reader.

Among German-language poets who wrote about WW1 are Gerrit Engelke (died October 13, 1918), Ernst Stadler (died October 30, 1914), and George Trakl (died November 3, 1914). Of course, there were many more. These three, however, will serve as objects for the present discursion.

All three wrote in, during, and about the war. All three had established themselves as poets prior to the war, and are largely remembered for their pre-war works; they are only secondarily considered as war poets.

Unlike the bulk of the English-language war poets, these three developed new styles and genres of poetry, and thus formed turning points in the history of literature. Their educations varied: Stadler completed his doctorate and was a professor of philology when the war began; Trakl had a mediocre secondary-school career, studied pharmacology, and had a fragmented and unremarkable career in pharmacy; Engelke had little secondary education, worked as an apprentice to become a painter, and some of his works were purchased by museums during his lifetime.

§

Trakl’s vocabulary is distinctive. He mentions Herbst more times than he mentions Winter, Sommer, and Frühling put together. He writes frequently of Schweigen and Stille. The word Schatten occurs in his writings about twice as often as hell. He mentions schwarz, blau, and rot more than three times as often as he mentions gelb and grün.

Russell Brown, citing the work of Josef Leitgeb, writes that:

Trakl is “the” poet of the evening: as Leitgeb points out, “Abend” is the second most frequent noun in his poetry, surpassed only by the analogous “Schatten.” It is also featured prominently; for at least thirty lines some form of “Abend” (“Abends,” “am Abend,” “am Abendgarten”) is the first significant word, while twelve poems in the complete work, including the first and last of Die Dichtungen, begin with an adverbial mention of evening.

In addition to Abend, Trakl often sets his poems in the Nacht. By contrast, Morgen and Tag appear less frequently.

In one 768-word prose piece — titled “Offenbarung und Untergang” — he uses some form of the work blau nine times. Schwarz appears eight times. Grün is used twice. Braun, grau, and gelb do not appear at all. Rot is used once.

In all his works together, Schwester appears about three times as often as Bruder.

Trakl uses first-person pronouns infrequently in his poetry, but more frequently in his few prose pieces.

In some of his earliest poetry, e.g., “Morgenlied”, written and published in 1906 before he was 20 years old — and in his last poetry, written only days before his death in November 1914 — he wrestles with form, specifically, with rhyme and with syllable counts. “Morgenlied” was probably not the first poem he ever wrote, but it was the first one he got published, and in it, he refuses to conform to a strict metrical pattern or to a strict rhyme scheme. Later, he embraced a clear structure, both in terms of meter and in terms of rhyme, in poems like “Die Raben” and “Im Winter” which were published in 1913. The reader will be reminded that that date of publication is distinct from the date of composition.

Even when Trakl veers toward what seems to be free verse, there is sometimes a subtle or hidden metrical pattern. His poem “Untergang” merits special attention in this regard.

This poem has nine lines. When a high school teacher asks his students to count the syllables in each line, the results seem to be random: There is no clear pattern of meter. Upon closer examination, however, a clever mathematical pattern emerges: the poem is divided into three stanzas of three lines each. While the number of syllables in each line seems random, and no pattern is discernable on a line-by-line level, the total number of syllables per stanza forms a clear pattern. Each of the three stanzas has the same number of syllables.

Far from yielding to the style of free verse, which some literary historians paint as the inevitable destiny of poetry, Trakl has built in “Untergang” a structure of mathematical determination. Once the reader has scanned the first two stanzas, the third stanza is predicted.

Although Trakl’s approach to meter and rhyme varied over the course of his career, the content of his poetry remained less diverse. From beginning to end, his verses discuss, on the one hand, decay, demise, and passing away, and on the other hand, a transcendental victory over those endings in a spiritual vision, sometimes including the Schwester as a saving force. Trakl’s spirituality is seen, e.g., in “Ein Winterabend” in the final two lines:

Da erglänzt in reiner Helle
Auf dem Tische Brot und Wein.

In an earlier draft of this poem, Trakl even included heilig and Gott to describe the table and the objects on it: an unmistakable allusion to the sacrament. Trakl’s life circumstances perhaps nudged him to meditate on spiritual matters; he was a Lutheran, and in the Austrian society in which he lived, Lutherans constituted a microscopic percentage of the largely Roman Catholic population.

§

Ernst Stadler uses first-person pronouns in his poetry more frequently than Trakl does. His lines contain, on average, more syllables than Trakl’s lines. Stadler’s preferred time of day also differs from Trakl’s, as Russell Brown notes:

Three of Stadler’s fifty-four poems have “Morgen” or “Frühe” in the title. Fifteen, or twenty-eight percent, mention “Morgen.”

Brown is referring to the fifty-four poems included in Stadler’s book Der Aufbruch. Stadler’s total production is significantly greater than fifty-four in total.

Stadler’s style developed over time: His later work tends toward larger numbers of syllables per line, and toward the more frequent use of Morgen.

Although baptized as a Protestant, Stadler’s extended family contained a significant number of Roman Catholics, so he, like Trakl, had cause to ponder spiritual matters. Stadler’s religious allusions bear comparison to Trakl’s. They are perhaps more experiential and less soteriological. Describing a romance in terms of the sacrament, Stadler writes:

Ich fühl, im Bette liegend, hostiengleich mir
zugewendet dein Gesicht.

He also uses the word Gebet in its direct literal sense, e.g., in the poem “Die Befreiung”:

Meine Seele war die kleine Glocke, die im Dorfkirchhimmel der Gebete hieng.

and in the poem “Simplicius wird Einsiedler im Schwarzwald und schreibt seine Lebensgeschichte”

Früher hab ich meinem Gott gedient mit Hieb und Narben so wie heute mit Gebeten,
Ich brauche nicht zu zittern, wenn er einst mich ruft, vor seinen Stuhl zu treten.

The last line of “Fahrt über die Kölner Rheinbrücke bei Nacht” includes the words Einkehr, Kommunion, and Gebet. Throughout the poems included in Der Aufbruch, the word Gott appears twelve times, and at least ten of those occurrences seem to be straightforward references to the Deity.

In her analysis of “Gegen Morgen” Verena Halbe correctly catalogues references to angels, cathedrals, litanies, and churches. She offers an extended analysis of Stadler’s religiosity.

Stadler’s vocabulary includes frequent use of Blut throughout Der Aufbruch. He also refers frequently to water: Flut, Fluß, and Wasser. Various forms of Licht also appear frequently.

While Wasser, Blut, and Licht are certainly central in Biblical and Christian imagery, in Stadler’s writing they are sometimes spiritual and at other times simply pointing to their obvious physical referents.

Verena Halbe notes that Stadler’s language uses colors as simply colors, describing physical objects, without any additional meaning beyond the literal. She reports that Stadler frequently uses nouns not preceded by articles, long lists of nouns in paratactic asyndetic enumeration, and the present participles of verbs.

§

The chief document of Gerrit Engelke’s poetry is the posthumously-published Rhythmus des neuen Europa, which includes both pre-war and wartime poems. There are other texts by Engelke which were not included in this anthology, and are found scattered about in various anthologies and academic journals.

What two major motion pictures did with images, Engelke does with words. Walter Ruttmann’s 1924 film Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt uses images to create a visual rhythm: the industrial cadence of machinery in factories and transportation. Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis had individual scenes which did what Ruttmann’s film did throughout.

Engelke relays the pulsing mechanical tempo of modernity, and while critical of certain aspects of industrialization, manifests an upbeat sense of hope about the future. While attuned to the grinding life of the factory worker, he avoids embracing a political view of the advantages and disadvantages of large-scale manufacturing labor.

Although occasionally mentioning nature and countryside, he always takes the reader quickly again into the city. Using relatively strict patterns of rhyme in most of his poems, Engelke paints a word-picture of urban mechanized life:

Im Fahrstuhlschacht, im Bau am Kran,
Treppauf und ab, durch Straßen über Plätze,
Auf Wagen, Rad und Straßenbahn:
Da schäumt des Menschenstrudels wirre Hetze.

Words like Fahrstuhlschaft are relatively rare in poetry.

Corresponding to his habit of treating people as a mass rather than as individuals, he uses the word Menschenstrudel.

While Engelke occasionally names Takt and Rhythmus explicitly, he more often shows rhythm and motion with words like walzen and Wirbel.

In the poem “Buch des Krieges” Engelke movingly mourns the death of a friend, the grief of the friend’s family, and the loss of the friend’s future. But even in this personal lament, he cites the sound and industrialized efficiency of the modern form of war:

Verfinsternd qualmendes Schicksalgewitter
Und mächtiges Mähen des Todes

and

Marschierten doch Tausend und Tausende rhythmischen Schrittes

After Engelke’s death, after the end of the war, and after the 1921 printing of Rhythmus des neuen Europa, some of his letters, private diary entries, and other texts were published, giving a fuller sampling of his writing about the war. Among these posthumous publications were both prose pieces and never-before-published poems.

In his later poems about the war, he captures rhythmic mechanical motion, and depicts soldiers as moving masses of force in which the individual disappears. His letters from the war show his more personal experiences: monotony and exhaustion, psychological strain, and a growing ambivalence about patriotism.

§

These three poets — Trakl, Stadler, and Engelke — had established styles and careers before the war. The last few texts by all three were written during, in, and about the war.

The war seems to have had little effect on their styles. The technical features of their war poetry differ little from those of their pre-war poetry. This observation undermines the construct of “war poetry” as an independent genre.

Not only did their forms remain largely unchanged, but even in terms of content there is a continuity with their pre-war works. It was hardly a new thing for Trakl to write about death.

Stadler is often read as part of the Expressionist school, and a common element among many Expressionists is a distaste for the modern mechanization of life. WW1 was mechanized industrial warfare on a scale previously unimaginable. Writing about how Stadler might have perceived the war, Detlev Schumann turns Expressionism’s anti-mechanization in an unexpected direction:

Stadler sees in war not this last step in the development of a soul-forsaken mechanized world, but “Aufbruch,” arousing and delivering from the fetters of mechanization, romantic escape into the irrational.

In any case, the war was simply a new, if reality-shattering, case of the struggle against mechanization — a struggle which literary historians tend to attribute to the Expressionists.

Given that Engelke’s pre-war style included both the rhythmic motion of industrialized civilization and the human cost of such mechanization, the war presented a massive amplification of these two themes. Combat was increasingly shaped by technological developments, and given that Engelke lived to the end of the war, he would have experienced tanks, machine guns, poison gas, artillery mounted on railroad cars, and the newer generations of airplanes, among other industrial elements of war. If the cost of pre-war factory life was the experience of living in a Wirbel, then the war was a Wirbel many times larger; if the factory was at times an inhuman Moloch, then the war was a legion of even larger Molochs.

The war presented a vision of mechanized mass movement and the experience of being swept into historical forces; Engelke used metallic and mechanical imagery to report speed and industrial soundscapes.

§

Scholars have long noticed that certain writers seemed to have a premonition of massive destruction in the near future: a prescience about the World War. Detlev Schumann writes:

There was in those days, among those gifted with sight, a vision of what was approaching.

These poets hinted that “the threatening World War is a Divine Judgment on the Hybris of Western Civilization.” A “gruesome imagination stresses especially the element of fiendish destruction, of demonic, crushing fate.” The result is “a war poem before the war, of which” there is more than one example.

Perhaps this is one reason why the war didn’t change core elements of their writing styles: they had already been writing about it; the war was not new information for them.

Reconstructing the Career of Lil Dagover: Grand Tales, Scant Evidence

On the island of Java, in September 1887, a star was born: a German star who would leave a lasting imprint on the movie industry. She was baptized with the impressive name of Marie Antonia Sieglinde Martha Seubert. In her childhood she was usually known as Lilitt. Her family was living on Java because her father, Adolf Karl Seubert, was employed by the Dutch government there.

Even these simple facts, however, require some clarification: in her autobiography, Lilitt writes that she was born in 1897 — a ten-year difference. Whether this was a simple typographical error or a deliberate deception is not clear.

This family was soon shattered by the death, first, of the mother, in 1897, after which the child was sent home to Germany, and then by the death of the father a few years later.

Again some explanation is needed: an exact, or even approximate, date for the father’s death is not available. Some sources report that Lilitt was orphaned at a young age, but there is also a record of a man named Adolf Seubert dying in 1941. How many men might have had that name? Could there have been an estrangement between the father and the daughter? There is no known record of such an estrangement. The date of the death or estrangement would be important for understanding the personal development of Lilitt.

Back in Germany at age ten, she lived for approximately ten years in Tübingen. Apparently, she attended a school in the Münzgasse there.

Prior to her mother’s death, accounts indicate that she spent time in England, France, and Switzerland. Precise details are elusive.

She married an actor, Fritz Daghofer. Again sources vary: the wedding was either in 1907 or 1913. The couple had a daughter, either in 1909 or 1914. The couple divorced sometime in 1919 or 1920.

The pattern is clear: There is little data about the early life of Lilitt, and the small amount of information which is available is ambiguous and dubious. It is reasonable to ask whether this is by design. Did she herself, or someone else, work to keep her life in the shadows? Or to keep the details pliable, in case someone wanted to adjust the narrative of her biography?

It was probably in 1913 — again, accounts vary — that a cinematographer made a short film of Lilitt, probably dancing. The film may have been an experiment, a sort of screen test, rather than a movie intended for commercial release. This happened in Weimar, where she and her husband lived for several years. This film, and probably several other early ones, are almost certainly permanently lost.

Accounts of her later life are more plentiful, detailed, and reliable. It was at this time that she took on the stage name by which most readers will know her: Lil Dagover.

In her autobiography, published in 1979, she gives many stories or vignettes from both the early and the later years of her life. The data is uneven: for example, she might give an exact location of an incident, but fail to give even the vaguest indication of when it might have happened. It is clear that the episodes in her book are not in chronological order, but rather self-contained stories, designed to highlight some theme in her life. Her memoirs may not be an entirely reliable source for the historian.

She relates an undated narrative, which must have happened prior to early 1919, and may have happened in the mid-1910s. Given the location of the story in her book, 1917 seems probable. It tells of a turning point in her career:

Es war an einem Nachmittag, mitten auf der Schillerstraße in Weimar. Ich hatte es eilig, denn ich war mit meinem Mann am Abend zu einem Künstlerfest eingeladen und mußte noch Besorgungen machen. Da trat plötzlich ein Herr auf mich zu, zog den Hut und sagte: »Verzeihen Sie, gnädige Frau, wenn ich Sie so einfach anspreche. Darf ich Sie etwas fragen?«

Wortlos ging ich weiter, erschrocken über das unglaubliche Benehmen eines Mannes, der sich — in Weimar! — soviel Frechheit erlaubte. Der Unbekannte aber blieb kühn an meiner Seite. »Ich beobachte Sie schon eine ganze Weile«, sprach er weiter. »Sie haben ein ausgesprochenes Filmgesicht. Hätten Sie nicht Lust, bei mir zu filmen?«

Das war nun allerdings ein starkes Stück. Ich nahm meinen ganzen Mut zusammen und herrschte ihn an: »Halten Sie es für besonders originell, auf diese Weise eine Dame anzusprechen?«

This story gives the feel of the social expectations of the time and place. Does it capture the dynamic of the exchange between Lil Dagover and the stranger? She had, after all, probably already done some film work.

In addition to the probable short test film around 1913, there is evidence that she made at least two films in 1916, and these were theatrical releases. Would she have been so shocked by the incident she recounts, even if it had happened prior to 1916? Did she feign surprise? Or did she add her surprised reaction to the narrative years afterward? Or did the social customs of the day shape her reaction?

She explains that her family and upbringing were shaped by a hierarchy of officers and officials; that Weimar society was filled with aristocrats, privy counselors, and professors; and that the man’s behavior was an impudent effrontery.

Later that same day, she and her husband attended the aforementioned party:

Ausgelassen ging es auch wieder auf diesem Künstlerfest zu. Ich hatte gerade einen langen Tanz hinter mir und saß erschöpft am Tisch einer Freundin, als quer durch den Saal mein Mann auf mich zukam, von einem Herrn begleitet. Ich erschrak fürchterlich: Denn sein Begleiter war kein anderer als der Rüpel aus der Schillerstraße.

In bester Laune sagte Fritz zu mir: »Darf ich dir einen guten Freund vorstellen? Herr Doktor Wiene!« und zu dem Mann sagte er triumphierend, den Arm um meine Schulter legend: »Meine Frau.«

Der Mann war fassungslos. »Das ist nicht wahr!« rief er, küßte mir verlegen die Hand und entschuldigte sich für sein Verhalten.

»Es ist wahr!« sagte Fritz mit dem ganzen Stolz des Besitzenden.

The comic element is undeniable, and one can easily imagine that Lil Dagover could not resist perhaps adjusting the details to make the story more amusing.

She goes on to explain that her husband and Robert Wiene knew each other, but hadn’t seen each other in a long time. They met by chance on the other side of the large room. As they spoke, Wiene’s eye happened upon Lil, and he mentioned to Fritz Daghofer that he’d seen that woman before and offered to get her into the movie business. Fritz said that he would introduce Wiene to the woman, but didn’t tell Wiene that the woman was his wife!

As she tells it, Wiene explained that her face was perfect for the cinema, and he wanted her to come to Berlin, the center of the German film industry. Her husband Fritz, on the other hand, said that Lil probably wasn’t interested in making movies. She writes that she tried to dissuade Wiene from the idea. Later, however, she sent a few still photos to Wiene.

She waited for a response, but after more than six months, she assumed that no response from Wiene would arrive.

Und eines Tages, als ich längst nicht mehr damit gerechnet hatte, traf es ein: das schicksalsschwere Telegramm, das mich kurz und bündig nach Berlin zu Probeaufnahmen bestellte. Der Absender Robert Wiene hatte die ›Weimarerin‹ also nicht vergessen.

Sofort erzählte ich Fritz davon; dann blickte ich ihn etwas ratlos an.

Er lachte nur und zuckte die Achseln. »Na, nun mach man, mach man!« rief er, und es hörte sich an wie: Da siehst du, was du dir eingebrockt hast! Jedenfalls hatte er nichts dagegen, daß ich in die Kaiserstadt zu Robert Wiene reiste. Offenbar war er überzeugt, daß ich wenige Tage später kleinlaut nach Weimar zurückkehren würde.

Wiene’s letter, written to Lil Dagover in reply to the photos she sent him, must have arrived in Weimar in late 1917 or early 1918. Dagover writes that she arrived in Berlin to explore her options in the film industry in 1918. The project for which Wiene had invited her dissolved, and Wiene sent her instead to work with Fritz Lang; Lang’s plans, however, suddenly changed, and Lang sent her to Ewald Andre Dupont. Finally, Dupont sent her to Alwin Neuß, who ultimately hired her.

Neuß gave her a prominent role in the film Das Lied der Mutter, which appeared in 1918, and Lil signed an ongoing contract with the production company.

In her memoirs, Lil Dagover gives the impression that this was her first film. She does not mention, but records clearly show, that she had starred in several other films prior to 1918. The wording in the book is vague; she makes no explicit claim that this was her first film, but she lets the reader draw this conclusion all too easily. Her goal in writing seems to be to tell engaging anecdotes, not chronicle events precisely.

The next year, her career took a major turn. Lil Dagover went from stardom to superstardom, propelled by her appearance in a film which, over a century later, is still carefully studied by cinema scholars.

Im Spätsommer des Jahres 1919 passierte es, daß der Mann, der mich in Weimar auf der Schillerstraße so kühn angesprochen hatte, daß Dr. Robert Wiene mir eine Hauptrolle in einem Film anbot, der ›Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari‹ hieß.

Wiene rief mich an: »Spinnen Sie noch immer bei Fritz Lang mit? Auch im zweiten Teil?«

Ich sagte: »Leider nicht, ich sterbe schon im ersten Teil.»

Darauf er: »Wie schön! Dann kann ich ja über Sie verfügen!«

Daß dieser Stummfilm in die Filmgeschichte eingehen würde, hatten wir damals beide nicht geahnt. Am wenigstens Produktionschef Erich Pommer, der Leiter der Decla-Bioskop-Filmgesellschaft. Er wollte diesen Stoff vor allem deshalb produzieren, weil er hoffte, es könnte ein billiger Film werden, und seine Rechnung ging auf.

A line attributed to Wiene above contains a pun. Lil Dagover had been working with Fritz Lang on a film titled Die Spinnen.

Nobody working on the Caligari film had an inkling that it would outlive hundreds of other films made in the decades before and after it.

Being part of such a historic and magnificent movie was both a blessing and a curse. The Caligari film would not only shape the movie industry; it would shape Lil Dagover’s career and her public image.

She can be forgiven for dwelling at length on this film in her book: several chapters are devoted to it. The book is a fascinating read, filled with reminiscences of film production and insights into the movie industry. Although sometimes vague, lacking the details a scholar might want, and sometimes revisionist to the point of being factually incorrect for the sake of a good story, the book still gives the reader the impression, if not the data, both of the film industry and of the making of a landmark film.

Remembering Germany’s Glory Days: Can the Wirtschaftswunder Be Resuscitated?

The German economy has been the standard for economic success since the 1948/1949 postwar “economic miracle” which Ludwig Erhard produced — although Erhard himself was quick to note that it was not a miracle, but rather the reproducible and predictable result of certain economic principles. In any case, not only Europe, but the rest of the world, admired the successful and productive German macroeconomy throughout the 1950s and even later.

By the 1970s, the German economy was still a global leader, but at some point, it began to run more on its inherited momentum than on its entrepreneurial initiative.

Germany remained an international powerhouse well into the twenty-first century, when Angela Merkel was able to explain to Barack Obama that economies were about producing products and selling them. She was right, but historian Wolfgang Münchau suggests that already by that point in time, the German economy was really good at manufacturing the products that the previous generation wanted.

Even as military officers are sometimes guilty of preparing to fight the last war rather than the next one, macroeconomic leaders can sometimes be really good at producing and selling the products which were in high demand a decade ago, rather than the products which will be demanded a decade into the future.

The German economy seemed strong, and was strong, right up to the point at which it lost its grasp on global market trends. From the 1970s to the early 2000s, Germany was a manufacturing powerhouse. Münchau recalls his childhood in the city of Mülheim in those days:

The town in which I grew up in Germany was not very large, but it had large companies. Mülheim is situated at the western edge of the Ruhr basin, and today has a population of 170,000. On my daily tram journey to my high school in the center of town, I passed two factories located next to each other. They were surrounded by large gray apartment buildings, characteristic of industrial towns in Germany and other parts of central Europe at the time. The first of the factories made pipelines. The second one made nuclear power reactors. The parents of several of my friends used to work in those factories — some as engineers or managers, and one as a nuclear physicist. Pipelines and nuclear reactors were the gears that powered the German economy. They were the life force of Germany’s industrial model.

A bit gritty, but successful: the German economy allowed middle-class families to own cars and take vacations. Other western European nations envied the German standard of living, and eastern European nations — the Warsaw Pact — saw West Germany as the gold standard which the Soviet Union and the Cold War kept ever at bay.

Even though West Germany — unification would happen in 1990 — was technically an occupied territory, given the presence of American, French, and British troops, the United States was eager to pay for products imported from West Germany. In American retail businesses, “made in West Germany” was a selling point: high quality at a low price.

But the transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy to an information economy to a cyber economy was underway, even if only in its embryonic stages. The strength of the German macroeconomy was being slowly undermined, and its business leaders and political leaders were perhaps not quite aware of the transition.

This was in the 1970s. Back then, Germany was the world’s leading producer of nuclear plants, and opted for nuclear power for its future energy needs. Pipelines, too, played an important role in German energy policy, especially after the first oil crisis in 1973. It was these pipelines that would later give Germany access to Norwegian oil and Russian gas.

The importance of energy had still not hit home to economists in Germany and in many other countries. When coal was readily available and steel mills seemed to be the primary driver of a nation’s economy, few foresaw that the price of oil or electricity would steer the future.

By the time that Merkel left office and Olaf Scholz became Chancellor, it was clear that a new economic model — based on information, data, and the service sectors — was much more influential than many business leaders in Germany expected it to be.

The woes and travails of the German macroeconomy over the last decade have been this: how to sustain its role as a global leader in manufacturing, and yet additionally assume a role as a leader in software, cybertechnology, and venture capitalism.

This, according to Wolfgang Münchau, is the challenge for Germany in the second quarter of the twenty-first century.

Frida Kahlo and Her German Heritage: Lessons from Her Father

Although Frida Kahlo died in 1954, it was not until the mid-1970s that her art became widely known among the broader public. It had been known, of course, to scholars in the field of art history since the 1930s. Frida herself had a hand in creating her own posthumous legend, inasmuch as she managed and marketed details of her life for the consuming public.

Already the very beginning of Frida’s life is an example of her ability to package and promote her own persona. She was born in 1907, but consistently stated that 1910 was the year of her birth: she did this to link her life with the life of the Mexican nation-state. At birth, she was named “Frieda” but later changed it to “Frida” in solidarity with the German people who were being oppressed by the Nazi government.

Two of the most basic facts about any human being — one’s name and one’s date of birth — were recreated by Frida about herself.

She also sometimes took liberties in telling her family’s history: at times, she described them as Hungarian Jews, whereas they were in reality Lutherans from southwest Germany.

If Frida re-made her life’s story, it may have been because she was following a family tradition. Her father, Wilhelm Kahlo, reinvented himself when he emigrated from Germany and immigrated to Mexico in 1891. Born in the 1870s, he renamed himself Guillermo. Explaining Wilhelm’s life, historian Hayden Herrera writes that “he was a successful photographer who had just been commissioned by the Mexican government to record the nation’s architectural heritage.”

As a photographer, Wilhelm had an eye for things like form, shape, space, line, and texture — the elements of an image. He introduced Frieda to painting. The skill transfer from his photography to her painting was one dimension of their close parent-child relationship, as Hayden Herrera explains:

Guillermo Kahlo was a fastidious technician with a stubbornly objective approach to what he saw; in his photographs, as in his daughter’s paintings, there are no tricky effects, no romantic obfuscation.

For Wilhelm Kahlo — for business purposes using the name Guillermo — to receive a significant contract from the Mexican government “was a remarkable achievement for a man who had arrived in Mexico without great prospects, just thirteen years before.” He’d arrived in Mexico and worked in a variety of small businesses in the German emigre community there. His career didn’t seem to have a strong sense of direction until he got into photography. This was the world into which Frieda was born, as Hayden Herrera reports:

He arrived in Mexico City with almost no money and few possessions. Through his connections with other German immigrants, he found a job as a cashier in the Cristaleria Loeb, a glassware store. Later he became a salesman in a bookstore. Finally, he worked in a jewelry store called La Perla, which was owned by fellow countrymen with whom he had traveled from Germany to Mexico.

Wilhelm was able to nimbly shift from one business to another because he had a good education — although an education which was broken off before it was complete. He’d been a student at the university in Nünberg, but a head injury left him susceptible to epileptic seizures and unable to earn his diploma.

Frida sometimes helped her father when he was experiencing a seizure. Later in life, she faced her own physical health problems — first polio, then injuries from a bus accident — equipped with the example of her father, who dealt with a medical condition and yet excelled in his profession.

At home, Frida spoke German with her father. The Kahlo family sent at least some, if not all, of their children to the “Colegio Aleman Alexander von Humboldt,” a school which functioned in German.

Although professionally successful, Guillermo remained a foreigner:

He never really felt at ease in Mexico, and although he was anxious to be accepted as Mexican, he never lost his strong German accent.

In addition to photography and painting, Guillermo filled the family home with culture, giving his children exposure to literature and music.

As befitted a cultured European of that period in Mexico, he also had a small but carefully selected library — mainly German books, including works by Schiller and Goethe, as well as numerous volumes of philosophy.

His working rooms in the house contained his photographic equipment, including cameras and lenses imported from Germany. “Above his desk and dominating the room was a large portrait of a personal hero, Arthur Schopenhauer.”

Hayden Herrera records Guillermo’s daily routine:

Every evening Guillermo Kahlo returned home at the same hour. Solemn, courteous, a little severe, he greeted his family, then went directly into the room that housed his German piano and shut himself in for an hour. His passions were Beethoven first, then Johann Strauss.

Just as she had changed her name from “Frieda” to “Frida” as a protest to the brutalities which the Nazis inflicted on the Germans, so also Guillermo opposed Naziism.

Frida saw bravery, both in the way that Guillermo lived with his physical handicap, and in the way that he took a stand against Naziism. She wrote: “He suffered for sixty years with epilepsy, but he never stopped working, and he fought against Hitler.”

The mature works of Frida Kahlo manifest that she shared her father’s passion for the visual arts, his perseverance in the face of physical handicaps, and his thoughtful reflection on culture.

Trying to Get Your Dream Job? Let Potential Employers Know That You Are Proficient in German!

The state of the job market in 2024, despite wars, a pandemic, and political and economic upheavals, is in one way still as it was in 2019, when Ross Ibbetson wrote that German is “the most sought-after second language for employers.”

He went on to report that “vacancies for German speakers were up.” Companies are regularly posting openings for professionals who can read and write German — and in some cases speak it, as well. The high demand for German proficiency is accompanied by premium salaries, so not only can you get that dream job, but they’ll pay you more to be in it.

Because Germany is both an “inward investor” in various economies around the globe, and because exports to Germany are high and growing, German is “the most valued second-language for employers” and “job vacancies for German speakers rose.”

Alan Jones confirmed that German is “the language most sought-after by employers.” As a result of Germany’s steady economic policies and growth, “vacancies specifying German language skills increased by more than a tenth over the past three years, compared with only a slight rise in demand for French speakers.”

Demand for professionals in various fields also includes those proficient in Italian, Chinese, and French. German is, however, more central in the global economy and more desired by potential employers.

Frida Kahlo’s Social Life: German Friends, German Family

The reader might be forgiven for thinking it odd to speak of a “social life” in connection with Frida Kahlo. The reader could well have gained the impression that she was a stern and always-serious person. This impression might arise from the oh-so-grim interpretations which some art historians make of her work, and from the often somber subjects in her work.

But Frida was a person who enjoyed the company of friends and family, and who had a lively sense of humor. Despite the fact that she lived in physical and emotional pain, despite the fact that she grieved the death of her child, she made jokes and laughed at the jokes of others.

One of Frida’s friends was Lucienne Bloch. Frida and Lucienne had a number of things in common. Both of them had fathers born in the German-speaking areas of Europe, and both fathers had emigrated from Europe and immigrated to the Americas. Both fathers were photographers. Both Frida and Lucienne learned the methods of imagery from their fathers: lighting, framing, composition, subjects, etc. Both Frida and Lucienne used German when speaking with their fathers.

As a trusted friend, Lucienne was present for some of the pivotal moments in Frida’s life, as historian Elizabeth Carpenter writes:

Perhaps more than any other photographer who came before or after her, Lucienne Bloch had unprecedented access to Kahlo throughout the 1930s, during which time they were very close friends and traveling companions. The daughter of Swiss photographer and composer Ernest Bloch, Lucienne first came to be acquainted with Rivera soon after he and Kahlo arrived in New York City in 1931. A multitalented artist herself, Bloch was invited by Rivera to join the crew of assistants poised to begin work on his Rockefeller Center mural commission. In addition to her artistic labor on the murals, she also faithfully documented Rivera at work and Kahlo’s frequent visits to the site. After Nelson Rockefeller’s controversial declaration that work on the mural must be stopped due to the prominent position held by the portrait of Lenin in the composition, it was Bloch who clandestinely took the only photographs documenting the development of the work, which was ultimately destroyed. It was also Bloch who traveled from New York to Detroit in June of 1932 to keep Kahlo company during the early stages of her pregnancy and to see her through a subsequent miscarriage. Bloch was there for her friend again three months later, when Kahlo received a telephone call that her mother was dying of breast cancer. They boarded a train for Mexico the next day, and their trip was sensitively recorded by Bloch with her Kodak Brownie snapshot camera.

Not only were the 1930s a traumatic time for Frida’s personal life, but world events were also turbulent. Well into adulthood — Frida was around thirty years old at the time — she changed her from “Frieda” to “Frida” to protest the harsh and genocidal dictatorship which Hitler’s National Socialism inflicted on the German people. Appropriately, “Frieda” is a German forename which means peace.

Frida was willing to change more than her first name. She played fast-and-loose with her personal story, changing details for symbolic reasons. Although she was born in 1907, she often gave her birthdate as 1910, a significant year in Mexican history. She also occasionally alluded to ancestors who were Hungarian or Jewish — or both — although she was acquainted with her family’s history which had deep roots in western Germany.

Frida embraced Mexico, the land into which her father had immigrated. Yet she could also see Mexican culture from a distance, given her German roots. She celebrated Mexican culture, and yet could view Mexico analytically, as Elizabeth Carpenter explains:

Kahlo’s interrogation and testing of Catholic, patriarchal, and bourgeois mores was a primary motivation throughout her life, ultimately helping her to define her identity as an artist and informing the art that she produced.

Frida’s heritage included both the Mexican version of Roman Catholicism that she inherited from her mother and a long tradition of German Lutheranism on her father’s side. Her world included Mexican patriarchy, but also a European sensibility which saw women as capable of creating worthy and significant works of art. She lived among the rooted Mexican middle class, but also among her father’s German emigre community in Mexico. Her life’s structure prevented her from being totally shaped by one single culture.

Not only her father, but also both of her grandfathers were involved in photography on a professional level. Images were the family stock-in-trade. It would have been surprising if Frida had not worked in the visual arts.

Not only Frida, but at least one of her siblings, spoke German fluently enough to attend a school in which German was the language of instruction. Later in life, Frida maintained her ability to speak German, but was not comfortable writing it. The letter which she wrote to her distant relatives in Germany after the end of WW2 is in English. She writes enthusiastically about details of the family history, having retained in her memory the stories of previous generations of Kahlo women and men, and is able to furnish details in her letter.

To be multilingual is to be able to think from different perspectives. About Frida, historian Victor Zamudio-Taylor writes:

She spoke German and English but also adored the colloquial forms of her native Spanish spoken in central Mexico.

From the cards and letters she wrote and received, and from casual photographs taken with friends and family, the viewer sees both the serious and even austere Mexican traditionalism, but also a fun-loving personality who grins and laughs.

A solid, middle-class Mexican version of social standards and Roman Catholicism were Frida’s inheritance from her mother. A German Lutheranism, a love of classical music on the piano, and a curiosity about Schopenhauer’s speculative philosophy were her inheritance from her father. Frida could not have been who she was without her father’s German artistic sensibilities. It is for good reason that more than one biographer records that he addressed his daughter habitually as Liebe Frieda.

Social Justice Arises from Ludwig Erhard’s Economic Policies

May 10, 1945 is sometimes called Stunde Null — “zero hour” — in German history. The war had officially ended at midnight. The German people finally had peace and were freed from the tyrannical oppression of Adolf Hitler. Yet it was the most difficult of times.

In German cities, bombs had destroyed homes and workplaces. Rubble filled and blocked streets and sidewalks. Many people had no access to electricity or running water. Subway, streetcar, bus, and railroad transportation were nearly nonexistent. Food supplies were insufficient, and people actually died of starvation.

Those who use the phrase “zero hour” to describe this moment in history see it as a moment when the German people were starting over. The past had been destroyed and they had nothing. They had to rebuild not only physical infrastructure, but the society itself, out of the emptiness.

Other historians argue against using the term Stunde Null, pointing out that the Germans were greatly burdened by the past. They were not starting with a clean slate. The past was real and was inflicting further suffering on them.

From mid-May 1945 onward, Germany was under the military governorship of the four victorious Allies — The United States, Britain, France, and the USSR. Paradoxically, these governors, having defeated the Nazis, left Nazi policies in place. These policies cruelly oppressed the Germans after the war. For twelve years, from 1933 to 1945, the National Socialist government had brutalized the German people. With the Nazis defeated and gone, the vicious policies were left in place.

The people had hoped that the war’s end would bring an end to the persecution, but the Allies continued the same practices. The abusive practices of the Nazi government grew from its name: National Socialism. The Nazis had “nationalized” various industries, confiscating people’s property, and placing businesses under the control of the government. They had introduced aspects of socialism — eliminating the freedom of the marketplace — by controlling wages and prices, by dictating the quantity of products to be manufactured, and by crushing the people with high rates of taxation.

The Nazis occasionally violated their own principles — they presented themselves as saving people from the evils of communism and socialism, while implementing socialist policies — they occasionally privatized industries when it served their purposes, violating their own broad trend of nationalizing industries. But the net effect and overall trend of Nazi policy was to eliminate personal economic freedom and to eliminate political liberty, which amounted to eliminating social justice.

Those National Socialist policies were foundational to fascism, and to be expected from the Nazi party. It was, however, unexpected that the American, British, and French would continue those policies — the same genocidal policies against which they had waged a long and painful war.

Along with the Allied military governors, one German political party, the SPD, also sought the continuation of National Socialist economic policies. These policies were driving Germany down at accelerating rates into misery. Observers inside and outside of Germany feared that the nation would be consigned permanently to a third-world status, or that it would take more than a century to rebuild the country.

The great surprise began in an area known as the Bizone. At the war’s end, most German territory was divided and occupied by four victorious Allies. The Americans and the British coordinated their governance of their respective occupational zones, and so the name Bizone arose. The French, whose occupational zone was defined somewhat later, also joined, and sometimes the area is called the Trizone.

In the Bizone, an innovative economist named Ludwig Erhard saw the problem and proposed a solution. To be anti-Nazi and anti-fascist, he argued, one must do the opposite of what the National Socialists had done, as Lawrence White explains:

Fortunately for ordinary Germans, Erhard — who became director of the economic administration for the U.K.-U.S. occupation Bizone in April 1948 — thought otherwise. A currency reform that he helped to design was slated to replace the feeble old Reichsmark with the new Deutsche mark in all three Western zones on June 20. Without approval from the Allied military command, Erhard used the occasion to issue a sweeping decree abolishing most of the price controls and rationing directives. He later told friends that the American commander, Gen. Lucius Clay, phoned him when he heard about the decree and said: “Professor Erhard, my advisers tell me that you are making a big mistake.” Erhard replied, “So my advisers also tell me.”

Erhard’s mission was to undo what the Nazis had done. His conceptual program included lowering taxes, removing wage and price controls, privatizing industry, and the end of the “command economy.” A command economy is one in which the government dictates how many of each type of product will be manufactured.

The Soviets criticized Erhard’s views. The SPD criticized Erhard’s views. Some American economists criticized Erhard’s views. But Ludwig Erhard had been, prior to his job as economic advisor in the postwar era, a researcher in an economic think-tank, and had been an assertive member of the anti-Hitler underground resistance movement. He was unmoved by his critics. The policy he proposed was not in error, as Lawrence White reports:

It was not a big mistake. In the following weeks Erhard removed most of the Bizone’s remaining price controls, wage controls, allocation edicts and rationing directives. The effects of decontrol were dramatic.

By every metric, the German economy — i.e., the economy in the Bizone and Trizone — began to recover, and it recovered quicker than anyone thought possible. Wages rose. The standard of living rose. Unemployment fell. German industries rebuilt and modernized.

In mid-1945, Germany was starving, had no resources, and was living in primitive squalor. Within a decade, it had the largest, healthiest, and most powerful economy in Europe, and the second most powerful economy in the world.

The free market was the path to social justice. The laissez-faire policies which Erhard introduced opened the path to true democracy: a government of freely-elected representatives.

The Economics of Ludwig Erhard: Applying Simple Principles in Complicated Situations

After May 1945, when WW2 ended, Germany was a physically and economically devastated country. Infrastructure was nonexistent in many places: electricity, running water, and telephone service were rare. Bombs had destroyed both residential and commercial structures. Railroads, highways, streets, and bridges had been wrecked.

Around the world, many economists, historians, and political leaders expressed the view that Germany might find it impossible to rebuild. Many thought that Germany would be permanently relegated to a third-world status. Some observers believed that, if Germany could rebuild, it would take more than 100 years. The country had taken such a terrible beating that recovery seemed impossible.

Yet within a single decade, Germany would be the most powerful economy in Europe, and by many metrics, the second most powerful economy in the world. Commentators from other nations were amazed, as Lawrence White writes:

Germany became a role model for recovery from a very different crisis. In the aftermath of World War II, Germany’s cities, factories and railroads lay in ruins. Severe shortages of food, fuel, water and housing posed challenges to sheer survival.

In 1945, the situation was so desperate that many Germans starved to death. Millions of young German men had died in the war, and now their families were dying from a lack of food at home.

In the immediate postwar situation, the armies of the winning countries (The United States, France, Britain, and the USSR) had political and civil control over Germany. The Germans were not allowed to have their own government until late 1949.

At first, the postwar military occupational powers enforced the economic policies which were on the books at the end of the war — the Nazi policies. The word “Nazi” is short for “National Socialist,” and the Nazis lived up to that name.

The Nazis nationalized industries — the government seizing an individual’s property. This was the case, e.g., for two major aircraft companies, Junkers and Arado, and for two railroad systems, the Lübeck-Büchener Railway and the Brunswick Landes railway. The Nazi government also created the massive Reichswerke Hermann Göring, a government-owned and -operated industrial conglomerate. State-owned companies were a central part of the fascist control of Germany.

The other part of “National Socialist” is the socialist economic programs which the Nazis implemented. Although in their propaganda, the Nazis portrayed themselves as rescuing the German people from the evils of communism and socialism, the reality was that the Nazis imposed regulations which choked the free functioning of markets. Opposing laissez-faire economic systems is a cornerstone of socialist economics.

Accordingly, the Nazis imposed wage and price regulations. Only the government could set prices for merchandise, and only the government could determine how much workers would be paid. In this way, the Nazis controlled nearly every aspect of the economy.

The Nazis also imposed significant taxes on all Germans, which amounted simply to the confiscation of the property of ordinary working-class people.

Finally, the Nazis engaged in a “command economy.” They dictated how much of each product might be manufactured — no more, and no less, was allowed.

As strange as it may be, the four powers who controlled Germany after the war initially decided to keep the genocidal Nazi economic policies in place. After fighting a war to defeat National Socialism, the victorious Allies kept Nazi economic regulations in effect, as Lawrence White reports:

Unfortunately, occupation policy makers actually perpetuated the shortages by retaining the price controls the Nazi government had imposed before and during the war. Consumers and businessmen battled against the bureaucratic regime of controls and rationing in what the German economist Ludwig Erhard described as Der Papierkrieg — the paper war. Black markets were pervasive.

The downward death spiral of the German economy continued to worsen. The great recovery began only when Ludwig Erhard persuaded the military governors to allow the dismantling of Nazi policies. Erhard worked systematically to undo fascism: his policies reduced regulations, reduced taxes, and reduced government ownership of industries. People could freely negotiate wages and prices, and could decide for themselves how much of any given product they wanted to manufacture.

Ludwig Erhard was simply the anti-Nazi and anti-fascist economist. Whatever the Nazis had done to the economy, Erhard would do the opposite.

Within a year, the growth of the German economy was significant. Unemployment fell, wages rose, and the standard of living rose. German companies became more innovative than their European competitors. Economists coined the word Wirtschaftswunder — “economic miracle” — to describe the turnaround.

Erhard commented that there was no miracle, but rather merely the consistent and sound application of economic policies and principles. He explained that prosperity and freedom were coextensive. The undoing of the fascist control of the economy was simultaneously the introduction of social justice and the beginning of an economic rebirth. He wrote:

Das, was sich in Deutschland in den letzten neun Jahren vollzogen hat, war alles andere als ein Wunder. Es war nur die Konsequenz der ehrlichen Anstrengung eines ganzen Volkes, das nach freiheitlichen Prinzipien die Möglichkeit eingeräumt erhalten hat, menschliche Initiative, menschliche Energien wieder anwenden zu dürfen. Wenn darum dieses deutsche Beispiel über das eigene Land hinaus einen Sinn haben soll, dann kann es nur der sein, aller Welt den Segen der menschlichen Freiheit und der ökonomischen Freizügigkeit deutlich zu machen.

The rebirth of the German economy was also the rebirth of a truly democratic society. Justice demanded the undoing of Nazi policies, which brought about personal freedom and political liberty, as well as prosperity.

Frida Kahlo: German or Mexican?

Great fame has come to the name Frida Kahlo. In the name itself is a key to the mystery of her self-concept. Around the age of thirty, she changed her name from “Frieda” to “Frida” in an act of protest: It was the 1930s, and she was not timid in saying, “Hitler’s a pig. He’s mistreating the Jews and and wants to wreak havoc across Europe!”

This incident is recorded by Marc Petitjean, whose father, Michel Petitjean, was a friend of Frida.

She changed the spelling of her name to distance herself from the brutality of the National Socialist government. Her disdain was for the Nazis. For the oppressed and suffering Germans, who were the victims of the Nazis, she felt kinship. After the war, she was enthusiastic in establishing a connection with her extended family members who lived in Germany.

Frida’s relationship to her own name is therefore already complex.

Long before changing her name, Frida’s heritage was established as a mixture of German and Mexican, as Marc Petitjean writes:

Frida’s father, Wilhelm Kahlo, was the son of a jeweler who lived in Baden-Baden in Germany and whom Frida maintained was of Hungarian descent. At twenty-one he emigrated to Mexico and Hispanicized his first name to Guillermo. He worked in the German community as a cashier in a glassware shop, as a salesman in a bookshop, and for a jeweler.

Wilhelm played important roles in Frida’s life: he transmitted her family’s German heritage to her, he taught her the German language, and he introduced her to the visual arts and encouraged her to pursue them. Wilhelm was himself an artist, working mainly in photography and graphic design.

The Kahlo home was a cultural enclave, and Wilhelm felt at home in Mexico’s small community of German immigrants. He did not, however, isolate: he learned to speak Spanish well, and more importantly, to read and write it. He developed significant business connections among Mexican business and government leaders.

Marc Petitjean describes Wilhelm’s personality, and his influence on Frida:

Guillermo was a Germanophile who read Schopenhauer and played Beethoven sonatas on the piano alone in his study. He taught Frida to speak German, to paint, and to take photographs.

Frida’s mother was a widow named Maria. Her first husband had also been a German. Wilhelm Kahlo was a widower; Maria was his second wife and the mother of Frida. Marc Petitjean records that Maria was “illiterate.” Maria died a decade before Wilhelm died. In sum, Wilhelm had more time and more intellectual resources to shape Frida’s thinking about art and culture.

Two cultures lived inside Frida: the Mexican which surrounded her, and the German which shaped her home life. Marc Petitjean recounts his father’s analysis of Frida:

My father was particularly aware of the two cultures within Frida: “a degree of rationalism, due to her German heritage, grew more complex when it was combined with Mexican exuberance, Mexican generosity, and Mexico’s colorful religious fervor. Frida was all this rolled into one.” She was completely Mexican and German. It fascinated him.

“In order to” express her contempt for Hitler and the National Socialists and to “distance herself from Nazi” politics, “she even claims that her father’s family is Jewish,” according to Petitjean. Sometimes she added Hungarian to her heritage. Frida’s view of historical reality was rather fluid and fanciful. There is no evidence that the Kahlo family had Jewish or Hungarian roots. The family seems to have been long established in western and southwestern Germany.

Frida often rewrote history to make a symbolic point: she changed her date of birth to reflect events in Mexican history, sometimes citing it as 1910 instead of 1907.

There are distinctly Mexican features combined with distinctly German features in Frida’s thought and work. Her father’s artistic contributions and affectionate support of Frida’s work are integral to her achievements.

Frida Kahlo’s Father: How Wilhelm Became Guillermo

The fact that Frida Kahlo spelled her name “Frieda” for the first part of her life is symbolic of her heritage. Her father, Wilhelm Kahlo, was a significant artist in his own right.

Wilhelm’s main medium was photography, although he also worked in graphic design, as reported in Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo von Pforzheim bis Mexiko, a monumental biographical study of Wilhelm’s life and career, published in 2005.

In 1890, he emigrated, leaving Germany and settling in Mexico. He brought with him a good middle-class education, the ability to play the piano well, and a love for authors like Goether, Schiller, and Schopenhauer. His collection of German books was a prominent feature in the home in which Frida was raised.

He learned Spanish and became proficient in the language, but continued to use German professionally and at home. He began to call himself Guillermo, the Spanish equivalent of Wilhelm, in social and business situations.

With his first wife, Maria, Wilhelm had three children, two of whom lived to adulthood. Maria died young, and Wilhelm remarried. His second wife was Matilde, who bore five children, four of whom lived to adulthood. Frida was born in 1907.

Some details of Frida’s life, and her father’s life, cannot be precisely clarified. Wilhelm’s education in Germany was clearly a thorough one, allowing him to navigate complicated accounting procedures in the business world, while reading Schopenhauer in his freetime. He could play the piano well, and artistic training, but historians have been unable to determine which schools or universities he attended.

Other details about the family are known, but contradict the fanciful versions which Frida liked to tell. The Kahlos were a well-established German family, and not descendants of Hungarian immigrants into Germany. Frida also liked to vary her date of birth, adjusting it to link it symbolically with the history of Mexico.

While it is routinely reported that Frida studied at the “Colegio Aleman Alexander von Humboldt,” a German language school in Mexico, no documents have survived to prove this. It is known that at least one of Frida’s sisters studied there.

In any case, Frida spoke German at home with her father, who called her liebe Frieda (“dear Frieda”). In the 1930s, she changed the spelling of her name as a protest against the suffering which the National Socialist (“Nazi”) government was inflicting upon the Germans.

Frida’s mother died in 1932, and her father lived almost another decade afterward. It was her father who introduced Frida to painting. Whether she inherited some of his artistic ability, or whether he taught it to her, is an open question.

During Wilhelm’s last decade, Frida apparently absorbed an appreciation for her family’s history. Wilhelm died in 1941, during WW2. When the war was over, Frida was enthusiastic about making contact with distant relatives in Germany — people she’d never met. When she wrote to them, she was able to give a wealth of details about individuals in the Kahlo family, going back several generations. She and her father must have conversed in depth about the family history.

Frida could speak German comfortably with her father, but her ability to write German at an academic level was never strong. After her father’s death, she didn’t use her German much, and so in a 1949 letter to her German relatives, she apologizes for writing in English.

Wilhelm and Frida had an affectionate relationship. He influenced her approach to images, cared deeply and unconditionally for her, and imparted family history to her, so that long after his death, she was enthusiastic to correspond with the Kahlo family members in Germany. A substantial part of Frida’s self-concept was German.

Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle co-edited Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo von Pforzheim bis Mexiko. The book was published in 2005 and includes essays by Juan Coronel Rivera, Cristina Kahlo Alcala, Helga Prignitz-Poda, and Raquel Tibol.

Poet as Prophet: Trakl’s Redeeming Truth, Ready to Resurrect the Collapse He Predicts

Trakl is a prophet. To which extent did he see himself as such? The prophetic tradition is defined by the three activities of a prophet: To be a spokesman for God; to be a social critic; to predict the future. Within the larger category of prophet are at least two subtypes: the condemning prophet and the weeping prophet.

Trakl saw the world — or saw its essence, its future, its fate — as something which is passing away. Sometimes it is passing away slowly, in a process of decay. Sometimes it is passing away quickly, in a violent destruction. Sometimes Trakl’s lyric imagery pictures the world after its demise, the viewpoint of one walking among the ruins.

But this destruction is not meaningless. It takes places within a conceptual framework, as Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis writes:

The experience of the shattering of the world, however, exhibits in Trakl two aspects that qualify its destructiveness by providing it with a religious context. The speechless and unutterable pain (sprachloser Schmerz) experienced is described in terms of an event (ereignet) that has irrupted from outside the sphere of its occurrence (hereingebrochen), and that Trakl names a judgment or sentence (Gericht).

There is a moral and spiritual logic in Trakl’s vision of the world’s decline. The routine chain of cause and effect operates within the sensible physical world. Trakl opens the door to the possibility of metaphysical causes producing tangible events.

Trakl is not a philosopher: certainly not one in the tradition of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, or Schopenhauer. Yet he is indirectly encountering some of the metaphysical topics which are known to philosophers.

It is not mere abstract principles of metaphysics which interest Trakl. The events he describes or envisions are loaded with value, whether good or evil:

It is a feature of the figural imagination to think of the world, not as an encapsulated realm in which cause and effect succeed each other with relentless horizontality, but rather to conceive of existence in time as an open-ended situation that may at any moment (and does, indeed, at all moments, although not always perceptibly) undergo a sudden incursion of God’s free action.

Trakl sees destruction coming to his society — slowly or quickly — and anticipates wreckage which will be left afterwards. Yet his tone is not one of fear or panic. Nor does he condemn: he is not a prophet of wrath, he takes no joy in the world’s downfall.

Is the coming collapse a punishment? If so, is it just? Is it God’s vengeance? Trakl doesn’t answer directly. His focus is on finding some way to retain meaning in the midst of the disintegration, and in so doing, offer some hint of renewal after the unraveling of civilization.

He views the apocalypse not sensationalistically in the manner of a tabloid newspaper — die Boulevardzeitungen were already well-known in Trakl’s day — but rather seeks for himself, and hopes to explain to others, a cosmic context which shattering of culture makes sense, even if it is a painful sense.

Trakl’s description of his painful experience is, then, in keeping with his figural view of the world as embodied in his poems. The devastating event, furthermore, leads the poet to formulate a desire for persevering in the “doing of the truth,” an expression pregnant with scriptural associations concerning those who are doers and not mere hearers of the Word.

The power of Trakl’s lyric style is that it universally evokes within the reader a sense of darkness — dunkel, finster, düster — in a literal optical sense of those words, words which occur frequently in his texts. Even in passages which don’t use those words, the sensation of darkness is inevitably and involuntarily called forth in the mind of the reader.

There is an internal tension within Trakl’s texts between, on the one hand the attempt to explain a framework within which the world’s destruction has some meaning, and on the other hand, the pain and darkness of that destruction. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis explains:

We must conclude that, in some manner, Trakl regards his frightful experience as occurring within a context that determines, but is not to be equated with, the immediate phenomena of namelessness, painfulness, and unremitting darkness (steinernes Dunkel).

There are dozens of occurrences of words like Schatten, dunkel, finster, and düster in Trakl’s poems. Yet references to Wahrheit are also significant.

In a poem titled Heiterer Frühling Trakl makes this melancholy observation:

Wie scheint doch alles Werdende so krank!

Yet only a few lines later use some form of wahr twice, followed immediately by a reference to Matthew 28:20, the last sentence of the last chapter of Matthew’s text: an ending, but an ending with a forward-looking promise.

So schmerzlich gut und wahrhaft ist, was lebt;
Und leise rührt dich an ein alter Stein:
Wahrlich! Ich werde immer bei euch sein.
O Mund! der durch die Silberweide bebt.

In a poem titled Romanze zur Nacht Trakl describes a way of seeing which is truthful. This could even be a programmatic statement for his lyricism.

Sehr friedlich schaut zur Nacht das Kind
Mit Augen, die ganz wahrhaft sind.

The truth of Trakl’s texts is his gift to the dying world: a gift which will give meaning to this death, and which lays the foundation, however ambiguous, for a life after this death. Trakl predicts a cataclysmic downfall, but does so with sympathy, empathy, and compassion. His prediction is true, and because it is, it can point the way to rebirth after the disintegration.

The Moloch Imagery in Early Twentieth Century German Expressionism

During the first third of the twentieth century, as during the preceding four millennia, the word ‘Moloch’ was understood to refer to an idol common among the Canaanites and other peoples of the Ancient Near East (ANE). Since then, some philologists have proposed that the word refers rather to the act of sacrificing to this idol, rather than to the idol itself. In either case, it is significant that, not only is Moloch cited by two Expressionists, Gerrit Engelke and Fritz Lang, but rather that also cited in the same way in the same context.

Gerrit Engleke is a poet who is often assigned to the category of Expressionism. Naturally, delegating various authors to various literary movements is always a debatable activity, because such genres are constructs and not concrete realities. Engelke’s texts are, however, specific data points, and in particular, his poem “Die Fabrik” from the first two decades of the twentieth century.

More precisely, this poem must have been written before his death in 1918, but most probably before 1915, and likely after 1910. The dating of this poem will require more research and it’s possible that the question about the exact date of its composition will never be answered.

In any case, Engelke writes about a factory — the factory as a concept — and its treatment of, and impact on, its workers:

Tag und Nacht: Lärm und Dampf,
Immer Arbeit, immer Kampf:
Unerbittlich schröpft das Moloch-Haus
Stahl und Mensch um Menschen aus.

The noteworthy aspect of Moloch worship is that it routinely and regularly included human sacrifice. Human sacrifice was not a rare thing in the ANE, or in the ancient world around the globe. It was a nearly universal practice. But Moloch worship distinguished itself by the quantity of its victims and the age of its victims. Perhaps only the Inca, Maya, and Aztec surpassed the Moloch worshippers in the mass quantities of human lives which were harshly ended. Moloch worship also distinguished itself by the painful manner of execution — being burned to death — of its victims, and by the age of its victims — many were infants.

Moloch worship combined, among other, these two factors: large quantities of death, and death of the young.

What moved both Fritz Lang and Gerrit Engelke to allude to Moloch was this: the concept of “assembly line” killing — a way of manslaughter which was routine, largescale, and indifferent to the plight of its victims.

Factory work of the early twentieth century was — or more importantly, appeared to Lang and Engelke to be — a ruthless consumption of young lives. It is no coincidence that both artists were associated with “worker” movements.

Engelke is often classified as a Arbeiterdichter and his work as Arbeiterdichtung. One of the few publications which he made during his lifetime was in an anthology under the title Schulter an Schulter: Gedichte von Drei Arbeitern. Other words used to describe him include Arbeiterschriftsteller, and to describe his work include Arbeiterliteratur.

It remains to be investigated, to which extent Engelke’s knowledge of factory life was first hand, and to which extent it was secondhand. It seems that he was not employed as a factory worker for any extended period of time.

In any case, he expressed sympathy or empathy or compassion for blue collar workers. One of the ways in which he expressed this was by means of the Moloch allusion in his poem “Die Fabrik.”

The ceaseless and mechanistic killing of Moloch victims in the ANE, and ongoing weariness of factory workers in early twentieth-century industrialized nations, are expressed in the Tag und Nacht and immer of factory work, which schröpft steel and humans aus.

Engelke perceives a connection between Moloch and modern industrialization. Certainly, the connection is debatable. The Industrial revolution is usually thought to be in the 1700s, and possibly in the early 1800s in parts of Europe and North America. It would have been in its very latest phase by the early 1900s. Some historians write of a “second industrial revolution” during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

In any case, it is true that workers experienced misery during the transition from pre-industrial to industrial economies. Engelke and Fritz Lang both depict such misery. Whether the misery of the factory is comparable to the misery of the Moloch victims would be a question of how one quantifies and compares sufferings. That question will be left as an exercise for the reader.

In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the protagonist, after both witnessing the exhausting labor of the factory workers and witnessing the injuries and deaths of an industrial accident, exclaims: “Moloch!” — and visually, the machines of the factory morph into a scene of human sacrifice in the ANE.

Gerrit Engelke and Fritz Lang have come to the same conclusions, and express those conclusions with the same metaphor.

Fritz Lang began filming Metropolis in 1925. The script is based on a novel written by his wife. His wife’s name was Thea von Harbou. The novel was published in 1925, so one may reasonably assume that Lang was aware of the story from early on: precise evidence is not possible, but perhaps 1924 would be a reasonable guess.

Several questions present themselves: Were Fritz Lang and his wife aware of Engelke’s poem Die Fabrik? Did they get the Moloch metaphor from Engelke? Did they arrive at it independently? Or did they get it from another source?

One may further ask whether Engelke invented the Moloch metaphor, or whether it found it in another source.

In an article published in 2007, Michael Cowen discusses Metropolis and cites the Moloch reference in the film. He even quotes a passage from Engelke, but not the Moloch metaphor. He instead cites a passage in which Engelke talks about the rhythm of life, and relates this to Lang’s use of rhythm in the film.

Likewise, author Stefanie Eck discusses the connections between Lang and Engelke in a 2012 essay, but does not cite the Moloch metaphor as an Anknupfüngspunkt.

In a 2010 dissertation, Michael Wallo cites a play written in 1919 by Ernst Toller and titled Masse Mensch. In this play, the Moloch metaphor appears. Toller’s use of the metaphor is broader than the concrete realities of factory work. He seems to use it to describe societal patterns.

Was Ernst Toller a source for Fritz Lang’s — and Thea von Harbou’s — use of the Moloch metaphor?

It seems that the time was ripe for a comparison between Moloch and the mature phase of industrialization which had been achieved during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

The Moloch metaphor also could be used to express the horrors of mechanized warfare in WW1 — Moloch was perhaps even more appropriate to WW1 than to factory work, but in the traumatized minds of those who’d lived through, or died in, WW1, the miseries of factory life and the gruesomeness of trench warfare may have merged. Fritz Lang had been wounded in the war, and Gerrit Engelke had died in it.

Through the works of Engelke, Ernst Toller, and Fritz Lang, the Moloch metaphor perhaps achieved some circulation. In what may be considered a post-Expressionist work, Ernst Jünger used the Moloch metaphor in Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt, a 1932 academic treatise.

The use of this metaphor reveals something about the audience: The German reading public could be expected to understand this allusion. A century later and an ocean away, no author can automatically expect that the American reading public would have any knowledge of who or what Moloch is.

There are probably many more instances of Moloch metaphor among German Expressionists during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Which author used it first, which authors obtained it from other authors, and how a large catalog detailing such occurrences might be compiled, are left as exercises for the reader.

Ludwig Erhard’s Soziale Marktwirtschaft — Why Is It Ignored Today?

Economics, properly pursued, is a complex discipline built around equations and graphs. Economic policy, by contrast, is a political pursuit, and therefore a media pursuit, built around perceptions and emotions. It is therefore unsurprising that misperceptions abound.

While there is a temptation to place all the blame on the public, because of its impatience with the dry academic calculations which are sometimes a part of economics, one can excuse some of the public’s ignorance on messaging it receives from political leaders, the news media, and academia.

Recent surveys in the Federal Republic of Germany indicate that the average citizen is not clear, or misinformed, about the differences and similarities between a freie Marktwirtschaft and a soziale Marktwirtschaft. To be sure, these contrasts and comparisons are sometimes subtle and not easy to articulate.

Likewise, the difference between sozial and sozialistisch is intuitively clear in most cases, and yet many Germans can’t give a precise conceptual definition when asked about this difference.

Given the tenuous information on these words and concepts, it is no surprise that the public offers some quirky results to pollsters, as Martin Zeil writes:

Glaubt man jüngsten Umfragen, so haben nur noch weniger als die Hälfte der Bundesbürger eine gute Meinung von der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft. Auf dem Höhepunkt der Weltwirtschaftskrise 2008/2009 waren es sogar bisweilen nur noch ein Drittel. Das Wort »Neoliberalismus« ist zum negativen Kampfbegriff in der politischen Auseinandersetzung geworden und wird dabei mit »sozialer Kälte« und »schrankenlosem Kapitalismuslraquo; gleichgesetzt. Unsere Gesellschaft, unsere Wirtschaftsordnung werden von vielen als »zu wenig gerecht,« als »nicht mehr sozial« empfunden. Vor diesem Hintergrund finden gesetzliche Eingriffe wie Mindestlöhne, Mietpreisbremse oder kostspielige Zusatzbelastungen künftiger Generationen wie Mütterrente oder Rente mit 63 in Umfragen Zustimmungsquoten von über 70%.

Some clarifications may help to clarify the muddying thinking: The difference between a freie Marktwirtschaft and a soziale Marktwirtschaft are not as great as may be supposed. The distinction is more about the perspective than about the reality of the macroeconomy. The freie Marktwirtschaft views this particular type of economy from the perspective of its process — what happens in the economy. The soziale Marktwirtschaft views this economy from the perspective of its results — which outcomes does this economy produce?

Scholars return repeatedly to these words from Ludwig Erhard:

Ich hoffe, Sie missverstehen mich nicht, wenn ich von der sozialen Marktwirtschaft spreche. Ich meine, dass der Markt an sich sozial ist, nicht dass er sozial gemacht werden muss.

Erhard’s meaning is that a market economy, as opposed to a command economy or a planned economy, is inherently sozial — its very nature causes it to act in accord with the intuitive concepts of social justice. In order to maximize profits, producers and retailers are constantly competing with each other to offer more and better products at lower prices: raising the standards of living for the working classes.

As a corollary to this principle, Erhard adds:

Je freier die Wirtschaft, umso sozialer ist sie auch.

Quantified and graphed on a cartesian plane, economic liberty and social justice increase along the same curve. It would be a complicated task to quantify liberty and justice, of course; it may even be impossible. In any case, however, the direct correlation holds.

Summarizing Ludwig Erhard’s thoughts, Alexander Kluy writes:

Nur der Markt könne den Wohlstand gerecht verteilen. Dies war der freiheitliche Grundgedanke, den er mit enormer Energie und unbändigem Optimismus zwischen 1946 und 1949 gegen Widerstände von allen Seiten durchfocht, selbst gegen die Alliierten, die sämtlich lieber eine gelenkte Volkswirtschaft gesehen hätten als eine Umsetzung von Erhards Vision, seinem Glauben an freies Unternehmertum und Deregulation und seine Ablehnung von Planung und wettbewerbsfeindlicher Kartelle.

Erhard’s thoughts were more than abstractions and hypotheses: In the postwar decades, measurable and observable economic indicators moved in ways which benefited the working class. The journey from Stunde Null to Wirtschaftswunder was the real-world application of Erhard’s imperatives. Lowering tax rates, deregulating commerce, and privatizing industries took bluecollar Germans from the brink of starvation in mid-1945 to higher standards of living than their European neighbors a decade later.

Both educational institutions and the media have quietly set serious economic thoughts aside. If more were known about Ludwig Erhard and his achievements, it is probable that the public would react more favorably to words like Marktwirtschaft.

Searching for a More Durable Form of Democracy: Building a Freedom-Based Postwar Society

After 1945, the immediate challenge for Germany was to rebuild its physical infrastructure, its economy, and its manufacturing base — almost all of which had been thoroughly destroyed during the last year of the war.

A long-term goal was to rebuild German society. A generation of young people had been shaped by an ideology which demanded total obedience to the government: an ideology which taught citizens gladly to be controlled by the government, even to seek the government’s control over them.

The Germans needed to rebuild the concept of liberty.

Ludwig Erhard was instrumental in expanding freedom in postwar Germany. Erhard avoided partisan loyalties as much as possible: even through political parties like the CSU, CDU, and FDP sought him, he delayed party membership for years, as historian Hans Jörg Hennecke writes:

In March 1948, at the suggestion of the CDU and FDP – and despite the resistance of the SPD – Erhard was elected director of the Economic Council of the Bizone (as the combined American and British zones of occupation were called) with a small but significant majority. In this role, Erhard not only oversaw the long-planned currency reform of 20 June 1948, but also introduced market-oriented economic reform when – literally overnight – he abolished price controls on a wide range of goods.

From that point, Germany began to move into its famous Wirtschaftswunder phase, years during which economic liberty enjoyed a powerful synergy with social and political liberty. Civil rights and prosperity developed in a virtuous cycle, each encouraging the other, and bringing democracy and financial stability to postwar Germany.

Yet danger still lurked. How is it that, people who enjoy the fruit of political liberty and experience a flourishing of justice such as Germany had in the 1950s, can yet be lured away into the confines of an anti-democratic government? This problem confronts any truly free society.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter, an influential economist who pre-dated Ludwig Erhard by several years, “had suggested in 1942 that free market capitalism and democracy sow the seeds of their own destruction,” in the words of historian Alfred Mierzejewski.

Schumpeter meant that when people become used to prosperity, they are less tolerant of the occasional economic crash, which is part of the natural cycle of the macroeconomy resetting itself as it seeks equilibrium. Accustomed to prosperity, people tend to see small problems as big problems, because the big problems have gone away. Intolerant of small problems, they embrace government intervention into the economy as a way to fix these problems: but in reality, such intervention will dismantle the free market which produced prosperity, and much larger problems will result.

In the comfort of prosperity, citizens forget that high taxes, price controls, and wage controls are not creative instruments for adjusting the economy and addressing problems, but rather that they are the sources of large-scale human misery, as Mierzejewski explains:

People become so accustomed to the rewards of the free market that they come to take them for granted and then abuse them, ultimately putting them at risk. Similarly, people disdain political freedom and turn to authoritarian government to pursue mirages such as economic equality and social justice. The result is dictatorship and poverty, or, as another liberal economist put it, serfdom.

The use of the word ‘serfdom’ is an allusion to economist Friedrich Hayek, winner of the Nobel Prize, and author of a book titled The Road to Serfdom.

The lesson which must be learned and relearned is this: that a planned economy or a command economy solves no problems and simply creates worse problems — wage controls, price controls, and high taxes generate only human suffering, and that this economic suffering leads inevitably to social suffering. Any successful democracy which produces justice and a humane society can only be the result of a free market.

Diversity Among Germans: The Germans Under the Microscope

If one travels around Germany — and even more, if one travels around the German-speaking regions of the world — remarkable differences will reveal that it is truly difficult to make generalizations about the “Germans” and their ways of life.

In terms of language, the differences between local dialects spoken in Flensburg in the North and Klagenfurt in the South are so great that they are mutually unintelligible. In this way, Germans are by far more diverse than Americans.

The differences between rural Germans and urban Germans is likewise pronounced. Life in the center of Berlin or Hamburg is significantly different from life in a remote and small village in Sachsen or in Baden-Württemberg.

As authors Uwe Oster, Paul Widergren, and Carol Gratton write:

What do we see if we examine the “Germans” under a microscope — a caricature of a German warrior wearing a helmet, full beard, and sword? No, it’s not that simple. “Germans,” in a sense, do not exist. The various people who live in Germany are as diverse as the many different German landscapes which run from the Alps to the North Sea.

It is natural to make generalizations about nations and ethnic groups. But in the case of Germans, as with many other groups, it is usually inaccurate to do so. Under careful examination, most generalizations fall apart.

It is possible to report extensively about any nation, including the Germans, and to do so in an informative and factual manner: this is done by specific and concrete descriptions of what some people do, and resisting the urge to make sweeping statements.

The Death of Friedrich Schiller: Romanticism, Enlightenment, and Idealism

The history of literature is ever plagued by ambiguities, especially when it tries to sort various authors into various movements, schools, and eras. The roots of imprecision are necessarily rooted deeply in the method of sorting authors into these types of groupings, because the groupings themselves are constructs: they are generalizations made after the fact, and subject to a necessary amount of inexactness.

In discussing the career of Friedrich Schiller, and in describing the influences in his environment, some scholars use a bewildering flurry of terminology, including: Romanticism, pre-Romanticism, proto-Romanticism, Classicism, neoClassicism, Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism, and Enlightenment.

Each of those words is alleged to describe some literary trend. Yet when examined carefully, the ambiguities and indistinctnesses multiply. Where do the boundaries of these groupings fall? Which characteristics are defining for these groups? Do these movements overlap each other, include each other, or exclude each other?

There is a clear distinction in methodology: one can compare and contrast two texts, examining the observable concrete details of each, or one can compare and contrast two constructs, muddling through ever more ambiguous generalizations. One can compare and contrast Herder’s Christliche Schriften with Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, or one can attempt to compare and contrast Weimar Classicism with the Enlightenment. The former can yield well-articulated conclusions, which, even if false, nonetheless have clear content, while the latter will produce merely increasingly vague generalizations about generalizations.

Two scholars, Julius Maria Roth and Paul Schulmeister, describe the death of Friedrich Schiller:

Als Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) mit nur 46 Jahren in Weimar verstarb, waren die Ärzte, die für die Obduktion des Dichters zuständig waren, höchst verwundert — vor allem darüber, »wie der arme Mann so lange hat leben können«. Seine Lunge hatte sich fast aufgelöst und war mit den verknöcherten Rippen und dem Herz verwachsen; das Herz selbst war laut medizinischem Bericht ein »leerer Beutel«, fast ohne Muskelgewebe; ähnliche Befunde lieferten Niere, Milz und Gedärme. Woher hatte Schiller überhaupt die Energie, zu schreiben, genommen? Die Antwort lässt er seinen Wallenstein geben: »Es ist der Geist, der sich den Körper baut.«

Note the transition from precise concrete details to generalized constructs as these same two scholars continue, in their next paragraph:

In der Aufklärung rückten vor allem die erzieherischen und selbsterzieherischen Aspekte in den Vordergrund: Die Distanzierung von den Affekten und leiblichen Dringlichkeiten, von Naturzwängen und Trieben wurden als Emanzipation verstanden. Die Freiheit des Geistes sollte in jedem entfacht werden und ihn zu einem mündigen Bürger machen. Schiller ist der leibhaftige Beweis, dass es sich dabei um mehr als nur leere Worte und windige Ideen handelt.

It is not merely the use of abstractions which characterizes the second paragraph, but rather the exclusive use of abstractions, and specifically abstractions which have no clear method of verifiability. The second paragraph probably contains some specific meanings, but a great deal of interpretation would be necessary to distill those meanings and to relate them to any observable or concrete phenomena — even the phenomena found in a literary text.

Abstractions can be used in salutary ways, and are not to be banished from all writing. But abstractions carry more meaning, and carry it better, when connected to concrete features of a text or of a historical event.

A grammatical analysis might reveal features in Schiller’s texts: how often verbs are used in the imperative mood; how often in the passive voice. A semantic analysis might reveal how often concrete nouns are used in comparison to abstract nouns; how often the subject of a sentence is specified; how often the metrical structure of a poem is maintained or violated.

It requires a great deal of self-discipline for a scholar to confine herself or himself to the concrete details of a text or the concrete details of an author’s historical context. The generalizations of constructs about movements and genres is ever enticing and seductive.

The Temptation to Dismiss Humanity: Sophie Scholl Wrestles with Despair

As an individual with an extraordinary level of dedication and commitment to a just cause, Sophie Scholl observed with great disappointment how easily and how frequently many people failed to be compassionate or loyal to their fellow human beings, and how they succumbed to the temptation to undertake unethical actions which benefitted themselves even if at the cost of others.

Sophie was understandably tempted at times to dismiss as hopeless the entire human race.

Fritz Hartnagel was Sophie’s fiance. She wrote to him in a letter dated May 29, 1940:

Ich könnte heulen, wie gemein die Menschen auch in der großen Politik sind, wie sie ihren Bruder verraten um eines Vorteils willen vielleicht. Könnte einem da nicht manchmal der Mut vergehen? Oft wünsche ich mir nichts, als auf einer Robinson-Crusoe-Insel zu leben.

Hartnagel was an officer in the army, and passionate supporter of the same resistance movement that Sophie served. He used his position as an insider in the military to aid the resistance secretly. He and Sophie shared their thoughts deeply and frequently, speaking in person, and writing when apart.

He’d joined the army in 1936, and remained in the army until the war’s end, surrendering in April 1945, more than two years after Sophie’s execution at the hands of the National Socialists.

Sophie points out that it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to live in society and not be affected by the exploitation which people habitually inflict on one another. She sees that much of the time, many people regard everyone and everything primarily as potential instruments for their own advancement. People are seen as instruments.

This objectification — some might use the word ‘othering’ — of people is a primary evil, from which secondary evils can arise.

The ‘othering’ here is not based on a variable about the person being made into an instrument — i.e., is not based on the usual socio-demographic variables of skin color, ethnicity, etc. — This is a different type, a more elemental type of othering, based purely on the fact that the other can be used to one’s advantage. In this type of othering, the other might be quite similar to the self, across all those variables, and yet be objectified; while someone quite different by those same metrics might be left in peace.

So ubiquitous is this tendency to see others as mere instruments that Sophie ponders the possibility that one would need to be “bad in order to remain alive,” that this evil corrupts all who live in society — hence to previous musing about living alone on a desert island.

Manchmal bin ich versucht, die Menschheit als eine Hautkrankheit der Erde zu betrachten. Aber nur manchmal, wenn ich sehr müde bin, und die Menschen so groß vor mir stehen, die schlimmer als Tiere sind. Aber im Grunde kommt es ja nur darauf an, ob wir bestehen, ob wir uns halten können in der Masse, die nach nichts anderem als nach Nutzen trachtet. Denen, um ihr Ziel zu erreichen, jedes Mittel recht ist. Diese Masse ist so überwältigend, und man muß schon schlecht sein, um überhaupt am Leben zu bleiben. Wahrscheinlich hat es bisher nur ein Mensch fertig gebracht, ganz gerade den Weg zu Gott zu gehen. Aber wer sucht den heute noch?

Yet Sophie sees that her view of humanity is so negative especially when she is especially tired, and especially when she is surrounded by the very worst of people.

Presumably — she does not quite explicitly state it — at other times, she is able to have a more merciful view of humanity: not ignoring or excusing its evil, but rather to note that each person’s mission is to be “on the way to God,” and that people make indirect routes with detours.

The challenge for Sophie, and for all people, is to have no illusions about the grave evil which is afoot in the world, and yet at the same time not to give up on the human race: not to dismiss humanity as hopelessly corrupt. One meets this challenge by being “on the way to God” in one’s own imperfect manner.