Divine Fury (42 page)

That process of conflation had been underway since the birth of the genius in the eighteenth century, and it was given further impetus during the French Revolution and the reign of Napoleon—the period of “the dawn of the idols”—when genius was invoked self-consciously as a criterion of political legitimacy. The Romantics and others in the nineteenth century reinforced the conflation, repeatedly describing the genius as a redemptive figure, a lawgiver and prophet, who could embody the national spirit, while science gave credence to the genius’s special election. But it was ultimately only in the first decades of the twentieth century—ironically, at the very moment that Kierkegaard’s work was experiencing an important revival—that the genius’s political
power was fully realized and revealed as part of what insightful contemporaries labeled the “religion of genius” or the “genius cult.” Flourishing across Europe between the wars, the cult was put to the service of even larger faiths, co-opted and instrumentalized by the two main “political religions” of the twentieth century, communism and fascism. Marxists employed the cult of genius in the Soviet Union to bolster the legitimacy of Lenin and Stalin, and leading scientists, such as the German neurologist Oskar Vogt, traveled to Moscow to dissect Lenin’s brain in the quest to engineer the perfect man. In the German-speaking lands in the aftermath of World War I, the religion of genius flourished even more spectacularly, achieving its terrible apotheosis in the genius-cult of the Nazis. A key factor in shaping the self-conception of Adolf Hitler, the religion of genius proved crucial to preparing and consolidating his public image and mystique. Yet genius was also the category through which the world imagined his rival and avenger, the good genius Albert Einstein, who would triumph over evil and do his best to rid the world of genius’s power by taking it upon himself.
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T
HERE WERE OTHERS BEFORE
him who proclaimed it, and many more who practiced its rituals and followed its rites. But the Jewish historian Edgar Zilsel was the first to devote an explicit, critical analysis to what he termed, in his seminal 1918 work of that name,
die Geniereligion
, the “religion of genius.” Originally published in Vienna, where Zilsel made his home until 1938, the work called attention to a cult then flourishing across the German-speaking world. The appreciation of genius, Zilsel aptly observed, had been on the rise since the seventeenth century, achieving prominence during the Age of Enlightenment and the German
Sturm und Drang
before the Romantics and Arthur Schopenhauer further enhanced its aura. Numerous others had cultivated the faith in the nineteenth century, preparing the way for a formidable array of apostles and “genius enthusiasts,” including the composer Richard Wagner, the man of letters Otto Weininger, and the author and critic Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who zealously preached “Genius worship as a religion.” The signs of their proselytism were now everywhere apparent. “In the windows of our bookstores we see biographies and letters of Goethe, Beethoven, Schopenhauer, Wagner,” Zilsel wrote. “Our novelists write stories about the lives of Leonardo da Vinci, Schiller, Spinoza, Schubert, Tycho Brahe, Frederick the Great, Goethe, and Paracelsus. Our musicians show us on stage how Schubert and Palestrina lived and composed. And our souvenir shops offer for pennies the pictures of our great men.” The full array of modern mass media had been put to the service of the
cult. Theater pieces, color prints, busts, and death masks vied for attention with illustrated newspapers and magazine features that gathered the sayings of departed geniuses while providing countless commemorations of their lives and works. “We worship the relics of our great men,” Zilsel further observed, “their autographs and locks of hair, their quill pens and tobacco cases, like the Catholic Church worships the bones, implements and robes of the saints.” So, too, had the resting places of geniuses been transformed in the shadow of Westminster and the Pantheon from simple graves to elaborate tombs, modern Valhallas that drew adoring crowds of pilgrims, who also flocked to birthplaces and monumental sites—Weimar, Stratford-upon-Avon, Bayreuth—as Catholics journeyed to Lourdes. Indeed, for all its scientific and medical pretensions, the primary attraction of the genius religion was its emotional appeal. Zilsel coined a new word to describe it:
Abfärben
, the “rubbing off” or “bleeding into” of feelings that passed from the genius to the genius enthusiast by way of all with which the great man had come into contact. To be in the space a genius had inhabited, or in the presence of an object he had touched, was to experience a feeling akin to religious awe.
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Although Zilsel focused overwhelmingly on Austria and Germany in his description of the genius religion, his knowledge of its wider European cultural foundations was extensive. In 1926, in fact, Zilsel published a history of the development of the genius concept from antiquity to the Renaissance that remains a useful resource. And though he never finished a projected second volume bringing the story up to the present, he was well aware that the genius religion drew on articles of faith that had been elaborated throughout Europe since the eighteenth century. Chief among them was the belief, clearly articulated by the Romantics, and stressed above all by Schopenhauer, that the true genius occupied a salvific role, serving to overcome human alienation through his vision, life, and work. A central feature of what has been described as an “ideology of genius” evident in nineteenth and early twentieth century literary culture, this belief emphasized the genius’s indispensable role as a savior who healed and redeemed. Germans described this capacity of genius as an
Erlösungskraft
, a power of deliverance or redemption, and they emphasized that it might be either terrible or sweet. The scholar Hermann Türck, for example, in his tremendously popular
Der geniale Mensch
(1899), first published in English as
The Man of Genius
in 1914, treated the unlikely pairing of Jesus and Napoleon to illustrate the point that the savior and the conqueror were “alike in their striving after the highest, eternal state of being.” Like Alexander and Julius Caesar, both Jesus and Napoleon felt
themselves in the grip of a higher power—God, Fate, the
daimonic
pull of their stars—and both worked to sweep away the old in the creation of the new, delivering their subjects from bondage and realizing their visions in the world. The point in Türck’s handling was self-consciously Hegelian: creation and destruction were closely allied, deliverance and death united in a common cause. But it serves nicely to illustrate a sentiment shared by those of other philosophical persuasions. Even if the genius as redeemer was most often conceived as an artist in the broadest sense—a “poet,” in Shelley’s parlance—he could easily be imagined as a ruler of men like Jesus or Napoleon, Alexander or Caesar, a
Tatengenie
(a “genius of deeds”) who created in flesh. Above all, the spellbinding example of Napoleon kept alive the possibility and hope that the genius and the statesman-creator might again someday be one.
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The power to redeem, and potentially to rule, was enhanced by the genius’s privileged position “midway” between ordinary humanity and whatever might transcend it. As Thomas Carlyle, one of Zilsel’s primary “genius enthusiasts,” had observed in preaching the virtues of “hero-worship” in the nineteenth century, the genius or hero as man of letters “must be regarded as our most important modern person,” for he performed “the same function which the old generations named a man Prophet, Priest, Divinity for doing,” teaching all men that “a God is still present in their life.” There was a “sacredness” to genius, Carlyle affirmed, and in a skeptical age, the genius’s role was to call attention to the “True, Divine, and Eternal,” which always exists behind the ephemera of life, but is rarely glimpsed by the many until it is revealed. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carlyle’s friend, preached a similar faith in the United States. “Genius is religious,” he assured, adding elsewhere that “when nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.” The bearer of natural providence, the genius was a mediating force who “should occupy the whole space between God or pure mind, and the multitude of uneducated men,” continually negotiating between the real and the apparent, the many and the one. It was a point that the German philosopher Herder and his admirers were concerned to make in a different register: the genius spoke for the nation, articulating the spirit—the genius—of the
Volk
.
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This special role put the genius in an inherently ambiguous relationship vis à vis the people, a point that Zilsel, a man of the Left, stressed with particular insistence. The religion of genius fostered a “salvation addiction” (
Erlösungssucht
) among the masses, he claimed, causing them to alienate and relinquish their power. It is true that the relationship need not be conceived solely in coercive terms. The nineteenth-century liberal
Benedetto Croce observed that “great geniuses reveal to us ourselves,” and implicit in this widely repeated notion was a prospect that could captivate liberal minds: the possibility of individual empowerment and democratic awakening. Emerson, for one, developed the thought. Yet, more often, the relationship between the genius and the many was conceived to be fraught. The tension was apparent in the Romantics’ ambiguous stance toward the people, whom they simultaneously praised as bearers of the
genius populi
and scorned as ingrates who stifled originality and made martyrs of genial men. Ambiguity of this kind showed up in the nineteenth century even among those who were otherwise well-disposed toward the people. John Stuart Mill, to take one salient example, insisted “emphatically on the importance of genius” and geniuses, judging these special creatures to be indispensable to the progress of humanity. And yet, because “persons of genius” were a “small minority,” and “
ex vi termini
, more individual than any other,” they were uniquely threatened by the power of the majority and the expanding equality of modern societies. Like Tocqueville, Mill worried that the “general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.” The tyranny of the majority was a greater threat to the genius than to anyone else.
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Attitudes of this kind were given further impetus by the advent of aesthetic modernism, which to an even greater extent than Romanticism was deeply conflicted in its attitudes toward the masses. On the one hand, modernists frequently pretended to a salvific role: they dreamed of transforming society in the image of art and believed earnestly that their work could set the people free. Yet, on the other hand, their work was often so arcane as to make it inaccessible to all but the discerning few. Those who failed to grasp its significance or even to try were dismissed as “philistines,” a common term of contempt for the barbarians who willfully refused to acknowledge genius’s authority. The term was evidence in itself of modernism’s ambivalence toward the masses, part of its broader “trouble with genius” that took the form of an alternate longing and loathing, a desire to lead the people as an “avant-garde” and a contempt for those left behind. Seeking refuge in a fantasy of future fulfillment, the unacknowledged genius would be redeemed by posterity, taking up his place in the “brotherhood of genius” that united true greatness in the timeless and universal fellowship of death.
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In developing these points—the core of what he termed the “dogma” of the religion of genius—Zilsel called attention to the irony of a cult that lavished appreciation on the “unappreciated genius,” pointing out ruefully how the frequent invocation of posterity justified a pose of
suffering and martyrdom in the here and now. But there was even more to this dogma than Zilsel revealed, for, in effect, the genius had occupied a special stance toward the future since the eighteenth century, when he was presented to the world as a beacon of the new. Charged with creating the unprecedented, the genius displaced an older mimetic ideal that aimed, it was said, only to replicate what already was. To create originally, by contrast, was to bring into being what had yet to be, which meant that the creator of genius must be gifted with the foresight to see beyond the horizon of the times. It was in part for this reason that the Romantics had emphasized the genius’s prophetic and visionary power. Members of the avant-garde stressed the point even more deliberately with their frequent injunction to “make it new.” As the great French poet Arthur Rimbaud put it, “one must be absolutely modern.” The religion of genius consecrated that commandment. And as the English physician (and degeneration theorist) Henry Maudsley insisted, the man of genius thrilled with the “prophetic pulse of an unknown future.” He was pregnant with the new.
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In looking toward the future, the genius was ruled by an inherently hostile attitude toward established authority, an attitude that Zilsel found particularly troubling in light of the fact that the genius religion possessed no stable moral ground. The genius was revered for the alleged “depth” of his person and the profundity of his work, regardless of its content or moral consequences. Zilsel was no conservative, intent on justifying the status quo. Yet he rightly detected in the genius religion’s cult of personality a disturbing tendency not only to accept moral transgression, but to praise it as necessary and natural. In the religion of genius, one confronted a faith that knew no rules, save the right of the genius to make them for himself and to legislate, accordingly, to others.
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It is curious in this connection that Zilsel made almost no mention of Friedrich Nietzsche, who had himself declared, “My religion . . . lies in working for the production of genius,” and whose own cult had already achieved prominence in Germanic culture. It is true that Nietzsche’s thinking about genius and geniuses was complicated. The term
das Genie
, rather surprisingly, is not crucial to his vocabulary, giving rise to the speculation that perhaps Nietzsche’s own early intimacy with a genuine genius, in the person of Richard Wagner, and their subsequent bitter break cured him of the tendency to embrace the notion without reserve. Be that as it may, Nietzsche’s importance in this connection lies less in his specific thoughts about geniuses than in his broader contention, continuously reaffirmed, that creativity was the highest human calling, one that necessarily involved conflict, domination, and even violence. Creation
was amoral, beyond good and evil, and morality itself a creation, the product of creators, who alone could see what lay on the human horizon. As Nietzsche put it in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, his most widely read work: “What is good and evil, no one knows yet, unless it be he who creates. He, however, creates man’s goal and gives the earth its meaning and its future. That anything at all is good and evil—that is his creation.”
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