The Empire’s Watermark: Erich Kahler and Exile

Abstract

The “long nineteenth century” came to an end in 1914, and with it the validity of its concepts of Wissen and Bildung. For the intellectuals of the time, such an ending appeared fated, since it was a standard gesture of cultural criticism in the empire to predict the inevitable collapse of the unprecedented heaping up of knowledge. Nietzsche was neither the first nor was he alone in his belief that Bildung and culture were in a state of crisis. In the second part of his Thoughts out of Season he passes in review, to great effect, the prevalent critique of the accumulations of merely antiquarian knowledge, remote from life. Others would follow. In 1911, for instance, Georg Simmel made out a “tragedy of culture,” contending that the nineteenth century had piled up a “stock of spiritual objectifications that reached to the sky,”¹ and that such stocks could no longer be restored to living subjectivity. Bildung had lost all meaning. What had once been the purpose of Bildung, deepening an understanding of oneself and one’s own culture, had simply ceased to exist. The diagnosis included all areas of Wissenschaft and art, even society itself. Society had produced a knowledge that was of no use to any Bildung, and that had become quite alien to it.