In a collection of articles finally translated into French, Norbert Elias criticizes the errors of his compatriots, essentially the German elites, incapable of freeing themselves from old models and the rigidity of social structures. In these conditions, can we speak of a national habitus?
We should be happy that the Study about the Germansa work published in 1989 in German and translated into English in 1996, are finally available in French, even if it is almost 30 years later than the original edition. It is less a book about “the Germans”, according to the title chosen for the English and French translations, than “studies”, a series of essays of different ages, written in English or German between 1961 and 1989. Some are very accomplished, like the first and fourth, others unfinished or very brief.
If Elias agreed to the publication before his death, in close cooperation with his disciple and publisher Michael Schröter, it was because he saw in his theorized reflections on his country of origin a kind of testament and a response to his detractors. It was also a kind of return to the sources of his work, after a long exile and a long refusal, on both sides, despite invitations to German universities and the complete works published by Suhrkamp, all the signs of success of the German academic (finally) arrived and recognized. Former assistant of Karl Mannheim, Norbert Elias had been chased and exiled from the University of Frankfurt by triumphant Nazism in the spring of 1933.
A German exception?
In an apparently objectivist tone, with this mixture of simplicity and depth, but also, sometimes, of shortcuts and simplifications which make any historian attentive to the nuances and details of the sequences tick, Norbert Elias develops a long critique of all the errors of his compatriots or, to be more precise, of the German elites and the ruling classes (especially Prussian) through the analysis of the relations between the aristocracy and the “middle class” (in the English sense of “bourgeoisie”).
In this perspectivist history, the people are hardly present (almost no peasants or workers); the Jews appear only as victims and scapegoats of the national and social frustrations of the failures of Weimar society, which provided the henchmen and sometimes the executives of Nazism. On the other hand, the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, between liberal, conservative or reactionary parties, between middle classes and working class or between employers and unions, are barely mentioned, in favor of the long-term history (from the Thirty Years’ War of XVIIe century to that of the XXe century) and major invariants such as the specificities of thehabitus German national – the central explanation of the German “catastrophe”, highlighted in the book’s subtitle.
The constitution of this habitusfrom the late Ancien Régime and aristocratic and monarchical domination, led the bourgeoisie and more broadly the Germans to this spirit of submission in the face of authority that Heinrich Mann had already depicted in his famous novel, The Emperor’s Subject (The Undertan). Added to this is the fetishization of the national ideal, precisely because the nation had so much trouble forming itself and was formed under the authority from above, of the aristocratic and military forces. These imposed their rules and their discipline on everyone and stigmatized more than anywhere else the contestation of authority, especially military, this spirit of revolt embodied by the Parisian revolutionary crowd that they saw at work during the conflict against France in 1870-1871, and of which a reduced equivalent was the “revolution” of November 1918 and its aftermath, such as the Spartacist attempt.
To define the contours of this habitusElias resorts to comparison with other nearby countries: less France (as in The Civilization of Morals And The Court Society) than England and, to a lesser extent, Holland. It sometimes tends to forget their own mistakes or failures, certainly less monstrous than the Second World War and the genocides perpetrated by the Nazis, but not without episodes of extreme violence and “de-civilization”, if we recall the colonial massacres and wars waged by one or other country in Ireland, India, Africa, Indonesia.
The thesis partly agrees with that of historians who support the Sonderwegthat is to say both the specificity of German national construction and its long-term effects, up to Nazism. This is a weak point of the essay, because more recent historiography has tended, precisely from the 1970s-1980s, to return to this dominant idea and to the inescapable character of Nazism or to its direct continuities with the XIXe century, or even the Ancien Régime.
The rise of extremes
Among the essays that make up the volume, there is a long analysis of dueling practices from theethos aristocratic and military and its adoption by certain sections of the German bourgeoisie, via the student corporations that practiced it at the time of the Empire and still under Weimar. Elias makes it the symbol of the bourgeoisie’s inability to free itself from old models and the rigidity of the social fractures characteristic of German society (a theme that can be found in the childhood memories developed by Elias in Norbert Elias by himself).
But his analysis, partly based on personal memories from the time when he himself was a student at Heidelberg, a traditional university where this type of corporation flourished, is not based on any overall statistics. He only cites one testimony, taken from an anecdotal work featuring a few famous cases. However, a whole historiography exists that relativizes the weight of these practices, nuances the importance of these student groups, which are in reality very much a minority, competing with other associations with much more liberal and polite morals, which contradicts the generalizations of Elias, whose recourse to sources and historical works is moreover minimalist.
The collapse of Weimar and the imposition of Nazism until the implementation of the Final Solution are analyzed in the section IV“The Collapse of Civilization” (text written after the Eichmann trial in 1961) and in the part III (“Civilization and Violence”, written in 1980 from a conference for the German Sociological Association). The defeat of 1918, the refusal to recognize it by a part of the old elites driven from power and the fragility of the parliamentary regime lead to the end of the monopoly of legitimate violence at two critical moments, at the beginning and the end of the Weimar Republic.
This end of the monopoly on legitimate violence facilitates the rise of the extremes in the streets, with clashes between paramilitary groups from both sides, or in the series of elections in the early 1930s where communists and Nazis made strong progress at the expense of the intermediate parties. It provokes the submission or rallying to Nazism of the intermediate majority, from the moment when Hitler apparently plays the game of compromise with the conservative or centrist parties demonetized in the ballot boxes.
While one can agree with the description of the process, one is struck by the near absence of economic factors: neither the collapse of the currency at the beginning of the regime (a consequence of the effects of the war and Germany’s diplomatic isolation until the question of reparations was settled) nor the extent of unemployment and economic depression, without which the communists and the Nazis would never have attracted all the outcasts of society, are taken into account as decisive elements of context – which, in turn, paralyses the ordinary parties and their capacity to act.
This rejection of ordinary liberal or Marxist theses, in order to understand Hitler’s rise to power, is a constant in Elias, but imposes, conversely, an almost exclusive interpretation in terms of social representations and historical and symbolic heritage (components of the national habitus), which does not allow us to understand the outbreak and the extent of the crisis nor to compare it to other similar crises, but with different outcomes, in Germany or elsewhere.
Persistent Faith in the Savior
Elias places great emphasis on the spirit of submission present in thehabitus German nationalism to explain the lack of resistance to the most absurd injunctions of the Nazi regime, even when the war appeared to be in its terminal and hopeless phase. The desire to believe in the “millennial Reich” and in victory, while the country was crushed under the bombs and losing one by one its territorial conquests in Europe, contrasts effectively with the dissolution of the German army from the summer of 1918 and the collapse of civilian morale at the end of the war, under the effect of restrictions and the blockade.
Elias essentially sees Hitler’s ability to identify with the “leader”, guarantor of national unity in the face of threats and the refusal of the majority of Germans to recognize the impasse to which their fetishism of order and the nation, supreme values, had led them by relying on him as a sort of “sorcerer”, “rainmaker”, with his first economic and diplomatic successes of the 1930s and his dazzling victories of 1940-1941.
To demonstrate the persistence of faith in the “savior”, Elias uses private correspondence from civilians in July 1944. But what is their degree of authenticity, given the intensity of police surveillance and propaganda, especially since we only have uncertain indications of the origin of the writers?
Elias also forgets or pretends to ignore the extent of the repression and the ferocity of the sanctions applied to all those who still showed reluctance or resistance, as indicated by the enormous number of those shot as an example (around 15,000) within the Wehrmacht in the last years of the war.
Habit social, habitus national
All these questions ultimately come back to the notion ofhabitus national. Defining it and measuring its effects is not so simple: how does it combine harmoniously (or not) with thehabitus social in Bourdieu’s sense? How plastic or adaptable is it to new historical circumstances? Is it truly a substitute religion, with the decline of traditional beliefs in industrial societies, as a passage in the book seems to indicate (p. 441)? Can it change or evolve?
The democratic transformation of Western Germany after 1945 seems to indicate that yes, despite Elias’s intrinsic pessimism, in a book that stigmatizes the people’s recourse to war and violence, instead of freeing themselves from their fantasies inherited from history. Conversely, the reappearance of political forms or ideologies related to extreme nationalism, in many democratic countries, at certain moments of crisis (especially in recent decades), also shows that the German case is not a simple aberration produced by a specific history.
Elias’s book partially addresses these questions, when he compares Germany to other imperial societies that have also experienced crisis and decline, or when he analyses the effects of the student crisis and the emergence of terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany. He sees above all the consequences of a refusal to confront the past by the older generations, while the new generation, embodied by the protesting students, is taking up the subject. He also expresses the fear of the precursors of a crisis leading to a new German authoritarian drift, which history has fortunately denied – for the moment.