2023-07-10 11:05:14
“A quiet room should also be reserved for you, with a beautiful view and every artistic comfort.” With this promise, the Jena publisher Eugen Diederichs tried to persuade Max Weber to take part in a “confidential, closed meeting about the meaning and task of our time” in May 1917 . Diederichs invited prominent politicians, scholars and artists to Lauenstein Castle in Upper Franconia for talks about the future of Germany after the end of the war. He also lured Max Weber with the prospect of nice weather: “So it could be a kind of platonic academy in the castle courtyard or in the nearby forest.” Not least on the advice of his wife Marianne, Max Weber agreed.
Eventually there were three rounds of talks – in May and September/October 1917 and the last meeting in May 1918, in which Max Weber, who had just been called to Vienna, no longer attended. As a result of a conference in the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Meike G. Werner, Professor of German and European Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, documented the round of talks: “A summit for tomorrow. Controversies 1917/18 about the reorganization of Germany at Burg Lauenstein”.
Lauenstein near Ludwigsstadt in Upper Franconia
Which: picture alliance / arkivi
She is now following this documentation with an impressive “visual micro-story” centered on the more than fifty photos taken at Lauenstein Castle and kept in two folders as part of Eugen Diederichs’ estate in Marbach. Werner rightly gives her “micro story” the title “Group picture with Max Weber”. It was, Diederichs wrote, his “most valuable acquisition”, which would attract other, famous participants. “Max Weber will perhaps determine the meeting somewhat one-sidedly,” wrote Ferdinand Tönnies to his friend Werner Sombart, “It will be worthwhile for both of us to be there.”
Diederichs had carefully planned the meetings, and around seventy people were invited, with a third each being professors, politicians, artists and supporters of the youth and life reform movements. In preparation, there were recommendations for reading, including Walther Rathenau’s book “Of Coming Things”. The castle, in the words of Marianne Weber, “lonely enthroned above Thuringia’s solemn fir forests on a bare summit” was intended to evoke a feeling of “rapture” in the participants, they had to do without post and newspapers. The speeches were held from the stairs in the courtyard, the audience listened sitting or standing. Diederichs, who wanted “to have a transformative effect on modern man through art”, had made sure that poems were recited in the octagonal tower room, and in the evening “artistic dancing with peach punch in the castle courtyard” tempted the audience.
Max Weber and the speech duel
As is part of the atmosphere of a castle, the focus of the debate tournament was a duel. Max Maurenbrecher and Max Weber competed. Diederichs had chosen the Evangelical-Reformed theologian Maurenbrecher, ten years younger than Max Weber, as the keyword. Maurenbrecher’s inclination towards ethnic ideas was well known, he had celebrated the war as the “starting point of a new German culture”. At Lauenstein Castle, Maurenbrecher took a stand against parliamentarism, he wanted an authoritarian state based on the old Prussian model, in which the “State Party of Intellectuals” would play a leading role.
Max Weber (with hat) in Lauenstein, small next to it: Ernst Toller
Quelle: picture-alliance / akg-images
Max Weber used one of his softer swear words when he called Maurenbrecher a “romantic”. He made an impassioned plea for economic liberalism, social pluralism and moderate imperialism – based on “the sober facts of the day” that intellectuals finally had to take note of. Max Weber’s Lauenstein intervention foreshadowed the outlines of his essay “Wahlrecht und Demokratie” published in 1917, in which he mocked the “German philistinism’s fear of water before diving into the specifically modern problem situation”. The lines of argument of his two famous Munich speeches from 1919 on “Politics as a profession” and “Science as a profession” were also already evident.
The recorder of the speech duel was thirty-year-old Wolfgang Schumann, editor of the magazine “Der Kunstwart” and member of the Dürerbund. He made no secret of his sympathy for Max Weber and his “brilliant speech”. For the writer Else Ernst, “despite clever eloquence, the clergyman was no match for the piercingly sharp mind, the brilliant wit and the temperamental superiority of the great scholar”. A young journalist from the weekly magazine “Deutsche Politik” named Theodor Heuss seconded: Max Weber was “fresh, witty, ruthless”.
Max Weber in Lauenstein, 1917
Quelle: picture-alliance / akg-images
Meike G. Werner uses many photos to show the expressiveness of a “visual micro-story”. When she describes the photo of Gertrud Bäumer, “all in white, facing the speaker, attentive, tense, as if ready to jump,” you can feel how energetically the women’s rights activist must have interfered in the Burg debates . Some photos raise questions. The economist and photo statistician Otto Neurath wears the uniform of a kuk officer – why is it missing, many young participants had experience at the front – the field gray and the soldier’s perspective?
“Well-fed in times of war” are two participants in a group photo – is there also talk in the courtyard of the “turnip winter” of 1916/17, of famine and freezing cold to which the German population is exposed? Ida Dehmel, the wife of the poet Richard Dehmel, wears mourning clothes that cover the whole body, almost demonstratively black, her young son fell on the western front in the spring – the assembly is in shock from the battles in Verdun and on the Somme, which took place in claimed hundreds of thousands of lives last year?
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Diederichs can hardly have counted the Lauenstein days as a success. Both Max remained alien to him, in the words of the writer Josef Winckler, the “brain-cool systematist” Weber as well as Maurenbrecher, the “boundless romantic”. There was also no fruitful contact at the castle, let alone an understanding between interest groups and age groups, and the attempt at a joint resolution failed. While the artists were declaiming poems in the tower room, in the courtyard, as Schumann noted, “people like Sombart, Tönnies, Neurath and others were running around freezing and somewhat godforsaken”. With the boys, “the historical explanations of the professors, going back to the Babylonians,” had no effect. This also applied to Max Weber, in whom the young people wanted to see a leader, but whose sarcasm repelled them.
Criticism was voiced even during the conferences of what Theodor Heuss called a “somewhat confused society”. Sombart’s smug comment that the events had a “variété character” almost led to a scandal. Twenty-two-year-old Alfred Kurella, who was active in the youth movement, criticized the older generation’s “forms of community formation” bitingly: “It stank of alcohol, everyone was tipsy. Only the smut was missing. Then came a smack. It made us puke.”
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Wolf Biermann on Ernst Toller
Looking back and looking ahead, the young Ernst Toller and the old Max Weber drew a bitter balance sheet of the Lauenstein days. Ernst Toller, who had been discharged from the army in 1916 as a disabled person, spoke in his autobiography “A youth in Germany” of the “Lauenstein bankruptcy”: “For days there was talk, discussion, outside on the battlefields of Europe the war was drumming, we wait, wait, why don’t these men speak the redeeming word, are they dumb and deaf and blind because they’ve never lain in the trenches, never heard the desperate cries of the dying?”
Looking back on the Lauenstein debates, the question that Max Weber asked himself, in its resigned tone, foreshadowed that nothing would change any time soon in terms of cultural transfiguration and political distance among German intellectuals: “Are they NO make you stand on the ground of truth without illusions?”
Meike G. Werner: “Group picture with Max Weber. Talks about the future of Germany after the war”. Wallstein Verlag, 248 pages, 30 euros.
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