One of the most incendiary lines of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind was that the America of the late 1980s was “a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic.” Today we might well drop the Disney characterization and just go straight to Weimar America (though Disney may be complicit in that story).
Bloom’s comment came back to mind when delving into Stefan Zweig’s slim 1925 book on Nietzsche. (Apropos of not much, my last conversation with Herbert Meyer in 2019, shortly before the tragic bicycle accident that ended his life, was about our mutual interest in Zweig.) Here’s some of Zweig’s commentary on Nietzsche’s desolation and solitude that were so essential to Nietzsche’s thought (can anyone imagine Nietzsche participating in a standard academic panel discussion?):
What makes this desolation so harrowing and ghastly, so truly grotesque, is that this glacier, this desert of solitude occurred at the heart of an Americanized Germany of some seventy million inhabitants, in the rattling and whirring of telegraphs and trains, of cries and tumult, at the center of a morbidly prurient culture which every year launches forty thousand volumes into the world, that every day searches around a thousand different problems in a hundred universities, that every day stages tragedies in hundreds of theaters, and yet knows nothing, divines nothing and senses nothing of the great drama of the spirit unfolding right in their midst.
The phrase “Americanized Germany” is interesting, and also ironic. As Bloom pointed out (following Leo Strauss), today we live in a “Germanized America.” Extend your own parallels (and remedies) from here.
