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  • Out of Arcadia: Classics and Politics in Germany in the Age of Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Wilamowitz
  • Paul Bishop
Ingo Gildenhard and Martin Ruehl (Eds.). Out of Arcadia: Classics and Politics in Germany in the Age of Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Wilamowitz. ( BICS Supplement 79.) London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2003. viii + 208 pp. ISBN 0-900587-90-3. Paperback, £45.

Is there something about classicists that inclines them toward the Right? Pétain appointed as his education minister the prolific classical historian Jérôme Carcopino, whose Daily Life in Ancient Romeis still available; and, closer to home, in the United Kingdom, there was Enoch Powell, who studied classics at Cambridge before becoming a professor of Greek at Sydney University when he was twenty-five (about the same age as Nietzsche when he became a professor in Basle) and then an MP for Wolverhampton SW, where he delivered his 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech. As for Germany, here classical philology became particularly radicalized in the 1920s and 1930s of the previous century (as the work of Frank H. W. Edler on Heidegger and Baeumler has shown). After World War I, such classicists as Werner Jaeger, Karl Reinhardt, Paul Friedlaender, and Wolfgang Schadewaldt—all pupils of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who had taken on Nietzsche over The Birth of Tragedy—showed a deep fascination with "the fearful-beautiful Gorgon-head of the classical" ( KGWII/1, 251), with a distinct emphasis on the "fearful" as it is explored by Nietzsche in "Homer's Contest" (1872). As Walter Burkert puts it, "[i]n the first third of the twentieth century, the history of ideas took a special turn in Germany[. . . ] [t]he rational world of the nineteenth century seemed broken, the elemental depths appeared" (cited 105).

Out of Arcadia, a selection of papers delivered at the conference "The Gods of Greece and Their Prophets: Liberal and Illiberal Moments in German Classical Scholarship since Burckhardt and Nietzsche" held at Princeton University in 1999, tackles the interface between the academy and the polis head-on, emblazoning its cover with the famously fascistoid poster by Franz Würbel for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. In "Jacob Burckhardt, Greek Culture, and Modernity," Egon Flaig uncovers the antidemocratic, militaristic, and eugenicist elements in Burckhardt's discourse. Examining the implications of Burckhardt's aestheticization of war, Flaig notes that "in purely aesthetic terms, there is no difference between [the last heroic stand of the German SS units on the Eastern Front in winter 1944–45 against the superior forces of the Red Army] and [the self-sacrifice] of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae" (35). Following Flaig's paper, Lionel Gossman defends Burckhardt in a "comment," as if no critical remark on the great Swiss Altliberalershould go unchallenged. Gossman's own fine contribution, " Per me si va nella città dolente['Through me the road to the city of desolation'—Dante, Inferno, Canto 3, line 1]: Burckhardt and the Polis," discusses the image of the state—a bleak, dark, and violent one—presented in Burckhardt's Cultural History of Greece(posthumously published in 1898–1902), which represents, Gossman concludes, "a powerful restatement, in the age of Blood and Iron, of a classic liberal, anti-Machiavellian view of the state found in Benjamin Constant and, before him, in Montesquieu" (59). But the motives behind such a view were "certainly not pro-democratic" (59).

Martin Ruehl's contribution, " Politeia1871: Nietzsche contraWagner on the Greek State" (a shortened version has since been published in Paul Bishop, ed., Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition[2004]), takes as its starting point the vignettes on the front covers of The Birth of Tragedyand the first volume of Wagner's My Life. Ruehl carefully reads "The Greek State," written in 1871, in terms of Nietzsche's enthusiasm for and then disengagement from Wagner: "When he invoked Schiller's credo of universal fraternity in The Birth of Tragedy, [Nietzsche] sent out a most Wagnerian message. With 'The Greek State,' he took it back," Ruehl observes (86). In "On the Genealogy of the Genealogical Method: Overbeck, Nietzsche, and the Search for Origins," Andreas Urs Sommer focuses...

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