Table Of ContentMAXIMILIAN HARDEN
CENSOR GERMANIAE
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ADVISORY BOARD
J. ANTON DE HAAS
Professor of International Relations at Claremont Men's College
PHILIP MUNZ
Director of Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden
WILLIAM T. JONES
Professor of PhilosoPhy, Pomona College
EDWARD WEISMILLER
Professor of English, Pomona College
FREDERICK HARD
President of Scripps College
DAVID DAVIES
Librarian of the Honnold Library
MAXIMILIAN HARDEN
Censor Germaniae
THE CRITIC IN OPPOSITION FROM
BISMARCK TO THE RISE OF NAZISM
by
HARR Y F. YOUNG
MARTINUS NIJHOFF-THE HAGUE
1959
to
E. S.
J. C.
n.M.
ISBN 978-94-015-1350-0 ISBN 978-94-015-2457-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-2457-5
Copyright 1959 by Martinus NijhojJ, The Hague, Netherlands
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1959
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to express my gratitude to all the people who have
helped me in writing this book. Professor Herbert Schering of
the U niversi ty of Toledo introduced me to Harden and encouraged
me to write about him. I am especially indebted to Professor
Hans W. Gatzke of the Johns Hopkins University, under whose
guidance I began my research, for critical advice and invaluable
suggestions in the collection of material. The late Arno Schiro
kauer of the Johns Hopkins University contributed to my
understanding of the period in numerous discussions. I am also
grateful to members of the staff of the German Bundesarchiv,
Koblenz, Germany, and to Dr. Wolfgang Mommsen in particu
lar, for aid in using the Harden papers there. Herr Klaus H. S.
Witting, of Dusseldorf, Germany, Harden's nephew, kindly
permitted me to use his Zukunft volumes during my revisions.
Dr. Ernst Jackh, of New York City, allowed me to use letters
from his private papers. The Aufbau, New York City, helped me
by publishing an appeal for material on Harden. I am grateful
to Harden's daughter, Frau Maximiliane Horowitz, of Berlin,
Germany, for recollections and confirmation of facts. Through
discussions and correspondence with many contemporaries of
Harden I have gained valuable information and impressions.
My greatest debt is to E. S., of Berlin, Germany, whose personal
papers and knowledge of Harden were essential to this work.
To my wife lowe great thanks for her help in revising and
preparing the manuscript.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Introduction. . . . . . . 1
I German and Jew . . . . . 5
II Literature and the Theater. 16
III Bismarck and the Founding of the Zukurift 36
IV The New Course . . . . . . . 54-
V The Eulenburg Affair . . . . . 82
VI Colleagues, Friends, and Enemies 126
VII Germany's Future. . . . . . . 154-
VIII War and Democracy . . . . . 178
IX The Weimar Republic and the End of the Zukurift. 219
X The Last Years. . . 257
Conclusion. . . . . 269
Bibliographical Note. 274-
Index . . . . • . • 280
MAXIMILIAN HARDEN
INTRODUCTION
Maximilian Harden, editor of the magazine Die :(,ukunft (The
Future), which appeared weekly from 1892 until 1922, was
Wilhelminian Germany's greatest publicist. Bismarck and
Clemenceau as well as Max Reinhardt and Pirandello recognized
his political and literary genius. Thomas Mann sent early works
to him with the inscription: "To the hero and savior";1 and when
Paul Valery learned that Harden had attended one of his lectures,
he wrote that there was "nothing more flattering and... intimi
dating than to know that you were among those who had
listened to me."2
Today Harden is misunderstood, if not forgotten. It is known
that he was an actor who turned to journalism and became
famous as a champion of the retired Bismarck. He was the most
persistent and daring critic of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He befriended
Friedrich von Holstein, the disgraced "evil genius" of the Foreign
Office. He entered the First World War a flaming patriot,
but later became the voice of the "good German." He vainly
aspired to a post of high responsibility under the Weimar Repub
lic; and he died in 1927, allegedly a bitter, misanthropic radical.
His name is associated with the homosexual scandals of
1907-1909, which were the result of his public campaign against
Prince Eulenburg, the Kaiser's close friend and advisor.
More than anything else, the Eulenburg affair has obscured
Harden's accomplishments as the master critic and guide to
a generation of German intellectuals and politicians.
1 Harden to E.S., Jan. 6, 1927, in private papers of E.S. Hereafter cited
as E.S. Papers. E.S., whose materials were used extensively in this work, was
Harden's companion for twenty years.
B Paul Valery to Harden, n.d. [1926], Ibid.
2 INTRODUCTION
An individualist who followed only his conscience, he was al
ways in the opposition: he opposed the Kaiser, the Republic,
and the doctrines and forces that led to the Third Reich. The
enemies he made through his unsparing criticism attributed to
him an uncanny power and a great capacity for evil, and since
their voices were stronger than those of his admirers, the dis
tortions and untruths that began to circulate early in his career
settled as fact in the frequent essays and articles about him and
eventually passed into serious histories and commentaries. The
times were never propitious for an objective examination of
Harden's career. It was his misfortune that the first study of him
was to be written by the Nazi historian Walter Frank, who set
forth the thesis that the Jew Maximilian Harden was a main
cause of German degeneracy before Hitler.l
Harden has often seemed to be the caricature of the crusading
polemicist. He appears as such most recently in Sybille Bedford's
novel A Legacy. Her Quintus N arden, a mudraker who writes with
heavy irony of a noble family's failings, tells the truth but never
the whole truth. Because he was subjective, polemical, and
theatrical, Harden was always a profitable subject for satirical
manipulation. He first entered fictional literature in 1903 as the
model for Della Pergola, the feared and incorruptible pamphleteer
in Heinrich Mann's novel Die Gottinnen. Some thirty years later
we see him again, less sympathetically drawn, as Martin Mordann
in Jakob Wassermann's novel Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz.
"Twenty, indeed only fifteen, years ago," writes Wassermann,
the name Martin Mordann was the banner of a great party of dissatisfied
people. His was the noisiest journalistic reputation of imperial times. His rise
had begun at the turn of the century. He was the spirit incarnate of the most
ruthless opposition, of the most passionate negation. Undeniably, he had a
certain similarity to Rochefort .... Those who wished to flatter him called him
the Nordic Aretin. One could not deny him the service he rendered in reveal
ing, often with admirable fearlessness, gross political and social abuses. But
on the other hand, his publication was the geometric center of most of the
scandals that had excited and disquieted the German world in three decades.'
1 Walter Frank, "Hore Israeli" Studien zur modernen Judenfrage (Hamburg,
1942). This book contains companion essays on two other Jews, Walther
Rathenau and Emin Pascha. A second study influenced by Nazi racialist
ideology is the Munich dissertation by Edith Sokolowsky, Maximilian Harden
und die Wilhelminische Zeit (Breslau, 1941), a thin presentation of Harden's
public statements on the political events of the reign of Wilhelm II.
I Jakob Wassermann, 'Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz," sechste Fort
setzung, Sie, Dec. 12, 1948.
INTRODUCTION 3
The reliable sources on Harden's life are largely limited to the
Zukurift, his personal magazine and the repository of his literary
and political thought, and to the letters and other biographical
material preserved by his family and friends. The many memoirs
of high imperial personages written in the 1920's, which are
rich sources for other aspects of German history, are less useful
for a study of Harden. He had associated with Bismarck and had
been sought after by the highest nobility and the greatest wealth,
but steady propaganda had so effaced his character and work that
few people were sure in their judgments of him. The biographical
work of the 1920's most concerned with Harden has contributed
most to the present inisconception of his role in Germany. This is
the two-volume apologia of Prince Eulenburg edited by the his
torian Johannes Haller.1 Here Harden figures as a villain, as an
AJterpublizist, as Haller calls him.
Harden was essentially a man of letters. "I am an essayist,"
he once said, "and have come from literature, my true profession,
into politics, which I treat to the best of my ability in a literary
way."B But although his accomplishments as a literary critic must
be examined here, he must be seen against the background of
German politics. He spanned the age that moved from the semi
autocracy of Wilhelm II through an interlude of helpless democ
racy toward the brutal nationalism of Hitler. Despite his in
dependence and opposition he shared many of the current
assumptions and prejudices which our time, with the advantage of
hindsight, recognizes as fateful insufficiencies. While the Zukurift
consistently warns against the public policy and cultural ten
dencies of Germany under Wilhelm and the Weimar Republic,
Harden's opinions, if different, were not always out of season.
Harden suffered the tragedy of many German patriots who
were denied recognition and lasting influence because they were
Jews. During the greater part of his career he believed that his
country's welfare could best be served by the extension of her
material power and influence, and he remained a patriotic Ger
man even after he had convinced himself that German nation
alism and expansion were incompatible with civilized values.
1 See the second of these two separately printed volumes: Aus dem Leben
des Fursten Philipp zu Eulenburg-Hertejeld (Berlin, 1924), p. VI.
Zukunjt, May 7, 1898, p. 232.
I
