Anti-intellectualism as romantic discourse

Daedalus, Spring 2009 by Ratner-Rosenhagen, Jennifer

Though the notion of America either as Edenic paradise or savage wilderness has long animated European thinking about America, the notion that it was therefore either unburdened by or illsuited for intellectual rigor took on particular form in the romantic imagination. As James Ceaser has argued, the romantics looked to the American democratic experiment as a symbol of modernity and freighted it with their own fantasies and fears about the "destiny of the modern world."5 Whereas eighteenth-century European discourse about America focused primarily on the conditions of the natural environment, in the early nineteenth century attention shifted to its forms of human culture. Of special interest to German romantics in particular was the notion of the organic ties between a people, their relationship to the homeland, and their styles of expression. Because Americans were not a Volk, but a mix of "races," transplanted to rather than historically rooted in the North American continent, German romantics wondered about the sources of aesthetic inspiration and the qualities of the intellect of people who were not a people, a nation of affiliation but not of belonging, an adopted homeland, but not an inherited Fatherland. Fascinated with the intellectual characteristics of what Nietzsche would later refer to as the "new human flora and fauna"6 taking shape in the new world, they described these new cultural types in oracular terms : were they heralds of intellect at its dawn or twilight? Models of mind unburdened by hollow pieties, or aimless imaginations without sail or ballast? For the romantics, American culture and the human qualities it produced served as a powerful symbolic field on which to test their ideas about the organic relationship between the individual imagination and the soul of a people, a culture, and its environment, and the prospect of a people politically liberated yet socially and psychically unified.

The redemptive promise of American culture can be seen most vividly in Goethe's enthusiasm for the youthful intellect of a people free from the entombing memories of history. Goethe, himself the living monument of European Kultur, long fancied that he would steal away to America, experimenting with his own ideas about emigrating in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1796) and again in The Travelings of Wilhelm Meister (1821). Though he never traveled to America in body, he journeyed there in mind, devouring studies of its ethnology, geology, politics, and economy, and speculating about how the happy circumstance of its location - both geographical and in the course of human history - might help cultivate the liberated spirit of its inhabitants. In 1819, he envied "Northamericans" who can be "happy" to have " [n]o ancestors and no classical soil" and who were liberated from the psychic weight of a now parched and impotent feudal and classical past. In an 1827 poetic love letter "[t]o the United States," Goethe effused:

America, yours is the better lot