The Disinherited Mind by Erich Heller
"The Disinherited Mind," published in 1952 by Erich Heller, explores the intellectual and cultural collapse experienced in German-speaking Central Europe during the early 20th century, particularly in the wake of World War II. Heller examines the consequences of a crisis initiated largely by the intellectuals and politicians of the Weimar Republic, linking it to the rise of Fascism and the moral failings leading to events like the Holocaust. The book is structured as a series of nine essays, focusing on pivotal figures in German literature and philosophy, including Goethe, Nietzsche, and Kafka. Heller identifies a countertradition that warned against the impending catastrophe, positing that the so-called "disinherited mind" reflects broader modern existential concerns.
Central to Heller's argument is the estrangement between symbol and reality, which he traces back to historical theological debates, highlighting the symbolic crisis affecting literature and art. He advocates for a return to a deeper understanding of meaning and value, particularly in poetry, while critiquing modernism's detachment from these concepts. Despite his conservative leanings and resistance to contemporary ideologies, Heller's work played a significant role in reintroducing the Austro-German literary heritage to English-speaking audiences, influencing students and scholars in the mid-20th century. The book serves as an important reflection on the cultural identity and moral questions facing modern civilization.
The Disinherited Mind by Erich Heller
First published: 1952
Type of work: Literary criticism
Principal Personages:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , an eighteenth century German poetFriedrich Nietzsche , a nineteenth century German philosopherJakob Burckhardt , a Swiss historianRainer Maria Rilke , a twentieth century German poet, born in PragueOswald Spengler , a conservative ideologist of the Weimar RepublicFranz Kafka , a distinguished twentieth century novelist, born in PragueKarl Kraus , an Austrian satirist, essayist, and poet who died in Vienna in 1936
Form and Content
When The Disinherited Mind was published in 1952, the German-speaking countries in Central Europe had just witnessed the total collapse of their culture. This collapse was all the more crucial because, for the most part, it had been initiated by these countries themselves. It was a crisis created by the counterrevolutionary intellectuals and politicians of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) and of the first Austrian republic (1919-1934) in their defense against Socialism and democracy. The rise and rule of Fascism in Central Europe has to a large degree been ascribed to the German mind. The total collapse of culture, as demonstrated by the German extermination camps, has been considered a catastrophe of civilization, designed and executed by a particularly German mentality.
While intellectual historians after 1945 were eager to identify the figures whose lifework anticipated the German catastrophe (Martin Luther and Frederick II of Prussia were often cited), Erich Heller turned to German literature and philosophy. Heller identified a countertradition that clearly warned of the impending catastrophe. He helped establish a consciousness of the intellectual and moral crisis of the twentieth century that was not limited to the German mind but was a distinctive symptom of modern literature and thought in general.
The Disinherited Mind consists of nine loosely connected essays of literary criticism, organized chronologically. There are two essays on Goethe, three on Nietzsche, and one each on Oswald Spengler, Franz Kafka, and Karl Kraus. The last essay is titled “The Hazard of Modern Poetry.”
Born in Bohemia in 1911, Heller studied in Prague and at the University of Cambridge, where he obtained a doctorate. He emigrated to England in 1939 and has held university positions at the London School of Economics, the University of Cambridge, the University of Wales, and Northwestern University, where he was appointed Emeritus Professor of German. In addition to The Disinherited Mind, Heller is the author of Thomas Mann: The Ironic German (1958) and The Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other Essays (1968).
The mind that is described as disinherited in this book is specifically the German (and Austrian) mind. Yet this disinherited mind is representative of the modern mind in general. While Heller saw the poets and philosophers of the Middle Ages linked in their preoccupation with the marvelous, he perceived their modern successors to be united in the reverse: They tried either to strengthen or to deflect the prosaic, as opposed to the marvelous. The book addresses this problem in its most direct form in the essay “Rilke and Nietzsche,” particularly in the discourse on the relationship between thought, belief, and poetry, and in the second section of the essay “The World of Franz Kafka.”
The methodology of this book is relatively subjective and conservative. Heller is primarily concerned with the communication of a sense of quality rather than measurable quantity; he is concerned with meaning rather than explanation. He considers his task, as he states, “not the avoidance of subjectivity, but its purification; not the shunning of what is disputable, but the cleansing and deepening of the dispute.” Thus, the methods employed are not methods per se but attitudes that produce “the intellectual pressure and temperature in which perception crystallizes into conviction and learning into a sense of value.”
Critical Context
In the last essay (“The Hazard of Modern Poetry”) and the postscript, which summarize the main themes of the book, Heller explains the theoretical assumptions of his criticism, which takes as its point of departure the crisis of the symbol in poetry. This crisis, which introduced the age of the disinherited mind, is traced to the sixteenth century controversy between Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli about the meaning of the Eucharist, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The question raised was whether the bread and the wine are actually the body and blood of Christ, as Luther believed, or whether they merely represent the body and blood of Christ, as Zwingli maintained. According to Heller, this controversy deprived the language of religion (as well as the language of art) of an essential degree of reality.
Goethe was the last to force the union of symbol and reality. Therefore, he plays a central role in The Disinherited Mind. After the time of Goethe, however, “the symbol was made homeless in the real world, and the real world made itself a stranger to the symbol.” This estrangement between symbol and reality is perceived by Heller as a war between rationalism and Romanticism. This war has caused a loss of order, of meaning, and of value, with Nietzsche as Heller’s major spokesman for the problem of values. This triple loss is for Heller the hazardous legacy left to modern poetry. The mandate of modern poetry is to overcome this crisis, which reflects the state of man in the modern world.
Heller’s approach is basically conservative. He is an opponent of Hegel and Hegel’s concept of the coming of a prosaic age. With the exception of Kafka’s work, Heller pays little attention to the modern novel. He discusses modernism in literature mainly in terms of poetry; T. S. Eliot’s poetry and criticism are the modernist texts most often cited in his analysis. In Heller’s survey, there is no room for either Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theater” or the dialectics of neo-Marxism. Heller is opposed to modern science and to Socialism, even in its most democratic form. Democracy itself is perceived in a negative way when it is viewed as a habit of thought, determining truth “through a plebiscite of facts.” Heller believes that there was a time in history when the world in all of its sinfulness was indeed the center of divine attention, and he expresses great nostalgia for this time.
In spite of this conservative bias—which includes some of the prejudices which the exiles from Nazi Germany set out to combat in their opposition to German Fascism—Erich Heller deserves credit for discussing the Austro-German heritage at a time when the English-speaking world had become totally alienated from this tradition. The Disinherited Mind reintroduced American and British intellectuals to the study of Goethe. It was standard reading material for students in England and the United States during the 1950’s and 1960’s and introduced generations of undergraduates to the work of Franz Kafka.
Bibliography
Barrett, William. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LVIII (October 11, 1953), p. 16.
Hermanson, Rudolf. Review in Library Journal. LXXXII (September 15, 1957), p. 2128.
Hill, Claude. Review in Saturday Review. XL (December 14, 1957), p. 15.
Rose, Ernst. A History of German Literature, 1960.
Simons, J. W. Review in Commonweal. LVIII (May 1, 1953), p. 106.