„Rasse mit Stil“
Abstract
Man is “the race with style”, according to Gottfried Benn’s essay Dorische Welt (1934), a text providing a transition between his political commitment to National Socialism and his ‘inner emigration’. Thus, on the one hand, it contains some of Benn’s most problematic statements—the celebration of Machiavellian political decisionism, the causal derivation of Western art from soldierly slave states or the celebration of eugenics—while, on the other hand, it reaffirms a bourgeois aesthetic of autonomy. The common denominator for this is a contradictory naturalization of the arts: they are an emanation of the social body and at the same time a law unto themselves, they are nature and turn into anti-nature, that is into “style”—an argument familiar from idealist aesthetics, but also from the considerations of German philosophical anthropology. The article discusses this variant of the naturalization of the arts using the example of a French-German cultural transfer; since one of the main sources for Benn’s text montage is Hippolyte Taine’s Philosophie de l’art en Grèce (1869).
