Struggling With the Daimon- Eliza M. Butler on Germany and Germans

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History of European Ideas 32 (2006) 99–115

Struggling with the daimon:

Eliza M. Butler on Germany and Germans

Sandra J. Peacock

Georgia Southern University Department of History, PO Box 8054, Georgia Southern University,Statesboro, GA 30460-8054, USA

Available online 8 September 2005

Abstract

In 1935, the British scholar Eliza M. Butler published The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany,

in which she explored the appeal of Greek art and poetry to modern German writers. She

argued that Hellenism had exerted a baleful influence on German literature and culture, and

that Germans were especially—even dangerously—susceptible to the power of ideas. In herview, the most dangerous Hellenic concept to German culture and society was the daimon,

which had reached Germany via the work of Winckelmann. Butler’s thesis and methods may

be problematic, as some reviewers of Tyranny pointed out, but her work is noteworthy as the

product of a scholar who had lived in Germany and was a witness to history, familiar with

German language, literature, and culture, writing on Germany during difficult times. As a

British scholar who began studying German just before World War I and ended her career

after World War II, Butler had an ambivalent relationship with Germany and Germans. But

in addition to political factors, she was also influenced by her family, her educational and

research experiences in Germany, and her preference for 18th- and 19th-century over 20th-

century Germans. Moreover, her perception of Germans and Germanness was consistently

posed against her perception of England and Englishness, and she defined the two culturalidentities in terms of their relation to each other. Writing Tyranny as the National Socialists

came to power in Germany, Butler judged Germans and their relationship to the daimon

harshly. In 1956, Butler reconsidered the daimonic in a study of Byron and Goethe, and in this

work it received a more sympathetic and nuanced analysis. A comparison of these two works

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is useful for understanding the evolution of Butler’s thought in the 20-year interval between

their publication.

r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Eliza M. Butler; German literature; Daimon; British women academics

In 1935, the British scholar Eliza M. Butler1 published The Tyranny of Greece

Over Germany, a most unconventional study of the infatuation of modern German

writers with the ‘‘idealism’’ of Greek art and poetry.2 According to Butler, while

Greece had ‘‘profoundly modified the whole trend of modern civilisationyGermany

is the supreme example of her triumphant spiritual tyranny’’ (TGG , 6). Moreover,

Hellenism had exerted a baleful influence on German literature and culture. The

Germans had ‘‘imitated the Greeks more slavishlyy

been obsessed by them more

utterlyyand assimilated them less than any other race’’ (TGG , 6). Butler traced the

mesmerising hold of Hellenism over German writers from Winckelmann to Stefan

George, and attributed its attraction to the ‘‘dynamic power’’ that ‘‘ideals, however

unreal, exerciseyespecially over German minds’’ (TGG , 7). Butler defiantly

defended her conclusions. ‘‘If this book seems sensational, the subject and not the

writer must be blamed. The Germans create sensations because they ignore obstacles

and appear unaware of danger where ideas or ideals are involved’’ (TGG , 8). The

most dangerous Hellenic concept to infiltrate modern German culture was the

daimon: ‘‘Goethe’s daimon, Nietzsche’s superman and George’s Maximin are thethree mythical creations which modern Germany owes one way and another to

Winckelmann’s discovery of Greece,’’ and of these the daimon had been the most

influential (TGG , 332). In 1956, Butler reconsidered the daimonic in a study of Byron

and Goethe, and a comparison of these two works, written before and after the

catastrophe of World War II, is illuminating, for the scope of intellectual history

deals with the experiences of scholars as much as with institutional and social

developments.

Shortly after the publication of Tyranny, Butler was appointed Henry Simon

Professor of German at Manchester University, a move she welcomed as a respite

from the stifling atmosphere of Cambridge, where she had spent 14 years. Outside of Germany, scholarly reaction to her book varied. One reviewer found it ‘‘spirited and

brilliantly written,’’ though lacking sociological analysis.3 Another found some

chapters ‘‘especially rich in psychological and aesthetic perception,’’ but chided

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1On Butler, see her autobiography, Paper Boats (1959); Sandra J. Peacock, ‘‘Biography and

Autobiography in Eliza Butler’s Sheridan, A Ghost Story,’’ Biography 21 (1998) 445–462; Brian Murdoch,

‘‘Butler, Eliza Marian,’’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 9: (2004) 132–133.2E.M Butler, The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935);

reprinted (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.) Hereafter abbreviated as TGG ; further references are given in

parentheses in the text. Page numbers refer to the Beacon Press edition.3Ernest Kohn-Bramstedt, ‘‘Review of Tyranny of Greece Over Germany,’’ Sociological Review 28 (1936)

104. Henry Hatfield, Clashing Myths in German Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1974), 178 views it as ‘‘witty’’ and ‘‘reductive.’’

S.J. Peacock / History of European Ideas 32 (2006) 99–115100


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Butler for the ‘‘lack of any positive methodological approach.’’4 Of contemporary

reviewers, M.F. Ashley-Montagu gave the most revealing assessment. He criticized

the book’s reductionism, and reproached Butler for drawing broad conclusions from

a minute body of evidence: ‘‘By such a means any sort of subjective interpretation ispossible, and though the reader may feel that Miss Butler is more often right than

wrong in her analyses, he isylimited to feeling this and not to thinking it, and this is

not altogether comfortable.’’5 Later, Gilbert Highet called the book ‘‘brilliant and

tendentious’’ and cited it frequently.6 Arnaldo Momigliano called it ‘‘that singular

criticism of German humanism’’ and praised Butler for ‘‘defending the history of

ideas at Cambridge.’’7 Hugh Lloyd-Jones observed peckishly that ‘‘this work seems

to have been written in a fit of emotional disturbance caused by the National

Socialists coming to power.’’8 In 1996, Suzanne Marchand weighed the book more

judiciously:

Few would, I think, dispute Butler’s claim that the ancient Greeks did indeed

entrance the educated eliteyand continued to do so long after the Goethezeit

y.But Butler’s book, treating only a handful of innovative philosophers and

poets, did not examine philhellenism’sypedagogical and scholarly emanations,

ythe sociopolitical means by which this ‘‘tyrannical’’ trope achieved and then

preserved its hegemonic cultural position. Writing self-consciously against

Nazism’s amoral aestheticization of politics and the ‘‘otherworldly’’ irresponsi-

bility of contemporary German writers, Butler did not [discuss institutional

developments in the nineteenth century], new research universities, secondary

schools, museums, and art academiesy

[that] universalized these values and in

effect imposed them on generations of middle-class Germans.9

Six decades separate Butler’s literary criticism from Marchand’s focus on the

socio-cultural impact of Hellenism on German education and life. Like Nietzsche,

Butler offered seminal insights on which others could build. Most recently, the

distinguished Germanist, Brian Murdoch, considers Tyranny ‘‘Butler’s finest

workyscholarly but highly readable; and it is a polemic.’’10

Butler’s thesis and methods are problematic, but her work is noteworthy as the

product of a scholar who had lived in Germany and was a witness to history, familiarwith German language, literature, and culture, writing on Germany during difficult

times. A number of factors helped shape her vision of Germany and Germans and

thus, consciously or unconsciously, influenced her research and writing: her family,

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4Albert Salomon, ‘‘Review of Tyranny of Greece Over Germany,’’ Social Research 3 (1936) 510.5M.F. Ashley-Montagu, ‘‘Review of Tyranny of Greece Over Germany,’’ Isis XXVI (1936): I, 209.6Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 662.7Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Middletown: Wesleyan

University Press, 1977), 4. Momigliano was no friend of the ‘‘Third Humanism.’’8Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1983), 33.9

Suzanne Marchand, Down From Olympus, Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), xviii–xix. This able book records both the institutional and

personal aspects of the ‘‘tyranny of Greece over Germany.’’10Murdoch, ODNB 9: 133.

S.J. Peacock / History of European Ideas 32 (2006) 99–115 101


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her educational and research experiences in Germany, and her preference for 18th-

and 19th-century over 20th-century Germans. The 20-year interval between The

Tyranny of Greece and Byron and Goethe, a period which included World War II,

denazification and reconstruction, also influenced her final views. Finally, herperception of Germans and Germanness was consistently posed against her

perception of England and Englishness, and she defined the two cultural identities

in terms of their relation to each other.

The academic study of German topics in Britain suffered in the first half of the

20th century, and looking back on her career, Butler observed that ‘‘the pursuit of

German studies in the 20th century can have brought mental serenity to few.’’11 Her

conflicting emotions, however, did not result solely from the cultural and political

antagonisms of those decades. Rather, they originated earlier in her life and only

grew more pronounced as broader events unfolded. Her ambivalence about

Germans began with her parents. Her father was an Irish immigrant who worked

his way up from Liverpool clerk to owner of a Lancashire coal mine. In his

adventurous youth, he had spent a term at Heidelberg University where he

developed ‘‘a great admiration for all things German’’ (PB , 8). He was such a

Germanophile that in 1896 he proposed sending his three eldest daughters, including

Eliza, to school in Hanover. The mother came from a Yorkshire family and only

reluctantly agreed to the scheme; Butler remembered hearing her mother say, ‘‘I

won’t have them turned into little Germans’’ (PB , 14). The couple compromised by

placing their daughters in a school run by two English women for a primarily

German clientele; there the girls remained for 5 years. Butler absorbed at an earlyage her parents’ conflicting attitudes toward Germans and German culture.

Her hostility toward Germany and Germans is evident throughout her

autobiography, Paper Boats (1959). She confessed that in Hanover she ‘‘privately

regarded my German school-fellows as members of an inferior race, even when I

liked them, because of their lack of control over their lachrymal glands and the fuss

they were always making about trifles’’ (PB , 16). She also remembered a more

sobering glimpse into what she perceived as the ‘‘German soul.’’ She once saw Kaiser

Wilhelm II reviewing troops, ‘‘abusing the regiment up hill and down dale, officers as

well as meny.I remember the chalk-white faces of the officers in front, standing stiff

as ramrods, and their eyes looked dead. It was a sickening and a sinister sight. I havenever been able to forget it’’ (PB , 18-19). After 5 years in Germany, nothing could

alter her ‘‘moral conviction that [the English] were the conquering race,’’ and she

believed smugly that ‘‘there was something inherently ridiculous about the

Germans’’ (PB , 20). After a stint at a stuffy girls’ school in Paris, Butler received

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11E.M. Butler, Paper Boats (London: Collins, 1959), 154. Hereafter abbreviated as PB , and subsequent

references appear in parentheses in the text. The autobiography is an engaging self-portrait, though like all

such works it must be approached cautiously. One might question whether Butler exaggerated her

Germanophobia in retrospect to balance her undeniable interest in German culture, or whether she hoped

to appear prescient of the Nazi rise to power. I suggest that the attitude she displays toward the Germansin her autobiography is so unattractive in its excess, and accompanied by such unthinking patriotic and

ethnocentric sentiment, that it can be taken as genuine. For earlier examples, see Stuart Wallace, War and

the Image of Germany. British Academics, 1914–1919 (Edinburgh: John Donald Ltd., 1988).



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a final year of schooling in Germany, which now looked better by comparison. She

attended Reifenstein, an unconventional school catering to landowners’ daughters,

teaching them ‘‘how to run large establishments and supervise the management of

estates.’’ In Butler’s words, ‘‘it also aspired to inculcate an idealistic and unworldlyoutlook on life’’ (PB , 27).

While her German master in Hanover had restricted his classes to a narrow range

of maudlin and sentimental German literature, at Reifenstein she ‘‘became

acquainted with German folk-songs, and in particular with the songs of

Heiney.wandering with the others on our expeditions to old, half-forgotten castles,

ruins, rivers, and lakes, I would listen whilst they sang lyrics in which music and

words melted into one to form a new dimension.’’ She described Reifenstein in terms

that apply equally to her love for the German Romantics: ‘‘Reifenstein was not only

of set purpose unworldly, it was out of this worldy.A school for domestic economy?

A part of the reform-movement for women? No, a paradise lost’’ (PB , 29). Her year

at Reifenstein is virtually the only experience with living Germans that she described

with unequivocal pleasure. It also cemented her abiding fondness for Heine, the

‘‘good German.’’

Upon returning to England in 1905, Butler spent several uneasy years trying to

decide her future. She prepared for a teaching career by studying at Cheltenham,

where an astute and sympathetic teacher encouraged her to consider a university

education. From 1908 to 1911 she studied French and German at Newnham College,

Cambridge and eventually won a scholarship which she took at the University of

Bonn in 1913. In her autobiography she complained bitterly of the arrogance andpedantry of the professors there and blamed them for turning her against the whole

notion of research, but she also made friends with some fellow students and generally

seemed to have had a positive experience outside the seminar room.12 She hoped to

transfer to Munich and pursue a Ph.D. (at that time denied to women at Cambridge

or Oxford), but she had to abandon those plans at the outbreak of World War I. She

spent the war years in a variety of pursuits, including the study of Russian with the

Newnham classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, whom Butler had idolized from her days as

a Newnham student and who focused on Russian during the war. Desperate to

contribute to the war effort, Butler began by doing land work and then parleyed her

Russian language skills into a position as translator for the Scottish Women’sHospital Unit in Serbia. In 1921, Butler returned to Newnham and taught German.

The college needed a German instructor; Butler, reluctant to do research in

German but eager to stay at Newnham, agreed to teach German but asked to be

allowed to do her research in French or Russian.13 The College Council declined,

and she yielded. Unwillingly, Butler became a professional Germanist. This

ambivalent choice led to a series of research trips over the next 30 years, most of

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12See Butler, Paper Boats, Ch. 4, 42–53.13

Butler had a great love for Russia, nurtured in part by her admiration for Jane Ellen Harrison, whowas a revered figure when Butler was a student at Newnham. Though Butler did not study classics with

her, they shared an intense devotion to Russian language and culture, and Harrison had taught her the

language.



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which coincided with unfortunate periods in German history. Her future books dealt

with German Saint-Simonians (1926), the minor German writer Prince Hermann

Pu ¨ ckler-Muskau (1929), the impact of Hellenism on German literature (1935),

Rilke (1941), Heine (1956), and Byron and Goethe (1956). Her many articlesincluded studies of Goethe, Kafka, ‘‘Young Germany,’’ and Mann’s Doktor

Faustus, as well as eight entries in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Though saturated in

its ‘‘high culture,’’ she maintained an abiding love–hate relationship with Germany.

In 1923, she went to do research in Leipzig and arrived during the height of the

inflation. In her autobiography she railed against the Germans, who despite the

inflation seemed to have more money than she did; moreover, she charged, they

cheated her at every turn. The next summer, she lodged with a kind, gentle landlady,

Frau Raske, and her insufferable daughter, Hilda. Butler liked the mother, but

Hilda enraged her: she was an ‘‘ardent follower of Rudolf Steiner’’ and ‘‘a devotee

of eurhythmics’’ whose ‘‘pattery

about auras, higher planes and the spiritual

properties of certain herbs culled when the moon was full’’ drove Butler to

distraction (PB , 94–95).

Butler went to Berlin in the summer of 1927 to do research for a biography of the

18th-century literary figure and rake, Prince Hermann Pu ¨ ckler-Muskau. This trip

was marked by a curious incident, recounted in Paper Boats, that illustrates her

escalating hostility to Germans. A day or two after a minor row with two Berlin

State Library officials about some overdue books, Butler took refuge in the canteen

during a mid-day thunderstorm. She disliked the canteen ‘‘because the atmosphere

was stale and officials made it stuffier,’’ but ‘‘this afternoon too it was crowded withlibrary attendants who should have been elsewhere, silently munching, swilling and

smoking, a very unattractive crew.’’ She felt as she took her seat that they ‘‘stared’’

and ‘‘glowered’’ at her, and she blamed the disagreement with the library officials for

the ‘‘malevolence’’ and ‘‘animosity’’ she felt in the air. The sudden emergence of the

sun only made the patrons look even more ‘‘dark and sinister’’ by contrast. She

opened a window to ease the room’s oppressiveness, but her action seemed only to

provoke greater anger. She headed toward the door, but ‘‘it was like fighting a strong

current to get there.’’ On her way out she ‘‘stumbled over a chair, bumped into a

table, and collided with someone.’’ As she left, she heard a voice yell at her to shut

the window. Butler did not comply, but left the room and ‘‘tip-toed away, feeling asif I were escaping from a mad-house’’ (PB , 105).

Shaken, she returned to the library to resume her struggle with Pu ¨ ckler’s difficult

handwriting. On the way, she ‘‘saw a tall, dandified figure leaning on an ebony stick

with an ivory handle and surveying the fountain through a monocle,’’ a figure that

looked exactly like the Prince. She exchanged words with him:

‘‘Illegibility aloft, hostility below?’’ he asked quizzically and yet sympathetically

too. Mutely I nodded assent. ‘‘It’ll be easier upstairs tomorrow’’, he assured me,

‘‘but keep away from that canteen’’y.I had looked into the strangest pair of eyes

I had ever encountered, and they seemed to be saying: ‘‘Watch out for my e’s andmy r’s!’’ But it all happened so quickly that to this day I am not absolutely certain

that it ever happened at all. (PB , 105–106)

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After that, she had no trouble reading his handwriting; she also took his advice

and avoided the canteen. Psychologically, Butler clearly projected her animosity

toward Germans onto the group in the cafeteria, exaggerating the degree of her run-

in with the officials until she saw a lunchroom full of hungry German workers as amob about to set upon her.14 The Prince represented the ‘‘good’’ Germans whom she

loved, and she balanced her terrifying encounter with real Germans with a vision of a

genial, kindly Romantic-era German.

In 1933, Butler observed Hitler’s ascendancy to power from England, where she was

lecturing at Newnham on the German classical movement. Hitler’s triumph provided

the impetus for The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany in 1935, she said, and the story

of those 2 years and the book that resulted from them illustrates the complex interplay

between life and work that was a leitmotiv of Butler’s life. She herself identified three

elements that motivated and shaped the work: memories of a ‘‘vision of evil’’ during

World War I; her reaction to the glories of Athens, which she glimpsed for the first

time in November, 1918; and her perceptions of the German character.

One of the formative experiences of Butler’s life was her wartime assignment as

Russian translator for Dr. Elsie Inglis, the heroine of the Scottish Women’s Hospital

Unit that served in the Balkans and Russia during World War I. When Butler heard

of Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, ‘‘war-memories, especially those connected

with Greece,’’ resurfaced (PB , 122). She was particularly haunted by the memory of

a ‘‘vision of evil’’ she had at the unit’s field hospital in Serbia, nicknamed ‘‘Dead

Horse Camp,’’ in 1918 (PB , 122). The hospital was situated near a ravine where the

carcasses of two dead horses attracted flies which, seemingly immune to pesticides,soon infested the camp. The flies were, no doubt, horrible, though Butler employed

rather startling imagery: the flies seemed to be ‘‘emissaries of the Germansy.and

like the Germans themselves, blotting out the sun, turning the whole world dark,

millions and millions of evil unclean creatures.’’ The unit moved on within 2 weeks,

but ‘‘the vision of evil’’ lingered much longer, until ‘‘the sight of the Acropolis

dispelled it’’ (PB , 123).

Butler visited Athens just as the war ended in November 1918. She had been

relieved of her duties with the hospital unit after recovering from a bout with

malaria, and there may have been a connection between the feverish illness and her

nightmarish perceptions of the camp (PB , 123). At any rate, she arranged to spend acouple of days in Athens on her way home to England. She described the Acropolis

as ‘‘a bastion repelling the hosts of evil, a great centre of light annihilating

darkness.’’15 The link between the German menace and the ‘‘healing radiance’’ of the

Acropolis remained with her until 1933. In 1918, she believed the light of Hellenic

culture was ‘‘more powerful, andywill prevail,’’ but in 1933, ‘‘darkness once more

began to spread from German lands, obliteratingywhat had seemed to be a source

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14In 1938, the distinguished historian, William L. Langer, was suddenly struck with ‘‘stage fright’’

during a lecture. The symptoms continued for two decades: ‘‘I sometimes felt that I was facing a hostile

group, ready to attack me at any moment.’’ Peter Loewenberg, Decoding the Past (New York: Knopf,1983), 84–85.15Sigmund Freud was also dazzled by the Acropolis as an icon of Western Civilization. ‘‘A Disturbance

of Memory on the Acropolis: an open letter to Romain Rolland,’’ (1937) SE 22: 239–248.



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of light emanating from the German Classical Movement.’’ She began to question

why the ‘‘great body of literature inspired by the beauty of ancient Greece and

hymning its ennobling influence had produced no general or lasting effect upon the

minds of the Germans themselves,’’ and how ‘‘its gospel of universal ‘Humanita ¨ t’’’had ‘‘been worsted by Nazi ideology.’’ She found one answer in her own response to

German Hellenism: ‘‘The basic detachment from reality altogether deprived too

many of the works in question of relevance to humanity as a whole. They were

without the spiritual driving force which can alter the direction of men’s

mindsy.And if they did not have this effect on me, what chance was there that

they would sway the German nation, that huge unwieldy conglomerate of self-

seeking individuals?’’ (PB , 126). This assessment of the fundamental disconnect

between reality and theory as the basic flaw of German Hellenism in particular and

German culture generally provided the thesis of her book.

In Tyranny, Butler blamed the Germans for their ‘‘hopeless passion for the

absolute,’’ calling them ‘‘unique perhaps in the ardour with which they pursue ideas

and attempt to transform them into realities’’ (TGG , 1).16 While this cultural

stereotype is commonplace in generalizations about Germans, she had also heard it

directly from the revered Jane Harrison. She traced this fault to the Protestant

Reformation, specifically to ‘‘the deeply brooding mind of Luther, who typified the

spirit of his race’’ (TGG , 4).17 Roman Catholicism was well suited to the Germans,

allowing play for their innate mysticism and desire for beauty while reining in their

excesses with piety and belief. Latin religiosity had provided a safe release of

emotion, and without it, poets could no longer dissipate their energies in religiousmysticism; rather, they were forced to turn to philosophy or ideas. A reconciliation

of emotion and reason seemed imminent in mid-18th century Germany, she asserted,

but Winkelmann’s elevation of the Greek ideal of serenity and beauty started

German literature on its downward slide into the realm of abstract ideas.

She continually returned to the paradox of an ideal of calm serenity causing

calamity. She began with Winkelmann, who summoned ‘‘a submerged continent to

the surface of 18th-century life’’ (TGG , 11). His Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek

Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755) had ‘‘an overwhelming inspirational force on

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16According to Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace Part 9, Section 10, ‘‘Only Germans are self-confident on the

basis of an abstract notion—scienceythe supposed knowledge of absolute truthy.The German’s self-

assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows

the truth—science—which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.’’ In December

1914, Jane Harrison wrote that Germans are ‘‘over-educated, unduly docile, not merely to a military

power, but to ideas; they are drunk, not with beer, but with theories. This domination of the idea strikes us

nowadays as cold, heartless, inhuman.’’ ‘‘Germany is over-theoreticalyUntouched, it would seem, by

modern realism, she still worships abstractions; she is a belated idealist.’’ See Jane Ellen Harrison,

‘‘Epilogue on the War,’’ in her Alpha and Omega: Essays from Experience, London: Sidgwick & Jackson

Ltd., 1915, 221–259. Reprinted (New York: AMS Press, 1973). The quotations appear on 245, 247.17Butler’s critique of Protestantism did not stop with its harmful effects on Germany. She blamed

Protestantism for turning magic into a purely evil force, and for introducing the prospect of eternaldamnation with absolutely no hope of absolution. See especially her series on magic: The Myth of the

Magus (1947), Ritual Magic (1949), and The Fortunes of Faust (1952), all published by Cambridge

University Press.



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his literary contemporaries.’’ She described it as ‘‘a most inspired production, a

sibylline utterance,yobviously made in a state of clairvoyance and not the result of

observation’’ (TGG , 45). Here, Butler veered off into characteristic rhetoric, blending

her interest in psychology, the occult, and literary scholarship. She speculated thatWinkelmann’s work ‘‘was dictated perhaps by prenatal knowledge,’’ and enlarged

upon the notion in discussing his interpretation of the Laocoon sculpture. To

Winkelmann, the figures embodied the classical Greek ideal of serenity; to Butler, as

to others, they embodied anything but that very ideal.

Why he should have chosen this particular group as an example of the very

qualities it lacks, is no easy question to answery.Nothing accounts so

satisfactorily for Winckelmann’s extraordinary blindness as the natural explana-

tion that, dazzled by the flash of a great revelation, he saw the distinctive qualities

of Greek art as he looked at this supposedly genuine specimen [Winckelmann sawonly plaster-cast copies]. He was in fact in a trance; and like many another

clairvoyant, he was uttering truths which did not apply to the object before him,

but were associated with it in his mind. (TGG , 47)

Butler then traced the influence of Winckelmann’s vision on subsequent writers.

Lessing wrote a study of the Laocoon theme and contradicted Winckelmann—while

the latter praised the sculpture as a model of quiet and restraint, the former preferred

literary and dramatic treatments that privileged action and emotion—but the effect

of their two works was to elevate classical Greece into a current topic of intense

interest. Herder invoked the appeal of mythology and the ancient Greek pantheon.Goethe, following Herder, responded to the vision of Greek culture articulated by

Winckelmann, and ‘‘Winckelmann’s Greece was the land of his Weimar dreams,

tragic only because it belonged to the past. To summon it back into the present was

all that was needed to conquer Goethe’s sense of disharmony between life and the

world and the dualism in his heart’’ (TGG , 97). Goethe strove to blend the two

visions of Greece, the serene and the savage, seeing in their reconciliation a model for

the modern world. Schiller, by contrast, admired the cultural greatness of Greece but

mourned it as an ideal irrevocably lost and unattainable. Butler described Ho ¨ lderlin

as the ‘‘most single-minded of Winckelmann’s disciples’’ who, unlike Schiller, could

never come to grips with the impossibility of restoring the Greek ideal. When hecould no longer sustain the emotional and intellectual tension between paganism and

Christianity, Ho ¨ lderlin rejected his beloved Greek ideal and descended into madness

(TGG , 238). Heine repudiated the Olympian deities and the qualities associated with

classical Greece; Butler suggests that his rejection of this model may have originated

in a visit Heine paid in 1824 to Goethe, the consummate ‘‘Olympian.’’ The meeting

did not go well and, snubbed by the great man, Heine turned against the Hellenic

gods. Unlike earlier writers, who had mainly dealt with idealized images of Greece,

Heine turned to more concrete historical topics for support in rejecting any desire to

imitate or revive Greek models. ‘‘Heine put his finger straight on one of the weak

spots of the German classical revival, a particular aspect of the general over-idealisation of all things Greek, a definite lack of reality’’ (TGG , 264). Later in his

life, ‘‘Heine turned the whole subject into a tragedy by considering the Greek gods,

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not as they were in the days of their glory, but as they became after the victory of

Christ: mournful wraiths, melancholy marble statues, destructive demons, or hunted

fugitivesy.He then put in the place of the glorious sun-godythe god of intoxication

and inspiration, the truly daimonic god’’ Dionysos (TGG , 299). ‘‘Heine ushered himin and then left it to Friedrich Nietzsche to see that he got his rights,’’ thereby setting

the stage for the calamity of the 20th century (TGG , 300). In her final chapter, Butler

considered the impact of Nietzsche’s and Stefan George’s interpretations of the

Dionysian on later German culture and history. Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy

was the first positive, unequivocal answer to Winckelmann’s conception of

Greece, striking at the very root of his optimistic assumptions by denying that a

people who had produced Greek tragedy could ever have been sunny and

sereney.Nietzsche evoked a sombre, tragic, valiant and beauty-loving people;

intimately aware of the terrible nature of the world they lived in, and creating aglorious Apolline art as a corrective of realityy.Then came the Dionysian

invasion: intoxication and music shattering forms and melting personal identity

away, so that the individual was pulled down into the racing river of life and

learnt to affirm its tragic secrets’’ (TGG 310-11).

Nietzsche, of course, hoped to revive the tragic spirit of the daimon in the modern

world.

As Butler saw it, the problem was that the Greek ideal was both Apollonian and

Dionysian, but Germans were incapable of comprehending both simultaneously and

tempering their enthusiasm for the emotionally appealing Dionysian with thecautious reason of the Apollonian. Goethe had emphasized one ‘‘half-truth,’’ that of

the ‘‘noble simplicity and serene greatness’’ derived from Winkelmann; in reaction,

Nietzsche had emphasized another half-truth, ‘‘the wild, ecstatic, orgiastic and

savage spirit of DionysiusyIt was in fact the first engagement in a conflict in which

moderation was vanquished by fanaticism, serenity by mass-hysteria and humane-

ness by inhumanity’’ (TGG , 127). Nietzsche’s vision had triumphed, and disaster

inevitably followed. Disciples of Nietzsche and George had employed the concept of

the Daimon to elevate other figures to mythological status, and ‘‘the horizon in

Germany is now well and truly surrounded by myths deriving from Goethe and

Nietzsche: national heroes for the most part, transformed into supermen, many of them in the clutches of a daimon; still further mythologised during the last few years

into prophets and fore-runners of Adolf Hitler; not gradually and slowly by popular

accretions and superstitions, but violently, willfully by highly intellectual if much-

bedazzled minds’’ (TGG , 333). Butler especially criticized a spate of overwrought

biographies emanating from the Stefan George circle. She also chided the ecstatic

prose of Stefan Zweig’s Der Kamp mit dem Dä mon (1925) which portrayed

Ho ¨ lderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche as victims of the daimonic. Yet, Butler herself often

employed daimonism in an almost reified sense to explain some modern Germans.

Butler watched the situation in Germany deteriorate in the years immediately

preceding World War II. During a visit in 1936, she observed Nazism first-hand. Shetraveled to a favorite spot, Hassfurt, ‘‘to give ‘the real Germany’ one more chance’’

but was disgusted by what she saw. The ubiquitous swastika, anti-Semitic posters,

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and ‘‘revolting little specimens of the Hitler youth’’ repelled her (PB , 149). She was

depressed by a visit with an elderly watchmaker who feared for his safety because

‘‘so far he had never done or said anything against the Jews, andywas afraid people

were beginning to notice it’’ (PB , 151). When a German doctor boasted that his faircomplexion kept him from going out in the sun, Butler explained loudly to her Welsh

traveling companion, ‘‘The Germanic races are lichtscheuy(an opprobrious term

meaning both ‘shunning the light’ and ‘shunning enlightenment.’) So we are lucky to

be Celtsywe can walk in the sun’’ (PB , 150). Her German hosts did not appreciate

the pun. During World War II, Butler participated in a lecture series on the

‘‘German Mind’’ with an ambivalent discussion of ‘‘Romantic Germanentum,’’

expanding her attack on Teutonic idealism to Fichte, Schlegel, and other thinkers

who unwittingly served the cause of extreme nationalism. She carefully distinguished

the distortions that Nazism added to such thought, and she emphasized Nietzsche’s

fierce critique of Imperial Germany while conceding the baleful potential in his

hymns to the superman and the will to power. She ended her lecture with a blunt

indictment of Stefan George for evoking the cult of a savage savior in poetry while

fleeing the reality when Hitler made his fantasy incarnate.18

Butler, who returned to Cambridge as the Schroeder Professor of German in 1945,

never resolved her ambivalence toward Germans. However, when she visited Bonn in

the spring of 1948 for the first time in over 30 years, she was profoundly disturbed by

the ‘‘dreadful devastation, the indescribable squalor of the inhabitantsythe general

impression of moral and physical ruinysuch as I hope never to see again’’ (PB , 50).

She had been invited by the British Foreign Office to lecture at the University, andhad chosen Thomas Mann’s recently published Doktor Faustus as her topic.19 When

she arrived in Bonn, she called on the redoubtable scholar Ernst Robert Curtius,

who reacted angrily to her decision to speak on Mann. ‘‘How had I the nerve to

lecture in Germany aboutyDoktor Faustus, which, as even a benighted English-

woman ought to be able to see, was to rub salt into the wound caused by the sins and

the sufferings of an unhappy nation? Thomas Mann had treacherously exposed his

own country; and now here was I adding insult to that injury’’ (PB , 50-51).20 Curtius

predicted that the students would protest by shunning her talk; the Foreign Office

representative took a more mundane view, that undernourished students would

forego a weekend lecture in favor of digging for potatoes in the fields. In fact, shehad a sizeable audience, because ‘‘there were only two copies of yDoktor Faustus in

the town, and hardly any of the students had read it. They naturally wanted to know

what this much-discussed novel was like.’’ Butler believed that the students were

moved by Mann’s parable, and that ‘‘they were in the right frame of mind to accept

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18E.M. Butler, ‘‘Romantic Germanentum,’’ in The German Mind and Outlook (London: Chapman and

Hall, 1945), 92–123. The lecture took place in 1942 or 1943.19Some of her lecture was surely reproduced in E.M. Butler, ‘‘The Traditional Elements in Thomas

Mann’s Doktor Faustus,’’ Publications of the English Goethe Society 18 (1949), 1–33.20

In 1949, Curtius attacked Karl Jaspers for his alleged impiety to Goethe and his critique of Germany.See Arthur R. Evans, Jr., On Four Modern Humanists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970),

‘‘Ernst Robert Curtius,’’ 85–145, esp. 129–132; and Eds. Lotte Kohler and Hans Sauer, Hannah Arendt-

Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969 (New York, 1992), 136, 714–715.



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his final message transcending the despair which produced it’’ (PB , 51). Even Curtius

mellowed when he learned that she had studied with his friend, Jane Ellen

Harrison.21 Her lecture was well received, and she left Bonn feeling slightly more

positive toward the Germans. When she visited Berlin in the autumn of 1948 foranother lecture tour, sponsored as part of the airlift, Butler saw the ruins of the

Berlin State Library, the scene of her run-in with German bureaucracy. Instead of

feeling triumphant, however, she sensed a ‘‘whiff of an heroic age’’ in the stoicism of

the West Berliners. She found in the ruins a ‘‘kind of beauty, as if Berlin had found

her soul in the surrounding chaos’’ (PB , 189). The destruction—both symbolic and

literal—of all that Butler hated in modern Germany seemed to offer hope for a

renaissance of the strengths and qualities she had cherished in Romantic-era

Germans. Perhaps this experience prompted her reevaluation of the daimonic in

Byron and Goethe, which appeared in 1956.22

Butler traced the genesis of this work to an invitation she received in 1949 to speak

on the topic of Byron and Goethe. She welcomed the offer less for the opportunity to

talk about Goethe than for the pleasure of immersing herself once again in English

literature. Always uncomfortable with her professional interest in German literature

and culture, Butler had tried in 1931 to shift to British literary topics with a

biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.23 This work did not provide the escape she

hoped for, and after so many years of studying German literature Butler appreciated

renewing her acquaintance with an English poet. She compared this experience

to ‘‘emerging bat-like from a dark labyrinthine tunnel into the full light of day’’

(PB , 185). While she could not deny the ‘‘beauty and fascination of Germanliterature and poetry, ‘‘she admitted that ‘‘the switch-over from German to English

at this point was like letting in the sun’’ (PB , 185). Butler embarked on a course of

research that later resulted in the publication of Byron and Goethe.

Since her last visit, the situation in Germany had improved dramatically, both

politically and economically. Bonn she remembered as a low point: her

acquaintances there were ‘‘either dead or dying,’’ and ‘‘with the return of

prosperityyI expected to find a consequent return of aggressiveness, and I won’t

say that I was wrong’’ (PB , 190). Still, she overcame the initial resistance of student

audiences. When she began her lecture series, the students made clear that they were

tired of Goethe and considered Byron old-fashioned, but they warmed to herdiscussion and the appeal of the poetry, and in the end she attributed ‘‘to the

audiences in Germany in 1954ythe determination and the energy’’ to write what

was her final book (PB , 190). Byron and Goethe examines the reciprocal influence of

the two literary figures and their growing mutual admiration, but it also reveals

Butler’s resolution of the ambivalence she had felt during her whole career about

German literature and culture. In this work, she revisited the concept of the

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21Jane Harrison had been a close friend of Curtius’ grandfather, namesake, and idol, the renowned

Hellenist Ernst Curtius. Later, she was a friend of Ernst Robert Curtius.22

Eliza M. Butler, Byron and Goethe (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1956). Hereafter abbreviated as BG ,and subsequent references appear in parentheses in the text.23See Sandra J. Peacock, ‘‘Biography and Autobiography in Eliza Butler’s Sheridan, A Ghost Story,’’

Biography 21:4 (Fall 1998): 445–462. The Sheridan book is also very unconventional.



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daimonic and subtly revised her assessment of its origins and history in Germany.

She noted how Goethe altered his judgement of the British poet after Byron’s death

in Greece and how Goethe’s vision of the daimon changed as well. Her explanation

of the change in Goethe’s opinion of Byron reflects a change in her own thinkingabout Germany and Germans after World War II. In Tyranny, the Germans were

solely responsible for the calamities of the 20th century because they embraced and

twisted the daimonic into a malevolent, destructive force. In Byron and Goethe, the

concept of the daimon and Goethe’s treatment of it receive a more sympathetic and

nuanced analysis.

In reevaluating Goethe’s use of the daimon, Butler focused on the contrast

between Faust I and Faust II , the collapse of Goethe’s faith in the power of the

classical Greek ethos to prevail in the modern world, and the influence of Byron on

Goethe’s thought. The German poet, she argued, had conveyed in Faust II his loss of

faith in the Greek model when, after the death of Euphorion (who symbolized

Byron) and Helen’s return to the underworld, ‘‘Faust’s Greek dream-world

vanished’’ (BG, 208). Moreover,

Byron’s death, but more than that his aspirations, had destroyed for ever

Goethe’s waning belief in the essential harmony and stability underlying

theyworld. His surety for that had always been the vision of ancient Greece;

and his hopes had lain in its resurgence in modern times. But Byron had shown

him what form that resurgence was most likely to take; he abandoned his hopes as

delusory and his conception of classical Greece itself as based on an illusion.

There was (as he had always really known) something dimly apprehended in theuniverse and in man warring against the realization of any such golden age,

something incommensurable, terrible and mysterious, to which he now held the

key. (BG , 208)

That ‘‘something’’ was the daimon, and Butler argued that it took on new form

and significance in Goethe’s thought.

Relying largely on Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann, Butler sketched the

evolution of his conception of the daimon and Byron’s role in this new vision. By

rights, the conservative German should have been so repelled by Byron’s politics that

he would have been immune to his other, attractive qualities. Nevertheless, Goetheresponded to Byron’s poetry and the irresistible force of his personality. Under this

influence, he began ‘‘shaping a mythological system in which Byron would find a

conspicuous place and a far more convincing label than hypochondriacal, negative,

polemical, self-tormenting or licentious which had done duty in the past,’’

particularly among English critics (BG , 209). Though Goethe ‘‘had carried the

notion of daimonism about with him for a very long time, almost since his poetical

beginnings,yit was not until the Helena-act [in Faust II ] was completed that it began

to impose itself in a mythological guise visible in the lightyilluminating the fate of

Euphorion and the hidden recesses of his own mind’’ (BG , 209). If Euphorion was

Byron, then the death of Helen’s and Faust’s offspring represented the incompat-ibility of the classical and the modern. According to Eckermann, until the late 1820s

Goethe spoke of the daimon and the genius interchangeably, because the daimon

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was primarily a creative force, or at least an important component of creativity. At

the same time, however, he began to argue as well that those people motivated by the

daimon had specific missions to fulfill, but that often they were opposed or thwarted

by what he eventually referred to as ‘‘retarding daimons.’’ Not all daimonic missionswere creative; some would have broader historical consequences, and Napoleon was

an obvious example (BG , 210-12).

Moreover, Goethe believed that ‘‘such men must be destroyed! Every outstanding

man has a certain mission which he has been sent to fulfil. When he has completed

ity.the daimons trip him up again and again, until at last he is vanquished’’

(BG , 212). Byron’s mission, Goethe felt, ‘‘was to dramatize the Old Testament, and

by so doing to unseal men’s eyes to the mercilessness of the current Christian dogma

based on the Bible, to destroy the fearful belief in eternal damnation’’ (BG , 212). In

Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe grappled with the notion of the daimon, as Jacob

had wrestled with the angel:

It was not divine, for it seemed irrational; not human for it appeared to be

without a mind; not devilish, for it could be beneficent; not angelic, for it often

betrayed malice. It resembled chance, being apparently causeless; yet it had some

similarity with providence, for it hinted at connections. Everything that seemed to

us limited was penetrable by this force, for it contracted time and extended space.

It seemed that its dwelling-place was among impossibilities and that it rejected

possibilities with scorn. This being, which seemed to interpose itself between all

other beings either to separate or unite them, I called daimonic after the example

of the ancients and others who have thought like them. I tried to escape from thisterrible being by taking refuge as was my practice in a symbol. ( BG , 214)24

The daimon, however, was too strong to remain a symbol indefinitely.

To someone as fundamentally reverent toward order as Goethe, the idea of such a

powerful force was unsettling:

The daimonic element appears in its most terrifying aspect when it manifests

predominantly in a human being. During the course of my life I have been able to

observe several such men, sometimes closely, sometimes from afar. They are not

always the most admirable persons, not necessarily the most intelligent nor themost gifted, and rarely are they remarkable for their goodness of heart; but an

extraordinary force goes out from themyAll the moral forces banded together

are powerless against them; in vain do the more enlightened among mankind

strive to render them suspect either as deceivers or as deceived; they attract the

masses, and they can only be vanquished by the universe itself with which they are

in conflict. (BG , 215)

Goethe had in mind here Cagliostro, whose ‘‘daimonic poweryhe firmly believed

had helped to precipitate the outbreak of the French Revolution,’’ though as Butler

pointed out, ‘‘his description evokes for the present-day reader the much more evil

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24Of course, ancient notions of the daimonic were not uniform. See Frederick E. Brenk, ‘‘A Most

Strange Doctrine.’ Daimon in Plutarch,’’ Classical Journal 69 (1973) 1–12.



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personality of Adolf Hitler, against whom all the moral forces banded together were

of no avail until his hour had struck’’ (BG , 215).

By 1831, Goethe ‘‘no longer thought of daimonism and genius as interchangeable

terms; and in his subsequent conversations with Eckermann on the subject, the menof purely artistic or poetical genius are no longer in evidence, and the men of

destinyy possess the field’’ (BG , 216). Byron was the only poet to be included in the

new pantheon, and ‘‘Goethe rightly sensed in Byron a power that might alter the

trend of future events’’ (BG , 216). The English, Butler argued, could see in Byron

and Byronism only the flouter of social convention, the rake, the outlaw and

outsider; they overlooked the daimonic source of his life energy and creativity.

‘‘yGoethe saw deeper and further than the English in penetrating through

Byronism to daimonism’’ (BG , 217).

What imprint had Byron and Byronism left on Europe? Butler cited Bertrand

Russell’s description of Byron, in his History of Western Philosophy, as the ‘‘poet of

the movement which asserted the right of rebellion in the name of nationalism, and

of the splendour of war in defence of liberty,’’ and she observed that ‘‘it will

obviously always depend on the personal attitude of the observer of events as to

whether his influence on this plane is to be acclaimed or deplored’’ (BG , 218). She

concluded that proof of Byron’s daimonic power lay in his appeal to someone like

Goethe, who rejected his political beliefs but was drawn irresistibly to his art and his

personality. According to Butler, their mutual attraction had terrible consequences:

‘‘Some may welcome [Byron’s] pervasive presence; others may regret it or scoff at it;

but nowhere except in Germany under the guise of daimonism as interpreted byGoethe has it spelt disaster’’ (BG , 220).

In the concluding pages, Butler speculated that both the English daimon and his

German admirer had been necessary to create the irrevocable cascade of events that

led to the horrors of the 20th century. ‘‘Neither of them can be blamed for the dire

effect this conception [the daimonic] was to have in the future; retrospectively they

appear as unconscious agents of the incalculable power of ideas which have

outstripped their creators, whether for good or for ill, especially visionary and

mythological ideas’’ (BG , 220). Byron opened for Goethe the door to a vision of a

powerful, irrational, and potentially devastating force, one that embodied life in its

most affirming, destructive, and elemental impulses. Byron had unleashed in Goethea dangerous element that Goethe had long tried to control, which made the English

complicit, no matter how indirectly, in the spread of daimonism in Germany and

everything that followed.

Butler closed by once again citing Russell, who traced the ‘‘romantic revoltyfrom

Byron, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Mussolini and Hitler,’’ and the process by

which the combination of ‘‘nationalism, Satanism, and hero-worship, the legacy of

Byron, became part of the complex soul of Germany’’ (BG , 221). She suggested

including Goethe in this list, ‘‘since it was daimonism rather than Satanism,

daimonism with all the weight of Goethe’s prestige behind it, which, joined to other

and darker forces, incited Germany to megalomania and madness’’ (BG , 221).Admittedly, both Byron and Goethe would have been appalled by Hitler, the Nazi

Party, and the ‘‘daimon-worship’’ they engendered. Yet, their ideas had borne

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strange fruit. In Tyranny, she had simply blamed the Germans for embracing the

daimonic and yielding gladly to its evil appeal. Twenty years later, in Byron and

Goethe, she offered a different explanation:

yfrom the contact of these two minds a third energy came forth, focusing and

concentrating the dark rays of daimonism, an indescribably baneful force,

sanctioning spiritual evil in high places, sinister and grotesque. That such a result

should have been produced by Goethe’s spiritual surrender to Byron is a sobering

reminder of the incalculable power latent in persons, emotions and ideas. One

would like to deny it in the present instance; but if in truth Byron’s legacy to

Europe was Hitlerism, then it must also be allowed that a vital contribution was

made to it from Goethe’s estate, and that the conjunction of the two poets was ill-

starred. (BG , 222)

Here, she attributed to both the English and the German writer, each of whom

represented a national character, a role in the chain of events that led to World War

II. True, she still charged the Germans with a dangerous susceptibility to ideas, but

she also identified the guilty daimon as English. Her conclusion indicates a softening

of her attitude on Germany and Germans. Instead of an inherent cultural weakness

in Germans, Butler now acknowledged the irresistible power of some ideas anywhere

and hence the contribution of the English daimon, Byron, to the terrible events of

the 20th century.

When Beacon Press published a paperback edition of Tyranny in 1958, the year

before her death, Butler wrote a preface that confirmed her shift in perspective.While she reasserted her belief that the writers she studied in Tyranny had expressed

ideas and visions that boded ill for Germany’s future, she evaluated them differently

than she had 25 years earlier. ‘‘It is a far cry from the great classical age in German

literature to the tragedy of the total war the Germans were about to unleash,’’ she

wrote. ‘‘Nor did the heroes in the main body of this study represent in themselves

any such danger to humanity’’ (TGG , vii). In fact, they had subscribed to a liberal,

humanitarian ideal which they saw—rightly or wrongly—embodied in Greek

classicism. Instead of holding these writers responsible for the inevitable march

toward Nazism, she now absolved some of them of responsibility for everything

except, perhaps, naivete ´ and a severe underappreciation of the ‘‘danger of excess’’(TGG , viii). Winkelmann had admired the ‘‘greatness, nobility, simplicity and

serenity of soul’’ he saw in the Greek ideal; Lessing had used his writings to promote

tolerance; Herder ‘‘saw the divine spirit unfolding like a flower in all the races on

earth,’’ and she could hardly bear to mention Goethe’s name ‘‘in the same

breathywith the nation responsible for Belsen and Buchenwald’’ (TGG , vii–viii).

Schiller and Ho ¨ lderlin could never have approved of the Nazi regime. Heine had

glimpsed the potential danger but nevertheless replaced Winkelmann’s calm, serene

ideal with Dionysius, who ‘‘took the heart of Nietzsche by storm’’ (TGG , ix).

Nietzsche, too, she believed, would have repudiated Hitler’s rule, but the concept of

the ‘‘race of daimonic supermen’’ held a fatal appeal for Germans. Yet even StefanGeorge, whose poetry had glorified the ideal of a sort of superman, ‘‘did not care for

the ideal when it was realized,’’ and died, an exile from the Nazi regime, in

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Switzerland (TGG , x). All these writers were susceptible to the seductiveness of ideas,

and Butler cautioned that humanity must recognize ‘‘the power innate even in the

noblest ideals to wreak havoc in real life’’ (TGG , xi). At the end of her life, she seems

to have understood the power that ideas had exerted over her as well.

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Struggling With the Daimon- Eliza M. Butler on Germany and Germans

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