Gems (?) of German Thought Part 1

Gems (?) of German Thought.

by Various.

INTRODUCTION

In accordance with cla.s.sic precedent, this anthology ought to have consisted of "1,001 Gems of German Thought," I have been content with half that number, not--heaven knows!--for any lack of material, but simply for lack of time and energy to make the ingathering. After all, enough is as good as a feast, and I think that the evidence as to the dominant characteristics of German mentality is tolerably complete as it stands.

Though I hope it is fairly representative, the collection does not pretend to be systematic. I have cast no sweeping drag-net, but have simply dipped almost at random into the wide ocean of German thought.

Some of my most precious "finds" I have come upon by pure chance; and by pure chance, too, I have no doubt missed many others. Some books that I should have liked to examine have not been accessible to me; and there must be many of which I have never heard. On the other hand, the list of books from which my gems have been selected by no means indicates the extent of my reading--or skimming. I have gone through many books and pamphlets which furnished no quotable extracts, but none that diverged in tone from the rest, or marred the majestic unison of German self-laudation and contempt for the rest of the world. I have read of (but not seen) a book by one F.W. Forster which is said to contain a protest against theoretic war-worship, and even a mild defence of England. How very mild it is we may judge from this sentence: "England has given us not only men like Lord Grey, scoundrels and hypocrites, who have this war upon their conscience; it has also given us the Salvation Army," etc., etc.

One voice the reader may be surprised to miss from the great chorus--the voice of William the Second. He is unrepresented--save in one pa.s.sing remark (No. 136)--for two reasons. In the first place, his most striking utterance--the injunction to his soldiers to emulate the Huns of Attila--though almost certainly genuine, is not official, and could not be quoted without discussion.[1] In the second place, to confess the truth, I shrank from the intolerable monotony of reading his Majesty's speeches--that endless array of plat.i.tudes in full uniform--on the chance of discovering one or two quotable gems.

Practically all my quotations are taken from books and pamphlets. The sole exceptions are a few extracts from pre-war newspapers, cited in Nippold's "Der deutsche Chauvinismus." It would have been an endless and unprofitable task to garner up the extravagances of German newspapers since the outbreak of the war; not to mention that a German anthologist could probably make a pretty effective retort by going through the files of the British war press.

Is my anthology as it stands open to a telling _tu quoque_ by means of a selection of gems from British books and pamphlets of the type of those from which I have made my gleanings? Is it a case of the mote and the beam? I think we may be pretty confident that it is not. I doubt whether the literature of the world can show a parallel to the amazing outburst of tribal arrogance, unrestrained and unashamed, of which these pages contain but a few scattered specimens. In the extracts from literature "Before the War" (which have always been kept apart from those which date from "After July, 1914"), the reader may see this habit of mind growing and gathering strength: the declaration of war opens the floodgates, and the torrent rushes forth, grandiose, overwhelming, and, I believe, unique. I know of only one English book in which the German taste and temper is emulated. It is certainly a deplorable production; but it is the work of a wholly unknown man, whereas many of the most incredible utterances in the following pages proceed from men of world-wide reputation. Indeed, few contemporary German names of much distinction are absent from my list.

Wilamowitz-Mollendorf, Harnack, Wundt, Oncken, Eucken, Haeckel, Naumann, Rohrbach, Sombart, Liszt, all join with a will in the chorus of arrogance, ambition, and hate. Many quotations come from a series of pamphlets called _Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit_, to which all the most eminent professors of Berlin University have contributed, with some from other universities. I have also, no doubt, culled pa.s.sages from a good many n.o.bodies and busybodies; but when the n.o.bodies and the somebodies are found to echo and re-echo each other, the inference is that the general tone of the public mind is very fairly represented. It will be noted that many of the wildest shrieks of self-glorification and ferocity proceed from clerics and theologians.

The world as a whole has been curiously blind to the inordinate self-valuation characteristic of the German spirit. So long ago as the beginning of last century, we find Fichte a.s.suring his countrymen that: "There are no two ways about it: if you founder, the whole of humanity founders with you, without hope of any possible restoration."

Even Heine, in the preface to "Deutschland" (1844) could write half-jestingly that "if only the Germans would out-soar the French in deeds, as they already had in thought," and if they would carry out in their spiritual and political life some rather vaguely indicated reforms, "not only Alsace and Lorraine, but all France, all Europe, the whole world, would become German." "I often dream," he adds, "of this mission, this universal dominance of Germany." Of course we are not to write Heine down a Pan-German of the modern, realistic type.

There is more than a dash of irony in this pa.s.sage--he obviously implies that there is very little chance of Germany fulfilling the conditions that he lays down as indispensable to her world-domination.

Nevertheless, there is a sinister significance in the fact that a spirit like his should be found dallying for a moment with dreams of world-supremacy. It was, of course, the war of 1870, with its resounding triumphs, that brought these visions, so to speak, within the range of practical politics. For fifteen or twenty years, Germany was, as Bismarck said, "sated"; but with the coming of the youthful, pushful, self-a.s.sertive Kaiser, her aggressive instincts re-awakened and she fell to brooding over the idea that her incomparable physical and spiritual energies were cabin'd, cribb'd, confined. The rapid growth of her population reinforced this idea, and the increase of her wealth, as was natural, only made her greedy for more. The result was that she gave her soul over in fatal earnest to an ambitious and grasping tribalism to which she was, from of old, only too p.r.o.ne. The Pan-Germans were the Uhlans, the stormy petrels, of the movement; but the whole mind of the nation was in reality carried away by it, save for a very small section which was conscious of its dangers and feebly protested. The egoism of which she was constantly accusing other nations, ran riot in her own breast, was elevated into a political virtue, and expressed itself on the spiritual side in a towering racial vanity. The word "deutsch," always a word of magical properties, became the synonym of an unapproachable superiority in every walk of life[2]--a superiority that sanctified aggression and made domination a duty. In many minds, no doubt, these sentiments wore a decent mask; but the moment war broke out, the mask dropped off, with the amazing results very imperfectly mirrored in the following pages.

But self-worship and the craving for aggrandizement are in reality very uninspiring emotions. The thing that has most deeply impressed me in my searching of the German war-scriptures is the extraordinary aridity of spirit that pervades them. A literature more unidea'd (to use Johnson's word), more devoid of original thought, or grace, or charm, or atmosphere, it would be hard to conceive. There are, of course, some inequalities. One or two writers seem (to the foreign reader) to have a certain dignity of style which is lacking in the common herd. But in the very best there is little that gives one even literary pleasure, and nothing that shows any depth of humanity, any generous feeling, any openness of outlook. Even a happy phrase is so rare that, when it does occur, one treasures it. I find, for instance, in a little book by Friedrich Meinecke, a distinction between "politics of ideas and politics of interests" that is happily put and worth remembering. Again, Professor v. Harnack re-states the principle that "he's the best cosmopolite who loves his native country best" in a rather ingenious way: "There is no such thing as fruit," he says, "there are only apples, pears, etc. If we want to be good fruit, we must be a good apple or a good pear." These are small scintillations, but the toiler through German pamphlet literature is truly grateful for them.

For the rest, when you have read three or four of these pamphlets, you have read all. The writers seem to be working a sort of Imperial German treadmill, stepping dutifully from plank to plank of patriotic dogma in a pre-arranged rotation. The topics are few and ever-recurrent--"dieser uns aufgezwungene Krieg" (this war which has been forced upon us), the glorious uprising of Germany at its outbreak, the miracle of mobilization, the Russian knout, French frivolity, the base betrayal of Germany by envious, hypocritical England, the immeasurable superiority of German Kultur and Technik, the saintly virtues of the German soldier, and so on, through the appointed litany. There is even a set of obligatory quotations which very few have the strength of mind to resist. By far the most popular is Geibel's couplet:

Und es mag am deutschen Wesen Einmal noch die Welt genesen.

(And the world may once more be healed by the German nature, or character.) It came into vogue before the war. The Kaiser struck the keynote of the whole chorus of self-exaltation when he said (August 31, 1907): "The German people will be the granite block on which the good G.o.d may build and complete His work of Kultur in the world. Then will be fulfilled the word of the poet who said that the world will one day be healed by the German character." In the extracts collected in Nippold's "Der deutsche Chauvinismus" (a pre-war publication) the Geibel couplet appears at least four times--probably oftener. After the outbreak of the war, it is easier to reckon the utterances in which it does _not_ occur than those in which it does. Next in popularity to the "Wesen--genesen" catchword comes the Kaiser's brilliant saying, "I no longer know of any parties--I know only German brothers." He is no good German who does not quote this with reverent admiration. Then come four or five others which are about equally in request: Bismarck's "We Germans fear G.o.d, and nothing else in the world"; "the old _furor Teutonicus_"; "_oderint dum metuant_"; Arndt's

Der Gott der Eisen wachsen liess, Der wollte keine Knechte--

(The G.o.d who made the iron grow meant none to be a bondman); and, finally,

Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel war', Es soll uns doch gelingen--

(And though the world were full of devils, we should succeed in spite of them.) Even a scholar of the distinction of Ulrich v.

Wilamowitz-Mollendorf, though he avoids the Geibel tag, ends one of his orations by quoting "Deutschland uber Alles." Imagine Sir Walter Raleigh or Prof. Gilbert Murray winding up an address with a selection from "Rule, Britannia"!

One English quotation occurs as often as any, except the ubiquitous "Wesen-genesen." It is "My country, right or wrong," invariably quoted in the form, "Right or wrong, my country." This is supposed to be the shockingly immoral watchword of British patriotism. It matters nothing to the German pamphleteer that the maxim is American, and that it is never quoted in England--nor, I believe, in the country of its origin--except in a spirit of irony.

And in the face of this deadly uniformity of sentiments, phraseology, and quotations, Professor La.s.son has the audacity to a.s.sure us that "The German is personally independent. He wants to judge for himself.

It is not so easy for him as for others blindly to follow this or that catchword!"

We are all, I suppose, unconscious of our own foibles, but I wonder whether we are all so apt as the Germans to deny them (and very likely attribute them to other people) while in the very act of exemplifying them. For example, it is firmly fixed in the German mind that the English consider themselves G.o.d's Chosen People, predestined to the empire of the world. I have collected numerous instances of this allegation (Nos. 453-466), but not a single one which is substantiated by a quotation from an English writer. It is, I am convinced, impossible to bring evidence for it, unless some expressions to this effect may be found in the writings of persons who believe that the English are descended from the lost Ten Tribes--persons who are about as representative of the English nation as those who believe that the earth is flat. The English mind, indeed, is but little inclined to this primitive form of theism. The German mind, on the other hand, is curiously addicted to it, and I have brought together a number of instances (Nos. 117-135) in which German writers make the very claim to Divine calling and election which they falsely attribute to the English, and denounce as insanely presumptuous.[3] So, too, with egoism. The Germans do not actually consider themselves free from egoism; on the contrary, they are rather given to boasting of it (Nos.

212, 213, 248, 300); but while it is a virtue in them, it is a very repulsive vice in the English. As for cant, which is, of course, the commonest charge against the English, one can only say that, when the German gives his mind to it, he proves himself an accomplished master of the art (Nos. 47, 55, 79, 89, 94, 104, 237, 423). Here is an example, from a book about Germany by a German-Austrian,[4] which scarcely comes within the scope of my anthology, but it is too characteristic to be lost. "_If you want_," says the writer, in italics, "_thoroughly to understand the German, you must compare the German sportsman with the hunters of other countries_. Then a sacred thrill (_heiliger Schauer_) of deep understanding will come over your heart." For the German sportsman "takes more pleasure in the life that surrounds him and which he _protects_, than in the shot which only the last hot virile craving (_Mannesgier_) wrings from him, and which he fires only when he knows that he will _kill_, _painlessly kill_. For this is the root principle of German sportsmanship: 'G.o.d grant me one day such an end as I strive to bestow upon the game.' ... And if, by mischance, the German sportsman wounds without killing a head of game, he suffers with it, and does not sleep or rest till he has put it out of its misery." If this be not very nauseous cant, where shall we seek for it?

Another curious German characteristic is the idea that, however truculent and menacing a writer's expressions may be, other people do him and his country a wicked injustice if they take him at his word. A good instance of this occurs in "Ein starkes Volk--Ein starkes Heer,"

by Kurd v. Strantz, published in 1914, shortly before the war. This writer quotes (or rather misquotes) with enthusiasm from Goethe:--

Du musst steigen und gewinnen, Du musst siegend triumphieren Oder deinend unterliegen, Amboss oder Hammer sein.[5]

Next he proceeds to quote from Felix Dahn:--

Seitdem ist's freudig Germanenrecht Mit dem Hammer Land zu erwerben.

Wir sind von des Hammergottes Geschlecht, Und wollen sein Weltreich erben.[6]

Then, on the same page, only four lines lower down, he remarks plaintively:--"Foreign, and especially French, diplomacy is now industriously spreading the calumny that the German Government and the German people are given to rattling the sabre, and that we want to use for aggressive ends the increased armament which has been forced upon us." Is it mere hostile prejudice to hold that his own poetical selections give a certain colour to the "calumny"?

Most of the German attacks on England will be found, in the last a.n.a.lysis, to rest on this quaint habit of mind--the habit of a.s.suming that, no matter how hostile and threatening Germany's words and deeds might be, we had no right to do her the injustice of supposing that she meant anything by them. We ought to have known that she was merely "dissembling her love."

Some readers may be disposed to regret that the great Germanic trinity, Nietzsche-Treitschke-Bernhardi, contribute so largely to my anthology. In the first place, it may be said, we are tired of their names; in the second place, Germans deny that they have had anything like the influence we attribute to them. There is a certain validity in the first of these objections. The constant recurrence of these three names is certainly a little tedious. They are like a three-headed Charles I--or a triplicate Geibel. I would gladly have omitted them had it been by any means possible. But one might as well compile an Old Testament anthology and omit Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. For, whatever the Germans may say, they are the major prophets of the new-German spirit. Treitschke is the prophet of tribalism, Nietzsche of ruthlessness, Bernhardi of ambition. It is absurd to say that they are not influential. Treitschke may have fallen somewhat out of fashion in the years immediately preceding the war, but his spirit had permeated the political thought of a whole generation. To the living influence of Nietzsche there is a host of witnesses. Gerhart Hauptmann, near the beginning of the war, averred that the cultured German soldier carried "Zarathustra," along with "Faust" and the Bible, in his knapsack. Nor was this an idle guess.

Professor Deissmann, of Berlin, tells us that he enquired into the matter, and learned from book-sellers that the books most in demand among soldiers were the New Testament, "Faust" and "Zarathustra."

O.A.H. Schmitz, in "Das wirkliche Deutschland," says of the German youth born in the 'seventies and early 'eighties that Nietzsche was "the lighthouse toward which their enthusiasm was directed." Prof.

Wilhelm Bousset, of Gottingen, writes: "There is among us much unripe, unclear Nietzsche enthusiasm: many a German a.s.s has thrown the lion's skin of the great man round his shoulders, and thinks he has thereby become a philosopher and prophet." Such testimonies could be multiplied indefinitely. There is no question that Nietzsche has been by far the greatest single force among the spiritual shapers of new-Germany. It may be true that he did not intend his "immoralism" to be read literally as a guide to conduct--it may be true that, in some of his most characteristic pa.s.sages, he knew himself to be talking reckless and dangerous nonsense (that was his way of "living dangerously")--but can we reasonably suppose that soldiers in a "conquered" country, soldiers full of the belief that any opposition to Germanism was in itself a crime (see No. 344), paused to look beneath his surface eulogies of murder and l.u.s.t for some esoteric meaning that may possibly underlie them? Can it be a mere coincidence that, in the first war which Germany has waged since Nietzsche entered upon his apostolate of ruthlessness, the German armies should have been animated, to all appearance, by a literal interpretation of his "beast of prey" ideal?

As for Bernhardi, whom some German writers profess never to have heard of until we began to talk about him in England, one can only say that he is an ex-member of the Great General Staff, and is probably a pretty faithful interpreter of the ideas prevalent in that not un-influential organization. Moreover, his "Germany and the Next War,"

which appeared in the spring of 1912, ran through five editions at 6 marks before that year was out, and was then republished in a cheap and somewhat condensed popular edition under the t.i.tle of "Our Future." Reviewing this edition, _Die Post_ says that, in its original form, the book "was received with the most serious attention in political and especially in military circles," and adds that this cheaper reprint "_must_ now become a book for the people."

It is an error, however, to suppose that a writer's importance is to be measured solely by the influence he can be shown to have exerted. A book or pamphlet may have had little or no active influence, and may yet be a very illuminating symptom of the national frame of mind.

Every book must be an effect before it can become a cause. That Treitschke, Nietzsche, and Bernhardi have been very efficient causes I see no reason to doubt; but at any rate they are immensely significant effects of the psychological conditions of which I am here gathering up some random evidences.

It was a more difficult question to decide whether the lucubrations of Herr Houston Stewart Chamberlain came within my scope. Yet I had little hesitation in including him. The fact that he is by birth an Englishman does not make him any the less a characteristic and recognized mouthpiece of the new-German spirit. It may be objected that he caricatures it, that he is more German than the Germans. That, in the first place, is impossible; in the second place, while we have many evidences that Germans, from the Kaiser downward, set a high value on Herr Chamberlain's writings, we hear little or nothing of any protest against them as misrepresentations of "Deutschtum." Shall I be suspected of a quaint perversity of national prejudice if I say that Herr Chamberlain's war pamphlets are distinctly better reading than the great majority of their kind? They are much more individual, much less stereotyped and monotonous. One finds in them an occasional idea that is not the common property of every man in the street. It is generally (not always) a more or less crazy idea, but one hails it as an oasis in the desert of bl.u.s.terous commonplace.

The arrangement of my little jewel-heap was more difficult, if less laborious, than the ingathering. Many of my extracts, perhaps most, might with equal appropriateness have been ranged under any one of three or four rubrics. Thus my cla.s.sification is at best rough and, to some extent, arbitrary. There is, however, a certain reason in the sequence of headings. The first section, "Deutschland uber Alles,"

represents the "badge of all the tribe"--the characteristic which lies at the root of the whole mischief--Germany's colossal self-glorification, self-adoration. If there is anything like it in history, it is unknown to me. Other nations may have been as vain, but, not having the printing-press so readily at command, they gave their vanity less exuberant expression. Besides, they may have had a sense of humour. The manifestations of this foible (if a thing of such tragic consequences can be called by such a name) fall under certain sub-headings. It was clear, for instance, that the vauntings of German Kultur must have a compartment to themselves--likewise the a.s.sertions of a special relation to G.o.d, the claims to the status of a Chosen People, and the comparisons, direct and indirect, between Germany and Christ. Having established, by means of a cloud of witnesses, the ruling pa.s.sion of the national mind, I present in the following section proofs of the "Ambitions" in which this megalomania finds its natural utterance. In the sections, "War-Worship," "Ruthlessness" and "Machiavelism," are grouped evidences of the methods of force and fraud by which it was hoped that these ambitions were to be realized. Then, in a final section, I have a.s.sembled evidences of the inevitable corollary to morbid self-adoration--the boundless and almost equally unprecedented contempt and loathing for all adversaries, but especially for England.

The great majority of my quotations are taken direct from the original sources, the references being exactly given. I was scrupulous on this point, not only that the reader might be able to test the accuracy and fairness[7] of my work, but because I hoped that some one, some day, might be moved to republish the anthology in the original German. One cannot but think that, when the war-frenzy is over, a brief retrospect of its extravagances may be salutary for the German spirit. In a certain number of cases, however, I have not been able to give exact references, because the originals have not been accessible to me. This applies to my selections from three previous volumes of selections: Nippold's "Der Deutsche Chauvinismus," Andler's "Collection de doc.u.ments sur le Pangermanisme," and Bang's "Hurrah and Halleluiah."

Andler's excellent and scholarly method has, however, enabled me to "place" quotations from his collection to within a page or two. Thus, if some very Pan-German utterance does not occur on the precise page I have indicated, it will certainly be found on the preceding or on the following page.

Italics in my text always represent italics, or, rather, s.p.a.ced type, in the original; but Germans are very lavish in their use of s.p.a.ced type, and I have not always thought it necessary to reproduce this peculiarity. Points of exclamation, unless enclosed in square brackets, are the author's, not mine. I have almost always resisted the temptation to employ typographical devices to enhance the l.u.s.tre of individual gems. In the Index of Authors I have added to many names a brief note which will enable the reader to estimate the position of the different writers in the public life of Germany.

In bringing together my material, I have found valuable help in many quarters. I should like especially to acknowledge my deep obligation to Mr. Alexander Gray for manifold aid and suggestion.

W.A.

_6th December, 1916._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] On the other hand, the almost equally remarkable warning to recruits that they must be ready to shoot down their nearest and dearest at the All-Highest command, is undoubtedly authentic.

[2] In a pamphlet by Professor A. La.s.son, ent.i.tled _Deutsche Art und deutsche Bildung_, the adjective "deutsch" occurs 256 times in 42 pages--sometimes 13 times in one page, often 10 or 11 times--and always, of course, with a sort of unctuous implication that human language contains no higher term of eulogy. This enumeration does not include the constantly recurring "deutsch" in "Deutschland," nor the frequently repeated "germanisch" and "teutonisch."

[3] It may, of course, be possible to find many pa.s.sages in which English writers say that, as a matter of history, G.o.d, or Heaven, or Providence, has given the British race great possessions throughout the world--a fact which the Germans are the first to admit and resent. But this is totally different from claiming a Divine mission to rule, or to civilize, or to "heal" the world.

[4] "Das Deutsche Volk in schwerer Zeit," by R.H. Bartsch, p. 118.