Germany and the Germans Part 7

As Germany has few traditions of freedom, having rarely won liberty as a united people, but having been beaten into national unity by her political giants, or her robuster sovereigns, so the press before and during Bismarck's long reign, from 1862 to 1890, was kept well in hand by those who ruled. It is only lately that caricature, criticism, and opposition have had freer play. That a journalist like Maximilian Harden (a friend and confidant of Bismarck, by the way) should be permitted to write without rebuke and without punishment that the present Kaiser "has all the gifts except one, that of politics," marks a new license in journalistic debate. That this same person was able, single-handed, to bring about the exposure and downfall of a cabal of decadent courtiers whose influence with the Emperor was deplored, proves again how completely the German press has escaped from certain leading-strings. A sharp criticism of the Emperor in die Post, even as lately as 1911, excited great interest, and was looked upon as a very daring performance.

There are some four thousand daily and more than three thousand weekly and monthly publications in Germany to-day; but neither the press as a whole, nor the journalists, with a few exceptions, exert the influence in either society or politics of the press in America and in England.

As compared with Germany, one is at once impressed with the greater number of journals and their more effective distribution at home. In America there are 2,472 daily papers; 16,269 weeklies; and 2,769 monthlies. Tri-weekly and quarterly publications added bring the total to 22,806. One group of 200 daily papers claim a circulation of 10,000,000, while five magazines have a total circulation of 5,000,000. It is calculated that there is a daily, a weekly, and a monthly magazine circulated for every single family in America. Not an unmixed blessing, by any means, when one remembers that thousands, untrained to think and uninterested, are thus dusted with the widely blown comments of undigested news. Editorial comment of any serious value is, of course, impossible, and the readers are given a strange variety of unwholesome intellectual food to gulp down, with mental dyspepsia sure to follow, a disease which is already the curse of the times in America, where superficiality and insincerity are leading the social and political dance.

To carry the comparison further, there are 22,806 newspapers published in America; 9,500 in England; 8,049 in Germany; and 6,681 in France: or 1 for every 4,100 of the population in America; 1 for every 4,700 in Great Britain; 1 for every 7,800 in Germany, and 1 for every 5,900 in France.

That a prime minister should have been a contributor to the press, as was Lord Salisbury; that a correspondent or editorial writer of a newspaper should find his way into cabinet circles, into diplomacy, or into high office in the colonies; that the editor and owner of a great newspaper should become an amba.s.sador to England, as in the case of Mr. Reid, is impossible in Germany. The character of the men who take up the profession of journalism suffers from the lack of distinction and influence of their task. Raymond, Greeley, Dana, Laffan, G.o.dkin, in America, and Delane, Hutton, Lawson, and their successors, Garvin, Strachey, Robinson, in England, are impossible products of the German journalistic soil at present.

There have been great changes, and the place of the newspaper and the power of the journalist is increasing rapidly, but the stale atmosphere of censordom hangs about the press even to-day. Freedom is too new to have bred many powerful pens or personalities, and the inconclusive results of political arguments, written for a people who are comparatively apathetic, lessen the enthusiasm of the political journalist. There are not three editors in Germany who receive as much as six thousand dollars a year, and the majority are paid from twelve hundred to three thousand a year. This does not make for independence.

I am no believer in great wealth as an incentive to activity, but certainly solvency makes for emanc.i.p.ation from the more debasing forms of tyranny.

Several of the more popular newspapers are owned and controlled by the Jews, and to the American, with no inborn or traditional prejudice against the Jews as a race, it is somewhat difficult to understand the outspoken and unconcealed suspicion and dislike of them in Germany.

There is no need to mince matters in stating that this suspicion and dislike exist. A comedy called "The Five Frankfurters" has been given in all the princ.i.p.al cities during the last year and has had a long run in Berlin. It is a scathing caricature of certain Jewish peculiarities of temperament and ambition.

There is even an anti-semitic party, small though it be, in the Reichstag, while the party of the Centre, of the Conservatives and the Agrarians, is frankly anti-semitic as well. No Jew can become an officer in the army, no Jew is admitted to one of the German corps in the universities, no Jew can hold office of importance in the state, and I presume that no unbaptized Jew is received at court. I am bound to record my personal preference for the English and American treatment of the Jew. In England they have made a Jew their prime minister, and in America we offer him equal opportunities with other men, and applaud him whole-heartedly when he succeeds, and thump him soundly with our criticism when he misbehaves. The German fears him; we do not. We have made Jews amba.s.sadors, they have served in our army and navy, and not a few of them rank among our sanest and most generous philanthropists.

To a certain extent society of the higher and official cla.s.s shuts its doors against him. One of the well-known restaurants in Berlin, until the death of its founder, not long ago, refused admission to Jews.

I venture to say that no intelligent American stops to think whether the Speyer brothers, or Kahn, or Schiff, or the members of the house of Rothschild, are Jews or not, in estimating their political, social, and philanthropic worth. Even as long ago as the close of the fourteenth century the great strife between the princes of Germany and the free cities ceased, in order that both might unite to plunder the Jews.

Luther preached: "Burn their synagogues and schools; what will not burn bury with earth that neither stone nor rubbish remain." "In like manner break into and burn their houses." "Forbid their rabbis to teach on pain of life and limb." "Take away all their prayer-books and Talmuds, in which are nothing but G.o.dlessness, lies, cursing, and swearing." In the chronicles of the time occurs frequently "Judaei occisi, combusti."

The German comes by his dislike of the Jew through centuries of traditional conflict, plunder, and hatred, and the very moulder of the present German speech, Luther, was a furious offender. The Jews have been materialists through all ages, claim the Germans: "The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness." It is to be in our day the battle of battles, they claim, whether we are to be socially, morally, and politically orientalized by this advance guard of the Orient, the Jews, or whether we are to preserve our occidental ideals and traditions. Many more men see the conflict, they maintain, than care to take part in it. The money-markets of the world are ramparts that few men care to storm, but, if the independent and the intelligent do not withstand this semitization of our inst.i.tutions, the ignorant and the degraded will one day take the matter into their own hands, as they have done before, and as they do to this day in some parts of Russia.

There are 600,000 Jews in Germany, 400,000 of them in Prussia and 100,000 of these in Berlin. In New York City alone there are more than 900,000. They are always strangers in our midst. They are of another race. They have other standards and other allegiances. Perhaps we are all of us, the most enlightened of us, provincial at bottom, we like to know who and what our neighbors are, and whence they came; and we dislike those who are outside our racial and social experiences, and our moral and religious habits, and the Jew is always, everywhere, a foreigner. At any rate, so the German maintains.

Strange as it may sound in these days, the Germans are not at heart business men. There are more eyes with dreams in them in Germany than in all the world besides. They work hard, they increase their factories, their commerce, but their hearts are not in it. The Jew has ama.s.sed an enormous part of the wealth of Germany, considering his small proportion of the total population. The German, because he is not at heart a trader, is an easy prey for him.

These things trouble us in America very little, and we smile cynically at the not altogether untruthful portraits of "Potash and Pearlmutter," and their vermin-like business methods. There is an undercurrent of feeling in America, that the virile blood is still there which will stop at nothing to throw off oppression, whether from the Jew or from any one else. If we are pinched too hard financially, if confiscation by the government or by individuals goes too far, no laws even will restrain the violence which will break out for liberty.

So we are at peace with ourselves and with others, trusting in that quiet might which will take governing into its own hands, at all hazards, if the state of affairs demands it.

With the Germans it is different. No people of modern times has been so harried and harrowed as these Germans. The Thirty Years' war left them in such fear and poverty that even cannibalism existed, and this was years after Ma.s.sachusetts and Maryland were settled. But nothing has tarnished their idealism. Whether as followers of Charlemagne, or as hordes of dreamers seeking to save Christ's tomb and cradle in the Crusades, or as intoxicated barbarians insisting that their emperor must be crowned at Rome, or as the real torch-bearers of the Reformation, or even now as dreamers, philosophers, musicians, and only industrial and commercial by force of circ.u.mstances, they are, least of all the peoples, materialists.

They have given the world lyric poetry, music, mythology, philosophy, and these are still their souls' darlings. They entered the modern world just as science began to marry with commerce and industry, and so their unworn, fresh, and youthful intellectual vigor found expression in industry. Renan writes that he owes his pleasure in intellectual things to a long ancestry of non-thinkers, and he claims to have inherited their stored-up mental forces. Germany is not unlike that. Her recent industrial and intellectual activity may be the release from bondage, of the centuries of stored-up intellectual energy from the "Woods of Germany."

It is true that they are easily governed and amenable, but this is due not wholly to the fact that they have been so long under the yoke of rulers, or because they are of cow-like disposition, but because their ideals are spiritual, not material. The American seeks wealth, the Englishman power, the Frenchman notoriety, the German is satisfied with peaceful enjoyment of music, poetry, art, and friendly and very simple intercourse with his fellows.

Certainly I am not the man to say he is wrong, when I see how spiritual things in my own country are cut out of the social body as though they were annoying and dangerous appendices.

The German of this type looks down upon the spiritual and intellectual development of other countries as far inferior to his own. Such an one in talking to an Englishman feels that he is conversing with a high-spirited, thoroughbred horse; to a Frenchman, as though he were a cynical monkey; to an American, as though he were a bright youth of sixteen.

The German considers his dealings with the intangible things of life to be a higher form, indeed the highest form, of intellectual employment. He is therefore racially, historically, and by temperament jealous or contemptuous, according to his station in life, of the cosmopolitan exchanger of the world, the Jew. He denies to him either patriotism or originality, and looks upon him as merely a distributer, whether in art, literature, or commerce, as an exchanger who ama.s.ses wealth by taking toll of other men's labor, industry, and intellect.

It has not escaped the German of this temper, that the whirling gossip and innuendoes that have lately annoyed the present party in power in England, have had to do with three names: Isaacs, Samuels, and Montagu, all Jews and members of the government.

German politics, German social life, and the German press cannot be understood without this explanation. The German sees a danger to his hardly won national life in the cosmopolitanism of the Jew; he sees a danger to his duty-doing, simple-living, and hard-working governing aristocracy in the tempting luxury of the recently rich Jew; and besides these objective reasons, he is instinctively antagonistic, as though he were born of the clouds of heaven and the Jew of the clods of earth. This does not mean that the German is a believer, in the orthodox sense of the word, for that he is not. He loves the things of the mind not because he thinks of them as of divine creation, and as showing an allegiance to a divine Creator, but because they are the playthings of his own manufacture that amuse him most. His superiority to other nations is that he claims to enjoy maturer toys. Not even France is so entirely unenc.u.mbered by orthodox restraints in matters of belief.

So far, therefore, as the German press is Jew-controlled, it is suspected as being not German politically, domestically, or spiritually; as not being representative, in short. It should be added that, though this is the att.i.tude of the great majority in Germany, there is a small cla.s.s who recognize the pioneer work that the Jew has done. Few men are more respected there, and few have more influence than such men as Ballin and Rathenau and others. For the very reason that the German is an idealist the Jew has been of incomparable value to him in the development of his industrial, commercial, and financial affairs. Not only as a scientific financier has he helped, not only has he provided ammunition when German industrial undertakings were weak and stumbling, but along the lines of scientific research, as chemists, physicists, artists--perhaps no one stands higher than the Jew Liebermann as a painter--the Jew has done yeoman service to the country in return for the high wages that he has taken. There are Germans who recognize this, and there are in the Jewish world not a few men to whom the doors of enlightened society are always open.

Whatever one may feel of instinctive dislike, the open-minded observers of the historical progress of Germany, all recognize that Germany would not be in the foremost place she now occupies in the compet.i.tive markets of the world, if she had not had the patriotic, intelligent, and skilful backing of her better-cla.s.s Jewish citizens.

Printing was born in Germany, and the town of Augsburg had a newspaper as early as 1505, while Berlin had a newspaper in 1617 and Hamburg in 1628. Every foreigner who knows Germany at all, knows the names of the Kolnische Zeitung, the Lokal Anzeiger and Der Tag, Hamburger Nachrichten, Berliner Tageblatt, Frankfurter Zeitung, and the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, this last the official organ of the foreign office. The Neue Preussische Zeitung, better known by its briefer t.i.tle of Kreuz Zeitung, is a stanch conservative organ, and for years has published the scholarly comments once a week of Professor Shiemann, who is a political historian of distinction, and a trusted friend of the Emperor. The Deutsche Tageszeitung is the organ of the Agrarian League. The Reichsbote is a conservative journal and the organ of the orthodox party in the state church. Vorwarts is the organ of the socialists and, whatever one may think of its politics, one of the best-edited, as it is one of the best-written, newspapers in Germany. The Zukunft, a weekly publication, is the personal organ of Harden, is Harden, in fact. The Zukunft in normal years sells some 22,000 copies at 20 marks, giving an income of 440,000 marks; this with the advertis.e.m.e.nts gives an income of say 500,000 marks. The expenses are about 350,000 marks, leaving a net income to this daring and accomplished journalist of 150,000 marks a year. In Germany such an income is great wealth. The Zukunft and its success is a commentary of value upon the appreciation of, as well as the rarity of, independent journalism in Germany.

The Vossische Zeitung, or "Aunty Voss" as it is nicknamed, is a solid, bourgeois sheet and moderately radical in tone. It is proper, wipes its feet before entering the house, and may be safely left in the servants' hall or in the school-room. Die Post represents the conservative party politically, is welcome in rich industrial circles, and is rather liberal in religious matters, though hostile to the government in matters of foreign politics, and of less influence at home than the frequent quotations from it in the British press would lead one to suppose. The two official organs of the Catholics are the Germania and the Volks Zeitung, of Cologne, whose editor is the well-known Julius Bachern. The Lokal Anzeiger and the Tageblatt of Berlin attempt, with no small degree of success, American methods, and give out several editions a day with particular reference to the latest news.

Leipsic, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Strasburg, Dresden, Konigsberg, Breslau, with its Schlessische Zeitung, and the Rhine provinces and the steel and iron industries represented by the Rheinisch- Westfalischer Zeitung, and other cities and towns have local newspapers. A good example of such little-known provincial newspapers is the Augsburger Abendzeitung, with its first-rate reports of the parliamentary proceedings in Bavaria and its well-edited columns. The circulation of these journals is, from our point of view, small. The Berliner Tageblatt in a recent issue declares its paid circulation to have been 73,000 in 1901; 106,000 in 1905; 190,000 in 1910; and 208,000 in 1911.

The custom in Germany of eating in restaurants, of taking coffee in the cafes, of writing one's letters and reading the newspapers there, no doubt has much to do with the small subscription lists of German journals of all kinds, whether daily, weekly, or monthly. The German economizes even in these small matters. A German family, or small cafe or restaurant, may, for a small sum, have half a dozen or more weekly and monthly journals left, and changed each week; thus they are circulated in a dozen places at the expense of only one copy. Where a family of similar standing in America takes in regularly two morning papers and an evening paper, several weekly and monthly, and perhaps one or two foreign journals, the German family may take one morning paper. The custom of having half a dozen newspapers served with the morning meal, as is done in the larger houses in America and in England, is practically unknown. Economy is one reason, indifference is another, provincial and circ.u.mscribed interests are others.

The German has not our keen appet.i.te for what we call news, which is often merely surmises in bigger type. Only the very small number who have travelled and made interests and friends for themselves out of their own country, have any feeling of curiosity even, about the political and social tides and currents elsewhere.

An astounding number of Germans know Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare better than we do, but they know nothing, and care nothing, for the sizzling, crackling stream of purposeless incident, and sterile comment, that pours in upon the readers of American newspapers, and which has had its part in making us the largest consumers of nerve-quieting drugs in the world. All too many of the pens that supply our press are without education, without experience, without responsibility or restraint. What Mommsen writes of Cicero applies to them: "Cicero was a journalist in the worst sense of the term, over-rich in words as he himself confesses, and beyond all imagination poor in thought."

No one of these journals pretends to such power or such influence as certain great dailies in America and in England. They have not the means at their command to buy much cable or telegraphic news, and lacking a press tariff for telegrams, they are the more hampered. The German temperament, and the civil-service and political close-corporation methods, make it difficult for the journalist to go far, either socially or politically. The German has been trained in a severe school to seek knowledge, not to look for news, and he does not make the same demands, therefore, upon his newspaper.

German relations with the outside world are of an industrial and commercial kind, and until very lately the German has not been a traveller, and is not now an explorer, and their colonies are unimportant; consequently there is no very keen interest on the part of the bulk of the people in foreign affairs. Even Sir Edward Grey's answering speech on the Morocco question did not appear in full in Berlin until the following day, though Germany had roused itself to an unusual pitch of excitement and expectancy.

As the Germans are not yet political animals, so their newspapers reflect an artificial political enthusiasm. Society, too, is as little organized as politics. There are no great figures in their social world. A Beau Brummel, a d'Orsay, a Lady Palmerston, a Lady Londonderry, a Duke of Devonshire, a Gladstone, a Disraeli, a Rosebery, would be impossible in Germany, especially if they were in opposition to the party in power. When a chancellor or other minister is dismissed by the Kaiser, he simply disappears. He does not add to the weight of the opposition, but ceases to exist politically. This has two bad results: it does not strengthen the criticism of the administration, and it makes the office-holder very loath to leave office, and to surrender his power. An ex-cabinet officer in America or in England remains a valuable critic, but an ex-chancellor in Germany becomes a social recluse, a political Trappist. Even the leading political figures are after all merely shadowy servants of the Emperor. They represent neither themselves nor the people, and such subserviency kills independence and leaves us with mediocrities gesticulating in the dark, and making phrases in a vacuum.

There are, it is true, charming hostesses in Berlin, and ladies who gather in their drawing-rooms all that is most interesting in the intellectual and political life of the day; but they are almost without exception obedient to the traditional officialdom, leaning upon a favor that is at times erratic, and without the daring of independence which is the salt of all real personality.

There are, too, country-houses. One castle in Bavaria, how well I remember it, and the accomplished charm of its owner, who had made its grandeur cosey, a feat, indeed! But all this is detached from the real life of the nation, which is forever taking its cue from the court, leaving any independent or imposing social and political life benumbed and without vitality. There is no free and stalwart opposition, no centres of power; and much as one tires of the incessant and feverish strife political and social at home, one returns to it taking a long breath of the free air after this hot-house atmosphere, where the thermometer is regulated by the wishes of an autocrat.

The press necessarily reflects these conditions. The Social Democrats, divided into many small parties, and the Agrarians and Ultramontanes, divided as well, give the press no single point of leverage. These political parties wrangle among themselves over the dish of votes, but what is put into the dish comes from a master over whom they have no control. If they upset the dish they are turned out as they were in 1878, 1887, 1893, and 1907, and when they return they are better behaved.

The parties themselves are not real, since thousands of voters lean to the left merely to express their discontent; but they would desert the Social Democrats at once did they think there was a chance of real governing power for them. A small industrial was warned of the awful things that would happen did the Socialists come into power. "Ah," he replied, "but the government would not permit that!" What has the press to chronicle with insistence and with dignity of such flabby political and social conditions?

The press may be, and often is, annoying, as mosquitoes are annoying, but its campaigns are dangerous to n.o.body. As I write, it is hard to believe that within a few days the members of a new Reichstag are to be elected. There are political meetings, it is true, there are articles and editorials in the newspapers, there is some languid discussion at dinner-tables and in society, but there is a sense of unreality about it all, as though men were thinking: Nothing of grave importance can happen in any case! We shall have something to say farther on of political Germany; here it suffices to say that the press of Germany betrays in its political writing that it is dealing with shadows, not with realities. "They have been at a great feast of language, and stolen the sc.r.a.ps," that's all.

The snarling Panther that was sent to Agadir, teeth and claws showing, came back looking like an adventurous tomcat that wished only to hide itself meekly in its accustomed haunts; and its un.o.btrusive bearing seemed to say, the less said about the matter the better. What a storm of obloquy would have burst upon such inept diplomacy in America, or in England, or even in France. Not so here. Everybody was sore and sorry, but the newspapers and the journalists could raise no protest that counted. It is all explained by the fact that the people do not govern, have nothing to do with the whip or the reins, nor have they any const.i.tutional way of changing coachmen, or of getting possession of whip and reins; and hooting at the driver, and jeering at the tangled whip-lash and awkwardly held reins, is poor-spirited business.

Only one political writer, Harden, does it with any effect, and his pen is said to have upset the Caprivi government.

As one reads the newspapers day by day, and the weekly and monthly journals, it becomes apparent that the German imagines he has done something when he has had an idea; just as the Frenchman imagines he has done something when he has made an epigram. We are less given either to thinking or phrasing, and far less gifted in these directions than either Germans or Frenchmen, and perhaps that is the reason we have actually done so much more politically. We do things for lack of something better to do, while our neighbors find real pleasure in their dreams, and take great pride in their epigrams.

As all great writing, from that of Xenophon and Caesar till now, is born of action or the love of it, or as a spiritual incitement to action, so a people with little opportunity for political action, and no centres of social life with a real sway or sovereignty, cannot create or offer substance for the making of a powerful and independent press.

There is no New York, no Paris, no London, no Vienna even, in Germany.

Berlin is the capital, but it is not a capital by political or social evolution, but by force of circ.u.mstances. Germany has many centres which are not only not interested in Berlin, but even antagonistic.

Munich, Hamburg, Bremen, Leipsic, Frankfort, Dresden, Breslau, and besides these, twenty-six separate states with their capitals, their rulers, courts, and parliaments, go to make up Germany, and perhaps you are least of all in Germany when you are in Berlin. It is true that we have many States, many capitals, and many governors in America, but they have all grown from one, and not, as in Germany, been beaten into one, and held together more from a sense of danger from the outside than from any interest, sympathy, and liking for one another.

With us each State, too, has a powerful representation both in the Senate and in the House of Representatives, which keeps the interest alive, while in Germany Prussia is overwhelmingly preponderant. In the upper house, or Bundesrat, Prussia has 17 representatives; next comes Bavaria with 6; and the other states with 4 or less, out of a total of 58 members. In the Reichstag, out of a total of 397 representatives, Prussia has 236.

Political society is not all centred in Berlin, as it is in London, Paris, or Washington, nor is social life there representative of all Germany. Berlin's stamp of approval is not necessary to play, or opera, or book, or picture, or statue, or personality. Indeed, Berlin often takes a lead in such matters from other cities in Germany where the artistic life and history are more fully developed, as, for instance, in other days, Weimar, and now Munich, Dresden, and, in literary matters, Leipsic. A recent example of this, though of small consequence in itself, is the case of the opera, the "Rosen Kavalier,"

which was given repeatedly in Dresden and Leipsic, whither many Berlin people went to hear it, before the authorities in Berlin could be persuaded to produce it.

The n.o.bility, the society heavy artillery, come to Berlin only for three or four weeks, from the middle of January to the middle of February, to pay their respects to their sovereign at the various court functions given during that time. They live in the country and only visit in Berlin. It is complained, that the double taxation incident to the up-keep of an establishment both in town and in the country, makes it impossible for them to be much in Berlin. They stay in hotels and in apartments, and are mere pa.s.sing visitors in their own capital. They have, therefore, practically no influence upon social life, and Berlin is merely the centre of the industrial, military, official, and political society of Prussia. It is the clearing-house of Germany, but by no means the literary, artistic, social, or even the political capital of Germany, as London is the English, or Paris the French, or as Washington is fast growing to be the American, capital.

There is no training-ground for an accomplished or man-of-the-world journalist, and the views and opinions of a journalist who is more or less of a social pariah, and he still is that with less than half a dozen exceptions, and of a man who begs for crumbs from the press officials at the foreign or other government offices, are neither written with the grip of the independent and dignified chronicler, nor received with confidence and respect by the reader.