I read those wonderful Black Forest Stories and my first serious
novel, On the Heights, contained a bust of Goethe, and on the shelves
were Fichte, Freytag, Spielhagen, Strauss, and a miscellaneous
collection of German authors grave and gay, or perhaps melancholy were
a better word, for even now I should find it hard to point to a German
author who is distinctively gay. No visitor to that library, and they
numbered many distinguished visitors, American and foreign, from
Emerson and Alcott and George Macdonald to others less well known,
dreamed that the serene marble features of Goethe would be replaced by
the granite fissures of the face of Bismarck; and that Auerbach's
Black Forest Stories would be less known than Albert Ballin's fleet of
mercantile ships. As I dream myself back to that big chair wherein I
could curl up my whole person, and still leave room for at least two
fair-sized dogs, I see as in no other way the almost unbelievable
change that has come over Germany. The Black Forest Stories, Hammer
and Anvil, The Lost Manuscript, Werther, Fichte, Kant, Hegel,
Schopenhauer, Strauss, Heine were Germany then; Bismarck, Ballin, and
Krupp are Germany now. Germany was Hamlet then; Germany is Shylock,
Shylock armed to the teeth, now.
No nation can change in one generation, as has Germany, by the natural
development of its innate characteristics; such a change must be
forced and artificial to take place in so short a time. This is not
only the internal danger to Germany itself, but the danger to all
those superficial observers who point to Germany as having solved
certain social and economic problems. She has not solved them by
healthy growth into better ways; she has suppressed them, strangled
them, suffocated them.
The heroes and heroines of my Black Forest Stories have been rudely
stuffed into the uniforms of officials, soldiers, factory hands, and
Red Cross nurses. The toy-shops have been developed, on borrowed
capital, into ship-building yards and factories for guns and
ammunition. The dreamer in dressing-gown and slippers has been forced
into the cap and apron of the workman. The small sovereigns have been
frightened into allegiance to the war lord, whose shadow falls upon
every corner of Germany.
In this new scheme of things it soon became evident, that the
individual was incompetent to take care of himself along lines best
suited to the plans of his new conqueror, therefore part of his
earnings were taken from all alike to provide against accident,
sickness, unemployment, and old age, and thus bind him fast to the
chariot of his warrior lord. Germany, having given up the belief that
the salvation of her own soul was of prime importance, became
suspiciously concerned about the souls and bodies of the people. We
are all to some extent following her example. The wise among us are
sad, the capitalist and his ally the demagogue are seen everywhere all
smiles, rubbing their hands, for the more people are made to believe
that they can be, and ought to be, taken care of, the more the
machinery is put into their hands, the more plunder comes their way,
the more indispensable they are.
The great majority of people who write or speak of Germany applaud
this situation; let me frankly say, what everybody will be saying in
twenty-five years, I deplore it. It is a purely artificial,
incompetent, and dreary solution. Even Hamlet were better than
Shylock.
Fortunately there is also a large and increasing class in Germany who
distrust the situation. They point to the fact that technical
education is producing an army of dingy artisans, who turn out the
cheap and nasty by the million, an education which chokes idealism and
increases the growing flippancy in matters of faith and morals; they
sneer, and well they may, at the manufactured art, the carpenter's
Gothic architecture, the sickly literature, the decaying interest in
scholarship; they find fewer and fewer candidates for exploration and
colonization; they rankle under the series of diplomatic ineptitudes
since Bismarck; they see France, Russia, and England antagonized and
leagued against them, and their own allies, Austria-Hungary and Italy,
in a confused state of squabble with their neighbors; they are nervous
and disquieted by the financial and industrial conditions; they
condemn whole-heartedly the political caste system by which much of
the best material in Germany is barred from the councils and the
diplomatic and executive activities of the nation; there are not a few
who would welcome an inconclusive war that would, they think, put an
end to this system, and make the ruler and the officials responsible
to the people; they wish to open the doors of this governmental,
legislative, educational, industrial hot-house, and give the nation a
chance to grow naturally in the open air.
The policy of making other people afraid of you must have an end, the
policy of making others respect and like you can have no end. There is
no question which is the natural law of national development. Neither
for the individual nor for a nation is it wholesome to increase
antagonisms and to lessen the conciliatory points of contact with the
world.
Many of the weaknesses, much of the strength of Germany are
artificial. They have not grown, they have been forced. The very
barrenness of the soil, the ring of enemies, the soft moral and social
texture of the population, have, so their little knot of rulers think,
made necessary these harsh, artificial forcing methods.
The outstanding proof of the artificiality of this civilization is its
powerlessness to propagate. Germans transplanted from their hothouse
civilization to other countries cease to be Germans; and nowhere in
the world outside Germany is German civilization imitated, liked, or
adopted. The German is nonplussed to find the Pole in the East, the
Frenchman in the West, the Dane in the North, scoffing at his alte
Kultur, as he calls it, and he is irritated beyond measure by the
German from America, who returns to the Vaterland to criticise, to
sneer, and to thank God that he is an American, not a German citizen.
Germans become English citizens, no Englishmen become Germans;
millions of Germans have become Americans, no Americans become
Germans. No other population would be amenable to the Prussian methods
that have made Germany, nor is there anywhere in the world a people
demanding Prussian methods, while there are millions under the
Prussian yoke who hate it.
The German rhetoric to the effect that Germany is to save the world by
Teutonizing the world, is laughable. Prussia is the ventriloquist
behind this half-hearted boast.
Werther, and Faust, and Lohengrin, are far more real than those
scarecrows autocracy, bureaucracy, and militarism, triplets of straw,
premature births, not destined to live, of which Germany boasts to-day
as the most precocious children in the world. They are just that,
precocious children, teaching the pallid religion of dependence upon
the state and enforcing the anarchical morality of man's despair of
himself. Our descendants will have Werther and Faust and Lohengrin, as
the companions of their dreams at least, when that autocracy shall
have been blown to the winds, when that bureaucracy shall have dried
up and wasted away, when that exaggerated militarism shall be but
bleaching bones and dust.
Who has not lived in Germany as a house of dreams, seen the Valkyrie
race by, heard the swan song, wept with Werther and with Marguerite,
smiled cynically with Mephistopheles, languished with the Palm Tree
and the Pine of Heine; who has not sat at the feet of Germany as a
philosopher, and traced the very fissures of his own brain in
following thinking into thought; but who in all the world longs for
this new Germany of the barracks, the corporal and the pedler?
Germania as a malicious vestal clad in horrid armor and making
mischief in the world is a very present danger; Germania with a torch
lighting the world to salvation is a phantom, a ghost, seen by hasty
and nervous observers, who rush out to proclaim an adventure that may
excite a passing interest in themselves. Her methods to-day are
solution by suffocation; no wonder those of us who loved her in our
youth see in her a ghost to-day. I am thankful that I was her pupil
when she had other things to teach, when she wore other robes, when
she was modest, and not snatching at the trident of Neptune, nor
clutching at the casque of Mars.
"Wir wissen zu viel, wir wollen zu wenig," became the national
complaint, and Germany has attempted to transform herself. She has
succeeded in the transformation, but the transformation is not a
success. Even that learned English friend of Germany, Lord Haldane,
does not see, or will not see, that a people thinking themselves into
action, instead of developing into action naturally, through action,
must suffer from the artificiality of the process. Lord Haldane
applauds their thought-out organization in industrial, commercial, and
military matters, but he fails to mention the squandering of
individual capacity and energy that has resulted in Germany's growing
dependence upon a wooden bureaucracy. Organization is only good as a
means; it is stupefying as an end. Germany has organized herself into
an organization, and is the most over-governed country in the world.
What every democracy of free men wants is not as much, but as little,
organization as possible compatible with economical administration of
industry, the army, the navy, and the affairs of the state. You can
think out a game of chess, but you cannot think out life ahead of the
living of it without cramping it and finally killing it. Life is to
live, not to think, after all. Neither a nation nor an individual has
ever thought out the way to power. This is where the metaphysician
invariably fails when he mistakes thinking for living, when he
mistakes organization, which can never be more than a mould for life,
for life itself. To plan an army is not to produce one, however good
the plan; even to plan a campaign, once you have an army, is to court
disaster unless there is a living man to thrust the plan aside when
the emergencies arise that make up the whole of life, but have nothing
to do with organization.
If all men were tailors, or lawyers, or farmers, or miners, then we
could think out an organization into which they would fit, but
unfortunately for the metaphysician, all men are not categories; all
men are men! In like manner, if all men were cases, then government by
lawyers would be successful, but men and women are neither categories
nor cases. It is purely fantastic, the mere reasoned confusion of the
philosopher, to point to Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel and their successors
as the originators of Germany's progress. If Germany had developed
along those lines, she would be something quite different from what
she is. The Great Elector, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, and Bismarck
made Germany, and her philosophers and pedants are only responsible
for the softness that made it possible. Metaphysicians and lawyers
have their place, but they will inevitably ruin any people whom they
are permitted to govern.
The reader will perhaps look back through these pages to discover a
contradiction. He will seem to find evidence that Germany's position
in the world called for just this present Germany, which is a factory
town with a garden attached, surrounded by an armed camp. I deny the
contradiction. I have tried to analyze and to give the reasons for
Germany's development along these meretricious and disappointing
lines, but I am the last to admit that the outcome is satisfactory, or
that the rest of the world should look to Germany to point out the way
of salvation. A steaming orchid-house is not the place to go to learn
to grow the fruits of the earth in their due season for the
nourishment of a free people. You will find some brilliantly colored
flowers there, in the gay uniforms of the artificial tropics, but they
shrink and shrivel in the open air. They have been trained to grow
luxuriantly in this stifling atmosphere, but they feed no one, please
no one, who will not consent to live in a glass house with them.
Because a people is blindfolded, its preachers and pedagogues gagged,
its officials subservient, is all the more reason why they should be
easily led, but no reason at all for supposing that they will lead
anybody else.
I have said here and there that I have learned much, and that we all
have much to learn from Germany. I permit myself to repeat it. She has
shown us that the short-cut to the governing of a people by
suppression and strangulation results in a dreary development of
mediocrity. She has proved again that the only safety in the world for
either an individual or a nation is to be loved and respected, and in
these days no one respects slavery or loves threats.
From an American point of view, any sacrifice, any war, were better
than the domination of the Prussian methods of nation-making. No
nation should be by its traditions and its ideals more ready to arm
itself, and to keep itself armed if necessary for years, against the
possibility of the transference of such methods to the American
continent than the United States of North America.
"Theuer ist mir der Freund, doch auch den Feind kann ich nuetzen,
Zeigt mir der Freund, was ich kann, lehrt mir der Feind was ich soll,"
writes Schiller.
We Americans have much to learn from both our friends and our enemies.
We have both in Germany, and we should cultivate the temper of mind
which profits by the encouragement of our friends and the criticism of
our foes.
End of Project Gutenberg's Germany and the Germans, by Price Collier