Germany is a land without power, without poise, with its prosperity
shattered, its authorities and its external aims annihilated, its
intellect and its ethics at a low ebb. In such a condition, if we wish
to understand the only kind of life-faculty which can save us from
intellectual and spiritual death, give us force and inspiration to
shape for ourselves and for the world the new social order of freedom,
spirituality[17] and justice, and in the true sense to "save" us, we
must look ourselves and the German character in the face--this
unknown, problematic character, which for a century in contradiction
to its own inmost being, has been flattering and lulling itself with
hackneyed and complacent phrases and unproved judgments. For we can
undertake nothing and claim nothing which has not its prototype in our
own soul and is not founded in our own past, our own traditions.
There is no people, not even the French, which in recent decades has
administered to itself and digested so much praise as we have. We
never discussed ourselves but at once the stereotyped toasts began.
The more German culture declined, the more disgusting became our
babble about it.
The persons through whose mouths we let ourselves be lauded were
school-teachers without comparative knowledge, professional
banquet-orators, nationalists who praised in the service of some
interested hatred, and scholars with appointments who were simply
commissioned to demonstrate that the Hohenzollern system was the last
word of creation. No one dreamed of distinguishing this glorification
of the German people from the apotheosis of the dynasties--to which we
had vowed our heart's blood--and the profound insincerity of these
declamations was shown by the indifference with which the dynasties,
the main feature in the programme, were afterwards got rid of, and the
affair of the heart's blood shelved.
We know the stereotyped phrases. German faith, French knavery. The
world is to find healing in the German soul. We are the heroes--the
others are hucksters.[18] To be German means to do a thing for its own
sake. We are a "race of thinkers and poets." We have Culture, the
others merely Civilization.[19] We alone are free--the others are
merely undisciplined (or, as the case may be, enslaved). All this we
owe to the favour of God and our education under the (here fill in
Prussian, Bavarian or Saxon) reigning House, which all the world
envies us. Clearly therefore we are destined for world-dominion; we
have only to fall-to.
In one of these phrases, about doing things for their own sake,[20]
there is truth. All the more was it for us in particular a vice and a
sign of degradation to let ourselves be dazzled by the shadowless
transparency-picture of glorification that was offered to us. There
were interests concealed in the game, and much lack of moral fibre,
all of which we passed over in silence; it was out of place in our
festal oratory.
It would be an equal or even a greater vice, only reversed, if we were
now to despair of ourselves. Moderation was what we needed then; what
we need now is vigorous and conscious self-possession. To-day it is no
easy and attractive business to bring our strong qualities to the
surface; it implies an amount of conviction which it is hard to
attain, and self-depreciation means a pitiful faint-heartedness. But
all sham goods offered by babblers, by selfish interests, prophets of
hate and commercial travellers must go overboard.
We have never been a "race of thinkers and poets," any more than the
Jews were a race of prophets, the French and Dutch a race of
painters, or Königsberg a city of Pure Reason.[21] The old German
upper classes have, in three well-defined epochs, had force enough to
throw up individuals of mighty endowments for music, poetry and
philosophy; the former lower-classes, whose blood runs in nine-tenths
of our present population, have scarcely contributed anything to these
glories. They have in recent years shown themselves thoroughly
industrious, plastic, apt for discipline, order-loving, intelligent,
practical, honourable, trustworthy, warm-hearted, prudent and helpful,
and adapted beyond all expectation to the mechanization of life and
industry; of their power to produce talent we know little, except
perhaps in the domain of research and technique, which are less a test
of creative energy than of applied knowledge and methodical assiduity.
The important question as to what relations exist between the number,
quality and greatness of individual endowments and genius on the one
side, and the character of a people on the other, is still unexplored
and very obscure, although we possess a science which calls itself by
the quite unjustified name of national psychology.
While on one side we have rarely made any serious study of national
characteristics, but have confused them with achievements of culture
and habits of life that mostly proceeded from a thin upper stratum
alone, on the other we have as a rule tacitly set down individual
endowment (with a strong emphasis on our own) as illustrations of
national character. In this respect, too, we showed that laxity in
proving what we wanted to prove which abounds everywhere from the
point where calculation with things weighable and measurable leaves
off, and judgment begins. We think it an established fact--in
accordance with just this arbitrary test of genius--that genius
belongs _par excellence_ to the so-called blonde blue-eyed races of
the earth. The fact that among the score or two of geniuses of all
ages who have been determining forces in the world it is hardly
possible to find a single example of this blue-blonde race, but they
can be proved to have been almost all dark, did not affect the
question. On the other hand the English, whose influence on culture
has been surpassed by none, had their genius-forming power, in which
they are actually deficient, seriously over-estimated. It was the
reverse with the Jews. The fact that in spite of their small numbers
they have produced more of world-moving genius than all other nations
put together, and that from them has proceeded the whole
transcendental ethics of the Western world, has not prevented their
being pronounced wholly incapable of creative endowment.
We shall put aside all this rubbish and for the present decline to go
into theoretic questions. Great individual endowments are related to
national character--to the character of the mind, not that of the
will, which must be considered apart--as the blossom to the plant or
the crystal to the mother-solution; to determine the one from the
other needs something more than a mechanical generalization. There is
no such thing as a "race of thinkers and poets." This, however, we can
say: that a people which begets great musicians, poets and
philosophers is one which devotes itself to moods and to visions,
while another, as for instance the Latin group, which creates forms
and standards, is one that at the cost of mood and vision, incarnates
its sense of will.
Devotion, receptivity, the feeling for Nature, comprehension, the
passion for truth, meditative depth, spiritual love, are the fairest
gifts that can be granted to any people, and to us they have been
granted. But they exclude other gifts, which stand to-day in high
repute, and which we affect in vain. They exclude the capacity for
shaping forms and standards, the aptitude for rule, if not even for
self-government; in any case the qualities which go to the creation of
nationalities and civilizations.
It is no mere accident that in not one of the hundredfold provinces of
life, from art to military organization, from State-craft to
jointstock-companies, from saintliness to table-utensils, have we
Germans discovered a single essential and enduring form. And again,
there is scarcely one of these forms which we have not filled with a
richer and more living content than those who first discovered it.
For whoever bears the All within himself can be satisfied with no
form; he finds in himself at once vision and reality, thesis and
antithesis. He seeks for a synthesis, but all form is one-sided. He
conceives, chooses, comprehends, fulfils, breaks in pieces and throws
away. He remains a unity in constant change, like the year as it
proceeds day by day, hour by hour, and no two of them alike. He does
not force things--out of respect for creation.
But he who makes forms must use force. He makes himself the standard
and comprehends himself only. Everything else, everything that is
extra-normal, unconformable, unintelligible and not understood remains
for him something alien, trivial, inferior, or negligible. The maker
of forms can rule, even by compulsion, without being a tyrant, for he
is convinced of the value of what he brings and knows no doubts. He is
ruthless, yet only up to a certain limit, which is determined by his
sense of the inferiority of the other. The man who rejects forms,
however, cannot rule; the very penetration into the domain of another
seems to him a wrong to his own, the basis of which is recognition and
allowance. If he is forced to penetrate, he loses all balance, for in
wrong-doing he understands no gradations. Similarly he is incapable of
civilizing, for he cannot take forms seriously; he violates them
himself--how can he impose them upon others? In his inmost soul he is
naïve, for creation is seething in him; but in execution he is
conscious, critical, eclectic and methodical, in order that he may be
completely master of the one-sided element into which he has forced
himself. The man of forms, however, is, in his soul, rigid and
conscious, but in action naïve, because he does not know the meaning
of doubt.
Forms grow up like natural products in the course of centuries. They
assume the existence of uniformity in individuals, fathers reproduced
in sons with scarcely a variation. Egypt, Rome, and that modern land
of antiquity, France, are examples. For generations France has been
content with three architectural styles, which are really one and the
same style. The changes in the language are hardly perceptible. The
principal domestic utensils are almost the same as they were a hundred
years ago, fashion is merely a vibration. Foreign living languages are
little studied, their spirit is not understood, the pronunciation
remains French. Foreign countries are looked on as a kind of
menagerie; everything is measured by the native standard. Every one is
a judge of everything, for he holds fast to the norm. Within the norm
the French are keenly sensitive, their feeling for relations is very
sure; the slightest deviation is observed. To doubt the validity of
the norm is out of question; one might as well criticize the sun and
moon as the style of Louis Quatorze.
The final judgment of the British in the affairs of life is "this is
English," "that is not English." Foreign lands are a subject of
geographical and ethnological study. The whole mighty will of a
nation is here concentrated in the form of civilizing political
energy. Every private inclination is a fad, and even fads have their
fixed forms. An offence against table-manners is banned like an attack
on the Church. Nature is mastered with consideration and intelligence,
whether the problem is the breeding of sheep or the ruling of India.
The assurance, self-command and art of ruling which spring from forms
are lacking in Germany. Our strongest spirits are formless; they are
eclectic or titanic, whether they despise forms or choose forms or
burst forms. We have three homes between which we hover--Germany, the
earth, and heaven. We comprehend and honour everything--every land,
every man, every art and every language; and we are fertilized by what
is foreign; on the lower level we enjoy it and imitate it, on the
higher it spurs us to creation. We are docile, and do not hate what
rules and determines us, only what contracts us and makes us
one-sided; an autocratic government may be tolerated, even venerated,
if it knows how to be national and popular and does not interfere with
our elbow-room.
We have already touched on the volitional character[22] of the German
people, a character which has been gravely altered by the subsidence
of the ancient upper stratum of society, and by long privations and
miseries. The Germans of Tacitus were a freedom-loving and turbulent
people; of this not a trace is left. Any one who did not recognize
under the autocracy that we care little for self-determination and
self-responsibility may do so under the revolution, which merely
arises out of an alteration in external conditions. We are not even
yet a nation, but an association of interests and oppositions; a
German _Irredenta_, as it has been and unfortunately will be shown, is
an impossible conception. And since we are not a nation and represent
no national idea, but only an association of households, it follows
that our influence abroad can only be commercial, and not civilizing
or propagandist.
From this side we are able to understand the German history of the
past two centuries. Prussia, an extra-German Power, grown up in
colonized territory, organized itself into a bureaucratic, feudal and
military State. It succeeded in mastering half Germany and in loosely
linking up the remainder. By rigid organization, by its federated
Princes and by the strongest army in the world, it supplied the place
of the national character and will which were wanting. Mechanism was
pressed into the service, and bore the colossus into a period of
blooming prosperity. The system looked like a nation; in reality it
was an autocratic association of economic interests bristling with
arms. It was incapable of developing national forces and ideas, not
even in relation to its settlers in other lands; it was confined to
commercial competition; weak alliances were relied on to secure the
position externally; self-government was not granted, because the
military organization was the pivot of the whole system; the
drill-sergeant tone at home had its counterpart in the brusqueness of
our foreign policy; enmities grew and organized themselves, and the
catastrophe came.
For character of will we had substituted discipline. But discipline is
not nationality; it is an external instrument, and when it breaks it
leaves--nothing. Now since the Prussian system which called itself by
the mediæval title of the German Empire was, in spite of the
professors, no popular, national fabric, but a dynastic, military and
compulsory association, with a constitutional façade, the interested
nationalist elements took on the repulsive and dishonourable forms
that we all know. The most deeply interested parties, cool and
conscious of their strength, the Prussian representatives of the
military and official nobility, avoided all declamation and only
interfered when their interests were endangered. The greater
industrialists sold themselves. A higher stratum of the middle-classes
composed of certain circles of higher teachers and subaltern officials
took the business seriously, and in order to escape from their drab
existence created that atmosphere of hatred of Socialists, telegrams
of homage, and megalomania, which made us intellectually and morally
impossible before the world. Instead of the Germany of thought and
spirit one saw suddenly a brutal, stupid community of interested
persons, greedy for power, who gave themselves out as that Germany
whose very opposite they were; who, unable to point to any
achievements, any thought of their own, prided themselves on an
imaginary race-unity which their very appearance contradicted; who had
no ideas beyond rancour; the slaverings of league-oratory and
subordination, and who with these properties, which they were pleased
to call _Kultur_, undertook to bring blessing to the world.
It was no wonder; for our slavonicized association of interests, bent
on subordination and on gain, does not produce ideas; its possessions
were power, mechanism and money; whoever was impressed by these things
believed they must impress others too, and so the conclusion was
arrived at that all the great spirits of the past had lived only to
make this triple combination supreme. Wagner had formed the bridge
between the old Germany and the new--armoured cruisers and giant guns
appeared as a free development from Kant and Hegel, and the word
_Kultur_, a word which Germany ought to prohibit by law for thirty
years to come, masked the confusion of thought.
To discover now, after our downfall, that Germany ought never to have
carried on a continental let alone a world policy, would be a pitiful
example of _esprit d'escalier_. It is true that it was our right, and
even our duty, by our intellect, our ethics and our greatness, to
carry it on; but the weakness of our character on the side of Will was
the cause of its failure. Bismarck, a born realist in politics, grown
up in the Prussian tradition, trained in the diplomatic tradition by
Gortschakov, made the calamitous choice. He made us safe for certain
decades; but it was only an intuitive policy in the manner of
Stein[23] that could have saved us for centuries.
In the midst of self-administered and self-determining nations the
German people, from lack of self-consciousness, indolence of will and
innate servility remained under a patriarchal system of government, a
minor under tutelage of divinely-appointed dynasties and ruling
classes. In the childish movement of the educated bourgeoisie of 1848
Bismarck saw only the helpless and Utopian, but not the symbolic side,
which Marx might have shown him. His practical spirit judged with a
smile that a handful of peasantry and grenadiers would suffice to
bring to reason this dynastically-minded people. It was only too true;
although the bulk of this people had not for thirty years been formed
by the peasant class, and although he himself had learned how to make
use of the power of the modern industrial State in peasant disguise.
And so he refused to allow his countrymen to come of age; broke, with
the superiority of genius, and with the weapons of success and
authority, the incompetent forces that resisted him; created, by the
magical mechanism of his Constitution, the German Empire as a mere
continuation of the Prussian bureaucratic State reinforced, by the
self-glorifying dynasties, with the whole volume of the still existing
and justly appreciated habit of obedience; and annihilated for a
generation every aspiration for freedom by branding it with the stain
of moral and social depravity. Our political worthlessness and
immaturity came to its climax in the race of office-climbers in 1880,
which in 1900 gave place to the battle-fleet patriotism of the great
capitalists.
A self-administered and a self-determining nation--such as the nations
of the world, except ourselves, Austria and Russia, were, on the
whole, at the turn of the century--would have been able to carry on a
sound and steadfast policy in economics and public affairs, and to
enjoy the confidence of the world, as little begrudged as America. On
the other hand, a dangerous warship, armed upon an unexampled scale,
given to backward movements and commanded by an uncontrollable sovran
dilettante, could only expect sooner or later to be expelled from the
harbour of the nations. History is apt to overdo it, especially when
corruption has gone on too long; with every year that passed the doom
became more certain; instead of being expelled, we were annihilated.
That four years of hunger, a lost war and a military revolt at last
set us free, does not betoken any change of character; and when to-day
a servile and facile Press lauds our wretched and idealess
Constitution as the finest in the world, that gives us no assurance
of its power to endure. Understanding is no substitute for character,
but it is at any rate a step towards the goal; and if it is once
understood that other measures are possible, and if, out of this
period, certain writings and thoughts shall survive--and survive they
will--then at any rate we may still be weak, but we shall be no longer
blind.
It might be possible at the outset of our journey towards strength of
will that we should grope our way slowly--very slowly--back to the old
problems of power. It does not matter if we do. Before we get there,
the world will be changed, and will be pregnant with new thoughts. Let
us fulfil the duties for which Germany was made what it is. Let us go
in quest of the idea and the faculty that are laid upon us; let us do
this in order to live, to recover our health, to shape ourselves anew,
to remain a People, to become a Nation, to create a future and to
serve the world.