[Footnote 17: Geistigkeit. This is a difficult word to translate. It
sometimes means merely intellectuality, sometimes in addition (as
here) all that is implied in the phrase, "Ye know not what manner of
spirit ([Greek: oiou pneumatos]) ye are of."]
[Footnote 18: Referring to Werner Sombart's war-book, _Händler und
Helden_.]
[Footnote 19: _Cf._ Thomas Mann's remarkable book on the real
significance of the war: _Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen_ (1918).]
[Footnote 20: Sachlichkeit. Rathenau seems to have in mind the German
feeling for disinterested study and research as illustrated, for
instance, by the fact that when the German Government heard of the
genius of Einstein they brought him to Berlin with a salary of nearly
£1000 a year and no duties except to think. Modern bigotry has
expelled him.]
[Footnote 21: Where Kant lived and taught, and published his _Kritik
der reinen Vernunft_.]
[Footnote 22: As opposed to the inward, intellectual and spiritual
character.]
[Footnote 23: Stein was the chief leader of Prussia from the
Frederician into the modern era. His ministry of reform by which a
peasant-proprietary was established, and municipal institutions
created, lasted only from September 1807 to November 1808.]
X
On balance it seems that the endowments of the German people work out
as follows:--
High qualities of intellect and heart. Ethics and mentality normal.
Originative will-power and independent activity, weak.
We give our devotion freely, and the heart rules in action. Our
feelings are genuine and powerful. We have courage and endurance. Led
by sentiment rather than by inspiration. We create no forms, are
self-forgetful, seek no responsibility, obey rather than rule. In
obedience we know no limit, and never question what is imposed upon
us.
Of its own accord the German people would never have adopted an ideal
of force. It was imposed on us by the idolaters of the great
war-machine and those who gained by it; even Bismarck did not share
it.
We are not competent to form an ideal of civilization, for the sense
of unity, will to leadership, and formative energy are lacking to us.
We have no political mission for the arrangement of other people's
affairs, for we cannot arrange our own; we do not lead a full life,
and are politically unripe.
We are endowed as no other people is for a mission of the spirit. Such
a mission was ours till a century ago; we renounced it, because
through political slackness of will-power we fell out of step; we did
not keep pace with the other nations in internal political
development, and, instead, devoted ourselves to the most far-reaching
developments of mechanism and to their counterpart in bids for power.
It was Faust, lured away from his true path, cast off by the
Earth-Spirit, astray among witches, brawlers and alchemists.
But the Faust-soul of Germany is not dead. Of all peoples on the earth
we alone have never ceased to struggle with ourselves. And not with
ourselves alone, but with our dæmon, our God. We still hear within
ourselves the All, we still expand in every breath of creation. We
understand the language of things, of men and of peoples. We measure
everything by itself, not by us; we do not seek our own will, but the
truth. We are all alike and yet all different; each of us is a
wanderer, a brooder, a seeker. Things of the spirit are taken
seriously with us; we do not make them serve our lives, we serve them
with ours.
"And you dare to say this, in the face of all the brutalizing and
bemiring that we experience--the profiteering and gormandizing, the
abject submissiveness, the shameless desertions, the apathy, the
insincerity, the heartlessness and mindlessness of our day?"
Yes, I dare to say it, for I believe it and I know it. The soul of the
German people lies still in the convulsions and hallucinations of its
slow recovery. It is recovery not alone from the war, but from
something worse, its hundred-years' alienation from itself. The
much-ridiculed choice of our old romantic unheraldic colours, black,
red and gold, instead of the bodiless and soulless colours under which
we waged the war,[24] was, among the whirling follies of the time, a
faint symbolic movement of our better mind. We must reunite ourselves
with the days before we ceased to be Germans and became Berliners.
What we need is Spirit. The whole world needs it, no more and no less
than we do, but will never create it. History knows why it decided for
Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors. Not mechanism alone, with its
retinue of nationalism and imperialism, is now again and for the last
time to be glorified; no, the whole Franco-British policy of
acquisition mounts up even to the throne of the Sun-king, and it is
seriously believed that it will govern the destinies of the world for
centuries to come. An inconceivable, and, in its monstrous irony,
unsurpassable drama, which is put forward as the introduction to the
great era. The bourgeois conscience of the West has no inkling of
what it means. To this conscience, the war was a huge violation of
decency, contrived by bandits; its victory is the final triumph of a
capitalist, rationalistic civilization; the torch lit in the East
means murder and incendiarism, and the upward migration of the people
from the depths is to it invisible.
No; it is not here that the spirit of the future is being formed. One
may discover further ingenious devices, lightning-conductors to
mitigate the stroke; but gently or violently a natural force will have
its way, and the new earth which it is preparing needs new seed.
That we have been given the faculty to shape a new spirit does not
imply that we are at liberty to choose whether we shall do it or not.
Even if it were not for our life's sake--even if it were against our
life--still we must obey. But it _is_ for our life's sake, as we have
seen, and as it is indeed obvious, for every organism can live only by
fulfilling the purpose of its being.
And now we have got to a very dangerous place--a place where the usual
moral peroration lies in wait for us--that German peroration which
announces universal redemption, and immediately, on that lofty note,
closes the discussion. Fatherland, Morality, Humanity, Labour,
Courage, Confidence--we all know how it goes, the writer has written
something fine, the reader has read something fine; emotion on both
sides, little conviction on either.
It appears, then, that I have just been writing something extremely
suspect. Has the reader followed me through five-and-thirty of these
difficult folios in order to arrive in the end at that very everyday
term, Spirit?[25] Is there any term in commoner use, and what are we
to think about it? Softly--there is worse to come! The next word is
still more dubious, philistinishly so, in fact--the word Culture.[26]
I cannot help it--we must pass on by way of these everyday
conceptions. We must get through the crowd, where hack-phrases elbow
us. Any journey you may take, though it were to Tibet, must begin at
the Berlin Central Railway Station. What is wrong with these popular
phrases is not that they start from an everyday conception, but that
they remain content with it, and do not think it out to the end.
Our task, therefore, stated in the most general terms, is to make
actually spiritual a people which is capable of spirituality. And
since spirituality cannot be propped up by any external thrust, by
sermons, newspaper articles, leagues, or propaganda, but must be
associated with life and developed out of life, so the organic process
and the condition of life to which it leads is called Culture.
It is only with deep reluctance and after long search that I have
written down this beautiful word, a word now worn almost beyond
recognition. Can we find our way back to its application and
significance? Even when it is not drawn out with a futile prefix[27]
one can hardly detect its pure meaning by reason of the many
overtones. The school, if possible the university, some French and
English, the rules about I and Me, visiting-cards, shirt-cuffs,
foreign phrases, top-hats, table-manners: these are some of the
overtones that make themselves heard when we talk of a cultured man,
or rather as they have it a cultured gentleman. A hundred years ago,
as the word implies, we understood by culture the unfolding and the
full possession of innate bodily, spiritual and moral forces. In this
sense Goethe showed us the two fraternal figures formed after his own
image: Faust the richer, and the poorer Wilhelm Meister, striving for
culture.
The ideal which hovers before us is not one of education, not even one
of knowledge, although both education and knowledge enter into it; it
is an ideal of the Will. It will not be easy to convey the breadth and
the boundless range which we are to attach to this conception. That it
is not an airy figment is clear from the fact that for centuries the
Greeks, with full consciousness, adopted as their highest law (though
directed to a somewhat different end) that impulse of the will which
they called _Kalokagathia_.[28]
From one who has introduced the conception of mechanism into German
thought, who has rescued the conception of the soul from the hands of
the psychologists and brought it back to its primal meaning, who has
written so much about soulless intellectualism, and has put forward
the empire of the soul as the goal of humanity, it is not to be
expected that he should preach any mechanical kind of culture, or
indeed any that it is possible to acquire by learning.
How culture is to be produced we shall see; the first thing necessary
is that it should be willed.
Willed it must be, in a sense and with a strength of purpose and a
force of appreciation of which we to-day, when the ages of faith, of
the Reformation, of the German classics, and the wars of liberation,
lie so far behind us, have no idea at all.
When the current conception of intellectual culture so much prized in
family, society and business life, and tricked out with criticisms of
style, with historical data and incidents of travel is justly
ridiculed, then the will to complete cultivation of the body, the
intellect and the soul of the people must be so strong that all
questions of convenience, of enjoyment, of prestige and of material
interests must sink far into the background. This word must sound so
that all who hear it can look in each other's eyes with a full mutual
understanding and without the slightest sense of ambiguity; just as
they do in Japan when the name of the common head of all families, the
Mikado, is named. There must be one thing in Germany and it must be
this thing, which is altogether out of reach of the yawning, blinking
and grinning scepticism of the coffee-house, and of the belching and
growling of the tavern. Any man who puts this thing aside in favour of
his class-ideas, or his speculations in lard, or his dividends, or the
demands of his Union, must understand that he is doing something as
offensive as if he went out in public without washing himself.
The conception of Culture as our true and unique faculty must be so
profoundly grasped that in public life and legislation it must have
the first word and the last. Though we become as poor as church-mice
we must stake our last penny on this, and tune up our education and
instruction, our models and outlook, our motives and claims, our
achievement and our atmosphere, to so high a point that any one coming
into Germany shall feel that he is entering into a new age.
Society must be penetrated by this conception. Those classes which
already possess something resembling it--such as training, education,
experience, tradition, outlook, good breeding--must pour out with both
hands what they have to dispense; not in the way of endowments,
conventicles, lectures and patronizing visits, but in quiet,
self-sacrificing, personal service.
All this, of course, cannot be done without the free response of the
other side. The devoted attempts which have been made, especially in
England, and for some years with us too, to win this response by long
and unselfish solicitation were destined to remain merely the mission
of individual lives, for they were not supported by the will of the
community as a whole; it rather ran counter to them. A Peace of God
must be proclaimed, not as between the Haves and the Have-nots, not
between the proletariat and the capitalists, not between the so-called
cultured classes and the uncultured, but between those who are ready
for a mutual exchange of experience, a give-and-take of their
tradition on both sides. Not an exchange on business principles, such
as propaganda in satisfaction of demands, or curiosity on one side for
a new pastime on the other, but a covenant. This, however, is only
practicable if the class-war, as an end in itself, is put a stop to.
The great change itself cannot be come by so cheaply; it demands other
assumptions, of which we shall have something to say later. But the
attitude and temper, the recognition of the task, could not be better
introduced than through the mutual service of the two social strata.
We have still at our disposal, handed on from the past, certain
organized methods of investigation and administration. We now need
chairs and institutes of research, not for the trivial business of
popular enlightenment and lectures, but for the study and
investigation of the needs of national culture, the idea which must
now take the place of national defence. We shall have need of central
authorities, not, like the late Ministries of Culture skimping the
scanty endowment of the Board Schools, but doing the work of German
education, progress, and interchange of labour.[29]