IX

We can hardly emphasize too much, or sufficiently underline, the moral

effect of 1870 on the German nature, the influence it had on the

German mind. It is essential to a clear understanding of the full

Prussianizing process that now set in. On the German's innate docility

and credulity many have dwelt, but few on what 1870 did to this. Only

with Bismarck's quick, tremendous victory over France as the final

explanation is the abject and servile faith that the Germans

thenceforth put in Prussia rendered conceivable to reason. They

blindly swallowed the sham that Bismarck gave them as universal

suffrage. They swallowed extreme political and military restraint.

They swallowed a rigid compulsion in schools, which led to the excess

in child suicide I have mentioned. They swallowed a state of life

where outside the indicated limits almost nothing was permitted and

almost everything was forbidden.

But all this proscription is merely material and has been attended by

great material welfare. Intellectual speculation was apparently

unfettered; but he who dared philosophize about Liberty and the Divine

right of Kings found it was not. Prussia put its uniform not only on

German bodies but on their brains. Literature and music grew

correspondingly sterilized. Drama, fiction, poetry and the comic

papers became invaded by a new violence and a new, heavy obscenity.

Impatience with the noble German classics was bred by Prussia. What

wonder, since freedom was their essence?

Beethoven, after Napoleon made himself Emperor, tore off the

dedication of his "Eroica" symphony to Napoleon. And Goethe had said:

"Napoleon affords us an example of the danger of elevating oneself to

the Absolute and sacrificing everything to the carrying out of an

idea." Goethe fell frankly out of date in Berlin. Symphony orchestras

could no longer properly interpret Mozart and Beethoven. A strange

blend of frivolity and bestiality began to pervade the whole realm of

German art. Scientific eminence degenerated _pari passu_. No

originator of the dimensions of Helmholtz was produced, but a herd of

diligent and thorough workers-out of the ideas got from England--like

the aniline dyes--or from France--like the Wassermann tests--and

seldom credited to their sources. So poor grew the academic tone at

Berlin that a Munich professor declined an offer of promotion thither.

For forty years German school children and university students sat in

the thickening fumes that exhaled from Berlin, spread everywhere by

professors chosen at the fountainhead. Any professor or editor who

dared speak anything not dictated by Prussia, for German credulity to

write down on its slate, was dealt with as a heretic.

Out of the fumes emerged three colossal shapes--the Super-man, the

Super-race and the Super-state: the new Trinity of German worship.

X

Thus was Germany shut in from the world. Even her Socialist-Democrats

abjectly conformed. China built a stone wall, Germany a wall of the mind.

To assert that any great nation has in these modern days deliberately

built around herself such a wall, may seem an extreme statement, and I

will therefore support it with an instance--only one instance out of

many, out of hundreds; it will suffice to indicate the sort of

information about the world lying outside the wall that Germany has

carefully prepared for the children in her schools. I quote from the

letter of an American parent recently living in Berlin, who placed his

children in a school there: "The text books were unique. I suppose there

was not in any book of physics or chemistry that they studied an

admission that a citizen of some other country had taken any forward

step; every step was by some line of argument assigned to a German. As

you might expect, the history of the modern world is the work of German

Heroes. The oddest example, however, was the geography used by

Katherine. (His daughter, aged thirteen.) This contained maps indicating

the Deutsche Gebiete (the German "spheres of influence" in foreign

lands) in striking colors. In North and South America, including the

United States and Canada, there are said to be three classes of

inhabitants--negroes, Indians and Germans. For the United States there

is a black belt for negroes and a middle-west section for Indians; but

the rest is Deutsche Gebiete. Canada is occupied mainly by Indians. The

matter was brought to my attention because one of Katherine's girl

friends asked her whether she was of negro or Indian blood; and when she

replied she was neither her friend pointed out that this was impossible

for she surely was not German." Information less laughable about the

morals taught in the German schools I forbear to quote.

During forty years Germany sat within her wall, learning and repeating

Prussian incantations. It recalls those savage rites where the

participants, by shouting and by concerted rhythmic movements, work

themselves into a frothing state. This has befallen Germany. Within

her wall of moral isolation her sight has grown distorted, her sense

of proportion is lost; a set of reeling delusions possesses her--her

own greatness, her mission of _Kultur_, her contempt for the rest of

mankind, her grievance that mankind is in league to cramp and suppress

her.

These delusions have been attended by their proper Nemesis: Germany

has misunderstood us all--everybody and everything outside her wall.

Like the bewitched dwarfs in certain old magic tales, whose talk

reveals their evil without their knowing it, Germans constantly utter

words of the most naif and grotesque self-betrayal--as when the German

ambassador was being escorted away from England and was urged by his

escort not to be so downcast; the war being no fault of his. He

answered in sincere sadness:

"Oh, you don't realize! My future is broken. I was sent to watch

England and tell my Emperor the right moment for him to strike, when

England's internal disturbances would make it impossible for her to

fight us. I told him the moment had come."

Or again, when a German in Brussels said to an American:

"We were sincerely sorry for Belgium; but we feel it is better for

that country to suffer, even to disappear, than for our Empire, so

much larger and more important, to be torpedoed by our treacherous

enemies."

Or again, when Doctor Dernburg shows us why Germany had to murder

eleven hundred passengers:

"It has been the custom heretofore to take off passengers and crew....

But a submarine ... cannot do it. The submarine is a frail craft and

may easily be rammed, and a speedy ship is capable of running away

from it."

No more than the dwarf has Germany any conception what such candid

words reveal of herself to ears outside her Teutonic wall--that she

has walked back to the morality of the Stone Age and made ancient

warfare more hideous through the devices of modern science.

Thus her Nemesis is to misunderstand the world. She blundered as to

what Belgium would do, what France would do, what Russia would do; and

she most desperately blundered as to what England would do. And she

expected American sympathy.

Summarized thus, the Prussianizing of Germany seems fantastic;

fantastic, too, and not of the real world, the utter credulity, the

abject, fervent faith of the hypnotized young men. Yet here are a young

German's recent words. I have seen his letter, written to a friend of

mine. He was tutor to my friend's children. Delightful, of admirable

education, there was no sign in him of hypnotism. He went home to fight.

There he inhaled afresh the Prussian fumes. Presently his letter came,

just such a letter as one would wish from an ardent, sincere, patriotic

youth--for the first pages. Then the fumes show their work and he

suddenly breaks out in the following intellectual vertigo:

"Individual life has become worthless; even the uneducated men feel

that something greater than individual happiness is at stake, and the

educated know that it is the culture of Europe. By her shameless lies

and cold-blooded hypocrisy England has forfeited her claim to the

title of a country of culture. France has passed her prime anyway,

your country is too far behind in its development, the other countries

are too small to carry on the heritage of Greek culture and Christian

faith--the two main components of every higher culture to-day; so _we_

have to do it, and we _shall_ do it--even if we and millions more of

us should have to die."

There you have it! A cultivated student, a noble nature, a character

of promise, Prussianized, with millions like him, into a gibbering

maniac, and flung into a caldron of blood! Could tragedy be deeper?

Goethe's young Wilhelm Meister thus images the ruin of Hamlet's mind

and how it came about: "An oak tree is planted in a costly vase, which

should only have borne beautiful flowers in its bosom; the roots

expand and the vase is shattered." Thus has Prussia, planted in

Germany, cracked the Empire.