that of hostility. Her aim is domination, the only rôle which suits the
people of God. Now, to attain that, two means are offered to her. The
first plainly is intimidation which must never flag. The feeble quickly
become insolent if their feebleness is not recalled to them. Other
nations must feel themselves constantly threatened with the worst
catastrophes if they resist Germany. But it being well understood that
Germany is the strongest, that she will never give up what she
possesses, however unjustly, then bargains advantageous not only for
herself but occasionally for the other party, may be the more direct and
less onerous means than violence to attain her end. So Germany will be,
by turns, or both at once, threatening and amiable. Amiability itself
can be effective when it rests on hatred, contempt, and omnipotence.
Now power counts before all. Germany must possess armaments superior to
those of all other nations. The reason is plain. The German Empire is a
rock of peace, _der Hort des Friedens_. The force which it accumulates
is directed toward imposing upon mankind the German peace, the divine
peace. Since Germany represents peace, whoever opposes Germany intends
war. Now it is legitimate that Germany should arm to the teeth because
she is the incarnation of peace, but the adversaries of Germany, who, in
opposing Germany oppose peace, cannot have the same right. It is the
duty of Germany to carry her armaments to the maximum; other peoples
have the right to arm only as Germany may permit.
Germany does not seek war. On the contrary, she tries by inspiring
terror to render it impossible. But if some nation should profit or be
capable of profiting by her love of peace to pretend to rights which
offend her she will consent to punish that nation. She will be pained by
the violence she has to do to that nation and the severity which she has
to use toward the guilty. But soldier of God as she is, she cannot fail
to her mission. Any nation which refuses to do the will of Germany
proves by that very fact its cultural inferiority and becomes guilty. It
must be chastised.
The method according to which Germany will make war is determined by
these premises. War is a return to the state of nature. Germany yields
to this temporary retrogression because she has to do with people of an
inferior culture who must be taught a lesson, and must be spoken to in a
language which they understand. Now a characteristic of a state of
nature is that force reigns undisputed. In this very trait resides the
sublime beauty of that state, its grandeur and its fecundity. Don't talk
of that romantic chivalry which pretends in time of war to temper the
violence of savage instincts by the intervention of feminine
sensibility. War is war. _Krieg ist Krieg_. It isn't child's play, it
isn't sport where it is necessary to blend barbarity and humanity so as
to conciliate and humanize them. It is barbarity itself let loose as
widely and fully as possible. This is not perversity. Man as man suffers
in becoming barbarous, but the man who replaces God suppresses the
feebleness of the creature. He submits himself to the mysterious and
sublime law in virtue of which evil is by so much more beneficent as it
is achieved with resolution and completeness. _Pecca fortiter._
*The Nature of War.*
The first article of the code of war is then the suppression of all
sensibility, pity, humanity. The nature of war is to kill and destroy.
The more it destroys and kills the sooner it comes to its ideal form.
Moreover, it is at bottom more humane the more inhuman it is, because
the very terrors which its excesses inspire shorten it and make it less
murderous.
In the second place, war necessarily ignores moral laws. Respect for
laws, treaties, conventions, loyalty, good faith, sentiment and honor,
scruples, nobility of soul generosity--these are mere fetters. The
God-people do not recognize them. It will then, without hesitation,
violate the rights of neutrals if it is to its interest. It will use
falsehood, perfidy, treachery. It will justify itself by futile pretexts
in committing the most atrocious acts--bombardment of undefended cities,
massacre of old men, women and children; barbarous torture, pillage and
assassination; bestiality to women; organized incendiarism; methodical
destruction of monuments which, by their history and their antiquity and
by the admiration of the world, would seem to be inviolable. "I am told:
I must avenge myself." This reason suffices. We are told that some
inhabitant of one city or another has been wanting in respect toward one
of our men. Therefore we must burn the city and show the inhabitants
what we have. Definitively, our duty is to let loose the elementary
energies of nature as far as possible to attain the maximum force and
the maximum of result.
The effect should, moreover, be psychological as well as material.
Actions which seem horrible to man and which spread terror are
commendable means, because they break the spirit even if they have no
value from a military point of view. Moreover, what offends common
morality is conformed to transcendent morality. The mission of the
Germans at war is to punish. They work Divine vengeance. They compel
their enemies to expiate the crime of resisting them. After they have
taken a city, if the enemy has the insolence to take it back, it is just
that they shall sack that city if possible, killing its inhabitants and
burning its finest monuments.
*Barbarity Multiplied by Science.*
Given this problem, how to let loose most widely the powers of evil, it
is clear that a people of superior culture is better equipped than any
other to resolve that problem. In fact, science, where it excels, can
work destruction and evil with the very forces which nature employs only
to create light, heat, life, and beauty. The God-people therefore unites
the maximum of science to the maximum of barbarity. The formula of its
action may be thus written: "Barbarity multiplied by science."
This is the last word of the famous doctrine of Germanism. Now the
identity of the ultimate consequences of the doctrine and the features
which the present war presents is evident. The problem which we
undertook is, therefore, solved. If, contrary to all likelihood,
barbarity co-exists with culture in the Germans; if in the present war
it appears to be absolutely bound up in that culture, the reason is that
German culture differs profoundly from what humanity understands by
culture and civilization. Human civilization tries to humanize war.
German culture tends indefinitely to increase its primitive brutality by
science.
In everything the Germans must be unique--in their women, their God,
their wine, their loyalty. The war which the Germans wage against us
strikes the world with horror and terror, because it is in the full
force of the term "the German way, _die deutsche Art_, the German war."
As the world recognizes this astonishing proposition it asks with
anxiety, what may be its future relations to Germany? Knowingly and
systematically, Germany opposes to all Hellenic, Christian, humane
civilizations the devastating theory of the Huns. True, after the war
she will claim that she has done nothing but conform, often with pain,
to the conditions of ideal and divine war, and she will appear willing
to pardon to her enemies the cruelties she has had to inflict upon them.
Decidedly, the world will refuse to admire this horrible magnanimity
which on the first impulse of resistance becomes savagery. Today the
veil is torn away. German culture is shown to be a scientific barbarity.
The world, which means in the future to rid itself of all despotism,
will not compromise with the despotism of barbarity.
But what a disappointment and what a grief! Formerly, Germany was held
to be a great nation. Its praises were sounded in many a land of solid
and high culture. The German tradition once held other doctrines than
those we have now seen devolop under the hands of Prussia. Germanism, as
the Prussians formulate it, consists essentially in contempt for all
other nations and in the pretension of domination. But Leibnitz--as
highly esteemed in the Latin world as in the German--professed a
philosophy which valued unity only under the form of harmony between
free and autonomous forces. Leibnitz exalted the multiple, the diverse,
the spontaneous. Between rival powers he sought to establish relations
which would reconcile them without changing or diminishing the value or
independence of any of them. Witness his effort at the reunion of the
Catholic and Protestant Churches. After Leibnitz came Kant. He certainly
was very much of a German. He owned, nevertheless, that he had learned
from Rousseau to honor the common man who, not being a savant, possesses
moral value far above the savant, who has no merit but science. And,
starting from the principle that every person, so far as he is capable
of moral value, is entitled to respect, he urged men to create not a
universal and despotic monarchy but a republic of nations in which each
should possess a free and independent personality.
This willingness to put liberty before unity, and respect and honor the
dignity of other nations while at the same time serving its own, was not
extinguished in Germany with Leibnitz and Kant. Permit me, my dear
Director, on this subject to indulge in some personal reminiscences.
*Treitschke Versus Bluntschli.*
In January, 1869, I was sent to Heidelberg by the Minister of Public
Instruction, Victor Duruy, to study the organization of German
universities. Germany was for me the land of metaphysics, music, and
poetry. I was greatly astonished to find that outside of the lecture
courses the only thing discussed was the war which Prussia was about to
make on France. Invited to a soirée, I heard it whispered behind me,
_Vielleicht ist er ein französischer Spion_--"Perhaps he is a French
spy." Such were the words as I caught them. At the beer garden a student
seated himself near me. He said to me, "We are going to war with you. We
shall take Alsace and Lorraine." That night I could see from my window,
looking out on the Neckar, the students clad in their club costumes
floating down the river on an illuminated raft singing the famous song
in honor of Blücher, who "taught the Welches the way of the Germans."
And at the university itself the lectures of Treitschke, attended by
excited crowds, were heated harangues against the French, inciting to
hatred and to war. Seeing that nothing was thought of but the
preparation for war, I came back at the Easter vacation of 1869
convinced that hostilities would ensue. I returned to Heidelberg some
time later and became acquainted with other persons, other centres of
ideas. I understood then that opinion in Germany was divided between two
opposite doctrines. The general aspiration was for the unity of Germany,
but there was no agreement as to the way of conceiving and realizing
this unity. The thesis of Treitschke was, _Freiheit durch Einheit_,
"liberty through unity," that is to say, unity first, unity before all;
liberty later, when circumstances should permit. And to realize at once
this unity, which really was the only thing that mattered, the
enrollment of all Germany under the command of Prussia for a war against
France.
Now the formula of Treitschke was opposed by that of Bluntschli,
_Einheit durch Freiheit_--"Unity through liberty." This doctrine, which
counted at that time some eminent advocates, aimed first to safeguard
the independence and unity of the German States and then to establish
between them on that basis a federated union. And as it contemplated in
the heart of Germany a union without hegemony, so it conceived of German
unity as something to be realized without harm to other nations, and
especially without harm to France. It was to be a free Germany in a free
world.
Germany at that epoch was at the parting of the ways. Should she follow
a tendency still living in many and noble minds or should she abandon it
entirely, to march head down in the ways in which Prussia had entangled
her? That was the question. The party of war, the party of unity as a
means of attacking and despoiling France, the Prussian party, gained the
day. And its success rendered its preponderance definitive. Since then
those who have undertaken to remain faithful to an ideal of liberty and
humanity have been annihilated.
Is it still possible that Germany may some day regain the parting of the
ways where she was before 1870 and this time take the other road, the
road of the Leibnitzes, the Kants, the Bluntschlis, which leads first to
the liberty of individuals and of peoples and afterward--- and only
afterward--a form of harmony where the rights of all are equally
respected? A word of the Scotch professor, William Knight, comes back to
my memory at this moment: "The best things have to die and be reborn."
The Germany which the world respected and admired, the Germany of
Leibnitz, appears indeed dead. Can it be reborn?
Accept, I beg, my dear Director, the assurance of my cordial devotion.
EMILE BOUTROUX.
*The German Religion of Duty*
*By Gabriele Reuter.*[B]
On various occasions in the past I have been reproached by my friends
for not showing the proper spirit of patriotism.
I have merely smiled at their criticism, for it was my opinion that true
patriotism does not consist of flowery speeches and assertions, but in
the effort dutifully to accomplish that for which one is best qualified.
It seemed to me that I was truly showing my love for the Fatherland by
writing my books to the best of my ability.
But the source of this reproach was very evident to me. The cause could
be traced to a quality which I share with many of my compatriots. It
must, in truth, be called a particularly characteristic trait. This is a
very earnest desire for and love of justice, which is not satisfied
simply to "recognize," but endeavors thoroughly to understand the
material and spiritual points of view of the other nations in order to
show them the proper appreciation.
It is natural to develop affection for that which one earnestly desires
to understand.
Many Germans have had the experience that they have rather overzealously
commenced by weighing the good of a foreign people in the balance with
the good of their own, and with well-nigh fanatic honesty they have
ended by acknowledging their own shortcomings compared to the merits and
advantages of the foreign nation. There have been instances when some
foreigner has drawn our attention to this or that particular weakness
and immediately innumerable of my countrymen assented, saying,
"Certainly it is true, the criticism is just, matters are probably even
worse than they have been represented."
Many of us, and I acknowledge I am one of the many, have developed a
form of ascetic mania for self-abasement, a desire for truth which knows
no limits in the dissection of its own condition and the disclosure of
social and personal shortcomings and disadvantages. This tendency may be
easily discerned in much of the German literature of the past twenty
years; also, in my books.
The individual is really always the symbol of the whole, and the
thoughts and feelings of one person are but the expression of strong
forces in national life and culture. It was not want of patriotism, but
an unbounded love for the universality of European culture which drove
us, drove many thousand people with German souls, to reach out over the
boundaries of our own Fatherland for intellectual conquests, for
permeation and coalescence with all the world's riches, goodness, and
beauty.
We loved the others; and believing ourselves among friends we were
candid and disclosed our weaknesses.
*Germans Trusted Too Well.*
We permitted criticism and criticised ourselves, because we were
convinced that those others had our welfare at heart, and also because
we were convinced that only by unsparing self-knowledge can the heights
be scaled which lead to superior and more refined development. It is
therefore probable that we ourselves have delivered the weapons into our
enemies' hands.
Confiding and harmless as children, we were blind to the enigmatical
hatred which has to an appalling extent developed all around us. This
hate which has been nourished systematically and with satanic cleverness
probably originated in a slight feeling of jealousy, and the tendency of
my countrymen to criticise each other led our enemies to believe that
they might look for internal discord in the Fatherland and that our
humiliation could therefore be more easily accomplished.
If we had recognized the danger in time, we might have prevented this
hatred, to which they at the beginning were hardly prone, from taking
root in the souls of nations. But only very few among us were aware of
it and they received little credence from the others. There were times
when each one of us sensed the antipathy which we encountered beyond the
boundary lines of our own country. But we never realized how deeply it
had taken root and how widely it had spread. We loved our enemies! We
loved this French nation for its high development of etiquette,
language, and taste; a culture which seemed well adapted to serve as a
complement to our own. How much misery France might have been spared had
she but understood this unfortunate love of the German people for the
"Hereditary Enemy!"
We loved the deep, mystically religious soul of the Russians in their
anguished struggles for freedom! How many Germans have looked upon
Tolstoy as a new savior!
Above all, though, the German admired the Englishman, in the rôle of the
"royal merchant," the far-seeing colonizer, the master of the seas.
Without envy Germany gave England credit for all these qualities. And
when during the Boer war voices were raised to warn against the English
character, even then to most of us our Anglo-Saxon cousin remained the
"Gentleman beyond reproach."
Then there is the great German love for Holland, Switzerland, and the
Scandinavian countries; here we may find the Germanic race less
adulterated than in our own country. Scandinavian poets have become our
poets and we are as proud of the works of the Swedish artist as we are
of those of our people.
We gaze with delight upon the proud, blonde grace of the Norse maid; the
more gentle and pliant manners of the Swedes and Danes arouse our
admiration; and we dearly love their beautiful fjords and forests of
beech and birch.
*Love Changed to Suspicion.*
Many of us wonder today how much of all this love we, in the days to
come, will be able to rescue from the debris. "Has the world gone mad
that it has ceased to believe in our sincerity?" This at present is the
cry of many, many thousand German men and women. Do we deserve to have
our love requited with hate? And to find in the countries which declare
themselves neutral, distrust, reserve, and, in fact, doubt of our honest
intentions? Sad, dull despair has taken possession of the hearts of our
best men and women. It is not because they tremble for the fate of the
loved ones who have been compelled to go to the front and not because
there is any fear as to the outcome of this war. Not one among us doubts
the ultimate triumph of Germany. We also know that we must pay a
terrible toll for this victory with the blood of our sons, fathers and
husbands.
Equally as much as they mourn the loss of our young manhood many of our
best citizens deplore the hatred which has spread over the face of the
globe, hate which has torn asunder what was believed to have been a
firmly woven net of a common European culture. That which we with ardent
souls have labored to create is being devastated by ruthless force.
The following story of the non-commissioned German officer is typical or
symbolical of many. He, while the bullets of the inhabitants of Louvain
fell around him, rescued the priceless old paintings from the burning
Church of St. Peter, simply because he was an art-historian and knew and
loved each of the masterpieces. And well we all understand the feelings
which mastered him during those moments of horror.
He would probably think and say, "I have but done my duty."
And now we have arrived at the point which gives rise to the greatest
amount of antipathy. Our opponents declare we are endowed with great
ability--they say they must acknowledge that. But how can a race of
stiff, dry, duty-performing beings awaken love? The German must lose all
claim to individual freedom and independence of thought in consequence
of the training which he receives. When he is a child he commences it in
a military subordination in the school, he continues it in the barracks,
and later, when he enters a vocational life, under the stern leadership
of his superiors. He becomes, our critics continue, simply a
disagreeable pedantic tool of the all-powerful "drill." This atmosphere
of "drill," or in other words this stern hard military spirit, envelops
him, accompanies him as guardian from the cradle to the grave, and makes
of him an unbearable companion for all the more refined, gentle, and
amiable nations. Yes, our opponents often declare that they are waging
war not only against Germany, but against this pedantic, military,
tyrannical sense of duty, which they call the "Prussian spirit." It
shall once and for all, they assert, be eradicated from the world.
*A Religious Feeling of Duty.*
Far be it from me to deny that my country people, male and female, do
indeed possess an unusually strong sense of duty. This is combined with
a desire for justice which is so often looked upon by outsiders as a
lack of patriotic pride, and with an honesty which easily makes the
German appear so clumsy and awkward. These three characteristics belong
indissolubly together and one is not to be thought of without the other.
The spirit from which the German sense of duty arises is what the
foreigner so often misunderstands in us. He generally confuses sense of
duty with blind obedience. But this sense of duty does not originate
from a need for submission or from a mental dependence. No, it rests on
a deep philosophical reason and arises from the mental recognition of
ethical and national necessity. That is why it can exist side by side
with the most extreme individualism, which also belongs to the
peculiarities of the character of our people. The Germans have always
been a nation of thinkers. Not only the scholar, also the simple worker,
the laborer, the modest mother take a deep pleasure in forming their
philosophy of life and the world. Side by side with the loud triumph of
our industry goes this quieter existence, which has been rather pushed
into the background in the last decades, but has not, therefore, ceased
to exist. And the further the belief in miracles stepped into the
background, the more the belief in duty acquired a warm religious tinge.
The loud complaints about the vanishing of the sense of duty among the
young, which has so often been voiced by public opinion, only prove how
strongly this ethical force was governing people's minds. Every seeming
diminution of it was felt to be a disastrous endangerment of the
knowledge of the people. We have perhaps acted childishly and foolishly
toward other nations by too great confidence. But in the consciousness
of the entire German Nation the ominous feeling was living and working
with mighty power, that only if every one of us devotes his entire
strength to the post assigned to him, and works until the exhaustion of
his last mental and physical power, only then can we as a national whole
retain our high level and, surrounded by dangers on all sides, create
sufficient room for ourselves to breathe and live.
*The Military and the Socialists.*