until recently--the military and the Social Democratic. The world sees
with amazement the perfection which has been reached by the military
organization of our army. Its achievements have only become possible
through the above-mentioned philosophical conception of the sense of
duty which raises it far above any systematic obedience and lets it
appear in the light of religious ideal. Duty becomes in these serious
and energetic minds a voluntary adaptation to a carefully organized
whole with the knowledge that to serve this whole at the same time
produces the highest achievement of the individual personality. The
Social Democratic organization, opposed though it is to the military
organization, is also composed of Germans and is, therefore, directed by
the same basic principles as the military organization, although for
entirely different purposes. For this one reason it was almost a matter
of course that the Social Democrats offered their services for the war
at the moment when they recognized that it had become of imperious
necessity to set aside personal wishes and ideals and to put in the
foreground only the duty of the defense of their country. The idea of
our opponents, that they would find a support in the Socialists of our
country, rested on a complete misunderstanding of the German character.
A foreign woman wrote to me in the days of the mobilization: "I do not
understand the German enthusiasm for war--how it is possible that one
can become enthusiastic about murder!" The woman only saw the exterior
and superficial phase of things.
In its endeavor to unite itself with the world the German soul had
suddenly come upon the wildest hatred * * * numerous high ideals of
culture fell to ruin within a few hours. Deeply wounded, it was hurled
back into its most personal possessions. Here it found itself face to
face with tasks which far surpassed anything demanded heretofore of it
as fulfillment of duty. And now there came to pass a wonder which will
be unforgettable for every one who lived through this period. Everything
dry, petty, pedantic, connected with German ways, which had often made
many of us impatient with ourselves, was suddenly swept away by the
storm of these days.
A gigantic wave of fiery hot feeling passed through our country flaming
up like a beautiful sacrificial pyre. It was no longer a duty to offer
one's self and one's life--it was supreme bliss. That might easily sound
like a hollow phrase. But there is a proof, which is more genuine than
words, than songs, and cheers. That is the expression in the faces of
the people, their uncontrolled spontaneous movements. I saw the eyes
light up of an old woman who had sent four sons into battle and
exclaimed: "It is glorious to be allowed to give the Fatherland so
much!" I saw the controlled calm in the features of sorrowing mothers
who knew that their only sons had fallen. But the expression in the
faces of many wounded who were already returning home gripped me the
most. They had lived through the horror of the battle, their feet had
waded through blood, their young bodies were horribly maimed. I saw this
strangely serene, quietly friendly expression in the young faces. They
were men who had sacrificed their ego. They were great patient
conquerors of selfishness. And with what tenderness, what goodness are
they surrounded, to lighten their lot, to give them joy. How the general
sentiment is often expressed in the gesture of a single person--you did
that for us--how can we sufficiently requite you?
A stream of love is flowing through our Fatherland and is uniting all
hearts. The unobtrusive mother "duty" gave birth to the genial child
"feeling." She bestowed on it her strong vitality so that it can defy a
world of hatred--and conquer it.
FOOTNOTES:
[B] Gabriele Reuter is one of the foremost German woman authors.
*A Letter to Gerhart Hauptmann*
*By Romain Rolland.*
I am not, Gerhart Hauptmann, of those Frenchmen who call Germany
barbarian. I recognize the intellectual and moral grandeur of your
mighty race. I realize all that I owe to the thinkers of old Germany;
and even at this extreme hour I recall to mind the example and the words
of our Goethe--for he belongs to all humanity--repudiating national
hatred and preserving his soul serene in those heights "where one feels
the joys and sorrows of all peoples as one's own." It has been the labor
of my life to bring together the minds of our two nations; and the
atrocities of impious war shall never lead me to soil my heart with
hatred.
Whatever reason I may have, therefore, to suffer through the deeds of
your Germany and to judge as criminal the German policy and the German
methods, I do not hold responsible the people who submit thereto and are
reduced to mere blind instruments. This does not mean that I regard war
as a fatality. A Frenchman knows no such word as fatality. Fatality is
the excuse of souls that lack a will.
No. This war is the fruit of the feebleness of peoples and of their
stupidity. One can only pity them; one cannot blame them. I do not
reproach you for our sorrows. Your mourning will not be less than ours.
If France is ruined, so also will be Germany. I did not even raise my
voice when I saw your armies violate the neutrality of noble Belgium.
This forfeit of honor, which compels the contempt of every
right-thinking mind, is too well within the political tradition of
Prussian Kings to have surprised me.
But the fury with which you treated that generous land whose one crime
was to defend, unto despair, its independence and the idea of
justice--that was too much! The world revolts in wrath at this. Reserve
for us your violence--for us French, who are your enemies. But to
trample upon your victims, upon the little Belgian people, unfortunate
and innocent--that is ignominy!
And not content with assaulting the Belgium that lives, you wage war on
the dead, on the glory of past centuries. You bombard Malines, you put
Rubens to flame, Louvain comes from your hands a heap of ashes--Louvain
with its treasures of art and knowledge, the holy city! Who indeed are
you and what name do you conjure us to call you, Hauptmann, you who
reject the title of barbarian?
Are you the children of Goethe or of Attila? Do you wage war against
armies or against the human spirit? Kill men if you must, but respect
man's work. For this is the heritage of the human race. And you, like
us, are its trustees. In making pillage of it as you have done you prove
yourselves unworthy of this great inheritance, unworthy of holding rank
in the small European army which is the garde d'honneur of civilization.
It is not to the sense of the rest of the world that I appeal against
you. It is to yourself, Hauptmann. In the name of our Europe, of which
up to the present you have been one of the noblest champions--in the
name of that civilization for which the greatest of men have
struggled--in the name of the honor even of your German race, Gerhart
Hauptmann, I adjure you, I command you, you and the intellectual élite
of Germany, where I have so many friends, to protest with utmost
vehemence against this crime which leaps back upon yourselves.
If you fail in this, one of two things will be proved--that you
acquiesce, (and then the opinion of the world will crush you,) or that
you are powerless to raise your voice against the Huns that now command
you. And in that case, with what right will you still pretend, as you
have written, that your cause is that of liberty and human progress?
You will be giving to the world a proof that, incapable of defending the
liberty of the world, you are helpless even to uphold your own; that the
élite of Germany lies subservient to the blackest despotism--to a
tyranny which mutilates masterpieces and assassinates the human spirit.
I await your response, Hauptmann--a response which shall be an act. The
opinion of Europe awaits it, as do I. Bear this in mind; in a moment
like this, even silence is an act.
*A Reply to Rolland*
*By Gerhart Hauptmann.*
You address me, Herr Rolland, in public words which breathe the pain
over this war, (forced by England, Russia and France,) pain over the
endangering of European culture and the destruction of hallowed
memorials of ancient art. I share in this general sorrow, but that to
which I cannot consent is to give an answer whose spirit you have
already prescribed and concerning which you wrongly assert that it is
awaited by all Europe. I know that you are of German blood. Your
beautiful novel, "Jean-Christophe," will remain immortal among us
Germans together with "Wilhelm Meister," and "der grüne Heinrich."
But France became your adopted fatherland; therefore your heart must now
be torn and your judgment confused. You have labored zealously for the
reconciliation of both peoples. In spite of all this when the present
bloody conflict destroys your fair concept of peace, as it has done for
so many others, you see our nation and our people through French eyes,
and every attempt to make you see clearly and as a German is absolutely
sure to be in vain.
Naturally everything which you say of our Government, of our army and
our people, is distorted, everything is false, so false that in this
respect your open letter to me appears as an empty black surface.
War is war. You may lament war, but you should not wonder at the things
that are inseparable from the elementary fact itself. Assuredly it is
deplorable that in the conflict an irreplaceable Rubens is destroyed,
but--with all honor to Rubens!--I am among those in whom the shattered
breast of his fellow-man compels far deeper pain.
And, Herr Rolland, it is not exactly fitting that you should adopt a
tone implying that the people of your land, the French, are coming out
to meet us with palm branches, when in reality they are plentifully
equipped with cannon, with cartridges, yes, even with dumdum bullets. It
is apparent that you have grown pretty fearful of our brave troops! That
is to the glory of a power which is invincible through the justice of
its cause. The German soldier has nothing whatsoever in common with the
loathsome and puerile were-wolf tales which your lying French press so
zealously publishes abroad, that press which the French and the Belgian
people have to thank for their misfortune.
Let the idle Englishmen call us Huns; you may, for all I care,
characterize the warriors of our splendid Landwehr as sons of Attila; it
is enough for us if this Landwehr can shatter into a thousand pieces the
ring of our merciless enemies. Far better that you should call us sons
of Attila, cross yourselves in fear and remain outside our borders, than
that you should indict tender inscriptions upon the tomb of our German
name, calling us the beloved descendants of Goethe. The epithet Huns is
coined by people who, themselves Huns, are experiencing disappointment
in their criminal attacks on the life of a sound and valorous race,
because it knows the trick of parrying a fearful blow with still more
fearful force. In their impotence, they take refuge in curses.
I say nothing against the Belgian people. The peaceful passage of German
troops, a question of life for Germany, was refused by Belgium because
the Government had made itself a tool of England and France. This same
Government then organized an unparalleled guerrilla warfare in order to
support a lost cause, and by that act--Herr Rolland, you are a
musician!--struck the horrible keynote of conflict. If you are at all in
a position to break your way through the giant's wall of anti-German
lies, read the message to America, by our Imperial Chancellor, of Sept.
7; read further the telegram which on Sept. 8 the Kaiser himself
addressed to President Wilson. You will then discover things which it is
necessary to know in order to understand the calamity of Louvain.
*Another Reply to Rolland*
*By Karl Wolfskehl.*
To you, Rolland, belonging as a chosen one to the more important
Frenchmen who can rise above their race, the German nature has often
been revealed. To you, now, we shall make answer, offer frank testimony
concerning the spirit of the time, concerning that fate, that very fate
in which you, the Frenchman, do not believe. You do not believe in it;
what to us is fate, mysterious necessity, to you is fatalité, an
unavoidable Alp which threatens the individual in his individual
freedom. This fatalité, we, too, do not believe in it, but we do believe
in the forces which bring forth the eternal in human will, that these
both are one, will and forces, one with necessity, with actuality, with
creative, moral power, of which all great ideas are the children, the
idea of freedom, the idea of the beautiful, the idea of tragic fidelity,
and that these, reaching far above being and passing away, are
nevertheless real, life entire, fact entire. All that which is as dear
to you as to us, great works and great feelings, resignation and
self-restraint, all that is necessity, is fate, that became will--all
that a unity out of choice and compulsion. All that is for us eternal,
not according to the measure of time, but according to the beginning and
the power of its working forces, in so far as it is necessary.
Thus has it become fate, destiny, not fatalité, rather like that fate
which in Beethoven's own words in the first movement of his "Eroica" "is
the knocking at the gate."
Such a fate is this war. No one wanted it in our Germany, for it was
forced upon us with terrible arbitrariness, contrary to all right. Do
you not know of the net that has been spun around us and drawn tight for
the last half of a generation, to choke us? Do you not know how often
this most peaceful of peoples has drawn back, how often the strange
powers in the East and in the West have with contemptuous snarls said,
"Wilhelm will not make war"? That you ought to know, Rolland, for it is
known to the whole world.
*The War "Came from God."*
But I will betray something to you that you cannot know, because you are
a stranger; and this will probably show you where we see fate. I will
betray to you the fact that there is still another Germany behind the
exterior in which great politics and great finance meet with the
literary champions of Europe. That Germany tells you in this heavy hour
of Europe:
This undesired war that has been forced upon us is nevertheless a
necessity; it had to come to pass for the sake of Germany and the world
of European humanity, for the sake of the world. We did not want it, but
it came from God. Our poet knew of it. He saw this war and its necessity
and its virtues, and heralded it, long before an ugly suspicion of it
flew through the year--before the leaves began to turn. The "Stern des
Bundes" ["Star of the Federation"] is this book of prophecy, this book
of necessity and of triumph.
The present need and the present triumph are quite human and quite
inexorable. They have a part in all that has taken place, and they are
unprecedented and new. None of us--do you hear, Rolland?--none of us
Germans today would hesitate to help destroy every monument of our holy
German past, if necessity made it a matter of the last ditch, for that
from which alone all monuments of all times draw their right of
existence and their worth unless they are empty husks, skeletons, and
framework; even so, we alone may ask what shall come to pass, not what
shall cease. Which ruins are ravings, and which are the pains of
childbirth, we do not presume to decide; but you, too, who are so pained
by ruins, even as we are pained by them, you, too, do not know it.
Today it is a question of the life or death of the European soul. Do you
not believe that this soul is more endangered at the hands of the hordes
of stub-nosed Slavs than of the phalanx of those whom you, Rolland, call
Huns? Your sense must give you the right to answer. Recall the terrible
story of Russian incendiarism for the last hundred years, which has torn
to pieces in ever-increasing lust for murder bodies and souls; recall
the eternally perjured and law-defying regiment of grave diggers; and
then blush that you have characterized as a heavy crime a manfully
confessed act of self-defense on the part of the Germans, the temporary
occupation of Belgium! Blush that you have forgotten the Russian Moloch
now loosed upon us, drunk with the blood and tears of alien peoples as
well as of its own children! That you have forgotten all that, in order
to lament over buildings which we have been forced in
self-defense--again in self-defense--to sacrifice! And blush for those
of your people who have become accomplices of that Moloch! Those who are
sinning against the Holy Ghost of Europe, in order to attempt belated
vengeance against Germany! Do you know what the ancients, the very
Greeks and Romans from whom you have drawn your blood and temperament,
called that sin? Blood-guiltiness is the name of that horror. And do you
know how it is atoned for? I shrink to ask further, yea, even to think
further; for horror falls upon me, and I see the unspeakable.
Today, battling against you allies of the swarms of Muscovites, we
Europeans are battling also for that France which you are
threatening--you, not we!
*German Intellectuals "All Afire."*
Yes, Romain Rolland, try, Frenchman that you are, to look into the
mysteries of the time. Ask yourself, marvel, how it comes to pass that
we, the intellectuals among the Germans, take part without exception in
this dreadful war; take part with body and soul. None of us ambitious,
none of us a politician, not one of us who, till this war, busied
himself about anything except his idea, the Palladium of his life! And
now we are all afire, with all our hearts, with our whole people, all
full of determination and prepared for the last. All our youth in the
field, every man among us thrilled with faith in our God and this battle
of our God, every man among us conscious of the sacred necessity that
has driven us, every man among us consecrated for timely death! Are
these incendiaries? Are these slaves, whom a despot points the way to
the rolling dead? Every one knows it is our all that is at stake; it is
a matter of the divine in humanity, a matter of our preservation and
that of Europe.
And so we stand amid death and ruins under the star--one federation, one
single union. This I have had to tell you, whether you will listen to
it, whether Europe has ears to hear it, or not. From now on, may our
deeds be our words!
*Are We Barbarians?*
*By Gerhart Hauptmann.*
The idea of cosmopolitanism has never taken deeper root anywhere than in
Germany. Let any person reflect about our literary translations and then
name a nation that has tried so honestly as we to do justice to the
spirit and the feelings of other races, to understand their inmost soul
in all good-will.
I must out with it: We had and have no hatred against France: we have
idolized the fine arts, the sculpture and painting and the literature of
that country. The worldwide appreciation of Rodin had its origin in
Germany--we esteem Anatole France, Maupassant, Flaubert, Balzac, as if
they were German authors. We have a deep affection for the people of
South France. We find passionate admirers of Mistral in small German
towns, in alleys, in attics. It was deeply to be regretted that Germany
and France could not be friends politically. They ought to have been,
because they were joint trustees of the intellectual treasures of the
Continent, because they are two of the great cultivated nations of
Europe. But fate has willed it otherwise.
In the year 1870 the German races fought for the union of the Germans
and the German Empire. Owing to the success of this struggle Germany has
enjoyed an era of peace for more than forty years. A time of budding,
growing, becoming strong, flowering, and bearing fruit, without parallel
in history. Out of a population, growing more and more numerous, an
ever-increasing number of individuals have been formed. Individual
energy and a general tendency to expand led to the great achievements of
our industry, our commerce, and our trade. I do not think that any
American, Englishman, Frenchman, or Italian when in a German family, in
German towns, in German hotels, on German ships, in German concerts, in
German theatres, at Baireuth, in German libraries, or in German museums,
ever felt as if he were among "barbarians." We visited other countries
and kept an open door for every stranger.
*English Relations.*
It is with pain and with bitterness that I speak the word England. I am
one of those barbarians on whom the English University of Oxford
conferred the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa. I have friends in England
who stand with one foot on the intellectual soil of Germany. Haldane,
formerly English Minister of War, and with him countless other
Englishmen, made regular pilgrimages to the little barbarous town of
Weimar, where the barbarians Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland, and
others, have created another world for humanity. We have a poet, whose
plays, more than those of any other German poet, have become national
property; his name is Shakespeare. This Shakespeare is, at the same
time, the prince of English poets. The mother of our Emperor is an
English woman, the wife of the King of England a German, and yet this
nation, so closely related by blood and choice, has declared war against
us. Why? Heaven only knows. This much, however, is certain, that the now
beginning European concert, saturated with blood, as it is, has an
English statesman for its impresario and its conductor. It is doubtful,
however, whether the finale of this terrible music will find the same
conductor at the stand. "My cousin, you did not mean well either with
yourselves or with us when your tools threw the fire-brand into our
dwellings!"
If heaven wills that we should issue regenerated from this terrible
trial, we shall have the sacred duty of showing ourselves worthy of our
regeneration. By the complete victory of German arms the independence of
Europe would be secured. It would be necessary to make it clear to the
different nations of Europe that this war must be the last between
themselves. They must see at last that their sanguinary duels only bring
a shameful advantage to the one who, without taking part in them, is
their originator. Then they must devote themselves mutually to the work
of civilization and peace, which will then make misunderstandings
impossible.
In this direction much had already been done before the war began. The
dfferent nations had already met in peaceful emulation and were to meet
again at Berlin for the Olympian games. It is only necessary to recall
the aeronautic races, the boat races, the horse races, and the
beneficial international influence of the arts and sciences, and the
great super-national Nobel Prizes. The barbarian Germany has, as is well
known, led the way among the other nations with her great institutions
for social reform. A victory would oblige us to go forward on this path
and to make the blessings of such institutions general. Our victory
would, furthermore, secure the future existence of the Teutonic race for
the welfare of the world. During the last decade, for example, how
fruitful has the Scandinavian literature been for the German, and vice
versa, the German for the Scandinavian. How many Swedes, Norwegians, and
Danes have lately, without feeling conscious of a drop of foreign blood,
shaken hands with German brothers in Stockholm, Christiania, Copenhagen,
Munich, Vienna, and Berlin. How much homely good-fellowship has grown up
around the noble names of Ibsen, Björnsen, and Strindberg.
*Faust and Rifles.*
I hear that abroad an enormous number of lying tales are being
fabricated to the detriment of our honor, our culture, and our strength.
Well, those who create these idle tales should reflect that the
momentous hour is not favorable for fiction. On three frontiers our own
blood bears witness. I myself have sent out two of my sons. All our
intrepid German soldiers know why they are going to war. There are no
analphabets to be found among them; all the more, however, of those who,
besides their rifle, have their Goethe's "Faust," their "Zarathustra," a
work of Schopenhauer's, the Bible, or their Homer in their knapsacks.
And even those who have no book in the knapsack know that they are
fighting for a hearth at which every guest is welcome.