The German Question

CHAPTER I ON THE GERMAN
NATIONAL CHARACTER

THE symbol of justice is the balance. If we want to arrive at a just judgment concerning the German nation in its terrible downfall of our day, we must continually weigh against one another accusation and exculpation. In this lies both the difficulty and the danger of our task. We must be just on one side to the weighty evidence of those who place all their emphasis on the case against Germany, and on the other hand we must not shut our ears to the voice of reason and conscience, which urgently reminds us that an unqualified condemnation of the whole German people would be a grave miscarriage of historic justice. It might be all the more fatal since it would exclude any reasonable treatment of the German problem and frustrate any hope of its ultimate solution. If we incline too much to one side or the other, to prosecution or defence, every time we do so we shall run into grave danger. If we identify ourselves without any reservation with the condemnation which the world is for very intelligible reasons inclined today to pronounce, we shall be failing in the task it is our duty to perform. No less great, however, is the danger if in opposing this condemnation we overstep certain limits. It is the danger that we might strengthen the Germans in a tendency against which they have most carefully to guard, if their present disaster is not to lose for them its profoundest lesson—that of the need for thorough-going moral purification.

In this situation we must always bear in mind that we have to speak in entirely different ways to the Germans and to the rest of the world. We have to warn the world not to allow itself to be carried away in its understandable wrath to decisions and actions that would overshoot the mark and do harm that would be difficult to repair. To the Germans we say: Take care not to take too lightly your heavy responsibility, and do not imagine that it is enough to set down the Nazis as a criminal gang with which you have nothing to do. If the Germans were to fall back on the comfortable theory that the Third Reich was no more than an unfortunate incident in their history, involving, apart from its agents, no guilt or responsibility of the German nation itself, they would not only be lulling themselves with a legend comparable with the famous legend of the “stab in the back,” but would also be doing themselves the worst of wrongs. They would be barring their own way to the moral and political revolution that will alone be able to free the German nation from a grave and obstinate disease and to give added historic meaning even to the catastrophe of today.

It is to be feared that the Germans may in any case be tempted glibly to evade responsibility for Nazism by means of a “mischance legend” of this sort. So much the more irresponsible would it be if we were to offer the slightest encouragement to this idea. It cannot be helped that some of the things we have to say to the outer world might be misused by the Germans to lull their conscience. If we wish to avoid complicity in this misuse, we must emphatically warn the Germans against it.

We must do still more. We must leave not a shadow of doubt that Nazism, far from being a mere incident in German history, arose from conditions peculiar to Germany alone. It could never have come if the matters of pure chance whose existence we have no intention of denying had not found an environment that is the product of Germany’s whole history. There are Hitlers everywhere, and have been at all times, but it is Germany’s shame that so miserable a figure could become her leader. In order to germinate, the seed of Nazism had to find a favourable soil: it found it in the German Reich and the Germans, such as they had become in their political, spiritual, economic, and social history. The very Germans who are so ready to deny at once any connexion between Nazism and the specifically German environment, and who to that end rely on the fact that, of course, other nations too are burdened with responsibility for wrongdoing, thereby demonstrate how easily, with that mentality, they were able to fall victim, at least for a time, to the Nazi poison.

We must therefore insist with the utmost emphasis that the Third Reich is deeply rooted in German history, and that it is, indeed, the disastrous conclusion of the fateful development that began with Bismarck’s brutal “unification” of Germany. But the very fact that this final outcome has been so apocalyptic gives us hope that the Germans themselves may struggle through to the recognition that now—after the first partial payment in 1914-1919—they must pay the full price for the wrong path they have pursued since 1866. With this hope is bound up the further hope that they may now be ready for a radical change of course that will solve the German problem. This brings us to the supremely important conclusion that, true as it is that Nazism grew out of conditions peculiar to Germany, it is entirely possible to make a radical change in these conditions. We are bound to say to many Germans that their case is far graver than they imagine; but we are entitled to assure many non-Germans that the case is much more hopeful than they think. The extent of the hope depends, however, entirely on the degree to which the Germans appreciate the gravity of their case, and this is also the only hope remaining to the Germans. The time has now come for them to open their eyes and realize the course their history has taken, and also to look deep into their own souls and conscientiously to consider what they find there.

We may put it another way: The right method of serious attack on the German problem may be compared to that of the psychiatrist in approaching a clinical case. Without any preconceived notion, in the simple search for the truth, he will seek to explore the soul of the patient and its development, in order in this way to arrive at an accurate diagnosis and to apply a suitable treatment. The solution of the German problem calls, in fact, for psychotherapeutical treatment on the vastest scale the world has ever known. In this spirit we will now devote ourselves to the study of the German mind.

DIFFICULTIES

We should not be following the example of the conscientious physician if we allowed ourselves to be carried away by the anger of the moment, and over-simplified our task by just setting Nazism down as the outcome of an incorrigible German national character. Even if we were to declare all living Germans to be open or camouflaged Nazis—which we have no right whatever to do—it would be monstrous to include in this judgment all the Germans of the past and to say, “Such are the Germans today, and such they have ever been.” There is a certain type of contemporary German who has become so hateful as to tempt us to include the Germans of all ages in our condemnation. The crimes of this modern German, whom we all know and loathe, are, however, too many already for us to allow him to play a further trick on us by making the Germany of the past hateful to us, by besmirching the whole history of that great and gifted nation at the heart of Europe and reducing everything connected with it to the unspeakable level of a Hitler or a Himmler. There is further a serious danger that the very ease with which the idea of the “eternal evil genius of Germany” can be shown to be false, may obscure the real problem, that of the origin of the Prussianized type of modern German, who so easily “fell for” Nazism.

Thus we cannot under any conditions accept the vulgar theory of the “eternal German of the Gestapo.” Any attempt to compile an impressive list of all the ill-deeds of German history, from the ancient Teutons down to Himmler and his minions, and of every condemnation of the Germans that has ever been pronounced, and to offer this list as evidence that Nazism revealed the German in his true and eternal form, is certainly unworthy of any serious sociologist or historian. Every educated person knows how easy it is to draw a caricature of this sort of any nation, simply by industriously making an appropriate selection of the facts of history. It would do nobody any good if the Germans tried to return the compliment.

All the more seriously must we treat the question whether and how far the national character of the Germans reveals traits that facilitated the triumph of Nazism over them. If the German seriously examines himself he will certainly be unable roundly to deny the existence of such traits. He will have to admit that without certain elements in the German character it would have been impossible for Nazism even to develop, much less gain and maintain supreme power.

It is true that we must bear in mind the great difficulties that call for solution in this connexion, difficulties implicit in any attempt at scientific treatment of so vague a concept as that of national character.1 These difficulties are particularly formidable in the case of Germany because the German character lacks the sharp outlines and the distinct form we recognize in the French or British character. In addition to this, we have continually to bear in mind Germany’s peculiar character as a “nation of nations,” the differences of racial character being so many that we find difficulty in recognizing any national character common to all the German territories. What has the Austrian, thoroughly German though he is, in common with the modern “Reichsdeutsche,” the German of the modern Reich; what has the Bavarian, the Aleman of Württemberg or of Baden, or the Rhinelander, or the man of Lower Saxony, in common with the Prussian?

The truth is that the German has the greatest trouble in understanding himself—how can others be expected to understand him? The question “What is Germany?” has never ceased to occupy the Germans just as much as the other question “What is the German’s fatherland?” and the two questions are both characteristic of the German’s “national character.”

Let us admit that the concept of “national character” is so problematic that it might almost have been created as an arena for the dilettanti and the chauvinists, and every honest man will make use of it only with the utmost reluctance. We shall find nothing to quarrel with in Schopenhauer’s dictum in his Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit—

“Individuality far outweighs nationality, and in any given man the former demands consideration a thousand times more than the latter. Of the national character, which has reference to the crowd, there will never be much good that can honestly be said. On the contrary, it is merely human narrowness, perversity, and baseness, making their appearance in every country in a different form, and this is called the national character. If one of these characteristics disgusts us we praise another, until that one disgusts us in turn. Every nation laughs at other nations, and all of them are right.”

Thus in the so-called national character we shall never be able to see more than a rough average or a collective component of the individual characters of all the members of a nation; and we must not be surprised if we find little or nothing of this conception of national character present in any individual case. In the very case of the German nation, many of its greatest men seem by no means to fit the general picture formed usually of the typical German. What was there German about Leibniz, about Goethe?

And yet we know that the national character is a reality, even in the case of the German national character, which is so exceedingly difficult to define. How else could we explain the spirit of the language of a nation, common to all its nationals? It may be that G. K. Chesterton gets nearest the truth in saying that “a national soul is as indefinable as a smell, and as unmistakable.”2 But there is another difficulty here. We must distinguish between the character of a nation at a particular time and its apparent permanent character through the ages. The two would be identical if we had any guarantee that the national character is invariable in its essentials. But this certainly is not the case. While some traits seem to remain unchanged in the course of history, and are true constants, others may undergo fundamental changes, whether under the influence of a great historic experience or through a change in religious and intellectual conditions, or through the example of some eminent personality. Very few people keep in mind the fact that it is a great mistake to treat the national character of the European nations as a historical constant and to overlook, for example, the great change that seems to have come over the English or the French character during the nineteenth century. But in no case, probably, is this mistake so great as in that of the German nation, which, precisely in the second half of the nineteenth century, suffered under the calamitous guidance of Bismarck, under the pressure of an unexampled increase in population, and under the influence of a real revolution in its economic and social structure, a specially abrupt change in its outlook and its conditions of existence. We are convinced, indeed, that what the world understands and disapproves in general as the German national character is in the main simply a product of this very latest phase of German history.3

In fact, everyone should delve into the literature of the first, half of the nineteenth century, allow himself to be influenced by the judgments expressed, not only by Germans but by foreigners, and compare the picture so gained with the type of German we find at the end of that century. Then it will be impossible to fail to note a really profound change in the German soul, or to fail to understand such a sober observer as Ranke when in 1832 he bore witness that the German nation was “a thoughtful, well-disposed race, with moderate needs and aspirations, attached to lawful and quiet progress, loyal to its constitution, devoted to peaceful occupations, and fearing God from the bottom of its heart.”4 Let anyone read the Jugenderinnerungen eines alten Mannes, by the painter Gerhard von Kügelgen (1772-1820), and ask himself how it is that in that book one finds so likeable, so introspective and spiritual a type of German, so markedly differing from the later type. Let him allow to sink into his mind the picture of the German people drawn about the middle of the nineteenth century by the historian W. H. Riehl (and drawn without leaving out the darker side), and compare it with the protestations of love for the Germans made, certainly not in complete blindness, by the great Frenchmen of that period, Victor Hugo, Michelet, E. Quinet, and others.

Or are we to suppose that Michelet was drawing upon his imagination when in the introduction to his Histoire Universelle he praised “le calme, la pureté, le chaste recueillement de l’Allemagne”? And even in 1860 the German writer Bogumil Goltz wrote of the German as the universal man and added, “If there is a world economy, a divine providence, a progress of the human race, a growing humanity, there will also be a German race to the end of the world.” A few decades later, and no German writer who was to be taken seriously would have ventured to attribute such qualities to the Germans. Who would not feel sympathy with the Germany of Ludwig Richter, of Moritz von Schwind, of Kügelgen, of Schubert, Schumann, Jean Paul, Stifter, Mörike, Wilhelm Raabe, and the brothers Grimm? Need we mention what eminent Swiss writers of that period—Gottfried Keller, Jacob Burckhardt, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, thought of that earlier Germany?

Quite obviously we have here a breach in Germany’s development. It is so striking that we have the impression that since Bismarck the German has lost his own soul. What has happened to him since will occupy us fully later on. In what follows here we limit ourselves to speaking with all caution of the constants of the German national character which, in spite of this latest change, may fairly be determined.

THE “ETERNAL GERMAN”

There is a really appalling habit of talking of this “eternal German,” whether in praise or blame. To the author of the Mythus des 20, Jahrhunderts—Alfred Rosenberg, a German Russian, as Hitler was an Austrian, Hess an Egyptian, Darré an Argentinian—“a Nordic heroic saga, a Prussian march, a composition of Bach, a sermon of Ekkehart, a Faust monologue” seemed merely “different expressions of one and the same soul.” That view is as intolerable as the opposite one of those who see in the Germans only the same savage barbarians rampaging through the centuries. It is all too easy to treat the immensely difficult subject in more or less witty aphorisms, to set out isolated testimonies from widely separated centuries, and then to say: “There you have the German, arrogant, brutal, and at the same time sentimental and lachrymose, as he was even at that time.”

It is very effective today to recall that as long ago as the beginning of the twelfth century a German mission seems to have behaved before the Pope at Châlons-sur-Marne in the same savage and menacing way as a Nazi trade delegation,5 or that in a Dutch poem of the sixteenth century the German is described as humble in misfortune but arrogant and overbearing when things are going well.6 In this connexion it is usual to mention the sack of Rome by Frundsberg’s German-Spanish soldateska, who had got out of control (Sacco di Roma, 1527), as evidence of the eternal barbarousness of the German—forgetting that undisciplined mercenaries who for months had received no pay might be expected to behave in this way anywhere, that the Spanish troops merrily took part in the Sack of Rome, and that the looting of Constantinople by the European knights in the fourth crusade (1204) was, if possible, still more barbarous. Is it really necessary to remind such critics that the French Armagnacs or the Swedish soldiers of the Thirty Years War were a frightful pestilence, the latter so much so that “Swedes” are a byword to this day in German popular speech? Is it still necessary just to pronounce the word “Ireland”?

If we want to avoid these dangerous paths and to keep to what is more or less demonstrable, the safest course is to proceed from the spirit of the German language as evidence that is constant and is accessible to scientific analysis.7 If we are to be polite we may talk of it, with Vinet, as a predominantly philosophic and lyrical language, in contrast with such mainly logical languages as French. To put it more plainly and in more general terms, the German language reflects the unrestrained, anarchical, soft, indefinite, romantic and non-classic, sentimental, brooding, and imprecise elements in the German—characteristics that have marked the man as unmistakably as his language.

The German language confirms the element of the florid, the Gothic, the baroque, which has struck every acute observer in the German nature, and which the German himself must admit to be characteristic of him. There is also the brooding, dreamy, introspective element, the habit of gazing into the unfathomable, that makes Dürer’s etching “Melancolia” one of the most German of all works of art. There is the irrational element that, as we shall see later, continually reveals itself in the history of the German soul and is in such strong contrast to the Latin formality and clarity. In his language the German seems to be untiringly occupied in pushing forward into the uttermost regions of the expressible, and when he has got as far as that he plunges into the sphere of that which can no longer be made adequately comprehensible by words, a sphere in which he occupies a unique position in the world—the sphere of lyricism, of metaphysics, and, as the ultimate stage, of music. Here there he open for him supreme opportunities, but at the same time the gravest dangers. We may add that the formlessness of the German language permits a juxtaposition of zenith and nadir in style and expression in a way scarcely any other language does.8

It is astonishing how many important conclusions may be drawn from this elementary German constant. It is only a step, for instance, from formlessness and lack of co-ordination to immoderation, which has without question been characteristic of the German in all ages. He must know that he has the dangerous tendency to proceed to extremes in his thinking and acting, without law or limitation, and only too often he comes to grief in the process. He seems to possess as a hereditary defect an almost uncontrollable urge to the fantastic in politics (which he then, in involuntary humour, calls Realpolitik), in science, art, music, and in every other field. This characteristic may make its appearance in his familiar “thoroughness,” in restless industry, or in towering systems of metaphysics, or in massive fugues and symphonies, but it may just as well appear also in wild frenzy, in the cult of the colossal, in intellectual extremism and radicalism. The German is always in danger of going too far, and of pursuing any thought or enterprise, whether good or, unfortunately, bad, to the uttermost conceivable conclusion. Germany is the country that has produced, in Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844), the most radical and so the most ridiculous book in the world’s literature; the country that kept up to the last gasp two world wars against the combined strength of almost all other nations, that carried an inflationary process down to the complete annihilation of the currency, and finally, when it made an experiment with totalitarianism, did not rest until this had become the most total and the most repulsive tyranny of all ages.

Providence has endowed the Germans with many great gifts. If it had provided them as amply with the quality of moderation, how great a blessing to mankind, instead of a curse, their country might have become. Since, however, German history is not by any means an unbroken chain of immoderacies, but has proved again and again that the German is quite able to master his dangerous tendency, and since the recognition of one’s own defects is itself the principal step toward their overcoming, we should ourselves be falling into an immoderacy of pessimism if we were not ready today to believe even here in the possibility of a profound change. The moment at which the Germans have plunged themselves by the greatest of their immoderacies into the profoundest disaster of their history should indeed give us good ground for hope.

We have mentioned the brooding element in the nature of the Germans, and from here we come to the seriousness and the moodiness of the German, which may grow into melancholy or evaporate into pessimistic humour. This is another cause of the German’s “thoroughness,” the German’s pedantry, but also of the German’s objectivity, the German’s energy and devotion to his task. The German depreciation of form in favour of the naked reality of any matter has also one of its roots here. Thus the German frequently lacks the element of simplicity, which he finds so attractive in the Italian, whereas he himself has to reflect upon everything, to work up everything into a theory. He likes constructing theories and systems, and he is half won to any cause if it is placed before him with all the weightiness of a metaphysic or a Weltanschauung. Karl Marx was just as German as the mass of his followers, who swore by his fat books, and the same way to the heart of the German, through a Weltanschauung, was taken later by the Nazis with fateful success.

Hence the lecturing, pedagogical style of the German, and hence his habit, so amusing to other nations, of considering everything in advance down to the smallest detail, so that, for instance, he will not buy a car until he has studied a textbook of motoring. Hence the type of German who, finding two doors, one marked “Entrance to Paradise,” and the other “Entrance to Lecture on Paradise,” makes for the latter. This is the soil on which, especially in Germany, the modern type of the conscientiously laborious man could thrive, after Protestantism had given the final and decisive impulse to that end. “I have simply to pay for being a German; it is characteristic of the Germans that they become so heavy about everything, that everything weighs so heavily upon them.”9 So Goethe made one of his women characters speak, and every German knows how right he was. It is a moodiness, a touch of melancholy, that one finds even in a Viennese waltz with its “sunny pessimism,” while at the other end of the scale we find it in the form of peevishness, of simple ill-humour, and of an absurd solemnity over trifles (over the affairs, say, of a rabbit fanciers’ club)—all traits that mark the German.

This seriousness makes the German take not only life as a whole but every task, however trifling, in dead earnest. If he starts anything he is determined to go methodically about it. Thus German philology with its meticulousness, and German history with its painstaking immersion in detail, have become proverbial, like the Reichskursbuch, the German time-table, whose ambition it was to give faultlessly every railway connexion in every part of the world. If the German writes a scientific book, he attaches the utmost importance to making his quotations with absolute exactitude, while with British and French authors (not so much so with Americans) it seems to be almost a point of honour to get foreign names and the titles of foreign books as wrong as possible. Similarly, the average German worker or craftsman is utterly unwilling to put in scamped workmanship unless absolutely driven to it by the pace at which he is made to work or the sweated rate paid.

The German will do nothing by halves, even if the task is repugnant. This means, among other things, that he is more ready than most people to submit to the discipline required of him by any hierarchy or organization. This is one of the reasons why the German is so particularly easy to govern, why he will readily and intelligently take his place in any organization, and why as a rule he is an equally good and conscientious civil servant or soldier. The other reason is to be sought in his mental attitude toward the issues of public life; to this we shall come later.10 This may be a great virtue, but it may just as easily be a grave danger, and how great the danger is was shown by the readiness with which the Germans submitted to Nazi direction. It would be a good thing if they could learn that there are cases in which it is simply a duty to be disobedient and undisciplined. Stubborn obedience and discipline have brought the Germans infinitely more misfortune than other peoples have suffered from the opposites of those qualities; without them the Germans would neither have permitted two world wars and a gigantic inflation to be carried to their ruinous end, nor have permitted so monstrous a regime as the Third Reich to come into power and to hold power for so long. It is part of the same story that of all the forms of the proletarian movement anarchism and syndicalism were never able to gain a footing in Germany, while it was from the moderate form of Social Democracy, a system in harmony with the German character, and from the Social Democratic idea of the State with well-organized welfare and police systems and from the rigid Social Democratic party organization, that Nazism borrowed some essential characteristics.

When in his Belagerung von Mainz 1793 Goethe admitted that he would “rather commit an injustice than put up with disorder,” he certainly made his own a very German view, but it is one in which merits and faults are closely associated. In public life, too, the German loves above all to have law and order in everything, and unhappily this order is only too often merely superficial, circumstances robbing it of its moral content—justice. Everything must seine Richtigkeit haben, must be “as it should,” with publication in the Reichsgesetzblatt (Official Gazette) in proper official terms, with due police order and authorizations, one leading to another with no interruption in formal legal continuity; and if everything is thus made “legal,” the German’s mind is only too easily set at rest, even if this legalization is applied to such enormities as the mass murder that took place under Hider’s orders on June 30th, 1934. The Nazis knew their Germans when they placed the utmost emphasis on the “legality’ of the means by which they proposed to come into power. “All in the right and proper way,” as an old peasant said to my father when he told him how in his youth he had industriously poached.

This is why in Germany revolutions have been so much rarer than elsewhere, and have been so reluctantly started. Even the German revolution of 1525, in which the German peasants had every right to rid themselves by violence of a great mass of injustice and oppression, began with an attempt at amicable negotiations; and in 1848 it actually happened that the inhabitants of one of the petty German principalities humbly petitioned their prince (their Landesvater, “the father of their country”) to grant them a revolution. During the revolutionary days of November, 1918, a menacing crowd of workers had collected in front of Dresden Castle. One of the king’s aides-de-camp came out and asked them what they wanted. When he learned that they were complaining that they had no work to do, he shouted innocently, “Why, you silly asses, you ought to be glad!” There were roars of laughter at the good joke, and the crowd dispersed peacefully.

The British, too, have no love for revolutions, and they, too, place law and justice above all else; but it is a lawfulness that rests much more than in Germany on the identification of free citizens, as a matter of course, with the life of the community, whose officials are not accorded any special standing: it is not based on any sense of a duty of subordination to authorities, respect for whose majesty has become a habit. Sir Ernest Barker has pointed out that “in England we tend to make the State itself a sort of club, and to extend the methods of the club into the management of the State. In Germany, it may be said, there is a tendency to make even a club into a sort of State, and to extend the methods of the State into the management of clubs.”11 Anyone will understand this who has ever belonged to a German students’ association, one of the most ridiculous of German institutions.

We must bear in mind that we are still concerned with identifying that part of the national character of the Germans today which seems to have also marked the Germans of past centuries—in other words, to determine the constants in the nature of the German. In so doing we must be alive to the great difficulty of distinguishing the constant traits from those which may only have made their appearance in recent generations. Very often it is precisely these latter that the German ought to learn to see with the critical eye of the foreigner, in order to find the way back to his better self of the past, now that disaster has made plain to him the path along which he has allowed himself to be driven. In this connexion we must realize that many characteristics that do no honour to the German of today are degenerate or exaggerated forms of qualities which may originally have actually been virtues. It is impossible, however, to keep on indicating here the exact point at which a virtue turns into a vice.

With this repeated warning to be cautious, we will try once more to probe the indefinite, vague, and plastic element in the nature of the German. We find to begin with that a mind of this sort, with no fixed form or limitation, possesses and tries to combine a great wealth of potentialities. This brings us up against the well-known German characteristic of bringing everything possible under consideration and trying to comprise even opposites in a more or less forced synthesis. Hence his inner disharmony, his often disquieting attitude toward the truth, his ability to entertain simultaneously in his mind the most heterogeneous and incompatible ideas and judgments, even if he is unable to reconcile them all with one another, and the unrest that comes from harbouring so many souls in his breast.12 Finally, he tries to rescue himself by making out of the illogical a higher logic and then talking of “dialectics,” “dynamics,” “development,” “becoming,” and other such things. Consequently, the German finds himself scarcely anywhere so entirely in his element as in the philosophy of history, in which, under the heading “destiny” or “development,” he sets up a special account for all that is dubious. Since, however, such a type of humanity finds no rest in his mind, since everything there is simmering, he will concentrate with all the more resolution in deciding and acting. Thus Faust alters the opening of the Gospel according to Saint John from “In the beginning was the Word,” to “In the beginning was the Deed.” Does this not provide the ultimate explanation of the paradoxical element in the German that makes him seem so unintelligible and so sinister to the foreigner? And should not the German realize that the time has come for him to set himself a law and a measure and a limit and to direct his mind to firmly established and evident points?

We have been speaking of the indefinite and inconstant element in the German mind. We may also speak of the German’s teeming emotional life, and thus push open another door to understanding, which in turn leads to many side-doors. Instead of spending many words on this with German emotional extravagance, we will simply mention the fact that for the German, Weihnachten (Christmas) is a word whose whole magic is almost beyond the understanding of a non-German, and that the special symbol of this festival, the Christmas tree, has made its way throughout the world from German lands. All Germans are as one in their warm feeling for the inner radiance of this festival, however differently they may think about everything else, and when in the winter of 1918-1919 battles were raging in Berlin between the Spartacists and the Government troops, on Christmas eve the fighters went peacefully to their homes in tacit agreement that at the moment the feast of Christmas was the thing that mattered.

It will rightly be remarked that this sudden softness alongside so much that is hard and indeed brutal deserves the depreciatory epithet “sentimental” and throws into strong relief the inexplicable discord in the German nature. But are we on this account to stigmatize the gentleness, the German Lieder, the fine German Christmas songs, or Stifter’s “Heilige Nacht,” and not, on the contrary, the hardness that has probably been superposed on it only in recent generations, and are we not to hope that the German may return in this respect also to his better and, we think, his true self, instead of offering the world this repulsive spectacle of the brutal-lachrymose?

The Christmas tree comes from the forest, and here we have another word that offers a key to the German nature. We need only to pronounce it in order to indicate the German’s quite specially intimate and, if you will, primitive feeling for nature, a feeling that harmonizes with the twilight of the highland forest. Is it not remarkable that Germany should be not only one of the most thickly-populated and most highly-industrialized but also one of the most extensively afforested countries? That here until lately—until the Nazi architects of ruin in their obsession with war penetrated to the uttermost corner with their motorways, their aerodromes, and their concealed war factories—there was a solitude remote from the world, in primeval forests in which the black stork (Ciconia Nigra), the blue roller (Corucias garrulus), the crane, and the eagle-owl (Strix bubo) were to be found? That until a few decades ago there lived in the woods of the Weser highlands a real hermit who looked as if he had come out of Weber’s Freischütz or of one of Moritz von Schwind’s cartoons, and that as recently as 1917 there came to the recruiting office at Celle a young peasant from a far corner of the Lüneburg Heath who said he had heard that there was a war going on and that he had got to report? Where else was there an industrial country in which it was possible to make grander trips far from the main roads?

All this presupposes a people with a specially intimate relationship with nature and a great respect for her. We can detect that relationship and respect in German lyrical poetry, in the place of the forest in German fiction and in the German opera, in the reluctance of the German to cut down an old tree, and in the high standing of forestry in Germany. It is significant that it was a German émigré of 1848, Carl Schurz, who, as Home Secretary, took the first steps for the preservation of the American forests, and so acquired the nickname of “American Head Forester.” It is also relevant in this connexion that the Germans (including here, as in so many other respects, the German-Swiss) have given the hunt a quite special character, which they express by the untranslatable word “Weidwerk,” a character in which the passion for the chase as a sport is united with knightliness and the enjoyment of nature. Those who have never lain in wait for the roebuck at dawn on a June day in a hunting stand in the forest, without in the slightest regretting missing the quarry, can hardly understand what is meant by that description of hunting.

Quite certainly, too, it was for this side of German life that Heine longed on his sickbed in Paris. He gave expression in his poems as hardly any other writer has done to that elementary German feeling for nature. But it was also that same author of the Harzreise who in his two works, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland and Elementargeister, both published in 1834 and both so well worth reading, showed more clearly and more impressively than any other German the dangers of such a feeling for nature.

Certainly we must be grateful to anyone who warns us that we cannot depart too far from nature without imperilling our spiritual health and our existence, and certainly there is a good deal that the world can learn in this respect from the Germans. But if, on the other hand, a man throws himself too impulsively on nature’s breast, he forgets that civilization implies liberation from nature. He runs into the risk of falling victim to the state of mind which the eminent French philosopher Ernest Seillière (who will be of service to us later) describes as “mysticisme naturiste” One short step further, and he is in the realm of the primitive, the brutal, the uncivilized. From forest to jungle is no great distance, while the symbol of civilization is not the block of tenements but the garden. This, too, is a point at which the German is in the utmost danger from the possible exaggeration of a healthy and attractive characteristic, but here, too, the danger is at once diminished if he recognizes it and bewares of it. May we not once more place hope in his knowledge of himself after the Nazis have availed themselves of this further German weakness to lead many Germans astray?

This emotional susceptibility of the German has one very evil aspect. We have remarked on an earlier page that Dürer’s “Melancholy” is one of the most German compositions, and it was so regarded by no less a judge than Jules Michelet. This figure of a woman gazing into the unfathomable would better symbolize “Germania” than the armed Brünhilde, with her defiant glare, who was made, with characteristic lack of taste, to decorate the German postage stamps of the period of William II. And yet that, too, is a symbol—of the need felt by a weak and emotional nature to seek support and compensation in a forced hardness, stolidity, and coldness, and to assume on every possible occasion a pugnacious, formidable, resolute “he-man” pose.

Probably this is one of the reasons why in the latter part of the nineteenth century the Germans felt so drawn to Prussianism that they largely fell victim to it. Everything became “iron”—iron resolution, iron crosses, and the Iron Chancellor who created Greater Prussia. In the end “iron” no longer sufficed: people became “of steely hardness,” the eyes of William II and of Hitler “flashed like steel,” the “steel helmet” became a political symbol. Meanwhile, the Anglo-Saxons, with the natural man’s revulsion against bombast, spoke disrespectfully of “Tin Hats”; and finally we had the “Steel Axis” between Berlin and Rome. Now came the horrible type of person with “frozen features,” represented in the pictures of German officers, government officials, and students in their corps, the person in whom everything is spasmodic and spurious, and who feels bound to maintain a permanent pose of defiant, dare-devil heroism. And how repulsive the German tongue had become in the aggressive, guttural, strident tones of these persons, and how unmanly were persons like Hitler and his cronies with their hysterical shrieking! We know how the Nazis bred this intolerable type in masses, and it was only with deep disgust at such distortions of humanity that in recent years we could look at the faces that goggled at us with such brutal stupidity. We need only to look at German faces of the past to realize how far we have travelled from the days of Dürer or even Michelet. But why should we not be able to hope that what has come into existence in so short a time might not disappear just as quickly, if the Germans wake from their torpor and find their way back to their true selves?13

FINAL QUESTIONS

These are a few of the answers to the question of the German national character, which presents us with so many baffling enigmas. The writer is aware how incomplete and unsatisfying are the considerations he has advanced, As for the particularly important question of the political side of the German mentality, he must ask the reader to wait for later remarks, as this is a point that can only be understood on the basis of the political, social, economic, and intellectual history of the German people. For the rest we will confine ourselves to a few concluding remarks.

To begin with we must frankly admit that we are far from fully comprehending all sides of the German character. Thus it is certainly of importance for the understanding of the German nature to know that, just as other peoples have their favourite illusions, among the Germans there is especially an obstinately held idea that they are innocent victims of circumstance or of other peoples. The German has a very dangerous inclination, continually standing in the way of self-examination, to feel that he is being persecuted and to pity himself, instead of asking how he is himself to blame and resolving to do better. For the German as well as for the foreigner it is exceedingly important to be perfectly clear about this pet notion of the Germans. But is it a constant or a characteristic only recently acquired? It is difficult to say. And how is this fixed idea to be explained? Perhaps we shall have later to offer a not unimportant contribution to the answering of this question. Or does there find expression in the inclination to self-pity the sense of belonging to a people that seems singled out for the blows of fate, so that whenever it has tried like other peoples to achieve a strong centralized national State it has come to grief?

The inclination to self-pity is associated with the other characteristic of the German that he is so exceedingly sensitive, both as an individual and as a member of his nation. He seems to be only sparely endowed with the precious gift of ironic introspection and of self-criticism, and he therefore lacks the fine type of humour that enables a man to laugh at himself. Any burlesque of his own history, such as the British enjoy, has so far been virtually an impossibility in Germany; on this subject the Germans are much less ready to be laughed at than the French, and when a German poet, Heinrich Heine, nevertheless dared to do it, they never forgave him.

An over-sensitiveness of this sort reflects an unhealthy mental tension, a continual occupation with oneself—the German is continually asking, “What is German?”—and the uncertainty of a man who does not know what to think of himself, and who consequently is trying all the time to find confirmation of his true nature. The German lacks at bottom the minimum of self-confidence that makes a man natural, sure of himself, cheerful, and unembarrassed, and enables him to respect other men’s self-confidence. That is why he is often so lamentably lacking in the tact that makes it unnecessary to have rules; he does not know how to maintain the happy mean between cringing and arrogance and is very liable to go from one extreme to the other. He is rather afraid of the wide world, and in face of it is liable to seem provincial. Consequently, he clings all the more to his own ilk, to his professional colleagues, the fellow-memhers of his association, to his Stammtisch (the café table reserved for his little group), to his compatriots. One must above all have observed the German colonies abroad to know how unpleasant this type easily becomes to other people. A narrow and obstinate nationalism will be abruptly exchanged for an undignified denial of one’s own nature. This profound unsureness seems also to have characterized the Germans of past centuries. Lichtenberg asked long ago, in the eighteenth century, “Why is it that non-Germans do not care to be taken for Germans? Why, if they want a disguise, do they usually claim to be French or English?” Nobody finds it so difficult to stand by his own nation as the German. In no other country have precisely the best people so candidly declared that they regard it as a real misfortune to belong to their own nation—once more with the characteristic exception of the Jews. Goethe, who called the Germans “estimable in the individual and wretched in the generality,” Schopenhauer, Hölderlin (in Hyperion), or Nietzsche, all have said devastating things about their own people. Lichtenberg, in the eighteenth century, actually coined the phrase: “The character of the Germans in two words—patriam fugimus” (“we run away from our country”).

No, as we have already said, the German is the very opposite of simple. He is like the dancer of whom Heinrich von Kleist writes in his immortal essay Ueber das Marionetten-Theater: “He grew all too self-conscious, and then he lost the natural grace of his physical and psychical movements. It would not be an injustice to the Germans to call them a neurotic people”

But what is the reason for that? I know of no short answer. A real explanation can only be found in the pathological elements of the collective existence the Germans have led for centuries, and quite specially in the last century. We shall come to this in the chapters that follow. But we may say at once that the deepest causes of this or that trait that seems to us to be “typically German” will probably always be beyond the reach of any serious scientific analysis.

Is not the ultimate truth perhaps that the national character of a people is like an immensely complicated chemical combination of various elements, elements that are to be found everywhere, while it is simply the way they have combined that is its special feature? This would mean that the German national character consists of many elements, not one of which is peculiar to this country, and only their specific combination produces die unique result. To this must be added the important fact that this chemical combination forming the national character continually changes in the course of history, often slowly and unnoticeably, often suddenly and violently. Some of the elements of which it consists may be good, others bad, and yet others neutral, while the whole combination may be a highly dangerous explosive material.

But that would mean that the student of Germany has the difficult task of discovering the formula for the chemical combination of the German national character. If he finds it, it may be possible by means of a re-grouping of the elements so to change the combination that the explosive may turn into a harmless and, indeed, useful material.

 

________________

14 The problems of the concept of national character are discussed by Sir Ernest Barker in his book National Character and the Factors in its Formation, third edition, London, 1939; Friedrich Hertz, “Die allgemeinen Theorien vom Nationalcharakter,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft, 1925, vol. 54; A. Fouillée, Esquisse psychologique des peuples européens, Paris, 1903.

15 G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature, p. 13.

16 Among the extensive literature on the subject of the German national character, mention may be made of the following works: Reinhard Buchwald, Die Wissenschaft vom deutschen Nationalcharakter, Jena 1917; Bogumil Goltz, Die Deutschen, eine ethnographische Studie, vol. 1, Berlin, 1860; Richard Müller-Freienfels, Psychologie des deutschen Menschen und seiner Kultur, second edition, Munich, 1930; E. Kahler, Der deutsche Charakter in der Geschichte Europas, Zurich, 1937; L. Reynaud, L’âme allemande, Paris, 1933; J. Rivière, L’Allemand, Paris, 1918; F. von Hügel, The German Soul, London, 1916; Balbino Giuliano, Latitatà e Germanesimo, Bologna, 1940; Eugen Diesel, Die deutsche Wandlung, das Bild eines Volkes, Stuttgart, 1929; Friedrich Hertz, Nationalgeist und Politik, vol. 1, Zurich, 1937; Max Scheler, Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses, Leipzig, 1917

17 L. von Ranke, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 49-50, p. 170.

18“Magis ad terrendum quam ad ratiocinandum missi . . . cerviciosi . . . teutonico impetu frendentes,” quoted in W. Kaegi, Historische Meditationen, Zurich, 1942, p. 16.

19 Zoolang die mof is arm en kaal
Zoo spreekt hij een bescheiden taal.
Maar als hij komt tot grooten staat
Dan doet hij God en menschen kwaad

—poem by the Dutch poet, Jacob Cats (1577-1660). “Mof” is a Dutch nickname for the Germans. It may be added that the Germans who at that time were troubling the Dutch were probably Austrians in the service of the Habsburgs.

20“It is wonderful to see how a people has deposited the imprint of its character in the smallest details of its language; and when we reflect that the most delicate elements of the language date from an epoch of semi-barbarism, and remark further how few things, of how little value, a civilized epoch can add of this type to the work of those dark ages, we are led to questions the answer to which is not entirely to the advantage of the doctrine of perfectibility.” A Vinet, Chrestomathie Française, vol. 2, Lausanne, 1860, p. ix. Unfortunately, there is a very amateurish method of using the German language for analysing the German national character, a method against which one cannot issue too emphatic a warning. A dreadful example of it is the deduction that the German-speaking peoples—including, therefore, the Austrians and the German Swiss—must always have had a spiteful character, since they possess the word Schadenfreude, meaning pleasure in another’s discomfiture. It is surely ridiculous to deny the universal human character of the satisfaction over somebody getting “what he deserves,” and to try to build up a whole philosophy on the neat translation of a passage in Seneca’s De Beneficiis that occurred to a German philologist (Ostermann, in 15 91). It would be just as reasonable to say that only the Greeks, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Germans are familiar with home-sickness, because only they have a word of their own for that feeling—or, indeed, only the Greeks, since, of course, the Anglo-Saxon and German words are a translation from the Greek. And does not the English language actually possess a native word of its own for Schadenfreude in “gloating”? And could not the German-speaking peoples reply further that both English and French lack a true equivalent for the kindly German word gönnen? It will be seen that such amateurish theories lead along very dangerous byways, and we were sorry to see a man like Mr. Harold Nicolson pursuing these paths in the Spectator of June 30th, 1944. The morbid mentality of the Nazis should not be looked for in the language of Goethe.

21 Ludwig Börne, Heine’s contemporary, wrote in his Schilderungen aus Paris (1822) the following far-fetched comment: “The French vocabulary consists entirely of silver coin; it has no copper like German, and a bad French writer never writes so badly as a bad German writer. On the other hand, French lacks the gold of the German language.” Elsewhere (in Bemerkungen über Sprache und Stil) he says: “The French cannot have any style, because their language has one.” Accordingly, the unspeakable style in which Hitler’s Mein Kampf is written could never be adequately translated into French or English, a fact that unfortunately assisted the Nazis’ first efforts to seem abroad to be almost civilized. Cf. also W. Röpke, “Die Kunst des Uebersetzens,” Neue Schweizer Rundschau, February, 1945.

22 —dass sie über allem schwer werden, dass alles über ihnen schwer wird. Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Book 4. ch. 20.

23 A third cause of these soldierly qualities of the Germans is enlarged upon by K. Thieme (op. cit., pp. 93 sqq.) in a justly severe criticism of the book D’où vient l’Alle-magne? (Paris, 1939), by Gonzague de Reynold, a book that is a model of how not to depict the “eternal German.” Apart from, a this, the German’s military qualities present a particularly complicated problem, which can only be adequately considered in connexion with the political history of the immediate past. Only this history explains why the German has had occasion to demonstrate his readiness to “toe the line” in this particular field of military organization.

24 Reflections on Government, London, 1942, p. 290.

25 In this verdict the German Müller-Freienfels (op. cit. p. 173), the Frenchman J. Rivière (op. cit. pp. 159 sqq.), and the Englishman F. von Hügel (op. cit. pp. 118 sqq.) entirely agree. Rivière’s mordant acidity perhaps penetrates deepest when he uses the example of the philosopher Paul Natorp to show that “the German has a natural gift for effecting the synthesis of the disparate” (p. 194).

26 R. Müller-Freienfels (op. cit., p. 148) well remarks that the need for compensation has also shown itself in German science, in which a counterweight to the tendency to vague speculation was sought in precision, in detail work, and in method. Perhaps we have here one of the roots of the fear, so typical of German savants, of a “light” style. Mention may also be made here of the self-imposed constraint found, for instance, in the German students’ unions, in strange contrast with the academic freedom so prized.

• 1THE dictum placed as a motto in front of this book came in 1866 from the pen of a far-seeing and unbending opponent of Bismarck. In that same fateful year of German and European history, Ludwig Bamberger, the eminent German Liberal and economist, wrote to his friend von Stauffenberg, after a fresh meeting with his old comrade of the revolution of 1848, Carl Schurz, who later became a Senator and Home Secretary of the United States: “I have greatly enjoyed meeting Schurz. That is what we could become if we were not stuck in a dog-kennel.” Almost eighty years later, Roosevelt, President of the country to which Carl Schurz, like so many others of the best Germans, had rendered inestimable service after 1848, spoke of the Germans as the “tragic nation.”
• 2What strength, what inspiration has proceeded from that central country of our continent in those thousand years! What talent, what honest and indeed desperate endeavour to gain the mastery over fate! And again and again the Germans’ effort has been fruitless—so much so that the whole history of Germany until 1866 (the year in which Germany ceased to exist, making way for a Greater Prussia) may be described as simply a history of frustration. Nowhere is it more natural than on Swiss soil to note how close together lie here the two opposite examples of a federalization that succeeded and one that failed throughout a thousand years—Switzerland and Germany, two countries bearing much the same relation to each other as two animals subjected to biological experiment, one of them receiving a particular vitamin and the other not. An obvious question, however, is whether there is not a danger that the ultimate consequences of the German fiasco might have very undesirable repercussions on the success of any tolerably sound political, economic, social, and spiritual structure in other countries. What that implies will be considered later.
• 3Let us hold on to the fact that the Germans, who today have become odium generis humani, are a people with whom fate has played a more evil game than with any other—fate and their own failure. What is worst of all is that this unique history—above all in its last and most fateful hundred years—has left deep traces in the German character that have made the Germans one of the most complex and problematic and, in the end, one of the best-hated of all nations. Thus, on top of all their other troubles, they have to bear the dislike of the rest of the world, which still further worsens their situation. In this, as in so many other things, they strikingly resemble another tragic nation of world history, the Jews; this has been noted again and again by acute observers, and is probably the final cause of the quite peculiar relation between Germans and Jews, which departs from normal to fall now into hatred and now into liking.
• 4In Nazism the complete unscrupulousness in the choice of serviceable-looking slogans and the truly reckless speculation on human stupidity reached perhaps its zenith in the invention of the gigantic farce of the propaganda for “European solidarity against Bolshevism.” After ruining Europe by their crimes and at the same time openly challenging Soviet Russia, nothing better occurred to the Nazis than to paraphrase the old Wilhelmian slogan, “Peoples of Europe, guard your holiest possessions!” This they did (1) after inciting the Japanese against the Europeans in the Far East; (2) after it had become clear that a Hitlerite Europe was simply not worth saving; (3) after all Europe had realized that it was brazen impudence for the Nazis to rage against Bolshevism; and (4) after all Europe had come to ask who would save it from the grip of Nazism. And when these barbarians talked of three thousand years of European civilization being at stake, the only possible answer was roars of laughter. “The saviour of Europe,” Jacob Burckhardt said long ago, “is preeminently the man who saves her from the danger of a political, religious, and social Procrusteanism that threatens her specific character, namely the manifold wealth of her intellect.”.
• 5“It is probable that the same disposition of the moderns that leads them to prefer peace to war would at the outset give great advantages to the people forced by its government to become an aggressor. Nations absorbed in the enjoyment of their possessions would be slow to resist: they would abandon a portion of their rights in order to preserve the rest; they would hope to save their repose by the compromise of their liberty. By a very strange combination, the more peaceful the general spirit, the more would the State that entered into war against that spirit gain easy successes at the outset.” And a few pages further on we come to a passage that might have been written in our own day:
• 6“But the nations that become the victims of its deplorable obedience would be unable to give it credit for concealed feelings which its conduct belies. They blame the instruments for the crime of the hand that directs them.”
• 7The Napoleonic wars can only be compared with Hitler’s with the utmost caution, since Napoleon’s relation to Hitler is that of a genuine dignitary of history to a disreputable gangster. But there is nothing to prevent us from taking from the history of the nineteenth century another example that reveals the part played in international life by an insane tyrant, showing very plainly that the case of Hitler is by no means unique. We refer to the abominable tyrant of Paraguay from 1862 to 1870, Francisco Solano Lopez, who like Hitler was obsessed by the insane idea of giving his continent a “New Order,” and who became involved in a war with all his neighbours; he was a precursor on a small scale of the authors of Germany’s tragedy today. This man, too, imagined that his will was all that was needed to stand the world on its head, and he, too, was completely blind to the true strength of the opposition he aroused. Relying on his armed force, he embarked on a policy that brought great initial successes, for the reasons stated by Constant, but ultimately, when his imperilled neighbours united against him, plunged his regime and his country into the abyss. “His intellectual arrogance”—so the Deutsche Rundschau boldly wrote in April, 1941—“growing more and more upon him, clouded his view of the superior moral and economic forces of the neighbour countries. He allowed himself to be elevated more and more by his entourage to the status of a demigod: flattering speeches and the incense of continual adoration intoxicated him, with his natural tendency to exaggerate his own qualities, so that he could no longer see the world as it really was. But his very successes were his undoing. They made the peril of this ‘total’ State seem so overpowering that Argentina and Brazil forgot their long-standing feud and united in a close alliance against this upstart military power.” So came, in the end, the inevitable catastrophe. “For the guilt one man had incurred in his madness, the whole nation must now surfer! Plectuntur Achivi” The article concludes:
• 8But here again it must not be forgotten that in the intellectual procreation of this monster the world outside Germany most certainly played a part. If National Socialism is essentially a particular form of totalitarianism, the story of its intellectual birth must to that extent be also that of totalitarianism. It is a specially complicated story, and this is not the place for its detailed narration. But the very circumstance that German totalitarianism was preceded by the Russian and Italian forms shows to how great an extent Nazism took over and worked out with German thoroughness ideas that were by no means of German origin. It would be wearisome to compile the names that mark the various stages passed through by the ideology of the totalitarian State. But if we merely mention the chief writers, such as the Frenchman Georges Sorel (who by their own acknowledgment strongly influenced both Lenin and Mussolini) and the Italian Pareto, and if we add how deeply the theorists and practicians alike, both of Russian Bolshevism and of Italian Fascism, influenced the German National Socialists, we have made it easy to see that the outer world worked just as ardently on the building of the intellectual foundations of the Third Reich as did Germany herself.
• 9Even the racial mania which seems to be an exclusive domain of German totalitarianism, was presented to the Germans by foreigners—particularly by the French writer Gobineau, who himself simply elaborated an idea that dates back to the eighteenth century. The racial delusion may be described as a cross between those foreign germs and the specifically German ethical romanticism which will occupy us later. While these and other precursors of the Nazi racial doctrine have nothing in common with the appalling delusionary character of that doctrine, the fact remains that that is the abyss into which we are inevitably plunged in the end, if we once pursue the mistaken path of the biologism of which Darwin and his school laid the foundations. The Nazi racial doctrine is the final putrid product of the decay of an intellectual process by which in the course of the Nineteenth Century man was degraded, with the zeal of a misunderstood science, to a subject of zoology and stud farming; but in this process all the principal countries of the West took part. The death chambers of Auschwitz and Maidanek are the final gruesome result of certain scientific ideas having ultimately found their way in the course of a century to the morally and mentally lowest levels of humanity, to a group which then, through a social catastrophe of inconceivable dimensions, became the rulers of a great people.
• 10That National Socialism is the expression of an international contemporary spirit rather than that of the spirit of a nation is, finally, also shown by the fact that similar tendencies are to be found in the contemporary literature of all countries, and, at least for a time, were not without influence. Whether we recall The Coming American Fascism, by an American, Lawrence Dennis, or The Managerial Revolution, by another American, James Burnham, or the tirades of Colonel Lindbergh and his wife about the “wave of the future” and all sorts of other things, we continually find, more or less disguised by perfumes, the miasma that has poisoned Germany. Everywhere are the “totalitarians in our midst” of whom F. A. Hayek, in his book The Road to Serfdom, has given from the English scene a ruthless analysis, not sparing representatives of totalitarianism on the Left. It is the painful duty of the honest observer to mention the names of Jewish writers who, like Emil Ludwig or Paul Einzig, have loudly praised Italian Fascism, thus laying themselves open to the suspicion that they were kept from a similar admiration of Nazism only by its anti-Semitism.
• 11If we are at least to make shift to give some answer to the difficult question what the structure of Nazism has in common with that of Fascism, in contradistinction with Bolshevism, we must emphasize various points. In both cases the totalitarian rule followed a coup d’état which was clothed as far as could be in legal forms and only gradually revealed its revolutionary aims. Both Fascism and Nazism set out to establish themselves in an extraordinarily complex society and actually with the aid of decidedly anti-revolutionary elements; consequently they found themselves compelled to proceed step by step, with a maximum of indefiniteness in their programmes, a maximum of mutually incompatible promises, and an appeal to every sentiment that seemed to influence opinion. This explains the total absence of any clear doctrine such as that of the Communists, and its replacement by a rhetorical propaganda that pulled out every stop of passion and emotion. Since neither Fascism nor Nazism wanted, like Bolshevism, to make a clean sweep of the existing social order, or could do so—both, on the contrary, were compelled at first to leave the traditional class divisions intact—there resulted a necessity for continual compromises, especially in economic policy, which were capable of disguising for a considerable time the collectivist character of the aims pursued. Many measures adopted were simply facades, behind which was either nothing at all or the precise opposite of what they represented. This applies, above all, to the treatment of private property. Just as in Russia the church was openly persecuted, but in the Third Reich it was as far as possible disintegrated from within, so in Russia private property in the means of production was openly abolished, but in the Third Reich it was reduced, by continual restrictions of the rights and functions of the owner, to an empty shell, while for propagandist purposes the shell was allowed to continue to exist. Thus in the two cases the forms of abolition of private property were different but their results were essentially the same.
• 12This sense of justice demands from us the recognition of the fact that what was done in Germany’s name was not done by the Germans as such, any more than all the crimes that were committed earlier in time of peace against the Germans themselves. How can it be forgotten in this connexion that we have to do with a totalitarian regime, and not only that but a regime at war and accordingly able to carry totalitarianism to the last extreme, a regime able to keep its people almost entirely ignorant of anything it did not want them to know, and one which, even if the people had been informed, would have ruthlessly suppressed all expression of opinion? As a rule it was Nazi special troops or agents of the Gestapo that carried out the sanguinary orders of the leaders, and often the worst of all were not strictly Germans. At the head of the German terrorist regime in the unfortunate Netherlands was an Austrian, of even more undoubted nationality than Hider, and Vlassov’s Cossacks competed with units of the S.S. and the Gestapo in mercilessness. Would anyone set down for all time as crimes of the Italian people Graziani’s massacre of Arabs in Libya, the abominable conduct of the war in Abyssinia, or the Good Friday attack on Albania?
• 13It was Nazism that showed its true features, not the German nation, in the atrocities. These features could long ago have been recognised if sufficient attention had been paid to the earlier activities of Nazism in Germany. What else but the blackest criminality could have been expected, for instance, from the Dr. Best who excited German opinion long before the Third Reich with his so-called “Boxheim documents”? It might even fairly be asked whether the Italian historian, Guglielmo Ferrero, was not right when, after the massacre of June 30th, 1934, he wrote that the savagery of the Nazis, exceeding all that had gone before, might be due to the exceptional resistance they had to overcome in Germany.
• 14Erich Eyck, Bismarck (Allen & Unwin)
• 15For the source of the structure of the Swiss State, see now William E. Rappard, Cinq siècles de sécurité collective (1291-1798), Geneva and Paris, 1945.
• 16Since we have touched on the exceedingly complicated relationship between Germans and Jews, we may also recall that again and again during the first world war there were attempts in the Allied countries to account for Germany’s unattractive traits as due not only to a “Prussification,” but also to a “Judification.” Max Scheler, in his interesting book on the origin of anti-Germanism (Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses, Leipzig, 1917, p. 114) was also driven to deal with that charge. Cf. now Karl Thieme, Das Schicksal der Deutschen, ein Versuch seiner geschichtlichen Erklärung, Basle, 1945, p. 35. We may quote Goethe as the greatest precursor of the view expressed in the text. He remarked to Riemer that “the antipathy of peoples against the Jewish type of humanity, an antipathy in which esteem increases distaste, is really to be compared only with another—that against the Germans, whose destined role and whose inward and outward situation among peoples reveal the most astonishing kinship with those of the Jews. He did not want, he said, to enlarge on the subject, but, he said, he confessed that at times he was overcome by a breath-taking fear that one day the united world hatred against the other salt of the earth, Germandom, would be liberated in a historic uprising.”
• 17Jacob Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, new impression, Basle, 1942, p. 144.
• 18Benjamin Constant, op. cit., p. 39 of the fourth edition (Paris, 1814).
• 19Benjamin Constant, op. cit. p. 58.
• 20We follow the account given by Ernst Samhaber in the Deutsche Rundschau of April, 1941; and we cannot omit to pay tribute to the courage shown by the writer of the article, and by the publisher of that review, with its long and distinguished record, in allowing the article to appear. If anyone asks how the German intellect made a stand against National Socialism, one answer must be to point to the Deutsche Rundschau.
• 21A comprehensive history of the ideas of totalitarianism has yet to be written. Cf., at present, Hans Barth, “Ueber den totalen Staat und seine ideologischen Voraussetzungen,” in Fluten und Dämme, der philosophische Gedanke in der Politik, Zurich, 1943, pp. 203-242. Not to be lost sight of is the important share of Socialism in the genesis of totalitarianism: Marx foreshadowed it in his “dictatorship of the proletariat.” For this intellectual line of descent see E. Halévy, L’ère des Tyrannies, Paris, 1938; F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Routledge, London, 1944.
• 22Among the important representatives of the racial doctrine is the Austrian L. Gumplowicz (Der Rassenkampf, Innsbruck, 1883), who exerted considerable influence. It is a tragic irony that he was a Jew. But all he did was to establish the existence of the racial struggle, not to promote it.
• 23Cf. also F. A. Hayek, op. cit., pp. 230 sqq.
• 24In this I am able still to rely on a study I published in 1935—“Fascist Economics,” Economica, February, 1935.
• 25See, among other sources, the British White Book, No. 2 (1939), on the proved crimes committed by Nazis against Germans. Those there recorded are but a tiny sample from the vast flood of the atrocities committed in Germany since 1933. Probably the full truth will never be learnt, since too many of the witnesses have themselves become victims of the same terror machine. According to one of the pamphlets published by the German trade union secretariat in Great Britain (The Other Germany, Facts and Figures), in the first three years of Nazi rule sentences totalling some 600,000 years of imprisonment were pronounced against “enemies of the State.” The number of persons condemned to death by the end of 1938 was estimated at 12,000, and in April, 1939, according to the same source, there were 302,562 political prisoners in Germany, while the registers of the Gestapo contained the names of some two millions of political suspects. The number of persons herded together and tortured in the concentration camps is as yet beyond all possibility of estimating, and the things that happened in Germany during the war must have been one long chain of horrors. Only with the discoveries at Belsen and the rest did the veil begin to be lifted. Unfortunately, the world only too easily forgets that these Golgothas were originally set up for the martyrizing of Germans.
• 26The same conclusion forces itself upon us in all other cases. Thus, C. Burnell Olds writes in the American Foreign Affairs that the Japanese people must not be held responsible for the cruelties of the Japanese militarists, and he writes in warm appreciation of the attractive sides of the character of the Japanese people and of Japanese culture.