The German Question

CHAPTER II THE PATHOLOGY
OF GERMAN HISTORY

FALLACIES AND HALF-TRUTHS

THIS chemical combination, with which we compared the German national character in the last chapter, may, broadly, be regarded as the ultimate product of a thousand years of German history, a history that differs in important respects from that of the other great European nations. But what is the peculiarity of German history that has led to what we must once again call the German problem?

Those who know how difficult the problem is do not need to be told that there is no short answer to this question. In this case, if ever, it is true that every simple answer is wrong.

Some people say that the source of all the evil lies in the fact that Roman civilization, after many efforts to subject Germania to the empire, was forced in the end to stop short at the limes, the fortified frontier, and to abandon to barbarism the country east of the Rhine and the Neckar. The real culprit was thus Arminius, chief of the Cheruski, who annihilated the legions of Varus in the Teutoburger Wald in A.D. 9. This limes theory, as we may call it, sounds plausible and so has many adherents, even in Germany. But it is spoilt by the fact that there are other regions of Europe—Scotland, Scandinavia, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and so on—that came even less under the influence of Roman civihzation and yet have a full share in the patrimony of Europe. The argument that the Scandinavian peoples were seafarers, whose contacts with Western civihzation were capable of bringing them under its influence without Roman occupation, cannot save the theory, since Czechoslovakia, for instance, has no sea coast, and on the other hand there were large Germanic tribes dwelling by the sea.1

Equally unconvincing with the limes theory is the similar argument about the belated penetration of Christianity into certain German regions—into Mecklenburg, for instance, so late as the twelfth century. To this there is the obvious objection that Scandinavia was converted to Christianity little earlier, and Finland still later.

This does not mean that these explanations of the German problem are entirely worthless. The fact that wide regions of Germany were little influenced by Roman civilization and others renounced paganism only at a late date is actually of great importance. It supplies one reason for the strong regional differences in German culture, in particular for the striking contrast between the west and south, on the one hand, and the east on the other. It has also certainly reinforced other causes of the fatal elements in the German character. But by itself it is not a sufficient explanation.

This absence of any monistic explanation may be illustrated by another very widespread theory, which attributes the origin of the German problem to a later and a highly important event in German history, the Reformation, and to the influence of Lutheran Protestantism. That this theory, too, contains a great truth, we shall be concerned to show later. Without any question, Lutheranism influenced the political, spiritual, and social history of Germany in a way which, after careful consideration of everything, can only be described as fateful. Unquestionably a Catholic or even a Calvinist Germany would have pursued an entirely different course, on which we should have met neither such men as Frederick II and Bismarck, nor such as Fichte, Hegel, Treitschke, and certainly no Hitler; and undoubtedly this course would have been followed by a people with less implicit faith in the State and with less political indifferentism, a more normal people. But Lutheranism itself was able to have this effect only because it was aided by the whole political, economic, and social character of Germany. That it does not alone suffice to explain the German problem is further shown by the fact that the Scandinavian countries, Finland, and the Baltic States are mainly Lutheran, and yet have not shown the same consequences as those observable in Germany. In Sweden, for instance, Lutheranism had results entirely different to those in Germany: not only because Olaus Petri, the leader of the Reformation in Sweden, was, unlike Luther, a convinced humanist, but especially because in Sweden the Lutheran Reformation had to be carried through under Gustavus Vasa with the peasants and against the nobles and against the Catholic Pretender, Sigismund, of Poland, so that the king and the Lutheran people became leagued together—a league sealed by the Massacre of Linköping (1600), in which the leaders of the nobles were executed. In Germany, on the contrary, the princes and nobles united against the rebelling peasants, who in accordance with Luther’s express recommendation were wie tolle Hunde totgeschlagen, “beaten to death like mad dogs.” It was not simply Lutheran Protestantism that was fatal for Germany, but its association with absolutism and feudalism.

We come, finally, to much the same result when we examine the widespread tendency to find the key to the German problem in the return to nature, in primitivism, and in romanticism, which together form such a noticeable constant in the German nature: we have already devoted sufficient attention to these. They are certainly of great importance and, as we saw, in their typically German exaggeration, have been disastrous traits, but here again we must not ignore the awkward fact that they seem to be a heritage of all the Germanic races, and are observable both in Switzerland—we need only mention Gessner, Bodmer, or Bachofen—and in England as well as in Germany. The innate tendency to Seillière’s mysticisme naturiste is thus not enough to explain the German problem; other circumstances have had to reinforce that tendency to enable it to develop in the manner peculiar to Germany. Thus we find again and again that all these theories suffer from the defect of singling out a fact that is not confined to Germany and one that can only lead to a satisfying general conclusion in association with other facts. In each case it is perhaps a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one, for the formation of the problematic Germany into which we are inquiring. In each case we find particular chemical elements which yield the explosive material only in a specific combination.

THE CURRENT OF GERMAN HISTORY

The question we now have to answer is something like this: How is it that the central country of Europe, fatally for itself and for Europe, again and again plays a lone hand in the intellectual and political life of this continent, fighting against the spirit of the rest, and that many Germans seem even to be proud of playing this part, as rebels against Europe? We know how complicated the question is. In order at all events to cut a way through the undergrowth we shall do best to proceed by making the generally accepted assumption, which at bottom is entirely justified, of two currents of German history, related but different, which united in the nineteenth century—the German current and the Prussian. In doing so we must not forget that at the moment of that union one of the German territories, which had played a prominent part in the general current of German history—Austria—was forcibly ejected by Prussia and thereafter went its own way in many things. In doing so, however, this country did not lose its essentially German character, but actually preserved it in a way that may serve in many respects as a model for the rest of Germany. It should be fully conscious of this part that it played.

If we begin with the general current of German history and follow it down to the nineteenth century, we may come to three main conclusions:

1. From the Treaty of Verdun (843), in which Germany was separated from France, until the ending of Germany and her transformation into Greater Prussia (1866), a healthy, genuine, and lasting federation of the German nations, for which their own nature and the geography of Germany called, was never successfully established; nor was a unified State, with which their character was thoroughly incompatible.

2. German history starts with a situation entirely similar to that of the other peoples of the Continent; but in Germany, largely owing to the failure to establish equilibrium between the whole and its members, in the late Middle Ages and at the beginning of modern times the power was broken of those classes which everywhere else formed a counterpoise to feudalism and absolutism and which created the type of the modern society, essentially liberal and democratic—the towns and the peasantry.

3. In this feudal and absolutist land certain spiritual influences were at work, particularly the Lutheran Reformation, in a way that may be observed to this day in almost every trait of the economic, social, and spiritual structure of the predominantly Protestant Germany, forming an essential feature of the complicated chemical combination with which we have compared the German national character.

We propose to deal separately with point (3). In what follows we will summarily examine the first two points. Here it is of special importance to make it clear that a sound federative structure, which has never been successfully achieved in Germany, presupposes equilibrium between the central power and the members, so that the central power may exercise a moderating influence upon the members and vice versa. This equilibrium is thus disturbed not only when the central power throttles the independent life of the members but also when the members overbear the central power. Germany fell victim to both of these troubles in succession—at first she suffered centuries of anarchy among her overgrown members, and later in Greater Prussia she was burdened with the caricature of a federal State governed centrally in essentials: the second trouble may be regarded as largely a reaction from the first. When in what follows we describe the weakness of the imperial central power as disastrous, we do not belie our firm conviction that federalism is the first condition of the healthy existence of a State: on the contrary, we confirm it. Anyone who glorifies the anarchy of the old German Empire—the immane monstrum, as Pufendorff called it in the seventeenth century—does ill service to the cause of federalism by presenting the caricature as the ideal.

Thus we consider that we have every reason to hold to a view that still seems to us, in spite of all the criticism levelled against it by historians, to come nearest to the truth. This view is that Germany, unlike France and England, did not grow steadily into an organic whole, but very soon, though starting similarly to the others, fell victim to a State crisis. While the Capet dynasty early developed into a hereditary monarchy and then, with the aid of the towns, steadily strengthened its position against the nobles, the German emperors failed lamentably in their efforts in this direction. From the beginning of the German expansion towards Italy under Otto I (950), Germany paid for her imperial dreams with an abnormal political and social development which it is not too much to say passed through its many stages to end with Hitler. “Never has a people that served what, in its day, was regarded as the supreme ideal, had to pay so heavily for doing so as the Germans had to pay in the Middle Ages with their very own—with the sacrifice of the healthy development of their State.”2 So writes a modern historian who has taken the trouble to be just to those who judge the Italian policy of the German emperors from the point of view of a higher historical mission.

The consequences of this development were incalculable. While at every fresh imperial election, with the blackmail the Electors extorted from the candidates, the imperial central authority lost more and more of the little power it had at first possessed, towns and peasantry were increasingly abandoned to the despotism of princes and feudal lords, in spite of all the efforts of various emperors to protect them and to use their support in the imperial struggle against the territorial States. The much-praised “German liberties” were as a rule merely the liberty of princes and feudal lords to oppress their subjects without let or hindrance, and to place them under the heel of their growing bureaucracy. Thus in the end the empire became an indescribable chaos, in which no cultural centre could form, imperial territories being filled with never-ending feuds. With the territorial fragmentation and the weakness of the central authority went serious class divisions among the population, since neither protection nor arbitrament from above was to be had.

All these consequences made themselves fully felt only from the beginning of the fifteenth century; then they came more and more into notice. Until then, especially in the towns, which owed their charters to the emperors, conditions of freedom, of independent enterprise, of autonomy and of cultural activity had developed, and in the powerful middle class that had formed here as in all the countries of the West there had come a counterweight against feudalism and autocracy. Names like the Hansa, the city leagues, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Cologne, the “Meistersinger,” Albrecht Dürer, or Willibald Pirckheimer, and all the art treasures which those cities created and handed down to the Germans as a priceless heritage—until in the Nazi fury against the whole world they were largely destroyed—all this needs only to be mentioned in order to recall to everyone that the culture of the mediaeval cities of Germany was one of the finest flowers of European history. Through this growth of the cities Germany, at least in the West and South, had a full share in one of the principal stages in the emancipation of the West from feudalism and absolutism and in the struggle for political, intellectual, economic, and social progress. When in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Christian Europe at last awakened out of the torpor of the Middle Ages and, after first learning from Islam, outstripped its teacher in art and in intellectual life—in the latter, particularly in scholasticism—these new energies revealed themselves especially among the burghers of the towns, and it may fairly be said that in this respect Germany in no way lagged behind other countries.

It is the peculiar, immeasurable tragedy of Germany that in the later Middle Ages and at the beginning of modern times this flourishing city culture fell victim almost entirely to the weakness of the imperial central authority and the disproportionate strength of the territorial princes and feudal lords. “And so at all times, from the moment when the German national spirit first tried to raise its head, down to the present hour, a malevolent genius fought against us. Do not imagine that our lawgivers were not sharpsighted enough. No, territorial sovereignty fought against commerce [that is, against the commercial system of the towns]. One of the two had to suffer defeat; and the downfall of the latter marks in history the commencement of the former.” So wrote Justus Möser in the eighteenth century in his Patriotische Phantasien, and not a word of this verdict need be changed today. Out of this struggle between emperor, territorial princes, feudal lords, towns, and peasants, came ultimately in Germany not a healthy and liberal State system, uniting the progressive burghers with the emancipation movement among the peasants against the coveters of domination, but a weak, disjointed empire and a pitiful collection of absolutist petty principalities, privileged nobles, and humbled peasants and townsmen—the immane monstrum of Pufendorff. Finally, in utter exasperation, the peasants tried to throw off the burden of feudalism, which had become intolerable; but this German peasant revolution of 1525 was suppressed with such ruthlessness that since then the Germans seem to have been purged for all time of the taste for revolutions. It was perhaps the only genuine revolution in Germany, the first and the last; moreover, its motives were entirely legitimate. In it the German rose up for the last time before he was finally brought under the yoke of unconditional obedience to his lords and superiors.

We should bear in mind that the really fatal collapse in German history came immediately after it had attained its zenith, in the downfall of the culture of the German cities which had been the true glory of the Germans. This downfall was the more tragic in that it came almost at the same time as the suppression of the anti-feudal peasant revolution. The combined effect of these two disasters was then confirmed and finally sealed by the political and social consequences of the Lutheran Reformation and by the Thirty Years War that resulted from it. The backbone of the German townsman and peasant had been so completely broken that to this day there seems no sign of any real recovery. Progress was delayed at least for a whole century, politically, socially, intellectually, and economically. There came upon the scene of history the German “subject,” who had to give blind obedience to his “superior,” and who acquired a reputation for servility. He was pursued by the recruiting sergeant, oppressed and exploited by his prince, his manorial lord, his squire, and firmly encased in the structure of the feudal, absolutist hierarchy. The principle of servility was further driven in by the pastor, who told him that he must not dare to grumble, since Luther, echoing the injunctions of the Apostle Paul, had said: “Let every man be subject to the authority that hath power over him.” Out of the upstanding burgher of the mediaeval town came the pitifully ridiculous figure of the “Spiessbürger” or provincial, whom Goethe describes with kindly irony in the “Easter promenade” in Faust. Margrave Ludwig, of Baden, said forcibly in a letter to Emperor Joseph I (1705-1711): “To be fearful and of poor spirit is an epidemic ailment of burghers.”

Again and again the portrait of this caricature of humanity has been painted, and everybody was familiar with it in countless Germans of yesterday who would have been amazed to learn that they owed the National Socialists anything else than obedience and support. We may add to this portrait the story told us and vouched for as handed down by oral tradition, of the good tailor who long ago, when the prince was paying a ceremonial visit to his town, put up on his house this inscription:

Unter deinen Flügeln

Kann ich ruhig bügeln

—“Under Thy sway I can iron away.” Later, in the Third Reich, there were thousands of variations on the saying “For the employment we are permitted here, we have to thank our Führer.” This is clear evidence that the type of our tailor could not yet have been extinct in Germany.

This is the Germany against which, in the eighteenth century, Schiller launched the protests of his youthful dramas, while others sought an escape into the airy heights of the “idealist” philosophy. A man like Lessing had to lead the wretched life of a subordinate official under a dull-witted and capricious tyrant, while Winckelmann preferred to shake the dust of his homeland from his feet and to emigrate to Rome. On the other hand, a man like Goethe will never be entirely understood if we forget that he had the good fortune to grow up as the son of a rich citizen of the free imperial city of Frankfurt. There was no numerous reading public, and writers without private means were driven to live on a pension graciously conferred by a prince, or, like Lessing, on the income from a subordinate office, or else, like Schiller, to work themselves literally to death.3

Small wonder that this sort of national experience, prolonged for a thousand years, produced quite special reactions in the German people. They tended to conformity, to implicit obedience, even to servility; they lacked experience, understanding, and interest in all questions of the life of the community; they left the consideration of political issues to the authorities, who could make such decisions as they thought fit; they were almost entirely without any tradition of democratic self-government; they took dangerous refuge in dreams of the unreal and in the world of words and of abstract ideas, in which the German found his realm of “inner freedom” (later called “German freedom”). This flight to inwardness went hand in hand with the division of the world, so fateful for the Germans’ political morality, into the political and the private sphere, with, in their view, quite different laws for the two spheres, supposed to be incompatible though co-existing. This was just what Lutheran Protestantism taught, so that the Germans felt strengthened by it in a tendency already suggested to them by their political situation.

Another form of the flight from stern political realities, and again one in which Protestantism -both Lutheran and in this case Calvinist—exerted the strongest possible influence, was the taking refuge in work of the utmost intensity and conscientiousness. Here, probably, as well as in the fundamental German tendency to take things very seriously, is one of the main roots of the German’s meticulous industry and of German pedantry, of which we meet with the most curious examples just at this time, after the Thirty Years War. And certainly we may confidently assume that most of the German eccentricities, craziness, hysterias, and extremisms—dreams of world domination such as Grimmelshausen has transmitted to us actually from the time of the Thirty Years War in his novel Simplicissimus (Book 3, Ch. 4); brooding over some mystical idea of a “Reich” dreams of German unity, Fichte’s Geschlossener Handelsstaat, Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, or Ernst Jünger’s Arbeiter—must be set down to the account of the entirely unhealthy collective existence which the German has been doomed to lead for so long.

This unhealthy collective existence of the Germans has had the further most unfortunate result that in Germany neither the aristocracy nor the middle class has been able to develop as a cultural element fixing the national standard, and that in these classes there has always in modern times been a bitter lack of the needed counterweights against the all-powerful State, such as we find in other countries in “public opinion” and, in the English or French sense, in “society.”4 This lack, which was further greatly accentuated by the rift between the religious denominations, shows itself among other things in the fact that in Germany there is almost a total absence of the type of literature that we call the society novel. There was a head of the State, but no head of society in any really leading class, whether among the bourgeoisie or the nobility, which as a rule was far from adopting the proud independence of attitude toward the monarchy that might have been expected from it. One result of this was that in Germany, unlike Britain and France, the Jews had not the support of a social class with the prestige and leadership that might have been able to find for them the way to integration in the German nation. It was a tragic peculiarity of the situation of German Jews that they were living with a people that so resembled them, a people just as unbalanced and unsettled as themselves; instead of supporting and complementing each other, Germans and Jews increased the mutual tension between them as in a marriage in which the two partners lack strength and firmness of character. No wonder this marriage was such an unhappy one, with its alternating protestations of love and outbreaks of hate

Thus everything conspired to place the needed plastic human material in the hands of a Government that knew what it wanted, or of one or other of the ambitious despots, whether Frederick II, Bismarck, or—one has to overcome one’s repugnance in bringing this name into such company—Adolf Hitler.

Nobody with any knowledge of the life of peoples and of their history need be reminded that this sketch of German history and of its consequences is much too rough not to be in need of modification at many points. To begin with, we have to bear in mind that, thanks to the very wide variety of German conditions, there are strong regional differences to note. Switzerland owes her separate existence to her success in warding off German and Austrian feudalism and absolutism: she released herself entirely from the German realm through the Swabian War (1499). But even leaving Switzerland aside, we may mention Alsace, which belonged to the Reich until the end of the seventeenth century, and also, in a certain sense, the Hansa towns of North Germany, which, owing to their special political situation, escaped almost entirely from the development described—so much so that even under William II an Oberbürgermeister of Bremen could behave with such offhand independence of spirit that thereafter the Kaiser is said to have avoided that free imperial city.

But in the rest of Germany, too, feudalism and absolutism were far from uniformly succeeding in humbling their people. Conditions were worse on the whole in Prussia, as we shall show later. But as regards the rest of Germany we must not let the chronique scandaleuse of the eighteenth century make us forget, amid the follies of certain serenissimi, the high achievements of other German territories. Hanover (then ruled by a sort of Whig aristocracy, to which the world is indebted for the founding of the University of Göttingen), Bavaria, Saxony, Weimar, Baden, and even Bückeburg, deserve mention in this connexion. Nor must we forget that in Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, Oldenburg, Friesland, and Westphalia a class of free and self-reliant peasants had existed from the earliest times, as described for us by Immermann in Oberhof, and that this class had possessed a large measure of local autonomy, a counterpart of the self-government of the imperial cities.

A thoroughly complex special case was that of Austria, which would require a very searching analysis.5 All we will point out about this country, which was a very important part of Germany so long as there was a Germany (that is to say, until 1866), is that, owing to the court atmosphere of Vienna and to the special position of the aristocracy, its sociological structure was in many respects not unlike that of France. Madame de Staël must have had reason for writing of Austria: “Here it is like a French island in the Germanic sea.” 6 Of great benefit, also, in the Austrian territories was an agrarian policy which, in strong contrast to Prussia, strengthened the position of the peasant in relation to the feudal lord,7 and it must also be borne in mind that in the Middle Ages Vienna was the only German capital city that served as the permanent seat of one of the great territorial princely houses.8 But we should fail to understand either the significance of Hitler’s Austrian origin or such disastrous representatives of the pan-German warmongering spirit as Othmar Spann and many other Austrians, if we left out of account the manifold tensions and unhealthy developments in Austrian society, with anti-Semitism, the exaggerated nationalism of the Germans of the border, the utterly uncourtly bluntness of the Alpine country, and the interdenominational complications.

In addition to these important regional differences, however, attention must be called to another circumstance. We saw how the abnormal course of Germany’s political and social history was bound to favour the development of a problematic type of humanity. Now it is not surprising that this history made its mark on the average German; what is astonishing is that in the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, in spite of the heavy handicap of their constitutional and social history, a large part of the Germans held out so well. There was a serious, responsible, cultured nobility, which could stand comparison with the best aristocracies of western Europe, and this class was actually far excelled by the high qualities of a middle class which even today may serve as a model for us, and which has been described for us in many contemporary works (of these Gustav Freytag’s Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit may be consulted), and in the familiar literary memorials by the German classic authors. If we seek the true pattern of one of these bourgeois of the very best sort amid the country’s troubles of that time, we need only mention one name, which at the same time is that of one of the highest peaks of the German intellect—Johann Sebastian Bach.

THE CURRENT OF INTELLECTUAL EVOLUTION AND GERMAN COLLECTIVE MORALITY

Before we turn to the other current of German history, the Prussian current, it seems necessary to consider some of the principal stages in the evolution of German intellectual life. Only so shall we be able thoroughly to understand how it could happen that later in the nineteenth century the specifically Prussian current of history absorbed the general German current, and how from the combination of these two there came into existence the Greater Prussia that became a peril for Europe and a disaster for Germany. For it is not Prussia alone but this admixture that explains the tragedy. Even before Prussia took over the leadership, political ideas in Germany had evolved, under the influence of certain intellectual currents, in a direction that led to the ultimate triumph of Prussia.

The thing that interests us here in the evolution of German intellectual life is thus the influence it exerted on the formation of a definite German collective morality and a characteristic German social philosophy, a morality and a philosophy that later combined to form an essential element in the Greater Prussian mentality. What that means is well known to every foreigner who has ever come into contact with Germans, and also to every German who has gained sufficient detachment for a critical view of his fellow-countrymen.

Goethe uttered these famous words:

“I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality. A comparison of the German people with other peoples arouses a painful feeling, which I try to overcome in every possible way: and in science and art I have found the wings with which one may raise oneself above it: for science and art belong to the world, and the barriers of nationality disappear before them.”9

This is in harmony with another remark of his:

“Germany is nothing, but every individual German is much, and yet these latter imagine just the opposite. Transplanted and dispersed like the Jews all over the world must the Germans become, in order to develop fully, and to the benefit of all nations, the store of the good that lies in them.”10

Estimable in the individual and wretched in the generality—that is the classic formulation of the observation, recorded over and over again, that the German, who seems neither better nor worse in his individual morality than the members of other nations, who shows a fairly balanced stock of virtues and failings, and who, indeed, can perhaps make himself liked by a particular warmth of friendship and hospitality, is so liable to give evidence of an appalling unreliability of judgment as soon as he finds himself faced with the ethical questions of the life of the community. Such a German is often a regularly obstreperous individualist in other fields, but in political questions he is generally so unsure of himself that he can only cover up his lack of judgment by uncritically following the biddings of the herd instinct. Then the clever man becomes a dullard, the straightforward man becomes the follower of a Macchiavellian or cynical collective morality in violent contrast with his individual conduct, and this ultimately drives him to defend boorishness and violence and unjust dealing. In these questions of collective morality he discards logic and takes refuge in specious arguments that quickly drive one to break off the discussion as a waste of time. Have we ever, indeed, been able to carry on a useful discussion with a German of this type about the violent deeds of German foreign policy since Bismarck, in the judgment of which the whole of the rest of the world is at one, about the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, about the attack on Belgium in 1914, about the greatness of Polish civihzation, about the place of justice and truth in international peace, about the necessity for moderation, for self-restraint, and for candid recognition of one’s own mistakes? Who can claim to have ever pierced the armour of stupid national vanity assumed by such a German in his resourcelessness and his individual mediocrity? And is not this German type appallingly common?

Certainly this remarkable and fatal separation of individual and collective morality, which distinguishes the German from other nations, together with the pushing nationalism that comes from it, has only grown since Bismarck into that “Prussian complex” with which we shall have later to concern ourselves particularly. Only through this was it possible for the controlling classes in Germany to fall victim so easily to National Socialism. But we need only mention Fichte and Hegel and recall the testimony of many Germans of the past in order to show the probability that the modern “Prussian complex” is the product of a history reaching far back. It need hardly be repeated here that the abnormal collective existence that has imposed their political history on the Germans played an important part in this. In what follows we are concerned only with its roots, which are to be sought in the history of the German mind.

If we follow the evolution of the German collective morality from the Middle Ages to the moment when the current of Prussian history united with the general German current, and gave the German his last fatal impress, we shall have to watch two main streams that sometimes ran alongside each other and sometimes mingled. One is the fundamental German trait of romanticism and mysticism, the other Lutheran Protestantism. Both have occupied us several times already; now they demand joint description.

It is not by a mere chance that the nature and the political consequences of the romantic and mystical element in the Germans have been described with special clarity by a French philosopher—Ernest Seillière.11 During the first period of the Bismarckian regime Seillière had had the opportunity, as a student in Heidelberg, of making acquaintance with German national pride, and the impression it made on him went far to suggest to him a philosophy of history to which we owe an interpretation of the phenomenon of romanticism in its universal character and a very valuable contribution to the understanding of the genesis of the German collective morality. Seillière showed that what we call romanticism can be traced to a mystical mentality that is among the eternal tendencies of mankind but becomes dangerous the moment it breaches the dyke of reason. A romantic mysticism of this sort may make its appearance in very different forms, which Seillière has traced and analysed in an interesting way—nature-loving (mysticisme naturiste), erotic (mysticisme passionel), religious, aesthetic, democratic-social, or national-ethnic.

In these manifold forms the emotional exuberance of the romantic soul, which Seillière contrasts with the classical ideal of due proportion determined by reason, may influence every field of intellectual life and communicate its colour to movements which may seem remote from romanticism in the narrower sense. It may also influence directly opposite currents in political life, making its appearance in the form of democratic-social mysticism as “romanticism of the Left” or in the form of national-ethnic mysticism as “romanticism of the Right,” so that without it we should fail to understand either democratism and Socialism or Conservatism and nationalism. It may appear in one form in one country and in another form in another country, but it is far too much a basic element of the mentality to be entirely missing anywhere; as a matter of fact, Seillière was able to show that it had produced profound effects even in France, the country regarded as “classic,” particularly in the French Revolution and all the currents that prepared the way for it or proceeded from it. Undoubtedly—this, too, we have learnt especially from Seillière—the deepest root of romantic mysticism is of religious origin and is to be sought in man’s longing to be lifted above himself and united with God. Thus there prove to be close relations between romantic mysticism and certain theological currents (mediaeval mysticism, quietism, pietism, and others), but its basic religious character lies nevertheless in a more or less avowed pantheism, which Schleiermacher rightly called the secret religion of the Germans.

If we adopt these explanations from Seillière, we can hardly doubt that romantic mysticism in almost all its forms has been a constant feature of the German mind through the centuries—so much so that the German may be described as the eternal romantic. It is, so to say, a motif that is always present, even if often it is no more than a soft accompaniment, but sometimes it swells to fortissimo as the dominant melody. We hear it plainly in the mediaeval mystics—Meister Ekkehart, Jacob Böhme, and many others—in German humanism, in Lutheranism, in the German baroque, and in pietism. We find it even in the period which, in contrast to the true German romanticism of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, we call the classic period; and here we find it so marked that historians of literature are hard put to it to make a clear distinction between the classic and the romantic. The German mind has, perhaps, most successfully liberated itself from this inclination to romanticism in Lessing and in the truly “classical” works of Goethe and Schiller, such as Iphigenie and Don Carlos. But how romantic does Faust seem when measured by the standards of French classicism !

It is not surprising that when, at the end of the eighteenth century, the German expressly made romanticism into a programme and a tendency that governed everything, he did so with unique gusto. Thereafter it influenced German intellectual life so strongly that at the turn of the last century a well-informed German was able to say that romanticism is “not something past and done with but an element in our midst to this day. Up to the present it has been impossible to overcome it because it has struck root too firmly in German intellectual life and possesses too much fascination for the German mind; and also because it is too closely akin to that which is best and deepest in the German mind, which has itself charmed and elevated this very romanticism out of the soul of the people.”12

That is enough in itself to bear out that all that, following Seillière, we have included under “romantic,” must certainly not be set down as an unhealthy deviation from a standard which it may be considered is to be found in the classic and rational. Assuming that romanticism remains under the control of the reason and does not degenerate into an irrationalism that confuses mind and feeling, it is actually a necessary counterweight to the “vagaries of rationalism,”13 which may become just as pernicious as excess of emotion and depreciation of reason. It is then an indispensable corrective of any unimaginative domination by reason, a valid reminder of the existence of all that is meant by history, life, organism, form, wholeness, feeling, intuition, and creative evolution—a fruitful principle of recognition of truths that are inaccessible to the analysing intelligence, and finally an opulent source of all true art and poetry, speaking straight to the heart. Thus Pascal’s famous phrase, Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connâit point, “The heart has its reasons, of which the reason knows nothing,’’ seems to us no less true because a Cartesian would call it “romantic,” and we would not have the German classics one whit less “romantic” than they are. The world would have been infinitely poorer and colder if there had been no mystics, no pietism, no Herder or Rousseau, and no “romantic school”; and the particularly rich contribution which Germany (together with Switzerland, in this respect so closely akin to her) has made in the course of centuries should not be pooh-poohed by people who admit only the linear classicism of the Latins and lump unhealthy degeneracies together with the healthy and fruitful in one general condemnation.14

We may compare romanticism with a comforting fire to which all European nations have brought logs, and if at times the fire of romanticism flickers a little doubtfully or smoulders, even then we rejoice at the manifold variety of the human spirit. Mankind can no more do without Rembrandt than Raphael, Victor Hugo than Molière, Schumann than Mozart, and not even the uncanny elements in such men of genius as E. T. A. Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe or de Quincey, Turner or Caspar David Friedrich, can turn us away from them.

But we know that this fire must be carefully tended, and we know what conflagrations have been started by stray sparks. The most fruitful may here be at the same time the most dangerous, and as we may depend in any case on the strength of the basic romantic feeling in man, and as instinct and feeling threaten at all times and among all peoples to outgrow reason, we have more ground as a rule for thankfulness to the warning voices and the sober sceptics than to the panegyrists. But no country stands more in need of warnings and scepticism than Germany, because no other country is in such danger as Germany from its fundamentally romantic, mystical, anti-intellectual disposition. It is characteristic of Germany that there the fire of romanticism is always at white heat and from time to time blazes out into wild conflagrations. In the basic romanticism of the German there lurks an immoderacy, an unbridled wildness, that has broken out five times in the last two centuries—in the Sturm und Drang of the eighteenth century, in the romantic movement proper, in the “young Germany’’ movement, in the “youth movement,” and finally in its worst and, we must hope, its last excess in National Socialism.

Many repulsive elements were combined in National Socialism, but anyone who wants fully to understand that movement must give it its place in this series of volcanic explosions of romanticism. It is not simply Prussianism; it is also the final degeneration of the romantic and mystical disposition of the Germans. No one who considers those earlier surges of unbridled immaturity can help feeling that in Nazism there is something of the men of the Sturm und Drang, of Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde (1799), in which effrontery and idleness are preached to the “serious beast (der ernsthaften Bestie) that is man,” of Turnvater Jahn, “father” of gymnastics, of the Teutschtiimelei or Germanomania of the Restoration period, of “Young Germany,” and of the circle of Young Hegelians to which the anarchist Max Stirner belonged (and in which Marx and Engels had also moved), and especially of the youth movement of the last generation. This is true although the Nazis always selected with a sure instinct the morbid and degenerate elements, and exaggerated even these. And always there is this eternal song of “youth,” making a cult and a cosmic principle of its own immaturity and inchoateness.

Particularly clear and direct was this pernicious influence of German romanticism on the collective morality of the Germans in the case of the variety which we may call with Seillière “national-ethnic romanticism.” It was especially this that shot up luxuriantly, particularly in Germany, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, after the soil had been prepared by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic invasion. From the exaltation of the German Volkstum or national character, of the German race, of German history and German folklore, from this ecstatic exaggeration of a healthy and fruitful idea, which in Herder had been the noble expression of humanity, there proceeded in a direct line the subsequent pan-Germanism and finally Nazism. This is the source from which Fichte and Arndt and later Treitschke, Langbehn, Richard Wagner, or Lagarde, drew intoxication, and there are few political thinkers and leaders in Germany who have not since enjoyed at least a drop of the stuff. Here begins the bad interpretation of the German nature as something primeval, unique, exclusive, to be understood only through the myth of blood and of racial history. The other interpretation of the German nature through humanity and universality, which is bound up with the great names of Herder, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Humboldt, was visibly pushed into the background and after a century was only to be met with in a few isolated figures. Then the German began, with his “German way” that was to “cure the world,” his Deutschland über Alles, and his “historic missions,” to be in the eyes of the world first ridiculous and in the end tiresome.

But even the aesthetic romanticism has, in Germany, been anything but harmless. The vagueness and dreaminess that it cultivates, corresponding so well with the German nature already described, the somnambulist element, sallow, sombre, drawn especially to night and moon and graves—all this points to a morbid state of mind that will do no good.15 The German’s romantic feeling for death, remarked by Clemenceau, probably has its origin here. Only recently the leaders of an S.S. division in Italy talked of “romantic death” to the neo-Fascists (who were but little impressed), and it is probably for the same reason that the German feels so strangely attracted by the twilight of the gods and the downfall of the Nibelungen. Closely related to this is the inclination of the romantic to abandon himself to an inscrutable fate, sensed pantheistically, and to feel that there are at work dark forces of nature or history that crush man. Thus the romantic becomes an anti-humanist, a fatalist, and a determinist, and those who are familiar with the history of the German mind since that time know how immensely strong this influence has been, particularly on political thinking. It has even communicated itself to geography, in which Ratzel, in the true spirit of this degenerate romanticism, laid the foundations of an anthropogeography, which later showed its actual anti-humane features in the “geographical romanticism” of General Haushofer’s “geopolitics,” thus separating itself plainly from the “geographie humaine” of the French.16 It is well known that this doctrine of the “blind brutality” (Ratzel) with which geography is supposed to rule the destinies of nations was exaggerated to the point of hysteria by the Nazis, and it may be that this “geopolitics” is one of the most fearful poisons administered to the German, until in the end he ran amok all over Europe. Romanticism—Ratzel—Haushofer—Hitler’s war—this, too, is a chain of causes, and probably one of the most fatal. The romantic intoxication from the atlas may be more disastrous than all else. And has it been noticed with what solemnity the modern German speaks the word Raum (“space”), how it has for him a weighty significance equalled only by his words for “destiny” and “development,” or by “Kultur”? And especially, has the German himself noticed it, and does he now know what he has in future to guard against?

We have had several times to oppose romanticism to humanism. There is a healthy romantic feeling with which humanism can very fruitfully unite, as has been shown, among others, by Herder. But it is obvious, and has been pointed out by us again and again, that grave dangers lurk here, and that a pronounced and basic romanticism and mysticism is difficult to reconcile with humanism. Probably we have here one reason why, since the beginning of modern times, the Germans have on the whole had less in common than other nations with the Roman humanist ideal, incorporated in the European tradition especially by Cicero and Virgil. A people so impregnated with romanticism and mysticism as the Germans will gain access only with difficulty to that source of European culture. But in addition to this, the Lutheran Reformation loosened the ties with the humanist tradition in Germany and seriously widened the gulf between German culture and the European tradition, a gulf which in any case the German can cross only with difficulty and by means of self-education. Whatever one may think of the Reformation in other respects, it cannot be denied that it threw Germany back centuries in her relation to the humanist culture of the West. It may fairly be said that the ground lost has not been recovered to this day, and that it is only now that the German is faced with the actual task of cultivating humanism, after pursuing to the most bitter end the path of anti-humanism.

This brings us now to the consideration of the other great main stream in the history of German collective morality, Lutheran Protestantism. There is an ample and valuable literature on this subject, and its exponents have reached increasing agreement in all essentials, so that we may deal briefly with it—all the more since we have already touched upon this important subject several times.17

For reasons connected partly with Lutheran theology, partly with Luther’s personality, and partly with Germany’s political character, the Lutheran Reformation bears the principal responsibility for the fact that the German was trained to make the separation of the spheres of political and private life which we recognize as one of the most unfortunate aspects of German collective morality. In that school he has learnt that the State and policy correspond to man’s evil nature and consequently follow their own brutal laws, and that therefore the moral laws that are binding for our individual behaviour are not ipso facto applicable to the State, and that in the face of this harsh outer world the true Christian must turn his thoughts the more devoutly inward to his own soul and its salvation.18 Thus there are two realms, that of the hard outer world and that of a man’s own soul The two are entirely separate from each other, and thus demand quite different conduct; they may. even be ruled by opposite moral principles without disturbing each other. In the realm of the State and of policy I may be ruthless and crafty, in the realm of the individual self I may be philanthropic, truth-loving, and pious; in the former I may submit to the tyranny of a despot, in the latter I may enjoy the freedom that in that doctrine is called “inner freedom” (“German freedom”).

It is easy to see what consequences for collective morality must follow from such a doctrine. One will be that those people who separated the “inner” from the “outer” freedom, and who regarded the former alone as essential, would care little for the “outer” freedom and would thus become the obedient subjects that just suited the German princes and nobles.19 As it is put in Luther’s famous hymn “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott,”

“Lass fahren dahin;

Sie habens kein Gewinn,

Das Reich muss uns doch bleiben”—

“Let them have their way: it avails them nought, ours still must be the Kingdom.”

Thus this doctrine meant for the Germans a school of non-resistance against the power of the State, of political indifference, of ready acceptance of the political situation at any moment, and of submission to the authorities in all questions of public life. The result was that compensation for the restriction on political activities was found in the day’s work, in family life, in the small circle of friends (die Stillen im Lande, the gentle souls of the countryside, as the pietists of the eighteenth century put it), and in the enrichment of the inner life. Thus the Tüchtigkeit of the Germans—their industry and solid worth in private life—and their political indifference are two aspects of one and the same process; thanks to Lutheranism the German virtù (to use Macchiavelli’s word for the qualities of courage and public spirit) struck inwards.

It would be difficult to find a more striking testimony to this action of Lutheran Protestantism upon human valuations than the declaration made to Allied journalists by Pastor Niemöller—that famous hero of anti-Nazism—immediately after his release from a concentration camp. This man, who claims to be purely evangelical, declared that at the outset of the war, as a former commanding officer of a U-boat, he placed himself at the disposal of the submarine command, adding: “My soul belongs to God, but I must do my duty to my country, without troubling whether she is right or wrong.” There then followed the declaration that his personal fight with Nazism had been a matter not of politics but of religion. In other words, if Nazism had left these pious Lutheran Christians in peace in their religious domain, they would have been in no way scandalized by its criminal policy and would have bowed faithfully to authority.

It is true that no observer could have failed to see that the Bekenntniskirche, the Confessional Church, had at all times shown this rather unedifying disposition, and no one who had grasped the essential teaching of Lutheranism could expect anything else. But this U-boat clergyman might have been reminded that the phrase he made use of, “My country right or wrong,” had been used as an inscription at the entrance to the ill-famed camp at Belsen. Anyone who uses this phrase in the future should be careful to add this detail.

At least as fatal, however, for the Germans as this education in Staatsfrömmigkeit or piety toward the State, and in political indifferentism, was another consequence of the distinction drawn between the public and private spheres, a consequence for which Lutheranism also bears the main responsibility. It was the education in a collective morality that denied in politics the bases of a humanist-Christian morality, in other words a naturalistic collective morality, which had the dangerous tendency of glorifying the national power and making it a supreme aim that sanctified the means to it. This is the seed from which can come power politics, imperialism, Macchiavellianism, and Realpolitik, and we know that these evil fruits ultimately ripened in Germany. But as it was always merely a question of a tendency that could mature only under special conditions, and one that had to fight against the noble counter-forces in the German soul, we can understand the struggle that went on in Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between the Christian-humanist and the naturalistic collective morality. The latter won through only at the moment when the influence of Lutheran Protestantism united with the other influence of national-ethnic romanticism in that philosophy which was very misleadingly called “idealistic,” and which found its best-known expression in Fichte and Hegel20. Until then the political thinking of the average German had been entirely un-Macchiavellian, unpolitical, and cosmopolitan, but about the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century there came a true revolution, in which Lutheranism and romanticism were fused by the hard experience of the Napoleonic invasion.

Looking more closely, we see that the Lutheran separation of politics from private life, combined with the absolutist regime prevalent in Germany, opened three different paths for the development of collective morality. The first was that of indifference to practical politics, united with a lofty idealism in the realm of political ideas. There was a withdrawal from the harsh reality of the State that simply demanded obedience, and of the power of evil in the world, into the secret realm of ideas, into the development of personality apart from the State or even against it (Wilhelm von Humboldt), and into a cosmopolitanism of an abstract type, in which it was possible to move the more freely since there was no need to take account of the conflicts of the real world. To this extent the separation had the result of confining men entirely to the “inward” and leaving the “outward” to look after itself. It may fairly be said that this is the stage in which German political thinking remained on the whole in the age of the German classics. The second path forced itself upon the Germans when they were rudely recalled by the French Revolution and by Napoleon to political realities that could not be ignored. Under the influence of the Lutheran tradition men were then faced with the temptation to turn the distinction between the two spheres into a distinction between the standards to be applied. That brought the ill-famed Macchiavellianism that started in Germany about the turn of the century. But at the same moment there was already visible a third possibility. This was offered when this dualism between politics and private life was felt to be unsatisfactory, and men felt the desire to overcome it, but were too much under the influence of romanticist and organicistic21 thinking to be able to effect the transition to the natural humanist-Christian tradition. Instead of regarding society as proceeding from the individual, and collective from individual morality, the opposite path was taken of bringing politics into the private sphere, a course that was bound to end in the total State and in collectivism. Thus it was a contemporary of Fichte and Hegel, the muddle-headed romanticist Adam Müller, who advocated a State in which “private life is nothing else than national life regarded from below, and public life is in the last resort nothing but the same national life seen from above.”22 It was from this Adam Müller that, a century later, the Austrian sociologist Othmar Spann drew in order to seduce a large part of the students of the German Universities into a romanticist totalitarianism and nationalism. Now that the Germans have tried these three bypaths to which the traditional doctrine of the dualism between the sphere of politics and that of the individual leads, and have realized that the first is impracticable and the other two lead to disaster, there remains to them only the fourth alternative of at last returning to the highroad of the European tradition and, in the spirit of Christian and humanist principles, starting, in politics as elsewhere, from the individual and his personal moral code.

What is particularly unfortunate is that the second and third lines of this political thinking are not in the least mutually exclusive. Just when they are combined, and Macchiavellianism is no longer advocated in opposition to an autonomous individual sphere but in the name of an organicist conception of society and State which attributes to the “State,” the “nation,” or the “people,” a life of its own over and above that of the individuals, and when the last vestiges of the individualist philosophy are sacrificed, even in the private sphere, to the collectivist philosophy—precisely then we are bound to get a formulation, without any reservation whatever, of the Macchiavellian philosophy of power. What that may lead to in the end has been shown by totalitarianism. Signs of this were to be felt in the period of the Napoleonic wars and in the Restoration period, and even in Fichte and Hegel, though less markedly than in Adam Müller; but even then we have not traced the ultimate sources of the collectivist social philosophy (the “realistic” as against the “nominahstic” philosophy of individualism, which had dominated the Western world since the days of scholasticism). We cannot enter into this matter here. We will only emphasize that such an organicistic and collectivist outlook is closely related to romanticist thought. The Lutheran, too, will be readily receptive of this conception of the State as a superorganism: once the antithesis between the State and individuals has been introduced, it is only a step to the doctrine that individuals are simply cells in the complex of society and State. Finally, we must on no account forget that it was the French Revolution that introduced to the European peoples, and especially to the particularly susceptible Germans, the doctrine of the collective nature of the “nation.”23 The fact that it spread the idea in the name of “liberty” can surprise only those who regard a dangerous collective morality as a monopoly of “reactionaries,” and who are unaware of the large number of democrats who at all times have been chauvinists and imperialists.

At that time, however, a century ago, few seem to have been farsighted enough to realize the full scope of this new collective morality, born of pantheism, Protestantism, and romanticism, the origination of which has to be credited mainly to Hegel and Fichte. One of those few was, once more, Heinrich Heine, who wrote in 1834 in his Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland these prophetic words:

“Once the taming talisman, the Cross, breaks to pieces, there rattles out again the savagery of the old fighting men, the unreasoning berserk fury of which the Nordic poets sing and say so much. That talisman is rotten, and come the day will when it will pathetically collapse. The thought precedes the deed, as lightning thunder. The German thunder is, indeed, German, and is not very nimble, and rolls along a bit tardily; but come it will, and when once you hear its crash, as it has never yet crashed in the world’s history, know ye: the German thunder has at last attained its object. At that roar the eagles will fall dead from the sky, and the lions in the farthest deserts of Africa will put their tails between their legs and creep into their royal dens. There will be produced in Germany a play compared with which the French Revolution may well seem no more than an innocent idyll.”

It took a full hundred years for this vision of Heine’s to become reality in National Socialism. In that period much had to happen to turn the Germany of humanism, cosmopolitanism, and Christian uprightness, into the other Germany that has now come to its end in a frightful explosion. Fichte’s teaching of nationalism and power politics took a long time to establish itself against the better German tradition. It had to absorb many other elements—historicism, positivism, materialism, and much else—in order to develop its full corrupting power. A Treitschke was needed, and a Nietzsche, and many others. But to win over the Germans completely and to become politically effective, that philosophy required a Prussia, to turn it into battalions and into factories, and that Prussian current of history had to absorb the general German current which we have been considering in its manifold composition.

THE CURRENT OF PRUSSIAN HISTORY

Naturally Prussia, and before her Brandenburg, shared in the general German evolution whose fatal characteristics we have been considering. But in that country, which for centuries had an existence of its own outside the realm of the true German State and people, there came an evolution of its own in addition to all that it shared with the evolution of the rest of Germany. It is necessary fully to grasp this in order to understand that in spite of everything, Germany and Prussia—Weimar and Potsdam—are two different worlds. Over this individual Prussian evolution, official Prussian historiography has deliberately thrown a veil, so that to this day, outside the circle of the initiated, much too little is known about it; and without that knowledge we cannot understand the subsequent political, intellectual, economic, and social evolution of Germany in the nineteenth century, which mainly bears the Prussian stamp. Indeed, the difference between the nature of the Prussian and that of the German west of the Elbe is so marked that in most cases, to this day, it is easy to determine without asking whether a German belongs to the original Prussia or not. There is an elementary truth in the widespread view that Prussia has been the evil genius of Germany—incorporated especially in two personalities, Frederick II24 and Bismarck.

For our purposes it is sufficient if we note the following essential points:

1. The Elbe and the Saale roughly form the frontier line that divides the ancestral country of the Germans from the colonial Germany won—some of it not until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—from Slav tribes by conquest, extermination, and enslavement, or by peaceful settlement. This distinct dualism of evolution has had consequences lasting to this day. Without entering upon the seductive question of racial mixture and its possible consequences, we may say that this environment of the east was bound to create the type of the colonial German, characterized in all classes by hardness, resolution, resourcefulness, alertness, and a shrewdness in daily life that borders on unscrupulousness, and in the upper class by the habit of command, while the lower class is marked by an equally strong habit of obedience. These conquering invaders of the East became victims of the pitiless Nemesis of all imperialism, which, while subjugating others, makes the conquering race itself, if it is to maintain its position, the slave of its leaders. It was not entirely without justice that Lessing, in a letter to Nicolai, described Prussia as “the most slavish country of Europe.”

From this dualism between Germany and the eastern territory there proceeded—and this again is of critical importance—a dualism in the agrarian system. In West and South agrarian history ran much the same course as in the rest of western Europe, a minority of peasants remaining entirely free, while the rest under the manorial system (Grundherrschaft) had the chance of gradually rising to be free peasants: in the East, in place of this system a large part of the peasantry was driven from the land, and there developed a system of Gutsherrschaft, under which great farming properties were run with the aid of serfs or bondsmen. In some cases this latter system assumed forms closely resembling the system of negro plantations,25 which appeared at about the same time in the West Indies. In the East the agrarian system was marked by the predominance of Rittergüter or baronial estates and by a social system in which a class of estate-owning nobles was served, with no extensive intermediate peasant class, by the mass of the “men,” that is to say, by landless and unfree farm-workers. In the West, in contrast with this, was a varied system under which peasants with farms of widely varying size and with every degree of personal or material freedom were found alongside landowners who confined themselves to small farms of their own, together with the type of the squire living on his rents, the very opposite of the skinflint, profiteering capitalist farmer.

This great difference between the position of the ground landlord west of the Elbe and the junker east of the Elbe produced a great difference in human types, which were well aware of this difference and which were led by it into mutual dislike—the type of the generous, cultivated grand seigneur of the West, and the other type of the junker, the “monocled peasant,” who united the petty profit-seeking and the craftiness of the bad type of peasant with the arrogance and domineering spirit of the feudal lord. The character, indeed, of the Prussian junker—his aggressive style, his conceitedness, his lack of tact and of intuition, his grabbing at every small advantage, so painfully evident even in the private life of Bismarck26 or Hindenburg, his craftiness, and the rest must be held responsible for many things that have made Prussia and the Prussianized German so hated. It is no mere chance that the liberal reforms of the decayed state of Frederick II after the collapse of 1806 were carried through by a knight of the empire from Nassau (Stein), a Hanoverian noble (Hardenberg), the son of a Hanoverian peasant (Scharnhorst), and a Saxon officer (Gneisenau), and were sabotaged by the Prussian junkers.27

This circumstance, that the Elbe divides a western Germany with predominantly peasant farming from an eastern Germany of predominantly feudal large-scale farming, explains also why in the West and South the whole social system shows an equilibrium which in Hanover, Westphalia, and southern Bavaria approaches perfection, and the class differences are much less acute than in the East. Prussia, with its much thinner stratum of peasants and middle-class town-dwellers, has always been a stony soil for liberalism, individualism, and the middle-class virtues, while it offered at all times the most favourable conditions for every sort of collectivism.

2. Owing to its social history, Prussia has not only been a country with few peasants but has also become the country in which the towns have made least progress and the few that grew up were soonest and most ruthlessly robbed of their liberties. It is entirely characteristic of the Prussian mentality that there was a poet in Prussia, Willibald Alexis, who actually sang the praises of that enslavement of the towns by the Hohenzollerns. Thus Prussia became not only the country with fewest peasants but also the country with the smallest middle class, and thus sociologically the most “eastern” country of Germany, and the country that was reached latest and least effectively by the struggle of the West for emancipation from absolutism and feudalism.

For these and various other reasons the Prussian State acquired a character that has not escaped the notice of any keen-sighted observer—the character of a thoroughly artificial State, not based on any common racial history but greedily gathered together, and held together only by monarchy, bureaucracy, army, and military prestige, a highly organised and mechanized State, without a soul, ruled in the harshest and most unimaginative way. It is the State of which Mirabeau said: “La Prusse n’est pas un pays qui a une armée, c’est une armée qui a un pays,”28 and Novalis: “No State has been administered more like a factory than Prussia since the death of Frederick William I.”29 Thus, as the model of mechanistic organization, this State has always had the sympathy of the rationalists, advocates of “scientism,”30 collectivists, and organization cranks of all countries, from the French Encyclopaedists, who were the best of propagandists for Frederick II, down to Professor Carr and other collectivists of our day.

As we saw earlier, absolutism and feudalism were the destiny of all Germany. But while outside Prussia they were mitigated by the more complex and more organic character of society, by a certain passive laisser faire, by a good-natured slackness, and in not a few cases by a truly liberal spirit, in Prussia they were rationalized, mechanized, and made into a system, until the Prussian State had become a regular clockwork in which the individuals were simply cog-wheels. Here in Prussia everything had to be done on the model of the smart shouldering of arms and the parade march.

Outside Prussia absolutism and feudalism had generally been bad enough. Only too often they were unintelligent, petty, cruel, extravagant, and even contemptible; but they were scarcely ever of the Prussian daemonic consistency. The Prussian State was a machine of which it could not even be said that if it suited nobody else it was at least to the liking of the prince; it seemed, in fact to have taken charge, to be running for its own sake, and it was just this feature that was inhuman and uncanny. Here was a pure efficiency that had ceased to be simply the means to some sensible end, but instead was itself demanding the implicit obedience of which we have seen the social and intellectual origins. Hence the Prussian mania for organization, hence the much-praised thoroughness, even exceeding that of the rest of Germany; hence the mistrust of everything improvised, the hardness considered a duty and accordingly prized as a virtue, the dry prosiness, the parade of superiority to all “slacker” peoples, the humourlessness, and the fixed idea (philosophically sublimated in Kant’s “Ethics”) that duty31 demands the suppression of human feeling and that whatever a man does attains a higher worth if it is done “for its own sake.” Hence the sinister type of man who, perhaps entirely normal and even good-natured as an individual, at once becomes a marionette when the call comes to perform his functions in the well-oiled collective machine—a marionette capable of turning into a devil. Hence the German slave to duty and labour, raised to a power that later gave the economic life of all Germany the repellent character of sterile activity and of a fever for work that lost all account of any reasonable objective. The “frozen features,” the heel-clicking, the angular bowing, the convict’s hair-cut (“Mongol’s tuft”), the lack of natural grace—all these things, and many others, smack unquestionably of Prussia; and not a few of them were taken over by Nazism and further coarsened, with the exception of many good qualities of the Prussian and with the exception of the moral reservations that set fixed limits even to Prussian policy.

It is possible to admire this sort of efficiency and discipline, especially if it is bound up with a certain rough uprightness; but people with these characteristics will not be liked. For the very reason that they achieve military conquests so easily, they will fail the more completely to achieve moral ones. Naturally they see that they are not popular, but since they will seek the reasons anywhere but in themselves, two sorts of psychical reaction are understandable. One consists in the determined effort to prove with their characteristic thoroughness that they are in very truth likeable and superior fellows—like old Frederick William I, who shook his stick in the street at his Berliners and shouted to them that the rascals had got to like him. The other reaction consists in turning away resentfully, in wounded self-esteem, from the blind and evil world that cannot appreciate merit and entirely fails to understand men of capacity. The first reaction led to continual push and propaganda, which under the Nazis were carried to maniacal extremes; the second to persecution mania and self-pity capable of producing a pronounced collective defiance neurosis.

These few remarks, confined to the main essentials, show that the conception of a Prussianism distinct from the general German character is far from being mere imagination on the part of the non-Prussian and the foreigner. But this conception has its limits and must not be made into a schematic explanation of everything. To begin with, we know from what has already been said here how many traits Prussian and non-Prussian Germans have in common: in not a few cases the “Prussian” seems to us to be a mere exaggeration of the “German.” In the second place, our survey of the evolution of the German mind has shown us how much that is dangerous has accumulated in the last few centuries actually in the mind of the non-Prussian German. Thirdly, however, it is indisputable that the Prussian predominance in recent generations has had the result of Prussianizing the rest of Germany in a high degree, and not only the territories acquired through the Vienna Congress or those annexed in 1866 but all southern Germany, too—of course, in differing degrees, in inverse proportion to the power of resistance conferred by tradition, racial character, social stratification, or religious confession. Again and again it may be observed that the Prussianized German of South and West is the most insufferable type, since, with the zeal of the convert, he overdoes the Prussian element to the point of caricature. Some of the most repulsive of the Nazis (not only Hider, but Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring, among others) were not Prussians—just as in the nineteenth century one of the philosophers of Prussianism was a Swabian (Hegel), another a Saxon (Treitschke), and a third a Bavarian Jew (Stahl).

 

________________

32 It should not be forgotten that, contrary to a widespread notion, the Germanic conquerors of the Roman Empire, Stilicho, Alaric, or Theodoric, regarded themselves entirely as executors of the Roman heritage.

33 Fr. Rörig, Ursachen und Auswirkungen des deutschen Partikularismus, Tübingen, 1937, p.9.

34 Cf. W. H. Bruford, Die gesellschaftlichen Grundlagen der Goethezeit, Weimar, 1936.

35 It should be noted here that in Germany, especially in recent generations, there have been no reviews acting as a true forum for public opinion, such as the French Revue des Deux Mondes, the American Harper’s Magazine or Atlantic Monthly, or the great English monthlies. In Germany those reviews which offered a living reflection of their time and were a true forum for discussion—for instance, the Neue Rundschau— were confined to certain circles, while the periodicals read by a wider public carefully avoided the contentious problems of the day. Among the daily newspapers, too, there was a lack of organs such as The Times, the Temps, or the Journal des Débâts, possessing an authority that bridged over party differences. Every German swore by his habitual paper, his “Leibblatt,” and learned of the opinion of other people only the caricature offered by this party paper. Such a paper as the Frankfurter Zeitung really carried weight as a rule only with an élite, while everybody else dismissed it as the Judenblatt, the “Jew paper.”

36 The literature concerning Austria is not very extensive. Attention may be called to André Tibal, L’Autrichien, essais sur la formation d’une individuanté nationale, Paris, 1936.

37 Letter of January 14th, 1808, to Baron de Barante (from J. de Pange, Mme. de Staël et la découverte de l’Allemagne, Paris, 1929, p. 80).

38 Werner Stark, “Niedergang und Ende des landwirtschaftlichen Grossbetriebs in den böhmischen Ländern,” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, 1937, vol. 146.

39 Otto Brunner, “Bürgertum und Städtewesen im deutschen Mittelalter,” Das Mittelalter in Einzeldarstellungen, Vienna, 1930, p. 155.

40 Conversation with H. Luden on December 13th, 1813 (Goethes Gespräche, Auswahl Biedermann).

41 Ibid., note by F. von Müller.

42 Among the many works of this very important philosopher, who is not by any means as well known as he ought to be, mention should be made for our purposes of: Introduction à la Philosophie de l’impérialisme, Paris, 1911; Le Romantisme, Paris, 1925; Les Pangermanistes d’ après-guerre, Paris, 1924; Morales et religions nouvelles en Allemagne, le nécromantisme au delà du Rhin, Paris, 1927.

43 Th. Ziegler, Die geistigen und sozialen Strömungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 2nd edition, Berlin, 1901, pp. 56-7. If we recall that in an earlier passage we inferred specifically romantic qualities—unrestrainedness, emotionality, immoderation, etc.—from the German language, we may, indeed, say that the very language reveals the fundamental romantic trait of the Germans. It is the language of an essentially romantic people. It is so in a special degree at all times when it is under the influence of a pronouncedly romantic current, whether that of the Sturm und Drang movement of the eighteenth century, or the actual German romantic period of the beginning of the nineteenth, or finally the youth movement. It will also be difficult to contradict so thoughtful a writer as Fritz Strich when he says (Deutsche Klassik und Romantik, 2nd edition, Munich, 1924, p. 400): “Where the German spirit follows its own bent, it is a spirit of romanticism. It can realize its classic ideal only with outside aid.”

44 See my books Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart, 4th edition, Erlenbach-Zürich 1943, pp. 81 sqq.; Civitas humana, Erlenbach-Zürich 1944 pp. 103 sqq.

45 As an example we may mention an otherwise very instructive book by an Italian, Carlo Antoni—La Lotta contro la Ragione, Florence, 1942. On the other hand, we are in agreement with the judgment of romanticism pronounced by Benedetto Croce—for instance, in his History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (London, Allen & Unwin). Although Seillière distinguishes very well between healthy and unhealthy romanticism, he has some trouble in doing justice to the former. That is one of the weaknesses of his philosophy.

46 “The logical end of romanticism could only be the longing for death.” (Fritz Strich, op. cit., p. 123.) On the other hand, Eichendorff attracts us by the very fact that he freed himself from this morbid romanticism and became “the poet of the morning” (Strich).

47 Lucien Febvre, La terre et l’évolution humaine, introduction géographique à l’histoire, Paris, 1922, pp. 21 sqq.

48 On the effects of the Reformation on the collective morality and the political philosophy of the Germans, cf. Helmuth Plessner, Das Schicksal deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürgerlichen Epoche, Zurich, 1935; Georges de Lagarde, Recherches sur l’esprit politique de la Réforme, Paris, 1926; Fritz Kern, “Luther und das Widerstandsrecht,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Reichsgeschichte, vol. 37, Weimar, 1916; Hugo Ball, Die Folgen der Reformation, Munich, 1924; F. von Hügel, The German Soul, London, 1916.

49 what results ultimately follow from such a theology is shown especially plainly in the work of the Lutheran Friedrich Naumann, Briefe über Religion, 6th edition, Berlin, 1916—well criticized by von Hügel, op. cit., pp. 48 sqq. Similar ideas are expressed in the writings of Ernst Troeltsch (especially in those published during the first world war), though far more mildly.

50 It is particularly interesting that this doctrine of the “inner freedom,” into which the outwardly unfree being is supposed to be able to retire without hurt, found its way from the Lutheran philosopher Hegel to the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, leading him to the view that external unfreedom (as today under collectivism) need not affect the freedom of the human soul. (Cf. the criticism in my book, Civitas bumana, pp. 91-2 of the Zurich edition.) Here, it should be noted, Luther still speaks.

51 This whole process has been described especially by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke (Die Idee der Staatsräson in der deutschen Geschichte, 2nd edition, Munich, 1925; Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, 7th edition, Munich, 1928). For earlier history cf. also O. Woodtli, Die Staatsräson im Roman des deutschen Barock. Frauenfeld-Leipzig, 1943.

52 Cf. Bertrand de Jouvenel, Du Pouvoir (Geneva, 1945), pp. 82 sqq.

53 Quoted from F. Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, p. 140.

54 Cf. The excellent remarks on this in Bertrand de Jouvenel, Du pouvoir, histoire naturelle de sa croissance, Geneva, 1945, pp. 69 sqq.

55On the fateful bearing on Germany of the career of Frederick II, it is possible now to consult K. Thieme, Das Schicksal der Deutschen, ein Versuch seiner geschichtlichen Erklärung, Basle, 1945. Cf. also O. Klopp, Der König Friedrich II von Preussen und seine Politik, 1867; Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende, Stuttgart, 1893; Fr. Hertz, Nationalgeist und Politik, vol. I, Zurich, 1937, pp. 64 sqq.; P. Gaxotte, Frédéric II, Paris, 1938

56Cf. H. Pirenne, History of Europe (George Allen & Unwin).

57The journals of L. Bamberger especially (Bismarcks grosses Spiel, Frankfurt am Main, 1932), provide many examples of Bismarck’s petty profit-seeking and his almost naive egoism.

58It was mainly owing to this sabotage that the emancipation of the peasants in Prussia turned a great part of the peasants into proletarians, from whom was then recruited the first industrial proletariat in Germany.

59Quoted from O. Guerlac, Les citations françaises, 2nd edition, Paris, 1933, p. 231. The originator of the famous saying is there given as the Hanoverian statesman Rehberg.

60Novalis, “Fragmente und Studien,” Schriften, edited by Kluckhohn, vol. 2, p. 56. It was a leading Prussian historian (Otto Hintze, Historische und politische Aufsätze, vol. I, p. 32) who described the State created by Frederick II as “an artificially calculated system, a machine,” adding: “When the momentum of the monarchial drive failed, the machine came to a stop.”

61Professor Hayek’s remarkable study, “Scientism and the Study of Society,” in Economica, August, 1942, February, 1943, and February, 1944.

62How deeply Kant’s whole philosophy is rooted in the soil of his Prussian mother-country has been shown especially by Max Scheler (Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses, Leipzig, 1917, pp. 190 sqq.). The totally different outlook of the non-Prussian is expressed by Schiller when in his essay “Über Anmut und Würde” he charges Kant with having taken thought only “für die Knechte,” for the serving men, and not for “die Kinder des Hauses,” the children of the house.

• 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.
• 14The upheaval of society by totalitarianism must of necessity bring the worst elements to the top. That is a general law, which has only been confirmed by Nazism and is of universal application all over the world. Wherever anything resembling the Nazi upheaval has happened (as in Russia, in Italy, or elsewhere), the biggest blackguards have regularly set the tone, dragging the honour of their country through the mire. Thus what happened in Germany was simply that such men as the execrable von Papen and his backers, who can never do adequate penance for their stupidity and perversity, opened up the sewers of the German community, a process which some of them, by unpardonable stupidity, even mistook for the freshwater supply.
• 15“The logical end of romanticism could only be the longing for death.” (Fritz Strich, op. cit., p. 123.) On the other hand, Eichendorff attracts us by the very fact that he freed himself from this morbid romanticism and became “the poet of the morning” (Strich).
• 16Lucien Febvre, La terre et l’évolution humaine, introduction géographique à l’histoire, Paris, 1922, pp. 21 sqq.
• 17On the effects of the Reformation on the collective morality and the political philosophy of the Germans, cf. Helmuth Plessner, Das Schicksal deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürgerlichen Epoche, Zurich, 1935; Georges de Lagarde, Recherches sur l’esprit politique de la Réforme, Paris, 1926; Fritz Kern, “Luther und das Widerstandsrecht,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Reichsgeschichte, vol. 37, Weimar, 1916; Hugo Ball, Die Folgen der Reformation, Munich, 1924; F. von Hügel, The German Soul, London, 1916.
• 18what results ultimately follow from such a theology is shown especially plainly in the work of the Lutheran Friedrich Naumann, Briefe über Religion, 6th edition, Berlin, 1916—well criticized by von Hügel, op. cit., pp. 48 sqq. Similar ideas are expressed in the writings of Ernst Troeltsch (especially in those published during the first world war), though far more mildly.
• 19It is particularly interesting that this doctrine of the “inner freedom,” into which the outwardly unfree being is supposed to be able to retire without hurt, found its way from the Lutheran philosopher Hegel to the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, leading him to the view that external unfreedom (as today under collectivism) need not affect the freedom of the human soul. (Cf. the criticism in my book, Civitas bumana, pp. 91-2 of the Zurich edition.) Here, it should be noted, Luther still speaks.
• 20This whole process has been described especially by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke (Die Idee der Staatsräson in der deutschen Geschichte, 2nd edition, Munich, 1925; Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, 7th edition, Munich, 1928). For earlier history cf. also O. Woodtli, Die Staatsräson im Roman des deutschen Barock. Frauenfeld-Leipzig, 1943.
• 21Cf. Bertrand de Jouvenel, Du Pouvoir (Geneva, 1945), pp. 82 sqq.
• 22Quoted from F. Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, p. 140.
• 23Cf. The excellent remarks on this in Bertrand de Jouvenel, Du pouvoir, histoire naturelle de sa croissance, Geneva, 1945, pp. 69 sqq.
• 24On the fateful bearing on Germany of the career of Frederick II, it is possible now to consult K. Thieme, Das Schicksal der Deutschen, ein Versuch seiner geschichtlichen Erklärung, Basle, 1945. Cf. also O. Klopp, Der König Friedrich II von Preussen und seine Politik, 1867; Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende, Stuttgart, 1893; Fr. Hertz, Nationalgeist und Politik, vol. I, Zurich, 1937, pp. 64 sqq.; P. Gaxotte, Frédéric II, Paris, 1938
• 25Cf. H. Pirenne, History of Europe (George Allen & Unwin).
• 26The journals of L. Bamberger especially (Bismarcks grosses Spiel, Frankfurt am Main, 1932), provide many examples of Bismarck’s petty profit-seeking and his almost naive egoism.
• 27It was mainly owing to this sabotage that the emancipation of the peasants in Prussia turned a great part of the peasants into proletarians, from whom was then recruited the first industrial proletariat in Germany.
• 28Quoted from O. Guerlac, Les citations françaises, 2nd edition, Paris, 1933, p. 231. The originator of the famous saying is there given as the Hanoverian statesman Rehberg.
• 29Novalis, “Fragmente und Studien,” Schriften, edited by Kluckhohn, vol. 2, p. 56. It was a leading Prussian historian (Otto Hintze, Historische und politische Aufsätze, vol. I, p. 32) who described the State created by Frederick II as “an artificially calculated system, a machine,” adding: “When the momentum of the monarchial drive failed, the machine came to a stop.”
• 30Professor Hayek’s remarkable study, “Scientism and the Study of Society,” in Economica, August, 1942, February, 1943, and February, 1944.
• 31How deeply Kant’s whole philosophy is rooted in the soil of his Prussian mother-country has been shown especially by Max Scheler (Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses, Leipzig, 1917, pp. 190 sqq.). The totally different outlook of the non-Prussian is expressed by Schiller when in his essay “Über Anmut und Würde” he charges Kant with having taken thought only “für die Knechte,” for the serving men, and not for “die Kinder des Hauses,” the children of the house.
• 32Erich Eyck, Bismarck (Allen & Unwin)
• 33For 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.
• 34Since 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.”
• 35Jacob Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, new impression, Basle, 1942, p. 144.
• 36Benjamin Constant, op. cit., p. 39 of the fourth edition (Paris, 1814).
• 37Benjamin Constant, op. cit. p. 58.
• 38We 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.
• 39A 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.
• 40Among 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.
• 41Cf. also F. A. Hayek, op. cit., pp. 230 sqq.
• 42In this I am able still to rely on a study I published in 1935—“Fascist Economics,” Economica, February, 1935.
• 43See, 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.
• 44The 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.
• 45Cf. the special chapter X of the book by F. A. Hayek already mentioned, The Road to Serfdom.
• 46But even the aesthetic romanticism has, in Germany, been anything but harmless. The vagueness and dreaminess that it cultivates, corresponding so well with the German nature already described, the somnambulist element, sallow, sombre, drawn especially to night and moon and graves—all this points to a morbid state of mind that will do no good. The German’s romantic feeling for death, remarked by Clemenceau, probably has its origin here. Only recently the leaders of an S.S. division in Italy talked of “romantic death” to the neo-Fascists (who were but little impressed), and it is probably for the same reason that the German feels so strangely attracted by the twilight of the gods and the downfall of the Nibelungen. Closely related to this is the inclination of the romantic to abandon himself to an inscrutable fate, sensed pantheistically, and to feel that there are at work dark forces of nature or history that crush man. Thus the romantic becomes an anti-humanist, a fatalist, and a determinist, and those who are familiar with the history of the German mind since that time know how immensely strong this influence has been, particularly on political thinking. It has even communicated itself to geography, in which Ratzel, in the true spirit of this degenerate romanticism, laid the foundations of an anthropogeography, which later showed its actual anti-humane features in the “geographical romanticism” of General Haushofer’s “geopolitics,” thus separating itself plainly from the “geographie humaine” of the French. It is well known that this doctrine of the “blind brutality” (Ratzel) with which geography is supposed to rule the destinies of nations was exaggerated to the point of hysteria by the Nazis, and it may be that this “geopolitics” is one of the most fearful poisons administered to the German, until in the end he ran amok all over Europe. Romanticism—Ratzel—Haushofer—Hitler’s war—this, too, is a chain of causes, and probably one of the most fatal. The romantic intoxication from the atlas may be more disastrous than all else. And has it been noticed with what solemnity the modern German speaks the word Raum (“space”), how it has for him a weighty significance equalled only by his words for “destiny” and “development,” or by “Kultur”? And especially, has the German himself noticed it, and does he now know what he has in future to guard against?
• 47But even the aesthetic romanticism has, in Germany, been anything but harmless. The vagueness and dreaminess that it cultivates, corresponding so well with the German nature already described, the somnambulist element, sallow, sombre, drawn especially to night and moon and graves—all this points to a morbid state of mind that will do no good. The German’s romantic feeling for death, remarked by Clemenceau, probably has its origin here. Only recently the leaders of an S.S. division in Italy talked of “romantic death” to the neo-Fascists (who were but little impressed), and it is probably for the same reason that the German feels so strangely attracted by the twilight of the gods and the downfall of the Nibelungen. Closely related to this is the inclination of the romantic to abandon himself to an inscrutable fate, sensed pantheistically, and to feel that there are at work dark forces of nature or history that crush man. Thus the romantic becomes an anti-humanist, a fatalist, and a determinist, and those who are familiar with the history of the German mind since that time know how immensely strong this influence has been, particularly on political thinking. It has even communicated itself to geography, in which Ratzel, in the true spirit of this degenerate romanticism, laid the foundations of an anthropogeography, which later showed its actual anti-humane features in the “geographical romanticism” of General Haushofer’s “geopolitics,” thus separating itself plainly from the “geographie humaine” of the French. It is well known that this doctrine of the “blind brutality” (Ratzel) with which geography is supposed to rule the destinies of nations was exaggerated to the point of hysteria by the Nazis, and it may be that this “geopolitics” is one of the most fearful poisons administered to the German, until in the end he ran amok all over Europe. Romanticism—Ratzel—Haushofer—Hitler’s war—this, too, is a chain of causes, and probably one of the most fatal. The romantic intoxication from the atlas may be more disastrous than all else. And has it been noticed with what solemnity the modern German speaks the word Raum (“space”), how it has for him a weighty significance equalled only by his words for “destiny” and “development,” or by “Kultur”? And especially, has the German himself noticed it, and does he now know what he has in future to guard against?
• 48This brings us now to the consideration of the other great main stream in the history of German collective morality, Lutheran Protestantism. There is an ample and valuable literature on this subject, and its exponents have reached increasing agreement in all essentials, so that we may deal briefly with it—all the more since we have already touched upon this important subject several times.
• 49For reasons connected partly with Lutheran theology, partly with Luther’s personality, and partly with Germany’s political character, the Lutheran Reformation bears the principal responsibility for the fact that the German was trained to make the separation of the spheres of political and private life which we recognize as one of the most unfortunate aspects of German collective morality. In that school he has learnt that the State and policy correspond to man’s evil nature and consequently follow their own brutal laws, and that therefore the moral laws that are binding for our individual behaviour are not ipso facto applicable to the State, and that in the face of this harsh outer world the true Christian must turn his thoughts the more devoutly inward to his own soul and its salvation. Thus there are two realms, that of the hard outer world and that of a man’s own soul The two are entirely separate from each other, and thus demand quite different conduct; they may. even be ruled by opposite moral principles without disturbing each other. In the realm of the State and of policy I may be ruthless and crafty, in the realm of the individual self I may be philanthropic, truth-loving, and pious; in the former I may submit to the tyranny of a despot, in the latter I may enjoy the freedom that in that doctrine is called “inner freedom” (“German freedom”).
• 50It is easy to see what consequences for collective morality must follow from such a doctrine. One will be that those people who separated the “inner” from the “outer” freedom, and who regarded the former alone as essential, would care little for the “outer” freedom and would thus become the obedient subjects that just suited the German princes and nobles. As it is put in Luther’s famous hymn “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott,”
• 51At least as fatal, however, for the Germans as this education in Staatsfrömmigkeit or piety toward the State, and in political indifferentism, was another consequence of the distinction drawn between the public and private spheres, a consequence for which Lutheranism also bears the main responsibility. It was the education in a collective morality that denied in politics the bases of a humanist-Christian morality, in other words a naturalistic collective morality, which had the dangerous tendency of glorifying the national power and making it a supreme aim that sanctified the means to it. This is the seed from which can come power politics, imperialism, Macchiavellianism, and Realpolitik, and we know that these evil fruits ultimately ripened in Germany. But as it was always merely a question of a tendency that could mature only under special conditions, and one that had to fight against the noble counter-forces in the German soul, we can understand the struggle that went on in Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between the Christian-humanist and the naturalistic collective morality. The latter won through only at the moment when the influence of Lutheran Protestantism united with the other influence of national-ethnic romanticism in that philosophy which was very misleadingly called “idealistic,” and which found its best-known expression in Fichte and Hegel. Until then the political thinking of the average German had been entirely un-Macchiavellian, unpolitical, and cosmopolitan, but about the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century there came a true revolution, in which Lutheranism and romanticism were fused by the hard experience of the Napoleonic invasion.
• 52Looking more closely, we see that the Lutheran separation of politics from private life, combined with the absolutist regime prevalent in Germany, opened three different paths for the development of collective morality. The first was that of indifference to practical politics, united with a lofty idealism in the realm of political ideas. There was a withdrawal from the harsh reality of the State that simply demanded obedience, and of the power of evil in the world, into the secret realm of ideas, into the development of personality apart from the State or even against it (Wilhelm von Humboldt), and into a cosmopolitanism of an abstract type, in which it was possible to move the more freely since there was no need to take account of the conflicts of the real world. To this extent the separation had the result of confining men entirely to the “inward” and leaving the “outward” to look after itself. It may fairly be said that this is the stage in which German political thinking remained on the whole in the age of the German classics. The second path forced itself upon the Germans when they were rudely recalled by the French Revolution and by Napoleon to political realities that could not be ignored. Under the influence of the Lutheran tradition men were then faced with the temptation to turn the distinction between the two spheres into a distinction between the standards to be applied. That brought the ill-famed Macchiavellianism that started in Germany about the turn of the century. But at the same moment there was already visible a third possibility. This was offered when this dualism between politics and private life was felt to be unsatisfactory, and men felt the desire to overcome it, but were too much under the influence of romanticist and organicistic thinking to be able to effect the transition to the natural humanist-Christian tradition. Instead of regarding society as proceeding from the individual, and collective from individual morality, the opposite path was taken of bringing politics into the private sphere, a course that was bound to end in the total State and in collectivism. Thus it was a contemporary of Fichte and Hegel, the muddle-headed romanticist Adam Müller, who advocated a State in which “private life is nothing else than national life regarded from below, and public life is in the last resort nothing but the same national life seen from above.” It was from this Adam Müller that, a century later, the Austrian sociologist Othmar Spann drew in order to seduce a large part of the students of the German Universities into a romanticist totalitarianism and nationalism. Now that the Germans have tried these three bypaths to which the traditional doctrine of the dualism between the sphere of politics and that of the individual leads, and have realized that the first is impracticable and the other two lead to disaster, there remains to them only the fourth alternative of at last returning to the highroad of the European tradition and, in the spirit of Christian and humanist principles, starting, in politics as elsewhere, from the individual and his personal moral code.
• 53Looking more closely, we see that the Lutheran separation of politics from private life, combined with the absolutist regime prevalent in Germany, opened three different paths for the development of collective morality. The first was that of indifference to practical politics, united with a lofty idealism in the realm of political ideas. There was a withdrawal from the harsh reality of the State that simply demanded obedience, and of the power of evil in the world, into the secret realm of ideas, into the development of personality apart from the State or even against it (Wilhelm von Humboldt), and into a cosmopolitanism of an abstract type, in which it was possible to move the more freely since there was no need to take account of the conflicts of the real world. To this extent the separation had the result of confining men entirely to the “inward” and leaving the “outward” to look after itself. It may fairly be said that this is the stage in which German political thinking remained on the whole in the age of the German classics. The second path forced itself upon the Germans when they were rudely recalled by the French Revolution and by Napoleon to political realities that could not be ignored. Under the influence of the Lutheran tradition men were then faced with the temptation to turn the distinction between the two spheres into a distinction between the standards to be applied. That brought the ill-famed Macchiavellianism that started in Germany about the turn of the century. But at the same moment there was already visible a third possibility. This was offered when this dualism between politics and private life was felt to be unsatisfactory, and men felt the desire to overcome it, but were too much under the influence of romanticist and organicistic thinking to be able to effect the transition to the natural humanist-Christian tradition. Instead of regarding society as proceeding from the individual, and collective from individual morality, the opposite path was taken of bringing politics into the private sphere, a course that was bound to end in the total State and in collectivism. Thus it was a contemporary of Fichte and Hegel, the muddle-headed romanticist Adam Müller, who advocated a State in which “private life is nothing else than national life regarded from below, and public life is in the last resort nothing but the same national life seen from above.” It was from this Adam Müller that, a century later, the Austrian sociologist Othmar Spann drew in order to seduce a large part of the students of the German Universities into a romanticist totalitarianism and nationalism. Now that the Germans have tried these three bypaths to which the traditional doctrine of the dualism between the sphere of politics and that of the individual leads, and have realized that the first is impracticable and the other two lead to disaster, there remains to them only the fourth alternative of at last returning to the highroad of the European tradition and, in the spirit of Christian and humanist principles, starting, in politics as elsewhere, from the individual and his personal moral code.
• 54What is particularly unfortunate is that the second and third lines of this political thinking are not in the least mutually exclusive. Just when they are combined, and Macchiavellianism is no longer advocated in opposition to an autonomous individual sphere but in the name of an organicist conception of society and State which attributes to the “State,” the “nation,” or the “people,” a life of its own over and above that of the individuals, and when the last vestiges of the individualist philosophy are sacrificed, even in the private sphere, to the collectivist philosophy—precisely then we are bound to get a formulation, without any reservation whatever, of the Macchiavellian philosophy of power. What that may lead to in the end has been shown by totalitarianism. Signs of this were to be felt in the period of the Napoleonic wars and in the Restoration period, and even in Fichte and Hegel, though less markedly than in Adam Müller; but even then we have not traced the ultimate sources of the collectivist social philosophy (the “realistic” as against the “nominahstic” philosophy of individualism, which had dominated the Western world since the days of scholasticism). We cannot enter into this matter here. We will only emphasize that such an organicistic and collectivist outlook is closely related to romanticist thought. The Lutheran, too, will be readily receptive of this conception of the State as a superorganism: once the antithesis between the State and individuals has been introduced, it is only a step to the doctrine that individuals are simply cells in the complex of society and State. Finally, we must on no account forget that it was the French Revolution that introduced to the European peoples, and especially to the particularly susceptible Germans, the doctrine of the collective nature of the “nation.” The fact that it spread the idea in the name of “liberty” can surprise only those who regard a dangerous collective morality as a monopoly of “reactionaries,” and who are unaware of the large number of democrats who at all times have been chauvinists and imperialists.
• 55Naturally Prussia, and before her Brandenburg, shared in the general German evolution whose fatal characteristics we have been considering. But in that country, which for centuries had an existence of its own outside the realm of the true German State and people, there came an evolution of its own in addition to all that it shared with the evolution of the rest of Germany. It is necessary fully to grasp this in order to understand that in spite of everything, Germany and Prussia—Weimar and Potsdam—are two different worlds. Over this individual Prussian evolution, official Prussian historiography has deliberately thrown a veil, so that to this day, outside the circle of the initiated, much too little is known about it; and without that knowledge we cannot understand the subsequent political, intellectual, economic, and social evolution of Germany in the nineteenth century, which mainly bears the Prussian stamp. Indeed, the difference between the nature of the Prussian and that of the German west of the Elbe is so marked that in most cases, to this day, it is easy to determine without asking whether a German belongs to the original Prussia or not. There is an elementary truth in the widespread view that Prussia has been the evil genius of Germany—incorporated especially in two personalities, Frederick II and Bismarck.
• 56From this dualism between Germany and the eastern territory there proceeded—and this again is of critical importance—a dualism in the agrarian system. In West and South agrarian history ran much the same course as in the rest of western Europe, a minority of peasants remaining entirely free, while the rest under the manorial system (Grundherrschaft) had the chance of gradually rising to be free peasants: in the East, in place of this system a large part of the peasantry was driven from the land, and there developed a system of Gutsherrschaft, under which great farming properties were run with the aid of serfs or bondsmen. In some cases this latter system assumed forms closely resembling the system of negro plantations, which appeared at about the same time in the West Indies. In the East the agrarian system was marked by the predominance of Rittergüter or baronial estates and by a social system in which a class of estate-owning nobles was served, with no extensive intermediate peasant class, by the mass of the “men,” that is to say, by landless and unfree farm-workers. In the West, in contrast with this, was a varied system under which peasants with farms of widely varying size and with every degree of personal or material freedom were found alongside landowners who confined themselves to small farms of their own, together with the type of the squire living on his rents, the very opposite of the skinflint, profiteering capitalist farmer.
• 57This great difference between the position of the ground landlord west of the Elbe and the junker east of the Elbe produced a great difference in human types, which were well aware of this difference and which were led by it into mutual dislike—the type of the generous, cultivated grand seigneur of the West, and the other type of the junker, the “monocled peasant,” who united the petty profit-seeking and the craftiness of the bad type of peasant with the arrogance and domineering spirit of the feudal lord. The character, indeed, of the Prussian junker—his aggressive style, his conceitedness, his lack of tact and of intuition, his grabbing at every small advantage, so painfully evident even in the private life of Bismarck or Hindenburg, his craftiness, and the rest must be held responsible for many things that have made Prussia and the Prussianized German so hated. It is no mere chance that the liberal reforms of the decayed state of Frederick II after the collapse of 1806 were carried through by a knight of the empire from Nassau (Stein), a Hanoverian noble (Hardenberg), the son of a Hanoverian peasant (Scharnhorst), and a Saxon officer (Gneisenau), and were sabotaged by the Prussian junkers.
• 58This great difference between the position of the ground landlord west of the Elbe and the junker east of the Elbe produced a great difference in human types, which were well aware of this difference and which were led by it into mutual dislike—the type of the generous, cultivated grand seigneur of the West, and the other type of the junker, the “monocled peasant,” who united the petty profit-seeking and the craftiness of the bad type of peasant with the arrogance and domineering spirit of the feudal lord. The character, indeed, of the Prussian junker—his aggressive style, his conceitedness, his lack of tact and of intuition, his grabbing at every small advantage, so painfully evident even in the private life of Bismarck or Hindenburg, his craftiness, and the rest must be held responsible for many things that have made Prussia and the Prussianized German so hated. It is no mere chance that the liberal reforms of the decayed state of Frederick II after the collapse of 1806 were carried through by a knight of the empire from Nassau (Stein), a Hanoverian noble (Hardenberg), the son of a Hanoverian peasant (Scharnhorst), and a Saxon officer (Gneisenau), and were sabotaged by the Prussian junkers.
• 59For these and various other reasons the Prussian State acquired a character that has not escaped the notice of any keen-sighted observer—the character of a thoroughly artificial State, not based on any common racial history but greedily gathered together, and held together only by monarchy, bureaucracy, army, and military prestige, a highly organised and mechanized State, without a soul, ruled in the harshest and most unimaginative way. It is the State of which Mirabeau said: “La Prusse n’est pas un pays qui a une armée, c’est une armée qui a un pays,” and Novalis: “No State has been administered more like a factory than Prussia since the death of Frederick William I.” Thus, as the model of mechanistic organization, this State has always had the sympathy of the rationalists, advocates of “scientism,” collectivists, and organization cranks of all countries, from the French Encyclopaedists, who were the best of propagandists for Frederick II, down to Professor Carr and other collectivists of our day.
• 60For these and various other reasons the Prussian State acquired a character that has not escaped the notice of any keen-sighted observer—the character of a thoroughly artificial State, not based on any common racial history but greedily gathered together, and held together only by monarchy, bureaucracy, army, and military prestige, a highly organised and mechanized State, without a soul, ruled in the harshest and most unimaginative way. It is the State of which Mirabeau said: “La Prusse n’est pas un pays qui a une armée, c’est une armée qui a un pays,” and Novalis: “No State has been administered more like a factory than Prussia since the death of Frederick William I.” Thus, as the model of mechanistic organization, this State has always had the sympathy of the rationalists, advocates of “scientism,” collectivists, and organization cranks of all countries, from the French Encyclopaedists, who were the best of propagandists for Frederick II, down to Professor Carr and other collectivists of our day.
• 61For these and various other reasons the Prussian State acquired a character that has not escaped the notice of any keen-sighted observer—the character of a thoroughly artificial State, not based on any common racial history but greedily gathered together, and held together only by monarchy, bureaucracy, army, and military prestige, a highly organised and mechanized State, without a soul, ruled in the harshest and most unimaginative way. It is the State of which Mirabeau said: “La Prusse n’est pas un pays qui a une armée, c’est une armée qui a un pays,” and Novalis: “No State has been administered more like a factory than Prussia since the death of Frederick William I.” Thus, as the model of mechanistic organization, this State has always had the sympathy of the rationalists, advocates of “scientism,” collectivists, and organization cranks of all countries, from the French Encyclopaedists, who were the best of propagandists for Frederick II, down to Professor Carr and other collectivists of our day.
• 62Outside Prussia absolutism and feudalism had generally been bad enough. Only too often they were unintelligent, petty, cruel, extravagant, and even contemptible; but they were scarcely ever of the Prussian daemonic consistency. The Prussian State was a machine of which it could not even be said that if it suited nobody else it was at least to the liking of the prince; it seemed, in fact to have taken charge, to be running for its own sake, and it was just this feature that was inhuman and uncanny. Here was a pure efficiency that had ceased to be simply the means to some sensible end, but instead was itself demanding the implicit obedience of which we have seen the social and intellectual origins. Hence the Prussian mania for organization, hence the much-praised thoroughness, even exceeding that of the rest of Germany; hence the mistrust of everything improvised, the hardness considered a duty and accordingly prized as a virtue, the dry prosiness, the parade of superiority to all “slacker” peoples, the humourlessness, and the fixed idea (philosophically sublimated in Kant’s “Ethics”) that duty demands the suppression of human feeling and that whatever a man does attains a higher worth if it is done “for its own sake.” Hence the sinister type of man who, perhaps entirely normal and even good-natured as an individual, at once becomes a marionette when the call comes to perform his functions in the well-oiled collective machine—a marionette capable of turning into a devil. Hence the German slave to duty and labour, raised to a power that later gave the economic life of all Germany the repellent character of sterile activity and of a fever for work that lost all account of any reasonable objective. The “frozen features,” the heel-clicking, the angular bowing, the convict’s hair-cut (“Mongol’s tuft”), the lack of natural grace—all these things, and many others, smack unquestionably of Prussia; and not a few of them were taken over by Nazism and further coarsened, with the exception of many good qualities of the Prussian and with the exception of the moral reservations that set fixed limits even to Prussian policy.