The German Question

CHAPTER III GREATER PRUSSIA FROM BISMARCK TO HITLER

THE MEETING OF THE CURRENTS OF GERMAN AND PRUSSIAN HISTORY

IN the course of the nineteenth century the two historic currents we have been observing, the general German one and the specifically Prussian one, steadily approached each other, until in the critical years from 1864 to 1871 they united, with the Prussian predominating. In 1866 Germany ceased to exist, after a life of nearly a thousand years, and her place was taken by what can only be called a greater Prussia. It was this Greater Prussia that in the spring of 1945 came to a frightful end, an end that corresponded to its violent origin and its character.

In order to gain a secure point of departure for the considerations that follow, we must first become quite clear as to the exact significance of this transformation of Germany into Greater Prussia by the great magician Bismarck. This is the more necessary since all of us—inside and outside Germany, in the camp of her enemies no less than in that of her friends—are still, consciously or unconsciously, under the influence of Prussian-inspired historiography. This, thanks to the calibre of its chief representatives, but thanks also to a contemporary spirit so favourable to the Prussian ideology—the cult of the colossal, the worship of success, historical evolutionism, and the over-rating of purely material progress—has almost monopolized the forming of the general opinion. Everyone is still under its spell who speaks, even with reluctance, about the genius of Bismarck, and who regards the empire he created as the inevitable and unshakable product of history. This view overlooks the fact that Bismarck’s greatness consisted fundamentally, as today we clearly recognise, only in his ability how to master, both in home and in foreign policy, a hopelessly muddled situation of his own creation. The mastering of such a situation was a clever trick of a performer who had himself arranged conditions that added to its difficulties, but unfortunately the conditions remained, and, indeed, grew worse, while in the course of time the juggler had to go. Thus today we see Bismarck’s “greatness” as entirely relative, and we see all the more plainly the fatal work of this figure, who in the end, in his cynicism and nihilism, could do nothing but disintegrate and destroy, unlike the two really great statesmen of his time, Gladstone and Cavour. We have also to remember the parallelism between Bismarck and Frederick II, which lies not only in the similar character of their personalities and policies, but also in the fact that Frederick’s State, like Bismarck’s, had become a machine which only a genius could control.

When the admirers of the Bismarckian empire overlook this and fail to see the fatal weakness of Greater Prussia, they are mistaken not only about the person and the achievement of Bismarck. As a rule they know little of Germany’s pre-Prussian and extra-Prussian history, so that, in their ignorance of Germany’s real nature as a nation of nations, they are easily led to apply to that country the historical formula that fits the story of the other European peoples. In view of this it is not going too far to say that the history of Germany for the last two hundred years needs to be entirely rewritten.

We need today to be clear in our minds at last that Germany’s unification by Bismarck’s “blood and iron” policy of 1866-71 was a solution by force that pushed Germany in the form of Greater Prussia along the path which inevitably led past the stages of 1914,1933, and 1939 to the catastrophe of today, to disaster alike for Germany and for Europe. This shows the truth of what a farseeing and humane man, the great Hanoverian historian A. H. L. Heeren, wrote as long ago as 1817—that the preservation of the loose federative character of Germany was in the highest interest of Germany and of Europe, making that country a bulwark of European peace, while a centralized Germany, owing to its situation and its resources, would not long resist the temptation to strive for hegemony over Europe.1 These were thoughts which later Constantin Frantz, a writer who was an opponent of Bismarck and who has come back into honour today, adopted and elaborated. There were thus plenty of men who were under no illusions as to what a rigidly united Germany would mean for German freedom and for the peace of Europe.

In order to arrive at a correct judgment of Prussia’s “unification” of Germany, we must also remember that it was in strong contrast to that of Italy, which took place at the same time. Italian ‘unification was the outcome of a popular movement, democratic and liberal in character, at the head of which the House of Savoy had the good sense to place itself. German unification took place amid contempt and suppression of the democratic movement and by means of “blood and iron,” that is to say civil war, conquest, broken pledges, intimidation, flatteries, and bribery, by the ultimate hegemony of Prussia, and by the artificial whipping-up of German nationalism against France. Not all of Mazzini’s dreams were fulfilled, but Cavour represented the democratic and liberal tradition, while Bismarck stood for its opposite. Italy’s national flag is still that of Cavour and Garibaldi and of a monarchy whose origin is based on the assent of the Italian people, whereas there could be no question of any such assent in the case of the Hohenzollerns, and a German would be embarrassed if he has to say just what the German flag is. There is no German flag that symbolizes, in a way binding on all Germans, the unity of Germany, because there never has been a German unity, of really organic character, sanctioned by the will of the people.

Considering the German problem from another angle, we realize that the method by which Bismarck unified Germany was essentially the same as that chosen by Hitler in our day for his policy of “unifying” Europe—the method of the “blood and iron” policy of conquest and all the other evil means used. We need only recall how in 1866 Hanover or the free imperial city of Frankfurt was treated by Bismarck and his Generals, in order to see that the policy Bismarck pursued on the national plane was copied seventy years later on the international plane by Hitler. What sort of a “united” State was it, indeed, that Bismarck had brought into being by hook or by crook, not shrinking even from bribing the reluctant King Ludwig II of Bavaria with money stolen from another prince, King George V of Hanover?

In drawing these parallels between Bismarck and Hider we have in view, of course, only the similarity in principles: the difference in degree of brutality is as great as that between the persons of Bismarck and Hitler, or that between a still civilsed epoch and our own age of unashamed barbarism. This difference, together with the difference that what Bismarck united was, after all, the German people, explains why his success was considerably more lasting than Hitler’s. But we must also not forget that this success was only attained after the unparalleled cleverness—including, it is true, the cleverness in falsifying the famous Ems telegram—with which he had exploited the old grievance which the Germans had nursed against France ever since the wars of conquest of Louis XIV and of Napoleon, and which had flared up again during the nineteenth century. The very fact that Bismarck had to resort to this cynical means of arousing German nationalism against the French, shows plainly how artificial and how morally unsound were the foundations on which he built up German unity. Under that star the Reich was born, and under the same star it was bound in time to perish.

If Germany was to become a unitary State on the model of Britain, France, or Italy, there was probably no other method of making her so except this of force, for the simple reason that such a centralism was utterly opposed to the true federative character of the country, acquired through a thousand years of history, as a nation of nations. It is more than just an amusing hypothesis to picture all that would have happened if Queen Victoria had not unfortunately been a woman and so, under the Salic law, excluded in 1837 from succession to the throne of Hanover. It is more than probable that no Prussian statesman would then have been able to stand in the way of the forces that had worked for that loose federation of the German States for which Professor Heeren, with the vision of the true historian, had called. The immeasurable consequences of Queen Victoria’s sex—Pascal’s “le nez de Cléopâtre” !—cannot be undone, but even today it is not too late to proceed along the other path from that trodden after the separation of the crowns of Great Britain and Hanover and the arrival of Bismarck. It is the only path left, now that Bismarck’s has led into the abyss.

The unfortunate course of events shows us now, with cruel clarity, that Bismarck’s unification of Germany was a monstrous tour de force. It was a solution against the nature of things, and therefore no true solution. That should have been clearly recognized at the time, and there was no lack of men who had that clear vision, both within and without Germany. But scarcely anyone saw the artificial and truly revolutionary character of the Bismarckian policy sooner or more clearly than the French historian E. Lavisse, who as early as 1873 described the foundation of the empire as a revolution that had been “too rapid and factitious,” and who said of it: “Carried out by force and by trickery, it has abruptly broken with the historic traditions of Germany, encouraged the daring schemes of dreamers, and proved the efficacy of well-prepared surprise attacks.”2 It was indeed a revolution in the true sense of the word—a violent and abrupt breach of law and of organic evolution, which at a blow destroyed the traditional Germany and put in its place another Germany which, by its very origin, had been taught to place faith in speculative adventure and in the success of “well-prepared surprise attacks.”

All the means by which this Reich had to be kept alive corresponded with that violent origin, and so did the whole resulting atmosphere—the unceasing high tension of home and foreign policy, the autocratic method of government, the universal nervous strain, the growing social unrest, the stifling of democratic and liberal elements, the suppression of every marked personality in politics, the growth of Sociahlism and its ruthless persecution at times, the Kulturkampf, the use of every possible intoxicating drug, including the particularly dangerous anti-semitism; the scramble for colonies, the neurotic character of the foreign policy, particularly under the highly neuropathic William II, and the vicious circle of growing mistrust of Germany and correspondingly increasing German jumpiness and indiscretion, a vicious circle that ended in the first world war. But it was, above all, the forced character of the Reich that compelled its leaders to find a substitute to make good the lack of any natural German patriotism that could be taken for granted, an ersatz that made up in noisiness what it lacked in genuineness. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that all German history from Bismarck to Hitler was one long series of shouts of “Germany awake!’—but the more hysterical these shouts became, the more they proved that there was no real and genuine echo. From beginning to end there had to be a search for “hereditary enemies,” an agitation for a “place in the sun,” a flaunting of the bogey of “encirclement,” and the stimulation of a true persecution mania. It had been possible for Bismarck to keep more or less a cool head, but his successors grew more and more agitated until the peak of hysteria was reached under Hitler. Worst of all, the very soul of the Germans was seduced and the mentality developed which we may call the “Fridericus-Potsdam-Realpolitik” complex.

But had not the setting up of Prussian hegemony over Germany been, at least at the outset, an act of violence against the rest of the Germans?

Matters were not so simple as that, either in the case of the Bismarckian Reich or later in that of National Socialism. Seldom, indeed, does a conquest really succeed unless there either exists or quickly develops a certain inner preparedness of the conquered.

At this point we must remind our readers of the results to which we were led by our inquiry into Germany’s mental development, and we must mention once more the names of Fichte and Hegel, who may be taken as symbolic of the social philosophy of which we spoke. Before the seed here sown could produce its crop, naturally a considerable time had to pass. Their doctrines could spread only slowly, and above all there had first to be a serious reduction of the capital of the Christian and humanist tradition in Germany. Thus we can understand that it was only in the period from 1830 to 1850 that there came a manifest change that may be noted everywhere in the German mentality.3 Realism, materialism, and the new faith in strength and power increasingly supplanted the Christian and humanist conceptions that had been dominant even in Hegel, and produced a spirit which in its beginnings—as yet relatively mild—was plainly evident in certain individuals.4 Without this new spirit neither List nor Marx can be understood. Indeed, even so distinguished a writer as the historian Leopold von Ranke, with his unemotionality, his treatment of States as “individualities” following their own laws, his doctrine—poison for the Germans—of the “primacy of foreign policy,” and his unfortunate coquetting with the idea of the power of nations, stood, clearly at this turning-point from better to worse,5 especially after he had entered the service of the Prussian State. After this it is no longer surprising to find such a man as the historian Dahlmann, one of the “Seven of Göttingen,”6 declaring in the Frankfurt Assembly in St. Paul’s Church in 1849: “The path of power is the only one that will satisfy the ebullient urge to freedom—for it is not only of freedom that the German is thinking, it is mainly for the power he has hitherto failed to secure that he lusts.”

Let us make this process clear to ourselves in another way. When the Germans were abruptly torn out of the world of the eighteenth century by the French Revolution and by Napoleon, they learned from these events two main things—the impulse to freedom, and patriotism in the new sense of devotion to the “nation,” together with conscription, the will to use force in self-defence, and the determination to pay back rogues in their own coin. As regards this last, it should never be forgotten that scarcely any other country in Europe was worse treated by Napoleon than was Prussia. Thus it was precisely the progressive groups that arrived at a mixture of liberalism and nationalism in which sometimes the one and sometimes the other predominated. In addition to this the intellectual influences which we have analysed impregnated influential groups in all the German territories with the will to union and to a German State that should be free but also strong and united. Thus in these groups, which were by no means confined to Prussia, and, indeed, were rejected by the leading Prussians as “democratic,” the ideals of freedom and of the national State united, without it being possible to say whether the one or the other was the stronger. It was sincerely believed that the two ideals went together perfectly, indeed presupposed each other. How, then, did it happen that these Liberal Germans, when in the Revolution of 1848 their dream of unity in liberty dissolved into nothingness, proved ready to sacrifice liberty for unity, and so turned into the inglorious type who at the end of the century were called National Liberals? So far as intellectual influences have to be held responsible for this development, we have already given the answer. But other causes also played an important part. Even those who have no love for the materialist conception of history will have to agree in this case of the nineteenth century, the truly economic century, that economic motives bulked largely though not decisively in that development of the German middle class (to which we must certainly add for that period the working class). And it was just here that one more complication was reached in the destiny of Germany.

Now that the German middle class was aware of and beginning to make use of its economic powers, what was it bound to want most urgently of all? Undoubtedly the thing it most lacked—economic freedom, and, above all, liberation from the excise system which was becoming more and more intolerable, threatening, in view of Germany’s political fragmentation, to cripple all industrial and commercial progress. It was entirely natural that in this situation men should envisage larger political units, and look contemptuously upon the petty State with its Customs exactions, that they should see a. virtue in the simple extensiveness of a State’s territory, and should, long for a Germany made into one great Customs area by the throwing down of all internal barriers. This current of opinion most profited Prussia, as, after Austria, the most extensive of the German States; and it was reinforced by Prussian economic policy.

This is the place at which we must emphasize that in those first decades of the nineteenth century a part of the Prussian administration, influenced by the ideas of humanity and of liberalism, did not correspond in the least to the conceptions which, with good reason, we have generally associated with Prussia. We need only mention, in addition to the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg, the names of the brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, and add that the foundation at that time of Berlin University (1810), following the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt, provided what has justly been regarded to this day as an exemplar for all Universities of the German language. The Prussian school system, based on the ideas of Pestalozzi, also deserves honourable mention here.

To this ministerial bureaucracy, which is one of Prussia’s true titles, to fame and whose last representatives (e.g., Rudolph von Delbrück) date back to Bismarck’s early days, belonged the men under whom, in 1818, Prussia introduced the famous Customs tariff which, as one of virtual free trade, aroused the admiration of all Europe. As it was the first of its sort, we may fairly say that the era of international economic liberalism was introduced not by England in 1846 but by Prussia in 1818. Those Prussian officials were eager followers of Adam Smith, and it was in Prussia that his Free Trade programme was first carried into practice. That country set an example that was eagerly studied in England and brought great strength to the English Free Trade movement.

This Prussian epoch, which lasted from the Customs tariff of 1818 until Bismarck’s tariff of 1879, is that in which, through the Zollverein, Prussia became the leader along the path of economic liberation. Inevitably, this role made her for wide circles of the middle and working classes the symbol of economic progress, and won moral victories for her—under the aegis of Adam Smith!—in quarters that were anything but Prussophile.

If now we add to this the intellectual influences considered above, we have assembled the principal elements that produced the type of German Liberal who, if not enthusiastic for Prussia, was at least ready for compromise with her. It is that type of Liberal who united liberty and unity, even under Prussian leadership—united liberalism, nationalism, and even chauvinism with one another; that type of Liberal who was ready to go to Berlin if only his railways were built and his dream of a Germany united, no matter how, was fulfilled. We see figures like Karl Mathy (whose story was convincingly told in a biography by Gustav Frey tag), Hansemann, Harkort, or Friedrich List, and, on the highest plane, men like Ranke, Droysen, Dahlmann, Theodor Mommsen, or Gustav Freytag, who were followed later by such men as Max Weber, Friedrich Naumann, and Naumann’s followers the German Nationalsozialen. Some of them were men of the very best type, who then suddenly, when we probe to the bottom of their democratic and Liberal convictions, so often prove a bitter disappointment, men who for all their culture seem to have had a bad conscience in clinging so to the old-fashioned and rather ridiculous idea of liberty, and who felt that they must find an excuse for it as the means of attaining national power and international status.

We must not overestimate the economic factor. But certainly this more attractive Prussia not only of the Humboldts, of the Biedermeier style, and of Berlin romanticism, but also of the Zollverein, the Delbrücks, and the railways, contributed substantially to reconciling the non-Prussian to the idea of making a trial, as a pis-aller, of a union under Prussian command, and of regarding Prussia as an agent of power and progress and—the thing that mattered in those days—of “evolution”; especially as Austria was then passing through the most reactionary phase of her history. Hence the offer of the imperial crown to King Frederick William IV, who in his romantic and un-Prussian way so well suited that Prussian epoch; and hence the evident turning away from “particularism,” that is to say from a rejection of Prussia which was supposed to have become out of date. Hence, probably, also the speed with which eminent men in Hanover reconciled themselves to the annexation of 1866, among them Rudolf von Bennigsen, later the leader of the National Liberals—though it must be pointed out with no less emphasis that Windthorst, Bismarck’s great parliamentary opponent, was also a Hanoverian. We certainly must not forget that at the University of Göttingen in 1837 seven professors jeopardized their positions and their homes in order to bear witness to the right against an evil despot; but where were the other professors of Göttingen? Did they not behave as wretchedly to the dismissed professors as so many of our former colleagues did to us in 1933 when at Hitler’s instance we were dismissed for loyalty to our convictions? And how would the Seven of Göttingen themselves have behaved in 1866?

It was just the working of fate that this lucid interval of Prussia’s from 1818 to 1879 had contributed so largely to making Germany ready to accept Prussian hegemony. The one and only time when Prussia had shown such attractive qualities came, to Germany’s misfortune, to an end. It had served only to make Bismarck’s success more certain; and his success ended that Prussia and began a new epoch in which the country returned to the bad old tradition. As we have just been speaking mainly of economic policy, we may point out that our statement is applicable just as much to this, since after the Bismarckian tariff of 1879 Prussia resumed Frederick the Second’s policy of mercantilism, autarkism, and State intervention in industry. After Germany had been won by force and fraud and seduction for Greater Prussia, Bismarck was able to go on his way undisturbed, and in economic policy also, as we shall see, this was a course that contributed extraordinarily to the Prussification of Germany, though it was the direct opposite of the former Liberal course.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE GERMAN INTO THE BLSMARCKIAN EMPIRE

The similarity between Germany’s conquest by Prussia and her later conquest by National Socialism leaps to the eye. In the years before the Third Reich Germany’s power of resistance had been greatly weakened, but effective mastery over her nevertheless required Hitler’s “blood and iron” policy, a coup d’état, the Reichstag fire, the Terror, and an infernal system of propaganda. We must keep this latest experience in mind if we are fully to understand the overwhelming of Germany by Bismarck’s Prussia. It is true, as we saw, that Germany had developed in a way that had increasingly weakened her resistance to Prussian hegemony and was bound greatly to facilitate Bismarck’s policy. But Germany and Prussia were still so wide apart that Prussia’s hegemony had to be imposed on the Germans by force and fraud. For such a policy Germany was least of all prepared. As in 1933, the last critical stage of the conquest of power had to be achieved against the will of the conquered with “blood and iron,” and, as we will add once more, also with craft and lying.

All we have said about Germany’s internal development in no way alters the fact that until the Bismarckian empire we were still in the old and true Germany, a Germany to which in spite of everything one cannot refuse sympathy, and which would certainly have become a healthy and useful member of the European family of nations had not an evil genius appeared on the scene, as a hundred years earlier in the person of Frederick II and a hundred years later in that of Hitler.

In order to give as vivid an impression as possible of this old Germany, we will choose two voices only out of countless others. Both are taken from the year of the abortive revolution of 1848. In that year the Liberal Prussian Alexander von Humboldt wrote:

“So far as specially concerns Germany, she appears, with her many centres of culture and her lack of a political capital, to be penetrated the most thoroughly among the Germanic nations by the anti-Roman principles of decentralization, wherein she is related to ancient Greece and modern Italy. The problem she has to solve is manifest—to fuse the two elements of culture and policy, without injuring either, instead of neglecting policy as hitherto to strive only after general culture.”7

After this Liberal Prussian we will let a non-Prussian speak, and we choose a pronouncement that comes to us from the solid middle class. We take one of the revolutionary newspapers of 1848—the Allgemeine Hannoversche Zeitung (Nienburg a.d. Weser) of May 10th, 1848—and here, in an article on “Die rechte Freiheit und das freie Recht,” which in view of its content and its admirable form would deserve to be quoted in full, we find these passages:

“What, then, is the just freedom? That is the just freedom which rests on the eternal pillars ‘Law and Order,’ which is in alliance with virtue, with justice, and with truth, which sacrifices nothing to ambition and avarice, and which respects the eternal values more than the perishable ones. May such, above all, be our political freedom. May such be also our religious freedom. May such, finally, be scientific freedom. If in this way the banner of the just freedom waves in front of us, then the victory of the free justice will have been achieved, of the free justice that recognizes no difference of status, of faith, of knowledge. Between justice and freedom there is an eternal alliance, which no one may infringe unpunished. Pernicious is the policy that for the sake of profit undermines freedom, whether it may egoistically serve the interest of the mighty, or be benevolently concerned for the welfare of peoples. Equally pernicious, however, is the policy that despises justice, even though it imagines that it finds its support in the will of the peoples. Only continual attention to this alliance between justice and freedom preserves us from the errors of Macchiavellianism as well as from those of Communism; it preserves us from the tutelage of the police systems of governments as well as from the tyranny of tumultous popular assemblies; from the arrogance of obsolete learning as well as from the foolhardiness of immature theories.”

This is political wisdom such as could not have been better formulated by a Burke, wisdom which to this day we may take to heart—and so long ago it was formulated in a tiny German townlet.

It would be cruel to draw no distinction between the new Germany, Greater Prussia, and that old Germany, which right up to the beginning of Bismarck’s triumphs had stood firm against all attacks. How robust the old Germany was, we may see from the fact that it took a considerable time after the foundation of the Bismarckian empire for the older Germany to overcome its distaste, its doubts, and its discomfort. It required the overwhelming victory over France to change the antipathy that was very widely felt against Bismarck, if not into liking, at least into admiration, and the first years of the empire still produced many witnesses to the anxiety with which the best of the nation were filled. Even a man like Gustav Freytag, who had done so much to make the new regime popular, thought at first that he saw cracks in the edifice of the empire that were warnings of early collapse, and even in 1881 he declared that Germany would have to surfer a long time from the fact that for fifteen years the political strength of the nation had been personified in one man.8

After the great Gründerkrise (promotion crisis) of 1873, and in view of all the rottenness it had revealed, dissatisfaction took very drastic forms in some cases. One of the noble thinkers of the old Germany, Wilhelm Raabe, wrote in his novel Christoph Pechlin:

“The heroes’ wounds had not yet healed, the tears of children and mothers, of wives and sweethearts and sisters had not yet dried, the grass had not grown on the graves of the fallen—but already, so soon after the dreadful war and the difficult victory, all was going very strangely in Germany. Just as after a great fire a cask of syrup bursts in a street and the mob and the youngsters start licking it up; so the moneybag had broken open, and the thalers rolled in the gutters, and only too many hands reached after them. It almost seemed as if this was the greatest gain the united Fatherland could rake up from its great achievement in world history!” And he closed his remarks with the well-known passage—“It has always been a privilege of decent people in disturbed times to keep to themselves, rather than prudently shout with the crowd as rogues among rogues.”

The same feeling is expressed in Spielhagen’s novel with the characteristic title Was will das werden? (“What is to come of it?”) (1886). Spielhagen later, in 1895, expressed a very harsh but justified judgment on Bismarck. Among other things he declared that the men of that time had failed in very many important respects to come up to the ideal he had formed of the German people. Instead of asking how anybody stood with regard to Bismarck, it must be asked how he stood in relation to Christ, that is to say to the gospel of the brotherhood of man. He believed, he said, in that gospel with all his heart, and he also believed that those who did not recognize it would sooner or later be delivered up to destruction.

A new generation had to take the place of the old, and much else had to happen in Germany, before these last scruples were entirely overcome and the old Black-Red-Gold standard of liberal humanitarianism was supplanted by the Black-White-Red of Greater Prussian realism and nationalism. But how was it that this German transformation, this Prussianization of Germany, could take place?

To make this process fully intelligible, we should have to write the intellectual history of a whole period, and to show how the German transformation proves to be a part of the great transformation of the West. It would be necessary to describe at length the using up of the cultural heritage of the past, to write at length of positivism, materialism, the dissolution of values and standards, of scientism, relativism, utilitarianism, and much else. But we must limit ourselves—as we can do with a good conscience, since we have treated of these things elsewhere—9 and we will therefore simply mention a few points characteristic of the German evolution.

We have to remember to begin with that the influence of an outstanding personality on a people may be of critical importance for a long time. In point of fact, Bismarck so impressed his stamp on the German and his mental make-up that it is extraordinarily difficult to efface its traces. The German with whom we have had to do since Bismarck can, indeed, be described as the “Bismarckian German.”

It was incomprehensible and unpardonable that people should have been led astray by that historic crook Adolf Hitler, who under other circumstances would have become simply a work-shy common criminal, perhaps a matrimonial swindler, or would have travelled from fair to fair with a glib tongue and a case of anatomical curiosities. It is comprehensible and pardonable to succumb to the spell of a Frederick II or a Napoleon. It is not entirely incomprehensible and not entirely unpardonable that Bismarck’s contemporaries should have found it difficult to keep free from the influence of his personality. It was Germany’s misfortune that he was a Mephistopheles of parts with charm and genuine power, who in lucid moments even had the rare gift of moderation; and to this day it is not easy for us to persuade ourselves that in spite of everything he was a Mephistopheles. On top of this, there were very talented writers and orators in his service to win over the German people to his personality and his achievements and to bring them into an almost Messianic frame of mind. A Frenchman who has to be reckoned with very seriously has said, and he may have been right, that Bismarck’s policy would have been impossible without men like Sybel and Freytag—and, we may add, Treitschke.10

We have also to bear in mind that while more and more non-Prussians modelled themselves on Prussian ideas, they had fallen victim to the fascination exercised always and everywhere, and quite especially in that age of materialism, by success and competence. There were, indeed, not a few foreigners who for the same reason became admirers of Bismarck and of the new empire, to say nothing of the many Austrians who were not deterred from their cult of Bismarck either by the old memory of Frederick’s attack on Maria Theresa or by the new one at Königgrätz or by the obligations implicit in the high level of Austrian civilzation. The worst product of that pernicious seduction was later to be Hider.

In addition to this, these influences established themselves on the basis of a true revolution in the structure of German society, a revolution which in the course of the nineteenth century was carried farther in Germany than in any other country. It has not been unjustly remarked that in the half-century after the revolution of 1848 social conditions and the mental and moral foundations in Germany changed more than in the preceding ten centuries;11 and the reason is to be sought primarily in the rapid industrialization and commercialization and in the accompanying urbanization, proletarization, and mass-formation.12

I have written at length concerning these morbid sociological processes, common to all countries, in my works Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart and Civitas humana, and I will confine myself to a few points that explain why Germany was very gravely affected by those processes. We may mention first the suddenness with which she was wrested from her traditions; indeed, America offers the only examples of mushroom growth of towns and industries such as took place in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. Now, we mentioned earlier that the men and women who became proletarians in these towns and industrial districts had largely come from the Prussian regions in which the emancipation of the peasants had produced a rural proletariat. But after this, undoubtedly, the critical element in proletarization and mass-formation in Germany was an increase in population of remarkable pace and dimensions, an increase which, however, was unique in its effects because it took place in a nation which was already making a radical breach in the continuity of its political, mental and moral, and economic evolution. If, indeed, we ask ourselves where anything remained of the Germany of Goethe, the Humboldts, and the Grimms, or of the Germany that spoke to us just now from that small-town Hanoverian newspaper of 1848, one of the various answers is that Germany was inundated by countless millions of incomers who arrived too quickly and in too great number to be culturally assimilated13. Germany became the victim of a barbarian invasion from within the nation’s own borders. In addition to this, finally, Prussia, by the levelling and centralizing effect of her administration, of universal military service, of education, and of the judicial system, contributed powerfully to the process of mass-formation and of Prussification.14

Finally, the Prussification of Germany was greatly furthered by the manner in which the evolution into a modern industrial State took place in Germany. We refer to the plain fact that what we may call German “capitalism” developed actually under Prussian leadership and under the dominance of Prussian economic conceptions. This German “capitalism” was not one of the Marxist pattern, but the historically unique and, we may fairly say, dismally distorted form in which the modern industrial system developed on German soil in a Greater Prussian empire—an environment that- had been created by policy and not by any immutable economic law.15 In other words, Berlin became really the centre, because it was becoming increasingly the meeting-point of the threads of an economic system under which the Germans were growing rich, powerful, and numerous. Not only was it natural that the new human type in trade and industry, versatile and more and more under materialistic influences, should quickly adjust itself to the dominant power, but the new gigantic superstructure of modern German industry was built up under an economic policy largely inspired and carried out by Prussia. And this economic policy, strongly interventionist, subventionist, and monopolistic, was so contrived that the business success of the individual depended more and more on whether or not he knew the right strings to pull in Berlin.

The actual deep dividing line came in 1879, when Germany passed from Free Trade to Protection and Bismarck began, with cynical openness, to turn the whole of home politics into a struggle between “pressure groups” and to transform the old ideological parties into parties representing interests. It was the year in which the conditions were first created for the growth of cartels and syndicates, of the neo-German monopoly capitalism and the imperialism bound up with it. Thus that year became one of the pregnant years of modern history, in the economic sphere and far beyond it.16

Thanks to this neo-Prussian economic policy, and thanks also to the unexampled increase in population, there began now the colossal growth of industry, of transport, of the great towns, of the great stores, of the industrial districts; of the mass parties, of State care for mass welfare; of monopolies, trade union federations, and banks—and the old Germany began to disappear and to give place to a Greater Prussia drunk with success, while the influence of non-Prussian traditions and institutions grew weaker and weaker, desperately though some of them fought for existence. In this thoroughly materialistic period the temptation was almost irresistible to grow rich and participate in the so-called progress, giving up the traditional ways of thought for the new German smartness. That this was a selling of one’s soul was scarcely noticed, much less felt to be any great objection.

The Prussian conception of economic life made its way, and now, in the new historic school,17 there was introduced even the economic theory which, under Schmoller’s despotic leadership (he was a Swabian as Hegel had been), went out from Berlin to monopolize the Universities and to train the bureaucracy which at the beginning of the century had learnt from Adam Smith. Even the peasants of western and southern Germany, so far as they did not remain loyal to their regional or religious organizations, joined the Bund der Landwirte (farmers’ union) and, from a short-sighted view of their interests, accepted the leadership of the Prussian landowners.

This Greater Prussian economic system meant not only State intervention in industry, monopohes, subsidies, and political control of economic affairs, but also hierarchical organization and centralization.

Berlin became the magnetic pole of German economic life; here the threads that bound together industry and politics were concentrated more and more; here the great associations had their syndics and their central offices, and no less so the trade union organizations, which in rigidity of construction were in no way behind those of the employers; here, too, the whole German credit system was soon centralized, especially after the concentration of the German banking system had progressively destroyed the valuable old tradition of the regional banks.

The disastrous consequences of this development are almost immeasurable. We have already seen that it does much to explain the Prussification of Germany since Bismarck. A further result of it was the unhealthy expansion of the heavy industry, both in the Rhineland and Westphalia and in Upper Silesia, on its monopolist, subsidized basis; with its strongly feudal character, it became a pillar of Prussianism and a seat of disastrous political influence, in which it shared with the Prussian junkers. Cartels and syndicates became, as it were, steps to throne and altar, and anyone who spoke disrespectfully of them showed great courage, which might cost him his social position. Such courage was rare in Germany, where monopolies, like all else, had always been accepted with the submission of dutiful subjects.

But if we probe to the very bottom we find that the world is indebted to this evolution of the Bismarckian empire not only for the prototype of monopoly-and-proletariat capitalism, and for the ideal, which since has everywhere become so seductive, of rigidly organized industry, but also for something quite different—organized Socialism as a mass movement, led by men whose only quarrel with such an economic system was that other men sat at the desks from which the commands go out, a Socialism to which men shut out from responsible leadership in political and economic life and embittered by violent class hostility gave the special character of an uncompromising mass faith. It is true that the fundamental idea and the name of Socialism come from France; but it is far too little remembered that in its modern political form it is essentially a specific product of German intellectual and social history.18

This explains not only why it was a German intellectual, Karl Marx, and a German manufacturer, Friedrich Engels, that founded modern Socialism, but also why to this day Germans have always taken so prominent a part in the Socialist movement in other countries. Many things have contributed to this—the intellectual effects of German philosophy; the pronounced proletarization and mass-formation in Germany; the sharp class distinctions inherited from feudalism and absolutism, especially in Prussia; the great increase in population; the exclusion of intellectuals from participation in healthy public life; the provocative character of the Greater Prussian economic system; the lack of tradition in the new German realm; and Germany’s leading position in the later intellectual currents of positivism, evolutionism, materialism, and historism.19 Finally, there was the circumstance that, for reasons peculiar to Germany, the Social Democracy of that country became the political refuge of people who originally were radical Liberals and Democrats and would have remained so in other countries, but in Germany, after the Liberal parties had made their peace with the new Reich, had become politically homeless.20 These recruits made the new Socialist doctrine their economic programme, without realizing in the slightest that it was incurably inconsistent with the Liberal and democratic political programme.

The tragic thing was that very few of those who became Socialists by way of protest against Greater Prussia had any inkling of the extent to which Prussianism was actually an element of Socialism, when that doctrine was freed from its democratic-liberal husk, revealing as kernel the faith in organization, in the collectivity, in the all-powerful State. How far it is possible today to go along this road if the troublesome vestiges of liberalism are shuffled off, is shown by the Social Democrats who became forerunners of Nazism, such as Paul Lensch, Johannes Plenge, or August Winnig, the former Marxist Sombart, and, equally with these, the Fascists, Nazis, and Communists of our day. In the stock on which all these are grafted are to be found not only Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte but also the Prussian kings, Hegel, Fichte, and all the rest of the creators of the Prussian spirit and the Prussian State; and that stock is the stock of modern Socialism in all its variations.21

Thus we see that Germany in the form of Greater Prussia has endowed the world on top of all else with ideologies, conceptions, and institutions in which she appears to be triumphing over her conquerors, and this at a moment when she herself would perhaps like to turn away from them as the causes of her destruction. One needs, indeed, to have lived in Germany in order to scent today almost everywhere the neo-German aroma.

The great question of our time is whether it will allow its mental, political, economic, and social development to come under the influence of countries that have been pushed along this path solely by a unique pathology of their social history. These countries are Germany and Russia, both gigantic world craters that are dropping their scoriae on all countries. So far, however, as Germany is concerned, it should be clear that anyone who tried to solve the German problem with the recipe of the necessarily centralist collectivism would only be proceeding along the path which for three generations has been leading her people to destruction. It would mean trying to cure her with the poison that has been engendered in her thoroughly morbid frame in the course of her history, the main stages of which we have here passed in survey.

THE FINAL STAGES

We have not to tell here the history of Germany from Bismarck to Hitler. Our task is to seek the underlying causes that explain its tragic ultimate course. We are not concerned, therefore, with Bismarck’s personality, in many respects so fascinating, but only with the seed he sowed. No matter how great a man he may—like Napoleon—have been, the results of his work were fateful, as with Napoleon. Their full dimensions can only be seen today, and only a German can fully assess them. And what applies to Bismarck applies also to all other effective forces in recent German history.

It would also be entirely to misunderstand us if the absurd and ill-judged purpose were attributed to us of representing Germany as the only black sheep in a flock of exemplary European peoples. On the contrary we must summon the courage to declare with the utmost emphasis, at the present moment when world opinion may be little inclined to accept the hard fact, that until 1914 Germany had no reason to be particularly ashamed of her record in comparison with other nations.

All peoples have reason in very truth to beat their breasts and to confess that they “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Every nation of today—especially every Great Power—has had at some time in the past a period of ruthless power policy, England in the age of colonial domination, of imperialism, of oppression of Ireland, and of jingoism; France under Richelieu, Louis XIV, and Napoleon; the United States at the time of negro slavery and in the incessant wars against the Indians; Turkey under the Osmanli; Russia almost throughout her history—and even such exemplary countries as Holland and Sweden have to look back on the dark chapters of the early Netherlands colonial history and the Swedish great-power policy from Gustavus Adolphus to Charles XII. None of the great nations came into existence through spontaneous generation or parthenogenesis, none by any other means than war and violence and diplomatic intrigue. The very fact that until toward the end of the nineteenth century there was neither a centralized German State nor an Italy among the Great Powers proves that until then those two countries were in the main victims of European great-power politics. It would be an injustice to consider the last phases of the history of these two countries without reference to the earlier phases during which they were not hammer but anvil.

If we are to examine Germany’s case with the relentless candour brought to bear in this book, let us follow the good maxim of the Gospel (Matthew vii, 5): “First cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” The best way to serve the common cause of all of us is for each nation ruthlessly to examine its own case. But, that done, it is not only our right, but, in the service of the truth and justice at which we have aimed, actually our duty to issue a warning against any sort of pharisaism on the part of other nations, and to permit no distortion of perspectives. As there is a danger today that few other people will venture to say it, let us say it ourselves: Neither do the Germans possess all the vices and the other peoples all the virtues, nor is it true that the Germans have been, not simply of late, but at all times, disturbers of the peace of an otherwise peaceful and respectable family of peoples. For centuries the relation between Germany and the other nations was much more the other way round. The Germans are hardly likely to forget the Thirty Years War, in which their country was trampled down as the arena of the European Powers, nor the wars of conquest of Louis XIV and the devastation of the Palatinate, nor Napoleon’s invasion. In Frederick II’s cynical policy of conquest we see one of the most baneful events of German and of European history, but nobody can claim that it was something unique, and the admiration its author aroused all over Europe at the time does not suggest that it was then felt everywhere to be in any way unique. And we can only repeat here that the course pursued by the Germans for the past hundred years, first in theory and later in practice—the course we have criticized so unsparingly—cannot be understood without the profound effects which the French invasion at the beginning of the nineteenth century had on Germany.

Now that with these remarks we have brought the scales of justice into equilibrium, we may say all the more frankly that since Bismarck’s time the Germans have pursued a fatally wrong course, and we can follow that course down to the black day in German history when the incompetent tinter of picture postcards from Braunau am Inn, Adolf Hitler, became Chancellor of the realm founded by Bismarck. We are now also entitled to say that the Germans cannot excuse themselves by claiming that in what they have done from Bismarck to Hitler they have really only followed the example set them by other peoples. The centralized unitary State, created for power politics, was the very thing that was utterly in conflict with the nature of Germany. It had therefore, to be brought into existence with a violence corresponding to the strength of the resistance to it, a violence that made this Germany really a disturber of the peace of Europe, against which in the end the universal revulsion of peoples and the might of their governments ultimately united.

The Germans had every reason to ask themselves whether this growing feeling that was assembling all the world against them did not point to causes they must seek in themselves. They would have been able to find one of these causes in the fact that the Greater Prussian power policy, based on universal military service, which had enforced German unity, implied a real menace to Europe. Long before Bismarck, Prussia had been the first among the powers to take conscription seriously and unceasingly to add to her military strength. Then, when through military predominance she had attained her aims in the wars of 1864 to 1870-71 and overwhelmed both the German Confederation and France, she took, in the brutal annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, a step beyond all remedy.

Greater Prussia imagined that in these provinces she could recover what Louis XIV had taken, but she forgot that in the intervening two hundred years nations had become living units aware of their unity, and that it was no longer possible to tear a limb from them without leaving an incurable wound. She did not realize that her policy had become a provocative anachronism. What other Powers had done in the past was now in truth no longer permissible to Germany—not only because it was in conflict with her nature and her situation, but also because it was opposed to the spirit of the time, a time that might with some justice have quoted Molière—

Nous vivons sous un règne et sommes dans un temps,
Où par la violence on fait mal ses affaires.

In this the Bismarckian empire set an example which the other Powers were compelled to follow, and the outcome was the “armed peace” out of the tensions of which came in the end the first world war. Germany had really been the pacemaker along the path of evil, not only because she had been the first to enter it, but also because she had become the predominant Power on the Continent, and because her acts, her gestures, and her spirit were bound to give the impression that she fully intended to make relentless use of her strength.

In those gestures and in that spirit of the new empire the Germans might, indeed, have been able to find another cause for the ever-increasing unity of the world’s judgment upon their country. It would lead us too far afield to mention here the many gestures which were bound to startle the world, and to make clear what was inevitably read into the speeches of William II and the German attitude at the Hague peace conference, to mention these two features alone. Almost of more importance was the spirit that spoke in these gestures and had become more and more the spirit of the Prussianized German himself, so much so that we have to see in William II not so much a leader of Germany like Bismarck as her representative.

We know already what spirit this was. It was the spirit of a nationalism, in which justified pride in the nation’s achievements was mixed with an almost morbid conceit, a spirit to which Frederick II, Potsdam, and Bismarck seemed the most genuine symbols of German greatness, and which glorified Macchiavellianism in the guise of the Realpolitik by which such store was set. Under the influence of this spirit more and more Germans came to regard the Bismarckian realm as the true fulfilment of the old mystical dream of empire symbolized by the saga of the sleeping Barbarossa in the Kyffhäuser, and to regard it as the embodiment of power and fame, without troubling any more about its artificial construction or the doubtful morality of its origin. When later, as we saw, so many of the German intellectuals took up a most unheroic attitude toward National Socialism (at all events in its beginnings), with fateful consequences, this attitude was certainly determined by the nationalist and militarist programme of the Third Reich and the exceedingly clever propaganda with which it appealed to the “Fridencus-Potsdam-Realpolitik” complex of those elements. The repulsive farce with which the newly-elected Reichstag was opened in March, 1933, in the garrison church at Potsdam was calculated with an uncanny sureness of aim to enrol that spirit of Greater Prussia in the service of the Third Reich. It was an unsurpassable symbol of the alliance entered into by Nazism with the Bismarckian empire, its traditions, and its leading groups, an alliance that formed the bridge by which it attained power.

It could not but be plain to anyone who was not blinded by Germany’s astonishing material progress under Bismarck and William II, that that spirit was a heinous aberration and a betrayal not only of the eternal values of our civilization but also of the best German traditions, which had retained their vitality far into the Bismarckian period. How long these traditions had survived may be shown by a small instance. At Christmas, 1917, the University of Göttingen sent to its students in the field a collection of sayings of the greatest scholars of its famous history, entitled “Voices from two hundred years of the Georgia Augusta University” (Stimmen aus zwei Jahrhunderten der Georgia Augusta). As an introduction to the collection there was an anonymous French poem on Albrecht von Haller, famed because—

D’écouter la nature il fit sa loi suprême;

Il soumit le savoir à cette autorité;

Il sut chez l’ ennemi chérir la verité

Et haïr l’erreur chez lui-même—

“He made it his supreme law to listen to nature; He submitted knowledge to that authority; He knew how to cherish truth in the enemy, And to hate error in himself.” These last stirrings of a noble German soul did nothing, indeed, to disprove the general trend of the time, but only show the opportunities that had been thrown away. For more than fifty years men had had to wait with growing impatience for a true “German awakening.” The longer such hopes were disappointed, the more certain it became that Germany was heading for a catastrophe. When the catastrophe came, in August, 1914, it dragged down Germany and Europe into the abyss.

After Germany’s defeat and the collapse of her political system in November, 1918, it seemed for a while as if the neo-German spirit had at last received the coup de grâce it needed and had given place to the “repentance and rebirth” for which the philosopher Max Scheler called at the time. When we now recall that period, we feel that there were then precious and irrevocable months in which all was ready for such a conversion of the Germans. It would lead us too far afield to explain at length why that opportunity was missed. The essential reason was that both in Germany and in the victor States there were but few far-seeing men familiar with the German problem who realized the necessity of accompanying Germany’s moral revolution with a political and an economic and social one. It was not enough just to transfer the National Assembly to Weimar in order to substitute the spirit of that classic spot for the “spirit of Potsdam,” and all the fine phrases of the Weimar Constitution were doomed to remain mere words so long as two other things that would attack the root of the German problem remained undone. These two indispensable conditions were a political and an economic and social revolution, with the common purpose of making an end of the Greater Prussian Reich and of the forces that were its support, and of putting in its place a new Germany liberated from the hegemony of Prussia and from the pernicious influence of the Prussian junkers and the heavy industries. The political revolution would have consisted in the thrusting of Prussia back to the Elbe and the restoration of a true federation of the autonomous States, Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Hesse, the Rhineland, Westphalia, Hanover, Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, and Saxony, that is to say in the creation of a German confederation such as would have developed after 1866 but for Prussia’s policy of force. The economic and social revolution would have had two purposes. One would have been to carry out in the Prussian territories a radical agrarian reform breaking up the great estates and putting peasant farms in their place. The other purpose would have been to end the economic and political dominance of the heavy industries, and this would have been done best and most securely by abolishing the Customs duties on iron and steel, which would have resulted in the collapse of the cartels in the heavy industries and the reduction of the latter to economically sound dimensions.

Why nothing of the sort happened, why instead, after a few months of anxiety, Prussia, the junkers, and the heavy industries emerged actually strengthened from the general collapse, is incomprehensible. This was the beginning of all the evils that followed. It was the neglect of these steps that ultimately wrecked the Weimar Republic and produced the Third Reich. The Prussian junkers had managed to emerge unscathed from Prussia’s defeat in 1806, and had even made use of the agrarian reform of Stein and Hardenberg to strengthen their own position and largely to eliminate the independent peasantry; and similarly after the defeat in 1918—which once more had been a defeat of their own policy—they succeeded in maintaining and further strengthening their privileged position. Meanwhile they had found apt pupils in the heavy industries.

As for the political revolution, it went no further than a few well-meant but ineffective articles of the new Constitution. In actual fact the centralization of Germany, directed from Berlin, was not loosened but intensified in a way of which neither Bismarck nor William II had dared to dream. The Hohenzollerns went, but the Prussian officers and government officials remained, and the Socialist Ministers of Prussia defended the hegemony of their country with all the stubbornness of their predecessors. Such movements for independence as were actively promoted in Hanover and in the Rhineland were proscribed and suppressed by every available means.

Only now, thanks to centralization in finance, in transport, in military administration, and in many other fields, did Germany become a real unitary State, and owing to an incomprehensible confusion of minds it was in the very circles that called themselves progressive that the greatest satisfaction was felt. To complete this confusion, the Bavarians, in their struggle against the centralist unitary State and the hegemony of Prussia, a struggle serving an entirely sound end, temporarily turned their sympathies to circles in which they saw allies because those circles were opposing the progressives with a reactionary Prussianism of the worst sort. It was a true tragedy of errors that in Munich, thanks to encouragement from these reactionary circles, Nazism was able to strike its first roots—Nazism, the revolutionary movement which was later to carry Prussianism and centralism to extreme lengths. Thus Munich, whose political climate is utterly opposed to Nazi totalitarianism and collectivism, had to bear after that tragic mistake the disgrace of being described by the Nazis as “Capital of the movement,” until, through the bloody suppression in 1943 of the revolt of its University against Nazism, this city earned the name of “Capital of the counter-movement.”

If we seek to establish the responsibility for these incomprehensible errors and omissions, through which, after the collapse of 1918, the moral, political, and economic-social revolution was frustrated and turned into its very opposite, we shall be unable to avoid casting severe blame on the parties then dominant, and first of all on the Social Democracy, which was in no way mentally prepared for the task suddenly thrust upon it. The idea of the political revolution as we have defined it was naturally remote from their centralistic thinking, but even for the economic revolution they had as a whole no understanding. Influential Social Democratic leaders opposed the transformation of the great estates in Prussia into peasant holdings, because under the Marxist programme they regarded this as a “retrograde step.” Finally, there emerged from the ranks of the Social Democracy men who, like Baade, the Reich Grain Commissioner (who in the past had belonged to the extreme Left), drove to the highest pitch the traditional Prussian policy of a protective tariff on grain for the benefit of the great landowners, and so actually shielded the Prussian junkers from the impact of the international economic crisis.

The Cabinets dominated by the Social Democrats in the first critical months and years of the Republic completely failed also in the other aim of breaking the economic and political power of the heavy industries. The Marxist programme forbade them to adopt the very effective Liberal expedient of abolishing the Customs duties on iron and steel, and on the other hand they were justifiably unable to decide on complete nationalization of the heavy industries; thus they went no further than a few half-measures, which very soon proved to be mere facades behind which the industrialists were able to develop their strong position all the more undisturbed. The responsibility of the Social Democrats for all these errors and omissions was shared by the other leading parties, the Centre and the Democrats, and by a large part of the officials of the Ministries, whose influence had only grown stronger. The beneficiaries were the classes who represented the tradition of the Bismarckian empire, and the parties that defended their views and interests.

As if it was not enough that the needed political and economic-social revolution had not come, and not enough, further, that the elements which these two revolutions should have broken had actually been strengthened, the governments of the Weimar Republic, in their weakness and perplexity, now permitted the further frightful misfortune of inflation. This it was in reality that so radically ploughed up Germany that the seed of National Socialism could thrive. One needs to have been living in Berlin at the time, and to have studied the German financial and currency policy at close quarters, to realize how helplessly the responsible authorities faced the deluge of notes. Meanwhile the middle class lost everything and was driven into the arms of the nationalist parties, while immense wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of inflation profiteers of the stamp of Hugo Stinnes.

But this very inflation is a reminder to us that it would be unjust to remember the errors of the Germans and forget those of the victors. These, too, were immense and today incomprehensible; as they were the errors of the actual arbiters of Germany’s destiny, and were made by men who were not suffering like the Germans from the perplexities of defeat and collapse, they were, indeed, the more unpardonable. We must assume today that the victors had no clear conception of the actual nature of the German problem, still less of its solution. They showed virtually no interest in a true political and socio-economic revolution in Germany; by the fluctuations of their Reparations policy they made it difficult to pursue a reasonable financial and currency policy in Germany; they failed to offer any sort of encouragement to the new democratic Government—and then they wondered why there was no moral revolution.22 There now developed the vicious circle of a harsh policy on the part of the victors and a continual stiffening of German public opinion. When the path of reconciliation was then entered under Stresemann, it was too late. The old Prussian spirit had been strengthened, and all the belated concessions now made served only to encourage it. Many drew the despairing inference that the Germans were incurable, instead of asking themselves where they themselves had gone wrong. There is a great danger that the consequences of the errors and omissions of that time may lead to their repetition today.

We now understand why there was no moral revolution in Germany after 1918. The poison of nationalism was not got rid of, but under the influence of defeat, collapse, and economic and social upheavals, was only propagated further. The very serious readiness for a searching self-examination that existed after November, 1918, was quickly dissipated and reduced to impotence in face of the opposite determination to return all the more defiantly to the old spirit. Truth-defying claims like the legend of “the stab in the back” and the theory of the “war guilt lie,” rejecting all German responsibility for the world war, soon began to have such influence on the ideas of the Germans that the nationalist parties and later National Socialism had an easy game. Very soon it was impossible for any German historian to venture any longer to express disapproval even of the unnecessary harshness of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, the infringement of Belgian neutrality, or the vandal destruction perpetrated by the Germans during their retreats in France. We may even suspect that none of those scholars any longer dreamed of such criticism. Thus there formed between the German historians and their foreign colleagues a barrier across which a few polite words might be shouted now and then, but no agreement was any longer possible about the crucial questions of contemporary history. While almost all other nations began to consider their power policy of the past with critical objectivity, German history became more and more a mythology, the questioning of whose sanctified traditions was godless blasphemy.

To those whose outlook is influenced by the materialist conception of history it is natural to regard the economic and social upheavals in Germany, and in particular the great crisis of 1929-33 with its mass unemployment, as the decisive causes of the rise of National Socialism. This doctrine is as one-sided as it is dangerous. Undoubtedly the inflation and the economic crisis played an important part in making the Germans susceptible to the bacillus of Nazism, but what was of critical importance was their mental and moral outlook. When the trade depression of 1929 reached Germany, the consequences were no more formidable than in other industrial countries, and certainly no more so than in the United States. Only when the unforgettable Reichstag elections of September, 1930, suddenly made the Nazis one of the strongest parties, and, together with the simultaneous swelling of the Communist vote, revealed the pressing danger of the extremest radicalism and nihilism, only when these two parties, the Nazis and the Communists, crippled the political machinery of the Reich and menaced the ultimate foundations of State and society and of world trade—only then did the storm of the crisis become a hurricane. Confidence was now utterly wrecked, and so everything became precarious—enterprise, foreign credits, the German currency, and the sensitive mechanism of the German credit system. Only then did the economic situation become really desperate, following the radicalization of the masses which had shaken the foundations of ordered economic life.

Thus we may fairly say that it was largely Nazism itself that so exacerbated the German economic crisis that it was easy for the Nazis to handle the victims of their hysteria, the unemployed, the uprooted intellectuals, the debt-ridden farmers, and that they also won over the hesitant when later, by the high-handed means of their rearmament policy—called the “full employment” policy—they made an end of unemployment. But that hysteria was the consequence of a malady of the German soul, the long antecedents of which we have here sketched.

 

________________

23A. H. L. Heeren, Historische Werke, 1817, II, pp. 423 sqq.

24Kevue des deux mondes, September 15 th, 1873 (reprinted in E. Lavisse, Etudes sur VAllemagne imperiale, Paris, 1888, p. 160).

25Friedrich Albert Lange, in his famous Geschichte des Materialismus (1866), regards the year 1830 as the turning point. About that time (Revue des deux mondes, 1831) the French philosopher Edgar Quinet wrote: “What we now see in Germany is the ruin of the intelligence . . . that impotence of consciences, that moral void, that decadence of the true intelligence in Europe.” It should be remembered, too, how at that time the representatives of “Young Germany” revolted against the dead Goethe and his humanity (Heine, W. Menzel, Börne, and others). Similarly, Jacob Burckhardt remarked that after 1830 the world degenerated. Cf. K. Lowith, Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, Zurich, 1941.

26Cf. my book Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart (4th edition, Erlenbach-Zurich, 1943, p. 93), where I have dealt at length with the figure of Friedrich List from the point of view of “historic interference.”

27Werner Kaegi, “Geschichtswissenschaft und Staat in der Zeit Rankes,” Schweiber Beiträge zur Allgemeinen Geschichte, vol. I, pp. 168 sqq.; Fr. Schnabel, Deutsche Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert, vol. 3, Freiburg i. Br. 1934, pp. 94 sqq.

28The Göttinger Sieben—the seven professors of the University of Göttingen (the brothers Grimm, Niebuhr, Dahlmann, and others) who were deprived of their chairs and expelled from Hanover in 1837 because they had refused to accept the high-handed abrogation of the Constitution by the new king, Ernest Augustus, Queen Victoria’s “wicked uncle.”

29Briefwechsel und Gespräche Alexander von Humboldts mit einem jungen Freunde, Berlin, 1861, p. 10.

30For these details we have relied on the admirable and generous labour of the French Germanist J. Dresch, in Le roman social en Allemagne (1850-1900), Paris, 1913.

31W. Röpke, Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart; W. Röpke, Civitas humana. Cf. E. R. Curtius, Deutscher Geist in Gefahr, Stuttgart, 1932, pp. 86 sqq., which also draws attention to the tragic fact of the immense part played by Jewish writers (beginning with Marx) in a development whose ultimate consequences produced so appalling a catastrophe for Jewry.

32Ernest Denis, La fondation de l’Empire Allemand, Paris, 1906, p. 133.

33E. Denis, op. cit., p. 226.

34Mass-formation (Vermassung)—the development of a mass-civilization: a sociological process by which the structure of society is dissolved into a mass of individuals whose coherence is merely mechanical or, at times, hysterical: the formation of mass society. See Röpke, Civitas humana.

35This view is expressed with some exaggeration but interestingly in: Marcel Dutheil, La population allemande, les variations du phénomène démographique, leur influence sur la civilisation occidentale, Paris, 1937. This writer takes no account of the fact that the German increase in population, which, indeed, is entirely comparable with the British increase, produced the far-reaching effects he mentions only in association with other factors of which we have spoken.

36Even before the founding of the Empire, the Munich historian W. H. Riehl wrote in his book Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft (6th edition, Stuttgart, 1866, p. 163): “Prussia is the German power that for two centuries represented most definitely the modern fact of political centralization, and so, without wishing it or realizing it, paved the way for the social centralization which is now growing in so daemonic a form.” An early diagnosis of mass-formation and a forecast of its political consequences is to be found in Bruno Bauer, Russtand und das Germanentum, 1853.

37Here as on many other points we find ourselves in agreement with Edmond Vermeil, Germany’s Three Reichs (London, 1944), pp. 220 sqq. A really serviceable economic and social history of Germany in the nineteenth century, written with the perspectives of today, does not yet exist. Among the best available are still: Henri Lichtenberger, L’UAllemagne moderne, Paris, 1907, and Henri Hauser, Les mèthodes allemandes d’expansion économique, Paris, 1915.

38This has been recognized with keen insight especially from the Socialist side, for instance by R. Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital, Vienna, 1910, and Paul Lensch, Drei Jahre Weltrevolution, Berlin, 1917. Cf. also my own book, German Commercial Policy, London, 1934, pp. 24 sqq.

39That school in economics which depreciated economic theory in favour of mere description of the economic institutions and their historical development (like Ashley in England). Its head was Professor Schmoller, at the University of Berlin. Its teaching was that there were really no economic laws which a benevolent government had to respect in its economic and social policy.

40At the very outset of the Bismarckian empire, such keen observers as E. Lavisse (Revue des deux mondes, September 15th, 1873) and L. Bamberger (Die Arbeiterfrage, 1873) were in agreement on this point.

41The general philosophy according to which the key to the understanding of any institution is to study its history and to relate it to its historical setting. There are famous books on it by E. Troeltsch and F. Meinecke. Cf. also Hayek, Scientism, etc., loc. cit.

42The best example of this is no less a man than August Bebel himself (E. Eyck, Bismarck, vol. 2, Erlenbach-Zurich, 1943, p. 304). Cf. also F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, London, 1944, pp. 124 sqq.; W. Röpke, Internationale Ordnung, Erlenbach-Zurich, 1945, pp. 12 sqq.

43Cf. Hayek, op. cit., pp. 124 sqq. With the same view and in particularly interesting perspective, J. Rivière, L’Allemand, Paris, 1918, pp. 232-3.

44Cf. L. Peltier, La Guerre de 50 ans, Geneva, 1944.

• 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.
• 23Erich Eyck, Bismarck (Allen & Unwin)
• 24For 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.
• 25Since 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.”
• 26Jacob Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, new impression, Basle, 1942, p. 144.
• 27Benjamin Constant, op. cit., p. 39 of the fourth edition (Paris, 1814).
• 28Benjamin Constant, op. cit. p. 58.
• 29We 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.
• 30A 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.
• 31Among 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.
• 32Cf. also F. A. Hayek, op. cit., pp. 230 sqq.
• 33In this I am able still to rely on a study I published in 1935—“Fascist Economics,” Economica, February, 1935.
• 34See, 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.
• 35The 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.
• 36Cf. the special chapter X of the book by F. A. Hayek already mentioned, The Road to Serfdom.
• 37But 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?
• 38But 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?
• 39This 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.
• 40For 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”).
• 41It 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,”
• 42At 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.
• 43Looking 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.
• 44Looking 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.