The German Question

IT is only too understandable that the seed of hatred the Germans have sown under their National Socialist leadership should now shoot up, though it must be clear to anyone who thinks of the future that the world cannot indefinitely continue in the present state of passionate feeling. Once our initial anger has abated we shall be driven, if ever the fatal process is to be ended, to ask ourselves quietly however it could happen that in a great civilized nation all the forces of evil should be let loose, and what now is the just and sensible way of treating the Germans. The answer to this question, with justice to its highly complicated character, and to the need for laying bare the historical and psychological roots of National Socialism, no longer brooks of delay.

The question to which we have thus to find an answer is more than a mere question of National Socialism. It is the German Question, with which generations have been concerned in the past, and which has now faced the world in its latest and acutest form in the rise and the collapse of National Socialism. It is the enigma that the great nation in the centre of Europe has more and more become since Bismarck.

It is not likely that anyone will be prepared to boast of the possession of a completely satisfactory answer, and quite certainly nobody is entitled to claim sole possession of the true answer. The German question has many aspects, of which one will be seen more clearly by some and another by others with, in each case, quite possibly, vagueness in regard to other aspects or a complete misconception of them. Everyone should be ready to amplify or correct his views, and every honest and informed contribution deserves to be welcomed.

Much depends upon the distance from which the German problem is considered, and I think there is an optimum distance, not too little and not too great. Closest to the problem is the German living among his fellow-countrymen. If he is capable at all of forming any sort of objective judgment, there are many things he will know better than the rest of us, and he will be able to correct not a few misjudgments; but he is not far enough away to be able, with the best of goodwill, himself to gain a comprehensive view of the whole problem of his nation. “He who only knows his own country,” said Lichtenberg, “does not really know even that.”

The maximum distance, of course, is that of the foreigner. He has a sharp eye for some things the German misses, and he is able to consider the problem with the outsider’s freedom from much that obscures or distorts the closer view; but he has to purchase this advantage with the disadvantage of the lack of a particularly important source of illumination—self-questioning. Between these two points of view, not too close and not too far, stands the man who has lived long enough as a German among Germans to enjoy the German’s advantages, and long enough abroad to be able to enjoy the advantages of the foreign observer. He must, of course, take care to avoid two sources of error—that of the sentimental advocate, filled with nostalgia for the fields and woods of his youth, the advocate of men to whom he has become a stranger; and that of the renegade who tries to conceal his origin by wild outbursts of hatred. I have done my best, but I am myself well aware how little that is. I have tried to follow the example of the physician who examines a patient with scientific impartiality, whether he finds him attractive or not. Let us not forget that the patient at present in question has been suffering from a highly infectious disease.

WILHELM RÖPKE

Geneva, May 31st, 1945