The German Question

THE 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.”1 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.”

No one, indeed, who studies the thousand years of the Germans’ history from Otto I down to Adolf Hitler, and who in our day has witnessed their physical, political, and moral suicide, can resist the feeling of being present at a tragedy such as the history of the world has never before seen, a true tragedy in which guilt and destiny have been interlinked. Other nations have known good and evil fortune, but when in all their political history have the Germans experienced genuine and lasting success in anything? Temperament, geographical situation, and historical inheritance have set difficulties enough in their path, but on top of that, all conceivable circumstances seem to have conspired again and again, whenever the Germans seemed at last to be reaching sound and stable conditions, to wreck the prospect at the very moment of approaching realization—be it the tragic cancer of the larynx that struck down Frederick III in 1888, or the fateful reconstruction of the President’s palace in the summer of 1932. That building operation brought Hindenburg to East Prussia, and so directly under the influence of the junkers then menaced by the “Osthilfe” scandal. Thus it prepared the way for his acceptance of Hider.

What 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.2 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.

Let 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.3

There is no intention here of making an urgent appeal for sympathy, still less of making any absurd attempt to alter in the least the world’s judgment concerning the unspeakable ideas and ideologies that carried Germany into the deepest abyss of her history and at the same time brought infinite misery upon all Europe. What we are concerned with, however, is one of the leading countries of the West, a country that has given mankind some of its greatest minds, an industrious and reliable nation, talented and endowed with not a few virtues, a nation whose culture is rooted in the same soil as that of the other European nations, whose language is one of our own languages, and of whose nationals we esteem many and love some. At the same time, we are concerned with a nation whose name, once standing so high, is today linked with atrocities that have turned a Breughel vision of Hell into appalling reality.

How in the world has this nation come to such an end? We wrote of “suicide,” and even in the case of the German nation, in spite of the terrible things it had to suffer, it is to be hoped that the term will remain no more than a metaphor; but how can this nation regain health and find the way back to its true self and to community with the West? What should be our own attitude, the attitude of the world outside Germany, to this nation after its terrible fall, what should be the attitude of those who but a little while ago trembled in face of its leaders and who were compelled, in infinite rage, to submit and to witness the submission of others to the worst things the mind of man can conceive? These are the questions to which we have to find a satisfactory answer, difficult as the task may be. They are questions that torment us so that we could say with Heinrich Heine:

Denk’ ich an Deutschland in der Nacht,

Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht—

“If in the night I think of Germany, I am robbed of my sleep.”

This German problem can scarcely be exceeded either in difficulty or in importance by any other problem of our day. Whether we will or no, the future of Europe depends on our succeeding at last after this war in attaining what three past generations have failed to attain, the peaceful reintegration of Germany in Europe, and with it the protection of Europe against Germany and of Germany against herself. We know that with a sick Germany in her midst Europe is doomed to final ruin, and nobody can ignore the fact that Europe cannot do without Germany if she is to maintain her place in the world.

The study, however, of the German problem, conceived in a broad historical and sociological sense, is scarcely less revealing in another respect. Not until we have grasped the fateful development of Germany since 1866 do we reach a full understanding of many symptoms of decay in the social, economic, and intellectual life of the West. Not until then is the full significance realised of the dangerous currents that are due, almost everywhere, either directly to German influence or to conditions similar to the German conditions. The investigation of the German problem means the study of the social and cultural crisis of the West in the special case of a nation that has fallen a victim to it in an almost unique way, and has become one of the worst sources of infection of the rest of the world. It means the setting up of a warning beacon for all; but our situation would be indeed desperate if we were to do this without any hope—hope for Germany as well as for the rest of the world.

________________

4Erich Eyck, Bismarck (Allen & Unwin)

5For 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.

6Since 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.”

• 1Erich Eyck, Bismarck (Allen & Unwin)
• 2For 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.
• 3Since 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.”
• 4THE 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.”
• 5What 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.
• 6Let 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.