Chapter 27

Not that Germany rejects, as regards other nations, every régime except that of hostility. Her aim is domination, the only rôle which suits the people of God. Now, to attain that, two means are offered to her. The first plainly is intimidation which must never flag. The feeble quickly become insolent if their feebleness is not recalled to them. Other nations must feel themselves constantly threatened with the worst catastrophes if they resist Germany. But it being well understood that Germany is the strongest, that she will never give up what she possesses, however unjustly, then bargains advantageous not only for herself but occasionally for the other party, may be the more direct and less onerous means than violence to attain her end. So Germany will be, by turns, or both at once, threatening and amiable. Amiability itself can be effective when it rests on hatred, contempt, and omnipotence.

Now power counts before all. Germany must possess armaments superior to those of all other nations. The reason is plain. The German Empire is a rock of peace, _der Hort des Friedens_. The force which it accumulates is directed toward imposing upon mankind the German peace, the divine peace. Since Germany represents peace, whoever opposes Germany intends war. Now it is legitimate that Germany should arm to the teeth because she is the incarnation of peace, but the adversaries of Germany, who, in opposing Germany oppose peace, cannot have the same right. It is the duty of Germany to carry her armaments to the maximum; other peoples have the right to arm only as Germany may permit.

Germany does not seek war. On the contrary, she tries by inspiring terror to render it impossible. But if some nation should profit or be capable of profiting by her love of peace to pretend to rights which offend her she will consent to punish that nation. She will be pained by the violence she has to do to that nation and the severity which she has to use toward the guilty. But soldier of God as she is, she cannot fail to her mission. Any nation which refuses to do the will of Germany proves by that very fact its cultural inferiority and becomes guilty. It must be chastised.

The method according to which Germany will make war is determined by these premises. War is a return to the state of nature. Germany yields to this temporary retrogression because she has to do with people of an inferior culture who must be taught a lesson, and must be spoken to in a language which they understand. Now a characteristic of a state of nature is that force reigns undisputed. In this very trait resides the sublime beauty of that state, its grandeur and its fecundity. Don't talk of that romantic chivalry which pretends in time of war to temper the violence of savage instincts by the intervention of feminine sensibility. War is war. _Krieg ist Krieg_. It isn't child's play, it isn't sport where it is necessary to blend barbarity and humanity so as to conciliate and humanize them. It is barbarity itself let loose as widely and fully as possible. This is not perversity. Man as man suffers in becoming barbarous, but the man who replaces God suppresses the feebleness of the creature. He submits himself to the mysterious and sublime law in virtue of which evil is by so much more beneficent as it is achieved with resolution and completeness. _Pecca fortiter._

*The Nature of War.*

The first article of the code of war is then the suppression of all sensibility, pity, humanity. The nature of war is to kill and destroy. The more it destroys and kills the sooner it comes to its ideal form. Moreover, it is at bottom more humane the more inhuman it is, because the very terrors which its excesses inspire shorten it and make it less murderous.

In the second place, war necessarily ignores moral laws. Respect for laws, treaties, conventions, loyalty, good faith, sentiment and honor, scruples, nobility of soul generosity--these are mere fetters. The God-people do not recognize them. It will then, without hesitation, violate the rights of neutrals if it is to its interest. It will use falsehood, perfidy, treachery. It will justify itself by futile pretexts in committing the most atrocious acts--bombardment of undefended cities, massacre of old men, women and children; barbarous torture, pillage and assassination; bestiality to women; organized incendiarism; methodical destruction of monuments which, by their history and their antiquity and by the admiration of the world, would seem to be inviolable. "I am told: I must avenge myself." This reason suffices. We are told that some inhabitant of one city or another has been wanting in respect toward one of our men. Therefore we must burn the city and show the inhabitants what we have. Definitively, our duty is to let loose the elementary energies of nature as far as possible to attain the maximum force and the maximum of result.

The effect should, moreover, be psychological as well as material. Actions which seem horrible to man and which spread terror are commendable means, because they break the spirit even if they have no value from a military point of view. Moreover, what offends common morality is conformed to transcendent morality. The mission of the Germans at war is to punish. They work Divine vengeance. They compel their enemies to expiate the crime of resisting them. After they have taken a city, if the enemy has the insolence to take it back, it is just that they shall sack that city if possible, killing its inhabitants and burning its finest monuments.

*Barbarity Multiplied by Science.*

Given this problem, how to let loose most widely the powers of evil, it is clear that a people of superior culture is better equipped than any other to resolve that problem. In fact, science, where it excels, can work destruction and evil with the very forces which nature employs only to create light, heat, life, and beauty. The God-people therefore unites the maximum of science to the maximum of barbarity. The formula of its action may be thus written: "Barbarity multiplied by science."

This is the last word of the famous doctrine of Germanism. Now the identity of the ultimate consequences of the doctrine and the features which the present war presents is evident. The problem which we undertook is, therefore, solved. If, contrary to all likelihood, barbarity co-exists with culture in the Germans; if in the present war it appears to be absolutely bound up in that culture, the reason is that German culture differs profoundly from what humanity understands by culture and civilization. Human civilization tries to humanize war. German culture tends indefinitely to increase its primitive brutality by science.

In everything the Germans must be unique--in their women, their God, their wine, their loyalty. The war which the Germans wage against us strikes the world with horror and terror, because it is in the full force of the term "the German way, _die deutsche Art_, the German war."

As the world recognizes this astonishing proposition it asks with anxiety, what may be its future relations to Germany? Knowingly and systematically, Germany opposes to all Hellenic, Christian, humane civilizations the devastating theory of the Huns. True, after the war she will claim that she has done nothing but conform, often with pain, to the conditions of ideal and divine war, and she will appear willing to pardon to her enemies the cruelties she has had to inflict upon them. Decidedly, the world will refuse to admire this horrible magnanimity which on the first impulse of resistance becomes savagery. Today the veil is torn away. German culture is shown to be a scientific barbarity. The world, which means in the future to rid itself of all despotism, will not compromise with the despotism of barbarity.

But what a disappointment and what a grief! Formerly, Germany was held to be a great nation. Its praises were sounded in many a land of solid and high culture. The German tradition once held other doctrines than those we have now seen devolop under the hands of Prussia. Germanism, as the Prussians formulate it, consists essentially in contempt for all other nations and in the pretension of domination. But Leibnitz--as highly esteemed in the Latin world as in the German--professed a philosophy which valued unity only under the form of harmony between free and autonomous forces. Leibnitz exalted the multiple, the diverse, the spontaneous. Between rival powers he sought to establish relations which would reconcile them without changing or diminishing the value or independence of any of them. Witness his effort at the reunion of the Catholic and Protestant Churches. After Leibnitz came Kant. He certainly was very much of a German. He owned, nevertheless, that he had learned from Rousseau to honor the common man who, not being a savant, possesses moral value far above the savant, who has no merit but science. And, starting from the principle that every person, so far as he is capable of moral value, is entitled to respect, he urged men to create not a universal and despotic monarchy but a republic of nations in which each should possess a free and independent personality.

This willingness to put liberty before unity, and respect and honor the dignity of other nations while at the same time serving its own, was not extinguished in Germany with Leibnitz and Kant. Permit me, my dear Director, on this subject to indulge in some personal reminiscences.

*Treitschke Versus Bluntschli.*

In January, 1869, I was sent to Heidelberg by the Minister of Public Instruction, Victor Duruy, to study the organization of German universities. Germany was for me the land of metaphysics, music, and poetry. I was greatly astonished to find that outside of the lecture courses the only thing discussed was the war which Prussia was about to make on France. Invited to a soirée, I heard it whispered behind me, _Vielleicht ist er ein französischer Spion_--"Perhaps he is a French spy." Such were the words as I caught them. At the beer garden a student seated himself near me. He said to me, "We are going to war with you. We shall take Alsace and Lorraine." That night I could see from my window, looking out on the Neckar, the students clad in their club costumes floating down the river on an illuminated raft singing the famous song in honor of Blücher, who "taught the Welches the way of the Germans." And at the university itself the lectures of Treitschke, attended by excited crowds, were heated harangues against the French, inciting to hatred and to war. Seeing that nothing was thought of but the preparation for war, I came back at the Easter vacation of 1869 convinced that hostilities would ensue. I returned to Heidelberg some time later and became acquainted with other persons, other centres of ideas. I understood then that opinion in Germany was divided between two opposite doctrines. The general aspiration was for the unity of Germany, but there was no agreement as to the way of conceiving and realizing this unity. The thesis of Treitschke was, _Freiheit durch Einheit_, "liberty through unity," that is to say, unity first, unity before all; liberty later, when circumstances should permit. And to realize at once this unity, which really was the only thing that mattered, the enrollment of all Germany under the command of Prussia for a war against France.

Now the formula of Treitschke was opposed by that of Bluntschli, _Einheit durch Freiheit_--"Unity through liberty." This doctrine, which counted at that time some eminent advocates, aimed first to safeguard the independence and unity of the German States and then to establish between them on that basis a federated union. And as it contemplated in the heart of Germany a union without hegemony, so it conceived of German unity as something to be realized without harm to other nations, and especially without harm to France. It was to be a free Germany in a free world.

Germany at that epoch was at the parting of the ways. Should she follow a tendency still living in many and noble minds or should she abandon it entirely, to march head down in the ways in which Prussia had entangled her? That was the question. The party of war, the party of unity as a means of attacking and despoiling France, the Prussian party, gained the day. And its success rendered its preponderance definitive. Since then those who have undertaken to remain faithful to an ideal of liberty and humanity have been annihilated.

Is it still possible that Germany may some day regain the parting of the ways where she was before 1870 and this time take the other road, the road of the Leibnitzes, the Kants, the Bluntschlis, which leads first to the liberty of individuals and of peoples and afterward--- and only afterward--a form of harmony where the rights of all are equally respected? A word of the Scotch professor, William Knight, comes back to my memory at this moment: "The best things have to die and be reborn." The Germany which the world respected and admired, the Germany of Leibnitz, appears indeed dead. Can it be reborn?

Accept, I beg, my dear Director, the assurance of my cordial devotion.

EMILE BOUTROUX.

*The German Religion of Duty*

*By Gabriele Reuter.*[B]

On various occasions in the past I have been reproached by my friends for not showing the proper spirit of patriotism.

I have merely smiled at their criticism, for it was my opinion that true patriotism does not consist of flowery speeches and assertions, but in the effort dutifully to accomplish that for which one is best qualified.

It seemed to me that I was truly showing my love for the Fatherland by writing my books to the best of my ability.

But the source of this reproach was very evident to me. The cause could be traced to a quality which I share with many of my compatriots. It must, in truth, be called a particularly characteristic trait. This is a very earnest desire for and love of justice, which is not satisfied simply to "recognize," but endeavors thoroughly to understand the material and spiritual points of view of the other nations in order to show them the proper appreciation.

It is natural to develop affection for that which one earnestly desires to understand.

Many Germans have had the experience that they have rather overzealously commenced by weighing the good of a foreign people in the balance with the good of their own, and with well-nigh fanatic honesty they have ended by acknowledging their own shortcomings compared to the merits and advantages of the foreign nation. There have been instances when some foreigner has drawn our attention to this or that particular weakness and immediately innumerable of my countrymen assented, saying, "Certainly it is true, the criticism is just, matters are probably even worse than they have been represented."

Many of us, and I acknowledge I am one of the many, have developed a form of ascetic mania for self-abasement, a desire for truth which knows no limits in the dissection of its own condition and the disclosure of social and personal shortcomings and disadvantages. This tendency may be easily discerned in much of the German literature of the past twenty years; also, in my books.

The individual is really always the symbol of the whole, and the thoughts and feelings of one person are but the expression of strong forces in national life and culture. It was not want of patriotism, but an unbounded love for the universality of European culture which drove us, drove many thousand people with German souls, to reach out over the boundaries of our own Fatherland for intellectual conquests, for permeation and coalescence with all the world's riches, goodness, and beauty.

We loved the others; and believing ourselves among friends we were candid and disclosed our weaknesses.

*Germans Trusted Too Well.*

We permitted criticism and criticised ourselves, because we were convinced that those others had our welfare at heart, and also because we were convinced that only by unsparing self-knowledge can the heights be scaled which lead to superior and more refined development. It is therefore probable that we ourselves have delivered the weapons into our enemies' hands.

Confiding and harmless as children, we were blind to the enigmatical hatred which has to an appalling extent developed all around us. This hate which has been nourished systematically and with satanic cleverness probably originated in a slight feeling of jealousy, and the tendency of my countrymen to criticise each other led our enemies to believe that they might look for internal discord in the Fatherland and that our humiliation could therefore be more easily accomplished.

If we had recognized the danger in time, we might have prevented this hatred, to which they at the beginning were hardly prone, from taking root in the souls of nations. But only very few among us were aware of it and they received little credence from the others. There were times when each one of us sensed the antipathy which we encountered beyond the boundary lines of our own country. But we never realized how deeply it had taken root and how widely it had spread. We loved our enemies! We loved this French nation for its high development of etiquette, language, and taste; a culture which seemed well adapted to serve as a complement to our own. How much misery France might have been spared had she but understood this unfortunate love of the German people for the "Hereditary Enemy!"

We loved the deep, mystically religious soul of the Russians in their anguished struggles for freedom! How many Germans have looked upon Tolstoy as a new savior!

Above all, though, the German admired the Englishman, in the rôle of the "royal merchant," the far-seeing colonizer, the master of the seas. Without envy Germany gave England credit for all these qualities. And when during the Boer war voices were raised to warn against the English character, even then to most of us our Anglo-Saxon cousin remained the "Gentleman beyond reproach."

Then there is the great German love for Holland, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries; here we may find the Germanic race less adulterated than in our own country. Scandinavian poets have become our poets and we are as proud of the works of the Swedish artist as we are of those of our people.

We gaze with delight upon the proud, blonde grace of the Norse maid; the more gentle and pliant manners of the Swedes and Danes arouse our admiration; and we dearly love their beautiful fjords and forests of beech and birch.

*Love Changed to Suspicion.*

Many of us wonder today how much of all this love we, in the days to come, will be able to rescue from the debris. "Has the world gone mad that it has ceased to believe in our sincerity?" This at present is the cry of many, many thousand German men and women. Do we deserve to have our love requited with hate? And to find in the countries which declare themselves neutral, distrust, reserve, and, in fact, doubt of our honest intentions? Sad, dull despair has taken possession of the hearts of our best men and women. It is not because they tremble for the fate of the loved ones who have been compelled to go to the front and not because there is any fear as to the outcome of this war. Not one among us doubts the ultimate triumph of Germany. We also know that we must pay a terrible toll for this victory with the blood of our sons, fathers and husbands.

Equally as much as they mourn the loss of our young manhood many of our best citizens deplore the hatred which has spread over the face of the globe, hate which has torn asunder what was believed to have been a firmly woven net of a common European culture. That which we with ardent souls have labored to create is being devastated by ruthless force.

The following story of the non-commissioned German officer is typical or symbolical of many. He, while the bullets of the inhabitants of Louvain fell around him, rescued the priceless old paintings from the burning Church of St. Peter, simply because he was an art-historian and knew and loved each of the masterpieces. And well we all understand the feelings which mastered him during those moments of horror.

He would probably think and say, "I have but done my duty."

And now we have arrived at the point which gives rise to the greatest amount of antipathy. Our opponents declare we are endowed with great ability--they say they must acknowledge that. But how can a race of stiff, dry, duty-performing beings awaken love? The German must lose all claim to individual freedom and independence of thought in consequence of the training which he receives. When he is a child he commences it in a military subordination in the school, he continues it in the barracks, and later, when he enters a vocational life, under the stern leadership of his superiors. He becomes, our critics continue, simply a disagreeable pedantic tool of the all-powerful "drill." This atmosphere of "drill," or in other words this stern hard military spirit, envelops him, accompanies him as guardian from the cradle to the grave, and makes of him an unbearable companion for all the more refined, gentle, and amiable nations. Yes, our opponents often declare that they are waging war not only against Germany, but against this pedantic, military, tyrannical sense of duty, which they call the "Prussian spirit." It shall once and for all, they assert, be eradicated from the world.

*A Religious Feeling of Duty.*

Far be it from me to deny that my country people, male and female, do indeed possess an unusually strong sense of duty. This is combined with a desire for justice which is so often looked upon by outsiders as a lack of patriotic pride, and with an honesty which easily makes the German appear so clumsy and awkward. These three characteristics belong indissolubly together and one is not to be thought of without the other. The spirit from which the German sense of duty arises is what the foreigner so often misunderstands in us. He generally confuses sense of duty with blind obedience. But this sense of duty does not originate from a need for submission or from a mental dependence. No, it rests on a deep philosophical reason and arises from the mental recognition of ethical and national necessity. That is why it can exist side by side with the most extreme individualism, which also belongs to the peculiarities of the character of our people. The Germans have always been a nation of thinkers. Not only the scholar, also the simple worker, the laborer, the modest mother take a deep pleasure in forming their philosophy of life and the world. Side by side with the loud triumph of our industry goes this quieter existence, which has been rather pushed into the background in the last decades, but has not, therefore, ceased to exist. And the further the belief in miracles stepped into the background, the more the belief in duty acquired a warm religious tinge. The loud complaints about the vanishing of the sense of duty among the young, which has so often been voiced by public opinion, only prove how strongly this ethical force was governing people's minds. Every seeming diminution of it was felt to be a disastrous endangerment of the knowledge of the people. We have perhaps acted childishly and foolishly toward other nations by too great confidence. But in the consciousness of the entire German Nation the ominous feeling was living and working with mighty power, that only if every one of us devotes his entire strength to the post assigned to him, and works until the exhaustion of his last mental and physical power, only then can we as a national whole retain our high level and, surrounded by dangers on all sides, create sufficient room for ourselves to breathe and live.

*The Military and the Socialists.*