The Future of Germany
THE following observations upon the course which the inner development of Germany is likely to take when peace has been restored are not mere daydreams. They are based upon the concrete evidence of popular movements and public discussions now going on in Germany. The fundamental thought running through all these discussions is: The war has given us a new Germany; let us see to it that this new Germany be brought to its full realization in the days to come.
I
Whatever one’s view may be about the underlying causes of the war, only ignorance or hatred can deny that the German people, in waging it, have presented a spectacle of consummate devotion and self-surrender. At its very outbreak, all petty class prejudices, all sectional jealousies, all sectarian rivalry, all industrial antagonisms seemed to be swept away. In a supreme moment the whole nation actually felt itself as one, ready to sacrifice everything for the maintenance of its common ideals.
The most striking manifestation of this suddenly awakened new national consciousness was the well-known declaration of the Socialist party in the Reichstag on August 4, 1914, that it would vote unanimously for the warcredit asked for by the Government. Less well known, but probably still more significant, is the part taken in the war organization by the Socialist trade-unions throughout the Empire. The trade-unions had had in the months before the war particularly galling evidence of governmental ill-will; repeated efforts had been made to stamp them as political organizations and thereby place them under stricter police surveillance. They had fully made up their minds that with the declaration of martial law at the beginning of the war they would be dissolved. But instead of dissolving them, the Government, immediately after the granting of the warcredit, turned to the trade-unions for help and coöperation, and the unions, without a moment’s hesitation, placed themselves at the service of the Government. They passed a vote that, during the war, contributions to strike funds be stopped, which was tantamount to the discontinuance of strikes during the war. They utilized their employment agencies for furnishing laborers for the gathering of the harvest, so vital to the national sustenance. They turned their coöperative societies — huge organizations which in the years before the war had been strictly confined to party membership — into centres for the distribution of food among the whole population. Persistently and methodically they employed their powerful and widely diffused party press to inspire their members, both at home and in the field, with the imperative necessity of standing together with the other parties in this crucial hour. In close collaboration with the government authorities, they worked out constructive plans for the care of the dependents of the men in the field and for the employment of soldiers who had returned disabled.
In short, there is no doubt that the magnificent subordination of all individual forces to the one great need of the Fatherland, which has enabled Germany to withstand victoriously the onset of nearly the whole world, including the supplying of enormous quantities of ammunition and other war material to her enemies by neutral America — there is no doubt that this wonderful economic mobilization for national defense rests to a large extent upon the vast system of Socialist party organizations, voluntarily and unstintedly devoting themselves to the common cause. It is needless to add that all the other parties and classes have not remained behind the German workmen in this self-sacrificing devotion.
What is the outlook which this extraordinary exhibition of a common national will opens up for Germany’s future? This is the main question which I shall try to answer. In doing so, I take it for granted that the war will not end with Germany’s political and economic destruction. For even if, as seems happily improbable, the German arms should finally be overwhelmed by numbers and money, the German spirit will remain, and will press on toward the working out of national conditions worthy of a people that has stood so marvelously this unparalleled test of public efficiency and virtue.
It is not to be supposed that after the war German public life will be held together by the same undivided concentration of purpose that now dominates everything. The old party struggles will reawaken, the old class interests will reassert themselves, perhaps more vigorously than before. For it is certain that the millions who have fought this war will return from the years in trenches and submarines and aeroplanes with a heightened sense of the rights of citizenship, and of what is the people’s due. On the other hand, every war—successful or otherwise—has a tendency to increase the demands of the advocates of militarism and of class rule. Serious clashes of opinion, therefore, between liberals and conservatives, progressives and reactionaries, socialists and capitalists, appear inevitable in the near future. What may confidently be hoped for is that this party struggle of the future will not have the same virulence and bitterness that it so often had in the Germany before the war; that, on the contrary, all parties will recognize one another as fellow servants of a common cause, differing from each other only in ways and means, not in ultimate aims and ideals, and therefore mutually inclined to reasonable compromises.
Perhaps the most hopeful augury of the future is that even now, in the midst of the war and in the joyous consciousness of the undivided allegiance of the whole people to its supreme task, the best men of all parties clearly recognize that, if a new and better Germany is to arise from the fearful cataclysm of these days, there is need of unsparing self-scrutiny on all sides and of unshrinking determination to make the noble enthusiasm of the moment a permanent power for reform and readjustment of the very foundations of German life. I may be permitted to say that a recent letter from a friend of mine gives me the assurance — if such assurance were needed — that no one in Germany feels this more deeply and earnestly than the man who in this war has been to all his subjects a shining example of real greatness of character, William II. My friend had spent an evening alone with the Emperor at the front, and he writes that all evening the Emperor talked, ardently and full of hope, of the reconstructed, ennobled, spiritualized Germany of the future.
II
Probably no German institution seems so little in need of improvement as the German army. That the army is a truly popular institution and not something foisted upon the people by autocratic caprice, was once more demonstrated, and with particular emphasis, when in August, 1914, two million volunteers offered themselves for service by the side of the regular reserves and the men then under the colors. The army is, indeed, one of the principal training-schools of national manhood and public devotion, and a living demonstration of the equality of all classes before the fundamental demand of the country’s self-preservation. It will remain so. For, unfortunately, there is little hope that after the war there will be less need of military preparedness. On the contrary, whatever may be the outcome of the present conflict, it will leave for many years to come such a vast accumulation of hatred, jealousy, and mutual fear among all European nations that any grouping of powers for the maintenance of peace will have to rely on the full military strength of each of its members. Germany, in particular, as the main butt of all these fears and hatreds, will agree to a reduction of armament only if she receives adequate pledges that disarmament will not be used as a weapon to cripple her permanently. And it is hard to see how such pledges can be given.
Under these circumstances, all that a German patriot and a friend of peace can hope for is that the army will become in a still fuller measure of reality what in principle it is now: the people in arms. Whether a complete reorganization after the pattern of the Swiss militia system — such as the Socialists have for years been advocating — would be compatible with fullest efficiency, is a question I do not feel competent to answer. But that the reform must and will be in the direction of greater democratization of the army, cannot reasonably be doubted. Let us frankly admit it: in the Germany before the war there was too wide a gap between the soldier, particularly the officer, and the civilian. The officer, particularly of the junior lieutenant grade, had come to look upon himself as a sacrosanct being whose social status must be kept inviolate from contact with ordinary mortals. The exclusive jurisdiction of military courts in cases involving both civilians and soldiers had led to flagrant miscarriages of justice and striking infringements upon civil rights. The virtual exclusion of Jews and of any person suspected of Socialism, or even of Radicalism, from holding officers’ commissions could not fail to arouse widespread indignation among right-minded people and to estrange them from a system that tolerated such intolerance.
All these evils have been swept aside by the comradeship of the war. And they will not be allowed to return after the war. Legislative steps will be taken to make their return impossible. The future German army will have room for any capable officer of whatever racial extraction and of whatever political creed. And the whole army will feel itself, not apart from the civilian population or superior to it, but identical with it and serving on the same level with any other organized body of public utility or public production.
III
The second change of vital importance which is likely to be brought about by this war affects the relation between government and parliament. Much has been written about the supposed ineffectiveness of the parliamentary system in Germany, often without due consideration of what has actually been achieved by this system. It seems to me undeniable that the German system of a government standing above a great variety of parties and working through constantly shifting compromises with ah the parties, has on the whole been very effective. It has, on the one hand, secured continuity and sustained vision of governmental policy, and on the other hand it has forced the government to steer a middle course between the conflicting interests of the different parties, thereby doing its part toward the harmonizing of these conflicts and the giving ‘to each his own.’
But thus far, the final conclusion from this method of non-partisan government has not been drawn: the conclusion that all the great parliamentary parties, including the Socialist party, must be represented in the ministry. This inevitable demand for a genuine coalition ministry will, I am confident, be fulfilled after the war. It will not do to exclude from a seat in the ministry a party which in the moment of supreme national need has demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt its unswerving loyalty to the country— which indeed, considering its numerical strength, its unmatched organization, and its hold upon the most intelligent part of t he large masses, may be said to have saved Germany in the most portentous hour of her history. This assumption by a Socialist party leader of a seat in the government, by the side of representatives of the Conservative, Libera], and Centrist parties, will be the crowning symbol of that complete unity into which Germany has been welded by the war; it will be a tacit acknowledgment that the Socialists have accepted the monarchy; it will rob German parliamentary life of the fierce and unprofitable party passion which has embittered it so often in the past.
And with this there will come a revision of the electoral laws and regulations, with regard both to the Reichstag and to the legislatures of the individual states. As to the Reichstag, the long-deferred redistribution of electoral districts, taking at last into account the enormous growth of the city population, so inadequately represented on the basis of the present distribution, has become an imperative necessity, and will surely be instituted as soon as peace has come. As is well known, the suffrage for most of the state legislatures is different from that for the Reichstag. Whereas the Reichstag is elected on the basis of universal manhood suffrage, the suffrage for most of the state legislatures, particularly the two most important ones, the Prussian and the Saxon, is hemmed in by unreasonable and obsolete property gradations and restrictions. As a matter of fact, the legislative record of these state legislatures, based upon a restricted suffrage, has not been so markedly inferior to that of the Reichstag, based upon universal suffrage, as one would suppose. It has not been dominated by the desire for class monopoly; it has been freer than many American state legislatures from the insidious influences of selfish interests; it has on the whole stood for public welfare and popular improvement. Nevertheless, the anomalous difference between the constitutional make-up of these legislatures and that of the Reichstag is irritating and harmful. The necessity of reform has been openly acknowledged on all sides. In Prussia, a reform bill was introduced by the Government some years ago, but was defeated by the Conservatives. There is no doubt that after the war this reform will be undertaken anew, and that it will not be defeated this time.
IV
The third question of inner politics which during the last decades has agitated public opinion in Germany, and perhaps even more so the foreign interpreters of German public opinion, has to do with the position occupied by officialdom in German life.
On this point also a great deal of superficial and misleading criticism has been indulged in. No amount of high-sounding phrases about autocratic oppression and one-man rule can controvert the fact that German bureaucracy in its essential aspects is the rule of experts — experts, publicly trained and publicly controlled, endowed with far-reaching power and responsibility, taught within their chosen specialities to serve the common good. So long as human society has not yet learned to get along without any rule, — and it hardly seems as if it had, — the rule of experts is perhaps the most reasonable kind of rule to be had and certainly preferable to the rule of bosses, ‘big business, ’ or the mob. One need only look at the splendid types of integrity, public foresight, conscientious workmanship, civic virtue, open-mindedness, energy, progressiveness, embodied in the burgomasters and other officials, high and low, of Frankfurt, Munich, Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg, Stettin, Danzig, and a host of other German cities, in order to realize what a boon officialdom has been for contemporary Germany, what a lesson German officialdom has taught, or ought to have taught, to the rest of the world. Nor does the quality of German state officials on the whole fall below that displayed by the public officials of the German cities. Expert training and objective consideration of the common welfare are the two fundamental requirements for appointment to administrative positions in the government service of the states constituting the German Empire, in Prussia and Saxony no less than in Bavaria or Baden or Alsace-Lorraine.
It is a striking testimony to the high level of German public opinion that, in spite of all these undeniable and highly significant excellences of German officialdom, there should have been expressed during the last decades frequent criticism, both in the press and in Parliament, of certain defects and abuses that seem to be inherent in government by experts. The expert is apt to be a somewhat formidable person. He often assumes the tone and attitude of the superman. He is often swollen with authority. He is likely to frown upon the ‘merely popular,’and to shun intercourse or confidence with the uninstructed many. He is not likely to win sympathies by his own personality. German officialdom has been liable in a good measure to all these defects. It has often appeared harsh and supercilious. While undoubtedly serving the whole people, it has often seemed to be an imperious master. While recruiting itself from all classes of the people, it has developed a class consciousness of its own and has frequently arrogated to itself an undue superiority over other classes. In a word, it often lacks conspicuously the human element. Furthermore, the prevailingly conservative temper of the central government has had the effect, that the political opinions of the official class have been almost wholly restricted to that creed; and there have been cases where able men of liberal or radical views, solely on account of these views, have been forced out of the government service. The extraordinary intelligence and efficiency that the large army of officials of the Socialist party has shown in business organization and administration, give one an idea of what has been lost to the government service by stifling among its members that independence and variety of political convictions which are a necessary corollary of nonpartisan principles of administration.
All this will be changed when, after the war, a true coalition ministry is at the helm of the Government, and when it is no longer possible to speak of the Socialists as ‘men without a country,’ or of the Centrists as ‘enemies of the Empire,’ or of the Liberals as ‘ impotent detractors.’ The Government will seek its expert officials among men of all parties. It will make the most sparing use of its right of veto in the appointment of city burgomasters. It will allow the widest possible range in the political affiliations of the provincial governors. It will make concessions to provincial peculiarities and traditions in the selection of Kreisdirektoren and Landräte. It will infuse new life into the diplomatic service by calling into it more regularly than before prominent men of business and scholars of distinction. Officialdom, without losing its expert authority, will be humanized and popularized; and another foundation stone in the building of a new Germany will have been laid.
V
Like all German political parties and all social classes, the churches also, particularly the Catholic and the Protestant, have stood shoulder to shoulder in the great war. Let us hope that this union will last after the war. The year 1917 will afford an unusual opportunity for demonstrating mutual recognition and understanding, for it will bring the four-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. It is inconceivable that this memorial celebration should be observed in the invidious spirit of clerical partisanship, that it should lead to excessive panegyrics of Protestantism or violent abuses of Catholicism, and vice versa; it seems a foregone conclusion that it will be observed in the spirit of national rejoicing over the fact that at last the deep gap in the national body, torn by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, has been filled; that millions of Catholics and Protestants have joyfully bled together for the same cause; and that there cannot be any difference hereafter in the feelings of either group for what the county demands of both.
But let us not conceal from ourselves a great danger and a great problem which the religious situation created by the war contains. The war has been fought by the German people in the spirit of ‘ Ein ’ feste Burg ist unser Gott.’ Millions and millions of so-called unbelievers discovered themselves as at bottom intensely religious. What had kept them from open religious professions was only righteous disdain of the lipworship practiced so frequently in church circles. It is to be feared that this impressive demonstration of the fundamental religiousness of the whole German people will be used by the reactionaries as a chance for forcing (with the help of the State) the masses of religious independents back into the fold of the church. Nothing could be more harmful for the future development of Germany than if they succeeded in this. And nothing could be a greater blessing for Germany than if the State rose to the necessity of withdrawing its support from any organized religious bodies, while vouchsafing free competition and unhindered activity to them all.
I am not unmindful of the peculiar difficulties that disestablishment must face in Germany. It means the breaking away from genuinely intimate relations, cherished through the centuries, between the Protestant church and the Prussian monarchy. And it involves huge financial expenditures; for not only the Protestant church, but the Catholic also, will have to be indemnified for the withdrawal of state support, since as a part of the wholesale secularization of Catholic church property during the Napoleonic era, the individual German states assumed more than a century ago the moral obligation of paying, in part at least, the salaries of the Catholic clergy. But now or never is the time for this truly reconstructive upheaval. Now or never can a successful appeal be made to the religious instinct of the masses to organize voluntarily to support the churches. Now or never is there hope for a new, truly popular religious life throughout the length and breadth of the Fatherland.
The time must irrevocably be past when the great majority of educated people had no inner relation to church life and maintained only an attitude of passive decorum towards its formal observances. The time must be past when the masses of industrial workers were filled with hatred of the church, because the church appeared to them only as a severe task-master and as a soulless and hypocritical upholder of obsolete formulas designed to perpetuate the power of riches and privilege. The time must be past when failure to have their children baptized or confirmed would subject honorable people to all sorts of social ostracism or official annoyances. The time must be past when the most enlightened and inspired among the Protestant clergy found themselves inevitably in opposition to the fundamental policy pursued by their own church, were tried as heretics, were forced to resign their ministry, and, owing to the lack of opportunity for independent church organization, were left without popular support. The time must come when every German will again be able to find comfort and inspiration in attending church, because it is the church of his own choice; when the greatest diversity of religious convictions will have a chance for open expression and concrete embodiment in diverse and divergent church organizations; when the finest, the freest, the most active, and the most charitable minds of the nation will make the pulpit once more — as it was in Herder’s time — a force of peaceful progress; when, in short, the great result of the war, generous tolerance and free coöperation of all the churches, will be made an instrument of the spiritual regeneration of the whole German people.
VI
Even the German school-system, unmatched as it is for thoroughness and fundamental soundness, offers ample opportunity for fruitful discussion of further improvements and reforms; and here again, as was the case with regard to the other public questions mentioned before, this opportunity has been eagerly seized upon by numerous writers and public speakers, even in the midst of the war. It would be instructive to analyze these pedagogical reform propositions, most of which culminate in the demand for one normal type of German schools, — the socalled Einheitsschule, — open to children from all strata of society, with greater unification of the lower grades and greater differentiation of the upper grades than now exist. But I shall not enter upon this subject here, because I would rather say a few words about a subject which is closely allied with the spiritual regeneration which we hope for from the new German church life.
Ever since Schiller’s Letters on the Æsthetic Education of Man, it has been a popular maxim in Germany that literature and art have a national mission, that it is their office to hold up ideal types of character, and to inspire the people with the striving for a wellrounded, harmonious culture, for a free and noble humanity. It is not only the great writers of the classic era of German literature who have lived up to these principles. Throughout the nineteenth century, down to our own days, this striving has been the main impulse in the best that German literature and art have contributed to the world’s possessions. Heinrich von Kleist and Franz Grillparzer; Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig; Richard Wagner and Arnold Boecklin; Gottfried Keller, Theodor Storm and Rosegger; Friedrich Nietzsche and Gerhart Hauptmann — to mention only a few of the leading names: varied and contrasting as their endeavors and achievements have been, they are united by the common vision of an ideal existence, they all stimulate the very best in man, they all lead out of the confusion and turmoil of evanescent matter to the serene heights of the eternal.
May we not be confident that the war will bring out this idealistic tendency of German literature and art in still greater effulgence? Will not the supreme national tasks of literature and art now be recognized more clearly than ever before? The extraordinary strides taken by Germany during the last decades in material advance, the phenomenal development of the technical sciences, the sudden accumulation of great wealth, have recently led the artistic imagination in Germany, as nearly everywhere else, into different channels. It has been the day of technical skill rather than of spiritual earnestness, of startling rather than elevating effects, of the aesthetic gourmand rather than the moral enthusiast, of the fastidious few rather than the receptive many. It is to the credit of Emperor William — whatever one may think of his own artistic taste — that he has ardently and persistently combatted this art of the over-cultivated tricksters and perverted connoisseurs; that he has unequivocally proclaimed the need of an art which should speak to the people, which should unite high and low, rich and poor, in the common striving for highest national culture. This inspiring and truly national art, which in architecture at least had already announced itself before the war, is bound to come now, in a different shape, to be sure, from that, of which the Emperor dreamed. It will not be the product of princely splendor; it will be born from bitter distress and nameless suffering. It will not be given to the people, but will grow out of the people. As the Homeric epic arose out of the conflict between Greek and Asiatic civilization; as the Apocalypse is a poetic reflex of the trials, the persecutions, and the hopes of early Christianity in its life-and-death struggle with the Roman Empire; as the Nibelungen lays came forth from the tremendous upheaval of the Migration epoch, so this gigantic war in which Germany is fighting for the innermost essence of her life, for everything for which her thinkers, her poets, her public men of the past have worked, suffered, and dreamed, this war of unspeakable woes and unparalleled grandeur surely must call forth voices of poets and visions of artists so deep, so clear, so overwhelmingly powerful as nothing else that has come from German literature and art. And in these poetic and artistic forms of the future the horrors and agonies of the present will live, purified and transfigured,
VII
I have reserved to the last what is probably Germany’s most portentous problem of inner reconstruction, the question of the continuance and widening-out of the social and economic reform so auspiciously and comprehensively begun in the decades before the war. Well may one’s courage falter at the thought of the countless lives that have already been sacrificed and that still will be sacrificed in this monstrous slaughter of nations. Well may one feel staggered at the prospect of the necessity of continued preparations for war when at last peace has come. And yet the likelihood of this necessity has to be faced, and with it the necessity of superhuman efforts to make good as far as possible the enormous losses of manhood that have been incurred, and to secure a numerous and healthy progeny. It is therefore a fundamental demand of the very existence of Germany as a powerful and progressive nation that the social legislation, in which Germany has taken the lead among all nations, not only be kept intact, but that it be broadened and intensified. After the war it will be more than ever the task of German statesmen to provide for the masses of the people economic and social conditions which will lead to the raising of large and prosperous families. More than ever will there be a need of protecting the weak in the struggle for existence, so that they may become strong and serve. More than ever will it be the duty of every German to develop all that is in him, so that he may help to build. More than ever will it be the supreme aim of public life to preserve every resource, to foster every activity, stimulate every ambition, and find a place for every individual talent.
A multitude of specific problems suggest themselves here. The progressive income tax, well administered as it is at present, will have to be revised in such wise that the scale of progression will be adjusted, not only to the individual income, but also to the number of persons dependent on the individual taxpayer; so that in the future it will be impossible for a bachelor without any dependents to be taxed no more heavily than the father of a family of twelve. The maximum of a day’s work and the minimum of a day’s pay will have to be regulated with increased regard for the maintenance of a working population physically strong and mentally active. The housing laws will have to do away with the six-in-a-room conditions still prevailing too widely in large cities. Unemployment, which, after the war, will, it is to be feared, assume enormous proportions, must be checked, not only spasmodically, through the carrying out of large public works, — canals, subways, and the like, — but principally through regular government contributions to the unemployment insurance instituted by the trade-unions. Nationalization of the largest industries, such as coal-mining, will after the war become an unavoidable financial necessity in order to enable the government to carry on its business; the gains from these nationalized industries will therefore help to meet great public needs and will benefit all classes of the people.
Woman after the war will be a social worker in an entirely new sense; for the war has discovered her genius for helpfulness in a manner never dreamed of before. From many different quarters there has come the suggestion that the social activity of women hereafter take the form of something analogous to the universal military service of men, — that is, that some kinds of regular civic duties, graded in proportion to the position and means of the individual, be hereafter made obligatory for all women — a universal, though differentiated, service which would undoubtedly carry with it a universal, though differentiated, political vote. In short, economically and socially no less than in military, parliamentary, governmental, religious, educational, and artistic life, there will arise a new Germany; not a Germany repentantly abjuring her past — nothing could be more uncalled for than that — but a Germany following to their ultimate conclusion the principles that have guided her past and that are upholding her now, in her hour of greatest need and in the supreme test of her true worth.
I have purposely refrained from speaking of Germany’s relation to other countries after the war. But I cannot close without expressing the belief that the war will bring a new life to all the nations engaged in it. They all stand in need, in many ways in greater need than Germany, of inner regeneration. They all have found in this war a source of moral quickening and public inspiration. The German Chancellor has recently declared that, if a fair and equitable adjustment of legitimate national claims can be found at the end of this war, Germany will be willing to join a league of all nations to maintain that peace. May we not hope that the universal striving for inner reconstruction, the newly awakened longing for a higher civic consciousness, the ideal of a national life devoted to the cultivation of the highest physical, intellectual, and spiritual powers of the individual, will finally quench the blind passions and violent hatreds inflamed by the war, so that a regenerated Europe will once more, and more firmly than ever before, believe in international brotherhood?