German Character and the German-American

IT is natural that the collapse of German political power, and the violent and unreasonable defamations of everything German which in this country resulted from the war, should have brought to German-Americans much distress, much searching of the heart, and much groping about for the true sources of German greatness and for the elements in German character from which a new era of high national culture may be hoped for. The following reflections may be considered as an individual reflex of this general state of mind.

I

I agree with two of the most distinguished German writers of to-day, Count Keyserling and Thomas Mann, that the Germans are not, in the true sense, a political nation. Only I do not, like them, see in this a title of honor, but an unfortunate limitation of German character. The whole course of German history has been a tragic confirmation of this fact. There have not been absent individual political achievements of high merit. I am thinking of the constitutions of the mediæval free cities, the organization of the Prussian State under Frederick the Great, the reform legislation of Stein and Hardenberg, the transformation by Bismarck of a loose federation of states (Siaatenbund) into a centralized state-confederacy (Bundesstaat), the model administration of the German cities of to-day. But only in rare moments of high distress or high enthusiasm has the whole nation been united in common action. The sober, persistent work in building up a free national commonwealth, such as the English people has engaged in for centuries, the German people has hardly known.

How erratic, for the most part, was the foreign policy of the mediæval German Empire. What a waste of human material and mental energy was entailed in the oft-repeated crossing of the Alps by German armies for the sake of winning the Roman crown, the foolish attempt to crush the Lombard city-republics, the fantastic designs to extend German sovereignty even as far as Sicily. To speak, as has been frequently done by German historians, with patriotic fervor of these high-flown imperialistic schemes of the Ottos, Fredericks, and Henrys, to consider them evidences of noble national aspirations, is a piece of strange political aberration. Far from having added to national power and prosperity, this fantastic policy of conquest has harmed the Empire both at home and abroad; at home, through the delegation of sovereign rights to the higher nobility, forced upon the Emperors thereby, and the consequent weakening of the central power; abroad, through the kindling of bitter national hatreds and resentments. The political disintegration and isolation of Germany, then, at the end of the Middle Ages were the natural result of centuries of neglect of what should have been the main concern of the ruling classes, the knighthood, and the free cities: the creation of national institutions which would have made possible habitual coöperation of all the estates of the Empire and habitual compromise between class interests and national tasks.

The Reformation of the sixteenth century seemed for a time to carry the whole German people with it, urged on by a wave of high moral enthusiasm. When Luther, at the Diet of Worms, upheld freedom of conscience in the face of the most formidable array of Church and State authority, the heart of Germany was with him. Never before in German history had there arisen a national hero like him; never before had there been a moment of equally portentous promises and possibilities. On Luther’s side stood the most enlightened and influential of the princes, and a large part of the knighthood; the free cities greeted him as a champion in their fight against episcopal encroachments upon their privileges; the peasants divined in him the deliverer from social injustice and serfdom. What might not have been achieved, if all friends of reform had stood together, if all party demands and class interests had been merged in one great stream of the people’s cause, if the creation of a great free commonwealth, such as hovered before Hutten’s imagination, had become the watchword of all. It was the German lack of political instinct which spoiled this opportunity. Each class by itself—the peasants, the knights, the cities, the territorial princes — clung after all to its own special interests. And from the wild civil wars which resulted from the conflict of these interests there arose at last the princely absolutism of the seventeenth century as the only firm, dominant political power—a lamentable outcome of a movement which had set in with the highest hopes for the freedom of the individual in matters of State as well as of Church.

Among the absolute monarchies which, from the Thirty Years’ War on, overruled private as well as public existence in Germany, the BrandenburgPrussian State unquestionably held a place of exceptional worth. The Hohenzollern princes, from the Great Elector to Frederick the Great, were in their way perfect types of governmental methods consecrated to the publicwelfare. Allegiance to duty, sense of order, economy, honesty, methodical care of popular education and prosperity, have become through them permanent characteristics of German officialdom. But an unloosening of common political activities, a delivery of popular political forces, was the last thing for which the Hohenzollerns stood. Something hard, rigid, class-bound, inheres in every contribution of theirs to public progress. The collapse of this whole elaborate state-machinery under the assault of the Napoleonic armies, inspired with the rhetoric of great national ideals, however illusive, revealed its inner torpidity and lack of soul.

The rising of 1813 brought once more, like the sixteenth-century Reformation, one of those great historical moments when a people carried away by one mighty feeling and united by one supreme aim seems capable of achieving the impossible. For the German youth which then rallied to the colors was impelled with the determination, not only to drive the foreign conqueror from the ancestral soil, but also to create a new Germany, a Germany transformed from a geographical term comprising an illassorted conglomeration of more or less despotic governments into a great national body of free commonwealths. But again, as in the time of the Refer mation, the great moment passed without leaving permanent results. As soon as the victory over the foreign enemy was achieved, the old political shortsightedness, the old distrust of free coöperation of all classes, asserted its baneful sway. A dull, spiritless bureaucracy, which had learned nothing from the popular rising, and which had forgotten all the evils of the past, succeeded for decades in repressing all liberal thought and attempts at reform, outlawed and persecuted the noblest patriots and most distinguished men of letters, and attempted to force a nation, raised through the classic achievements of German philosophy, literature, and music to the highest level of spirituality, back into the humiliating fetters of the ancient régime. And when, in spite of all this, in the Revolution of 1848 the new spirit triumphantly broke forth and irresistibly swept away all impeding barriers, it was again not, as so often has been asserted, the inexperienced idealism of the Frankfort Parliament, but the political obtuseness of the governmental classes, and their inability to harness and direct the popular idealism as a driving force in creating a new Empire, which robbed even this noblest ‘Springtime of Nations’ of its best fruits.

The final unification of Germany in the Hohenzollern Empire of 1871 was undoubtedly a remarkable achievement of Bismarckian diplomacy; and yet even this achievement of the greatest German statesman lacked the crowning merit of true political wisdom. Bismarck’s own internal policy suffered from two fundamental defects: his undervaluation of the moral strength of the Catholic Church and his unconditional condemnation of Social-Democracy. The coercive measures of the so-called Kulturkampf — the incarceration of bishops, the wholesale suspension of Catholic priests, the expulsion of the Jesuits and other religious orders — outraged the feelings of the Catholic population, one of the staunchest and most stalwart sections of the whole German people, and estranged it from allegiance to the Empire in the very first years of its existence. And the official denunciation and degradation of the Social-Democratic Party, a party led by men of such moderation and insight as Bebel and Liebknecht, into a band of intractable traitors and ‘enemies of the Empire,’ with whom no compromise could be thought of, instilled a poison into all German political life of the last fifty years which no amount of paternal workingmen’s legislation has been able to counteract.

Particularly disastrous in the further course of the Wilhelmian era came to be the political shortcomings of the German bourgeoisie. If the German bourgeoisie in political matters had had only one tenth of the insight it betrayed in commercial and industrial organization, it would have recognized the necessity of forming with the Social-Democrats a solid party of opposition, strong enough in internal affairs to guard parliamentary rights, and in European and colonial questions to curb the aimlessly provoking bravado of the imperial policy. The fact that, with the exception of the numerically inconsequential Progressive Party, the German bourgeoisie, from fear of the Social-Democrats, delivered itself up hand and foot to the reactionary jingoism of the ultranationalists seems to me in the tragedy of the last decades to form a particularly tragic episode; at any rate, it is another striking illustration of how little instinctive sense for political fundamentals the average German possesses, and how little we are justified in holding up German political experiments as models to be followed by other nations. A noteworthy exception to this is found in the lack of corruption in the German civil service and the nonpartisan objectivity of German municipal administration — recognized the world over as shining examples of honesty, efficiency, and common sense.

II

If then — to sum up all the foregoing — the peculiar virtue of the German does not lie in his qualification for national politics, where may we look for the traits in which he is distinguished from other national types and perhaps superior to them? To say it in a word: in the depth of the individual personality. A few manifestations of this side of German character may briefly be considered. ‘Not a great nation, only great men’ — thus Heinrich Mann, the counterpart of his brother Thomas, has characterized Germany. I take the part of Heinrich against his brother by briefly pointing out in what special sense the great men of German history have been lonely men, how little they owed to the masses, how deeply they were anchored in themselves.

From Luther to Nietzsche there extends a long chain of men who, for pronounced subjectivity, for defiant independence from the crowd spirit, and for intensity of inner strength, hardly have their equals. At the head of them Luther himself, the hero of the ‘Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise’; the man of ironic contempt of the world which, at the very height of his activity, made him say: ‘ I trust that in course of time my books will be forgotten in the dust, especially what good through the grace of God they may contain’; the unswerving apostle of faith who drove away all attacks of doubt and despondency with the word:

’The Lord has said He would dwell in the gloom and has made the darkness His tent.’ Johann Sebastian Bach, who, from the modest round of his Leipzig organist life, called forth artistic creations in which all suffering, all longing, all dumb striving for light and freedom, seem transformed into a world raised above all limitations of reality, a world of eternal suns and heavenly bliss. Klopstock, who in an epoch of weakly and petty sentiments dared ‘ to think creation’s thought anew’; who pierced the commonplace barriers of his surroundings with the trumpet sound of his own full, generous personality; who inspired a generation crushed under the weight of political oppression with the prophetic word: —

Lessing, the lonely champion of genuine individuality and inner truthfulness; lacking every support or background of a living literary tradition; conquering every inch of intellectual territory by himself; pointing to new paths in æsthetic criticism, in dramatic production, in religious speculation; in his whole reformatory activity guided by the thought which he for the first time expressed in some youthful album verses:—

and for the last time in the last words of his last work: ‘Is not all eternity mine?’ Kant, the self-centred thinker, who — without any personal contact with the actual world in its wider aspects, confined throughout his life to the narrow boundaries of an isolated provincial town — through mere reasoning created a world in which sensuous experience appears as product of the mind, and in which the moral life is ruled by the principle: ‘Thou canst, for thou shalt’; the retiring scholar, who in the midst of an age bristling in arms clung to the idea of ‘permanent peace,’ not dreaming about it as a utopia, but setting it forth as a necessary consequence of a democratized Europe. Schiller, who not only, as a youth, hurled flaming words against class tyranny and princely absolutism, but whose whole lifework and highest artistic achievements were inspired by the desire to replace the humdrum, mechanized, fragmentary existence of the despotic state by a free, creative humanism, developing all vital powers and leading to totality of character. Goethe, whose world-wide activity essentially bore the signature of his own dictum: ‘Highest bliss of humankind rests after all in personality’; who, at the end of the classical ‘ Walpurgis Night,’ when the shades are recalled from their brief earthly existence, lets only Helena and the leader of the chorus return to the conscious life of the Beyond, while the mass of the chorus is dissolved into the elements of earth and air. Fichte, who, during the occupation of Berlin by the French, writes to a friend: ‘ People here are near despair, and it is hard to see what will become of us during the coming winter if these guests do not leave us. I, locked up in a lonely garden-house, guard myself as well as I can lest a sound of that despair or of the insults by which it is caused penetrate across my threshold; for I must retain the freedom of my spirit to think out the principles of a better order of things’; and who in this state of mind sets himself to writing his ‘Addresses to the German Nation,’ the intellectual callto-arms against the foreign oppression. Heinrich von Kleist, who, driven about by fate, ignored or misjudged even by the best of his people, consumes himself in passionate attempts to find inner poise and control of his instincts, until at last he leaves to his indifferent contemporaries immortal poetic embodiments of his own self. Hebbel, the stubborn self-willed Frisian, who condenses his opposition to traditional morality into the word: ‘Not all the Ten Commandments whip a man forward as vehemently as do his own youthful follies’; and whose life-work is that of a man who, as it were, with his teeth set and his eyes closed sets about to hammer out of the quarry of the past a new feeling of humanity and a new form of dramatic art. Richard Wagner, who with titanic self-reliance and boundless contempt for people and opinions that stand in his way, in a much higher sense than Hebbel, conquers for the German drama a new domain of astounding emotional effects. Bismarck, who asserted that a wave of popularity always made him doubtful of himself, and who was never more himself than when facing a hostile majority either in the old Frankfort Bundestag or in the Prussian landtag or in the diplomatic concert of Europe. Carl Sehurz, who not only in Germany, single-handed, defied political tyranny by rescuing, at the risk of his own life, a noble apostle of freedom from death behind prison walls, but who in this country also stood only too often alone as unflinchingly opposed to any kind of party dictation in matters of principle. And finally Nietzsche, the social aristocrat, for whom the masses had interest only in three respects: ‘first as dimmed copies of the great men, printed on poor paper and from worn-out plates; secondly as opposition to the great; and finally as instruments of the great — for the rest, may the Devil and statistics take them’; the recluse of Sils-Maria, who feels himself ‘exiled from fatherand mother-lands’ and seeks only his ‘children-land, the undiscovered one in the farthest sea,’in order to ‘atone to his children’ for his being his ‘forefathers’ child’; the prophet of the Superman who may say of himself: ‘I walk among men as fragments of the future, that future which I see. And all my desire and striving is only this: to bring together and form into a whole what is fragment.’

What a gallery — and it might easily be doubled and trebled — what a gallery of heads, of sharply chiseled individuals, personalities rooted in themselves, to whom the bringing into play, the heightening and broadening, of their own self is an inner necessity, and who, unconcerned about the opinion of the crowd, charmed against misjudgment and slander, with the whole weight of men singled out by fate, throw themselves into their appointed task. Truly in men like these the politically sterile Germany has brought forth cultural values which benefit all striving men in all countries — shining examples of the victorious spirit of all times.

III

If thus the most significant German personalities have, for the most part, achieved their highest either apart from the masses or in opposition to them, the average German seems to me to possess in an unusual degree the capacity to draw inner profit from outward conditions.

What I mean hereby may be illustrated by the fact that in no country of the world, with the exception perhaps of China, is the value of intellectual training so generally recognized as in Germany. Nowhere in Europe or America does scholarship as such, irrespective of its practical utility, enjoy a social prestige so widely spread. Nowhere is the title of professor so universally and instinctively honored. Nowhere do school questions — the children’s marks in the semestral examinations, their promotions from one form to another — play such a part in family life. Nowhere are the children so early taught to make a choice for their professional career; nowhere do they learn so early to have respect for their intellectual superiors. To be sure, all this is connected with the less wholesome aspects of German life: on the one hand with the harshness of the struggle for existence and the economic necessity of working up from narrow conditions; on the other with a certain submissiveness of German character which is itself a consequence of these narrow conditions. On the whole, however, we may say that this instinctive recognition of intellectual values imparts even to the average German life deeper substance and more earnest aspiration than is to be found in the average life of most other countries. That there is mixed up with this a good deal of half-knowing and loose thinking cannot be denied. I doubt, for instance, whether the thousands of German students who within the last decade have been carried away by Oswald Spengler’s Decay of the Occident have got from it more than a vague notion of the worthlessness of all previous historical writing and a confused conception of a certain parallelism in the development of national cultures. But the mere fact that such a book, the ponderous product of an immense learning and of an astounding power of fantastic combination of facts, which on almost every page confronts the critical reader with doubts and conundrums, should have intoxicated a large part of German academic youth is at least an evidence of the hunger for intellectual nourishment pent up in its rank and file. In no other country could such a book have produced such an effect. And the whole German Jugendbewegung, it may be added, is something entirely unique. That youth itself should philosophize about the idea of youth, should adopt the watchword, ‘Away from the sins of the fathers,’ should consciously rally for a new life of reveling in nature and in the great art of the past, and in moral matters should try to live up to the demand ‘ in the midst of mean reality to profess a higher reality’ — that could occur only in a country in which the striving for true cultivation of individual character, in contradistinction to a purely passive reception of external impressions, had been inherited from generation to generation and had become a part of the national character.

At least one consequence of this German cultivation of the inner life I wish to emphasize: the capacity to transform suffering into an impulse for higher activity. The whole history of modern Germany is one long story of national suffering, and at the same time a story of constant victories of countless anonymous individuals over the national suffering. What catastrophes have not swept over the German lands in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The sixteenth century brought, besides the terrible Peasants’ War and the fearful massacres of Anabaptists, the clash between the Emperor and the Protestant princes in the Schmalkaldian War, and constant feuds between territorial princes and free cities; the seventeenth, not only the Thirty Years’ War, but, after a short pause, new incursions by Swedes and French, the devastation of the Palatinate by Louis XIV, and the siege of Vienna by the Turks. The beginning of the eighteenth is filled with the wars of the Spanish and the Austrian Succession, largely waged upon German soil; its middle with the Silesian campaigns and the Seven Years’ War; its end and the beginning of the nineteenth with the inundation of all Germany by the armies of the French Revolution and Napoleon. Hardly a decade in these three centuries when wide provinces of the Empire were not ravaged and laid waste. And, in the midst of all this misery, a constant, ever-new gathering of vital forces, a slow, often interrupted, but never entirely repressed ascent to spiritual greatness.

From this point of view, the very time of deepest political humiliation, the time from the Thirty Years’ War to the accession of Frederick the Great, is seen to be a splendid manifestation of the constructive power of the spirit. For seldom has a people in the very breakdown of its political institutions so clearly proved its ability to rebuild its national culture. One generation after another, and one group of men by the side of another, devoted itself to this task. The brutalization of the masses and the fashionable degeneracy of the educated call forth, from the middle of the seventeenth century, in everwidening circles of thinking men, patriotic indignation and attempts at the resurrection of national dignity in manners, speech, and feeling. The horrors of the war and the pressure of a servile subject-existence awaken the Stoic ideal of steadfastness and make calmness of soul a liberating power. The woes of the present make the tormented minds seek comfort in the study of ancient times and foreign countries, and thus help to create the science of universal history and ethnology.

And the work which Luther had begun, but had not been able to carry through, —the foundation of religion upon the moral consciousness of the individual, — is taken up once more in the midst of the national misery. Enlightened theologians, both of the Catholic and of the Protestant Church, pave the way for a reconciliation of fundamental creeds. Pietism opposes to dead ecclesiastical formulas the fervor of prayer and the duties of practical Christianity. Rationalism leads from the defects and imperfections of reality to the conception of a living universe, in which evil itself is made a power for good, and in which there seem to be evidences of a constant progress from lower to higher forms of life. And at last there emerges from these incessant and laborious efforts of respectable mediocrities the classic epoch of German genius.

We may indeed say that the best and noblest possessions of the German people as a whole have been born from suffering; and perhaps we should be grateful to Fate that it has put the German people to trials in which it could prove itself great, not only in a few individual men, but also as a people. The last decade has been another such time of testing national worth. When has any nation, except Russia, in the short span of five years experienced so violent a convulsion, such an elemental upheaval of all its foundations of life, such mental distress, such a disintegration of whole classes of society, as the Germany thrown into the dust at Versailles? And to-day? Impoverished, humiliated, politically degraded, internationally gagged, is Germany even to-day. But this impoverished, humiliated, gagged nation possesses one thing which perhaps none of the victor nations possesses in the same degree: the belief in the spirit born from its sufferings, the burning desire for high achievements, the glowing wish to replace the loss of power by inner superiority, the firm determination to create a new national culture.

I have left to the end what is perhaps the most significant and most productive quality of German character in its best representatives: the wide intellectual horizon and the receptivity for the ideals of the universally human. I say deliberately ‘in its best representatives.’ For I do not wish to create the impression that I ignore such lamentable phenomena of mass psychosis as contemporary anti-Semitism or ultranationalist party fanaticism. These are phenomena which, lamentable as they are, find their explanation in particular social evils and particular political constellations. They do not belong to the great traditions of German culture. No other people has had a classic epoch of national culture which in cosmopolitanism, in breadth of horizon, and in detachment from inherited preconceptions could be compared with the age of classic German literature. From the æsthetic point of view this aloofness from the soil is an element of weakness in classic German literature; it gives to not a few of its creations something overrefined, too delicately spun, something shadowy, unreal. To realize this, one need only compare Goethe’s Iphigenie with Shakespeare’s Julius Cœsar, or Schiller’s Jungfrau von Orleans with Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. But in spiritual values, in pure humanity, in moral fervor and stimulus, the world of poetic imagination that sprung from the brains of Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller belongs to the very highest that has been achieved by any people of any age. Here we see, as hardly anywhere else, human personality in absolute freedom. Here the barriers of church, of race, of class, have been entirely eliminated. From Nathan the Wise to Wallenstein, Wilhelm Tell, and Faust, man is seen as such, in his eternal relations, his highest insights, his deepest conflicts, his mightiest strivings. A people which has accustomed itself to feel and live with such ideal figures as these is lifted thereby unconsciously to a higher level. And the fact that, in spite of many countercurrents, in spite of all critical attempts to belittle the grandeur of our classics, in spite of all the stars of lesser magnitude which have been glorified by Romanticism, Naturalism, Impressionism, and Expressionism, this ideal world of the German Classics has lost nothing of its lustre, but, on the contrary, throughout the nineteenth century and to this very day, in everincreasing measure has come to be the spiritual treasure and support of the mass of the German people, is sufficient to prove the mission of Germany for the culture of the world.

IV

I close with a brief summing-up of the tasks which, as a result of all these reflections, seem to me the paramount duties of German-Americans, as heirs and guardians of German culture in this country. It seems to me clear that these tasks do not lie in the pursuit of group politics. We certainly should not abdicate our political rights. We should emphatically insist that the unworthy encroachments upon German equality, the neglects and injustices to American citizens of German descent, the abolition of German instruction in public schools, and similar outgrowths of war fanaticism, as far as they still exist, should speedily be revoked. We should do our best to win fuller understanding and sympathy with the present republican Germany in the American press, in the American institutions of learning, and among the American public in general. But the attempt to play a separate political role, to form a special German-American party, would not be what we owe to the country of our adoption. For, apart from the harmful results which such a racial policy would have for American party-life, it would not bring out what is best and most valuable in German character; it would not represent the specifically German contribution to American civilization; it would not render to American life the specific service to which we, as German-Americans, are called. On the contrary, the formation of such a petty party-group, limited to the immediate interests of a particular set of people bound together by common descent, would be only a new and deplorable evidence of German lack of political farsightedness. That which is best and most valuable in German character, unless all my previous observations are mistaken, consists in independence of personality, in depth of conviction, in freedom from prejudice, in earnestness of intellectual effort, in breadth of view, in spiritual striving, in just appreciation of cultural values.

Let us cultivate, each in his own way, these precious legacies of our OldWorld ancestry. Let us, like Carl Schurz, take our stand by the side of our fellow citizens of other descent as fully rounded personalities, bent on high achievements; let us take prominent part in all matters concerning the political, intellectual, moral, social, and artistic elevation of the masses; in other words, let us make use of the best of German culture in the service and for the benefit of our new fatherland. Through such a forwardlooking attitude we shall win genuine respect for German character among our fellow citizens. And, above all, we shall in ever-increasing measure be in the front rank of those who are creating what is sacred to us all: the ideal America of the future.