The German Mind

I

THE man who regards raw materials as more important than a people’s philosophy, or believes that figures decide history and not feelings, is liable to be surprised by a sudden outburst of national character. Philosophers, and only philosophers, have accurately forecast developments: that has held good from Plato and Cicero to Nietzsche, and we have a modern example in Norman Angell, who in 1912 foretold all that happened later, or Bernard Shaw, who did it in 1931 for this country in New York. Statesmen who have no philosophers to advise them are lost. If, before the war, the international secret services had busied themselves with other people’s character instead of their guns, the Germans would have known what the Anglo-Saxon character means, and would never have ventured on the war. Today, if the Americans and the English would study the German character, they might yet ward off the war which threatens. That is my reason for writing on this subject, which I studied for twenty years.

The decisive difference between the spiritual history of Germany and that of other peoples lies in the opposition between the State and Mind. While the great epochs of English and French culture coincide with the epochs of power of the two nations, Germany was always powerless without and torn within when German culture was flourishing. But, whenever she was powerful and united as regards the outside world, spiritual values declined. You can trace this process from Erasmus to Planck, over five centuries. Goethe, the greatest event in German history, was doomed to develop in a Germany torn within and defeated without, and the seven-starred constellation of German music, from Bach to Schubert, rose above the prostration of the nation as an aeroplane rises above a bank of mist.

The men and works that make Germany’s fame in the world, the great artists and inventors, thinkers and poets, lived not only at the darkest periods, but even in the parts of Germany that were weaker than Prussia, which has produced no great musician and only one great poet. The courts of the minor princes and the small towns were the real centres of culture, while the powerful German kings or the rich Hansa towns neglected the spiritual leaders of their time. Frederick the Great attacked Goethe both in French and in German, although he could write neither language. Immanuel Kant sat persecuted in the remotest corner of the country, while Brandenburg, which was really the origin of German power, would be utterly unknown to us if Bach had not deigned to dedicate the so-called Brandenburg concertos to the King of Prussia.

No one ever realized this more profoundly or criticized it more bitterly than Goethe. When, as an old man, he named the three teachers to whom he owed everything, the names were Shakespeare, Linné, and Spinoza — an Englishman, a Swede, and a Jew. His whole life long he suffered from the realization that the Germans, as he said, were ‘so great as individuals, and so wretched as a whole.’ And while Goethe’s hero was his country’s enemy, Napoleon, Nietzsche wrote against Bismarck, who had made his country powerful.

This fateful separation of state and mind in German history comes from the lack of a real spirit of freedom, and is at the same time the reason why that spirit never grew. Yet, as Homer said, with freedom we lose the balance of our souls. Germany was not the only country in which a military class got the power into its hands and held it at times unshared; but in other countries the civil population always rose and threw the soldiers out again. For three centuries the whole of Germany, but most of all Prussia, was ruled by the officer class, the Junkers, and on this class the kings relied for protection against revolutions. No civilian ever rebelled against this state of affairs. Germany is the only country in Europe which has never had a real revolution; for the Peasants’ War was opposed by Luther, who inspired it, the revolution of 1848 was over without result in some weeks, and that of 1918 was actually no revolution at all.

What happened then was simply that twenty-two princes made good their escape, abandoning a country that had collapsed by its own fault to a troop of poor party leaders who were neither energetic nor well-trained enough to do as the French had done — to make the best of a lost war and win through it their inner freedom. What happened in Germany after the World War was that ‘a rusty chain snapped,’ and its bits, which were still hanging on the ordinary citizen, were used by the old ruling class to forge new weapons against his freedom.

It is for this reason that the German royal houses are the only ones in Europe in which a king was never deposed by the people. When I visited the capitals of the German countries in December 1918, the leading citizens always assured me with pride that they were the last to advise their princes to abdicate. Yet it is good for kings to realize that they are deposable. Even though the same family is restored later, the shadow of a beheaded king is effective.

The German citizen did not mourn over the absence of equal rights; on the contrary, he was very glad to leave the government and the army to the Junkers, whose head swelled and brain shrank in consequence, while among the civil population the spirit of freedom dwindled, but talent and business grew. The sons of the Junkers had to be provided for, and one of the shrewdest said to me before the war: ‘I shall leave my estates to the brightest of my sons; the second can go into the army, and the fool of the family into the Foreign Office.’ The ambition of the middleclass German, on the contrary, was that his son should succeed him in his business, his profession, or his art. The great spirits of Germany as a body come from the middle class; but nearly all Germany’s generals and ministers have been aristocrats. We cannot, however, claim that it is they who made the glory of Germany. Bismarck the Junker is the sole exception on the one side, the poet von Kleist on the other.

II

This separation of state and mind, which is the same at all epochs, in all classes, and in the various provinces, has created the image of a double Germany which is a source of great confusion outside. How is it, other countries ask repeatedly, that the land of Goethe and Beethoven is perpetually relapsing into barbarism? The reason is simply that the ordinary man, in the long run, admires and imitates the men who represent power. As the greatest banker or the most celebrated professor entered society behind the riding boots and decorations of colonels and counts, even the astronomer tried to appear in uniform, as long as he had to tread this earth. The students tried to look as soldierly as possible and hacked each other’s faces in duels, and he was most admired whose face most resembled a beefsteak. Those very uniforms and duels are once more the greatest fashion in Germany to-day. The lieutenant has again become the flapper’s ideal.

The consequence of this German military organization was a regular anarchy of the spirit. The conception of the state, adapted to the mind of the Junker, unspiritual and overweening, was separated from the ideals of the mind. Obedience and organization were raised from their position as third-rate necessities to first-rate virtues, and approved by those who needed them in their own interests. The Germans are the only nation on earth who obey with passion, and not out of necessity. And so the will to freedom departed into the provinces of the mind and created German individualism.

Here we have one of the profoundest differences between the German and the French national character. For in Germany profound obedience prevails in political and social life, but an equally profound resistance to rules in the intellectual life; in France it is exactly the other way round. If a French writer uses a subjunctive which is not in the Encyclopédie, he is accused of having broken a law: but if a notice is put up telling people to walk to the right, the Parisian will certainly walk to the left.

In Germany, as Goethe said, every thinker begins again at the beginning, and that is why German literature and philosophy are so rich in great individuals, while a national literature has never existed. A national drama, such as Shakespeare could create because state and spirit are united in England, never came into being in Germany; of Schiller’s eight historical dramas, only one is on a German subject.

Hence no nation has had so many bitter critics among its greatest spirits, because they never felt responsible for the state, which had excluded them from government at the outset. Goethe, as Prime Minister of Saxe-Weimar, strove for ten years to unite the state and the spirit, only to come to grief. There is no greater danger for a German statesman than to have the reputation of being a scholar. If a German minister were to write about Homer, like Gladstone, he would simply be ridiculous. A large number of England’s ministers of state have written novels or history, while in France there is hardly one who never wrote. Rathenau was exposed to the laughter of Germany because he had published five or six volumes, and Prince Bülow kept it a secret for ten years that he knew Faust very well. The German learns to rule, not with the pen, but with the sword.

This is what the French dislike so fundamentally. The eternal war between these neighbors only becomes clear in the light of their radically different characters. What the one has the other lacks. What weakens the one strengthens the other.

Here we have, side by side, an overorganized and an underorganized people, a mystical beside a logical, and an aggressive beside a defensive one. The Germans distrust French grace, the French distrust Germany’s gravity. In France a man wants to be left alone, hating even to have his name at his own door; in Germany there is a man to organize everything, even amusement. In France the authorities are polite, but letters often go astray; in Germany the authorities snarl at you, but your letters get there. In France even the head of the state is plain Monsieur; in Germany every butcher and baker and candlestick maker must have a title. The Frenchman loves his cat, because it keeps to itself and takes orders from nobody, just like its master. The German loves the police dog, which stands obedient, asking with its eyes which enemy it shall fall upon, just like its master. Obedience is despised in France, worshiped in Germany.

In Berlin, after the war, when the Republic had given orders to the police to get rid of their harsh ways in traffic regulation, I was shouted at in good Prussian manner by a policeman for being on the wrong side of the street. After he had done, he said quietly: ‘Well, I could not be more polite than that! ’

Some years later, in Paris, when crossing the road outside the ‘nails,’ an agent de ville rather gruffly called me to attention. Then, as if regretting his military tone, he came up close to me and said, ‘I do it myself if I’m not in uniform.’

And now these two men are condemned by God to live side by side for a thousand years!

III

If we compare the German character with the English, we shall find certain similarities in their business efficiency and enterprise. But while the play instinct and irony form a fundamental element of the English character, both are completely alien to the German. The Englishman has a sense of the comic; the German is in love with tragedy, or even, as Clemenceau said, with death. He lacks the detachment which lies at the bottom of the passion for play; he not only wants to win — he despises the loser. It is said that in the war, when the first English prisoners tried to shake hands with the Germans, not one German would do so.

Germany was virtually under a dictatorship for three hundred years, with the exception of the fourteen years of the German Republic. The ruling power never tolerated caricature; it always came from the opposition. There is no such thing as loyal humor in Germany; it is prohibited. Humor cannot exist without the feeling of freedom, which must be won by fighting for it. A history without revolutions is also a history without humor. What the German must have is his living pyramid of state; his ambition is to stand as high as possible in it. The most grotesque of all English institutions for the German is the fact that the state pays the leader of the opposition instead of eliminating him.

In England there is the smallest number of written laws, in Germany the largest. In England, as they say, everything is allowed which is not forbidden. In Germany everything is forbidden which is not allowed. That morning on which, as a young man, I saw for the first time in Hyde Park that there were no railings around the grass, I voted for England, because in the Tiergarten in Berlin there are more railings than trees. When I saw that railway luggage was not registered in England, but that everybody carried off his trunks simply on his own word, I imagined I had been wafted off to Plato’s ideal republic. Later, it is true, I became aware of a few differences.

Have the Germans then, in their obedience, no political ambition? They have, and because it is so mystical and general it is a perpetual disturbing element in Europe; it is aggressive, and thus prevents them from giving others their due. In the English rejoicings over King George’s last Jubilee, the German Kreuzzeitung wrote: ‘Of the real love of a people, such as we Germans have for our Führer, the English have not the faintest idea.’

To the lack of freedom, to the passion for obedience, we must add a third radical trait of the German character — their musicality, without which it is quite impossible to understand them. This is their refuge from overorganization. Yet a people cannot be the most musical on earth with impunity; and it is no accident that the English and the Germans — cousins, as they say — have developed their strength in exactly opposite directions: the most musical nation is the least political, while the politically strongest one has produced the fewest musicians. The music of the German rises from the mystic elements in his nature, and has helped to strengthen them.

After the war was lost, the entire people sought their refuge in Beethoven. More Beethoven was played in Germany than ever before. During the Republic, for instance, the biggest popular theatre in Berlin performed the Ninth Symphony every New Year’s Eve, beginning at eleven-fifteen, so that with the stroke of midnight the great Hymn to Joy rang out to the world.

This mystic bent in the German character is most dangerous in politics. Present rulers have made use of it to give a mystical meaning even to power, so that the German’s wonted worship of the uniform is now bathed in religious light. Since, in a large number of Germans, this mysticism either replaces religious feeling or deepens it, they will gradually come to believe that every notice with verboten on it is of divine origin.

Since the Reich came into being, the best German minds, above all Nietzsche, have dreaded military victories of their people. Rathenau, one of the best of Germans, who did great work for his country during the war, said to me in 1915: ‘If we win, I shall go and live in Switzerland!’ He dreaded the pride of a victorious military class, which has now again come to the top in the Germany of to-day. To train a people for liberty required stronger institutions than the Weimar Republic. Let me mention one of the reasons why the Republic failed. If a racing champion who has always been victorious is beaten, he must find a scapegoat: his doctor, his cook, the man who swept the track — one of them must have been at fault, otherwise he would not have been beaten. If the Germans had ever coöperated in the state, if they had been politically active, they would have realized that they had lost the great match because an incompetent government had led them into war, and would have declared war upon it, just as the French, in 1870, overthrew the guilty imperial house, and have refused to allow their exiled princes to return up to this very day.

Since the German people had fought half the world, and had held out against it for four years, they would have been all the more able to throw the blame on the government. For three centuries a warlike people had learned that the state is upheld by might, and that might is more important than mind. For a century this theory had led them to victory and expansion. A nation which slavishly worships its rulers will hold itself guilty rather than them. When Hindenburg, therefore, invented the legend of the dagger which had struck the German army in the back, he was sure of being believed. To-day every German believes it: every boy and every girl is taught that the Germans neither began nor lost the war. This double lie has been used to convince the Germans that, on the eve of victory, they were cheated of it by a diabolical conspiracy of Jews and Socialists.

IV

To-day the world is faced with a Germany just as ready to fight and to die, just as obedient, disciplined, and armed, as she was in 1914; but then she was a flourishing and rich nation, hardworking and inventive, arrogant, it may be, but sociable, and so she could only be driven to war by being told she had been attacked. To-day, on the other hand, she feels strong but misjudged, born to rule, yet cheated of victory. To-day she stands in clattering armor before the world demanding vengeance. The Germans are the more dangerous to-day because they are fighting not for the preservation but for the restoration of what they call their honor.

For the Germans do not want raw materials or colonies or Russian cornfields. They want something much more ideal. They do not want war in order to sink their own oil wells or to plant their own cotton. They want victory. They want war in order to revenge the crime the world committed when it fell upon them in the midst of peace and then, although they offered conciliation and negotiation while standing deep in an enemy country, cheated them in a malicious peace and crowned their dishonor by prohibiting their arms.

They are not satisfied with the admiration of the world for their four years’ resistance in the war, nor with the world’s acclamation, after the defeat, of German science, shipping and aircraft, authors and musicians, chemists and biologists. That is not honor as a soldier people understands it. Honor means victory by arms, and it is not by chance that Herr Hitler, at every popular festival, calls on the assembled thousands to shout with him ‘ Sieg-heil! ’

Every man who feels he has been wronged exaggerates his demands. War seems menacing because nothing will satisfy the Germans if it has been achieved by negotiation and not by conquest. Give them Tanganyika to-morrow, and the day after they will be claiming all the other colonies as their right. Give them Danzig, and they will immediately claim the Polish Corridor. Give them Eupen and Malmedy, or some other strip of Holstein, and to-morrow they will be demanding bits of Belgium and Denmark: this is already an item in Hitler’s programme. They feel that they are the innocent victims of the world’s malice, but strong enough to avenge themselves. They have no use for concessions.

If the Germans want victory, that victory is to be won only in Paris. Who imposed the shame of Versailles upon them? The French. Nobody reflects that if it had not been for the intervention of Wilson the French would have won the left bank of the Rhine, the holy river with which Germany’s most ancient national memories are connected. Nobody reflects that the Germans, during the war, had determined to keep nearly all the country they had occupied. The monstrous conditions which the Germans imposed on the defeated Russians and Rumanians in their peace treaties of 1917-1918 do not justify the errors of Versailles.

What is branded into the soul of every school child is the scene in the mirror hall of Versailles. This scene has bred in the Germans a feeling of inferiority which they must get rid of at all costs. In that very Versailles, Bismarck had stood and founded the German Empire on French soil. A bold thought — the thought of a poet! It was a wonder that in 1871 the French accepted it, and, thirty years later, the overwhelming majority had lost even their ideas of revenge — a satisfied people that would on no account proceed to aggression. And now in 1919, forty-eight years later, in that very mirror hall, the Tiger sat, forcing the Germans to sign a peace which disarmed them! That is the scene that is provoking the new war.

We German pacifists, writing ten years for a European coalition and for the League, hoped once that an understanding between two equally gifted neighbors might replace the eternal idea of revenge. We forgot that one of these two peoples is more vital, younger, more cramped for room, more accustomed to privation than the other. If the French, mature, stable, and averse to change, bore their defeat for forty years without aggression, if it was the victor himself who invaded their country a second time in 1914, how much more likely it is that the defeated German will repeat the move! That is what we Europeans hoped to overcome. We were wrong: the German character disowned us.

While Herr Hitler is protesting that he never wants Strasbourg again, the children are learning in the schoolbooks he dictates that Strasbourg has been German and must again be German. While he is assuring the French that he has no further quarrel with them, even today the book in which he calls the French a ‘half-nigger nation’ is sold by compulsion in all government offices, schools, and universities. Germany is not the only country to have broken treaties, and Bethmann-Hollweg’s phrase, ‘a scrap of paper,’ has been brought up against the Germans by many a statesman who was himself no paragon of virtue. But at that time the breaking of treaties was not yet held sacred. To-day the German Government pronounces that treaties arc ‘valid only as long as the welfare of the state demands.’ That statement appeared during the last summer in official organs, and was directed against the Pope as well as against Austria, although neither treaty was inherited from a former government, as Versailles was, but both were signed by this very government of Herr Hitler.

And yet, nobody cares if treaties are broken. There was only a paper protest when the Germans reintroduced conscription and occupied the Rhineland. Men and women, especially in England, thought: ‘In Versailles, after the war, we were not fair to them; you cannot, in the long run, disarm a great nation; we must give them back their equal rights.’

In actual fact, the three real hardships of Versailles had already been done away with before Hitler, when Brüning was still in power. The reparations, the occupation of the Rhineland, and the limitation of the army to a hundred thousand men had been to all intents and purposes annulled by negotiation. My idea of Germany is radically different from Chancellor Brüning’s. He is a nationalist and believes in guns; I am a European and believe in the power of the mind. But he, as the last German gentleman, negotiated according to those principles of confidence on which all transactions between states must rest.

V

It is a mistake to say that Hitler is not Germany. In his demagogism, he unites just those incentives which goad the German mind to frenzy. He resembles Wagner in his histrionic instinct. It is from Wagner that Hitler has adopted his endless melodies — that is, the wearisome repetition of the same few themes; the splendor of the processions and choruses, the burning thirst for success, the bluster, the brutality and blamelessness, which make Wagner’s work so effective can all be observed in the way Hitler works on his audience.

He is altogether most effective in his speeches, and he is the first popular orator modern Germany has ever had. Up to 1900, no German minister had ever made a speech outside the Reichstag; Bismarck was eighty before he spoke to the people. Wilhelm II had already won his influence over the Germans by Ms oratory, without which there would have been no World War. Hitler is like him in so many ways that he might be called Wilhelm III. Even physically—draw in the Kaiser’s moustache on Hitler’s latest photographs, and there is the Kaiser again: the smartness, the same histrionic energy. The history of modern Germany will one day record that the people let themselves be gulled twice by the poses of a neurasthenic.

For here we have a power of suggestion that has carried away the whole nation. Do not believe that it is merely a party government! Although millions are discontented to-day, no one has the courage to bring about a change. They complain of high prices, the scarcity of butter, low wages, the lack of free speech, but that does not mean revolution. A people that loves order more than freedom does not revolt. When Napoleon III asked Bismarck in 1861 whether there would not be revolutions, he received the superb answer: ‘No, Sire! In Prussia only the kings make revolutions!’ Discipline, which has again descended upon the German, is far more congenial to him than uncomfortable freedom, against which, after fourteen years, he can at last seek refuge in a uniform. A little socialistic bank messenger, with whom I was once speaking about the lost republic, said to me, sighing: ‘If only we had known then that it was allowed to cut off people’s heads! ’

It is not the German masses that behead men — but they are quite prepared to see the government doing so. On May first of this year, when Hitler concluded a speech with the word Gehorsam (obedience) thrice repeated, the wireless recorded the jubilation with which the beloved word was received. For, in the very deepest sense, the principles of the regime are akin to the overwhelming majority. For three hundred years, uniforms had governed life; decorations, parades, flags, were the glories of life. That had all disappeared for fourteen long years — first, because a people cannot rise immediately after a defeat; secondly, because the leaders of the Republic lacked imagination. When the bands and the flags returned, when every hairdresser had his helmet and every chimney sweep his Prussian boots, this warrior people rejoiced who had been deprived of their right to obey. A very advanced sociological thinker, once when I was discussing Europe with him in 1920, broke out with the sudden earnest exclamation: ‘They have taken our soul — our sword! ’

This German sword has a mystical meaning. When the youth of Germany see Siegmund, in the Valkyrie, drawing the sword from the ash tree, it goes home to them. But as there are unfortunately no swords to-day, but only unromantic hand grenades and bombs, Herr Hitler has introduced the dagger of honor, for boys of twelve and upwards.

Since these ideas are irreconcilable with Christianity, the opposition to the Bible in the new Germany is perfectly logical. To attain their new aims, Germans even have to return to their old Germanic faith. Recently, in East Prussia, the SS troops, in a body, took an oath to have their bodies burnt after death according to the old Germanic rites. The most sincere among them is a soldier like Ludendorff, who, in a number of his periodical, describes the Bible as a ‘document of human hypocrisy, calculated to promote the domination of the Jews and ambitious priests,’ while the Siegrune, the arena of the struggle for the Germanic faith, writes on the subject of the ‘wild oats’ of Jesus: ‘The Jewish cowardice of Jesus becomes clear from the fact that his first action was a flight from danger. He must not be held up to the sons of Germany as an example. The scene with the moneylenders in the temple is worthy of a horde of Bolshevist anticlericals.’ This paper is published with the express approval of the state authorities, while two hundred of the ecclesiastical periodicals are forbidden.

Even where the Gospel is not always welcome, it still is the canon of morals. In Germany, on the other hand, there is to-day a reappearance of the Teutonic Saga, with its breaches of trust and victories of violence. Every man outside Germany can read in the textbook of Wagner’s operas how the new treaties will be kept in the good old Teutonic way. The German leaders believe, if not in England’s sympathy, at least in her neutrality. The fear of England and of America has swelled into superstition. If the three great democracies would make up their minds to unite in telling the dictators that they mean to stand together, and would say so in the clearest possible words to be understood by every man in the street, it would make the profoundest impression on the peoples involved.

Three years ago it was thought the generals would overthrow Hitler. But their history shows that they will take advantage of any form of power as long as it is to their profit. Hitler gave them back their power, position, and wealth; in fact, the uniformed Germans are the only ones who have gained by the régime. But no German officer in the hour of need — with the exception of three naval officers — died for the Emperor. The rest disappeared or went over to the Republic; none defended the twenty-two royal houses in November 1918. Will they stay with the leader to whom they have sworn loyalty, if it does not suit them any longer?

If he is overthrown, it will certainly be by his own men, and not by Communists and democrats. It was always so in the German Sagas — Hagen stabs Siegfried from behind. Hagen’s descendant of to-day can hope to sell guns and gain honor in the coming war. But the lower middle classes, who will have to pay for it with their lives, have only the satisfaction of seeing themselves reflected in their Führer. For the secret of his success is that he is of them.

The dormant elements of revolution in Germany consist of a few million workmen, — who are, however, very difficult to organize, — of the clergy, and other religious-minded men of both creeds. The priests who go to prison rather than give up the Bible, and the workmen who set their paper in small print in cellars these real heroes of the Germany of today are not strong enough for revolution now. But they are the precursors of those who, when the war comes, will represent the other Germany in much greater strength than in 1914. Then the other, the great side of the German character will come again to the top.