What Makes a German

I

THE Germans are the only people who pretend to be incomprehensible to anyone not born a German. Sometimes this assertion is made boastfully, sometimes with regret. One must accept the premise that it is sincere, and not merely an easy way to evade many of the troublesome questions that are constantly asked about the Germans, and to the Germans by other people.

To cloak oneself with mystery, to say that one is different and one’s soul so exceptional that none can understand you, is of course one of the familiar affectations of the romantic.

To break feminine hearts, to get very drunk or even to indulge in opium, hashish, and cocaine, may not be commendable from the point of view of bourgeois morality and social hygiene, but the fact that the romantics have usually been strictly interested in themselves, and very little interested in what was going on around them, has made them relatively innocuous.

But when we speak of the romantics of England, France, America, and other Western countries, we should not forget that across the Rhine romanticism took a very different form, or rather that — under its Germanic aspect — this explosion of sentimental emotionalism, of inflated egotism and poetic license, translated itself into something forceful, aggressive, bloody, racial, and barbaric.

The most important difference between the romanticism of the Western countries and German romanticism is to be found in the fact that whereas, on this side of the Rhine, romanticism has remained within the frame of laws and restrictions generally accepted by the Western people, this same movement in Germany has become a philosophy of life, affecting politics as well as art, science as well as economics. Western romanticism had a great effect on the shaping of the individual, at least for a while. It had little effect on the political history of the countries concerned. In Germany, on the contrary, romanticism became all-embracing and served to justify some of the most extreme and dangerous contradictions of modern Germany. Neither in England nor in France can one find the equivalent of a Richard Wagner or even of a Goethe — that is, of artists serving at once to create and to become part of what the Germans call Weltanschauung.

The specific meaning of the word Weltanschauung—in itself a sort of Teutonic metaphysical battle cry — has been described many times. I merely wish to point out that the whole trend of German poetry, philosophy, and scientific thinking of the last one hundred and fifty years seems to have been towards establishing further impassable barriers between things essentially German and things not German. In other words, the great romantic discovery that man is ever lonely, ever incomprehensible, ever victimized by the rigors of a disciplined society; that true expression of the divine ego can only be found through breaking all codes of morality and all laws — all this rebellion of the individual against his surroundings which was characteristic of the two or three generations preceding ours has been transmuted by the Germans into a national theme. The whole German people now visualize themselves as the incarnation of the great romantic age. They are at once the Chosen People, the Master Race and the Victim Race (compare this to the attitude of mind of the Montparnasse or Greenwich Village artist). They are a force of nature and also the superachievement of man-the-hero. They are wild and fearless, ruthless and cruel. But they are also the tenderest people on earth, the most loving of children and helpless animals. They cultivate and admire with equal fervor sentimentality and boorishness, individual acts of kindness and organized cruelty.

All these contradictions which the Germans would not condone in another people, they justify for themselves because it is the fundamental theme of romanticism that the ego is the supreme law unto itself, it being understood that other egos can under no circumstances be considered as having equivalent rights or even equivalent value. Such an admission would imply necessarily the existence of such things as justice, morality, law, and other anti-romantic notions.

II

It is interesting to note that Adolf Hitler is the perfect example of the romantic hero made accessible to the greatest possible number. He is curiously unmodern. Mein Kampf is not a book of the future, nor even of the present. It belongs definitely to the latter half of the last century — to that rather indecent school of writing which began with the Confessions of Rousseau and produced the greatest quantity of unregulated intellectual exhibitionism that the world has known. The very title of the book is revealing — My Struggle. It is a subjective outburst in which the author is totally unable to disassociate his own story and his own self from the events around him. Hitler is constantly sorry for himself, and finds an obvious enjoyment in describing his difficult youth: how he was made to suffer because no one recognized his genius as a painter, how hard and unjust the world is to the poor and unknown, and at the same time how marvelous it is to have been poor and unknown and to be now on the way to ruling the world.

‘I did not want to become an official,’ writes Hitler describing his troubles with his father in his early youth. ‘Neither persuasion nor “sincere” arguments were able to break down this resistance. I did not want to become an official, no, and again no! . . . The thought of being a slave in an office made me ill; not to be master of my own time, but to force an entire lifetime into the filling-in of forms.’

I wonder how many times the reader has come across precisely this kind of stuff, or how many readers perhaps have themselves been tempted to write in this vein about their own childhood.

Hitler, like all romantics, is inordinately proud of his own childish conflicts and does not shy at telling us what a bad little boy he was.

‘What ideas this must have awakened in a boy who was anything but “good” in the ordinary sense of the word!’ he goes on. ‘The ridiculously easy learning at school left me so much spare time that the sun saw more of me than the four walls of my room. When today my political opponents examine my life down to the time of my childhood with loving attention, so that at last they can point with relief to the intolerable pranks this “Hitler” carried out even in his youth, I thank Heaven for now giving me a share of the memories of those happy days. Woods and meadows were the battlefield where the ever-present “conflicts” were fought out.’

Thus the great Romantic — left over from another age — depicts himself with a time-tested mixture of naivete, complacency, and smugness.

But there are other passages in Mein Kampf, as well as in Hitler’s speeches, where the frustrated artist expresses aspects of romanticism which are considerably less innocuous and not in conformity with the outworn Father and Son motif. These are the passages where Hitler preaches the great rebellion against law, against reason, against independent criticism, against charity and tolerance. These are the passages where Hitler gives a new meaning to the word ‘liberation.’ ‘For liberation something more is necessary than an economic policy, something more than industry: if a people is to become free, it needs pride, and will power, defiance, hate, hate, and once again hate. . .'

The son of the Austrian official who rowed with his father because he would not let him paint has now merged his own individualistic romanticism with the romanticism of the German Volk.

This merger is so complete that it has baffled most of the foreign statesmen who came into contact with Hitler. For the Western mind it is difficult to conceive that an individual, the leader of 80 million people, should in fact be so totally an incarnation of something as organic and undcfinable as the German Volk that he ceases to be recognizable as a personality.

But this very shadowiness of Hitler’s figure, his lack of style, of measure, his inability to limit himself, either in his speeches or in his conquests, the vagueness of his purpose, the whole impression of something blurred, uncontrolled, and totally reckless which the name of Adolf Hitler brings to the consciousness of the foreigner — all this is what makes Hitler indissolubly united with an aspect of the German temperament that tends to overshadow all others.

Mr. H. R. Knickerbocker quotes an interview he had with Dr. Jung in October 1938, which is quite illuminating on the problem of the relation of Hitler to Germany.

‘I asked [Dr. Jung],’ writes Mr. Knickerbocker, ‘“Why is it that Hitler, who makes nearly every German fall down and worship him, produces next to no impression on any foreigner?”’

‘Exactly,’ Dr. Jung assented. ‘Few foreigners respond at all, yet apparently every German in Germany does. It is because Hitler is the mirror of every German’s unconscious, but of course he mirrors nothing from a non-German.’

An illustration of this was given by no less an authority than Dr. Hermann Rauschning in an interview given to the New York Times on November 9, 1941.

‘One strength of Hitler,’ said Dr. Rauschning, ‘is that in Hitler’s presence a man feels the complications being cut out of his mind, and we are such a complicated people, there is relief in that.’ He described an occasion when he had gone into Hitler’s office at the same time as Baron von Neurath, the Foreign Minister. ‘The Foreign Minister was like a schoolboy who has been sent for by his chief master, he knows not why. To be small, to be obedient, to merit no punishment, was his aim. Why? I cannot tell you, yet I know how he felt. I was myself like a schoolboy in Hitler’s presence. In Danzig I opposed him and what he stood for. In his presence I never opposed him. I think I might have found it impossible. He causes fear. I do not know why. And I have heard Herr Dr. Schacht, the Finance Minister, say that when he left Hitler it was with a feeling that he was bigger, braver, than he had been before. He said that for some time after returning to his office he felt braver, bigger, as though he could accomplish the impossible.’ ¹

Now Dr. Rauschning is definitely not a follower of Hitler today and he has shown that he was aware of some of the implications of the Nazi Revolution. But Dr. Rauschning is a German, and from that point of view his testimonial regarding the effect produced by Hitler on men not known to be particularly emotional, such as von Neurath and Dr. Schacht (not to speak of Dr. Rauschning himself), is illuminating. No wonder that Dr. Jung in his interview with Mr. Knickerbocker could compare Hitler to a seer, to a tribal witch doctor, to a new Mohammed, and call him the Messiah of the German people.

‘He [Hitler] is the loud-speaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German soul until they can be heard by the German’s conscious ear. He is the first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and feeling all along in his unconscious about German fate, especially since the defeat in the World War; and the one characteristic which colors every German soul is the typically German inferiority complex. . . . Hitler’s power is not political; it is magic.'

Hitler himself has expressed many times the idea that there existed between himself and the German people a mystical tie, that he was not only their spokesman and ruler but their living incarnation. Hitler believes he is in fact the German people, the visible and acting representation of this ‘collective organic mystical entity which is greater than the sum of its individuals’ (Peter Viereck, Metapolitics, p. 196) called the Volk.

III

It is well-nigh impossible for the Western mind, which is used to words like ‘people’ or ‘nation,’ to understand what a word like ‘Volk’ means to the Germans. It does not merely signify the sum of the individuals of German birth. ‘Volk’ is an all-embracing word, the connotations of which are at once historical, lyrical, and metaphysical. The Volk is not comparable to anything else. There are not several Volks. The French, the English, the Americans are not Volks. Only the Germans form a Volk — the Volk.

The Volk is bound by no law, except those of nature; but nature in turn finds its most perfect expression through the manifestations of the Volk. The Volk is superior to everything conceivable, and particularly to all other human groups. The Volk’s mission is to impose its metaphysical domination over the world because it is better qualified (by its own standards, which are the only ones recognized) to do so.

Anyone who has the unrewarded courage to read Fichte or Hegel must be struck by the painstaking effort of these two prophets of true Germanism to rationalize the irrational and to try to explain in plausible language certain impulses which, if they were described in unphilosophical terms, would hardly retain the attention of anyone. Fichte and Hegel are true romantics, and German romantics at that, which means that they have the ability to the highest degree to confuse obscurity and depth, complication and insight, and especially what they feel as Germans with what they think is right for mankind.

Hitler has brought down to a popular level the teaching of these prophets of modern Germanism which had already been made more accessible by Gobineau, Houston Chamberlain, and especially Richard Wagner. But in bringing such ideas to the masses, one should not think that Hitler has made them either clearer or sounder. Quite the opposite. If Hitler has a claim to a real talent, it is his understanding of the art of debasing the intelligence of the masses. In order to assure the triumph of the Volk idea both in Germany and in the world, Hitler has no hesitation at all in recommending that the Volk should be lied to, deceived and fooled by its leaders — that is, by the incarnation of the Volk itself.

This is the level to which the ideas of Fichte concerning the sacred amorality of the State and the turgid romanticism of Richard Wagner are brought down through the practical mind of Adolf Hitler. All the highfalutin metaphysics and apocalyptic poetry so dear to the Germans and their admirers finally ends in Hitler’s recipes on the art of propaganda, in which he makes the interesting discovery that this great Volk may be divine but is certainly deprived of intelligence. ‘The great masses’ receptive ability is only very limited, their understanding is small, but their forgetfulness is great,’ writes Hitler. And again: ‘The people, in an overwhelming majority, are so feminine in their nature and attitude that their activities and thoughts are motivated less by sober consideration than by feeling and sentiment.’

The foreigner may sometimes wonder how Hitler can possibly reconcile this obviously sincere scorn for the intelligence of the people — an attitude of mind which makes him appear as one of the greatest cynics of all times — and his fanatical glorification of these same people (Volk) and of himself as their living incarnation. Hitler offers the strange spectacle of a Messiah despising the Chosen People which he leads because the inner logic (if such a word can be used here) of the whole German conception of ruthless amorality makes it necessary that the Chosen People themselves should be treated like beasts. Thus the theory of racial superiority, of the divine right of the German Volk to rule all other people, and similar ideas nurtured by a long line of pre-Nazi prophets, when finally expressed by Hitler and his friends, end in a series of contradictions: Hitler is a witch-doctor, a seer, and a new Mohammed. He is the reincarnation of Barbarossa and Siegfried. He is the heir of Charlemagne, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck. He is the nearest thing to a god that so-called rational human beings have wanted to recognize in many centuries. But his mind is that of a very cheap type of underdog, such as this civilization of ours can too often produce, and which creates gangsters or, at best, second-rate professors in cynicism.

IV

Hitlerism has brought about the perfect synthesis between apparently irreconcilable concepts: the romanticism of the last century and the machine efficiency of the present day. One has been made to serve the other. The ‘blue flower’ has turned into a Stuka propeller. Goebbels, Rosenberg, and other Nazi doctrinaires have created what they call ‘steel romanticism.’ Heroism, Death, Sacrifice, Purification by the Sword and by Blood, the final rest in Valhalla, all these Wagnerian themes so vague but so poignant for the Germans have been turned magically into some sort of spiritual fuel for the panzer divisions and the bomber planes.

Other contradictions have been solved, or rather made to act as forces directed towards the same aim. The Germans have now succeeded in combining a condition of chronic hysteria with perfect efficiency. Whoever has listened to the crowds greeting a speech by Hitler knows what I am talking about. It is frenzy, but it is organized frenzy. The delirium has been regulated like everything else. Heroism on the battlefield seems, by many accounts, to be of the same order. German heroism is never gratuitous. The German hero seems to remain thoroughly conscious of being part of something organic, larger than himself, larger than his regiment, larger than the German army or perhaps even than the sum total of all the Germans dead and alive. The German hero does not seem to find in death that final loneliness so characteristic of the Western attitude towards death. Through death he reintegrates himself even more completely into the metaphysical All called the Volk.

Through Hitler, the Germanic tendency to identify brutality with strength, cruelty with manliness, hardness with determination, has been brought to perfection. Mr. William Shirer in his Berlin Diary shows his astonishment at the capacity of the Germans for being at once so kind and so brutal. ‘The German has two characters,’ he writes (p. 585). ‘As an individual he will give his rationed bread to feed squirrels in the Tiergarten on a Sunday morning. He can be a kind and a considerate person. But as a unit in the Germanic mass he can persecute Jews, torture and murder his fellow men in a concentration camp, massacre women and children by bombardment, overrun without the slightest justification the lands of other peoples, cut them down if they protest and enslave them.’

The remark of Mr. Shirer concerning the difference in behavior between the German acting as an individual and the German acting as a unit in a mass brings up a point which is of general importance. All men, to whatever nation they belong, tend to act differently as persons and as members of that nation. The greatness or validity of a nation as a civilizing factor can be measured by the degree to which it approximates the recognized standards of usual morality which are applied to individuals.

It must be admitted that all nations, including those that most ardently profess their attachment to a code of morality, have a tendency to behave much more like organized gangs of brigands than like communities of civilized men. Formulæ of exception, such as ‘sacred egotism,’ ‘My country right or wrong,’ ‘the undisputed primacy of patriotism,’ are called for to justify actions by the state which have no excuse whatsoever according to ordinary ethics. The nation or the state is admittedly somewhat beyond good and evil, and dealings between states or nations are conducted according to rules that would lead the ordinary citizen to jail if he applied them in his personal dealings with other citizens.

But this being admitted, there are nevertheless very important differences between the various nations in the manner they practise or tolerate international immorality. It also makes a great difference whether the individual citizen belongs to a nation which condemns international gangsterism (though it may resort to it at times) or to one which glorifies it and considers it as the fundamental law of nature and the national guiding principle.

There is no reason to suppose that the individual German as a human being is essentially different from the individual Frenchman, Englishman, or American. The capacity for cruelty, kindness, brutality, pity, is probably fairly evenly divided among men who on the whole belong to the same biological stock and have been submitted to the same broad influences. This is why people are right, at least in theory, who say that it is at once unreasonable and dangerous to treat the Germans as if they belonged to a different species from the rest of the white race. Germans who have emigrated to America have given ample proof of their adaptability to a society which condemns practically everything that is now associated with the name of Germany.

This is why these same people are right also — always in theory — in assuming that the way to solve the German problem is to separate the German people, who are individually identical with all other men, from those who lead them astray and pervert their morals. The First World War was fought on the assumption that, once the Kaiser and the military clique of Germany were removed, the German people would automatically renounce war and the practice of force. Today, Hitler has been substituted for Kaiser Wilhelm, and the same idea prevails: once Hitler and the Nazis are out, the rest of the world will have no difficulty in dealing with the German people on a basis of mutual understanding and in a spirit, of human brotherhood. The prevalent idea, especially in America, is that the only reason the good German — that is, the one who feeds squirrels in the Tiergarten and would adopt democracy — cannot exorcise the bad German who shoots hostages and puts Jews in concentration camps is Adolf Hitler and his friends.

If only the problem of Germanism were as simple as that! But I think that the time has come to take a more realistic view of the situation which confronts us.

V

The truth is that, whereas the individual Britisher or American — whether he is a decent citizen or not — belongs to an order of society which openly and constantly recommends law, moral discipline, tolerance, order, and other civilized virtues, the German unfortunately has been submitted for centuries to a series of influences which have taught him that the great mission of the Teutonic people is to overthrow the Western world, to rid themselves of its moral disciplines, of its rationalism, and of its concept that there is a law above men.

This has been going on, under one form or another, since the Romans had to erect Maginot Lines against the hordes of the East. And unfortunately, the modern German is far from being on the mend as compared to his ancestor of the time of Arminius. Quite the contrary. Back of him there is now over one hundred years of romantic and militaristic education; one hundred years of pan-Germanic propaganda and barbaric exaltation. The modern German is further away from the trend of Western civilization than was even the German who fought the war of 1914-1918. He is further away because Hitler and National Socialism are not an accidental outbreak, the temporary and feverish expression of a sentiment of revolt of an oppressed people: Hitler and National Socialism are the final blossoming of a very long evolution, the most perfect synthesis of this aspect of Germanism which finds satisfaction in the irrational romanticism of Richard Wagner, in the heretic racial scientific divagations of Houston Chamberlain, Gobineau, and Rosenberg and in the militaristic ruthlessness of Clausewitz, Treitschke, Ludendorff, Banse, Haushofer, and others.

We should stop and think. What would be the effect on the morality of the average American citizen if high officers of the United States Army wrote the kind of books which form the bulk of German military literature? In these books, war is presented as the supreme aim of the nation. But these are not mere technical books, such as those published by army officers the world over. As is usual with everything German, they overlap into other fields. They deal, and have always dealt, with what we now call ‘total war’ — a form of warfare which engulfs the whole of the nation and the whole of man. These books teach that war must be not only ruthless, but cruel if necessary. They advocate the suspension of all laws of humanity under the pretense that the worse a war is, the sooner it will come to an end — the sooner the enemy is exterminated, the sooner the peace will reign. Treachery, deceit, absolute ruthlessness are preached; ordinary laws of humanity and decency are scorned.

People for whom it has become a parlor game to quote passages out of Mein Kampf to show the immorality of Hitler’s Germany overlook the fact that Hitler is relatively mild compared to a good many German military writers whose works form part of the popular education. These military writers are more sinister than the romantic Nazis of the Hitler or Rosenberg type, because they assume an air of scientific authority to demonstrate the necessity of concentrating the whole effort of the nation towards war, and to a type of war which knows no law, and no restriction whatsoever.

The combination of German military dogmatism and of the fanatical exaltation of the Nazi whirling dervishes is the overwhelming force which dominates the German soul of today. The outside world must realize that, under such a régime, it matters very little whether Fritz and Hans are kind, humane, appreciative of the higher values of life (such as we conceive them), and in general civilized. All these tendencies are combated by the surroundings in which they live. The highest entity in which they are asked to believe and to which they belong, the German Volk, is presented to them as a negation of these values, as a great force of destruction.

Human nature being what it is, a mixture of good and bad, this appalling thing called Germanism is certainly not sufficient to destroy in every German all the good that is in him as in any other man. But to expect anything but brutality, stupidity, and barbarism from this same German when acting as a unit in the mass is expecting too much, Germanism, in its most positive manifestations, is one of the most dangerous forms of human destructiveness that history has known. And the trouble with it is that the sinister aspects of Germanism, far from being on the wane, are obviously on the ascendant. Hitler is the last phase of an evolution towards total evil which has been pursued under the various incarnations of the primitive Teutonic tribe, the German concept of State, Prussian militarism, and the notion of Volk for several centuries.

VI

I am well aware of the theory of the ‘two souls’ of Germany as expressed in the often quoted passage of Goethe: ‘Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast together; the one wants separation from the other.’ The whole personality of Goethe is cited as typical of this ability or even desire of the German mind to split, and there is the great Faustian theme in which the symbol of the German psyche can be recognized.

There is the fact that Germany has produced philosophers and artists, as well as eminent individuals in all walks of life, who have expressed an aspect of Germany radically antithetic to the one described in the preceding pages. Germany is not wholly anti-Western. Germany, like a giant pendulum, oscillates between attraction to the West and repulsion from it. Germany’s friends, as well as many Germans, believe that the whole problem of Germany is how to stabilize this perennial swing between German rebellion against the West and coöperation with the West.

No one denies that that pendulum movement exists, nor can anyone be blind to the fact that we are witnessing one of its sharpest and most dangerous swings. In fact, this time the whole Western world is definitely threatened by it. Adolf Hitler is mincing no words about it. His purpose is the destruction of the Western world and what it stands for, and there is no reason to suppose that he will not carry out his plan if he can.

This being so, the question is whether this excess will be followed by a swing in the other direction. If Nazi Germany is defeated in this war, can we expect a period during which the other soul of Germany will again manifest itself?

This is obviously the hope of most liberals in the Anglo-Saxon countries. It is also the hope, quite naturally, of all the Germans who are out of Germany, fighting Naziism and wanting their country to be saved eventually. This is a natural hope because it is reasonable to expect that after a movement as extreme as National Socialism has spent, itself or been destroyed a period of moderation will follow.

This may well happen, but looking back on German history is not reassuring. If one admits the theory of the two Germanies, and of a kind of oscillation between the good and the bad, the constructive and the destructive (from the Western point of view), one cannot escape the conclusion that the bad overweighs the good to such an extent that it is difficult to adopt a purely statistical attitude towards such a problem.

It is not easy to weigh with the same scales a quartet of Beethoven and a panzer division, a page of Goethe and the practices of the concentration camps. But for that very reason there is a fallacy in the reasoning of those who pretend that Bach, Beethoven, Schiller, and Goethe atone, in a certain way, for the brutality and ruthlessness of Germany in the realm of politics and war.

The root of the problem is not the outcome of the struggle between the two ‘souls’ of Germany. The root of the problem is the fact that such dualism exists at all and that on it hinges the fate of the whole civilized world.

No other nation has thought of basing its policy and its world outlook on a case of schizophrenia. No other nation has tried to justify its quasi-pathological manifestations of brutality, lawlessness, and ferocity on the basis that the whole world was leagued against it in some sort of fabulous plot. No other nation has complained so much of being treated unjustly not only by fate but by every other single nation whether powerful or weak. No other nation has practised with such consummate skill and persistence the double blackmail of trying to inspire pity as a victim and terror as a bully.

Again I wish to state that I do not believe that this kind of diseased fermentation in which the Germans are maintained by their cultural leaders makes the individual German necessarily different from other people. But unfortunately it is not with individual Germans that the world has to deal, but with this solid, organic, barely human Thing called the German Volk. And the chances are that it is with this German Volk that the rest of the world will have to deal not only during the war but after.

The German people, acting as a people, are giving no sign that they wish to find some sort of synthesis between themselves and the civilization of the West. The reason for this is that such a synthesis is inconceivable. Germanism is out to eliminate Western civilization and to supplant it with something totally hostile to it. Germanism cannot be blended with Western civilization.

Hitler is not merely an accident in the evolution of Germany. He is not a ‘usurper,’ as Napoleon was called by his enemies. No one denies that Hitler is a legitimate German phenomenon, the final product of a very long Teutonic will to rebel against the rule of the West.

The removal of Hitler might plunge Germany into a condition of chaos. It might end the war. It would not solve the German problem, because the roots of Hitlerism go far deeper than the immediate events which seem to have given birth to it.

The solution of the German problem is not visible today because there is no indication whatsoever that the German people are ready to repudiate the dual heritage of romanticism and militarism of which the Nazis are the perfect synthesis.

Moreover, even if one should imagine that after the present rebellion (presupposing, of course, it is checked) Germany would swing back to a collaboration with the West, this would not be reassuring in the long run. What is wrong with Germany, what makes the problem of Germanism so much more disturbing and dangerous than any other we have to face, is precisely this faculty of the German soul to move in and out of the orbit of civilization. As long as the Germans (and this applies to some of the best of them) stick to this romantic idea of their dualism, the chances for a durable solution of the German problem will be small indeed.

The world is one, and no progress is conceivable if all nations do not accept and understand the fundamental fact of the unity and universality of civilization. National idiosyncrasies and diversity are not only tolerable; they are necessary to civilization itself. What is not tolerable is the existence of a chronic rebel in our midst.

The purpose of this war is to quell a Germanic revolt against two thousand years of civilization. It is not the first one. Our position has obvious analogies with that of the Roman Empire when it was attacked by the ancestors of the present Germans. Our chances of resisting successfully the onslaught seem, however, to be considerably better than those of the Romans. In spite of many obvious deficiencies — which are political and spiritual as well as material — the countries of the Western world and those siding with them have a resiliency and resources which the Roman Emperors of the decadence lacked completely.

But even if we obtain total victory over Germany, it will not necessarily mean that a solution of the problem of Germany against the world will be at hand. That solution implies the fundamental transformation of the German outlook on all the essential questions which for so many centuries have faced humanity. The Germans have given no proof of being able to shake off the deadly burden of what they believe is their national destiny: the periodic rejuvenation of mankind through barbarism.