CHAPTER IIIGERMAN CULTURETHE ACADEMIC GARRISON
Nothing is so characteristic of the German nation as its astonishing single-mindedness—using that term in a mental and not a moral sense. Since Prussia established her ascendency the nation has developed an immense concentration of purpose. If the military men are not more belligerent than the diplomatists, the diplomatists are not more belligerent than the professors. A single purpose seems to animate them: it is to proclaim the spiritual efficacy, and the eternal necessity, of War.
Already there are signs that the German professors are taking the field. Their mobilization is apparently not yet complete, but we may expect before long to see their whole force, from the oldest Professor Emeritus down to the youngestPrivat-dozent, sharpening their pens against us. Professors Harnack, Haeckel, and Eucken have already made a reconnaissance in force, and in language which might have come straight from the armory of Treitschke have denounced the mingled cupidity and hypocrisywith which we, so they say, have joined forces with Muscovite “barbarism” against Teutonic culture. This, we may feel sure, is only the beginning.
German professors have a way of making history as well as writing it, and the Prussian Government has always attached the greatest importance to taking away its enemy’s character before it despoils him of his goods. Long before the wars of 1866 and 1870 the seminars of the Prussian universities were as busy forging title-deeds to the smaller German states and to Alsace-Lorraine as any medieval scriptorium, and not less ingenious. In the Franco-Prussian War the professors—Treitschke, Mommsen, Sybel—were the first to take the field and the last to quit it. Theirs it was to exploit the secular hatreds of the past. Even Ranke, the nearest approach to “a good European” of which German schools of history could boast, was implacable. When asked by Thiers on whom, the Third Empire having fallen, the Germans were continuing to make war, he replied, “On Louis XIV.”
Hardly were the results achieved before a casuistry was developed to justify them. Sybel’s apologetics in “Die Begründung des deutschen Reichs” began it; others have gone far beyond them. “Blessed be the hand that traced those lines,” is Professor Delbrück’s benediction on the forgery of the Ems telegram; and in language which is almost a paraphraseof Bismarck’s cynical declaration that a diplomatic pretext for a war can always be found when you want one, he has laid it down that “a good diplomat” should always have his quiver full of such barbed arrows. So, too, Sybel on Frederick’s complicity in the Second Partition of an inoffensive Poland anticipates in almost so many words the recent sophistry of the Imperial Chancellor on the violation of the neutrality of Belgium. “Wrong? I grant you—a violation of law in the most literal sense of the word.” But, he adds, necessity knows no law, and, “to sum it up,” after all, Prussia “thereby gained a very considerable territory.” And thus Treitschke on the question of the duchies, or again, to go farther afield, Mommsen on the inexorable “law” that the race is always to the swift and the battle to the strong. Frederick the Great surely knew his fellow-countrymen when he said with characteristic cynicism: “I begin by taking; I can always find pedants to prove my rights afterwards.” Not the Chancelleries only, but even the General Staff has worked hand in glove with the lecture-room. When Bernhardi and von der Goltz exalt the spiritual efficacy of war they are repeating almost word for word the language of Treitschke. Not a faculty but ministers to German statecraft in its turn. The economists, notably von Halle and Wagner, have been as busy and pragmatical as the historians—theirsis the doctrine of Prussian military hegemony upon a basis of agrarianism, of the absorption of Holland, and of “the future upon the water.” The very vocabulary of the Kaiser’s speeches has been coined in the lecture-rooms of Berlin University.
To understand the potency of these academic influences in German policy one must know something of the constitution of the German universities. In no country is the control of the Government over the universities so strong; nowhere is it so vigilant. Political favor may make or mar an academic career; the complaisant professor is decorated, the contumacious is cashiered. German academic history is full of examples. Treitschke, Sybel, even Mommsen all felt the weight of royal displeasure at one period or another. The present Emperor vetoed the award of the Verdun prize to Sybel because in his history of Prussian policy he had exalted Bismarck at the expense of the Hohenzollerns, and he threatened to close the archives to Treitschke. Even Mommsen had at one time to learn the steepness of alien stairs.
On the other hand, no Government recognizes so readily the value of a professor who is docile—he is of more value than many Pomeranian Grenadiers. Bismarck invited Treitschke to accompany the army of Sadowa as a writer of military bulletins, and both he and Sybel were, after due caution, commissionedto write those apologetics of Prussian policy which are classics of their kind. Most German professors have at one time or another been publicists, and theGrenzbotenand thePreussische Jahrbüchermaintain the polemical traditions of Sybel’s “Historische Zeitschrift.” Moreover, the German university system, with the singular freedom in the choice of lectures and universities, which it leaves to the student, tends to make a professor’s classes depend for their success on his power of attracting a public by trenchant oratory. Well has Acton said that the “garrison” of distinguished historians that prepared the Prussian supremacy, together with their own, “hold Berlin like a fortress.” They still hold it and their science of fortification has not changed.
It is not necessary to recapitulate here the earlier phases of this politico-historical school whose motto found expression in Droysen’s aphorism, “The statesman is the historian in practise,” and whose moral was “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht,” or, to put it less pretentiously, “Nothing succeeds like success.” All of them, Niebuhr, Mommsen, Droysen, Häusser, Sybel, Treitschke, have this in common: that they are merciless to the rights of small nationalities. This was no accident; it was due to the magnetism exercised upon their minds by the hegemony of Prussia and by their opposition to the idea of a loose confederation ofsmall States. They were almost equally united in a common detestation of France and could find no word too hard for her polity, her literature, her ideals, and her people. “Sodom” and “Babylon” were the best they could spare her. “Die Nation ist unser Feind” wrote Treitschke in 1870, and “we must draw her teeth.” Even Ranke declared that everything good in Germany had risen by way of opposition to French influences. The intellectual war was carried into every field and epoch of history, and all the institutions of modern civilization were traced by writers like Waitz and Maurer to the early German tribes uncorrupted by Roman influences. The same spirit was apparent in Sybel’s hatred of the French Revolution and all its works.
This is not the place to expound the intellectual revenge which French scholars like Fustel de Coulanges in the one sphere, and Albert Sorel in the other, afterwards took upon this insensate chauvinism of the chair. Sufficient to say that this cult of war and gospel of hate have narrowed the outlook of German thought ever since, as Renan warned Strauss they would, and have left Germany in an intellectual isolation from the rest of Europe only to be paralleled by her moral isolation of to-day. It was useless for Renan to remind German scholars that pride is the only vice which is punished in this world. “We Germans,” retorted Mommsen, “are not modest anddon’t pretend to be.” The words are almost the echo of that “thrasonic brag” with which Bismarck one day electrified the Reichstag.
In the academic circles of to-day much of the hate formerly vented upon France is now diverted to England. In this, Treitschke set the fashion. Nothing delighted him more than to garnish his immensely popular lectures with uproarious jests at England—“the hypocrite who, with a Bible in one hand and an opium pipe in the other, scatters over the universe the benefits of civilization.” But there was always method in his madness. Treitschke was one of the first to demand for Germany “a place in the sun”—this commonplace of Imperial speeches was, I believe, coined by Sybel—and to press for the creation of a German Navy which should do what “Europe” had failed to do—set bounds to the crushing domination of the British Fleet and “restore the Mediterranean to the Mediterranean peoples” by snatching back Malta, Corfu, and Gibraltar. The seed fell on fruitful soil. A young economist, the late Professor von Halle, whose vehement lectures I used to attend when a student at Berlin University, worked out the maritime possibilities of German ambitions in “Volks-und Seewirthschaft,” and his method is highly significant in view of the recent ultimatum delivered by Germany to Belgium. It was nothing less than the seductionof Holland by economic bribes into promising to Germany the abandonment of the neutrality of her ports in the event of war. Thereby, and thereby alone, he argued, Germany would be reconciled to the “monstrosity” (Unding) of the mouth of the Rhine being in non-German hands. In return Germany would take Holland and her colonies under her “protection.” To the same effect writes Professor Karl Lamprecht in his “Zur jüngsten deutschen Vergangenheit,” seizing upon the Boer war to demonstrate to Holland that England is the enemy. The same argument was put forward by Professor Lexis. This was in the true line of academic tradition. Even the discreet and temperate Ranke once counseled Bismarck to annex Switzerland.
Such, in briefest outline, is the story of the academic “garrison.” Of the lesser lansquenets, the horde of privat-dozents and obscurer professors, whose intellectual folly is only equaled by their audacity, and who are the mainstay of the Pan-German movement, I have said nothing. It may be doubted whether the second generation can show anything like the intellectual prestige which, with all their intemperance, distinguished their predecessors. But they have all laid to heart Treitschke’s maxim, “Be governmental,” honor the King, worship the State, and “believe that no salvation is possible except by the annihilation of the smallerStates.” It is a strange ending to the Germany of Kant and Goethe.
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das LebenDer täglich sie erobern muss—
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das LebenDer täglich sie erobern muss—
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das LebenDer täglich sie erobern muss—
The noble lines of Goethe have now a variant reading—“He alone achieves freedom and existence who seeks to repeat his conquests at the expense of others” might be the motto of the Germans of to-day. But as they have appealed to History, so will History answer them.