CHAPTER IVGERMAN THOUGHTTREITSCHKE

In a pamphlet of mordant irony addressed to “Messieurs les Ministres du culte évangélique de l’armée du roi de Prusse” in the dark days of 1870, Fustel de Coulanges warned these evangelical camp-followers of the consequences to German civilization of their doctrines of a Holy War. “Your error is not a crime but it makes you commit one, for it leads you to preach war which is the greatest of all crimes.” It was not impossible, he added, that that very war might be the beginning of the decadence of Germany, even as it would inaugurate the revival of France. History has proved him a true prophet, but it has required more than a generation to show with what subtlety the moral poison of such teaching has penetrated into German life and character. The great apostle of that teaching was Treitschke who, though not indeed a theologian, was characteristically fond of praying in aid the vocabulary of theology. “Every intelligent theologian understands perfectlywell,” he wrote, “that the Biblical saying ‘Thou shalt not kill’ ought no more to be interpreted literally than the apostolic injunction to give one’s goods to the poor.” He called in the Old Testament to redress the balance of the New. “The doctrines of the apple of discord and of original sin are the great facts which the pages of History everywhere reveal.”

To-day, everybody talks of Treitschke, though I doubt if half a dozen people in England have read him. His brilliant essays,Historische und Politische Aufsätze, illuminating almost every aspect of German controversy, have never been translated; neither has hisPolitik, a searching and cynical examination of the foundations of Political Science which exalts the State at the expense of Society; and hisDeutsche Geschichte, which was designed to be the supreme apologetic of Prussian policy, is also unknown in our tongue. But in Germany their vogue has been and still is enormous; they are to Germans what Carlyle and Macaulay were to us. Treitschke, indeed, has much in common with Carlyle; the same contempt for Parliaments and constitutional freedom; the same worship of the strong man armed; the same somber, almost savage, irony, and, let it not be forgotten, the same deep moral fervor. His character was irreproachable. At the age of fifteen he wrote down this motto for his own:“To be always upright, honest, moral, to become a man, a man useful to humanity, a brave man—these are my ambitions.” This high ideal he strove manfully to realize. But he was a doctrinaire, and of all doctrinaires the conscientious doctrinaire is the most dangerous. Undoubtedly, in his case, as in that of so many other enlightened Germans—Sybel, for example—his apostasy from Liberalism dated from the moment of his conviction that the only hope for German unity lay not in Parliaments but in the military hegemony of Prussia. The bloody triumphs of the Austro-Prussian War convinced him that the salvation of Germany was “only possible by the annihilation of small States,” that States rest on force, not consent, that success is the supreme test of merit, and that the issues of war are the judgment of God. He was singularly free from sophistry and never attempted, like Sybel, to defend the Ems telegram by the disingenuous plea that “an abbreviation is not a falsification”; it was enough for him that the trick achieved its purpose. And he had a frank contempt for those Prussian jurists who attempted to find a legal title to Schleswig-Holstein; the real truth of the matter he roundly declared, was that the annexation of the duchies was necessary for the realization of German aims. When he writes about war he writes without any sanctimonious cant:

It is not for Germans to repeat the commonplaces of the apostles of peace or of the priests of Mammon, nor should they close their eyes before the cruel necessities of the age. Yes, ours is an epoch of war, our age is an age of iron. If the strong get the better of the weak, it is an inexorable law of life. Those wars of hunger which we still see to-day amongst negro tribes are as necessary for the economic conditions of the heart of Africa as the sacred war which a people undertakes to preserve the most precious belongings of its moral culture. There as here it is a struggle for life, here for a moral good, there for a material good.

Readers of Bernhardi will recognize here the source of Bernhardi’s inspiration. If Treitschke was a casuist at all—and as a rule he is refreshingly, if brutally, frank—his was the supreme casuistry of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. That the means may corrupt the end or become an end in themselves he never saw, or only saw it at the end of his life. He honestly believed that war was the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, he feared the commercialism of modern times, and despised England because he judged her wars to have always been undertaken with a view to the conquest of markets. He sneers at the Englishman who “scatters the blessings of civilization with a Bible in one hand and an opium pipe in the other.” He honestly believed that Germany exhibited a purity of domestic life, a pastoral simplicity,and a deep religious faith to which no European country could approach, and at the time he wrote the picture was not overdrawn. He has written passages of noble and tender sentiment, in which he celebrates the piety of the peasant, whose religious exercises were hallowed, wherever the German tongue was spoken, by the massive faith of Luther’s great Hymn. Writing of German Protestantism as the corner-stone of German unity, he says:

Everywhere it has been the solid rampart of our language and customs. In Alsace, as in the mountains of Transylvania and on the distant shores of the Baltic, as long as the peasant shall sing his old canticleEin’ feste Burg ist unser GottGerman life shall not pass away.

Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott

German life shall not pass away.

Those who would understand the strength of Treitschke’s influence on his generation must not lose sight of these purer elements in his teaching.

But Treitschke was dazzled by the military successes of Prussia in 1866. With that violent reaction against culture which is so common among its professional devotees, and which often makes the men of the pen far more sanguinary than the men of the sword, he derided the old Germany of Goethe and Kant as “a nation of poets and thinkers without a polity” (“Ein staatloses Volk von Dichtern und Denkern”), and almost despised his own intellectual vocation. “Each dragoon,” he cried enviously,“who knocks a Croat on the head does far more for the German cause than the finest political brain that ever wielded a trenchant pen.” But for his grievous deafness he would, like his father, have chosen the profession of arms. Failing that, he chose to teach. “It is a fine thing,” he wrote, “to be master of the younger generation,” and he set himself to indoctrinate it with the aim of German unity. He taught from 1859 to 1875 successively at Leipzig, Freiburg, Kiel, and Heidelberg. From 1875 till his death in 1896 he occupied with immense éclat the chair of modern history at Berlin. And so, although a Saxon, he enlisted his pen in the service of Prussia—Prussia which always knows how to attract men of ideas but rarely produces them. In the great roll of German statesmen and thinkers and poets—Stein, Hardenberg, Goethe, Hegel—you will look almost in vain for one who is of Prussian birth. She may pervert them; she cannot create them.

Treitschke’s views were, of course, shared by many of his contemporaries. The Seminars of the German Universities were the arsenals that forged the intellectual weapons of the Prussian hegemony. Niebuhr, Ranke, Mommsen, Sybel, Häusser, Droysen, Gneist—all ministered to that ascendency, and they all have this in common—that they are merciless to the claims of the small States whoseexistence seemed to present an obstacle to Prussian aims. They are also united in common hatred of France, for they feared not only the adventures of Napoleon the Third but the leveling doctrines of the French Revolution. Burke’sLetters on a Regicide Peaceare not more violent against France than the writings of Sybel, Mommsen, and Treitschke. What, however, distinguishes Treitschke from his intellectual confrères is his thoroughness. They made reservations which he scorned to make. Sybel, for example, is often apologetic when he comes to the more questionable episodes in Prussian policy—the partition of Poland, the affairs of the duchies, the Treaty of Bâle, the diplomacy of 1870; Treitschke is disturbed by no such qualms. Bismarck who practised a certain economy in giving Sybel access to official documents for his semi-official history of Prussian policy,Die Begründung des deutschen Reichs, had much greater confidence in Treitschke and told him he felt sure he would not be disturbed to find that “our political linen is not as white as it might be.” So, too, while others like Mommsen refused to go the whole way with Bismarck in domestic policy, and clung to their early Radicalism, Treitschke had no compunction about absolutism. He ended, indeed, by becoming the champion of the Junkers, and his history is a kind of hagiography of the Hohenzollerns. “Be governmental” was hissuccinct maxim, and he rested his hopes for Germany on the bureaucracy and the army. Indeed, if he had had his way, he would have substituted a unity state for the federal system of the German Empire, and would have liked to see all Germany an enlarged Prussia—“ein erweitertes Preussen”—a view which is somewhat difficult to reconcile with his attacks on France as being “politically in a state of perpetual nonage,” and on the French Government as hostile to all forms of provincial autonomy.

By a quite natural transition he was led on from his championship of the unity of Germany to a conception of her rôle as a world-power. He is the true father of Weltpolitik. Much of what he writes on this head is legitimate enough. Like Hohenlohe and Bismarck he felt the humiliation of Germany’s weakness in the councils of Europe. Writing in 1863 he complains:

One thing we still lack—the State. Our people is the only one which has no common legislation, which can send no representatives to the Concert of Europe. No salute greets the German flag in a foreign port. Our Fatherland sails the high seas without colors like a pirate.

Germany, he declared, must become “a power across the sea.” This conclusion, coupled with bitter recollections of the part played by England in theaffair of the Duchies, no doubt accounted for his growing dislike of England.

Among the English the love of money has killed every sentiment of honor and every distinction between what is just and unjust. They hide their poltroonery and their materialism behind grand phrases of unctuous theology. When one sees the English press raising its eyes to heaven, frightened by the audacity of these faithless peoples in arms upon the Continent, one might imagine one heard a venerable parson droning away. As if the Almighty God, in Whose name Cromwell’s Ironsides fought their battles, commanded us Germans to allow our enemy to march undisturbed upon Berlin. Oh, what hypocrisy! Oh, cant, cant, cant!

Europe, he says elsewhere, should have put bounds to the overweening ambition of Britain by bringing to an end the crushing domination of the English Fleet at Gibraltar, at Malta, and at Corfu, and by “restoring the Mediterranean to the Mediterranean peoples.” Thus did he sow the seeds of German maritime ambition.

If I were asked to select the most characteristic of Treitschke’s works I should be inclined to choose the vehement little pamphletWas fordern wir von Frankreich?in which he insisted on the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. It is at once the vindication of Prussian policy, and, in the light of the last forty-four years, its condemnation. Like Mommsen, who wrote in much the same strain at the same time, heinsisted that the people of the conquered provinces must be “forced to be free,” that Morality and History (which for him are much the same thing) proclaim they are German without knowing it.

We Germans, who know Germany and France, know better what is good for Alsace than the unhappy people themselves, who through their French associations have lived in ignorance of the new Germany. We will give them back their own identity against their will. We have in the enormous changes of these times too often seen in glad astonishment the immortal working of the moral forces of History (“das unsterbliche Fortwirken der sittlichen Mächte der Geschichte”) to be able to believe in the unconditional value of a plebiscite on this matter. We invoke the men of the past against the present.

The ruthless pedantry of this is characteristically Prussian. It is easy to appeal to the past against the present, to the dead against the living. Dead men tell no tales. It was, he admitted, true that the Alsatians did not love the Germans. These “misguided people” betrayed “that fatal impulse of Germans” to cleave to other nations than their own. “Well may we Germans be horrified,” he adds, “when to-day we see these German people rail in German speech like wild beasts against their own flesh and blood as ‘German curs’ (‘deutschen Hunde’) and ‘stink-Prussians’ (‘Stinkpreussen’).” Treitschke was too honest to deny it. There was, heruefully admitted, something rather unlovely about the “civilizing” methods of Prussia. “Prussia has perhaps not always been guided by genial men.” But, he argued, Prussia united under the new Empire to the rest of Germany would become humanized and would in turn humanize the new subject-peoples. Well, the forty-four years that have elapsed since Treitschke wrote have refuted him. Instead of a Germanized Prussia, we see a Prussianized Germany. Her “geniality” is the geniality of Zabern. The Poles, the Danes, and the Alsatians are still contumacious. Treitschke appealed to History and History has answered him.

Had he never any misgivings? Yes. After twenty-five years, and within a month of his death, this Hebrew prophet looking round in the year of grace 1895 on the “culture” of modern Germany was filled with apprehension. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sedan he delivered an address in the University of Berlin which struck his fond disciples dumb. The Empire, he declared, had disarmed her enemies neither without nor within.

In every direction our manners have deteriorated. The respect which Goethe declared to be the true end of all moral education disappears in the new generation with a giddy rapidity: respect of God, respect for the limits which nature and society have placed between the two sexes; respect for the Fatherland, which is everyday disappearing before the will-of-the-wisp of an indulgent humanity. The more culture extends, the more insipid it becomes; men despise the profundity of the ancient world and consider only that which subserves their immediate end.

The things of the mind, he cried, had lost their hold on the German people. Every one was eager to get rich and to relieve the monotony of a vain existence by the cult of idle and meretricious pleasures. The signs of the times were everywhere dark and gloomy. The new Emperor (William the Second), he had already hinted, was a dangerous charlatan.

The wheel had come full circle. Fustel de Coulanges was justified of his prophecy. And the handwriting on the walls of Destiny was never more legible than now.

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