New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 1, No. 1

Is that to say that the notion of right which men invoke against force has in reality no meaning, and that a highly civilized people would disregard it? We must clearly understand the relation which exists between the notion of right and the notion of force. Force is not the right. All existing forces do not have an equal right to exist; mediocre forces in reality have but a feeble share in the Divine force; but in proportion as a force becomes greater it is more noble. A universally victorious and all-powerful force would be identical with Divine force and should, therefore, be obeyed and honored in the same degree. Justice and force, moreover, belong to two different worlds—the natural and the spiritual. The former is the phenomenon and symbol of the latter. We live in a world of symbols; and so preponderant force is for us the visible and practical equivalent of right.

It is, then, puerile to admit the existence of a natural right inherent in individuals or in nations, and manifested in their aspirations, their powers, their sympathies, their wills. The right of peoples should be determined by a purely objective method.

Now in this sense people should be divided into Naturvölker, Halbkulturvölker, and Kulturvölker—people in the state of nature, half-cultivated people, and cultivated people. This is not all. There are people who are simply cultivated—Naturvölker—and people who are wholly cultivated—Vollkulturvölker. Now the degree of right depends on the degree of culture. As compared with the Kulturvölker the Naturvölker have no rights. They have only duties—submission, docility, obedience. And if there exists a people which deserves more than all others the title of Vollkulturvölker—completely cultured people—to this people the earth belongs and the supremacy thereof. Its mission is to bend all other peoples beneath the yoke of its omnipotence co-ordinated with its supreme culture.

The Master Nation.

Such is the idea of the master nation. This nation must not be simply an abstract type, it must necessarily be able to realize itself in our world. In effect the spirit is the supreme form of being; it necessarily wishes to be; and as it is infinite, it can be realized only by means of an infinite force. A nation capable of imposing its will upon everybody is the necessary instrument of the Divine will which can grant the prayer: "Our Father, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven."

As a master nation is necessary in the world there must be subordinate nations. There can be no efficient "yes" without a decided "no." The ego, says Fichte, is effort. Therefore it presupposes something that resists it, namely, that which we call matter. The master nation commands. Therefore nations must exist who are made to obey it. It is needful even that these nations, which are to the master nation what the non ego is to the ego, should resist the action of this superior nation. For this resistance is necessary to enable the latter to develop and employ its force and to become fully itself; that is, to become the whole, enriching itself by the spoils of its enemies.

The ideal nation is thus defined by a transcendental deduction, and this same deduction leads us to affirm that the master nation must be not merely an idea but a reality. Now, it is plain that this realization of the ideal nation is going on under our eyes in the German Nation, which represents the highest created race and which surpasses all other nations in science and in power. It is to her, and to her alone, that the task of accomplishing the will of God upon earth is consigned.

Means of Success.

To succeed in it, what means must she employ?

In the first place she must acquire complete consciousness of her superiority and of her own genius. Nothing German is found in the same degree of excellence in other nations. German women, German fidelity, German wine, the German song, hold the first rank in the world. To combat Satan, that is to say, enemies of Germany, the Germans have at their service the ancient god, the German god, der alte, der deutsche Gott, who identifies His cause with theirs. And as everything which is German is by that very fact unique and inimitable, so it is correspondingly true that everything which the world has of excellence belongs to Germany in fact and in right. Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Ibsen, are Germans. A German brain alone could understand them and has a right to admire them. It is doubtful if even Joan of Arc, that sublime heroine, is French. German savants have maintained her German nationality. If the people of Alsace and Lorraine are faithful to France that only proves that they ought to be German subjects, because fidelity is a German virtue.

As Germany possesses, in principle, all the virtues, all the perfections, she suffices to herself and can learn nothing from other people. By still stronger reason she owes them no duty of respect or good-will. What is called humanity has no meaning for the German. The mot of William II., "Humanity for me stops at the Vosges," is not merely an instance of national egoism. The German Emperor feels that what is for the present beyond his empire can only acquire value when it shall be annexed to it.

How, then, ought Germany to behave to other nations?

There are people who wish to be loved, who believe that among nations as between individuals, courtesy may have a place and that it would be an advance for humanity to admit that justice and equity may rule international relations. But Germany, as regards other nations, makes no account of justice. She has nothing but scorn for that feminine sentiment which particularly characterizes the Latin races. The sentiment of justice and humanity is weakness and Germany is and ought to be force. Wo Preussens Macht in Frage kommt, kenne ich kein Gesetz, said Bismarck—"When the power of Prussia is in question I know no law."

Enemies Most Welcome.

The German does not ask to be loved. He prefers to be hated provided he is feared. Oderint, dum metuant. He does not mind being surrounded by enemies. He knows with satisfaction that in the very heart of the empire certain annexed provinces constantly protest against the violence which has been done to them. The ego cannot work without opposition. The German needs enemies to keep himself in that state of tension and of struggle which is the condition of vigor. He willingly applies to himself what the Lord God said of man in general in the prologue of Goethe's "Faust":

Man's activity has only too great a propensity to relax. Left by himself man seeks repose. That is why I give him a devil for a companion. He will excite him and keep him from getting sleepy.

Germany has a certain satisfaction in recognizing in the neighbors whom she menaces, in the subjects whom she oppresses, these providential devils whose mischief will stimulate her activity and her virtue.

Not that Germany rejects, as regards other nations, every régime except that of hostility. Her aim is domination, the only rôle which suits the people of God. Now, to attain that, two means are offered to her. The first plainly is intimidation which must never flag. The feeble quickly become insolent if their feebleness is not recalled to them. Other nations must feel themselves constantly threatened with the worst catastrophes if they resist Germany. But it being well understood that Germany is the strongest, that she will never give up what she possesses, however unjustly, then bargains advantageous not only for herself but occasionally for the other party, may be the more direct and less onerous means than violence to attain her end. So Germany will be, by turns, or both at once, threatening and amiable. Amiability itself can be effective when it rests on hatred, contempt, and omnipotence.

Now power counts before all. Germany must possess armaments superior to those of all other nations. The reason is plain. The German Empire is a rock of peace, der Hort des Friedens. The force which it accumulates is directed toward imposing upon mankind the German peace, the divine peace. Since Germany represents peace, whoever opposes Germany intends war. Now it is legitimate that Germany should arm to the teeth because she is the incarnation of peace, but the adversaries of Germany, who, in opposing Germany oppose peace, cannot have the same right. It is the duty of Germany to carry her armaments to the maximum; other peoples have the right to arm only as Germany may permit.

Germany does not seek war. On the contrary, she tries by inspiring terror to render it impossible. But if some nation should profit or be capable of profiting by her love of peace to pretend to rights which offend her she will consent to punish that nation. She will be pained by the violence she has to do to that nation and the severity which she has to use toward the guilty. But soldier of God as she is, she cannot fail to her mission. Any nation which refuses to do the will of Germany proves by that very fact its cultural inferiority and becomes guilty. It must be chastised.

The method according to which Germany will make war is determined by these premises. War is a return to the state of nature. Germany yields to this temporary retrogression because she has to do with people of an inferior culture who must be taught a lesson, and must be spoken to in a language which they understand. Now a characteristic of a state of nature is that force reigns undisputed. In this very trait resides the sublime beauty of that state, its grandeur and its fecundity. Don't talk of that romantic chivalry which pretends in time of war to temper the violence of savage instincts by the intervention of feminine sensibility. War is war. Krieg ist Krieg. It isn't child's play, it isn't sport where it is necessary to blend barbarity and humanity so as to conciliate and humanize them. It is barbarity itself let loose as widely and fully as possible. This is not perversity. Man as man suffers in becoming barbarous, but the man who replaces God suppresses the feebleness of the creature. He submits himself to the mysterious and sublime law in virtue of which evil is by so much more beneficent as it is achieved with resolution and completeness. Pecca fortiter.

The Nature of War.

The first article of the code of war is then the suppression of all sensibility, pity, humanity. The nature of war is to kill and destroy. The more it destroys and kills the sooner it comes to its ideal form. Moreover, it is at bottom more humane the more inhuman it is, because the very terrors which its excesses inspire shorten it and make it less murderous.

In the second place, war necessarily ignores moral laws. Respect for laws, treaties, conventions, loyalty, good faith, sentiment and honor, scruples, nobility of soul generosity—these are mere fetters. The God-people do not recognize them. It will then, without hesitation, violate the rights of neutrals if it is to its interest. It will use falsehood, perfidy, treachery. It will justify itself by futile pretexts in committing the most atrocious acts—bombardment of undefended cities, massacre of old men, women and children; barbarous torture, pillage and assassination; bestiality to women; organized incendiarism; methodical destruction of monuments which, by their history and their antiquity and by the admiration of the world, would seem to be inviolable. "I am told: I must avenge myself." This reason suffices. We are told that some inhabitant of one city or another has been wanting in respect toward one of our men. Therefore we must burn the city and show the inhabitants what we have. Definitively, our duty is to let loose the elementary energies of nature as far as possible to attain the maximum force and the maximum of result.

The effect should, moreover, be psychological as well as material. Actions which seem horrible to man and which spread terror are commendable means, because they break the spirit even if they have no value from a military point of view. Moreover, what offends common morality is conformed to transcendent morality. The mission of the Germans at war is to punish. They work Divine vengeance. They compel their enemies to expiate the crime of resisting them. After they have taken a city, if the enemy has the insolence to take it back, it is just that they shall sack that city if possible, killing its inhabitants and burning its finest monuments.

Barbarity Multiplied by Science.

Given this problem, how to let loose most widely the powers of evil, it is clear that a people of superior culture is better equipped than any other to resolve that problem. In fact, science, where it excels, can work destruction and evil with the very forces which nature employs only to create light, heat, life, and beauty. The God-people therefore unites the maximum of science to the maximum of barbarity. The formula of its action may be thus written: "Barbarity multiplied by science."

This is the last word of the famous doctrine of Germanism. Now the identity of the ultimate consequences of the doctrine and the features which the present war presents is evident. The problem which we undertook is, therefore, solved. If, contrary to all likelihood, barbarity co-exists with culture in the Germans; if in the present war it appears to be absolutely bound up in that culture, the reason is that German culture differs profoundly from what humanity understands by culture and civilization. Human civilization tries to humanize war. German culture tends indefinitely to increase its primitive brutality by science.

In everything the Germans must be unique—in their women, their God, their wine, their loyalty. The war which the Germans wage against us strikes the world with horror and terror, because it is in the full force of the term "the German way, die deutsche Art, the German war."

As the world recognizes this astonishing proposition it asks with anxiety, what may be its future relations to Germany? Knowingly and systematically, Germany opposes to all Hellenic, Christian, humane civilizations the devastating theory of the Huns. True, after the war she will claim that she has done nothing but conform, often with pain, to the conditions of ideal and divine war, and she will appear willing to pardon to her enemies the cruelties she has had to inflict upon them. Decidedly, the world will refuse to admire this horrible magnanimity which on the first impulse of resistance becomes savagery. Today the veil is torn away. German culture is shown to be a scientific barbarity. The world, which means in the future to rid itself of all despotism, will not compromise with the despotism of barbarity.

But what a disappointment and what a grief! Formerly, Germany was held to be a great nation. Its praises were sounded in many a land of solid and high culture. The German tradition once held other doctrines than those we have now seen devolop under the hands of Prussia. Germanism, as the Prussians formulate it, consists essentially in contempt for all other nations and in the pretension of domination. But Leibnitz—as highly esteemed in the Latin world as in the German—professed a philosophy which valued unity only under the form of harmony between free and autonomous forces. Leibnitz exalted the multiple, the diverse, the spontaneous. Between rival powers he sought to establish relations which would reconcile them without changing or diminishing the value or independence of any of them. Witness his effort at the reunion of the Catholic and Protestant Churches. After Leibnitz came Kant. He certainly was very much of a German. He owned, nevertheless, that he had learned from Rousseau to honor the common man who, not being a savant, possesses moral value far above the savant, who has no merit but science. And, starting from the principle that every person, so far as he is capable of moral value, is entitled to respect, he urged men to create not a universal and despotic monarchy but a republic of nations in which each should possess a free and independent personality.

This willingness to put liberty before unity, and respect and honor the dignity of other nations while at the same time serving its own, was not extinguished in Germany with Leibnitz and Kant. Permit me, my dear Director, on this subject to indulge in some personal reminiscences.

Treitschke Versus Bluntschli.

In January, 1869, I was sent to Heidelberg by the Minister of Public Instruction, Victor Duruy, to study the organization of German universities. Germany was for me the land of metaphysics, music, and poetry. I was greatly astonished to find that outside of the lecture courses the only thing discussed was the war which Prussia was about to make on France. Invited to a soirée, I heard it whispered behind me, Vielleicht ist er ein französischer Spion—"Perhaps he is a French spy." Such were the words as I caught them. At the beer garden a student seated himself near me. He said to me, "We are going to war with you. We shall take Alsace and Lorraine." That night I could see from my window, looking out on the Neckar, the students clad in their club costumes floating down the river on an illuminated raft singing the famous song in honor of Blücher, who "taught the Welches the way of the Germans." And at the university itself the lectures of Treitschke, attended by excited crowds, were heated harangues against the French, inciting to hatred and to war. Seeing that nothing was thought of but the preparation for war, I came back at the Easter vacation of 1869 convinced that hostilities would ensue. I returned to Heidelberg some time later and became acquainted with other persons, other centres of ideas. I understood then that opinion in Germany was divided between two opposite doctrines. The general aspiration was for the unity of Germany, but there was no agreement as to the way of conceiving and realizing this unity. The thesis of Treitschke was, Freiheit durch Einheit, "liberty through unity," that is to say, unity first, unity before all; liberty later, when circumstances should permit. And to realize at once this unity, which really was the only thing that mattered, the enrollment of all Germany under the command of Prussia for a war against France.

Now the formula of Treitschke was opposed by that of Bluntschli, Einheit durch Freiheit—"Unity through liberty." This doctrine, which counted at that time some eminent advocates, aimed first to safeguard the independence and unity of the German States and then to establish between them on that basis a federated union. And as it contemplated in the heart of Germany a union without hegemony, so it conceived of German unity as something to be realized without harm to other nations, and especially without harm to France. It was to be a free Germany in a free world.

Germany at that epoch was at the parting of the ways. Should she follow a tendency still living in many and noble minds or should she abandon it entirely, to march head down in the ways in which Prussia had entangled her? That was the question. The party of war, the party of unity as a means of attacking and despoiling France, the Prussian party, gained the day. And its success rendered its preponderance definitive. Since then those who have undertaken to remain faithful to an ideal of liberty and humanity have been annihilated.

Is it still possible that Germany may some day regain the parting of the ways where she was before 1870 and this time take the other road, the road of the Leibnitzes, the Kants, the Bluntschlis, which leads first to the liberty of individuals and of peoples and afterward– and only afterward—a form of harmony where the rights of all are equally respected? A word of the Scotch professor, William Knight, comes back to my memory at this moment: "The best things have to die and be reborn." The Germany which the world respected and admired, the Germany of Leibnitz, appears indeed dead. Can it be reborn?

Accept, I beg, my dear Director, the assurance of my cordial devotion.

EMILE BOUTROUX.

The German Religion of Duty

By Gabriele Reuter. 2

On various occasions in the past I have been reproached by my friends for not showing the proper spirit of patriotism.

I have merely smiled at their criticism, for it was my opinion that true patriotism does not consist of flowery speeches and assertions, but in the effort dutifully to accomplish that for which one is best qualified.

It seemed to me that I was truly showing my love for the Fatherland by writing my books to the best of my ability.

But the source of this reproach was very evident to me. The cause could be traced to a quality which I share with many of my compatriots. It must, in truth, be called a particularly characteristic trait. This is a very earnest desire for and love of justice, which is not satisfied simply to "recognize," but endeavors thoroughly to understand the material and spiritual points of view of the other nations in order to show them the proper appreciation.

It is natural to develop affection for that which one earnestly desires to understand.

Many Germans have had the experience that they have rather overzealously commenced by weighing the good of a foreign people in the balance with the good of their own, and with well-nigh fanatic honesty they have ended by acknowledging their own shortcomings compared to the merits and advantages of the foreign nation. There have been instances when some foreigner has drawn our attention to this or that particular weakness and immediately innumerable of my countrymen assented, saying, "Certainly it is true, the criticism is just, matters are probably even worse than they have been represented."

Many of us, and I acknowledge I am one of the many, have developed a form of ascetic mania for self-abasement, a desire for truth which knows no limits in the dissection of its own condition and the disclosure of social and personal shortcomings and disadvantages. This tendency may be easily discerned in much of the German literature of the past twenty years; also, in my books.

The individual is really always the symbol of the whole, and the thoughts and feelings of one person are but the expression of strong forces in national life and culture. It was not want of patriotism, but an unbounded love for the universality of European culture which drove us, drove many thousand people with German souls, to reach out over the boundaries of our own Fatherland for intellectual conquests, for permeation and coalescence with all the world's riches, goodness, and beauty.

We loved the others; and believing ourselves among friends we were candid and disclosed our weaknesses.

Germans Trusted Too Well.

We permitted criticism and criticised ourselves, because we were convinced that those others had our welfare at heart, and also because we were convinced that only by unsparing self-knowledge can the heights be scaled which lead to superior and more refined development. It is therefore probable that we ourselves have delivered the weapons into our enemies' hands.

Confiding and harmless as children, we were blind to the enigmatical hatred which has to an appalling extent developed all around us. This hate which has been nourished systematically and with satanic cleverness probably originated in a slight feeling of jealousy, and the tendency of my countrymen to criticise each other led our enemies to believe that they might look for internal discord in the Fatherland and that our humiliation could therefore be more easily accomplished.

If we had recognized the danger in time, we might have prevented this hatred, to which they at the beginning were hardly prone, from taking root in the souls of nations. But only very few among us were aware of it and they received little credence from the others. There were times when each one of us sensed the antipathy which we encountered beyond the boundary lines of our own country. But we never realized how deeply it had taken root and how widely it had spread. We loved our enemies! We loved this French nation for its high development of etiquette, language, and taste; a culture which seemed well adapted to serve as a complement to our own. How much misery France might have been spared had she but understood this unfortunate love of the German people for the "Hereditary Enemy!"

We loved the deep, mystically religious soul of the Russians in their anguished struggles for freedom! How many Germans have looked upon Tolstoy as a new savior!