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VIII

Had it not culminated before our eyes, the case of Germany would be perfectly incredible. As it stands to-day, the truly incredible thing is that she should have made her spring at the throat of an unexpecting, unprepared world. Now that she has sprung, the diagnosis of her case has been often and ably made – before the event, Dr. Charles Sarolea, a Belgian gentleman, made it notably; but prophets are seldom recognized except by posterity. The case of Germany is a hospital case, a case for the alienist; the mania of grandeur, complemented by the mania of persecution.

Very well do I remember the first dawning hint I had of this diseased mental state. It was Wednesday, August 5, 1914. We were in mid-ocean. Before the bulletin board we passengers were clustered to read that day's marconigram and learn what more of Europe had fallen to pieces since yesterday. This morning was posted the Kaiser's proclamation, quoting Hamlet, calling on his subjects "to be or not to be," and to defy a world conspired against them. In these words there was such a wild, incoherent ring of exaltation that I said to a friend: "Can he be off his head?"

Later in that voyage we sped silent and unlanterned through the fog from two German cruisers, of which nobody seemed personally afraid but one stewardess. She said: "They're all wild beasts. They would send us all to the bottom." No one believed her. Since then we believe her. Since then we have heard the wild incoherent ring in many German voices besides the Kaiser's, and we know to-day that Germany's mania is analogous to those mental epidemics of the Middle Ages, when fanaticism, usually religious, sent entire communities into various forms of madness.

The case of Germany is the Prussianizing of Germany. Long after all of us are gone, men will still be studying this war; and, whatever responsibility for it be apportioned among the nations, the huge weight and bulk of guilt will be laid on Prussia and the Hohenzollern – unless, indeed, it befall that Germany conquer the world and the Kaiser dictate his version of History to us all, suppressing all other versions, as he has conducted the training of his subjects since 1888. But this will not be; whatever comes first, this cannot be the end. If I believed that the earth would be Prussianized, life would cease to be desirable.

To me the whole case of Germany, the whole process, seems a fatalistic thing, destined, inevitable; cosmic forces above and beyond men's comprehension flooding this northern land with their high tide, as once they flooded southern coasts; giving to this Teuton race its turn, its day, its hour of white heat and of bloom, its temperamental greatness, its strength and excess of vital sap, intellectual, procreative – all this grandeur to be hurled into tragedy by its own action.

The process goes back a long way behind Napoleon – who stayed it for a while – to years when we see the Germany of the Reformation, Poetry, Music, the grand Germany, blossoming in the very same moment that the Prussian poison was also germinating. About 1830, Heine perceived and wrote scornfully concerning the new and evil influence. This was a germination of state and family ambition combined, fermenting at last into lust for world dominion. It grows quite visible first in Frederick the Great. By him the Prussian state of mind and international ethics began to be formulated. By force and fraud he annexed weak peoples' territory. He cut Poland's body in three, blasphemously inviting Russia and Austria to partake with him of his Eucharist.

Theft has followed theft since Frederick's. His cynical, strong spirit guided Prussia after Waterloo, guided first the predecessor of Bismarck and next Bismarck himself, with his stealing of Schleswig-Holstein, his dishonest mutilation of the telegram at Ems and the subsequent rape of Alsace and Lorraine in 1870. Very plain it is to see now, and very sad, why the small separate German states that had indeed produced their giants – their Luthers, Goethes, Beethovens – but had always suffered military defeat, had been the shambles of their conquerors for centuries, should after 1870 hail their new-created Emperor. Had he not led them united to the first glory and conquest they had ever known? Had he not got them back Alsace and Lorraine, which France had stolen from them two hundred years ago? So they handed their soul to the Hohenzollern. This marks the beginning of the end.

IX

We can hardly emphasize too much, or sufficiently underline, the moral effect of 1870 on the German nature, the influence it had on the German mind. It is essential to a clear understanding of the full Prussianizing process that now set in. On the German's innate docility and credulity many have dwelt, but few on what 1870 did to this. Only with Bismarck's quick, tremendous victory over France as the final explanation is the abject and servile faith that the Germans thenceforth put in Prussia rendered conceivable to reason. They blindly swallowed the sham that Bismarck gave them as universal suffrage. They swallowed extreme political and military restraint. They swallowed a rigid compulsion in schools, which led to the excess in child suicide I have mentioned. They swallowed a state of life where outside the indicated limits almost nothing was permitted and almost everything was forbidden.

But all this proscription is merely material and has been attended by great material welfare. Intellectual speculation was apparently unfettered; but he who dared philosophize about Liberty and the Divine right of Kings found it was not. Prussia put its uniform not only on German bodies but on their brains. Literature and music grew correspondingly sterilized. Drama, fiction, poetry and the comic papers became invaded by a new violence and a new, heavy obscenity. Impatience with the noble German classics was bred by Prussia. What wonder, since freedom was their essence?

Beethoven, after Napoleon made himself Emperor, tore off the dedication of his "Eroica" symphony to Napoleon. And Goethe had said: "Napoleon affords us an example of the danger of elevating oneself to the Absolute and sacrificing everything to the carrying out of an idea." Goethe fell frankly out of date in Berlin. Symphony orchestras could no longer properly interpret Mozart and Beethoven. A strange blend of frivolity and bestiality began to pervade the whole realm of German art. Scientific eminence degenerated pari passu. No originator of the dimensions of Helmholtz was produced, but a herd of diligent and thorough workers-out of the ideas got from England – like the aniline dyes – or from France – like the Wassermann tests – and seldom credited to their sources. So poor grew the academic tone at Berlin that a Munich professor declined an offer of promotion thither.

For forty years German school children and university students sat in the thickening fumes that exhaled from Berlin, spread everywhere by professors chosen at the fountainhead. Any professor or editor who dared speak anything not dictated by Prussia, for German credulity to write down on its slate, was dealt with as a heretic.

Out of the fumes emerged three colossal shapes – the Super-man, the Super-race and the Super-state: the new Trinity of German worship.

X

Thus was Germany shut in from the world. Even her Socialist-Democrats abjectly conformed. China built a stone wall, Germany a wall of the mind.

To assert that any great nation has in these modern days deliberately built around herself such a wall, may seem an extreme statement, and I will therefore support it with an instance – only one instance out of many, out of hundreds; it will suffice to indicate the sort of information about the world lying outside the wall that Germany has carefully prepared for the children in her schools. I quote from the letter of an American parent recently living in Berlin, who placed his children in a school there: "The text books were unique. I suppose there was not in any book of physics or chemistry that they studied an admission that a citizen of some other country had taken any forward step; every step was by some line of argument assigned to a German. As you might expect, the history of the modern world is the work of German Heroes. The oddest example, however, was the geography used by Katherine. (His daughter, aged thirteen.) This contained maps indicating the Deutsche Gebiete (the German "spheres of influence" in foreign lands) in striking colors. In North and South America, including the United States and Canada, there are said to be three classes of inhabitants – negroes, Indians and Germans. For the United States there is a black belt for negroes and a middle-west section for Indians; but the rest is Deutsche Gebiete. Canada is occupied mainly by Indians. The matter was brought to my attention because one of Katherine's girl friends asked her whether she was of negro or Indian blood; and when she replied she was neither her friend pointed out that this was impossible for she surely was not German." Information less laughable about the morals taught in the German schools I forbear to quote.

During forty years Germany sat within her wall, learning and repeating Prussian incantations. It recalls those savage rites where the participants, by shouting and by concerted rhythmic movements, work themselves into a frothing state. This has befallen Germany. Within her wall of moral isolation her sight has grown distorted, her sense of proportion is lost; a set of reeling delusions possesses her – her own greatness, her mission of Kultur, her contempt for the rest of mankind, her grievance that mankind is in league to cramp and suppress her.

These delusions have been attended by their proper Nemesis: Germany has misunderstood us all – everybody and everything outside her wall.

Like the bewitched dwarfs in certain old magic tales, whose talk reveals their evil without their knowing it, Germans constantly utter words of the most naïf and grotesque self-betrayal – as when the German ambassador was being escorted away from England and was urged by his escort not to be so downcast; the war being no fault of his. He answered in sincere sadness:

"Oh, you don't realize! My future is broken. I was sent to watch England and tell my Emperor the right moment for him to strike, when England's internal disturbances would make it impossible for her to fight us. I told him the moment had come."

Or again, when a German in Brussels said to an American:

"We were sincerely sorry for Belgium; but we feel it is better for that country to suffer, even to disappear, than for our Empire, so much larger and more important, to be torpedoed by our treacherous enemies."

Or again, when Doctor Dernburg shows us why Germany had to murder eleven hundred passengers:

"It has been the custom heretofore to take off passengers and crew… But a submarine … cannot do it. The submarine is a frail craft and may easily be rammed, and a speedy ship is capable of running away from it."

No more than the dwarf has Germany any conception what such candid words reveal of herself to ears outside her Teutonic wall – that she has walked back to the morality of the Stone Age and made ancient warfare more hideous through the devices of modern science.

Thus her Nemesis is to misunderstand the world. She blundered as to what Belgium would do, what France would do, what Russia would do; and she most desperately blundered as to what England would do. And she expected American sympathy.

Summarized thus, the Prussianizing of Germany seems fantastic; fantastic, too, and not of the real world, the utter credulity, the abject, fervent faith of the hypnotized young men. Yet here are a young German's recent words. I have seen his letter, written to a friend of mine. He was tutor to my friend's children. Delightful, of admirable education, there was no sign in him of hypnotism. He went home to fight. There he inhaled afresh the Prussian fumes. Presently his letter came, just such a letter as one would wish from an ardent, sincere, patriotic youth – for the first pages. Then the fumes show their work and he suddenly breaks out in the following intellectual vertigo:

"Individual life has become worthless; even the uneducated men feel that something greater than individual happiness is at stake, and the educated know that it is the culture of Europe. By her shameless lies and cold-blooded hypocrisy England has forfeited her claim to the title of a country of culture. France has passed her prime anyway, your country is too far behind in its development, the other countries are too small to carry on the heritage of Greek culture and Christian faith – the two main components of every higher culture to-day; so we have to do it, and we shall do it – even if we and millions more of us should have to die."