IV.
The war-philosophy of the university professors and the influence it has had on generations of students would deserve a volume to itself. Whence comes this implacable hatred of France among those who lived through the war of 1870 and among their pupils? We could understand it more easily if we found it in a conquered nation. And why have these intellectuals such a loathing for England? It is not enough to say that France, forty-five years ago, was not weakened enough to satisfy them, and that in the English they detest the rulers of a colonial empire which they covet for themselves. The origin of these hatreds may be traced, and their lastingness may be ascribed, to the teaching of history as it is practised in the universities, under the impulse of the Prussian school of historians, from Niebuhr, Ranke, Mommsen, and Siebel, down to Treitschke, Giesebrecht, Häuser, Droysen, Lamprecht, and Delbrück. If mere teachers in secondary schools and Gymnasien train their boys to hate foreign races, which they depict as enemies or rivals, the fact is highly deplorable; but has not the same excess of blind patriotism, unfortunately, been observed in other countries as well? What is peculiar to German universities is the way in which their experts in historical criticism have directed their teaching of the history of their country to a definite object.
The Prussian school writes German history as if it were the development of a single idea, the evolution of a movement which, beginning in the Middle Ages, goes on down to the unification of Germany achieved by Bismarck, and, starting from the first German Emperor, Charlemagne, comes to a head in the Kings of Prussia, the present emperors. According to this theory, the Hohenzollern Empire is not a new creation, but a new phase of a primeval sovereignty. After the division of Charlemagne’s heritage, the first reconstruction of his empire was the work of the Ottonian dynasty—a work carried on by the Henries and brought to its zenith by the Hohenstaufen. For three and a half centuries of almost ceaseless fighting, Germany was supreme in Europe, and ruled almost a third of the ancient Roman Empire. Frederick Barbarossa, the most popular of these old Cæsars, reigned over Germany, Italy, and the Kingdom of Arles, before perishing in an attempt to add to his titles that of King of Jerusalem. The Germany of the past, say the Prussian historians, is to be revived in the Germany of the future.
They are compelled to explain, however, the long decline that, like an arctic night, followed this brilliant epoch. Nothing could be easier. They show us the Germans absorbed from the Middle Ages in the pursuit of a spiritual and religious ideal, solely engaged in rescuing freedom of thought and freedom to interpret the Scriptures from the tyranny of the Church. The noble aim pursued by the Lutheran Reformation could not be realized without internal struggles that drained Germany of her sap for many a long year, while the Imperial sceptre came near to falling from the enfeebled grasp of the Hapsburgs. The fact that the first nation of Europe was devoting all its efforts to solving the religious problem and to establishing its spiritual control on the ruins of Roman superstition, enabled other nations—Spain, France, and England—to fight during that period for the temporal mastery of the world. The Prussian school would have us believe that in this way the Germans were cheated of their destiny. They could not at the same time follow the noblest of all ideals and fulfil their duty as a civilizing force. Without the Reformation, which nevertheless gives them an inestimable claim to the gratitude of the human race, their dominion would now extend from the Straits of Dover to the Bosphorus and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. It would also include vast colonies, for the German mariners would not have let themselves be forestalled by others in the exploration and conquest of the New World.
At last, however, the God-given mission of carrying on the work of Charlemagne and the first elective Cæsars has been entrusted to a new line of rulers marked out by fate. Successive princes of the great Hohenzollern house have patiently built up again the edifice that time had destroyed. In reuniting the scattered limbs of the Germanic body, in making it once more alive and whole, they have restored all its ancient vigour. Once more it is master of its destiny, free to pursue its irresistible onward march.
It would not be difficult to pick holes in these scientific arguments, which are used, among other things, as a warrant for regaining territories that once were fiefs of the Imperial Crown, but have been severed from Germany for hundreds of years. The Hohenstaufen Empire included races that it was impossible to amalgamate or unify. A colossus with feet of clay, it soon lost its solidity and was shattered into fragments. The power of the emperors dwindled away in Germany itself, choked by the parasitic growth of feudal princedoms and free cities, while around it in Europe strong and cohesive nations were being formed. With malice aforethought, the Prussian theory ignores the fact that countries once attached to the Holy Roman Empire managed to secure and lead a separate existence long before the Reformation, and, like the Netherlands for instance, have since then preserved their own language and customs, which were not the language or the customs of Germany. Others, like the two Burgundies or the Kingdom of Arles, retain no trace of their short-lived reincorporation in the Germanic scrap-heap.
After all, the most striking feature in this wilful distortion of events and processes is not its fantastic character, but the goal that its authors sought to attain. That goal was not so much to produce work of scientific value, as, by throwing an artificial light upon the past, the light of an exaggerated patriotism, to equip their countrymen for the coming struggles. The plan that they followed was to arouse the nationalist sentiment—never far below the surface—of the academic youth, by foretelling the resurrection of a great age that had vanished, by making the conquests of recent years seem paltry in comparison with those yet to be won—in short, by showing that the triumphal march of the past century was not yet ended, and that it must lead to yet more fruitful victories. The Prussian school could only succeed in their task by inspiring their pupils with a hatred of those rival nations which it was essential to crush, before the Germany of their dreams could come into her own.