V.
The most notable representative of this school was Heinrich von Treitschke, compiler-in-chief of the Hohenzollern saints’ calendar. Since the beginning of the war, much attention has been paid to him in England and in France; people have even begun to read him. From his books on history and politics we try to gain an insight into those glowing ideas which have played their part in bringing on the present conflict. In reading them we are struck with their literary merit; we are amazed at their wealth of document, their profound study of the original sources; we cannot help admiring the infinite care with which this true artist paints a historical portrait in all its details. His influence on German thought, however, and on all classes of German society, is mainly due to his overpowering eloquence, which may probably be set down to his Slavonic blood. During the last twenty years of his life he made a great name for himself as professor at Berlin University, and saw one of his dearest wishes fulfilled—that of becoming the real educator of the younger generation.
Entering upon his professorship and his political work during the Schleswig-Holstein crisis, at the time when Germany was in the throes of her national unification, he was from the first an ardent admirer of the Hohenzollerns and of Bismarck. He scornfully compared the wisdom and resolution of William I. and his minister with the hopeless mediocrity of the minor German sovereigns, who, he maintained, showed an alarming family likeness in this respect. The greatness of Prussia, the glory of a nation that was also an army, the Heaven-sent mission of that peerless dynasty, the Hohenzollerns—these were the articles of the faith preached to his countrymen by this apostle of the Bismarckian policy. The history of Germany, as traced by his pen, culminated in her union under Prussian sway. After extolling this achievement of the Hohenzollern sword, the prophetic writer passes on to the vision of a Germany that will become the first Power in the world, once her flag has crossed all the seas in triumph. What limit shall be set to her dominion? Treitschke, in offering these dazzling vistas to the imagination of his hearers and readers, was probably the true father of that world-policy for which William II. and Prince von Bülow are generally held responsible.
One finds in his works all the stock commonplaces, beloved of German military writers, regarding the necessity and moral value of war. He glorifies war as the foster-mother of heroic ideas, and for him the issue of battles is the judgment of God. But among all the historians who have bowed down before the Prussian Baal, he stands out from the ruck by virtue, not only of his superior talents, but also of his extraordinary aversion for England. The pride and envy of this Saxon who became a Prussian heart and soul could not endure that England should own a fifth of the habitable globe. It seemed to him that so vast an empire was out of all proportion to the real strength of the British nation—a nation of shop-keepers, which had won its territories, not by any remarkable genius or courage, but through fraud and hypocrisy, aided by the stupidity of other peoples. It is hardly surprising that he is accused in England of having undermined the friendly relations that formerly subsisted between the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans, and of having brought about that explosion of hatred which drove them apart three years after his death, at the beginning of the Boer War.