The German Problem. An Answer
IHAVE given this a great deal of thought. I have read a great deal and I believe I have never known of a writer who furnished what I should call an answer. And that is the most important thing—the vital thing. So I have evolved a simple, natural proposal. It is the only proposal, I think, that will remedy the evil of the German nation—remedy the ugly situation that hangs over the careless earth.
"We know that when young foreigners are educated in considerable part in a country, they generally become at peace with it. Everything, in fact, draws them to this attitude—for instance, their excusable satisfaction in feeling that their sojourn abroad has been a success for them instead of a failure. Any foreign instruction makes the student more of an intelligent, cosmopolitan sympathizer. It knits together warm acquaintances abroad. Every Rhodes scholar is an ally of England. He goes forth bearing kindly messages for her. I have told you how it works with our Americans coming over here to the German universities. They nearly all become pro-Germanic. And this is one reason why our compatriots at home have in general such a downright admiration for what they consider the super-excellence of the Teutons.
"But while this providing of the German education for Americans is pulling so strong in favor of Germany, we have nothing similar in America pulling Germany toward us and our ways. Young Germans are not sent to the United States to study and to lead our lives and to return home bearing good-will and good reports. They stay where they are and become more narrowly, intrinsically Teutons—irreclaimably Teutons. They are left with the undisputed idea that their system of instruction is altogether the best, as proven by the spectacle of aliens coming here for schooling. Why, then, should German lads and misses go abroad to learn? And they don't.
"Now as long as this state of things continues, the German race will remain a tribe in itself, and radically at loggerheads with the world. It will be hopelessly separated, unreconciled, inimical. It will be strange and opposed to everyone else—everything else. As you have seen yourself, even the meanings of the most common and essential terms are usually, to the German, the contrary of what they are to the rest of mankind.
"How will there ever be any natural and genuine meeting of the minds, fellowship, community of interests, under present programmes? For centuries civilized countries have been living side by side with the Teutons, have been pursuing education ever more zealously, and still the German brain and character stay profoundly different from the rest and are not understood. They are so different, in fact, that the forces of war and destruction must be maintained as against them and are constant irritants to thought and activity.
"My plan is this. Young German men and women should be amicably educated abroad in very large numbers—the largest well possible. And on a broader basis than the Cecil Rhodes scheme. In our country they would become, from youthful association, more or less fond of our open homes, our sense of democracy, the untrammeled opportunities to go and to do. They would see the advantages of these blessings—or at least their human attraction—among boys and girls.
"Under my programme these Germans, still adolescent, will return home and a little of this foreign education will stick. But their children will do the same. More will stick with them. Then their children, and still more sticking. After fifty or a hundred years you will have a large population in Deutschland thinking and liking and to a great extent living like their Christian and less warlike neighbors. It will be a tremendous beneficial element introduced for the first time into Germany. It will slowly and silently, without friction or loss of self-respect, accomplish an internal revolution.
"Foreign education for Teuton boys and girls! That's the only final answer I can find—the only true one. You see, a war will never accomplish this, nor tariffs or penalties. Such agencies do not change human nature or character or modes of existence. They antagonize, make stubborn or resentful or malevolent. And, unlike other races, the Germans would always remain, as they are to-day, UNITED. This is the explanation of their World Power."
Anderson stopped as if waiting for a comment.
"It all sounds well and is a beautiful way to do it, but how is it practicable?" asked Gard, who had listened attentively, impressed. "How are you going to coax the Germans to enter into this? What benefit will they see in it?"
"You are right," returned Anderson. "That's the difficulty at present. It can't be put in operation, as I see it, unless Germany happens to be defeated in the coming war. If she is defeated she will, of course, be humbled and temporarily sick of fighting, and this proposal could then be readily forced into adoption as one of the post-war measures looking to the quickest rehabilitation of the nation. Anything that will put it on its feet again soon will be most welcome at that time. Meanwhile, the instruments of war, the power to do damage, must not be left in the German's hands. As long as he has them, he will prepare to destroy."
"But if Germany is victorious, as you seem to think she will be?" suggested Gard.
"Oh, then nothing will work. It won't have a chance. What will there be of all this to contemplate? Germany will be the master and its semi-paganism will prevail. The modern Teuton tribes will begin to level the Christian civilizations to the ground just as the Huns leveled the Roman civilization. The Hun disposition in the German must be eradicated—must be destroyed. Until this is done the world will always have these Huns at its gates."...
It was now July in the year of everlasting tragedy—1914. Kirtley must leave for home, as Villa Elsa knew. He talked over his route with Anderson. His interest in Charlemagne made him wish to see at Aix-la-Chapelle the great emperor's tomb, underneath which, according to an old-time legend, the ruler still sits in his white robes of state in his marble chair, looking forward to resurrection to power. So the trip was mapped out through central Germany.
As the time was at hand for Gard to announce his date of setting off, his perplexities before Frau and Elsa grew entangled. But, happily, their knot was cut for him. Von Tielitz, who had long been away, broke in upon the household one morning with glorious news. He had received a commission as bandmaster in the army with fair pay. Most unexpected. A civilian, who could make sport of the military, summoned into the ranks! What could it mean? Something must be in the wind.
At all events he had come to arrange to marry Elsa, and converted the Villa into a hubbub. He was so beside himself that he appeared ready to embrace and marry the first person he met. He was also officious as if conducting a rehearsal. He rushed to Gard's room and overwhelmed him with the tidings. His eye-glasses kept tumbling off. He was upstairs and down, in the flower garden, out at the tea table, and now and then he rushed to the Pleyel and rent the air with its exultant chords.
The family turned the day into celebration. The wine cellar was opened. The kitchen sent forth its hot and overflowing dishes hour after hour until well into the evening. The marriageable Jim Deming and Gard Kirtley were to Villa Elsa as if they had never been. Frau proclaimed in husky sounds that she had not felt so young in thirty years. Luckily Fräulein Wasserhaus had gone off to Brunswick to visit a relative soon after Deming's advent, so she was not in Wiesenstrasse to encounter this joyous climax and Gard's preparations for his eventful journey.
Elsa acted as one overjoyed. It was what she had yearned for and what filled the measure of her Teutonic maiden nature. On seeing her happy like a yellow mermaid on a sunlit, blissful shore, and knowing what Friedrich was with all his talent, Gard realized she was never for him or he for her. It had been for him a vagary, an irresponsible venture in ethno-psychology, a poorly based confusion of appreciation with a vague notion of duty intermingled with sentiment.
His illness had cleared his intuitions. The unalluring defects of the Teuton systems of love-making overshadowed his own defects as a suitor. Elsa had been as truly foreign to him as the German habits of eating and drinking. In thinking of her he now knew he had always been conscious of her nation. The German woman, as he had already learned, is sunk into her race. It swallows up her individuality. In marrying her, one married the whole people—the German State—the Kaiser. One became possessed not only of a help-meet but of an aggressive political idea.
Now that Gard was a friend instead of a lover, how much easier were his relations with Fräulein! Brooding sensitiveness and responsibility passed into lightsomeness. The unnatural and crankling proceeding of his trying to woo a German girl was smoothed away into a genial indifference. The mental picture of Elsa would remain as one that had attracted him on the wall of his German memories. And like the hundred maids that a youth is smitten with, she would gradually blend into the dim gallery of such pleasant visions of Kirtley's susceptible spring-time—visions which, in all men, fade sweetly into their manhood.
In this manner the cloud of Gard's awkward discomfort in speaking out or acting out his answer to Frau's virile project, had melted away before these lighted-up faces. He felt as if a fog were lifted off his consciousness. He was glad to slip out thus easily. In the lively jumble of robust, rejoicing realities about him, he seemed to have emerged from the fringy edges of a daze.