FOOTNOTES:
[17] Geistigkeit. This is a difficult word to translate. It sometimes means merely intellectuality, sometimes in addition (as here) all that is implied in the phrase, "Ye know not what manner of spirit (οιου πνευματος ) ye are of."
[18] Referring to Werner Sombart's war-book, Händler und Helden.
[19] Cf. Thomas Mann's remarkable book on the real significance of the war: Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918).
[20] Sachlichkeit. Rathenau seems to have in mind the German feeling for disinterested study and research as illustrated, for instance, by the fact that when the German Government heard of the genius of Einstein they brought him to Berlin with a salary of nearly £1000 a year and no duties except to think. Modern bigotry has expelled him.
[21] Where Kant lived and taught, and published his Kritik der reinen Vernunft.
[22] As opposed to the inward, intellectual and spiritual character.
[23] Stein was the chief leader of Prussia from the Frederician into the modern era. His ministry of reform by which a peasant-proprietary was established, and municipal institutions created, lasted only from September 1807 to November 1808.
X
On balance it seems that the endowments of the German people work out as follows:—
High qualities of intellect and heart. Ethics and mentality normal. Originative will-power and independent activity, weak.
We give our devotion freely, and the heart rules in action. Our feelings are genuine and powerful. We have courage and endurance. Led by sentiment rather than by inspiration. We create no forms, are self-forgetful, seek no responsibility, obey rather than rule. In obedience we know no limit, and never question what is imposed upon us.
Of its own accord the German people would never have adopted an ideal of force. It was imposed on us by the idolaters of the great war-machine and those who gained by it; even Bismarck did not share it.
We are not competent to form an ideal of civilization, for the sense of unity, will to leadership, and formative energy are lacking to us. We have no political mission for the arrangement of other people's affairs, for we cannot arrange our own; we do not lead a full life, and are politically unripe.
We are endowed as no other people is for a mission of the spirit. Such a mission was ours till a century ago; we renounced it, because through political slackness of will-power we fell out of step; we did not keep pace with the other nations in internal political development, and, instead, devoted ourselves to the most far-reaching developments of mechanism and to their counterpart in bids for power. It was Faust, lured away from his true path, cast off by the Earth-Spirit, astray among witches, brawlers and alchemists.
But the Faust-soul of Germany is not dead. Of all peoples on the earth we alone have never ceased to struggle with ourselves. And not with ourselves alone, but with our dæmon, our God. We still hear within ourselves the All, we still expand in every breath of creation. We understand the language of things, of men and of peoples. We measure everything by itself, not by us; we do not seek our own will, but the truth. We are all alike and yet all different; each of us is a wanderer, a brooder, a seeker. Things of the spirit are taken seriously with us; we do not make them serve our lives, we serve them with ours.
"And you dare to say this, in the face of all the brutalizing and bemiring that we experience—the profiteering and gormandizing, the abject submissiveness, the shameless desertions, the apathy, the insincerity, the heartlessness and mindlessness of our day?"
Yes, I dare to say it, for I believe it and I know it. The soul of the German people lies still in the convulsions and hallucinations of its slow recovery. It is recovery not alone from the war, but from something worse, its hundred-years' alienation from itself. The much-ridiculed choice of our old romantic unheraldic colours, black, red and gold, instead of the bodiless and soulless colours under which we waged the war,[24] was, among the whirling follies of the time, a faint symbolic movement of our better mind. We must reunite ourselves with the days before we ceased to be Germans and became Berliners.
What we need is Spirit. The whole world needs it, no more and no less than we do, but will never create it. History knows why it decided for Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors. Not mechanism alone, with its retinue of nationalism and imperialism, is now again and for the last time to be glorified; no, the whole Franco-British policy of acquisition mounts up even to the throne of the Sun-king, and it is seriously believed that it will govern the destinies of the world for centuries to come. An inconceivable, and, in its monstrous irony, unsurpassable drama, which is put forward as the introduction to the great era. The bourgeois conscience of the West has no inkling of what it means. To this conscience, the war was a huge violation of decency, contrived by bandits; its victory is the final triumph of a capitalist, rationalistic civilization; the torch lit in the East means murder and incendiarism, and the upward migration of the people from the depths is to it invisible.
No; it is not here that the spirit of the future is being formed. One may discover further ingenious devices, lightning-conductors to mitigate the stroke; but gently or violently a natural force will have its way, and the new earth which it is preparing needs new seed.
That we have been given the faculty to shape a new spirit does not imply that we are at liberty to choose whether we shall do it or not. Even if it were not for our life's sake—even if it were against our life—still we must obey. But it is for our life's sake, as we have seen, and as it is indeed obvious, for every organism can live only by fulfilling the purpose of its being.
And now we have got to a very dangerous place—a place where the usual moral peroration lies in wait for us—that German peroration which announces universal redemption, and immediately, on that lofty note, closes the discussion. Fatherland, Morality, Humanity, Labour, Courage, Confidence—we all know how it goes, the writer has written something fine, the reader has read something fine; emotion on both sides, little conviction on either.
It appears, then, that I have just been writing something extremely suspect. Has the reader followed me through five-and-thirty of these difficult folios in order to arrive in the end at that very everyday term, Spirit?[25] Is there any term in commoner use, and what are we to think about it? Softly—there is worse to come! The next word is still more dubious, philistinishly so, in fact—the word Culture.[26] I cannot help it—we must pass on by way of these everyday conceptions. We must get through the crowd, where hack-phrases elbow us. Any journey you may take, though it were to Tibet, must begin at the Berlin Central Railway Station. What is wrong with these popular phrases is not that they start from an everyday conception, but that they remain content with it, and do not think it out to the end.
Our task, therefore, stated in the most general terms, is to make actually spiritual a people which is capable of spirituality. And since spirituality cannot be propped up by any external thrust, by sermons, newspaper articles, leagues, or propaganda, but must be associated with life and developed out of life, so the organic process and the condition of life to which it leads is called Culture.
It is only with deep reluctance and after long search that I have written down this beautiful word, a word now worn almost beyond recognition. Can we find our way back to its application and significance? Even when it is not drawn out with a futile prefix[27] one can hardly detect its pure meaning by reason of the many overtones. The school, if possible the university, some French and English, the rules about I and Me, visiting-cards, shirt-cuffs, foreign phrases, top-hats, table-manners: these are some of the overtones that make themselves heard when we talk of a cultured man, or rather as they have it a cultured gentleman. A hundred years ago, as the word implies, we understood by culture the unfolding and the full possession of innate bodily, spiritual and moral forces. In this sense Goethe showed us the two fraternal figures formed after his own image: Faust the richer, and the poorer Wilhelm Meister, striving for culture.
The ideal which hovers before us is not one of education, not even one of knowledge, although both education and knowledge enter into it; it is an ideal of the Will. It will not be easy to convey the breadth and the boundless range which we are to attach to this conception. That it is not an airy figment is clear from the fact that for centuries the Greeks, with full consciousness, adopted as their highest law (though directed to a somewhat different end) that impulse of the will which they called Kalokagathia.[28]
From one who has introduced the conception of mechanism into German thought, who has rescued the conception of the soul from the hands of the psychologists and brought it back to its primal meaning, who has written so much about soulless intellectualism, and has put forward the empire of the soul as the goal of humanity, it is not to be expected that he should preach any mechanical kind of culture, or indeed any that it is possible to acquire by learning.
How culture is to be produced we shall see; the first thing necessary is that it should be willed.
Willed it must be, in a sense and with a strength of purpose and a force of appreciation of which we to-day, when the ages of faith, of the Reformation, of the German classics, and the wars of liberation, lie so far behind us, have no idea at all.
When the current conception of intellectual culture so much prized in family, society and business life, and tricked out with criticisms of style, with historical data and incidents of travel is justly ridiculed, then the will to complete cultivation of the body, the intellect and the soul of the people must be so strong that all questions of convenience, of enjoyment, of prestige and of material interests must sink far into the background. This word must sound so that all who hear it can look in each other's eyes with a full mutual understanding and without the slightest sense of ambiguity; just as they do in Japan when the name of the common head of all families, the Mikado, is named. There must be one thing in Germany and it must be this thing, which is altogether out of reach of the yawning, blinking and grinning scepticism of the coffee-house, and of the belching and growling of the tavern. Any man who puts this thing aside in favour of his class-ideas, or his speculations in lard, or his dividends, or the demands of his Union, must understand that he is doing something as offensive as if he went out in public without washing himself.
The conception of Culture as our true and unique faculty must be so profoundly grasped that in public life and legislation it must have the first word and the last. Though we become as poor as church-mice we must stake our last penny on this, and tune up our education and instruction, our models and outlook, our motives and claims, our achievement and our atmosphere, to so high a point that any one coming into Germany shall feel that he is entering into a new age.
Society must be penetrated by this conception. Those classes which already possess something resembling it—such as training, education, experience, tradition, outlook, good breeding—must pour out with both hands what they have to dispense; not in the way of endowments, conventicles, lectures and patronizing visits, but in quiet, self-sacrificing, personal service.
All this, of course, cannot be done without the free response of the other side. The devoted attempts which have been made, especially in England, and for some years with us too, to win this response by long and unselfish solicitation were destined to remain merely the mission of individual lives, for they were not supported by the will of the community as a whole; it rather ran counter to them. A Peace of God must be proclaimed, not as between the Haves and the Have-nots, not between the proletariat and the capitalists, not between the so-called cultured classes and the uncultured, but between those who are ready for a mutual exchange of experience, a give-and-take of their tradition on both sides. Not an exchange on business principles, such as propaganda in satisfaction of demands, or curiosity on one side for a new pastime on the other, but a covenant. This, however, is only practicable if the class-war, as an end in itself, is put a stop to.
The great change itself cannot be come by so cheaply; it demands other assumptions, of which we shall have something to say later. But the attitude and temper, the recognition of the task, could not be better introduced than through the mutual service of the two social strata.
We have still at our disposal, handed on from the past, certain organized methods of investigation and administration. We now need chairs and institutes of research, not for the trivial business of popular enlightenment and lectures, but for the study and investigation of the needs of national culture, the idea which must now take the place of national defence. We shall have need of central authorities, not, like the late Ministries of Culture skimping the scanty endowment of the Board Schools, but doing the work of German education, progress, and interchange of labour.[29]
FOOTNOTES:
[24] Black, red and gold were originally the colours of a students' Corps in Frankfort. They were adopted as the colours of the abortive German Federation of 1848, apparently under a mistaken idea that they represented the colours of the ancient Germanic Empire. The colours of the Empire of 1870 were the Prussian black and white, with the addition of red.
[25] Geist.
[26] Bildung. It is as difficult in English as it is in German to render in one word exactly what the author is thinking of. In its literal sense Bildung implies a shaping and formative action.
[27] Ausbildung.
[28] A harmony of character, compounded of beauty and goodness.
[29] Arbeitsausgleich. The meaning of this will be apparent later.
XI
Some decades ago the conscience of middle-class society in England was stirred. The result was Toynbee Hall and the Settlements-movement, which afterwards found praiseworthy counterparts in Germany. Society had begun to understand the wrong which it had done to its brothers, the proletariat, whom it had robbed of mind, and offered them instead soul-destroying, mechanical labour. Then choice spirits arose who dedicated their whole lives to the service of their brothers. This great and noble work did much to soften pain and hatred, and here and there many a soul was saved by it; but it could not act as it was intended to act, because it could not become what it imagined itself to be.
It ought to have been, and believed itself to be, a simple and obvious piece of love-service, a pure interchange of spiritual possessions between class and class, no condescending pity or educative mission. It was a noble and a splendid error; the movement retained the form of sacrifice and benefaction. On both sides social feeling was indifferent to it, or even hostile. What one hand gave, a thousand others took back; what one hand received, a thousand others rejected. The collective conscience of a class had never been stirred, it was merely that the conscience of certain members of upper-class society had sent out envoys; it had not moved as a body. Individuals were ready to sacrifice themselves, but the conditions of labour remained unchanged.
So long as a general wrong is allowed to stand, it gives the lie to every individual effort. The wrong becomes even more bitter because it loses its unconsciousness—men know it for wrong, and do not amend it. For this reason a second movement of importance, that of the People's High Schools, which has created in Denmark the most advanced peasant-class in existence, can achieve no social reform in lands cloven by proletarianism. If in addition to this the High School movement should depart from its original conception, that of a temporary community of life between the teachers and the taught, and should, instead of this, resolve itself into a lecture-institution, then the danger arises that what is offered will be disconnected matter, intended for entertainment, and without any basis of real knowledge, something commonly called half-culture which is worse than unculture, and is more properly described as misculture.
No work of the charitable type can bring about the reconciliation of classes or be a substitute for popular education. The reconciliation of classes, however, even if it were attainable, is by no means our goal, but rather the abolition of classes, and our ultimate object is not popular education but popular culture. We do not intend to give with one hand and take back with the other, we shall not condemn a brother-people to dullness and quicken a few chosen individuals; no, we mean to go to the root of the evil, to break down the monopoly of culture, and to create a new people, united and cultured throughout.
But the root of the trouble lies in the conditions of labour. It is an idle dream to imagine that out of that soulless subdivision of labour which governs our mechanical methods of production, the old handicrafts can ever be developed again. Short of some catastrophic depopulation which shall restore the mediæval relation between the area of the soil and the numbers that occupy it, the subdivision of labour will have to stand, and so long as it stands no man will complete his job from start to finish—he will only do a section of it; at best, and assuming the highest mechanical development, it will be a work of supervision. But mindless and soulless work no man can do with any joy. The terrible fact about the mechanization of industry is that productive work, the elementary condition of life, the very form of existence, which fills more than half of each man's waking day, is by it made hated and hateful. It degrades the industrious man, thrilling with energy, into a work-shy slacker—for what else does it mean that all social conflicts culminate in the demand for a shortening of the hours of work? For the peasant, the research-worker, the artist, the working day is never long enough; for the artisan, who calls himself par excellence a "worker," it can never be too short.
The advance of technical invention will make it possible in the end to transform all mechanical work into supervision. But the process will be long and partial, we cannot wait till it is completed, especially as times will come when technical knowledge will stand still, or even, it may be, go back. Any one who knows in his own flesh what mechanical work is like, who knows the feeling of hanging with one's whole soul on the creeping movement of the minute-hand, the horror that seizes him when a glance at the watch shows that the eternity which has passed has lasted only ten minutes, who has had to measure the day's task by the sound of a bell, who kills his lifetime, hour after hour, with the one longing that it might die more quickly—he knows how the shortening of the working day, whatever may be put in its place, has become for the factory artisan a goal of existence.
But he knows something else as well. He knows the deadliest of all wearinesses—the weariness of the soul. Not the rest when one breathes again after wholesome bodily exertion, not the need for relaxation and distraction after a great effort of intellect, but an empty stupor of exhaustion, like the revulsion after unnatural excess. It is the shallowest kind of tea-table chatter to talk about good music, edifying and instructive lectures, a cheerful walk in God's free Nature, a quiet hour of reading by the lamp, and so on, as a remedy for this. Drink, cards, agitation, the cinemas, and dissipation can alone flog up the mishandled nerves and muscles, until they wilt again under the next day's toil.
The worker has no means of comparison. He does not know what wholesome labour feels like. He will never find his way back to work on the land, for there he cannot get the counter-poisons which he thinks indispensable, and he lacks the organic, ordering mind which mechanical employment has destroyed. Even if some did get back, it would be in vain, for though agriculture is hungering for thousands of hands it cannot absorb millions. The worker has no means of comparison; hence his bottomless contempt for intellectual work, the results of which he recognizes, but which, in regard to the labour it costs, he puts on a level with the idling of the folk whom he sees strolling or driving about with their lapdogs in the fashionable streets.
The middle-class conscience, and even that of the men of science, turns away its face in shameful cowardice from the horror of mechanized labour. Apart from the well-meaning æsthetes who live in rural elegance surrounded by all the appliances which mechanism can supply, who wrinkle their brows when the electric light goes out, and who write pamphlets asking with pained surprise why people cannot return to the old land-work and handicraft, most of us take mechanical labour as an unalterable condition of life, and merely congratulate ourselves that it is not we who have to do it.
The Utopianist agitators who knowingly or unknowingly suppress the essential truth that their world of equality will be a world of the bitterest poverty, treat the situation just as lightly. Before them, in the future State, hovers the vision of some exceptional literary or political appointment. The others may console themselves with the thought that in spite of a still deeper degree of poverty, towards which they are sinking by their own inactivity, the hell of mechanical work, by no means abolished, will probably be a little reduced, so far as regards the time they spend in it. The notion that mechanical work will be made acceptable and reconciled with intellectual, if only it is short enough and properly paid, has never been thought out; it is a still-born child of mental lethargy, like all those visions of the future that are being held up to our eyes. Try notions like this on any other ill—toothache, for instance! All our rhetoric about mechanical work being no ill at all, is ignorant or fraudulent, and if nothing further be done than to reduce it to four hours, all our social struggles will immediately be concentrated on bringing it down to two. The goal of Socialism, so far as it relates to this pons asinorum of shortening hours, is simply the right to loaf.
Let us look facts in the face. Mechanical work is an evil in itself, and it is one which we never can get rid of by any conceivable economic or social transformation. Neither Karl Marx nor Lenin has succeeded here, and on this reef will be wrecked every future State that may be set up on the basis of current Socialistic ideas. In this point lies the central problem of Socialism; undisturbed, as was till lately that legendary conception of surplus-value, and bedded, like that conception, in a rats'-nest of rhetorical phrases, repeated from mouth to mouth and never tested by examination.
The bringing of Mind into the masses, the cultured State,[30] which is the only possible foundation of a society worthy of humanity, must remain unattainable until everything conceivable has been thought out and done to alleviate the mischievous operation of this evil, which dulls and stupefies the human spirit and which, in itself, is ineradicable. No Soviet-policy, no socialization, no property-policy, no popular education, nor any other of the catchwords which form ad nauseam the monotonous staple of our current discussion of affairs, can go to the heart of the problem. Instead we must establish and put into practice the principle which I have called that of the Interchange of Labour, and which I must now, in broad outline, endeavour to explain.
The object of this principle is to bring mind into labour. It demands—since mind cannot be brought into mechanical work beyond a certain degree fixed by technical conditions—that the day's work as a whole shall have a share of it, by means of the exchange and association of mental and mechanical employment. Until this principle shall have been carried into effect, all true culture of the people remains impossible. So long as there is no culture of the people, so long must culture remain a monopoly of the classes, and of escapes from the masses; so long must society be wanting in equilibrium, a union open to breach from every side, and one which, however highly its social institutions may be developed, holds down the people to forced labour, and destroys culture.