The Germans of course did not attempt to make a distinction between objects and documents in their threat to Italy, or in their destructive policy in France and Belgium. Public libraries were necessarily endangered by the menace to public museums, galleries, and buildings; and the attack therefore was openly made upon the national archives themselves, both in their documentary and their material form. The cranks of the Futurist movement desired to annihilate historical records because they considered them to be of no value to human progress: the Germans were willing to obliterate these records because they considered them to be of less value than the temporary operations of their armies. There is very little difference between the two points of view.
Any person of intelligence will quickly recognise that the mind which looks with complacency upon the destruction of a part of the world’s archives will regard with equanimity the destruction of the entire record of man’s past activities. Ancient buildings, objects and documents are not so numerous that the loss of a few specimens can pass unnoticed; but even if the number were unlimited the crime of the destruction of some of that number would not be
A human-faced lion, probably dating from the reign of Pharaoh Amenemes III., B.C. 1825. One of the great masterpieces of ancient Egyptian art. Now in Cairo
diminished. A thief who steals a handy hundred pounds from a public fund is not less culpable because he leaves untouched the bulk of the capital sum, which happens to be out of his reach. This aspect of the matter thus resolves itself into a question whether a knowledge of history is of any practical value to the man of the present day, or whether it is merely a hindrance to the progress of his original thought. The Futurist definitely accepts the latter view.
“Would you poison yourselves,” says his Manifesto, “by a knowledge of history? Do you want to decay? Would you waste your strength by a useless admiration of the past, from which you can but emerge exhausted, reduced, downtrodden?”
The German seemed to take the same attitude towards history, with this one qualification—that he was prepared to tolerate, to a certain extent, the history of his own nation. In his blind agony he saw a certain use in the study of the development of Germanic thought, but recognised none in the lessons conveyed by the history of other nations. German antiquities had some sort of value to him because they were German, not because they were antiquities. Like the Futurist, he felt that he “stood upon the summit of the world”; he believed that he had the right to make new laws, to upset accustomed habits; he would not be bound by the old traditions of which the growth is recorded by history. Confident in the freedom and maniacal strength which he derived from his destruction of tradition, he bounded forward, to use the words of the Manifesto, “scratching the air with hooked fingers, and sniffing at the academy doors the odour of the rotting minds within; warming his hands at the fire made by the burning of the old books; while injustice, strong and healthy, burst forth radiantly in his eyes.”
Like the Futurist, the militant German hated the restrictions placed upon him by calm, sedate history; he detested the admonitions of accumulated experience; and, regarding himself as superman, he wished to be rid of all records, documentary or material, which tended to pull his thoughts down from the untrodden paths of his high attainment to the unchanging plains of the world. Just as in warfare he brushed aside every restraint which experience and custom had placed upon all military actions, and stopped his ears to the voice of history which counselled moderation, so in regard to the treatment of art treasures he adopted a policy of deliberate destructiveness based on the argument that the world’s art, the world’s history, the world’s accumulations of experience, the world’s very soul, was as nothing compared with Germany’s needs of the moment.
“Come, good incendiaries with your charred fingers,” he cried, in the words of the Futurist Manifesto, “set fire to the shelves of the libraries! Flood the museums, that the glorious canvases may drift hopelessly away! Destroy the venerable cities!” So might Germany, untrammelled by obsolete codes, reign supreme over a new earth.