German Problems and Personalities

by Charles Sarolea

The truth is that national character has little to do with race. It is the result of political institutions and religious beliefs. And it is the political institutions and religious beliefs of modern Germany which largely explain the failure of Democracy.

We have already pointed out the baneful influence of the Socialist creed. But there is another creed which has exercised an even more baneful influence. If we attempt to trace, farther back in history, the main source of German character, we are driven to the conclusion that it is Lutheranism which is responsible for the perversion of the German soul, that it is Lutheranism that is the fons et origo malorum. Before the war all our ideas about religion and philosophy in Germany were made up of unmeaning formulas. And I make the confident forecast that all those ideas will have to be transvalued in the light of the present catastrophe.

If I were asked to sum up the achievements of Lutheranism, I would say that it has accomplished two things equally fatal to Germany and Europe.

On the one hand it has broken up the spiritual unity of Medieval Christendom and the political unity of the Holy German Empire into two thousand four hundred petty principalities. It has set up a tribal religion and the pagan idolatry of the State; and, on the other hand, it has broken up the human soul into two water-tight compartments.

Or to express the Lutheran achievement in terms of freedom and despotism, it has, in the first place, killed political liberty by surrendering all ecclesiastical power to the Prince, or to the State incarnated in the Prince. It has brought about the fusion and confusion of spiritual and temporal powers. It has decreed that the religion of the ruler shall determine the religion of the subject. Cujus regio illius religio. From the beginning his own ecclesiastical policy compelled Luther to sanction the bigamy of the Landgrave Philip of Hesse. In the most violent of his tracts he denounced a miserable German peasantry, and he called upon the nobility to massacre those peasants who had only too faithfully obeyed the provocations of the reformer.

And, in the second place, Lutheranism has killed spiritual liberty by creating an inner world of emotions and of dreams and an outer world of social and political activities without any relation to the inner world. It has divorced speculation and action, theory and practice. The German is like the symbolical eagle of the Habsburg. He has two heads, and both look in an opposite direction.

I would say that the poison of Lutheranism has been acting like that mysterious Indian poison called “curare,” which I used to inject in my distant student days when I had to dissect frogs in the Zoological Laboratory at Liége. The “curare” does not kill the nerves, for the frog still suffers under the dissecting knife. Nor does it kill the muscles, for the muscles still react if you stimulate them. But the poison cuts the connection between the nerves and the muscles. The nerves can no more transmit their orders to the muscles. Even so Lutheranism has not killed the thinking power of the German people. On the contrary, it has given it a morbid stimulus, as speculation is no more hampered by reality. Nor has it paralyzed their external activities, but it has prevented any connection between the two. It has prevented the thinking from influencing the acting. It justifies the recent damning statement of Prince von Bülow, who ought to be a competent judge, that the Germans have remained an essentially unpolitical people.

At the outbreak of the Reformation there took place in Wittenberg, the Mecca of Lutheranism, a memorable and ominous meeting to which few textbooks take the trouble to allude, and which has had more far-reaching consequences than any meeting known to history. It was the meeting between Dr. Martinus Luther and the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Albrecht of Hohenzollern. Luther advised the Grand Master to secularize his Order, to confiscate its immense territories, and to proclaim himself Duke of Prussia. Under such auspices arose the Prussian State. Under such auspices, at the instigation of the “Champion of Liberty,” was established the most tyrannical despotism of modern times. Under such auspices was consummated the unholy alliance between a “reformed” Germany and a twice “reformed” Hohenzollern Monarchy.

This unholy alliance has been shattered by the war. And with the alliance will vanish the Lutheran creed, with all the evil works that proceeded therefrom.

For four hundred years the German people have followed their preachers, and have been led by them to the abyss, even as in the famous ballad of Burger the German maiden Lenore has fallen under the spell of a corpse and has been driven to the gates of hell.