Germany and the Next War

by Friedrich von Bernhardi

The formation of peoples and races, the rise and fall of States, the laws which govern the common life, teach us to recognize which forces have a creative, sustaining, and beneficent influence, and which work towards disintegration, and thus produce inevitable downfall. We are here following the working of universal laws, but we must not forget that States are personalities endowed with very different human attributes, with a peculiar and often very marked character, and that these subjective qualities are distinct factors in the development of States as a whole. Impulses and influences exercise a very different effect on the separate national individualities. We must endeavour to grasp history in the spirit of the psychologist rather than of the naturalist. Each nation must be judged from its own standpoint if we wish to learn the general trend of its development. We must study the history of the German people in its connection with that of the other European States, and ask first what paths its development has hitherto followed, and what guidance the past gives for Our future policy. From the time of their first appearance in history the Germans showed themselves a first-class civilized people.

When the Roman Empire broke up before the onslaught of the barbarians there were two main elements which shaped the future of the West, Christianity and the Germans. The Christian teaching preached equal rights for all men and community of goods in an empire of masters and slaves, but formulated the highest moral code, and directed the attention of a race, which only aimed at luxury, to the world beyond the grave as the true goal of existence. It made the value of man as man, and the moral development of personality according to the laws of the individual conscience, the starting-point of all development. It thus gradually transformed the philosophy of the ancient world, whose morality rested solely on the relations with the state. Simultaneously with this, hordes of Germans from the thickly-populated North poured victoriously in broad streams over the Roman Empire and the decaying nations of the Ancient World. These masses could not keep their nationality pure and maintain their position as political powers. The States which they founded were short-lived. Even then men recognized how difficult it is for a lower civilization to hold its own against a higher. The Germans were gradually merged in the subject nations. The German element, however, instilled new life into these nations, and offered new opportunities for growth. The stronger the admixture of German blood, the more vigorous and the more capable of civilization did the growing nations appear.

In the meantime powerful opponents sprung up in this newly-formed world. The Latin race grew up by degrees out of the admixture of the Germans with the Roman world and the nations subdued by them, and separated itself from the Germans, who kept themselves pure on the north of the Alps and in the districts of Scandinavia. At the same time the idea of the Universal Empire, which the Ancient World had embraced, continued to flourish.

In the East the Byzantine Empire lasted until A.D. 1453. In the West, however, the last Roman Emperor had been deposed by Odoacer in 476. Italy had fallen into the hands of the East Goths and Lombards successively. The Visigoths had established their dominion in Spain, and the Franks and Burgundians in Gaul.

A new empire rose from the latter quarter. Charles the Great, with his powerful hand, extended the Frankish Empire far beyond the boundaries of Gaul. By the subjugation of the Saxons he became lord of the country between the Rhine and the Elbe; he obtained the sovereignty in Italy by the conquest of the Lombards, and finally sought to restore the Western Roman Empire. He was crowned Emperor in Rome in the year 800. His successors clung to this claim; but the Frankish Empire soon fell to pieces. In its partition the western half formed what afterwards became France, and the East Frankish part of the Empire became the later Germany. While the Germans in the West Frankish Empire, in Italy and Spain, had abandoned their speech and customs, and had gradually amalgamated with the Romans, the inhabitants of the East Frankish Empire, especially the Saxons and their neighbouring tribes, maintained their Germanic characteristics, language, and customs. A powerful German [A] kingdom arose which renewed the claims of Charles the Great to the Western Roman Empire. Otto the Great was the first German King who took this momentous step. It involved him and his successors in a quarrel with the Bishops of Rome, who wished to be not only Heads of the Church, but lords of Italy, and did not hesitate to falsify archives in order to prove their pretended title to that country.

[Footnote A: German (Deutsch=diutisk) signifies originally "popular," opposed to "foreign"—e.g., the Latin Church dialect. It was first used as the name of a people, in the tenth century A.D.]

The Popes made good this right, but they did not stop there. Living in Rome, the sacred seat of the world-empire, and standing at the head of a Church which claimed universality, they, too, laid hold in their own way of the idea of universal imperium. The notion was one of the boldest creations of the human intellect—to found and maintain a world-sovereignty almost wholly by the employment of spiritual powers.

Naturally these Papal pretensions led to feuds with the Empire. The freedom of secular aspirations clashed with the claims of spiritual dominion. In the portentous struggle of the two Powers for the supremacy, a struggle which inflicted heavy losses on the German Empire, the Imperial cause was worsted. It was unable to mould the widely different and too independent subdivisions of the empire into a homogeneous whole, and to crush the selfish particularism of the estates. The last Staufer died on the scaffold at Naples under the axe of Charles of Anjou, who was a vassal of the Church.

The great days of the German-Roman Empire were over. The German power lay on the ground in fragments. A period of almost complete anarchy followed. Dogmatism and lack of patriotic sentiment, those bad characteristics of the German people, contributed to extend this destruction to the economic sphere. The intellectual life of the German people deteriorated equally. At the time when the Imperial power was budding and under the rule of the highly-gifted Staufers, German poetry was passing through a first classical period. Every German country was ringing with song; the depth of German sentiment found universal expression in ballads and poems, grave or gay, and German idealism inspired the minnesingers. But with the disappearance of the Empire every string was silent, and even the plastic arts could not rise above the coarseness and confusion of the political conditions. The material prosperity of the people indeed improved, as affairs at home were better regulated, and developed to an amazing extent; the Hanseatic League bore its flag far and wide over the northern seas, and the great trade-routes, which linked the West and Orient, led from Venice and Genoa through Germany. But the earlier political power was never again attained.

Nevertheless dislike of spiritual despotism still smouldered in the breasts of that German people, which had submitted to the Papacy, and was destined, once more to blaze up into bright flames, and this time in the spiritual domain. As she grew more and more worldly, the Church had lost much of her influence on men's minds. On the other hand, a refining movement had grown up in humanism, which, supported by the spirit of antiquity, could not fail from its very nature to become antagonistic to the Church. It found enthusiastic response in Germany, and was joined by everyone whose thoughts and hopes were centred in freedom. Ulrich von Hutten's battle-cry, "I have dared the deed," rang loud through the districts of Germany.