¶ Thus, you have before you this spectacle: Germany’s greatest poetical genius forgets the sad reality of his broken, dispirited and disrupted country and leaves her to her wretched fate; passing his time as a sentimental voluptuary in the splendor of the Weimar court, where he concerns himself with such works as “Elective Affinities,” a frank endorsement of adultery.
¶ On the other side, the noble Schiller, poet of the people, recalled to his fellow countrymen the faded glory of Germany. “Schiller stands forth,” says Menzel, “as the champion of liberty, justice and his country.”
In a word, it took Germany 100 years to learn by suffering that if she is ever to regain her fallen prestige as a nation, she must fight her enemies at home and abroad; she must restore the military ideal of ancient times. And here, in a nutshell, is the very root of all this cry about militarism: The man who will not fight for what he regards as his political rights, remains a slave his whole life long; for it is the essential nature of man to exercise tyrannous power over human lives, whenever such practice holds out promise of advantage.
Therefore, Bismarck again trained Germany to be a fighting nation; and if an ideal of a free and united people is no justification, then words have no meaning.
15
The French peasant’s son, returning from the wars brings his wife a diamond necklace.
¶ The cross-angles of politics, for years, lead as far as one cares to go, in this German family fight. Each petty state has its intrigues and its grievances; you become befuddled; it is all weariness of the flesh.
¶ However, behind all the political jargon, mighty forces are taking form; and little by little, certain outstanding facts come to view, involving every king, knight, bishop, prince and pauper on the German map, from the North Sea to the Black Sea.
After 1789, the German was down with that new disease, French constitutionalism; liberty, fraternity and equality. No human being knew exactly what it meant. It was a political fever that had to be gone through with; and blood-letting was the only cure.
Monarchs seemingly secure on their thrones from the days of old, now shivered like ghosts as the mobs marched the streets of Vienna and Berlin, waiving new flags and crying “Liberty!”