Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View

by Price Collier

I venture to say that no intelligent American stops to think whether the Speyer brothers, or Kahn, or Schiff, or the members of the house of Rothschild, are Jews or not, in estimating their political, social, and philanthropic worth. Even as long ago as the close of the fourteenth century the great strife between the princes of Germany and the free cities ceased, in order that both might unite to plunder the Jews.

Luther preached: “Burn their synagogues and schools; what will not burn bury with earth that neither stone nor rubbish remain.” “In like manner break into and burn their houses.” “Forbid their rabbis to teach on pain of life and limb.” “Take away all their prayer-books and Talmuds, in which are nothing but godlessness, lies, cursing, and swearing.” In the chronicles of the time occurs frequently “Judaei occisi, combusti.”

The German comes by his dislike of the Jew through centuries of traditional conflict, plunder, and hatred, and the very moulder of the present German speech, Luther, was a furious offender. The Jews have been materialists through all ages, claim the Germans: “The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” It is to be in our day the battle of battles, they claim, whether we are to be socially, morally, and politically orientalized by this advance guard of the Orient, the Jews, or whether we are to preserve our occidental ideals and traditions. Many more men see the conflict, they maintain, than care to take part in it. The money-markets of the world are ramparts that few men care to storm, but, if the independent and the intelligent do not withstand this semitization of our institutions, the ignorant and the degraded will one day take the matter into their own hands, as they have done before, and as they do to this day in some parts of Russia.

There are 600,000 Jews in Germany, 400,000 of them in Prussia and 100,000 of these in Berlin. In New York City alone there are more than 900,000. They are always strangers in our midst. They are of another race. They have other standards and other allegiances. Perhaps we are all of us, the most enlightened of us, provincial at bottom, we like to know who and what our neighbors are, and whence they came; and we dislike those who are outside our racial and social experiences, and our moral and religious habits, and the Jew is always, everywhere, a foreigner. At any rate, so the German maintains.

Strange as it may sound in these days, the Germans are not at heart business men. There are more eyes with dreams in them in Germany than in all the world besides. They work hard, they increase their factories, their commerce, but their hearts are not in it. The Jew has amassed an enormous part of the wealth of Germany, considering his small proportion of the total population. The German, because he is not at heart a trader, is an easy prey for him.

These things trouble us in America very little, and we smile cynically at the not altogether untruthful portraits of “Potash and Pearlmutter,” and their vermin-like business methods. There is an undercurrent of feeling in America, that the virile blood is still there which will stop at nothing to throw off oppression, whether from the Jew or from any one else. If we are pinched too hard financially, if confiscation by the government or by individuals goes too far, no laws even will restrain the violence which will break out for liberty. So we are at peace with ourselves and with others, trusting in that quiet might which will take governing into its own hands, at all hazards, if the state of affairs demands it.

With the Germans it is different. No people of modern times has been so harried and harrowed as these Germans. The Thirty Years’ war left them in such fear and poverty that even cannibalism existed, and this was years after Massachusetts and Maryland were settled. But nothing has tarnished their idealism. Whether as followers of Charlemagne, or as hordes of dreamers seeking to save Christ’s tomb and cradle in the Crusades, or as intoxicated barbarians insisting that their emperor must be crowned at Rome, or as the real torch-bearers of the Reformation, or even now as dreamers, philosophers, musicians, and only industrial and commercial by force of circumstances, they are, least of all the peoples, materialists.

They have given the world lyric poetry, music, mythology, philosophy, and these are still their souls’ darlings. They entered the modern world just as science began to marry with commerce and industry, and so their unworn, fresh, and youthful intellectual vigor found expression in industry. Renan writes that he owes his pleasure in intellectual things to a long ancestry of non-thinkers, and he claims to have inherited their stored-up mental forces. Germany is not unlike that. Her recent industrial and intellectual activity may be the release from bondage, of the centuries of stored-up intellectual energy from the “Woods of Germany.”

It is true that they are easily governed and amenable, but this is due not wholly to the fact that they have been so long under the yoke of rulers, or because they are of cow-like disposition, but because their ideals are spiritual, not material. The American seeks wealth, the Englishman power, the Frenchman notoriety, the German is satisfied with peaceful enjoyment of music, poetry, art, and friendly and very simple intercourse with his fellows.

Certainly I am not the man to say he is wrong, when I see how spiritual things in my own country are cut out of the social body as though they were annoying and dangerous appendices.