Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View

by Price Collier

In Germany there are more men of culture per thousand of the population than in any other land, but they rule the country not by “sweetness and light,” but by force. This seems at first a contradiction. It is not. Religion, life, and love are all savage things. Because we have known men who preach but do not believe; men who breathe and walk who have not lived; men who protest but who have not loved, we are prone to think of religion, life, and love as soft. We have conquered and chastened so much of nature: the air, the water, the bowels of the earth that we fool ourselves with thinking that culture also is tame, that religion, life, and love are tame too. Savage things they are! You may know them by that! If you find them nice, vivacious, amusing, amenable, be sure that they are forgeries.

This is the profound fallacy underlying the present-day economic peace propagandism, whose heaviest underwriter, Mr. Carnegie, is, by the way, an agnostic. While there is faith there will be fighting. Do away with either and society would crumble. What the Puritans did for us, the Prussians have done for Germany. They have fought, are fighting, and will fight for their faith. Though they have many unpleasant characteristics, this is their most admirable quality. They believe in an aristocracy of culture with a right to rule. Goethe said of Luther that he threw back the intellectual progress of mankind by centuries, by calling in the passions of the multitude to decide on subjects that ought to have been left to the learned. This is a good example of imitation culture. This is very much the view that Mr. Balfour holds in regard to Cromwell. But Luther and Bismarck made Germany. The one taught Germany to bark, the other taught Germany to bite. The great deliverers of the world came, not to bring peace, but a sword.

When you leave the drab crowd in the streets, and enter the houses of the real rulers of Germany, the contrast between the aristocrat and the plebeian is nowhere so outstanding. I have seen no finer-looking specimens of mankind in face and figure and manner than the best of these men. If you stroll though the halls of the Krieges Academie, where the pick of the young officers of the German army, are preparing themselves for the examinations which admit a very small proportion of them, to appointments on the general staff, you will be delighted with the faces and figures, and the air of alertness and intelligence there. And you will find as fine a type of gentlemen, in face, manners, and figure, at their head as exists anywhere.

There are complaints that this Prussian aristocracy is socially exclusive, is given office both in the army and in civil life too readily; but what an aristocracy it is! These are the men whose families gave, often their all, to make Prussia, and then to make Germany. Service of king and country is in their blood. They get small remuneration for their service. There is no luxury. They spurn the temptations of money. Hundreds and hundreds of them have never been inside the house of a rich parvenu, nor have their women. They work as no other servants work, they live on little, they and their women and children; and you may count yourself happily privileged if they permit you the intimacy of their home life.

Officers and gentlemen there are, living on two thousand five hundred dollars a year, and most of them on much less, and their wives, as well born as themselves, darning their socks and counting the pfennigs with scrupulous care. These are the women whose ancestors flung themselves against the Roman foe, beside their husbands and brothers; these are the women who gave their jewels to save Prussia; these are the women, with the glint of steel and the light of summer skies braided in their eyes, who have taken their hard, self-denying part in making Prussia, and the German Empire. No wonder they despise the mere money-maker, no wonder they will have none of his softness for themselves, and hate what Milton calls “lewdly pampered luxury,” as a danger to their children. They know well the moral weapons that won for this starved, and tormented, and poverty-stricken land its present place in the world as a great power.

“And as the fervent smith of yore
Beat out the glowing blade,
Nor wielded in the front of war
The weapons that he made,
But in the tower at home still plied
His ringing trade;
“So like a sword the son shall roam
On nobler missions sent;
And as the smith remained at home
In peaceful turret pent,
So sits the while at home the mother
Well content.”

I, convinced democrat that I am, know very well that there are, and always have been, and always will be aristocrats, for there is no national salvation without them anywhere in the world. The aristocrats are the same everywhere, no matter what their distinctions of title, or whether they have none. They are those who believe that they owe their best to God and to men, and they serve. Likewise the plebeians are the same all over the world; whatever their presumptions or denials, they believe that they are here to get what they can out of God and men, and they take far more than they give.

Perhaps no feature of German life is so little known, so little understood, as this simple-living, proud, and exclusive caste, who have made, and still protect and guard, Prussia and Germany. They say: “We made Prussia and Germany, and we intend to guard them, both from enemies at home and from enemies abroad!” My admiration for these men and women is so unbounded, that I would no more carry criticism with me into their homes, than I would carry mud into a sanctuary.

They have done much for Germany, but the best, perhaps, of all is that they have made economy and simple living feasible and even fashionable; they have made talent aristocratic; they have insisted that social life shall be founded on service and breeding and ability. They will have no dealings with Herr Muller, the rich shopkeeper, but whatever name the distinguished artist, or public servant, or man of science, or young giant in any field of intellectual prowess may bear, he is welcomed. In general this welcome given by German society to talent holds good. There is, however, a society composed of the great landed proprietors, who live in the country, who come to Berlin rarely, and whose horizon is limited severely to their own small interests, their restricted circle, and by their provincial pride. They recognize nobody but themselves, for the reason that they know nobody and nothing else. There is an exclusiveness born of stupidity, just as there is an exclusiveness born of a sense of duty to one’s position and traditions in the world. One must recognize that this side of social life exists in Germany just as it exists in England, and France, and Austria, but it is fast losing its importance and its power.

One hears it lamented that society is changing, that the rich Jew and the rich gentile are received where twenty-five years ago the social portals were shut against them, and that many go to their houses who would not have gone not many years ago. My experience is too slender to weigh these matters in years; my contention is only that, from an American or English stand-point, their social life is notably simple, and still largely founded on merit and service, rather than upon the means to provide luxury.