Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View

by Price Collier

Forty years ago Germany was known to a few students as having supplied us with music, mythology, and a certain amount of enchanting literature; scholarship along certain lines; and work in philosophy that a few in America and in England were studying. As a knight in shining armor, demanding a place at the council-board of nations, and ready to resent any passing over of her claims to recognition in the discussion and settlement of international politics, she is a newcomer.

One of the chief causes for the restlessness, particularly in England, the heart of the greatest empire in the world, is that this new-comer must be made room for at the table, received with courtesy, and consulted. Another individual has married into the family, and must gradually find her place there. Of all nations in the world, England is the slowest to make new friends and acquaintances, and easily the most awkward in doing so. She is a good friend when you know her, but with the most abominable manners to strangers.

The Englishman, for example, pops into his club to escape the world, not to seek it there. The English club and the English home are primarily for seclusion, not for companionship, and this characteristic alone is wofully hard for the stranger to understand. To the gregarious German, priding himself upon Gemüthlichkeit, loving reunions, restaurants, his Stammtisch, formal and punctilious in his politeness, unused to the ways of the world, but yet convinced that he is now a great man politically and commercially, the Englishman is not only an enigma but an insult. I am criticising neither. I have received unbounded hospitality and friendliness from both. I have ridden, fought, drunk, travelled, and lived with both, but for that very reason I understand how horribly and continually they rub one another the wrong way.

In the fundamental matter of morals the German looks upon the Englishman as a hypocrite, and the Englishman looks upon the German as rather unpolished and undignified. Berlin is open all night, London closes at half-past twelve. The British Sunday is a gloomy suppression of vitality, touched up here and there with preaching and hymn-singing, and fringed with surreptitious golf; the German Sunday is a national fair, with a blossoming of all kinds of amusements, deluged with beer, and attended by whole families as their only relaxation during the week.

The German licenses vice, lotteries, and gambling; the Englishman refuses to recognize the existence of any of the three. The German does not understand the Englishman’s point of view in these matters, which is that, though he knows these things to exist, and that he is no better in actual practice than other men, he refuses to accept these as his ideal. He denounces and passes judgment upon, and punishes men and women, who go too far in their appreciation and practice of apolausticism as a philosophy of life. He might have run away from danger himself, but he none the less scorns the man who did so. The shipwreck, the fire, the test of moral courage and endurance, may have found him a coward, or weak, or a deserter, but he holds that he must none the less measure the coward, the weakling, and the deserter, not by his own possible weakness if put to the same tests, but by his ideal of a courageous and straightforward Englishman. I agree with him wholly and heartily. If our sympathy is to go out on every occasion, to the man who failed to come up to the mark of noble manhood, just because we feel that we might under like circumstances have failed too, then we give up the code of honor altogether, and our ideals droop to the level from which we fight and pray to be preserved.

We pass judgment upon the coward, upon the failure, upon the man who has not mastered his life and life itself, unhesitatingly. It is hard to do, it looks as though one were without pity and without sympathy. Not so; it is because we have great sympathy, and I hope unending pity, and a growing charity, and constant willingness to lend a hand; but to condone failure is to commit the selfish and unpardonable cowardice of not judging another that you may not be forced to judge yourself too harshly. That is far from being hypocrisy. Indeed, in these days it is one of the hardest things to do, so fast are we levelling down socially and politically and even morally. It looks like an assumption of superiority when, God knows, it is only a timorous attempt on our part not to lose our grip on the ideals that help to keep us out of the dust and the mud. But he who lets others off lightly in order that he may not be thought to have too high a standard himself, or because he fears that he may one day fail himself, such a one is the coward of cowards, the candidate for the lowest place in hell; and well he deserves it, for he helps to lower the standard of manhood, and he tarnishes the shield of honor of the whole race. Let them call us hypocrites till they strangle doing so, for when we lower our standards because we fear that we cannot live up to them ourselves, all will be lost. To be mild with other men, because we distrust ourselves, is a poisonous sympathy that rots away the life of him who receives it, and of him who gives it, and ends in a slobbering charity which must finally protect itself by tyranny and cruelty. Not infrequently in dealing with individuals and with subject nations it is senseless cruelty to be over-kind.

This sneer of Saxon hypocrisy, of “Perfide Albion,” is seldom explained to other people by men of our race, and we Americans and Englishmen have taken little pains to make it clear. We should not be surprised, therefore, if we are misunderstood. We have been easily first so long that we have neglected the explanation or the defence of ourselves to others.

The Germans, too, have something of the same indifference. A most sympathetic observer of German manners and customs, and a man for whose honesty and gentleness I have the highest esteem, Père Didon, remarked of the Germans: “J’ai essayé maintes fois de découvrir chez l’Allemand une sympathie quelconque pour d’autres nations; je n’y ai pas réussi.”

I call attention again to the important point, that it has been difficult to manufacture an all-round German patriotism. As a consequence patriotism in Germany is more than a sentiment, it is a theory, a doctrine, a theme to which statesmen, philosophers and poets, and rulers devote their energies. The German looks upon his nation not only as a people, but as a race, almost as a formal religion; hence perhaps his hatred of the Jew and the Slav, and his difficulties with all foreign peoples within his borders. In order to build up his patriotism the German has been taught systematically to dislike first the Austrians, then the French, now the English; and let not the American suppose that he likes him any better, for he does not. This patriotism, once developed, was drawn on for funds for an army, then for a navy. At the present time there must be some explanation offered, and the explanation is fear of England, dislike of British arrogance. In one of his latest speeches the Kaiser said: “We need this fleet to protect ourselves from arrogance”; that, of course, means, always means, British arrogance.

From the moment a child goes to school, by pictures on the walls, by an indirect teaching of history and geography, he is led on discreetly to find England in Germany’s way. At the present writing German school children, and German students, and German recruits are imbued with the idea that Germany’s relations with England are in some sort an armistice. This poisonous teaching of patriotism has produced wide-spread enmity of feeling among the innocent, but this enmity has built the navy. And now that in certain quarters it is found desirable to soothe and calm this feeling, it proves to be more difficult to subdue than it was to arouse. The monster that Frankenstein called up devours its own creator. Now that England can no longer be the enemy, because Germany’s greatest present and future danger is from the Slav races, there are evidences that the German state is teaching the dog not to bark at England any more.