CHAPTER IV
GERMAN THOUGHT
TREITSCHKE
In a pamphlet of mordant irony addressed to “Messieurs les Ministres du culte évangélique de l’armée du roi de Prusse” in the dark days of 1870, Fustel de Coulanges warned these evangelical camp-followers of the consequences to German civilization of their doctrines of a Holy War. “Your error is not a crime but it makes you commit one, for it leads you to preach war which is the greatest of all crimes.” It was not impossible, he added, that that very war might be the beginning of the decadence of Germany, even as it would inaugurate the revival of France. History has proved him a true prophet, but it has required more than a generation to show with what subtlety the moral poison of such teaching has penetrated into German life and character. The great apostle of that teaching was Treitschke who, though not indeed a theologian, was characteristically fond of praying in aid the vocabulary of theology. “Every intelligent theologian understands perfectly well,” he wrote, “that the Biblical saying ‘Thou shalt not kill’ ought no more to be interpreted literally than the apostolic injunction to give one’s goods to the poor.” He called in the Old Testament to redress the balance of the New. “The doctrines of the apple of discord and of original sin are the great facts which the pages of History everywhere reveal.”
To-day, everybody talks of Treitschke, though I doubt if half a dozen people in England have read him. His brilliant essays, Historische und Politische Aufsätze, illuminating almost every aspect of German controversy, have never been translated; neither has his Politik, a searching and cynical examination of the foundations of Political Science which exalts the State at the expense of Society; and his Deutsche Geschichte, which was designed to be the supreme apologetic of Prussian policy, is also unknown in our tongue. But in Germany their vogue has been and still is enormous; they are to Germans what Carlyle and Macaulay were to us. Treitschke, indeed, has much in common with Carlyle; the same contempt for Parliaments and constitutional freedom; the same worship of the strong man armed; the same somber, almost savage, irony, and, let it not be forgotten, the same deep moral fervor. His character was irreproachable. At the age of fifteen he wrote down this motto for his own: “To be always upright, honest, moral, to become a man, a man useful to humanity, a brave man—these are my ambitions.” This high ideal he strove manfully to realize. But he was a doctrinaire, and of all doctrinaires the conscientious doctrinaire is the most dangerous. Undoubtedly, in his case, as in that of so many other enlightened Germans—Sybel, for example—his apostasy from Liberalism dated from the moment of his conviction that the only hope for German unity lay not in Parliaments but in the military hegemony of Prussia. The bloody triumphs of the Austro-Prussian War convinced him that the salvation of Germany was “only possible by the annihilation of small States,” that States rest on force, not consent, that success is the supreme test of merit, and that the issues of war are the judgment of God. He was singularly free from sophistry and never attempted, like Sybel, to defend the Ems telegram by the disingenuous plea that “an abbreviation is not a falsification”; it was enough for him that the trick achieved its purpose. And he had a frank contempt for those Prussian jurists who attempted to find a legal title to Schleswig-Holstein; the real truth of the matter he roundly declared, was that the annexation of the duchies was necessary for the realization of German aims. When he writes about war he writes without any sanctimonious cant:
It is not for Germans to repeat the commonplaces of the apostles of peace or of the priests of Mammon, nor should they close their eyes before the cruel necessities of the age. Yes, ours is an epoch of war, our age is an age of iron. If the strong get the better of the weak, it is an inexorable law of life. Those wars of hunger which we still see to-day amongst negro tribes are as necessary for the economic conditions of the heart of Africa as the sacred war which a people undertakes to preserve the most precious belongings of its moral culture. There as here it is a struggle for life, here for a moral good, there for a material good.
Readers of Bernhardi will recognize here the source of Bernhardi’s inspiration. If Treitschke was a casuist at all—and as a rule he is refreshingly, if brutally, frank—his was the supreme casuistry of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. That the means may corrupt the end or become an end in themselves he never saw, or only saw it at the end of his life. He honestly believed that war was the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, he feared the commercialism of modern times, and despised England because he judged her wars to have always been undertaken with a view to the conquest of markets. He sneers at the Englishman who “scatters the blessings of civilization with a Bible in one hand and an opium pipe in the other.” He honestly believed that Germany exhibited a purity of domestic life, a pastoral simplicity, and a deep religious faith to which no European country could approach, and at the time he wrote the picture was not overdrawn. He has written passages of noble and tender sentiment, in which he celebrates the piety of the peasant, whose religious exercises were hallowed, wherever the German tongue was spoken, by the massive faith of Luther’s great Hymn. Writing of German Protestantism as the corner-stone of German unity, he says:
Everywhere it has been the solid rampart of our language and customs. In Alsace, as in the mountains of Transylvania and on the distant shores of the Baltic, as long as the peasant shall sing his old canticle
Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott
German life shall not pass away.
Those who would understand the strength of Treitschke’s influence on his generation must not lose sight of these purer elements in his teaching.
But Treitschke was dazzled by the military successes of Prussia in 1866. With that violent reaction against culture which is so common among its professional devotees, and which often makes the men of the pen far more sanguinary than the men of the sword, he derided the old Germany of Goethe and Kant as “a nation of poets and thinkers without a polity” (“Ein staatloses Volk von Dichtern und Denkern”), and almost despised his own intellectual vocation. “Each dragoon,” he cried enviously, “who knocks a Croat on the head does far more for the German cause than the finest political brain that ever wielded a trenchant pen.” But for his grievous deafness he would, like his father, have chosen the profession of arms. Failing that, he chose to teach. “It is a fine thing,” he wrote, “to be master of the younger generation,” and he set himself to indoctrinate it with the aim of German unity. He taught from 1859 to 1875 successively at Leipzig, Freiburg, Kiel, and Heidelberg. From 1875 till his death in 1896 he occupied with immense éclat the chair of modern history at Berlin. And so, although a Saxon, he enlisted his pen in the service of Prussia—Prussia which always knows how to attract men of ideas but rarely produces them. In the great roll of German statesmen and thinkers and poets—Stein, Hardenberg, Goethe, Hegel—you will look almost in vain for one who is of Prussian birth. She may pervert them; she cannot create them.