Treitschke’s views were, of course, shared by many of his contemporaries. The Seminars of the German Universities were the arsenals that forged the intellectual weapons of the Prussian hegemony. Niebuhr, Ranke, Mommsen, Sybel, Häusser, Droysen, Gneist—all ministered to that ascendency, and they all have this in common—that they are merciless to the claims of the small States whose existence seemed to present an obstacle to Prussian aims. They are also united in common hatred of France, for they feared not only the adventures of Napoleon the Third but the leveling doctrines of the French Revolution. Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace are not more violent against France than the writings of Sybel, Mommsen, and Treitschke. What, however, distinguishes Treitschke from his intellectual confrères is his thoroughness. They made reservations which he scorned to make. Sybel, for example, is often apologetic when he comes to the more questionable episodes in Prussian policy—the partition of Poland, the affairs of the duchies, the Treaty of Bâle, the diplomacy of 1870; Treitschke is disturbed by no such qualms. Bismarck who practised a certain economy in giving Sybel access to official documents for his semi-official history of Prussian policy, Die Begründung des deutschen Reichs, had much greater confidence in Treitschke and told him he felt sure he would not be disturbed to find that “our political linen is not as white as it might be.” So, too, while others like Mommsen refused to go the whole way with Bismarck in domestic policy, and clung to their early Radicalism, Treitschke had no compunction about absolutism. He ended, indeed, by becoming the champion of the Junkers, and his history is a kind of hagiography of the Hohenzollerns. “Be governmental” was his succinct maxim, and he rested his hopes for Germany on the bureaucracy and the army. Indeed, if he had had his way, he would have substituted a unity state for the federal system of the German Empire, and would have liked to see all Germany an enlarged Prussia—“ein erweitertes Preussen”—a view which is somewhat difficult to reconcile with his attacks on France as being “politically in a state of perpetual nonage,” and on the French Government as hostile to all forms of provincial autonomy.
By a quite natural transition he was led on from his championship of the unity of Germany to a conception of her rôle as a world-power. He is the true father of Weltpolitik. Much of what he writes on this head is legitimate enough. Like Hohenlohe and Bismarck he felt the humiliation of Germany’s weakness in the councils of Europe. Writing in 1863 he complains:
One thing we still lack—the State. Our people is the only one which has no common legislation, which can send no representatives to the Concert of Europe. No salute greets the German flag in a foreign port. Our Fatherland sails the high seas without colors like a pirate.
Germany, he declared, must become “a power across the sea.” This conclusion, coupled with bitter recollections of the part played by England in the affair of the Duchies, no doubt accounted for his growing dislike of England.
Among the English the love of money has killed every sentiment of honor and every distinction between what is just and unjust. They hide their poltroonery and their materialism behind grand phrases of unctuous theology. When one sees the English press raising its eyes to heaven, frightened by the audacity of these faithless peoples in arms upon the Continent, one might imagine one heard a venerable parson droning away. As if the Almighty God, in Whose name Cromwell’s Ironsides fought their battles, commanded us Germans to allow our enemy to march undisturbed upon Berlin. Oh, what hypocrisy! Oh, cant, cant, cant!
Europe, he says elsewhere, should have put bounds to the overweening ambition of Britain by bringing to an end the crushing domination of the English Fleet at Gibraltar, at Malta, and at Corfu, and by “restoring the Mediterranean to the Mediterranean peoples.” Thus did he sow the seeds of German maritime ambition.
If I were asked to select the most characteristic of Treitschke’s works I should be inclined to choose the vehement little pamphlet Was fordern wir von Frankreich? in which he insisted on the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. It is at once the vindication of Prussian policy, and, in the light of the last forty-four years, its condemnation. Like Mommsen, who wrote in much the same strain at the same time, he insisted that the people of the conquered provinces must be “forced to be free,” that Morality and History (which for him are much the same thing) proclaim they are German without knowing it.
We Germans, who know Germany and France, know better what is good for Alsace than the unhappy people themselves, who through their French associations have lived in ignorance of the new Germany. We will give them back their own identity against their will. We have in the enormous changes of these times too often seen in glad astonishment the immortal working of the moral forces of History (“das unsterbliche Fortwirken der sittlichen Mächte der Geschichte”) to be able to believe in the unconditional value of a plebiscite on this matter. We invoke the men of the past against the present.
The ruthless pedantry of this is characteristically Prussian. It is easy to appeal to the past against the present, to the dead against the living. Dead men tell no tales. It was, he admitted, true that the Alsatians did not love the Germans. These “misguided people” betrayed “that fatal impulse of Germans” to cleave to other nations than their own. “Well may we Germans be horrified,” he adds, “when to-day we see these German people rail in German speech like wild beasts against their own flesh and blood as ‘German curs’ (‘deutschen Hunde’) and ‘stink-Prussians’ (‘Stinkpreussen’).” Treitschke was too honest to deny it. There was, he ruefully admitted, something rather unlovely about the “civilizing” methods of Prussia. “Prussia has perhaps not always been guided by genial men.” But, he argued, Prussia united under the new Empire to the rest of Germany would become humanized and would in turn humanize the new subject-peoples. Well, the forty-four years that have elapsed since Treitschke wrote have refuted him. Instead of a Germanized Prussia, we see a Prussianized Germany. Her “geniality” is the geniality of Zabern. The Poles, the Danes, and the Alsatians are still contumacious. Treitschke appealed to History and History has answered him.
Had he never any misgivings? Yes. After twenty-five years, and within a month of his death, this Hebrew prophet looking round in the year of grace 1895 on the “culture” of modern Germany was filled with apprehension. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sedan he delivered an address in the University of Berlin which struck his fond disciples dumb. The Empire, he declared, had disarmed her enemies neither without nor within.