§2. Culture.—What is the German ideal? What do German thinkers regard as Germany's contribution to human progress? The answer comes back with a monotonous reiteration which has already sickened us of the word. It is Kultur, or, as we translate it, culture. Germany's contribution to progress consists in the spread of her culture.
Kultur is a difficult word to interpret. It means "culture" and a great deal more besides. Its primary meaning, like that of "culture," is intellectual and aesthetic: when a German speaks of "Kultur" he is thinking of such things as language, literature, philosophy, education, art, science, and the like. Children in German schools are taught a subject called Kulturgeschichte (culture-history), and under that heading they are told about German literature, German philosophy and religion, German painting, German music and so on.
So far, the English and the German uses of the word roughly correspond. We should probably be surprised if we heard it said that Shakespeare had made a contribution to English "culture": but, on consideration, we should admit that he had, though we should not have chosen that way of speaking about him. But there is a further meaning in the word Kultur, which explains why it is so often on German lips. It means, not only the product of the intellect or imagination, but the product of the disciplined intellect and the disciplined imagination. Kultur has in it an element of order, of organisation, of civilisation. That is why the Germans regard the study of the "culture" of a country as part of the study of its history. English school children are beginning to be taught social and industrial history in addition to the kings and queens and battles and constitutions which used to form the staple of history lessons. They are being taught, that is, to see the history of their country, and of its civilisation, in the light of the life and livelihood of its common people. The German outlook is different. They look at their history in the light of the achievements of its great minds, which are regarded as being at once the proof and the justification of its civilisation. To the question, "What right have you to call yourselves a civilised country?" an Englishman would reply, "Look at the sort of people we are, and at the things we have done," and would point perhaps to the extracts from the letters of private soldiers printed in the newspapers, or to the story of the growth of the British Empire; a German would reply (as Germans are indeed replying now), "Look at our achievements in scholarship and science, at our universities, at our systems of education, at our literature, our music, and our painting; at our great men of thought and imagination: at Luther, Dürer, Goethe, Beethoven, Kant."
Kultur then means more than "culture": it means culture considered as the most important element in civilisation. It implies the disciplined education which alone, in the German view, makes the difference between the savage and the civilised man. It implies the heritage of intellectual possessions which, thanks to ordered institutions, a nation is able to hand down from generation to generation.
We are now beginning to see where the British and German attitudes towards society and civilisation diverge. Broadly, we may say that the first difference is that Germany thinks of civilisation in terms of intellect while we think of it in terms of character. Germany asks, "What do you know?" "What have you learnt?" and regards our prisoners as uncivilised because they cannot speak German, and Great Britain as a traitor to civilisation because she is allied with Russia, a people of ignorant peasants. We ask, "What have you done?" "What can you do?" and tend to undervalue the importance of systematic knowledge and intellectual application.
But we have found no reason as yet for a conflict of ideals. Many English writers, such as Matthew Arnold, have emphasised the importance of culture as against character; yet Matthew Arnold's views were widely different from those of the German professors of to-day. If their sense of the importance of culture stopped short at this point, we should have much to learn from Germany, as indeed we have, and no reason to oppose her. What is there then in the German admiration for culture which involves her in a conflict with British ideals?
§3. Culture as a State Product.—The conflict arises out of the alliance between German culture and the German Government. What British public opinion resents, in the German attitude, is not culture in itself, about which it is little concerned, but what we feel to be its unnatural alliance with military power. It seems to us wicked and hypocritical for a government which proclaims the doctrine of the "mailed fist" and, like the ancient Spartans, glories in the perfecting of the machinery of war, to be at the same time protesting its devotion to culture, and posing as a patron of the peaceful arts. It is the Kaiser's speeches and the behaviour of the German Government which have put all of us out of heart with German talk about culture.
This brings us to a fundamental point of difference between the two peoples. The close association between culture and militarism, between the best minds of the nation and the mind of the Government, does not seem unnatural to a modern German at all. On the contrary, it seems the most natural thing in the world. It is the bedrock of the German system of national education. Culture to a German is not only a national possession; it is also, to a degree difficult for us to appreciate, a State product. It is a national possession deliberately handed on by the State from generation to generation, hall-marked and guaranteed, as it were, for the use of its citizens. When we use the word "culture" we speak of it as an attribute of individual men and women. Germans, on the other hand, think of it as belonging to nations as a whole, in virtue of their system of national education. That is why they are so sure that all Germans possess culture. They have all had it at school. And it is all the same brand of culture, because no other is taught. It is the culture with which the Government wishes its citizens to be equipped. That is why all Germans tend, not only to know the same facts (and a great many facts too), but to have a similar outlook on life and similar opinions about Goethe, Shakespeare and the German Navy. Culture, like military service, is a part of the State machinery.
Here we come upon the connecting link between culture and militarism. Both are parts of the great German system of State education. "Side by side with the influences of German education," wrote Dr. Sadler in 1901,[1] "are to be traced the influences of German military service. The two sets of influence interact on one another and intermingle. German education impregnates the German army with science. The German army predisposes German education to ideas of organisation and discipline. Military and educational discipline go hand in hand…. Both are preserved and fortified by law and custom, and by administrative arrangements skilfully devised to attain that end. But behind all the forms of organisation (which would quickly crumble away unless upheld by and expressing some spiritual force), behind both military and educational discipline, lies the fundamental principle adopted by Scharnhorst's Committee on Military organisation in Prussia in 1807: 'All the inhabitants of the State are its defenders by birth.'"
[Footnote 1: Board of Education Special Reports, vol. ix. p. 43.]