Some readers may be disposed to regret that the great Germanic trinity, Nietzsche-Treitschke-Bernhardi, contribute so largely to my anthology. In the first place, it may be said, we are tired of their names; in the second place, Germans deny that they have had anything like the influence we attribute to them. There is a certain validity in the first of these objections. The constant recurrence of these three names is certainly a little tedious. They are like a three-headed Charles I—or a triplicate Geibel. I would gladly have omitted them had it been by any means possible. But one might as well compile an Old Testament anthology and omit Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. For, whatever the Germans may say, they are the major prophets of the new-German spirit. Treitschke is the prophet of tribalism, Nietzsche of ruthlessness, Bernhardi of ambition. It is absurd to say that they are not influential. Treitschke may have fallen somewhat out of fashion in the years immediately preceding the war, but his spirit had permeated the political thought of a whole generation. To the living influence of Nietzsche there is a host of witnesses. Gerhart Hauptmann, near the beginning of the war, averred that the cultured German soldier carried "Zarathustra," along with "Faust" and the Bible, in his knapsack. Nor was this an idle guess. Professor Deissmann, of Berlin, tells us that he enquired into the matter, and learned from book-sellers that the books most in demand among soldiers were the New Testament, "Faust" and "Zarathustra." O.A.H. Schmitz, in "Das wirkliche Deutschland," says of the German youth born in the 'seventies and early 'eighties that Nietzsche was "the lighthouse toward which their enthusiasm was directed." Prof. Wilhelm Bousset, of Göttingen, writes: "There is among us much unripe, unclear Nietzsche enthusiasm: many a German ass has thrown the lion's skin of the great man round his shoulders, and thinks he has thereby become a philosopher and prophet." Such testimonies could be multiplied indefinitely. There is no question that Nietzsche has been by far the greatest single force among the spiritual shapers of new-Germany. It may be true that he did not intend his "immoralism" to be read literally as a guide to conduct—it may be true that, in some of his most characteristic passages, he knew himself to be talking reckless and dangerous nonsense (that was his way of "living dangerously")—but can we reasonably suppose that soldiers in a "conquered" country, soldiers full of the belief that any opposition to Germanism was in itself a crime (see No. 344), paused to look beneath his surface eulogies of murder and lust for some esoteric meaning that may possibly underlie them? Can it be a mere coincidence that, in the first war which Germany has waged since Nietzsche entered upon his apostolate of ruthlessness, the German armies should have been animated, to all appearance, by a literal interpretation of his "beast of prey" ideal?
As for Bernhardi, whom some German writers profess never to have heard of until we began to talk about him in England, one can only say that he is an ex-member of the Great General Staff, and is probably a pretty faithful interpreter of the ideas prevalent in that not un-influential organization. Moreover, his "Germany and the Next War," which appeared in the spring of 1912, ran through five editions at 6 marks before that year was out, and was then republished in a cheap and somewhat condensed popular edition under the title of "Our Future." Reviewing this edition, Die Post says that, in its original form, the book "was received with the most serious attention in political and especially in military circles," and adds that this cheaper reprint "must now become a book for the people."
It is an error, however, to suppose that a writer's importance is to be measured solely by the influence he can be shown to have exerted. A book or pamphlet may have had little or no active influence, and may yet be a very illuminating symptom of the national frame of mind. Every book must be an effect before it can become a cause. That Treitschke, Nietzsche, and Bernhardi have been very efficient causes I see no reason to doubt; but at any rate they are immensely significant effects of the psychological conditions of which I am here gathering up some random evidences.
It was a more difficult question to decide whether the lucubrations of Herr Houston Stewart Chamberlain came within my scope. Yet I had little hesitation in including him. The fact that he is by birth an Englishman does not make him any the less a characteristic and recognized mouthpiece of the new-German spirit. It may be objected that he caricatures it, that he is more German than the Germans. That, in the first place, is impossible; in the second place, while we have many evidences that Germans, from the Kaiser downward, set a high value on Herr Chamberlain's writings, we hear little or nothing of any protest against them as misrepresentations of "Deutschtum." Shall I be suspected of a quaint perversity of national prejudice if I say that Herr Chamberlain's war pamphlets are distinctly better reading than the great majority of their kind? They are much more individual, much less stereotyped and monotonous. One finds in them an occasional idea that is not the common property of every man in the street. It is generally (not always) a more or less crazy idea, but one hails it as an oasis in the desert of blusterous commonplace.
The arrangement of my little jewel-heap was more difficult, if less laborious, than the ingathering. Many of my extracts, perhaps most, might with equal appropriateness have been ranged under any one of three or four rubrics. Thus my classification is at best rough and, to some extent, arbitrary. There is, however, a certain reason in the sequence of headings. The first section, "Deutschland über Alles," represents the "badge of all the tribe"—the characteristic which lies at the root of the whole mischief—Germany's colossal self-glorification, self-adoration. If there is anything like it in history, it is unknown to me. Other nations may have been as vain, but, not having the printing-press so readily at command, they gave their vanity less exuberant expression. Besides, they may have had a sense of humour. The manifestations of this foible (if a thing of such tragic consequences can be called by such a name) fall under certain sub-headings. It was clear, for instance, that the vauntings of German Kultur must have a compartment to themselves—likewise the assertions of a special relation to God, the claims to the status of a Chosen People, and the comparisons, direct and indirect, between Germany and Christ. Having established, by means of a cloud of witnesses, the ruling passion of the national mind, I present in the following section proofs of the "Ambitions" in which this megalomania finds its natural utterance. In the sections, "War-Worship," "Ruthlessness" and "Machiavelism," are grouped evidences of the methods of force and fraud by which it was hoped that these ambitions were to be realized. Then, in a final section, I have assembled evidences of the inevitable corollary to morbid self-adoration—the boundless and almost equally unprecedented contempt and loathing for all adversaries, but especially for England.
The great majority of my quotations are taken direct from the original sources, the references being exactly given. I was scrupulous on this point, not only that the reader might be able to test the accuracy and fairness[7] of my work, but because I hoped that some one, some day, might be moved to republish the anthology in the original German. One cannot but think that, when the war-frenzy is over, a brief retrospect of its extravagances may be salutary for the German spirit. In a certain number of cases, however, I have not been able to give exact references, because the originals have not been accessible to me. This applies to my selections from three previous volumes of selections: Nippold's "Der Deutsche Chauvinismus," Andler's "Collection de documents sur le Pangermanisme," and Bang's "Hurrah and Halleluiah." Andler's excellent and scholarly method has, however, enabled me to "place" quotations from his collection to within a page or two. Thus, if some very Pan-German utterance does not occur on the precise page I have indicated, it will certainly be found on the preceding or on the following page.
Italics in my text always represent italics, or, rather, spaced type, in the original; but Germans are very lavish in their use of spaced type, and I have not always thought it necessary to reproduce this peculiarity. Points of exclamation, unless enclosed in square brackets, are the author's, not mine. I have almost always resisted the temptation to employ typographical devices to enhance the lustre of individual gems. In the Index of Authors I have added to many names a brief note which will enable the reader to estimate the position of the different writers in the public life of Germany.
In bringing together my material, I have found valuable help in many quarters. I should like especially to acknowledge my deep obligation to Mr. Alexander Gray for manifold aid and suggestion.
W.A.
6th December, 1916.