In this direction much had already been done before the war began. The dfferent nations had already met in peaceful emulation and were to meet again at Berlin for the Olympian games. It is only necessary to recall the aeronautic races, the boat races, the horse races, and the beneficial international influence of the arts and sciences, and the great super-national Nobel Prizes. The barbarian Germany has, as is well known, led the way among the other nations with her great institutions for social reform. A victory would oblige us to go forward on this path and to make the blessings of such institutions general. Our victory would, furthermore, secure the future existence of the Teutonic race for the welfare of the world. During the last decade, for example, how fruitful has the Scandinavian literature been for the German, and vice versa, the German for the Scandinavian. How many Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes have lately, without feeling conscious of a drop of foreign blood, shaken hands with German brothers in Stockholm, Christiania, Copenhagen, Munich, Vienna, and Berlin. How much homely good-fellowship has grown up around the noble names of Ibsen, Björnsen, and Strindberg.
Faust and Rifles.
I hear that abroad an enormous number of lying tales are being fabricated to the detriment of our honor, our culture, and our strength. Well, those who create these idle tales should reflect that the momentous hour is not favorable for fiction. On three frontiers our own blood bears witness. I myself have sent out two of my sons. All our intrepid German soldiers know why they are going to war. There are no analphabets to be found among them; all the more, however, of those who, besides their rifle, have their Goethe's "Faust," their "Zarathustra," a work of Schopenhauer's, the Bible, or their Homer in their knapsacks. And even those who have no book in the knapsack know that they are fighting for a hearth at which every guest is welcome.
On the frontier stands our blood testimony; the Socialist side by side with the bourgeois, the peasant beside the man of learning, the Prince beside the workman; and they all fight for German freedom, for German domestic life, for German art, German science, German progress; they fight with the full, clear consciousness of a noble and rich national possession, for internal and external goods, all of which serve for the general progress and development of mankind.
To Americans From a German Friend
By Ludwig Fulda.
Like most of the champions of Germany in the literary field, Ludwig Fulda is a Doctor of Philosophy. He is also author of many famous poetical and prose works of fiction.
Many things have been revealed to us by this war that even the keenest-minded among us would have declared immediately before its outbreak to be impossibilities. Nothing, however, has been a greater and more painful surprise to Germans than the position taken by a great part of the American press. There is nothing that we would have suspected less than that within the one neutral nation with which we felt ourselves most closely connected, both by common interests and by common ideals, voices would be raised that in the hour of our greatest danger would deny us their sympathy, yes, even their comprehension of our course.
To me, personally—I cannot avoid saying it—this was a very bitter disappointment. A year has hardly passed since I was over there the second time as a guest and returned strengthened in my admiration for that great, upward striving community. In my book, "Amerikanische Eindrucke," ("American Impressions,") a new edition of which has just appeared in a considerably supplemented form, comprising the fruits of that trip, I have made every effort to place before my countrymen in the brightest light the advantages and superiorities of Americans, and especially to convince them that the so-called land of the dollar was not only economically but also mentally and spiritually striding upward irresistibly; that also in the longing and effort to obtain education and knowledge and in the valuation of all the higher things in life, it was not surpassed by any other country in the world. In the entire book there is not a page that is not filled with the confidence that for these very reasons America and Germany were called upon to march hand in hand at the head of cultured humanity. Is this belief now to be contradicted? Shall I as a German no longer be permitted to call myself a friend of America because over there they think the worst of us for the reason that we, attacked in dastardly wise by a world of foes, are struggling with unanimous determination for our existence?