We have already touched on the volitional character[22] of the German people, a character which has been gravely altered by the subsidence of the ancient upper stratum of society, and by long privations and miseries. The Germans of Tacitus were a freedom-loving and turbulent people; of this not a trace is left. Any one who did not recognize under the autocracy that we care little for self-determination and self-responsibility may do so under the revolution, which merely arises out of an alteration in external conditions. We are not even yet a nation, but an association of interests and oppositions; a German Irredenta, as it has been and unfortunately will be shown, is an impossible conception. And since we are not a nation and represent no national idea, but only an association of households, it follows that our influence abroad can only be commercial, and not civilizing or propagandist.
From this side we are able to understand the German history of the past two centuries. Prussia, an extra-German Power, grown up in colonized territory, organized itself into a bureaucratic, feudal and military State. It succeeded in mastering half Germany and in loosely linking up the remainder. By rigid organization, by its federated Princes and by the strongest army in the world, it supplied the place of the national character and will which were wanting. Mechanism was pressed into the service, and bore the colossus into a period of blooming prosperity. The system looked like a nation; in reality it was an autocratic association of economic interests bristling with arms. It was incapable of developing national forces and ideas, not even in relation to its settlers in other lands; it was confined to commercial competition; weak alliances were relied on to secure the position externally; self-government was not granted, because the military organization was the pivot of the whole system; the drill-sergeant tone at home had its counterpart in the brusqueness of our foreign policy; enmities grew and organized themselves, and the catastrophe came.
For character of will we had substituted discipline. But discipline is not nationality; it is an external instrument, and when it breaks it leaves—nothing. Now since the Prussian system which called itself by the mediæval title of the German Empire was, in spite of the professors, no popular, national fabric, but a dynastic, military and compulsory association, with a constitutional façade, the interested nationalist elements took on the repulsive and dishonourable forms that we all know. The most deeply interested parties, cool and conscious of their strength, the Prussian representatives of the military and official nobility, avoided all declamation and only interfered when their interests were endangered. The greater industrialists sold themselves. A higher stratum of the middle-classes composed of certain circles of higher teachers and subaltern officials took the business seriously, and in order to escape from their drab existence created that atmosphere of hatred of Socialists, telegrams of homage, and megalomania, which made us intellectually and morally impossible before the world. Instead of the Germany of thought and spirit one saw suddenly a brutal, stupid community of interested persons, greedy for power, who gave themselves out as that Germany whose very opposite they were; who, unable to point to any achievements, any thought of their own, prided themselves on an imaginary race-unity which their very appearance contradicted; who had no ideas beyond rancour; the slaverings of league-oratory and subordination, and who with these properties, which they were pleased to call Kultur, undertook to bring blessing to the world.
It was no wonder; for our slavonicized association of interests, bent on subordination and on gain, does not produce ideas; its possessions were power, mechanism and money; whoever was impressed by these things believed they must impress others too, and so the conclusion was arrived at that all the great spirits of the past had lived only to make this triple combination supreme. Wagner had formed the bridge between the old Germany and the new—armoured cruisers and giant guns appeared as a free development from Kant and Hegel, and the word Kultur, a word which Germany ought to prohibit by law for thirty years to come, masked the confusion of thought.
To discover now, after our downfall, that Germany ought never to have carried on a continental let alone a world policy, would be a pitiful example of esprit d'escalier. It is true that it was our right, and even our duty, by our intellect, our ethics and our greatness, to carry it on; but the weakness of our character on the side of Will was the cause of its failure. Bismarck, a born realist in politics, grown up in the Prussian tradition, trained in the diplomatic tradition by Gortschakov, made the calamitous choice. He made us safe for certain decades; but it was only an intuitive policy in the manner of Stein[23] that could have saved us for centuries.
In the midst of self-administered and self-determining nations the German people, from lack of self-consciousness, indolence of will and innate servility remained under a patriarchal system of government, a minor under tutelage of divinely-appointed dynasties and ruling classes. In the childish movement of the educated bourgeoisie of 1848 Bismarck saw only the helpless and Utopian, but not the symbolic side, which Marx might have shown him. His practical spirit judged with a smile that a handful of peasantry and grenadiers would suffice to bring to reason this dynastically-minded people. It was only too true; although the bulk of this people had not for thirty years been formed by the peasant class, and although he himself had learned how to make use of the power of the modern industrial State in peasant disguise. And so he refused to allow his countrymen to come of age; broke, with the superiority of genius, and with the weapons of success and authority, the incompetent forces that resisted him; created, by the magical mechanism of his Constitution, the German Empire as a mere continuation of the Prussian bureaucratic State reinforced, by the self-glorifying dynasties, with the whole volume of the still existing and justly appreciated habit of obedience; and annihilated for a generation every aspiration for freedom by branding it with the stain of moral and social depravity. Our political worthlessness and immaturity came to its climax in the race of office-climbers in 1880, which in 1900 gave place to the battle-fleet patriotism of the great capitalists.
A self-administered and a self-determining nation—such as the nations of the world, except ourselves, Austria and Russia, were, on the whole, at the turn of the century—would have been able to carry on a sound and steadfast policy in economics and public affairs, and to enjoy the confidence of the world, as little begrudged as America. On the other hand, a dangerous warship, armed upon an unexampled scale, given to backward movements and commanded by an uncontrollable sovran dilettante, could only expect sooner or later to be expelled from the harbour of the nations. History is apt to overdo it, especially when corruption has gone on too long; with every year that passed the doom became more certain; instead of being expelled, we were annihilated.
That four years of hunger, a lost war and a military revolt at last set us free, does not betoken any change of character; and when to-day a servile and facile Press lauds our wretched and idealess Constitution as the finest in the world, that gives us no assurance of its power to endure. Understanding is no substitute for character, but it is at any rate a step towards the goal; and if it is once understood that other measures are possible, and if, out of this period, certain writings and thoughts shall survive—and survive they will—then at any rate we may still be weak, but we shall be no longer blind.
It might be possible at the outset of our journey towards strength of will that we should grope our way slowly—very slowly—back to the old problems of power. It does not matter if we do. Before we get there, the world will be changed, and will be pregnant with new thoughts. Let us fulfil the duties for which Germany was made what it is. Let us go in quest of the idea and the faculty that are laid upon us; let us do this in order to live, to recover our health, to shape ourselves anew, to remain a People, to become a Nation, to create a future and to serve the world.