DP Qfarticll Unineraltij Slibrarg 3tt)aca, Neni gath BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE JACOB H. SCHIFF ENDOWMENT FOR THE PROMOTION OF STUDIES IN HUMAN CIVILIZATION 1918 *""TfE?''3fa?esBows when this volume was taken. To renew this book copy the call No. and give to the hbrarian. HOME USE RULES All Books subject to Recall All borrowers must regis- ter in the library to borrow books for home use. All books must be re- turned at end of college year for inspection and repairs. Limited books must be re- turned within the four week limit and not renewed. Students must* return all books before leaving town. Officers should arrange for the return of books wanted during their absence from town. Volumes of periodicals and of pamphlets are held in the library as much as possible. For special pur- poses they are given out for a limited time. Borrowers should not use theic library privileges for the benefit of other persons. Books of special value and gift books, when the giver wishes it, are not allowed to circulate. Readers are asked to re- port all cases of books marked or mutilated. Do not deface books by marks and writing. DD 76.F82'"^" """^'^•'V Library German spirit Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028163503 BOOKS ON GERMANY BY KUNO FRANCKE A HISTORY OF GERMAN LITBRATTJRB AS DK- TBRMIMKD BY SOCIAL FORCES. HxHay Holt & Co. lUh impretsion 1910. GLIMPSES OF MODERN GERMAN CULTURE. DODD, UsAD & Co. 1898. GERMAN IDEALS OF TO-DAY. HonoHTON, Mif- flin & Co. 1907. DIE KULTURWERTK DEH DEUTSCHEN LITBEA- TUR IM MITTBLALTER. Bbblin, Weiduabn. 1910. PERSONALITY IN GERMAN LITERATURE BE- FORE LUTHER. Habtard Unitkbsitt Pbbss. (/» pres8.) THE GERMAN SPIRIT BY KUNO FRANCKE Profestor of the History of Oerman Culture at Harvard University NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1916 J2 'h >-A '■cSZlko COPTBISBT, 1916 .' BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY PuUit/Ud April, 1016 THE QUrNN A BOBCN CO. PRIM MHWAYi N. J, TO MY BROTHER DR. ALEX FRANCKE of BERNE, SWITZERLAND FOREWORD Of the three papers pubhshed here to- gether, the first one was written in the spring of 1914; it was dehvered as Con- vocation Address at the University of Chicago in June, and appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for November of that year. The second essay was written in the spring of 1915 and appeared in the Atlantic for October. The third, a lecture delivered at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences and various other educational in- stitutions in February, 1916, has not been published before. It seems to me that the three papers together present a view of contemporary Germany which may help Americans to understand better both the sources of en- during German greatness and the reasons why German achievements have so often vl FOREWORD failed to appeal to America. At the pres- ent moment of blinding passion, the an- tithesis between American and German feeling has become so acute that a reason- able and sympathetic view of German aspirations has become well-nigh impos- sible. I should be glad if this little book could do something to restore sympathy and reasonableness. K. F. CONTENTS CHAFTBB PAGE I. German Literature and the Ameri- can Temper 3 II. The True Germany .... 43 III. Germany's Contribution to Civili- zation 87 GERMAN LITERATURE AND THE AMERICAN TEMPER GERMAN LITERATURE AND THE AMERICAN TEMPER In this age^ of exchange professorships, peace dinners, and other means of cement- ing friendships between great nations, it is a somewhat ungrateful, if not danger- ous, undertaking to emphasize differences of national temper. If, then, I make bold to venture a few remarks upon the essen- tial dissimilarity of the American and the German temper, and upon the effect of this dissimilarity on the standing of Ger- ^ This and the following sentences, written two months be- fore the outbreak of the war, sound now grimly frivolous and irrelevant. I leave them unchanged as an involuntary com- ment upon the blindness of human conditions. 3 4 GERMAN LITERATURE man literature in America, I had better preface them by saying that nothing is further removed from my mind than the desire to sow seeds of international discord, even if it were in my power to do so. Indeed, having entertained for some thirty years relations to both Germany and the United States which might be described as a sort of intellectual bigamy, I have come to be as peaceable a person as it behooves a man in such a delicate marital situation to be. But while I have honestly tried in these thirty years to make the two divinities presiding over my intellectual household understand and appreciate each other, I have again and again been forced to the conclusion that such a mutual understand- ing of my two loves was for the most part a matter of conscious and conscientious effort, and hardly ever the result of in- stinctive give-and-take. Perhaps the most fundamental, or shall I say elementary, difference between the GERMAN LITERATURE 5 German temper and the American may be expressed by the word " slowness." Is there any possible point of view from which slowness might appear to an American as something desirable? I think not. Indeed, to call a thing or a person slow seems to spread about them an atmosphere of com- plete and irredeemable hopelessness. Com- pare with this the reverently sturdy feelings likely to be aroused in a German breast by the words " langsam und feierlich " in- scribed over a religious or patriotic hymn, and imagine a German Mannerchor singing such a hymn, with all the facial and tonal symptoms of joyful and devout slowness of cerebral activity — and you have in brief compass a specimen-demonstration of the difference in tempo in which the two na- tional minds habitually move. It has been said that the " langsamer Schritt " of the German military drill was in the last resort responsible for the astounding victories which in 1870 shook 6 GERMAN LITERATURE the foundations of Imperial France. Sim- ilarly, it might be said that slowness of movement and careful deliberateness are at the bottom of most things in which Ger- mans have excelled. To be sure, the most recent development of Germany, particu- larly in trade and industry, has been most rapid, and the whole of German life of to-day is thoroughly American in its desire for getting ahead and for working under high pressure. But this is a condition forced upon Germany from without through international competition and the exigencies of the world-market rather than springing from the inner tendency of Ger- man character itself. And it should not be forgotten that it was the greatest Ger- man of modern times, Goethe, who, an- ticipating the present era of speed, uttered this warning : " Railways, express posts, steamships, and all possible facilities for swift communication, — these are the things in which the civilized world is now chiefly GERMAN LITERATURE 7 concerned, and by which it will over-civilize itself and arrive at mediocrity." As to German literary and artistic achievements, is it not true that — for better or worse — their peculiarly German stamp consists to a large extent in a certain slow- ness of rhythm and massiveness of mo- mentum? Goethe himself is a conspicuous example. Even in his most youthful and lively drama, Goetz von BerlicMngen, what a broad foundation of detail^ how deliber- ately winding a course of action, how little of dramatic intensity, how much of intimate revelation of character! His Iphigenie and Tasso consist almost exclusively of the gentle and steady swaying to and fro of contrasting emotions; they carry us back and forth in the ebb and flow of passion, but they never hurl us against the rocks or plunge us into the whirlpool of mere excitement. No wonder the American col- lege boy finds them slow. And what shall we say of Wilhelm Meister? Not only 8 GERMAN LITERATURE American college boys, I fear, will sym- pathize with Mariane's falling soundly asleep when Wilhelm entertains her through six substantial chapters with the account of his youthful puppet-plays and other theatrical enterprises. And yet, what thoughtful reader can fail to see that it is just this halting method of the narrative, this lingering over individual incidents and individual states of mind, this careful bal- ancing of light and shade, this deliberate arrangement of situations and conscious grouping of characters, this constant effort to see the particular in the light of the universal, to extract wisdom out of the seemingly insignificant, and to strike the water of life out of the hard and stony fact — that it is this which makes Wilhelm Meister not only a piece of extraordinary artistic workmanship, but also a revela- tion of the moving powers of human existence. Schiller's being was keyed to a much GERMAN LITERATURE 9 higher pitch than Goethe's, and vibrated much more rapidly. But even his work, and above all his greatest dramatic pro- ductions, from Wallenstein to Wilhelm Tell, are marked by stately solemnity rather than by swiftness of movement; he too loves to pause, as it were, ever and anon, to look at his own creations, to make them speak to him and unbosom them- selves to him about their innermost mo- tives. No other dramatist has used the monologue more successfully than he as a means of affording moments of rest from the ceaseless flow of action. As for the German Romanticists, — who has decried more persistently than they the restlessness and hasty shallowness of human endeavor? Who has sung more rapturously the praises of the deep, impenetrable, calm, unruffled working of nature, the abyss of silent, immovable forces in whose brood- ing there is contained the best and holiest of existence? And must it not be ad- 10 GERMAN LITERATURE mitted that, in the best of their own pro- ductions, such as parts of Novalis's rhyth- mical prose, some Romantic lyrics, some Romantic paintings, above all in the work of Beethoven and his peers, we receive the impression of a grand, benign, heavenly, all-comprehensive being, slowly and ma- jestically breathing, slowly and majes- tically irradiating calm and joy and awe and aU the blessings of life. Something of this same slowness of movement we find throughout the nine- teenth century in many of the most char- acteristically German literary achievements. We find it in Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas, with its seemingly imperturbable, objective, cold, and circumstantial account of events which make one's blood boil and one's fist clench. We find it in Otto Ludwig's Be- tween Heaven and Earth, with its constant reiteration of the fvmdamental contrast be- tween the two leading figures, and with its constant insistence on the relentlessness of GERMAN LITERATURE 11 Fate, which gradually, imperceptibly, but inevitably drives them to the deadly clash v?ith each other. We find it in the diffuse, lingering, essentially epic style of most of Gerhart Hauptmann's dramas. We find it even in a man of such extraordinary nervous excitability and sensitiveness as Richard Wagner. Nothing perhaps is more German in Richard Wagner than the broad, steady, sustained onward march of his musical themes, — notably so in Tristan, Die Meister singer, and Die Walkure. Surely there is no haste here; the question of time seems entirely eliminated; these masses of sound move on regardless, one might say, of the limitations of the human ear; they expand and contract, gather volume and disperse, in endless repetition, yet in always new combinations; they ad- vance and recede, surge on, ebb away and rise again to a mighty flood, with some- thing like rhythmical fatality, so that the hearer finally has no other choice than to 12 GERMAN LITERATURE surrender to them as to a mighty and over- whehning pressing on of natural forces. To be sure, I have known people — and not only Americans — who would have preferred that the death-agonies of Tristan in the last act should be somewhat accelerated by a stricter adherence of Isolde's boat to schedule time. A striking consequence of this difference of tempo in which the American mind and the German natiu-ally move, and perhaps the most conspicuous example of the prac- tical effect of this difference upon national habits, is the German regard for authority and the American dislike of it. For the slower circulation in the brain of the Ger- man makes him more passive and more easily inclined to accept the decisions of others for him, while the self-reliant and agUe American is instinctively distrustful of any decision which he has not made himself. Here, then, is another sharp distinction GERMAN LITERATURE 13 between the two national tempers, another serious obstacle to the just appreciation of the German spirit by the American. I verily believe that it is impossible for an American to imderstand the feelings which a loyal German subject, particularly of the conservative sort, entertains toward the State and its authority. That the State should be anything more than an institution for the protection and safeguarding of the happiness of individuals; that it might be considered as a spiritual, collective per- sonality, leading a life of its own, beyond and above the life of individuals; that service for the State, therefore, or the position of a State official, should be con- sidered as something essentially different from any other kind of useful employment, — ^these are thoughts utterly foreign to the American mind, and very near and dear to the heart of a German. The American is apt to receive an order or a communica- tion from a public official with feelings of 14. GERMAN LITERATURE suspicion and with a silent protest; the German is apt to feel honored by such a communication and fancy himself elevated thereby to a position of some public im- portance. The American is so used to thinking of the police as the servant, and mostly a very poor servant, of his private affairs, that on placards forbidding trespassing upon his grounds he frequently adds an order, " Police take notice " ; the German, especially if he does not look particularly impressive himself, will think long before he makes up his mind to approach one of the impressive-looking Schutzleute to be found at every street corner, and deferen- tially ask him the time of day. The American dislikes the uniform as an em- bodiment of irksome discipline and subordi- nation, he values it only as a sort of holi- day outfit and for parading purposes; to the German the " King's Coat " is some- thing sacrosanct and inviolable, an em- GERMAN LITERATURE 15 bodiment of highest national service and highest national honor. With such fundamental antagonism in the American to the German view of state and official authority, is it surprising that a large part of German literature, that part which is based on questions touching the relations of the individual to State and country, should have found very little sympathy with the average American reader? It has taken more than a hun- dred years for that fine apotheosis of Prus- sian discipline, Heinrich von Kleist's Prinz von Hamburg, to find its way into Ameri- can literature through the equally fine translation by Hermann Hagedorn; and I doubt whether this translation would have been undertaken but for its author's hav- ing German blood in his veins. As for other representative men of nine- teenth-century German literature who stood for the subordination of the individual to monarchical authority, — ^men like Hebbel, 16 GERMAN LITERATURE W. H. Riehl, Gustav Freytag, Ernst von Wildenbruch, — have remained practically without influence, and certainly without following, in America. II Closely allied with this German sense of authority, and again in sharp contrast with American feeling, is the German dis- trust of the average man. In order to realize the fundamental polarity of the two national tempers in this respect also, one need only think of the two great rep- resentatives of American and German political life in the nineteenth century, Lincoln and Bismarck. Lincoln in every fiber of his being a son of the people, an advocate of the common man, an ideal type of the best instincts of the masses, a man who could express with the sim- plicity of a child his ineradicable belief in the essential right-mindedness of the plain GERMAN LITERATURE 17 folk. Bismarck with every pulse-beat of his heart the chivalric vassal of his im- perial master; the invincible champion of the monarchical principle; the caustic scorner of the crowd; the man who, when- ever he notices symptoms in the crowd that he is gaining popularity with it, becomes suspicious of himself and feels inclined to distrust the justice of his own cause; the merciless cynic who characterizes the futile oratorical efforts of a silver-tongued po- litical opponent by the crushing words: " He took me for a mass meeting." But not only the political life of the two countries presents this difference of atti- tude toward the average man. The great German poets and thinkers of the last century were all of them aristocrats by temper: Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, the Romanticists, Heine, Schopen- hauer, Wagner, Nietzsche — is there a man among them who would not have begged off from being classed with the advocates 18 GERMAN LITERATURE of conxmon sense or being called a spokes- man of the masses? What a difference from two of the most characteristically American men of letters, Walt Whitman and Emerson — the one consciously and pur- posely a man of the street, glorying, one might say boastfully, in his comradeship with the crudest and roughest of tramps and dock-hands; the other a philosopher of the field, a modern St. Francis, a prophet of the homespun, an inspired interpreter of the ordinary, — perhaps the most enlight- ened apostle of democracy that ever lived. Is it not natm'al that a people which, al- though with varying degrees of confidence, acknowledges such men as Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Emerson as the spokesmen of its convictions on the value of the ordi- nary intellect, should on the whole have no instinctive sympathy with a people whose intellectual leaders are men like Bismarck, Goethe, and Richard Wagner? To be sure, there is another, a democratic GERMAN LITERATURE 19 side to German life, and this side naturally appeals to Americans. But Overman de- mocracy is still in the making, it has not yet achieved truly great things, it has not yet found a truly great exponent either in politics or in literature. In literature its influence has exhausted itself largely, on the one hand, in biting satire of the ruling classes, such as is practiced to-day most successfully by the contributors to Simplizissimus and similar papers, sym- pathizing with Socialism; on the other hand, in idyllic representations of the healthy primitiveness of peasant life and the humble contentedness and respectability of the artisan class, the small tradespeople and subaltern officials — I am thinking, of course, of such sturdy and charming stories of provincial Germany as have been written by Wilhelm Raabe, Fritz Renter, Peter Rosegger, and Heinrich Seidel. It may be that all these men have been paving the way for a great epoch of German de- 20 GERMAN LITERATURE mocracy; it may be that some time there will arise truly constructive minds that will unite the whole of the German people in an irresistible movement for popular rights, which would give the average man the same dominating position which he enjoys in this country. But clearly this time has not yet come. In Germany, expert train- ing still overrules common sense and dilet- tanteism. The German distrust of the average in- tellect has for its logical counterpart an- other national trait which it is hard for Americans to appreciate — the German bent for vague intuitions of the infinite. It seems strange in this age of cold obser- vation of facts, when the German scientist and the German captain of industry ap- pear as the most striking embodiments of national greatness, to speak of vague in- tuitions of the infinite as a German char- acteristic. Yet throughout the centuries this longing for the infinite has been the GERMAN LITERATURE 21 source of much of the best and much of the poorest in German intellectual achieve- ments. From this longing for the infinite sprang the deep inwardness and spiritual fervor which impart such a unique charm to the contemplative thought of the Ger- man mystics of the fourteenth century. In this longing for the infinite lay Luther's greatest inspiration and strength. It was the longing for the infinite which Goethe felt when he made his Faust say, — The thrill of awe is man's best quality. This longing for the infinite was the very soul of German Romanticism; and all its finest conceptions, the Blue Flower of Novalis, Fichte's Salvation by the Will, Hegel's Self -revelation of the Idea, Scho- penhauer's Redemption from the Will, Nietzsche's Revaluation of All Values, are nothing but ever new attempts to find a body for this soul. But while there has thus come a great 22 GERMAN LITERATURE wealth of inspiration and moral idealism from this German bent for reveling in the infinite, there has also come from it one of the greatest national defects: German vagueness, German lack of form, the lack of sense for the shape and proportion of finite things. Here, then, we meet with another discrepancy between the American and the German character. For nothing is more foreign to the American than the mystic and the vague, nothing appeals more to him than what is clear-cut, easy to grasp, and well proportioned ; he cultivates " good form " for its own sake, not only in his so- cial conduct, but also in his hterary and artistic pursuits, and he usually attains it easily and instinctively, often at the ex- pense of the deeper substance. To the German, on the contrary, form is a prob- lem. He is principally absorbed in the subject-matter, the idea, the inner mean- ing; he struggles to give this subject- matter, this inner meaning, an adequate GERMAN LITERATURE 23 outer form; and he often fails. To com- fort himself, he has invented a technical term designed to cover up his failure; he falls back on the " inner form " of his productions. German literature and art afford nu- merous examples of this continuous and often fruitless struggle with the problem of form. Even in the greatest of German painters and sculptors,— Durer, Peter Vischer, Adolph Menzel, Arnold Bocklin, — there are visible the furrows and the scars imprinted upon them by the struggle; rarely did they achieve a complete and un- disputed triumph. Does the literature of any other people possess an author so crowded with facts and observations, so full of feeling, so replete with vague intima- tions of the infinite, and so thoroughly un- readable as Jean Paul? Is there a parallel anywhere to the formlessness and utter lack of style displayed in Gutzkow's am- bitious nine-volumed Kulturromane? Did 24. GERMAN LITERATURE any writer ever consume himself in a more tragic and more hopeless striving for a new artistic form than did Kleist and Heb- bel? Among the greatest of living Euro- pean writers is there one so uneven in his work, so uncertain of his form, so inclined to constant experiment and to constant change from extreme naturalism to extreme mysticism, and from extreme mysticism to extreme naturalism, as Gerhart Haupt- mann? And who but a German could have written the Second Part of Faust, that tantalizing and irresistible pot-pourri of meters and styles and ideas, of symbolism and satire, of metaphysics and passion, of dryness and sublimity, of the dim mythi- cal past, up-to-date modernity, and pro- phetic visions of the future — all held together by the colossal striving of an individual reaching out into the infinite? GERMAN LITERATURE 25 III I have reserved for the last place in this review of differences of German and American temper another trait intimately connected with the German craving for the infinite; I give the last place to the consideration of this trait, because it seems to me the most un-American of all. I mean the passion for self-surrender. I think I need not fear any serious op- position if I designate self-possession as the cardinal American virtue, and conse- quently as the cardinal American defect also. It is impossible to imagine that so unmanly a proverb as the German — Wer niemals einen Rmisch gehabt Der ist kem rechter Mann — should have originated in New England or Ohio. But it is impossible also to con- ceive that the author of Werthers Leiden should have obtained his youthful impres- 26 GERMAN LITERATURE sions and inspirations in New York City. " Conatus sese conservandi unicum virtutis fundamentum " — this Spinozean motto may be said to contain the essence of the Ameri- can decalogue of conduct. Always be master of yourself; never betray any irrita- tion, or disappointment, or any other weak- ness; never slop over; never give yourself away; never make yourself ridiculous^ what American would not admit that these are foremost among the rules by which he would like to regulate his conduct? It can hardly be denied that this habitual self-mastery, this habitual control over one's emotions, is one of the chief reasons why so much of American hfe is so iminterest- ing and so monotonous. It reduces the number of opportunities for intellectual friction, it suppresses the manifestation of strong individuality, often it impoverishes the inner life itself. But, on the other hand, it has given the American that sure- ness of motive, that healthiness of appetite. GERMAN LITERATURE ST that boyish frolicsomeness, that purity of sex-instincts, that quickness and litheness of manners, which distinguish him from most Europeans; it has given to him all those quaUties which insure success and make their possessor a welcome member of any kind of society. If, in contradistinction to this funda- mental American trait of self-possession, I designate the passion for self-surrender as perhaps the most significant expression of national German character, I am well aware that here again I have touched upon the gravest defects as well as the highest virtues of German national life. The deepest seriousness and the noblest loyalty of German character is rooted in this passion. Sich hinzugeben ganz und eine Wonne Zu fuhlen die ewig sein muss, Ewig, — that is German sentiment of the most un- questionable sort. Not only do the great 28 GERMAN LITERATURE names in German history — as Luther, Les- sing, Schiller, Bismarck, and so many others — stand in a conspicuous manner for this thoroughly German devotion, this absorption of the individual in some great cause or principle, but countless unnamed men and women are equally typical rep- resentatives of this German virtue of self- surrender: the housewife whose only thought is for her family; the craftsman who devotes a lifetime of contented ob- scurity to his daily work; the scholar who foregoes official and social distinction in un- remitting pursuit of his chosen inquiry; the oificial and the soldier, who sink their person- ality in unquestioning service to the State. But a German loves not only to sur- render himself to a great cause or a sacred task, he equally loves to surrender himself to whims. He loves to surrender to feel- ings, to hysterias of all sorts; he loves to merge himself in vague and formless imaginings, in extravagant and reckless ex- GERMAN LITERATURE 29 perience, in what he likes to call " living himself out." And thus this same passion for self-surrender which has produced the greatest and noblest types of German earnestness and devotion, has also led to a number of paradoxical excrescences and grotesque distortions of German character. Nobody is more prone to forget his better self in this so-called " living himself out " than the German. Nobody can be a cruder materialist than the German who has per- suaded himself that it is his duty to un- mask the "lie of idealism." Nobody can be a more relentless destroyer of all that makes life beautiful and lovely, nobody can be a more savage hater of religious beliefs, of popular tradition, of patriotic instincts, than the German who has con- vinced himself that by the uprooting of all these things he performs the sacred task of saving society. In literature this whimsical fanaticism of the Grcrman temper has made an even 30 GERMAN LITERATURE development of artistic tradition, such as is found most conspicuously in France, im- possible. Again and again the course of literary development has been interrupted by some bold iconoclast, some unruly rebel against established standards, some impas- sioned denouncer of what thus far had been considered fine and praiseworthy; so that practically every German writer has had to begin at the beginning, by creating his own standards and canons of style. No other literature contains so much defamation of its own achievements as German literature; no writers of any other nation have spoken so contemptu- ously of their own countrymen as Ger- man writers of the last himdred years have spoken of theirs, from Holderlin's characterization of the Germans as " bar- barians, made more barbarous by industry, learning, and religion," to some such say- ings by Nietzsche as, " Wherever Germany spreads she ruins culture"; or, "Wagner GERMAN LITERATURE 31 is the counter-poison to everything essen- tially Gterman; the fact that he is a poison too I do not deny " ; or, " The (Germans have not the faintest idea how vulgar they are, they are not even ashamed of being merely Germans " ; or, " Words fail me, I have only a look for those who dare to utter the name of Goethe's Faust in the presence of Byron's Manfred; the Germans are incapable of conceiving anything sublime." Is there cause for wonder, when Ger- mans themselves indulge in such fanatically scurrilous vagaries about their own people and its greatest men, that foreigners are inclined to take their cue from them and come to the conclusion that German litera- ture is after all " merely German " ? rv We have considered a number of pecu- liarly German traits: slowness of temper. 32 GERMAN LITERATURE regard for authority, distrust of the aver- age intellect, bent for vague intuitions of the infinite, defective sense of form, pas- sion for self-surrender, whimsical fanati- cism; and we have seen how every one of these German traits is diametrically opposed to American ways of thinking and feeling. We cannot therefore be sur- prised that the literature in which these peculiarly German traits find expression should not be particularly popular in America. As a matter of fact, there has been only one period, and a brief one at that, when German literature exercised a marked in- fluence upon this country, when it 'even held something hke a dominant position. That was about the middle of the nine- teenth century, the time of Emerson, Long- fellow, Hedge, and Bayard Taylor. That was the time when the creations of classic German literature of the days of Weimar and Jena were welcomed and exalted by GERMAN LITERATURE 33 the leaders of spiritual America as revela- tions of a higher life, of a new and hopeful and ennobling view of the world. At that time there did not exist in America, as to-day, millions of citizens of German birth, the great majority of whom are absorbed in practical and every-day affairs. At that time the age of industriahsm and imperialism had not dawned for Germany. Germany ap- peared then to the intellectual elite of America as the home of choicest spirits, as the land of true freedom of thought. Wil- helm Meister and Faust, Jean Paul's Titan and Flegeljahre, Fichte's Destiny of Man, Schleiermacher's Addresses on Religion, were then read and reread with something like sacred ardor by small but influential and highly cultivated circles in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. And the few Germans who at that time came to America, most of them as political refu- gees and martyrs of the Liberal cause, ap- 34. GERMAN LITERATURE peared as living embodiments of the gospel of humanity contained in German litera- ture, and were therefore given a cordial and respectful reception. Things are very different to-day. To be sure, the noble bronze figures of Goethe and Schiller by Rietschel, which stand in front of the Ducal theater at Weimar, also look down, in the shape of excellent reproductions, upon multitudes of Ameri- cans at San Francisco, Cleveland, and Syracuse; and one of the finest monuments to the genius of Goethe ever conceived has recently been dedicated in Chicago. But are these monuments in reality expressions of a wide sway exercised by these two greatest German writers upon the Ameri- can people? Are they not appeals rather than signs of victory — appeals above all to the Germans in this country to be loyal to the message of classic German literature, to be loyal to the best traditions which bind them to the land of their ancestors, to be GERMAN LITERATURE 35 loyal to the ideals in which Germany's true greatness is rooted? The most encouraging aspect of the present situation is to be found in the study of German literature in American colleges and universities; for there is not a imi- versity or a college in the land where there are not well-trained teachers and ardent admirers of what is truly fine and great in German letters. And in spite of all that has been said to-day, there is plenty in the German literary production of the last hundred years which is, or at least should be, of intense interest to Americans, — plenty of wholesome thought, plenty of deep feeling, plenty of soaring imagination, plenty of spiritual treasures which are not for one nation alone, but for all humanity. For it is a grave mistake to assume, as has been assumed only too often, that, after the great epoch of Classicism and Romanticism in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Germany produced but 36 GERMAN LITERATURE little of universal significance, or that, after Goethe and Heine, there were but few Germans worthy to be mentioned side by side with the great writers of other Euro- pean countries. True, there is no German Tolstoi, no German Ibsen, no German Zola, but then, is there a Russian Nietzsche, or a Norwegian Wagner, or a French Bis- marck? Men like these — ^men of revolu- tionary genius, men who start new move- ments and mark new epochs — are neces- sarily rare, and stand isolated among any people and at all times. The three names mentioned indicate that Germany, during the last fifty years, has contributed a goodly share of even such men. Quite apart, however, from such men of overshadowing genius and all-con- trolling power, can it be truly said that Germany, since Goethe's time, has been lacking in writers of high aim and notable attainment? It can be stated without reservation that. GERMAN LITERATURE 37 taken as a whole, the German drama of the nineteenth century has maintained a level of excellence equal if not superior to that reached by the drama of most other nations during the same period. Schiller's Wallen- stein and Tell, Goethe's IpMgenie and Faust, Kleist's Prinz von Hamburg, Grill- parzer's Medea, Hebbel's Maria Magdalene and Die Nibelungen, Otto Ludwig's Der Erbforster, Freytag's Die Journalisten, Anzengruber's Der Meineidbauer, Wil- brandt's Der Meister von Palmyra, Wil- denbruch's Konig Heinrich, Sudermann's Heimat, Hauptmann's Die Weber and Der arme Heinrich, Hofmannthal's Elektra, and, in addition to all these, the great musical dramas of Richard Wagner — this is a century's record of dramatic achieve- ment of which any nation might be proud. I doubt whether the French or the Russian or the Scandinavian stage of the nineteenth century, as a whole, are above this standard. Certainly, neither the English nor the 38 GERMAN LITERATURE Spanish nor the Italian stage come in any way near it. That German lyric verse of the last hun- dred years should have been distinguished by beauty of structure, depth of feeling, and wealth of melody, is not to be wondered at if we remember that this was the centiu-y of the revival of folk-song, and that it pro- duced such song-composers as Schubert and Schimiann and Robert Franz and Hugo Wolf and Richard Strauss. But it seems strange that, apart from Heine, even the greatest of German lyric poets, such as Platen, Lenau, Morike, Annette von Droste, Geibel, Liliencron, Dehmel, Miinchhausen, Rilke, should be so little known beyond the borders of the Father- land, The German novel of the past century was, for a long time, unquestionably in- ferior to both the English and the French novel of the same epoch. But in the midst of much that is tiresome and involved and GERMAN LITERATURE 39 artificial, there stand out, even in the mid- dle of the century, such masterpieces of characterization as Otto Ludwig's Zwischen Himmel und Erde and Wilhelm Raahe's Der Hunger pastor; such delightful reve- lations of genuine hxmior as Fritz Renter's Ut mine Stromtidj such penetrating studies of social conditions as Gustav Freytag's Soil und Haben. And during the last third of the century there has clearly de- veloped a new, forcible, original style of German novel-writing. Seldom has the short story been handled more skillfully and felicitously than by such men as Paul Heyse, Gottfried Keller, C. F. Meyer, and Theodor Storm. Seldom has the novel of tragic import and passion been treated with greater refinement and deli- cacy than in such works as Fontane's Effi Briest, Ricarda Huch's Ludolf Ursleu, Wilhelm von Polenz's Der Biittnerbauer, and Ludwig Thoma's Andreas Tost. lAiid it may be doubted whether, at the present 40 GERMAN LITERATURE moment, there is any country where the novel is represented by so many gifted writers or exhibits such exuberant vitality, such sturdy truthfulness, such seriousness of purpose, or such a wide range of imagi- nation, as in contemporary Germany. It is for the teachers of German litera- ture in the universities and colleges throughout the country to open the eyes of Americans to the vast and solid treas- ures contained in this storehouse of Ger- man literary production of the last hun- dred years. They are doing this work of enlightenment now, with conspicuous popu- lar success at the universities of the Middle West. And I look confidently forward to a time when, as a result of this academic instruction and propaganda, German litera- txire will have ceased to be unpopular in America. II THE TRUE GERMANY II THE TRUE GERMANY Much of the criticism of Germany in English and American war literature of the past few months is written in such a vein as to leave the impression that the Germany of to-day is not the real Ger- many, that it is a perversion of its former self, and that the delivery of the German people from this perverted state and the restoration of the German mind to its earlier and truer type is a demand of humanity, and the real issue of the pres- ent war. I have no doubt that most of the persons who hold this view hold it in all seriousness and candor. It therefore seems to me eminently worth while to dis- 43 44 THE TRUE GERMANY cuss it with equal seriousness and candor, to examine the foundations on which it rests, to sift what is true and authentic in it from what is specious and sophisticated, and thus to find out what the real relation is between contemporary Germany and the Germany of a hundred years ago; to determine, in brief, to what extent the contemporary German type has preserved and embodies what by the opponents of Imperial Germany is called the true Ger- man type. I am free to confess that I personally feel more at home in the idyllic atmos- phere of the Weimar and Jena of the end of the eighteenth century than in the mar- tial industrialism of the Berlin or Ham- burg of the beginning of the twentieth. The classic age of Weimar and Jena was one of those rare epochs in the world's history when spiritual achievements out- balanced the manifestations of material power. Indeed, I doubt whether there ever THE TRUE GERMANY 46 was a time in which inner strivings so clearly overshadowed external conditions as in the decades that produced Goethe's Iphigenie and Faust, or SchiUer's Wallen- stein and Tell. Germany was then a coun- try of small towns and villages, a land of prevailingly agricultural pm-suits. It had no centralized national government, no national parliament, no national army, no national politics of any sort. On the other hand, there was in the Germany of that time a great deal of provincial and local independence, a great variety of intellectual centers, a great deal of patriarchal dig- nity and simple refinement in the ordi- nary conduct of life. The great concern of life was the building up of a weU- rounded personality, the rational cultiva- tion of individual talent and character. And the ideal of personality was contained in the threefold message of Kant, Goethe, and Schiller: the exaltation of duty as the only true revelation of the divine, the ex- 46 THE TRUE GERMANY altation of restless striving for complete- ness of existence as the way in which err- ing man works out his own salvation, and the exaltation of aesthetic culture as a means of reconciling the eternal conflict between the senses and the spirit and of leading man to harmony and oneness with himself. Noble and inspiring as was this ideal of personality established by the classic epoch of German literature and philosophy, it lacked one essential element of effective- ness: it was nearly devoid of the impulse of national self-assertion. This impulse was added to German life by the dire need of the Napoleonic wars, by the stern necessity of summoning the whole strength of the whole people against the ruin threatened by foreign oppression. It was Napoleonic tyranny which created the German nation. It would, however, be a great mistake to believe that this new conception of German nationahty, which was born out of the political wreck of the old German THE TRUE GERMANY 47 Empire at the beginning of the nine- teenth century, discarded the high ideal of personality proclaimed by the classic writers of the eighteenth century. On the con- trary, the noble triad of ideal incentives? of personal conduct bequeathed by them — submission to duty, incessant striving for ever higher activity, and belief in the moral mission of sesthetic culture — was made by their successors the very cornerstone of the new national training upon which the German State of the nineteenth century was to be reared. It might indeed be said that the share taken by these ideals in shaping German public consciousness and in creat- ing German national institutions forms the most important part of German history in the nineteenth century, and has im- parted to it many of its most distinctive and characteristic traits. To trace the effect of these ideals upon some at least of the most striking phases of German national life throughout the past hundred 48 THE TRUE GERMANY years, is tantamount to proving the pres- ence, in Imperial Germany of to-day, of the same spiritual forces which were the glory of cosmopolitan Germany in the time of Kant, Goethe, and SchUler. II It is a trite saying that the Prussian State is a living embodiment and a concrete application, upon a large scale, of Kantian principles of duty. Trite as this saying is, it may not be superfluous to analyze its meaning somewhat more closely. There can be no doubt that it is historically cor- rect in so far as the founders of modern Prussia were, directly or indirectly, dis- ciples of the Kantian philosophy. Not that Kant's views on politics and public affairs did in any specific manner shape Prus- sian legislation of the early nineteenth cen- tury; his views were too individualistic and too little concerned with national needs for THE TRUE GERMANY 49 that. Not Kant but the men who followed him — Stein, Hardenberg, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Fichte, and Hegel — ^have been official exponents, so to speak, of the mis- sion of Prussia for a regenerated Gter- many. But it is nevertheless true that the spirit of the whole work of legislative re- form which brought about the reconstruc- tion of Prussia after the battle of Jena would not have been what it was but for the influence of Kant's thought. " Thou canst, for thou shalt " — ^these words in which Kant epigrammatically summed up his view of life were indeed the funda- mental creed of all those noble men who, in the years following the Prussian debacle, tried, as Frederick William III said, to help the State " to replace by spiritual agencies what it had lost in physical resources." The one thought pervading the Stein- Hardenberg legislation from 1807 to 1810 was to release from inertia and set in 50 THE TRUE GERMANY motion moral power. By the abolition of serfdom, the mass of the agricultural population was to be converted from a herd of dumb and lifeless subjects into active and spirited workers. By the es- tablishment of municipal self-government throughout Prussia, the cities were to be made a training ground for intelligent and effective participation of the middle classes in public affairs. By the introduction of universal military service, the obligation of every individual of whatever rank or sta- tion to prepare to defend with his own life the common cause, was to be made an integral part of the daily existence of the whole people. Stein himself frankly and plainly characterizes the intention of all these legislative measures when in his Reminiscences he says, " We started from the fundamental idea of rousing a moral, religious, patriotic spirit in the nation; of inspiring it anew with courage, self-con- fidence, readiness for every sacrifice in the THE TRUE GERMANY SI cause of independence and of national honor; and of seizing the first favorable opportunity to begin the bloody and haz- ardous struggle for both." Little as Kant was given to the expression of patriotic emotions, he would surely have recog- nized the kinship of such utterances as these, and their practical applications, with his own fundamental conviction that man's dignity and freedom consist in the uncon- ditional surrender to duty, and that the aim of society is, not the largest possible gratification of the individual instinct for happiness, but the highest possible expres- sion, in individual activity, of mankind's striving for perfection. If the political and mihtary reconstruc- tion of Prussia through Stein and Harden- berg may be called an outgrowth of the Kantian conception of moral discipline, the reorganization of higher Prussian educa- tion, connected with the names of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Fichte, is clearly based 62 THE TRUE GERMANY on similar views. In temper and in intel- lectual sympathies these men were dia- metrically opposed to each other: Fichte a radical fire-eater, Himiboldt a conservative statesman; Fichte a fanatic spokesman of the Germanic craving for the infinite, Hmnboldt a placid devotee of Greek beauty of form; Fichte a democratic prophet of Socialism, Humboldt an aristocratic up- holder of individual culture. But they were at one in the Kantian belief that the aim of education is the training of the will; they were at one in the conviction that it was the educational mission of the Prussian State to create a new type of na- tional character. The most striking result of the efforts of these men was the founda- tion of the University of Berlin in the very midst of national humiliation and distress, one of the most shining manifestations of faith in the superiority of ideal aspirations over the tyranny of facts that the world has ever seen. But the founding of the THE TRUE GERMANY 63 University of Berlin was only the most striking result of Humboldt's and Fichte's efforts; perhaps even further-reaching, though less conspicuous, was the reorgani- zation of the whole system of public-school instruction throughout Prussia that pro- ceeded from them and their associates. For it was in the first decades of the nine- teenth century that Prussia, by combining the democratic ideal of making higher edu- cation financially accessible to all classes of society with the aristocratic ideal of stimulating, by careful selection of in- dividuals, the race for intellectual Reader- ship, came to be the foremost organized educational power in Europe. And in the Prussian Gymnasia of the early nineteenth century the categorical imperative of Kant's moral law assumed a particularly energetic and life-inspiring form; for here the intellectually finest of the Prussian youth of all classes, the son of the butcher or the seamstress no less than the son of 54. THE TRUE GERMANY the prince and the prime minister, met on the common groimd of training for the vmi- versity; here they were imhued, as the youth of no other nation were, with the duty of surrendering themselves to higher motives and of making themselves fit in- struments of the spirit. " Work or per- ish " was the motto chosen for his own guidance by one of the successors of Hum- boldt in the administration of the Prus- sian Gymnasia; it might be called the motto of the whole Prussian educational policy. In Hegel's conception of the State this line of moral regeneration that took its start from the Kantian view of duty reached its climax. To Hegel the State is " the real- ization of the ethical idea; it is the ethical spirit as incarnate, self-conscious, substan- tial wiU." The State is to him an organism uniting in itself all spiritual and moral aspirations of the people, stimulating every kind of public and private activity, strain- THE TRUE GERMANY 55 ing every nerve and protecting every re- source, subordinating all individual com- fort to the one great aim of national achievements. It is the source of inspira- tion for every progress in organization, invention, industrial enterprise, scientific inquiry, philosophical speculation, artistic creation. It is " the manifestation of the divine on earth." These were the ideas under whose in- fluence generation after generation of the Prussian people, from the beginning of the nineteenth century on, grew up and did their work. These were the ideas which overthrew Napoleon; the ideas which in the thirties and forties, in spite of its over- bearing bureaucracy and its reactionary statesmen, made Prussia the only German state from which the political unification of Germany could be looked for; the ideas which in the sixties, under the leadership of such extraordinary men as William I, Bismarck, Moltke, and Lassalle, brought 56 THE TRUE GERMANY about, on the one hand, the foundation of the new German Empire, on the other hand the organization of the most compact and the most enlightened labor party of modern history. We have fallen into the habit of sum- ming up this whole set of ideas under the word efficiency. And efficiency it certainly is which all of Germany has been taught by the Prussian conception of the State. But in applying this word to the Ger- many of to-day we should not forget that it is efficiency inspired by high ideals, by the Kantian precept of the imconditional submission to duty. Can there be any doubt that the spirit shown by the whole German people in the present war is a wonderful exhibition of strength put into the service of moral commands? I certainly do not wish to belittle the spirit of self-sacrifice manifested by other nations in this war. Who above all could fail to have the deepest sympathy with the Belgian people THE TRUE GERMANY 67 in their heroic defense of their homes and hearths? But none of the nations now fighting, I believe, is filled with the same joyous, jubilant exultancy of self -surren- der, the same imswerving and undoubting obedience to the inner voice, the same un- shakable conviction of fighting for the best that is in them, that the Germans have shown. Germany in this conflict has had no need of calling for volunteers: two million of them, from boys of eighteen to gray- beards of sixty-five, offered themselves spontaneously without a call at the very proclamation of war. Germany has had no need of a spasmodic resort to prohibition legislation; her soldiers and her workmen are disciplined enough to keep in fit con- dition for the manufacture and the use of arms. Germany has had no need of scour- ing Asia and Africa for savage hirelings to wage her war: her own sons, thousands of business and professional men, flocked from 68 THE TRUE GERMANY all over China to the colors in besieged Kiao-chao, with the absolute certainty of either death or capture, impelled by no other motive than to make good the truly Kantian cablegram sent by the comman- dant of the fortress to the Emperor : " Guar- antee fulfillment of duty to the utmost." In mihtary achievements, can any of the nations that are besetting Germany match her by such examples of trained intelli- gence, consummate skill, iron determina- tion, persistent daring, unquestioning devotion, — in short such examples of per- sonalities steeled by obedience to the cate- gorical imperative, — as Germany has given in the captain and the crew of the Emden; in the career of the Dresden and the Eitel Friedrich; in the submarines that made their way from the North Sea, through the Straits of Gibraltar, into the Dardanelles; or in that living wall of millions of men that are steadily and relentlessly flinging back the assault upon THE TRUE GERMANY 59 her own frontiers by all the great powers of Europe? I cannot forego quoting from some let- ters which I have received during the winter from one of these men, — letters which illus- trate the spirit ingrained into all Ger- many by a century of Prussian tradition of character-building. The writer is at the head of one of Germany's foremost publish- ing houses. Although a man of over sixty, he volunteered at the outbreak of the war, together with his oldest son, a young mu- sician of unusual promise. The son fell in one of the early engagements near Dix- mude; the father is captain in a Landsturm regiment holding the trenches around Lille. These are among the things he writes : — " A friendly fate has after all taken me and my Landsturm battalion into the enemy's country, directly behind the long war front which is gradually being pushed 60 THE TRUE GERMANY westward. I had already begun to fear that I would be kept all the time in guard- ing prisoners' camps, which, easy as the service is, would have come to be intoler- ably tedious in the long run. Happily, my wife has stood the double leave-taking bet- ter than I feared. The night before Heinrich's . [the son's] departure, she sat all night long at his bed, he peacefully sleeping with his hand lying in hers and only from time to time awakening for a moment to feel the comfort of being thus guarded. ' As a mother comforteth ' — the scripture says. When at five o'clock in the morning he had left her with the words, ' You are a wonder of a mother,' and she was sitting alone in the dining-room sob- bing, suddenly a little angel in a night- gown [the youngest boy] came downstairs and put his hand in hers, reminding her of what was still left to her. " ' Volunteer R. missing since Novem- ber 10,' is a wireless message from the THE TRUE GERMANY 61 234th regiment that reached me yesterday, after my wife and I for a fortnight had been worried by the absence of all news, and later had been startled by postal cards addressed to the boy being returned, with the official mark, ' wounded.' When or whether we shall ever hear anything definite about his fate is doubtful. What alarms me most is my poor wife. God give her trust and strength. I myself shall pull through; the constant duties of the day, the intercourse with comrades, and horseback riding will help me. And happily, my wife and I find the same well of comfort in the Word of God, which one lives in these days as never before, without any dogmatic doubts. And how can we ask anything special for ourselves, when each and all make such sacrifices for the Father- land? These sacrifices will not be in vain. ' " Since yesterday I know that I shall not see Heinrich again. What this means for us, I need not tell you. I had labored 62 THE TRUE GERMANY and labored to make my heart firm, but that the blow would be so terrific, so crush- ing, I had not imagined. My wife thus far has struggled through heroically, in the clear consciousness that she must save her- self for our youngest and me, so far as it is in her power. If the same feeling did not uphold me, I would, in spite of my age and my poor hearing, apply to be trans- ferred to the first line. We cannot under- stand the sufferings which now are heaped upon us and countless others. The only help is to go on with our tasks. Christmas time will give my wife plenty of oppor- tunity to show love to others and thereby to combat the void at her own hearth. " The day before yesterday, since I could not get any definite news, I rode about sixty kilometers northward into Flanders. That I could do it I owe to special circumstances. What would hap- pen if the roads, crowded with troops as they are, and the precious motor cars, were THE TRUE GERMANY 63 often used thus for the sake of a poor common soldier? After some searching about, I at last found Heinrich's company, shrunk from 250 to 90, quartered in a little church at West Roosebecke, the tower of which had been demolished in order not to attract the fire of the enemy near by. Soon I was surrounded by a crowd of young men who had taken part in the last battle together with Heinrich. He had been among the skirmishers in front of the storming company, they said. Close before the enemy's line, he was shot through the left arm, tried to creep back, was shot in the back, fell over, and was left dead on the ground, next to his friend and class- mate K. Since the French shoot even at men burying the dead, they could not bury him. A few days before, Heinrich him- self had rescued a wounded comrade who had crept into a baking-oven directly in front of the enemy's position. They said he had been more spirited and exuberant 64. THE TRUE GERMANY and joyous in the performance of his duties than most of his comrades. What could he have been to them in the long evenings, as they were huddled together in that little church? " Of war-weariness or discouragement there is not a shadow of a trace among us. Detachments of the recruits of 1914 have just arrived here, to finish their drill in the enemy's country. They are singing, singing, singing, wherever you meet them, just like the volunteers of last August of whom so many are now sleeping under- ground. My heart grows tender when I talk with them or look at them while I ride past them. Our opponents have no conception of what stuff our people is made." Ill By the side of Kant's stern doctrine of duty there must be placed, as another of the great legacies left to Germany by her THE TRUE GERMANY 65 classic writers, the Goethean gospel of salvation through ceaseless striving. It is Goethe who has impressed upon German life the Superman motif. As his own life was a combination of Wilhelm Meister and Faitst in their undaunted striding from experience to experience and in their ever- renewed efforts to round out their own being, so it may be said that there is something Faustlike and something Meisterlike in most of the representative men of German literature in the nineteenth century, above all in Heinrich von Kleist, Hebbel, Otto Ludwig, Richard Wagner, Nietzsche. None of these men were re- ligious formalists; to aU of them life was an experiment of deepest import; all of them found the value of life in wrestling •with its fundamental problems. And this whole tradition of striving has imparted even to the average German of to-day a mental strenuousness and an emotional in- tensity such as is absent from the average 66 THE TRUE GERMANY European of other stock, not to mention the average American. A strange spec- tacle indeed, and an inspiring one : a people naturally slow and of phlegmatic temper stirred to its depths by intellectual and spiritual forces and thereby keyed up to an eagerness and swiftness of action which gives it easily the first place in the race for national self-improvement. What other people equals the German in the readiness to react upon stimuli from abroad, to adopt and incorporate ideas grown on foreign soil? Where have Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Calderon, Ibsen exerted as truly popular and deeply penetrating an influence as in Germany? Where have they become educational forces of equal momentum? Is there any other country where the knowledge of foreign languages is so widely spread? any other country where there is so much individual desire for solid learning? any other coun- try where individual talent is as carefully THE TRUE GERMANY 67 and conscientiously cultivated? any other country where there is so much honest and serious effort to approach the great ques- tions of existence from an individual angle, to restate them in personal terms, to find new answers and new vistas? American students who have lived in German families of the middle classes, for instance the family of a Gymnasiallehrer or a government official, will bear testimony to the fact that German daily life of to-day in all these respects upholds the Goethean tradition of a hundred years ago. Indeed, the reign of the present Emperor has given particularly conspicuous evidence of this spirit of striving and effort penetrat- ing all departments of life. For what sphere of activity is there in which the Emperor's example, his imiversal and im- passioned impulse for achievement, has not borne fruit? Only one of these fruits, matm-ed in the midst of the present war, may be singled out. In October, 1914, 68 THE TRUE GERMANY there was formally opened, with simple ceremonies, the new University of Frank- furt, the first German university to be founded by an individual city. Well may the professors and students of this latest German university be proud of the date pf its birth. For it will proclaim to posterity that not even the most fearful crisis that ever befell a people has been able to crush the German striving for ideal achievements, the Faustlike determination to make every new experience a stepping-stone for a higher one, and thus to press on to com- pleteness of existence. Together with Kant and Goethe, Schiller stands as guardian of the best that the Ger- man people has contributed to human progress in the nineteenth century. To him more than to any other individual is it due that the German people believes as no other people believes in the moral mission of aesthetic culture. Schiller's whole activity was rooted in the conviction that beauty is THE TRUE GERMANY 69 the great reconciler, that not only in the creation of the beautiful, but also in its en- joyment, man overcomes the conflict be- tween his sensuous and his spiritual nature, becomes at one with himself, rises to his full stature. This conviction, consciously embraced by the educated, instinctively ab- sorbed by the masses, has come to be one of the great popular forces that have molded German national character in the nine- teenth century and distinguished it from the emotional life of most other peoples. To the German, the drama is a sacred matter. He looks to it for inspiration, widening of sympathies, upheaval of emo- tions, cleansing of purpose, strengthening of the will. From Schiller on to Haupt- mann and Schonherr, generation after generation of German dramatic writers has tried to hve up to this ideal, not al- ways with full artistic success, always with nobility of aim. Anyone who has attended the annual performances at Weimar, ar- 70 THE TRUE GERMANY ranged by the Schillerbund for the flower of German youth from all over the empire, will know something of the effect which this view of the drama has exercised upon the Grcrman people. Even now, in the midst of the war, when in London the serious stage has given way to the noisy and sensational vaudeville show, the Ger- man theaters in all cities, large and small maintain and emphasize the classic tradi- tion and add their share to the ennobling of national character.^ To the German, music is a sacred matter. Who could describe what Beethoven and Schubert and Schumann and Wagner have been to the German people throughout these past hundred years? Who could ' Germans may be justly proud of the fact that at the very time when the British navy has been trying to shut off Ger- many from the rest of the world, Germany has not only kept all her important theaters regularly open to Shakespearean plays, but has even exported Shakespeare across the Baltic : Max Reinhardt and his Deutsches Theater have been playing Hamlet and Lear during the present summer to crowded audi- ences at Stockholm and other Swedish cities. THE TRUE GERMANY 71 measure the wealth of comfort, delight, strength, elevation, which song — song giv- ing wings to the feelings of an Uhland, Eichendorff, Heine, Lenau, Geibel — ^has showered upon countless German homes? And Beethoven as well as folk-song, have accompanied the German nation into the war. Not a catchy and meaningless music- hall tune is what the German soldiers love to sing in the trenches, but " Es braust ein Ruf wie Donnerhall," or "In der Heimat, in der Heimat — da gibt's ein Wieder- sehnl " To the German, the enjoyment of nature is a sacred matter. A short time before his death, in his eightieth year, Ludwig Tieck declared that the greatest event in his whole life, the event which had influenced and shaped his character more than any other, had been a sunrise which he had watched as a youth of eighteen when he was tramp- ing in the Thuringian mountains. That is German sentiment. That is what millions 72 THE TRUE GERMANY of Germans feel to-day. That is what makes the flowerpots bloom behind the windowpanes — ^kept so scrupulously clean — of German tenement houses; what has transformed the public squares of German cities into parks and meadows; what makes Whitsuntide, with its joyful roaming through field and forest, with its bedeck- ing of all houses with the young foUage, the most charming of all German holidays. That is what made the " field-gray " of the German troops marching into war last August disappear under such masses of roses as if all the German gardens had emptied themselves upon them. No, the Germany of to-day is not a per- version of a former and better type. It is a normal and splendid outgrowth of national ideals that have been at work for more than a century, — ^the ideals of training the will, of stimulating energy, and of cultivating the soul. To give once more concrete illustrations of the type of THE TRUE GERMANY 73 personality developed under the influence of these ideals, I quote again from some letters that I received at the beginning of this year. This is from a widow living near Lake Constance, whose eldest son, a young Uhlan who volunteered fresh from the Gymnasium, had come home on furlough for the Christmas holidays: — " On the twenty-fourth I rode to Con- stance to fetch our Christmas surprise, our dear tall Uhlan who was allowed to spend three whole days with us. It was a won- derful time for us. The children dragged him about everywhere, from the cellar to the attic, from the garden into the field. It was a joy to see him playing for them gay riders' songs on the piano, whistling tunes to the guitar, etc. But he has grown very serious. A veil lies over his youthful face ; and there is something touchingly pro- tecting in the way in which he behaves toward the children. His features in re- 74. THE TRUE GERMANY pose are strangely sad; and strangely ma- ture he seems when he talked, so re- servedly and yet so understandingly, with a neighbor who had just heard of the death of his only son. There were three steamers full of reservists when, on the third day, I accompanied him across the lake. Some fifty people were at the pier and waved good-by. A young lad next to us on the steamer, who had kept up waving back a long time, broke into despairing sobs when his aged mother vanished out of sight. But they all spoke firmly and with wonderful elevation, about our beloved Fatherland. It helped me to keep myself in hand. And now — as God wills." The next is from a young minister who studied at the Harvard Divinity School last year and who, on the day of his re- turn to Germany, volimteered as a private. His three brothers were also in the field; two of them have since been killed. He THE TRUE GERMANY 75 was struck by a shell while carrying a wounded officer out of the firing line. The following words are from a letter written in the hospital on the day of his death: — " Depression of spirit I battle down with good weapons and good success. Anxious thought about my brothers makes me al- most glad not to have any news from home. How long will it last? One must reach out for the great things." And this is from a young artillery offi- cer, by profession a chemical expert in one of the great German industrial labora- tories, who writes from the trenches at Ypres : — " After a magnificent sunset, we were called to the Christmas service. It was held in a barn; the walls covered with fir branches; torches and candles the only form of lighting; a curious mixture of the real stall of Bethlehem and our traditional 76 THE TRUE GERMANY Christmas. The chaplain spoke simply and nicely: Christmas should bring inner peace to us, even in the field, and make our whole army feel as one great family. " Then our captain made an inspiring and patriotic address, with cheers for the Emperor, winding up with the distribution of some iron crosses, one of them falling to my lot. And finally the opening of the packages from home. What an infinite love these numberless presents revealed; how they made us feel that the soul of Ger- many is with us in the fight 1 During the night — it was a still, clear, frosty night — we sent our improvised band into the trench nearest the French and had it play to them Christmas songs and marches. One really must guard one's self against sentimentahty in these times. But this, I think, is true — that the war has created a mutual respect between the fighting peoples; and upon the basis of this mutual respect there may perhaps arise a more solid cooperation of THE TRUE GERMANY 77 nations than the friends of eternal peace have thus far been able to bring about." IV How is it possible that a people ani- mated by such a spirit, a people which for a century has assiduously and devotedly labored to produce types of human per- sonality as noble and enlightened as any people ever has brought forth — how is it possible that such a people should suddenly appear to large numbers of intelligent ob- servers as an enemy of mankind, as a menace to the security and peace of the' rest of the world? Much of the hostile criticism of Imperial Germany, of its alleged sinister craving for world-dominion, or its atrocious conduct of the war, is out- right slander and willful distortion. It is indeed a grim mockery to have the ten- tative and circumscribed efforts made by Germany during the past twenty-five years 78 THE TRUE GERMANY for colonial expansion denounced by the enemies of Germany as dangerous and in- tolerable aggression, when one remembers that during these same years England throttled the independence of the South African republics, established a protec- torate over Egypt, partitioned Persia — to- gether with Russia — into " spheres of in- fluence," encouraged France to build up an immense colonial empire in Cochin China, Madagascar, Tunis, and Morocco, allowed Italy to conquer Tripoli, and helped Japan to tighten her grip upon China. As to the manner of the German conduct of war, here also a huge mass of extraordinary exag- gerations and a vast amount of anonymous aspersions have been indulged in. For the rest, these accusations find their explana- tion in the fact that Germany thus far has, in the main, been able to ward off the enemy from her own soil and to transfer the deadly work of destruction into the enemy's country. THE TRUE GERMANY 79 And yet, there is a residuum of truth in the assertion that Germany during the last generation has overreached herself. So far as this is the case, she bears her part of the guilt of having conjured up the pres- ent world calamity. In saying this, I am not thinking of Germany's consistent poMcy of formidable armament; for I fail to see how Germany could have afforded not to prepare for war, so long as she found herself surrounded by neighbors every one of them anxious to curb her rising power. What I am thinking of is a spirit of super- ciliousness which, as a very natural con- comitant of a century of extraordinary achievement, has developed, especially dur- ing the last twenty-five years, in the rul- ing classes of Germany. The manifestations of this spirit have been many and varied. In German do- mestic conditions, it has led to the growth of a capitalistic class as snobbish and over- bearing as it is resourceful and intelligent, 80 THE TRUE GERMANY counteracting by its uncompromising Her- renmoral the good effect of the wise and provident social legislation inaugurated by Bismarck. It has led to excesses of mili- tary rule and to assertions of autocratic power which have embittered German party politics and have driven large numbers of Liberal voters into the Socialist ranks, as the only party consistently and unswerv- ingly upholding Parliamentary rights. In Germany's foreign relations, it has led to a policy which was meant to be firm but had an appearance of arrogance and aggres- siveness and easily aroused suspicion. Sus- picion of Germany led to her isolation. And her isolation has finally brought on the war. It should, however, be said that these excesses of German vitality, so skillfully used by anti-German writers to discredit Germany's position in the present conflict, have not, as is asserted, been a serious danger to the rest of the world. Rather THE TRUE GERMANY 81 have they been an element of weakness to Germany herself. They are not essen- tially different from the spirit of haughty masterfulness that characterized English foreign policies and English insular self- sufficiency throughout the larger part of the nineteenth century; or from the French belief in the superiority of France in all matters of higher civilization; or even from the American assumption that the United States is the foremost standard-bearer of international justice and righteousness. They are an impressive instance of that tragic national self-overestimation which seems to be inseparable from periods of striking national ascendency, both quicken- ing and endangering this ascendency it- self. Let us hope that this tragic situation — the catastrophe of greatness, induced, partly at least, through the faults of its virtues — ^will have a solution worthy of the noble ideals that sustained Germany's up- 82 THE TRUE GERMANY ward flight. Let us hope that it will lead to the purging, purifying, and strengthen- ing of German greatness through this fear- ful trial. A letter received recently from a German judge, now fighting as lieutenant on the Russian frontier, points to such a hope. He writes: "The conduct of our men in this war is beyond all praise. What- ever may be the outcome of the war, the German people is bound to gain by it in inner strength. All classes have come to know what they are to each other, and we confidently trust that they will never for- get it. The party strife thus far waged with venom and hatred will give way to a generous and objective discussion of hon- estly conflicting opinions, and the ideal of constructive social work will be more fully grasped and more devotedly pursued than ever before. To us in the field, that will be the best reward." Whether these hopes of the future are ever fulfilled in their totality or not, our THE TRUE GERMANY 83 survey of the past and the present of Germany has, I trust, made it clear that the German people of to-day is not, as its enemies declare, a degenerate perversion of a former and nobler type. On the con- trary, with all its defects and excrescences of temper, it is a splendid outgrowth of a century's training in the national appli- cation of those ideals which distinguished the classic period of German literature and philosophy: unconditional submission to duty, unremitting endeavor for intellectual advance, assiduous cultivation of the things that give joy to the soul. A people that believes in these ideals cannot be lost. Ill GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION Ill GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION One of the saddest effects of the present war has been the mania of international aspersion and behttlement engendered by it. Germany, in particular, has been treated by her opponents to vilifications so fanatic and hysterical that they can arouse only astonishment and pity. According to these critics there is hardly a single national achievement of the highest rank to which Germany could justly lay claim. German statesmanship is brutal and inso- lent, German scholarship is heavy and me- chanical, German science is uninventive and unoriginal, German academic freedom 87 88 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION is a catch-word without substantial mean- ing, German literature is mediocre and formless, German sculpture and architec- ture are crude and barbaric, German paint- ing is a climisy copy of French models, the greatest German composer, Beethoven, was a Belgian, Nietzsche, the greatest German thinker of the last generation, was a Slav — these are a few strains from the voluminous chorus of detraction and misrepresentation which ignorance or malice or both during the last twelvemonth have hurled against a country which, until the beginning of the war, appeared to most of the world as an embodiment of high intellectual striving, spiritual uprightness, imaginative power, and civic virtue. I shall refrain from answering such at- tacks either by counter-accusations directed against what other nations have produced or by the glorification of individual Ger- man achievements. The former would be incompatible with the German respect for GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 89 national contributions to the common stock of the world's possessions from whatever country they may come. The latter would be unprofitable and unconvincing. For however good a case I might be able to make out for Goethe or Beethoven or Hegel or Helmholtz or Mommsen or Wag- ner or Bismarck, there would always be some obdurate persons left who would insist that the countries with which Ger- many is at war had an equal or even larger number of great names to offer indicative of their contributions to modern civiliza- tion, although I personally doubt whether such a trio as Goethe, Beethoven, and Wagner has been produced by any other country dtiring the last century and a half. The fact is, the greatest men in all de- partments of human activity are detached from national limitations. They stand by themselves. And although the number of such men in a given nation is undoubtedly an index of that nation's ability to con- 90 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION tribute to the progress of humanity, yet a nation's pecuhar contribution to civilization consists not so much in producing such men of transcending and universal genius as in accustoming masses of men to a definite, nationally determined habit of feeling, thinking, and acting. The supreme achievements of great individuals, — inven- tions, discoveries, systems of philosophy, works of art — are the common property of mankind. The invention of the printing press, the discovery of the law of gravita- tion, the theory of evolution, the Divine Comedy, Hamlet, Faust, although they sprang from representatives of different nationalities do not themselves represent something pre-eminently national; they are contributions by Germans, Englishmen, Italians, rather than by the German, Eng- lish, or Italian nation. What a nation, as nation, contributes to civilization, is its own collective type, the type of personality which it creates in the millions of people GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 91 belonging to it, the standards of life to which the masses of its constituents sub- scribe. The question, then, " What is Germany's contribution to civilization? " resolves itself into the further question, " What are the peculiar standards of feel- ing, thinking, and acting which the rank and file of Germans acknowledge as their own? " This is the question which I shall try to answer. II The most fundamental phenomenon bearing upon this question is a strange antithesis of qualities, or rather a combina- tion of two extremes in the German char- acter. On the one hand, the German more earnestly than most other occidentals insists upon the sacredness of personality in all matters pertaining to private life. The German dislikes regulation of his domestic existence by society conventions, he wishes to shape his daily conduct in the freedom 92 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION and naturalness of his family surroundings, he resents interference with his holiday- recreation by the church, he loves to follow his own intellectual bent, he prizes above everything every honest eflFort for individ- ual self -improvement. On the other hand, the German more willingly than all other Europeans submits to the authority of the State in all public matters. It is a matter of course with him that public safety and public order demand constant self-denial and self -discipline from the individual citi- zen. Grumblingly perhaps, but none the less readily, he complies with all sorts of irksome police regulations, because he understands their necessity. Cheerfully, often joyfully, he sacrifices part of his best years to service in arms for the State, and he bears the taxes necessary for army purposes without thought of evasion. It is a self-evident axiom for him that a public office is a public trust and it does not occur to him that it might be used for private GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 93 gain. Public welfare is indeed to him the highest law. It is easy to see the historical basis for this double quality of the modern German character. The beginning of modern Ger- many, the Protestant Reformation, was an outcry for freedom of the inner life. The soul struggles of one great individual, Luther, found a response in the soul of the nation and stirred it to mighty striv- ings for individual salvation through per- sonal communion with the divine. But the Reformation of the sixteenth century did not succeed in making Germany a nation of freemen. On the contrary, the civic disorders and civil wars aroused by it led in the long run to the destruction of all popular liberty and to the establishment of the most unrelenting princely absolutism. In the struggle against this absolutism of the seventeenth century, the innermost principle of the Reformation, the faith in spiritual freedom, came to life again. 94> GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION Pietism and Rationalism, Nature Worship and Sentimentalism and Storm and Stress Revolt worked together to raise the dowij- trodden individuals to a new conception of human dignity and ideal aspirations and thus ushered in that classic era of noblest personal refinement when Kant discovered in the inner voice the only sure revelation of the divine, when Schiller pointed to beauty as the great reconciler between the sensuous and the spiritual nature of man, and when Goethe found the hope of sal- vation in the restless striving for culture. But this age of highest personal refine- ment, of moral freedom, and aesthetic cul- ture had weakened Germany's power to resist attacks from without. The classic era of German literature and philosophy coincided with the breakdown of the old German Empire and the subjugation of the German people by Napoleon. From this catastrophe Germany was saved through the ideal of public obligation and solidarity GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 95 embodied in the Prussian monarchy. By summoning all her powers — physical, in- tellectual, spiritual — against the ruin threatened by foreign dominion, Germany, under Prussian leadership, once more rose to political greatness. A new and exalted conception of the State, — a State uniting in itself all ideal aspirations of the people, making national progress, culture, and achievement the supreme goal of individ- ual exertion — inspired the best Germans throughout the nineteenth century and finally led to the foundation of the new Empire and to the recent epoch of German prominence among the nations of Europe which, we hope, has not come to an end with the present world war. Here, then, we have four centuries of German history in which the desire for freedom and fullness of the inner life was the propelling force in all upward move- ments resting on popular initiative — in the Reformation, in the spread of religious 96 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION toleration after the Thirty Years' War, in the intellectual reconstruction from Leibniz to Lessing, in the classic era of Weimar and Jena; — while the political re- generation in the main came from above, appeared as a demand of public necessity, was forced upon the people by authority, and only gradually came to terms and finally to a close imion with the demands of individual liberty. Fullness of the inner life in every Ger- man, sense of public responsibility and solidarity in all Germans — ^these ideals of conduct seem to me the natural outcome of German history since Luther. They also seem to me the greatest contribution made by Germany to civilization. Let us con- sider both sides of this contribution some- what more closely. Ill Trust in the supreme value of the inner life is probably the deepest strain of Ger- GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 97 man character, and it is impossible to do justice to this trait in a brief analysis. Four of its manifestations, however, are, I believe, of particular significance: the German contempt for appearances, the German delight in small things, the Ger- man sense of the spiritual oneness of all things, and the German loyalty to prin- ciple, or disdain of intellectual com- promises.^ Deutsches Herz, verzage mcht, Tu was dein Gewissen spricht. Baue nicht auf brinten Schem, Lug und Trug ist dir zu fein. Schlecht gerat dir List und Kunst, Feinheit tvird dir eitel Dunst " — 1 In the discussion of the four manifestations of German " Innerlichkeit " which follows here, I have taken the liberty of repeating some things said in my essay on "Emerson and German Personality," German Ideals of To-day, pp. 97 fif. " German heart, do not despair. Do as conscience bids thee dare. Build not on deceiving show. Tricks and lies thou dost not know. Cunning prospers ill with thee. Vain to thee is subtlety. ' 98 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION these words of Ernst Moriz Arndt's stir a true German to his innermost depth. And although it must be admitted that in this German contempt for appearances there is often hidden a good deal of that supercilious self-righteousness which Goethe's Baccalaureus expresses so naively by saying Im Deutschen liigt man, wenn man hoflich ist^ yet a nation may be justly proud of such a fundamental dislike of superficialities in the great mass of its members. Foreign- ers have often willingly acknowledged this German trait; none* perhaps more under- standingly than Emerson in his characteri- zation of German literature. " What dis- tinguishes Goethe," he says, " for French and English readers is a property which he shares with his nation, — an habitual reference to interior truth. The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, ^ One lies in German if one is polite. GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 99 the fine, practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily: to what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity. There must be a man behind the book, a per- sonality which by birth and quality is pledged to the doctrines there set for-th. If he cannot rightly express himself to-day, the same things subsist and will open themselves to-morrow. There lies the bur- den on his mind, — the burden of truth to be declared, — more or less vmderstood; and it constitutes his business and calhng in the world to see those facts through, and to make them known. What signifies it that he trips and stammers; that his voice is harsh and hissing; that his methods or his hopes are inadequate? That message will find method and imagery; articulation and melody. Though he were dumb, it would speak." 100 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION I cannot conceal my belief that the enormous material expansion of modern Germany has reacted unfavorably upon this traditional and sterling aversion to sham in the German character. Indeed, not a little of recent German production in the drama, in the novel, in historical litera- tm-e, in sculpture, and painting, is con- spicuous for a certain shallow brilliancy and for cultivation of technique at the ex- pense of inner truthfulness. But I trust that one effect of this terrible war will be to sweep away aU this flimsy cleverness of the smart cliques and to bring out once more in its full power the deep fervor of the German people for the untarnished and imdisguised essence of things. Nothing better has Germany given to the world than this passion for truth. Closely allied with the German con- tempt for appearances is the often praised delight of the Germans in small things. He who knows how to enter lovingly into GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 101 what is outwardly inconspicuous and seem- ingly insignificant, he who is accustomed to look for fullness of the inner life even in the humblest and most circimiscribed spheres of society, to him new worlds will reveal themselves in regions where the hasty, dissatisfied glance discovers nothing but empty space. " Man upon this earth," says Jean Paul, "would be vanity and hoUowness, dust and ashes, vapor and a bubble, — were it not for the fact that he feels himself to be so. That it is possible for him to harbor such a feeling, this, by implying a comparison of himself with something higher in himself, this it is which makes him the irmnortal creature that he is." Here we have the root of that Ger- man love for still hfe, that German capacity for discovering the great in the little, which has given to our literature such lovable characters as Jean Paul's own Quintus Fixlein, Wilhelm Raabe's Hunger- pastor, Heinrich Seidel's Leberecht Hilhn- 102 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION chen^ or the sturdy company of Rosegger's Styrian Highlanders. And even to-day this tenderness for the humble and lowly makes Germany the land of all lands where in the midst of the bewildering tumult of industrial strife and social com- petition there are to be found hundreds upon hundreds of men firmly determined to resist the mad desire for what is called success, perfectly content to live in a cor- ner, unobserved but observing, at home with themselves, wedded to some task, some ideal which, however little it may have to do with the pretentious and noisy world about them, fills their soul and sheds dig- nity upon their lives. The danger of this state of mind is that it may lead to political quietism and to an over-readiness to accept the decisions of superior authority in public affairs. That this danger exists in Germany cannot be doubted, especially among petty officials, small tradespeople, artisans, in so far as GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 103 they are not affected by socialistic ideas, and also in wide circles of the moderately well-to-do. But even so, if we were asked the question, which country contributed more to civilization: a country where the great mass of the population are politically alive, conscious of their rights and ready to assert them, but without joy fulness in their daily tasks and chafing at the re- strictions of their private existence, or a country where the prevailing spirit of the people is not that of political restlessness, but of contented respectability and the con- sciousness of a man's inner worth, liow- ever modest the external surroundings of the individual may be,— the answer would not be difficult. Germany, in the main, still belongs to the latter type. The natural counterpart to a high ap- preciation of seemingly small and insignifi- cant things is a strongly developed sense for the spiritual unity of all things, a strongly developed consciousness of the 104 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION supremacy of the infinite whole of which all individual beings are only parts, a divining perception of the spirituality of the universe. Am I wrong in saying that this, too, is a pre-eminently German state of mind? How deeply German mysticism of the Middle Ages had drawn from this well of the Infinite, how strongly it had imbued even the popular mind with the idea of the absorption of the individual in the divine spirit, may be illustrated by an anecdote of the fourteenth century attached to the name of the great preacher and mystic thinker, John Tauler. It is said that at the time when Tauler was at the height of his fame and popularity in Strassburg, one day a simple layman came to him and frankly told him that in spite of all his sacred learning and his fine sermons he was further removed from the knowledge of God than many an unlettered man of the people. Upon the advice of the lay- man, — so the jstory runs— Tauler now with- GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 105 drew from the world, gave away his books, refrained from preaching, and devoted himself in solitude to prayerful contempla- tion. Not until two years later did he dare to ascend the pulpit again. But when he attempted to speak his words failed him. Under the scorn and derision of the congregation he was forced to leave the church, and was now considered by every- body a perverted fool. But in this very crisis he discovered the Infinite within himself, the very contempt of the world filled him with the assurance of his near- ness to God, the spirit came over him, his tongue loosened as of its own accord, and he suddenly found himself possessed by a power of speech that stirred and swayed the whole city as no preacher ever had swayed it before. This story of the fourteenth century may be called a symbolic and instinctive antici- pation of the well-defined philosophic be- lief in the spiritual oneness of the universe. 106 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION which was held by all the great German thinkers and poets of the classic and romantic period. Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Tieck, Jean Paul, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, however much they diflPered in tem- per and specific aims, all agreed in this, that the whole visible manifold world was to them the expression of the same infinite personality, the multiform embodiment of one universal mind. And they all saw the crowning glory and divinity of man in his capacity to feel this unity of the world, to hear the voice of the world spirit within his own self, to be assured of its eternity in spite of the constant change and decay of visible forms. Was Jcann der Mensch im Leben mehr gewinnen Als doss sich Gott-Natur ihm offenbare, Wie sie das Feste lasst xu Geist zerrirmen, Wie sie das Geisterzeugte fest hewdhre — * ' What more in life can mortal man accomplish Than that God-Nature be to him unfolded, How what is firm to spirit it dissolveth, How what is spirit-born it firmly keepeth. GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 107 these words of Goethe's express, I believe, the creed of the majority of Germans whether they are Cathohcs or Protestants or agnostics. It is a creed all the more firmly held and of all the more general application since it has sprung from within and is not a formula imposed from without. As the fourth, and last, evidence of the German trust in the supremacy of the inner life I have mentioned loyalty to principle and disdain of intellectual compromises. I am not unaware of the fact that some of the most serious defects of German life are connected with this national trait: the bitterness of political party strife; the acrimoniousness and lack of urbanity in scientific discussions; the lack of mutual understanding so frequently foimd be- tween father and son, between the older and the younger generation in general; the often ill-disguised enmity between pupil and teacher, between servant and master. 108 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION between the classes and the masses. The best men in GJermany to-day hope that the war will blot out these defects, that its great lesson of fraternal feeling will con- tinue to be a bridge between what used to be contending factions. May this hope be amply fulfilled. Meanwhile it should be said that this habitual insistence on prin- ciple, disdainful of compromises, regard- less of consequences, has been one of the most powerful propelling agencies in Ger- man intellectual advance. The eagerness and virility of German university life is largely due to this habit of the German professor of identifying himself unreserv- edly with the cause for which he stands. If the German professor has been himiorously defined as " a man who thinks otherwise," we should not forget that this controversial state of mind represents more than mere quarrelsomeness or the desire to have the last word. It also represents intellectual courage and disregard of one's own advan- GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 109 tages in matters of general import; and it has made German miiversity men in a con- spicuous manner leaders of public opinion and champions of freedom of thought. A country which has produced such sturdy controversialists as Luther, Lessing, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, may indeed be said to have fought a good fight for the spiritual cause of mankind. rv We have in the foregoing briefly con- sidered what may be called the sum of Germany's individual contributions to civil- ization. Let us now take a glance at what may be designated as her public contri- bution. The whole of German life acquired a new meaning and received a higher impetus at the beginning of the nineteenth century when, under the stress of national calamity, a new ideal of the State was born. This 110 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION ideal rests upon the fundamental convic- tion that the State is not only a protector of vested' rights, not only a guardian of public safety and of social conditions that make for individual happiness, but that it is pre-eminently a moral agency superior to society, and that its principal mission is to raise the individuals that make up society to a higher level of public con- sciousness and energy. No doubt there never was a conception of the State among any people from which this moral and disciplinary view was en- tirely absent. But not since Plato's time has this view anywhere been a national force as truly vital and all-embracing as it has come to be in modern Prussia and Germany. It has imbued the whole Ger- man people, as no other people is imbued, with the spirit of national service and na- tional achievement. The modern German mind instinctively refuses to accept any of the thousand and one private activities that GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 111 constitute the daily life of a people as some- thing really private and isolated. The farmer and the miner, the factory hand and the sailor, the business man and the preacher, the scholar and the artist, — they are all soldiers, soldiers for German great- ness and progress; and their spheres of activity, far apart as they seem from each other, are in reality on one and the same level, the level of the fight for making Germany in every way — politically, eco- nomically, intellectually, and morally — a self-supporting, self-relying, conspicuously healthy and conspicuously productive na- tional organism. To call such views of the State a dis- guise of despotism seems to me doing violence to the English language. For how can there be despotism in a State, where all classes acknowledge public serv- ice as the highest law. Besides, it is a well- known fact that, owing to the multiplicity of sovereign German states within the Em- 112 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION pire, each one with its own executive and legislature, and owing to the exceptionally- high develbpment of municipal self-govern- ment in Germany, there is more of habitual, organized popular scrutiny of govern- mental acts in Germany than in England, France, or Italy — quite apart from the Reichstag's being based upon universal manhood suffrage. But on the other hand, it is clear that a State concentrating all the energies of the people upon the one aim of national achievement, is boimd to make continuity of administrative policy the very cornerstone of its governmental system. Hence the importance attached in the German theory of the State to an executive standing above parties, an ex- ecutive body consisting of the most highly trained experts in their several depart- ments, representing the most enlightened and most objective opinion upon public conditions and needs, working now with this now with that combination of parlia- GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION US mentary groups, but not pledged to any one of them, and subject in its tenure of office only to the crown, and not to chang- ing parliamentary majorities. No unprejudiced observer of contempo- rary European affairs can faU to see the inspiring effect which this ideal of the State has had upon modern Germany, The type of modern Germany is not, as has been said by hostile critics, that of a huge, soulless machine, but of free energy con- trolled by a common aim. Germany dur- ing the last fifty years has excelled most other countries in eagerness and momentum of private initiative. The German school- boy is more eager to learn; the German university student is more firmly set upon independent research; the Grerman work- man has a higher level of average intelli- gence ; the German farmer is more scientific in the cultivation of his soil; the German manufacturer is more ready to introduce new methods of production; the German 114. GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION business man is more active in finding new outlets for his wares; the German city administrator is more keenly alive to civic improvements ; the German army and navy officer is more fully abreast with every new experiment or device of military tac- tics; the majority of all Germans are keyed up to a more intense, a more swiftly pul- sating manner of life, appear more alert and wide awake, more strongly bent upon self -improvement than is the case in most, if not all, the nations with which Germany, is now at war. All this intensity of private initiative, I believe, is largely due to the impelling force exerted upon the individual by the exalted views instinctively held by all Germans regarding the mission and the functions of the State. But the crowning test of the German conception of the State has been afforded by the present war. For a year and a half all Germany has been one vast beleaguered fortress. For a year and a half she has GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 115 been cut off from nearly the whole world. Her merchant marine has been swept off the ocean. Her export trade has been completely stopped and her import trade nearly so. For a year and a half she has had to rely upon her own resources, in men, in food, in equipment, in armament; while nearly all the great military powers of the earth have been together pressing against her and the greatest of the neutral nations — the republics of North and South America — ^have been furnishing her foes with vast quantities of war material, money, foodstuffs, and other supplies. In the face of all this, Germany has mobilized and brought into play her eco- nomic, military, intellectual, and moral forces in so extraordinary a manner that she has not only been able to hold the whole world at bay, but seems in a fair way of forcing her antagonists, so vastly superior in numbers and resources, to some kind of compromise which will assure a 116 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION legitimate outlet for her teeming popula- tion and her superior mental vitality. The economic and industrial adapta- tion of Germany to the needs of the war has indeed been something marvelous, by far exceeding even the boldest expec- tations. The most trenchant and far-reaching eco- nomic measures — such as the sequestration by the government of the whole wheat crop, the regulation of the bread consumption of the whole population by an elaborate card system, the limitation of meat con- sumption and even of the use of fats for cooking purposes to certain days of the week, the establishment of maximum prices for a variety of foodstuffs — all these meas- ures, affecting deeply the daily life and the fundamental needs of 68,000,000 peo- ple, have been carried out with an ease and a lack of friction as though they concerned only the superfluities and luxuries of a handful of privileged individuals. And GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 117 with equal readiness and unhesitating de- cision have the majority of German in- dustries placed themselves at the service of the one great national demand: the upkeep of the army. It is fanciful and false to see in the abundance of mimitions and all the other army equipments in Ger- many, even after a year of isolation from the rest of the world, a proof of Ger- many's having stored up before the war a fabulous amount of war material. This abundance is a proof of the extraordinary ability and willingness of the German people to adjust itself to the supreme need of the hour. Steam engine factories now turn out shells, pianoforte factories furnish cartridge cases, leather chair factories make knapsacks, boiler factories make field kitchens, hat factories make helmets, roller coaster firms build field hospitals, chemical concerns produce coffee- and beef-tea- tablets, and so forth ad infinitum. The dearth of raw materials has largely been 118 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION taken care of through the use of substi- tutes, of potato flour for wheat flour, of tin for aluminum, of steel for brass, of iron electric wires for copper electric wires, and so on; or through the production of arti- ficial materials, such as the production of rubber from oxydized linseed oil or the pro- duction of saltpeter — so necessary both for explosives and for fertilizers — from the nitrogen of the air. And in addition to all this, the German sense of economy, in- grained in the people, generation after generation, by a long tradition of do- mestic and public schooling, has in this war revealed itself more impressively and finely than ever before. There is not a household now in all Germany where re- trenchment in eating and drinking is not the unalterable law of daily conduct, where every waste in cooking and baking is not scrupulously avoided, where every crumb and every piece of refuse is not carefully preserved, and from where every par- GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 119 tide of food and clothing that can possibly be spared does not go out week after week to the men who are fighting in France, in Flanders, in Russia, in the Balkans, in the North Sea, or the Baltic. And while this constant stream of loving gifts is going out to the front, the men at the front send back to their families at home what they can spare of their pay. The fact that the German field postal service is handling up- wards of 15,000,000 private pieces of mail and packages a day, is sufficient illustra- tion of what results this systematic and considerate economy is bringing both to the men in the field and to their kindred at home. It also shows that the soul of Germany is in this fight, and that it is the people and not a militarist class that is waging it. And how has the money, needed for this gigantic war, been raised? Let me quote some figures. The total of the third Ger- man war loan, raised last October, was 120 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 12,000,000,000 mark. It was subscribed by 3,551,746 persons or institutions. Of these, 545 persons or institutions sub- scribed over 1,000,000 mark each; 849 per- sons or institutions subscribed from 1,000,000 to 500,000 mark each; 7,274 persons or in- stitutions subscribed from 500,000 to 100,- 000 mark each; 10,512 persons or institu- tions subscribed from 100,000 to 50,000 mark each — and so on, until at the end of the hst we reach the following figures: 881,923 persons (for here the institutions hardly count any longer) contributed from 1,000 to 600 mark each; 812,011 persons contributed between 500 and 300 mark each; and 686,289 persons contributed less than 200 mark each. In other words, the 3,551,746 contributors to this war loan rep- resent indeed the whole German people from top to bottom, all degrees of income, all strata of society. The German people gave their money joyfully, unreservedly, and trustingly; and there is every indication GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 121 that they will continue to do so when other loans are called for. The spirit of national service, of uncon- ditional surrender to the needs of the State, has enabled Germany to mobilize and to sustain her economic forces in this war as none of her antagonists has been able to do. It has also mobihzed her emotional and moral forces in a manner unheard of before. With the exception of a few So- cialist theorizers, not a German has lifted his voice during the last twelvemonth but to declare that this war is the decisive test of German nationality, of everything for which Germans have lived and died in the past. American observers have frequently expressed surprise that the intellectual and spiritual leaders of the Germany of to-day — scientists like Haeckel and Ostwald, phi- losophers like Eucken and Wundt, philolo- gists like Wilamowitz and Diels, historians like Eduard Meyer and Erich Marcks, economists like SchmoUer and Wagner, 122 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION theologians like Harnack and Troeltsch, musicians like Hximperdinck and Strauss, poets like Dehmel and Gerhart Hauptmann — are all of one mind in this crisis, and that their individual or collective utterances are much more impressive as expressions of conviction than as presentations of argu- ment. The reason, I think, is that these men, and with them the mass of the Gter- man people, feel that the German cause in this war needs no logical defense, that it is impossible to think that the most or- derly, industrious, law abiding, sober, and spiritually minded of nations should sud- denly have become insane, and from sheer madness of passion and lust of conquest have plunged into a war of aggression against the majority of the world's military powers, in other words into what to all out- ward appearances would seem certain self- destruction. They believe that Germany has been the victim of a world-wide coali- tion to rob her of the legitimate fruits of GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 123 her unremitting toil for national organiza- tion and to crush the spirit of national solidarity that has led to German ascend- ency in so many fields of higher activity. Whatever may be one's view as to the historical basis for this belief, there can be no doubt that it is this belief more than anything else which is giving Germany in this war such an extraordinary heroic strength. Some months ago, there took place at Namur, the Belgian fortress occupied by German troops since the autumn of 1914, a memorable open air performance. Goethe's Iphigenie was produced by Ger- man actors in a public square of that town, and the audience consisted of the rank and file of German regiments, with their offi- cers. It would be interesting to know what was going on in the minds of these German soldiers listening in the enemy's 124. GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION country and within sound of cannon thun- der to the most delicate and subUmated creation of German dramatic poetry, the triumphal song of the inner life and of purity of soul. Undoubtedly, there were many gradations of feeling, from sleepiness and ennui to aesthetic delight and patriotic rapture. But consciously or unconsciously, all these men must have felt with particular force that day what kind of a country and what kind of a State had sent them forth into war — a State, assiduously cultivating, every higher tendency, every refining in- fluence; maintaining in its schools and uni- versities the noble message of intellectual striving and moral freedom bequeathed by the classic epoch of German literature; a State, demanding much from every citizen, in taxes, in military service, in submission to all sorts of regulations and ordinances; but giving as much to every citizen, in un- impeachable cleanliness of administration, in the schooling of all classes for the true GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 125 democracy of public obligations, in secur- ing general respectability and comeliness of the outward conditions of life; a State, con- serving every one of its physical and in- tellectual resources, protecting the streams and the forests, safeguarding the workmen against the excesses of capitalism, and at the same time stimulating every activity, enter- prise, and invention, and inspiring every one of its members with a feeling of pride of belonging to it. Is it a wonder that such a State has rallied the whole of Germany around itself, and that the German people is determined to uphold this State, at any sacrifice and against any assault? The supreme contribution of a nation to civilization consists not in what it possesses but in what it is. The present war has shown more strikingly than ever before what Germany is — a country where highest development of individuality goes hand in hand with unquestioning devotion to the 126 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION common cause. She may be satisfied with her contribution to civilization. Note — Germany's enemies, during this war and indeed long before it, have made much of the dan- ger which German efficiency is supposed to be for other less well organized nations. Does this danger really exist? The history of all the leading nations of the past shows only too clearly that there is a real temptation for a people to use highly organized national power for aggressive purposes. During the last centuries, France used her higher national organization for wars of aggrandizement under Louis XIV and again under Napoleon. England used her higher national organization for wars of conquest on a colossal scale under Walpole and Pitt and Palmerston and Disraeli and Gladstone and Salisbury. Prussia used her higher national organization for wars of aggression under Fred- erick the Great and again under Bismarck. It can be said, I think, with good reason that Ger- many, since the foundation of the new empire in 1871, has been less aggressive and less territorially expansive than any one of the great European powers during the same period. Germany has acquired some colonies in Africa and in the Far East. But what are Kamerun and Dar-es-Salaam GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 127 and Kiao-chao compared with the British hold upon Egypt, the British subjugation of the South African republics, the Italian conquest of Tripoli, and the French colonial empire in Madagascar, Cochin China, Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco? Wherever Germany has made her influence felt on the globe she has stood for the principle of the open door. Wherever she has engaged in colonial enterprises she has been willing to make compro- mises with other nations and to accept their coop- eration, notably so in the Bagdad railway under- taking. Over and over again she has been blocked in these enterprises by the ill-will of her more grasping rivals, and it is hard to resist the con- clusion that the present war was entered upon by, her enemies with the hope of shutting her out once for all from the great stakes of colonial expansion. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the present war itself, with its enormous sacrifices in men and money, has led in Germany to a strong and widely spread popular propaganda for terri- torial compensations, both on the western and the eastern frontier, to be exacted at the end of the war as presumable " guarantees of durable peace." It is hard to understand how judicious people can believe that the forcible annexation of terri- tories with hostile and racially unassimilated popu- lations could possibly form guarantees of durable 128 GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION peace. It is hard to understand how people can fail to see that these annexed provinces would form a constant source of international irritation and domestic dissension, that the necessity of holding them by force would inevitably tend to degrade and debase the whole tenor of German public life. Fortunately, the Socialists are not alone in resisting this martial annexation propa- ganda. Men of such weight and influence as Bren- tano, Delbriick, Dernburg, Harnack, Mendels- sohn, SchmoUer, Siemens, have openly attacked it. The German government, I trust, wiU find some way at the coming peace conference of restoring the independence both of Poland and of Bel- gium while at the same time attaching these coun- tries to the economic interests of the new Austro- German federation. The annexation of Poland and Belgium would be at variance with the German conception of the State as a moral agency whose mission it is to raise every one of its members to a higher level of public consciousness and activity. The German people, it seems to me, has a rare opportunity before it to demonstrate to the world in a striking manner that its highly developed national organization is not a danger to other less well organized nations, that its remarkable display of national will power is backed up by an equally remarkable power of national self-restraint, and GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION 129 that Germany indeed took up arms for no other purpose than to uphold national achievements made possible by her superior sense of public obligation and solidarity. The only conquest which win add to Germany's greatness as a result of this war is the recognition by the rest of the world of the moral strength imparted to a whole people by an exalted view of the mission of the State. Of this conquest Germany is assured, no matter what the final decision of the battlefield may be. INDEX Aesthetic culture, 68-72. Appearances, contempt for, 97-100. Arndt, Ernst Moriz, 97. Authority, sense of, 12-16, 92. Average man, distrust of, 16-20. Belgium, 128. Berlin, tfniversity of, 52. Bismarck, 16, 17. Civilization, national con- tributions to, 90, 91. Compromises, disdain of, 107-109. Contrasts between German and American character, 4, 5, 12-14, 16-18, 22, 25- 27, 31, 32. Democracy, 19. Efficiency, 56. Emerson, 18, 98, 99. Expansion, colonial, 78. Fanaticism, 28-31. Fichte, 51, 52. Field postal service, 119. Form, lack of, 22-24. Frankfurt, University of, 68. Frederick William III., 49. German achievements, be- littlement of, 87, 88. German intellectuals on is- sue of present war, 121- 123; on annexation of Belgium and Poland, 128. German literature, study of in America, 32-40; classic epoch of, 44-46. Goethe, 6-8, 21, 24, 65-68, 94, 98, 106. Production of Goethe's Iphigenie at Namur 123. Gymnasia, Prussian, 53, 54. Hagedorn, Hermann, 15. Hauptmann, Gerhart, 11, 24. Hebbel, Friedrich, 24, 37, 65. Hegel, 54. Holderlin, 30. Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 51, 52. Individual initiative, 113, 114. Industries, adaptation of to war needs, 117. Infinite, sense of, 20-24, 104- 107. Inner life, trust in the, 96-109. Internationalism, 66. Kant, 48, 51, 94. Kleist, Heinrich von, 10, 15, 65. Lincoln, 16. Ludwig, Otto, 10, 37, 65. Moral discipline, 48-64. Music, love of, 70, 71. Nature, enjoyment of, 71, 72. Nietzsche 30, 31, 65. Paul, Jean, 101. 131 132 INDEX Personality, insistence on, 91, 92. Poland, 128. Prussian monarchy, 94, 95. Public responsibility, sense of, 110, 111. Quietism, political, 102. Reformation of the XVI. century, 93. Romanticists, 9, 10. Schiller, 9, 68, 69, 94. Self-surrender, passion for, 25-28. Shakespeare performances during the war, 70n. Slowness, 5-10. Small things, delight in, 100-103. Spinoza, 26. State, 13, 14, 48-64, 95, 109- 114, 124, 125. Stein, Freiherr von, 49-51. Striving, salvation through, 65-68. Superciliousness, 79-81. Tauler, John, 104, 105. Tieck, Ludwig, 71. Wagner, 11, 12, 65. War, the German people in the present, 57-64, 73-77, 82, 114-125. War loan, third German, 119, 120. Wars of aggression, 126n. William II., 67. Whitman, Walt, 18. HAZEN'S EUROPE SINCE 1816 By Charles Downee Hazbn, Professor in Smith College. With fourteeQ colored maps. (In American Historical Series edited by Prof. Haskins of Harvard.) xv+830 pp. B3.00 net. A clear and concise account of European history from Waterloo to such recent matters as the Dreyfus Trial, church disestablishment in France, and the various Eussian Dumas. The author has paid fully as much attention to economic and social as to military matters, and has simplified his narrative by considering one country at a time for considerable periods. Europe's relations to her Colonies and to the United States are also considered. There is a full bibliography of general works and of those bearing on each chapter and a full index. " A clear, comprehensive and impartial record of the bewilderinpr changes in Europe. . , . Illumioatinf^ly clear. . . . 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