Germany is a land without power, without poise, with its prosperity shattered, its authorities and its external aims annihilated, its intellect and its ethics at a low ebb. In such a condition, if we wish to understand the only kind of life-faculty which can save us from intellectual and spiritual death, give us force and inspiration to shape for ourselves and for the world the new social order of freedom, spirituality[17] and justice, and in the true sense to "save" us, we must look ourselves and the German character in the face—this unknown, problematic character, which for a century in contradiction to its own inmost being, has been flattering and lulling itself with hackneyed and complacent phrases and unproved judgments. For we can undertake nothing and claim nothing which has not its prototype in our own soul and is not founded in our own past, our own traditions.

There is no people, not even the French, which in recent decades has administered to itself and digested so much praise as we have. We never discussed ourselves but at once the stereotyped toasts began. The more German culture declined, the more disgusting became our babble about it.

The persons through whose mouths we let ourselves be lauded were school-teachers without comparative knowledge, professional banquet-orators, nationalists who praised in the service of some interested hatred, and scholars with appointments who were simply commissioned to demonstrate that the Hohenzollern system was the last word of creation. No one dreamed of distinguishing this glorification of the German people from the apotheosis of the dynasties—to which we had vowed our heart's blood—and the profound insincerity of these declamations was shown by the indifference with which the dynasties, the main feature in the programme, were afterwards got rid of, and the affair of the heart's blood shelved.

We know the stereotyped phrases. German faith, French knavery. The world is to find healing in the German soul. We are the heroes—the others are hucksters.[18] To be German means to do a thing for its own sake. We are a "race of thinkers and poets." We have Culture, the others merely Civilization.[19] We alone are free—the others are merely undisciplined (or, as the case may be, enslaved). All this we owe to the favour of God and our education under the (here fill in Prussian, Bavarian or Saxon) reigning House, which all the world envies us. Clearly therefore we are destined for world-dominion; we have only to fall-to.

In one of these phrases, about doing things for their own sake,[20] there is truth. All the more was it for us in particular a vice and a sign of degradation to let ourselves be dazzled by the shadowless transparency-picture of glorification that was offered to us. There were interests concealed in the game, and much lack of moral fibre, all of which we passed over in silence; it was out of place in our festal oratory.

It would be an equal or even a greater vice, only reversed, if we were now to despair of ourselves. Moderation was what we needed then; what we need now is vigorous and conscious self-possession. To-day it is no easy and attractive business to bring our strong qualities to the surface; it implies an amount of conviction which it is hard to attain, and self-depreciation means a pitiful faint-heartedness. But all sham goods offered by babblers, by selfish interests, prophets of hate and commercial travellers must go overboard.

We have never been a "race of thinkers and poets," any more than the Jews were a race of prophets, the French and Dutch a race of painters, or KÖnigsberg a city of Pure Reason.[21] The old German upper classes have, in three well-defined epochs, had force enough to throw up individuals of mighty endowments for music, poetry and philosophy; the former lower-classes, whose blood runs in nine-tenths of our present population, have scarcely contributed anything to these glories. They have in recent years shown themselves thoroughly industrious, plastic, apt for discipline, order-loving, intelligent, practical, honourable, trustworthy, warm-hearted, prudent and helpful, and adapted beyond all expectation to the mechanization of life and industry; of their power to produce talent we know little, except perhaps in the domain of research and technique, which are less a test of creative energy than of applied knowledge and methodical assiduity.

The important question as to what relations exist between the number, quality and greatness of individual endowments and genius on the one side, and the character of a people on the other, is still unexplored and very obscure, although we possess a science which calls itself by the quite unjustified name of national psychology.

While on one side we have rarely made any serious study of national characteristics, but have confused them with achievements of culture and habits of life that mostly proceeded from a thin upper stratum alone, on the other we have as a rule tacitly set down individual endowment (with a strong emphasis on our own) as illustrations of national character. In this respect, too, we showed that laxity in proving what we wanted to prove which abounds everywhere from the point where calculation with things weighable and measurable leaves off, and judgment begins. We think it an established fact—in accordance with just this arbitrary test of genius—that genius belongs par excellence to the so-called blonde blue-eyed races of the earth. The fact that among the score or two of geniuses of all ages who have been determining forces in the world it is hardly possible to find a single example of this blue-blonde race, but they can be proved to have been almost all dark, did not affect the question. On the other hand the English, whose influence on culture has been surpassed by none, had their genius-forming power, in which they are actually deficient, seriously over-estimated. It was the reverse with the Jews. The fact that in spite of their small numbers they have produced more of world-moving genius than all other nations put together, and that from them has proceeded the whole transcendental ethics of the Western world, has not prevented their being pronounced wholly incapable of creative endowment.

We shall put aside all this rubbish and for the present decline to go into theoretic questions. Great individual endowments are related to national character—to the character of the mind, not that of the will, which must be considered apart—as the blossom to the plant or the crystal to the mother-solution; to determine the one from the other needs something more than a mechanical generalization. There is no such thing as a "race of thinkers and poets." This, however, we can say: that a people which begets great musicians, poets and philosophers is one which devotes itself to moods and to visions, while another, as for instance the Latin group, which creates forms and standards, is one that at the cost of mood and vision, incarnates its sense of will.

Devotion, receptivity, the feeling for Nature, comprehension, the passion for truth, meditative depth, spiritual love, are the fairest gifts that can be granted to any people, and to us they have been granted. But they exclude other gifts, which stand to-day in high repute, and which we affect in vain. They exclude the capacity for shaping forms and standards, the aptitude for rule, if not even for self-government; in any case the qualities which go to the creation of nationalities and civilizations.

It is no mere accident that in not one of the hundredfold provinces of life, from art to military organization, from State-craft to jointstock-companies, from saintliness to table-utensils, have we Germans discovered a single essential and enduring form. And again, there is scarcely one of these forms which we have not filled with a richer and more living content than those who first discovered it.

For whoever bears the All within himself can be satisfied with no form; he finds in himself at once vision and reality, thesis and antithesis. He seeks for a synthesis, but all form is one-sided. He conceives, chooses, comprehends, fulfils, breaks in pieces and throws away. He remains a unity in constant change, like the year as it proceeds day by day, hour by hour, and no two of them alike. He does not force things—out of respect for creation.

But he who makes forms must use force. He makes himself the standard and comprehends himself only. Everything else, everything that is extra-normal, unconformable, unintelligible and not understood remains for him something alien, trivial, inferior, or negligible. The maker of forms can rule, even by compulsion, without being a tyrant, for he is convinced of the value of what he brings and knows no doubts. He is ruthless, yet only up to a certain limit, which is determined by his sense of the inferiority of the other. The man who rejects forms, however, cannot rule; the very penetration into the domain of another seems to him a wrong to his own, the basis of which is recognition and allowance. If he is forced to penetrate, he loses all balance, for in wrong-doing he understands no gradations. Similarly he is incapable of civilizing, for he cannot take forms seriously; he violates them himself—how can he impose them upon others? In his inmost soul he is naÏve, for creation is seething in him; but in execution he is conscious, critical, eclectic and methodical, in order that he may be completely master of the one-sided element into which he has forced himself. The man of forms, however, is, in his soul, rigid and conscious, but in action naÏve, because he does not know the meaning of doubt.

Forms grow up like natural products in the course of centuries. They assume the existence of uniformity in individuals, fathers reproduced in sons with scarcely a variation. Egypt, Rome, and that modern land of antiquity, France, are examples. For generations France has been content with three architectural styles, which are really one and the same style. The changes in the language are hardly perceptible. The principal domestic utensils are almost the same as they were a hundred years ago, fashion is merely a vibration. Foreign living languages are little studied, their spirit is not understood, the pronunciation remains French. Foreign countries are looked on as a kind of menagerie; everything is measured by the native standard. Every one is a judge of everything, for he holds fast to the norm. Within the norm the French are keenly sensitive, their feeling for relations is very sure; the slightest deviation is observed. To doubt the validity of the norm is out of question; one might as well criticize the sun and moon as the style of Louis Quatorze.

The final judgment of the British in the affairs of life is "this is English," "that is not English." Foreign lands are a subject of geographical and ethnological study. The whole mighty will of a nation is here concentrated in the form of civilizing political energy. Every private inclination is a fad, and even fads have their fixed forms. An offence against table-manners is banned like an attack on the Church. Nature is mastered with consideration and intelligence, whether the problem is the breeding of sheep or the ruling of India.

The assurance, self-command and art of ruling which spring from forms are lacking in Germany. Our strongest spirits are formless; they are eclectic or titanic, whether they despise forms or choose forms or burst forms. We have three homes between which we hover—Germany, the earth, and heaven. We comprehend and honour everything—every land, every man, every art and every language; and we are fertilized by what is foreign; on the lower level we enjoy it and imitate it, on the higher it spurs us to creation. We are docile, and do not hate what rules and determines us, only what contracts us and makes us one-sided; an autocratic government may be tolerated, even venerated, if it knows how to be national and popular and does not interfere with our elbow-room.

We have already touched on the volitional character[22] of the German people, a character which has been gravely altered by the subsidence of the ancient upper stratum of society, and by long privations and miseries. The Germans of Tacitus were a freedom-loving and turbulent people; of this not a trace is left. Any one who did not recognize under the autocracy that we care little for self-determination and self-responsibility may do so under the revolution, which merely arises out of an alteration in external conditions. We are not even yet a nation, but an association of interests and oppositions; a German Irredenta, as it has been and unfortunately will be shown, is an impossible conception. And since we are not a nation and represent no national idea, but only an association of households, it follows that our influence abroad can only be commercial, and not civilizing or propagandist.

From this side we are able to understand the German history of the past two centuries. Prussia, an extra-German Power, grown up in colonized territory, organized itself into a bureaucratic, feudal and military State. It succeeded in mastering half Germany and in loosely linking up the remainder. By rigid organization, by its federated Princes and by the strongest army in the world, it supplied the place of the national character and will which were wanting. Mechanism was pressed into the service, and bore the colossus into a period of blooming prosperity. The system looked like a nation; in reality it was an autocratic association of economic interests bristling with arms. It was incapable of developing national forces and ideas, not even in relation to its settlers in other lands; it was confined to commercial competition; weak alliances were relied on to secure the position externally; self-government was not granted, because the military organization was the pivot of the whole system; the drill-sergeant tone at home had its counterpart in the brusqueness of our foreign policy; enmities grew and organized themselves, and the catastrophe came.

For character of will we had substituted discipline. But discipline is not nationality; it is an external instrument, and when it breaks it leaves—nothing. Now since the Prussian system which called itself by the mediÆval title of the German Empire was, in spite of the professors, no popular, national fabric, but a dynastic, military and compulsory association, with a constitutional faÇade, the interested nationalist elements took on the repulsive and dishonourable forms that we all know. The most deeply interested parties, cool and conscious of their strength, the Prussian representatives of the military and official nobility, avoided all declamation and only interfered when their interests were endangered. The greater industrialists sold themselves. A higher stratum of the middle-classes composed of certain circles of higher teachers and subaltern officials took the business seriously, and in order to escape from their drab existence created that atmosphere of hatred of Socialists, telegrams of homage, and megalomania, which made us intellectually and morally impossible before the world. Instead of the Germany of thought and spirit one saw suddenly a brutal, stupid community of interested persons, greedy for power, who gave themselves out as that Germany whose very opposite they were; who, unable to point to any achievements, any thought of their own, prided themselves on an imaginary race-unity which their very appearance contradicted; who had no ideas beyond rancour; the slaverings of league-oratory and subordination, and who with these properties, which they were pleased to call Kultur, undertook to bring blessing to the world.

It was no wonder; for our slavonicized association of interests, bent on subordination and on gain, does not produce ideas; its possessions were power, mechanism and money; whoever was impressed by these things believed they must impress others too, and so the conclusion was arrived at that all the great spirits of the past had lived only to make this triple combination supreme. Wagner had formed the bridge between the old Germany and the new—armoured cruisers and giant guns appeared as a free development from Kant and Hegel, and the word Kultur, a word which Germany ought to prohibit by law for thirty years to come, masked the confusion of thought.

To discover now, after our downfall, that Germany ought never to have carried on a continental let alone a world policy, would be a pitiful example of esprit d'escalier. It is true that it was our right, and even our duty, by our intellect, our ethics and our greatness, to carry it on; but the weakness of our character on the side of Will was the cause of its failure. Bismarck, a born realist in politics, grown up in the Prussian tradition, trained in the diplomatic tradition by Gortschakov, made the calamitous choice. He made us safe for certain decades; but it was only an intuitive policy in the manner of Stein[23] that could have saved us for centuries.

In the midst of self-administered and self-determining nations the German people, from lack of self-consciousness, indolence of will and innate servility remained under a patriarchal system of government, a minor under tutelage of divinely-appointed dynasties and ruling classes. In the childish movement of the educated bourgeoisie of 1848 Bismarck saw only the helpless and Utopian, but not the symbolic side, which Marx might have shown him. His practical spirit judged with a smile that a handful of peasantry and grenadiers would suffice to bring to reason this dynastically-minded people. It was only too true; although the bulk of this people had not for thirty years been formed by the peasant class, and although he himself had learned how to make use of the power of the modern industrial State in peasant disguise. And so he refused to allow his countrymen to come of age; broke, with the superiority of genius, and with the weapons of success and authority, the incompetent forces that resisted him; created, by the magical mechanism of his Constitution, the German Empire as a mere continuation of the Prussian bureaucratic State reinforced, by the self-glorifying dynasties, with the whole volume of the still existing and justly appreciated habit of obedience; and annihilated for a generation every aspiration for freedom by branding it with the stain of moral and social depravity. Our political worthlessness and immaturity came to its climax in the race of office-climbers in 1880, which in 1900 gave place to the battle-fleet patriotism of the great capitalists.

A self-administered and a self-determining nation—such as the nations of the world, except ourselves, Austria and Russia, were, on the whole, at the turn of the century—would have been able to carry on a sound and steadfast policy in economics and public affairs, and to enjoy the confidence of the world, as little begrudged as America. On the other hand, a dangerous warship, armed upon an unexampled scale, given to backward movements and commanded by an uncontrollable sovran dilettante, could only expect sooner or later to be expelled from the harbour of the nations. History is apt to overdo it, especially when corruption has gone on too long; with every year that passed the doom became more certain; instead of being expelled, we were annihilated.

That four years of hunger, a lost war and a military revolt at last set us free, does not betoken any change of character; and when to-day a servile and facile Press lauds our wretched and idealess Constitution as the finest in the world, that gives us no assurance of its power to endure. Understanding is no substitute for character, but it is at any rate a step towards the goal; and if it is once understood that other measures are possible, and if, out of this period, certain writings and thoughts shall survive—and survive they will—then at any rate we may still be weak, but we shall be no longer blind.

It might be possible at the outset of our journey towards strength of will that we should grope our way slowly—very slowly—back to the old problems of power. It does not matter if we do. Before we get there, the world will be changed, and will be pregnant with new thoughts. Let us fulfil the duties for which Germany was made what it is. Let us go in quest of the idea and the faculty that are laid upon us; let us do this in order to live, to recover our health, to shape ourselves anew, to remain a People, to become a Nation, to create a future and to serve the world.