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To me the whole case of Germany, the whole process, seems a fatalistic thing, destined, inevitable; cosmic forces above and beyond men’s comprehension flooding this northern land with their high tide, as once they flooded southern coasts; giving to this Teuton race its turn, its day, its hour of white heat and of bloom, its temperamental greatness, its strength and excess of vital sap, intellectual, procreative–all this grandeur to be hurled into tragedy by its own action.

The process goes back a long way behind Napoleon–who stayed it for a while–to years when we see the Germany of the Reformation, Poetry, Music, the grand Germany, blossoming in the very same moment that the Prussian poison was also germinating. About 1830, Heine perceived and wrote scornfully concerning the new and evil influence. This was a germination of state and family ambition combined, fermenting at last into lust for world dominion. It grows quite visible first in Frederick the Great. By him the Prussian state of mind and international ethics began to be formulated. By force and fraud he annexed weak peoples’ territory. He cut Poland’s body in three, blasphemously inviting Russia and Austria to partake with him of his Eucharist.

Theft has followed theft since Frederick’s. His cynical, strong spirit guided Prussia after Waterloo, guided first the predecessor of Bismarck and next Bismarck himself, with his stealing of Schleswig-Holstein, his dishonest mutilation of the telegram at Ems and the subsequent rape of Alsace and Lorraine in 1870. Very plain it is to see now, and very sad, why the small separate German states that had indeed produced their giants–their Luthers, Goethes, Beethovens–but had always suffered military defeat, had been the shambles of their conquerors for centuries, should after 1870 hail their new-created Emperor. Had he not led them united to the first glory and conquest they had ever known? Had he not got them back Alsace and Lorraine, which France had stolen from them two hundred years ago? So they handed their soul to the Hohenzollern. This marks the beginning of the end.

IX

We can hardly emphasize too much, or sufficiently underline, the moral effect of 1870 on the German nature, the influence it had on the German mind. It is essential to a clear understanding of the full Prussianizing process that now set in. On the German’s innate docility and credulity many have dwelt, but few on what 1870 did to this. Only with Bismarck’s quick, tremendous victory over France as the final explanation is the abject and servile faith that the Germans thenceforth put in Prussia rendered conceivable to reason. They blindly swallowed the sham that Bismarck gave them as universal suffrage. They swallowed extreme political and military restraint. They swallowed a rigid compulsion in schools, which led to the excess in child suicide I have mentioned. They swallowed a state of life where outside the indicated limits almost nothing was permitted and almost everything was forbidden.

But all this proscription is merely material and has been attended by great material welfare. Intellectual speculation was apparently unfettered; but he who dared philosophize about Liberty and the Divine right of Kings found it was not. Prussia put its uniform not only on German bodies but on their brains. Literature and music grew correspondingly sterilized. Drama, fiction, poetry and the comic papers became invaded by a new violence and a new, heavy obscenity. Impatience with the noble German classics was bred by Prussia. What wonder, since freedom was their essence?

Beethoven, after Napoleon made himself Emperor, tore off the dedication of his “Eroica” symphony to Napoleon. And Goethe had said: “Napoleon affords us an example of the danger of elevating oneself to the Absolute and sacrificing everything to the carrying out of an idea.” Goethe fell frankly out of date in Berlin. Symphony orchestras could no longer properly interpret Mozart and Beethoven. A strange blend of frivolity and bestiality began to pervade the whole realm of German art. Scientific eminence degenerated pari passu. No originator of the dimensions of Helmholtz was produced, but a herd of diligent and thorough workers-out of the ideas got from England–like the aniline dyes–or from France–like the Wassermann tests–and seldom credited to their sources. So poor grew the academic tone at Berlin that a Munich professor declined an offer of promotion thither.