Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View. Collier Price
as Luther freed Germany, and all Christendom indeed, from the tyranny of tradition, as Lessing freed us from the tyranny of the letter, from the second-hand and half-baked Hellenism of a Racine and a Corneille, so Frederick the Great freed his countrymen at last from the puerile slavery to French fashions and traditions, which had made them self- conscious at home and ridiculous abroad. He first made a Prussian proud to be a Prussian.
This last quarter of the eighteenth century in Germany saw the death of Lessing in 1781, the publication of Kant’s “Kritik der Reinen Vernunft” in the same year, and the death of the great Frederick in 1786. These names mark the physical and intellectual coming of age of Germany. Lessing died misunderstood and feared by the card-board literary leaders of his day, men who still wrote and thought with the geometrical instruments handed them from France; Kant attempted to push philosophical inquiry beyond the bounds of human experience, and Frederick left Prussia at last not ashamed to be Prussia. Napoleon was eighteen years old when Frederick died, and he, next to Bismarck, did more to bring about German unity than any other single force. Unsuccessful Charlemagne though he was, he without knowing it blazed the political path which led to the crowning of a German emperor in the palace at Versailles, less than a hundred years after the death of Frederick the Great. In 1797 at Montebello, Napoleon said: “If the Germanic System did not exist, it would be necessary to create it expressly for the convenience of France.”
II FREDERICK THE GREAT TO BISMARCK
Frederick the Great died in 1786, leaving Prussia the most formidable military power on the Continent. In financial, law, and educational matters he had made his influence felt for good. He distributed work-horses and seed to his impoverished nobles; he encouraged silk, cotton, and porcelain industries; he built the Finow, the Planesche, and Bromberger Canals; he placed a tariff on meat, except pork, the habitual food of the poor, and spirits and tobacco and coffee were added to the salt monopoly; he codified the laws, which we shall mention later; he aided the common schools, and in his day were built the opera-house, library, and university in Berlin, and the new palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam.
Almost exactly one hundred years after the death of Frederick the Great, there ended practically, at the death of the Emperor William I, in 1888, the political career of the man, who with his personally manufactured cement of blood and iron, bound Germany together into a nation. The middle of the seventeenth, the middle of the eighteenth, and the middle of the nineteenth centuries, with the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck as the central figures, mark the features of the historical landscape of Germany as with mile-stones.
How difficult was the task to bring at last an emperor of all Germany to his crowning at Versailles, January 18, 1871, and how mighty the artificer who accomplished the work, may be learned from a glance at the political, geographical, and patriotic incoherence of the land that is now the German Empire.
Germany had no definite national policy from the death of Frederick the Great till the reign of Bismarck began in 1862. Hazy discussions of a confederation of princes, of a Prussian empire, of lines of demarcation, of acquisitions of German territory, were the phantoms of a policy, and even these were due to the pressure of Prussia.
The general political torpidity is surprisingly displayed, when one remembers that Goethe (1749–1832), who lived through the French Revolution, who was thirty-seven years old when Frederick the Great died, and who lived through the whole flaming life of Napoleon, was scarcely more stirred by the political features of the time than though he had lived in Seringapatam. He was a superlatively great man, but he was as parochial in his politics as he was amateurish in his science, as he was a mixture of the coxcomb and the boor, in his love affairs. Lessing, who died in 1781, Klopstock, who died in 1803, Schiller, who died in 1805, Kant, who died in 1804, Hegel, who died in 1831, Fichte, who died in 1814, Wolf, who died in 1824, “Jean Paul” Friedrich Richter, who died in 1825, Voss, who died in 1826, Schelling, who died in 1854, the two Schlegels, August Wilhelm and Frederick, who died in 1845 and in 1829, Jacob Grimm, who died in 1863, Herder, Wieland, Kotzebue, what a list of names! What a blossoming of literary activity! But no one of them, these the leaders of thought in Germany, at the time when the world was approaching the birthday of democracy through pain and blood, no one of these was especially interested in politics.
There was theoretical writing about freedom. Heine mocked at his countrymen and at the world in general, and deified Napoleon, from his French mattress, on which he died, in 1856, only fifty-seven years old. Fichte ended a course of lectures on Duty, with the words: “This course of lectures is suspended till the end of the campaign. We shall resume if our country become free, or we shall have died to regain our liberty.” But Fichte neither resumed nor died! Herder criticised his countrymen for their slavish following of French forms and models in their literature, as in their art and social life. And well he might thus criticise, when one remembers how cramped was the literary vision even of such men as Voltaire and Heine. We have already mentioned some of Voltaire’s literary judgments in the preceding chapter, and Heine ventured to compare Racine to Euripides! No wonder that Germany needed schooling in taste, if such were the opinions of her advisers. Such literary canons as these could only be accepted by minds long inured to provincial, literary, and social slavery.
Just as every little princeling of those days in Germany took Louis XIV for his model, so every literary fledgling looked upon Voltaire as a god, and modelled his style upon the stiff and pompous verses of the French literary men of that time.
Not even to-day has Germany escaped from this bondage. In Baden three words out of ten that you hear are French, and the German wherever he lives in Germany still invites you to Mittagessen at eight P. M. because he has no word in his own language for diner, and must still say anständiger or gebildeter Mensch for gentleman. To make the German even a German in speech and ideals and in independence has been a colossal task. One wonders, as one pokes about in odd corners of Germany even now, whether Herder’s caustic contempt, and Bismarck’s cavalry boots, have made every German proud to be a German, as now he surely ought to be. The tribal feeling still exists there.
Fichte’s lectures on Nationality were suppressed and Fichte himself looked upon askance. The Schlegels spent a lifetime in giving Germany a translation of Shakespeare. Hegel wrote the last words of his philosophy to the sound of the guns at the battle of Jena. Goethe writes a paragraph about his meeting with Napoleon. Metternich, born three years before the American Revolution, and who died a year before the battle of Bull Run, declared: “The cause of all the trouble is the attempt of a small faction to introduce the sovereignty of the people under the guise of a representative system.”
If this was the attitude of the intellectual nobility of the time, what are we to suppose that Messrs. Muller and Schultze and Fischer and Kruger, the small shop-keepers and others of their ilk, and their friends thought? Even forty years later Friedrich Hebbel, in 1844, paid a visit to the Industrial Exposition in Paris. He writes in his diary: “Alle diese Dinge sind mir nicht allein gleichgültig; sic sind mir widerwärtig.” Germany had not awakened even then to any wide popular interest in the world that was doing things. As Voltaire phrased it, France ruled the land, England the sea, and Germany the clouds, even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. This is the more worth noting, as giving a peg upon which to hang Germany’s astounding progress since that time. Even as late as Bismarck’s day he complained of the German: “It is as a Prussian, a Hanoverian, a Würtemberger, a Bavarian, or a Hessian, rather than as a German, that he is disposed to give unequivocal proof of patriotism.” The present ambitious German Emperor said, in 1899, at Hamburg: “The sluggishness shown by the German people in interesting themselves in the great questions moving the world, and in arriving at a political understanding of those questions, has caused me deep anxiety.” What kind of material had the nation-makers to work with! What a long, disappointing task it must have been to light these people into a blaze of patriotism! In those days America, though the population of the American colonies was only eleven hundred and sixty thousand in 1750, talked, wrote, and fought politics. The outstanding personalities of the time were patriots, soldiers, politicians, not a dreamer among