As for Bernhardi, whom some German writers profess never to have heard of until we began to talk about him in England, one can only say that he is an ex-member of the Great General Staff, and is probably a pretty faithful interpreter of the ideas prevalent in that not un-influential organization. Moreover, his "Germany and the Next War," which appeared in the spring of 1912, ran through five editions at 6 marks before that year was out, and was then republished in a cheap and somewhat condensed popular edition under the title of "Our Future." Reviewing this edition, _Die Post_ says that, in its original form, the book "was received with the most serious attention in political and especially in military circles," and adds that this cheaper reprint "_must_ now become a book for the people."
It is an error, however, to suppose that a writer's importance is to be measured solely by the influence he can be shown to have exerted. A book or pamphlet may have had little or no active influence, and may yet be a very illuminating symptom of the national frame of mind. Every book must be an effect before it can become a cause. That Treitschke, Nietzsche, and Bernhardi have been very efficient causes I see no reason to doubt; but at any rate they are immensely significant effects of the psychological conditions of which I am here gathering up some random evidences.
It was a more difficult question to decide whether the lucubrations of Herr Houston Stewart Chamberlain came within my scope. Yet I had little hesitation in including him. The fact that he is by birth an Englishman does not make him any the less a characteristic and recognized mouthpiece of the new-German spirit. It may be objected that he caricatures it, that he is more German than the Germans. That, in the first place, is impossible; in the second place, while we have many evidences that Germans, from the Kaiser downward, set a high value on Herr Chamberlain's writings, we hear little or nothing of any protest against them as misrepresentations of "Deutschtum." Shall I be suspected of a quaint perversity of national prejudice if I say that Herr Chamberlain's war pamphlets are distinctly better reading than the great majority of their kind? They are much more individual, much less stereotyped and monotonous. One finds in them an occasional idea that is not the common property of every man in the street. It is generally (not always) a more or less crazy idea, but one hails it as an oasis in the desert of blusterous commonplace.