Another curious German characteristic is the idea that, however truculent and menacing a writer's expressions may be, other people do him and his country a wicked injustice if they take him at his word. A good instance of this occurs in "Ein starkes Volk--Ein starkes Heer," by Kurd v. Strantz, published in 1914, shortly before the war. This writer quotes (or rather misquotes) with enthusiasm from Goethe:--
Du musst steigen und gewinnen, Du musst siegend triumphieren Oder deinend unterliegen, Amboss oder Hammer sein.[5]
Next he proceeds to quote from Felix Dahn:--
Seitdem ist's freudig Germanenrecht Mit dem Hammer Land zu erwerben. Wir sind von des Hammergottes Geschlecht, Und wollen sein Weltreich erben.[6]
Then, on the same page, only four lines lower down, he remarks plaintively:--"Foreign, and especially French, diplomacy is now industriously spreading the calumny that the German Government and the German people are given to rattling the sabre, and that we want to use for aggressive ends the increased armament which has been forced upon us." Is it mere hostile prejudice to hold that his own poetical selections give a certain colour to the "calumny"?
Most of the German attacks on England will be found, in the last analysis, to rest on this quaint habit of mind--the habit of assuming that, no matter how hostile and threatening Germany's words and deeds might be, we had no right to do her the injustice of supposing that she meant anything by them. We ought to have known that she was merely "dissembling her love."
Some readers may be disposed to regret that the great Germanic trinity, Nietzsche-Treitschke-Bernhardi, contribute so largely to my anthology. In the first place, it may be said, we are tired of their names; in the second place, Germans deny that they have had anything like the influence we attribute to them. There is a certain validity in the first of these objections. The constant recurrence of these three names is certainly a little tedious. They are like a three-headed Charles I--or a triplicate Geibel. I would gladly have omitted them had it been by any means possible. But one might as well compile an Old Testament anthology and omit Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. For, whatever the Germans may say, they are the major prophets of the new-German spirit. Treitschke is the prophet of tribalism, Nietzsche of ruthlessness, Bernhardi of ambition. It is absurd to say that they are not influential. Treitschke may have fallen somewhat out of fashion in the years immediately preceding the war, but his spirit had permeated the political thought of a whole generation. To the living influence of Nietzsche there is a host of witnesses. Gerhart Hauptmann, near the beginning of the war, averred that the cultured German soldier carried "Zarathustra," along with "Faust" and the Bible, in his knapsack. Nor was this an idle guess. Professor Deissmann, of Berlin, tells us that he enquired into the matter, and learned from book-sellers that the books most in demand among soldiers were the New Testament, "Faust" and "Zarathustra." O.A.H. Schmitz, in "Das wirkliche Deutschland," says of the German youth born in the 'seventies and early 'eighties that Nietzsche was "the lighthouse toward which their enthusiasm was directed." Prof. Wilhelm Bousset, of Göttingen, writes: "There is among us much unripe, unclear Nietzsche enthusiasm: many a German ass has thrown the lion's skin of the great man round his shoulders, and thinks he has thereby become a philosopher and prophet." Such testimonies could be multiplied indefinitely. There is no question that Nietzsche has been by far the greatest single force among the spiritual shapers of new-Germany. It may be true that he did not intend his "immoralism" to be read literally as a guide to conduct--it may be true that, in some of his most characteristic passages, he knew himself to be talking reckless and dangerous nonsense (that was his way of "living dangerously")--but can we reasonably suppose that soldiers in a "conquered" country, soldiers full of the belief that any opposition to Germanism was in itself a crime (see No. 344), paused to look beneath his surface eulogies of murder and lust for some esoteric meaning that may possibly underlie them? Can it be a mere coincidence that, in the first war which Germany has waged since Nietzsche entered upon his apostolate of ruthlessness, the German armies should have been animated, to all appearance, by a literal interpretation of his "beast of prey" ideal?