What artist ever bothered much before about the political events of the day—He lived only in his art, and only in it did he walk through life; but ominous, difficult times have gripped the human being with an iron fist, and the pain is pressing sounds from him that were foreign to him before.
—E. T. A. Hoffmann, Highly Absent-Minded Thoughts
Objectivity is freedom, is cheerfulness. We breathe a sigh of relief, we may be “scientific” again, as in the beginning of our reflections. We ask: What is politics?
One will answer: “Politics is the science of the state.” Or perhaps, as a scholar formulates it with seemingly final exactness: “Politics is practical behavior, including the rules derived from it, which, whether it be on the part of government, particular groups of people, or even individuals, sets as its goal the maintenance or the reformation of the existing state.” But today these are outdated definitions. The true definition of the concept, “politics,” is only possible with the help of its opposite concept; it says: “Politics is the opposite of aestheticism.” Or: “Politics is salvation from aestheticism.” Or, stated quite strictly: “To be a politician is the only possible way of not being an aesthete.” We claim and insist that only this offers a living definition of the concept of politics that fits present conditions, although it does not escape us that we are here defining an unknown with an unknown—that no definition exists as long as we have not defined this second X, the concept of aestheticism, as well. We are ready to do this! What is aestheticism? What is an aesthete?
In answering this question, it is customary to emphasize altogether too much nonessential-secondary material, while neglecting the true-essential characteristics, and above all, circumscribing the concept much too narrowly. Aestheticism is not, for example, the beautiful spirit, the beautiful soul, the beautiful beard; it is absolutely not a criterion of aestheticism for one to insist upon “dying in beauty,” or always having figures of speech such as “wine leaves in the hair” on one’s tongue. On the contrary, it is quite possible to perceive this wish to be unbearably affected and this manner of speaking rather trite, and still to be an aesthete of the first water. Neither does that lack of warm-heartedness and humanity, that clever and intellectual mixture of triviality and subtlety, or of brutality and refinement, which makes up the essence of many a modern, or no longer so modern, work of art, suffice to exhaust and to fulfill the concept of aestheticism. Aestheticism as the opposite of the political nature—for only within this antithesis does the concept become current and alive today! Aestheticism is rather . . . But let us allow examples to speak!
Schiller, to single out the first good example that comes to mind, is an aesthete when in The Bride of Messina he praises peace through the mouth of a chorus leader in the most ingratiating of words, compares it to a lovely boy resting by a quiet stream, surrounded by frisky lambs, luring sweet tones from his flute—but who uses—or misuses—his very next breath to speak of war with the same poetic dedication, declaring that it, too, has its honor, calling it “the mover of human fate,” and then breaking out into that song praising human butchery—precisely those falsely moral verses that so angered Romain Rolland when I quoted them. Schiller, let us repeat, is an aesthete here, because he is not a politician here—not one at all, neither a good one nor a bad one. He could have glorified war and called the pacifists cowards and snivelers: then he would have been a bad, a false politician, an enemy of humanity to be combatted. He could have been inclined to celebrate eternal freedom and to brand war as a return to subhuman conditions: then he would have acted as a good, enlightened, and praiseworthy politician. But to immerse himself deeply into the essence of peace and war with the same dilettantish empathy, love, and free contemplation, precisely this was aestheticism; it was the unprincipledness of the—I will say it: of the parasite.
Unlike Schiller, whose aestheticism sometimes seems to be called in question by his morality, Flaubert is universally known to be a pronounced aesthete; but it would be superficial to believe that he is so because of his chiseled artistic prose, which is weighed out with whimsical care. It is no more than a symptom, and scarcely that; for a good style is just as much the sign of the true, praiseworthy, and humanitarian politician. No, something else stamps Flaubert as an aesthete. It is, for example, the way he treats the two characters, the druggist and the priest, in Madame Bovary, as they sit together by Emma’s corpse and as their philosophies clash—the famous worldview of M. Homais and that of the country cleric. The poor sinner, Emma, has just died—these are austere, terrible, solemn pages. Well, as I said, philosophies clash against one another. “ ‘Since God always knows what we need, what is prayer for?’—‘Are you not a Christian, then?’—‘I admire Christianity; it was the first to abolish slavery . . .’—‘We are not talking about that. The Bible . . .’—‘I do not care about your Bible! The Jesuits . . .’ ” At times they are interrupted by the entry of Charles Bovary, who is drawn to the corpse. He is the one whose wife has died, and it seems as if this somehow elevates him above the arguments of the two worthies. At any rate, he makes a very serious and respectable impression each time he enters. “As soon as Charles had left the room, the two began their discussions anew. ‘Read Voltaire!’ said the one. ‘Read Holbach! The Encyclopedists!’—‘Read The Letters of Some Portuguese Jews,’ said the other, ‘read the Foundations of Christianity by Nicolas!’—They got excited, their faces turned red, and they argued simultaneously with each other. Bournisien was irritated by the apothecary’s presumption, Homais astonished by the priest’s narrowness. They were both almost at the point of insulting one another . . .” Finally they go to sleep. “Thus they sat opposite one another, with their bellies sticking out, with their bloated faces full of wrinkles in their brows. After all their conflict, the same human weakness united them. They moved just as little as the corpse beside them, which seemed to be sleeping. Charles came. He did not waken the two. He came for the last time. To take leave of her.” I will not add anything to this. It is aestheticism; for here politics comes off badly in the most scandalous way.
Schopenhauer constantly betrays himself as an aesthete; in the following two places he does not do so at all with particular impetuosity, but perhaps nevertheless with paradigmatic terseness. He speaks of fame, of accomplishments through which one attains fame: they fall, he says, into actions and works, and each of these two paths to fame has its advantages and disadvantages.
The main difference is that actions are transitory while works remain. The most noble action still has only a temporary effect; the work of genius on the other hand lives and has beneficial and uplifting effect through all times. Only the memory of the actions remains, which becomes weaker and weaker, more distorted and indifferent, and must even gradually disappear if history does not take it up and transmit it in a petrified state to posterity. Works, on the other hand, are themselves immortal and can, especially the written ones, live through all times.
In a footnote, Schopenhauer remarks that it is a poor compliment when, as is the fashion today, one thinks one is honoring works by calling them actions. For works are on an essentially higher level because they have arisen from intelligence, from pure, innocent intelligence, rising like a fragrance from this world of evil. This is the first reference. In another place, he says:
Nature does not do as bad poets do, who, when they portray scoundrels or fools, do it so clumsily, so purposefully, that one sees, as it were, the poet standing behind each one, continually disavowing the character’s attitude and speech, and calling out with a warning voice: “This is a rascal, this is a fool; do not pay any attention to what he says.” Nature, on the other hand, does as Shakespeare and Goethe do, in whose works every character, even if he is the devil himself, while he is on stage and speaking, is right; we are drawn to his side and are forced to sympathize with him because he is grasped so objectively: for he is developed from an inner principle, just as the works of nature are, and his speech and actions therefore appear natural and necessary.
It seems to me that one can go no farther in politically hostile aestheticism than to declare nature herself to be aesthetic.
Even Tolstoy is an aesthete and not a politician when at the end of his story “Lucerne,” he breaks out with the words:
What an unhappy, miserable creature the human being is, who in his need for positive solutions is thrown into this eternally moving, shoreless ocean of good and evil, of facts, evaluations and contradictions! If the human being had only learned not to judge and to think so sharply and decisively, and not always to answer questions that are only asked him so that they will always remain questions! Would that he would realize that every thought is at the same time incorrect and correct! It is incorrect because the human being is one-dimensional, and it is impossible for him to grasp the whole truth in its totality; it is correct because through it a part of human striving is always expressed. Human beings have created compartments for themselves in this eternally moving, shoreless, infinitely mixed-up chaos of good and evil, they have drawn imaginary boundary lines in this sea, and they expect the sea to divide itself along these lines. As if there were not millions of other divisions of completely different points of view from and in other levels! . . . Civilization is good, barbarism is evil; freedom is good, restraint evil. This imaginary knowledge destroys the instinctive, blessed, original striving for good in human nature. Who can define freedom, despotism, civilization, and barbarism? What are the boundaries between these concepts? Who has in his soul such an infallible measuring stick for good and evil that he can measure all the fleeting and confused facts with it? Who has ever seen a condition where good and evil were not mixed up together? . . . Infinite is the goodness and wisdom of the one who permitted and ordered all these contradictions. They only seem to be contradictions to you, miserable worm, you who boldly and insolently try to penetrate his laws and counsel. He looks down mildly from his radiant, immeasurable height and rejoices in the endless harmony in which you all move in eternal contradiction.
What laxity! What doubt! Finally, what false transfiguration! And the starving peasants? Will they be sated by your “endless harmony”? It is not plaintive-conciliatory trains of thought that lead to the political action!
Strindberg relates:
The postmaster and the quarantine master did not, to be sure, see people and life from the same point of view, for the postmaster was a decided man of the Left, and the quarantine master was a doubter, but they could chat so well with one another . . . At times, the quarantine master’s greater scope was expressed in disapproval, something like this: “You party men are like one-eyed cats. Some see only with the left eye, others only with the right one, and you can therefore never see stereoscopically, but always only in a flat and one-sided way.”
Is this enough? At the end of Black Flags the same author says:
As a writer you have a right to play with thoughts, to experiment with points of view, but without binding yourself to anything, for freedom is the poet’s vital air.
Is that enough? No, do not let yourself be confused. It is in no way enough to prove that Strindberg really belonged as a thinker and a personality to the European aestheticism that Ibsen personified in Hedda Gabler—just as little as the above-cited expressions would be sufficient to seriously stamp Schiller, Flaubert, Schopenhauer, and Tolstoy as aesthetes; for even Flaubert—as I believe we indicated—does not deserve this name in the narrow, pejorative, dandyish sense. But my examples, I believe, are quite sufficient to illustrate what aestheticism as the opposite of the political nature is—and I repeat, this is its present, living, topical meaning.
In the Strindberg statement, the word “stereoscopic” stands out particularly strongly. It could mislead one to define the aesthetic way of seeing as simply a physical way of seeing. This would be insufficient. There are spiritual, flat, one-sided intellectual products that nevertheless —even in their titles—bear the stamp of “aestheticism.” “Thoughts in Wartime,” for example—that would be such a title. It would be a limitation, the expression of a restriction of these thoughts, of a reservatio mentalis, to express myself in a Jesuit manner, the reservation of someone who knows that thoughts in war necessarily look different from thoughts in peace, who also knows that absolutely everything that is merely stated is limited and assailable, no matter how absolute and apodictic it may act and be perceived at the moment, and no matter how unassailably unique and alone the form; that the exquisite superiority of art over simple intellectuality lies in art’s lively ambiguity, its deep lack of commitment, its intellectual freedom—the freedom that Turgenev always meant when he spoke of freedom. One must completely understand that someone who is not used to speaking directly on his own responsibility, but who is used to letting people and things speak—that someone who is used to creating art, never takes spiritual and intellectual things completely seriously, for his job has always been rather to treat them as material and as playthings, to represent points of view, to deal in dialectics, always letting the one who is speaking at the time be right. One does not understand the intellectual content in a work of art when one takes this context as an end in itself; it cannot be evaluated in a literary way—this is something that even sophisticated critics sometimes forget or do not know; it is useful for the composition; only in relationship to the composition does it have purpose and confirmation; taken absolutely, from a literary point of view, it can be banal, but within the composition it can be ingenious. Assuming that a mind of such structure and habit were to be brought to speak directly, to think outside of a composition, to write in the narrower sense: on the one hand he will find the conflicting inhibitions almost insuperable—first because in such a case he scarcely knows how he is to write, since he has nothing and no one to have speak and is without every artistic support; all in all, however, because as soon as he is not dealing with characters, he will not know what to do at all. “It always seems to me,” Turgenev confesses, “as if one could always argue with equal correctness the opposite of everything I say. But if I talk about a red nose and blond hair, then the hair is blond and the nose is red—this cannot be argued away.” On the other hand, however, it is precisely his strangely loose relationship to intellectual matters that easily lends him a touch of seeming unscrupulousness, frivolity, dialectic, and pettifoggery; unaccustomed to engaging personally in intellectual disputes, he will now hardly feel a sense of serious responsibility here, either. He will have himself speak in the same way he has things and people speak, and in addition, he will not identify himself any more profoundly with this role than with the earlier ones. The statement that no one has a conscience except the contemplator, that the man of action is always without conscience, applies here, too, even if in a nonclassical-complex way: The aesthete is conscientious as a doer (maker, shaper), for his manner of action is so free and serene that it achieves the dignity and coolness of contemplation; but for him contemplation easily becomes action—perhaps he knows and wants it only as action—and it is precisely as he contemplates, therefore, that he tends toward unscrupulousness.
But I can hear the reply that all this is skepticism, relativism, frivolity, and weakness! Weakness above all! For skepticism and relativism are the opposite of all genius, all primeval power and nature; they are also the opposite of all creativity and all religiosity. Is this certain? Is it not possible that in Tolstoy’s doubt about the validity of the “compartments” that the human being creates for himself in “chaos” there is more religiosity than in any political position on what good and evil, civilization and barbarism, freedom and slavery are? Is not skepticism perhaps too light, too intellectual a word to characterize the Tolstoyan way of thinking—for his words definitely signify a devastating criticism of all intellectualism, of all drawing-lines-in-water? Skepticism is itself an intellectual attitude vis-à-vis intellect; it is not anti-intellectualism, for anti-intellectualism means reverence, and the concept of skepticism is never without a touch of frivolity. Reverence and doubt, absolute conscientiousness and absolute freedom—does this connection exist? Yes, it does, for it forms the essence of the aesthetic worldview.
Have we solved, at least to some extent, the task of defining the concept of aestheticism by its present contrast to the political nature? If so, we have then indirectly also learned the essential thing about the politician—but in doing so we consider ourselves in no way exempted from a closer analysis of this incomparably more important and more topical character. It is clear, however, that we are not speaking of the politician in the ordinary sense of the word, of the professional, career politician. He is a low and corrupt being who is in no way fit to play a role in the intellectual sphere. No, the politician we mean is the man of intellect, indeed, of pure and beautiful, of radical and literary intellect; he is therefore the man of the word, indeed, of the pure and beautiful, of the radical and literary word: we see before us the belles lettres-politician, the politician as a literary man and the literary man as a politician, the “intellectual,” the “voluntarist,” the “activist”—and whatever other noble names he bestows upon himself. But since he is a voluntarist—what does he want?
The highest! He is like Adalbert Stifter’s beautiful youths at the beginning of the Bachelor: “Then comes the state. In it the most infinite freedom, the greatest justice, and the most unlimited tolerance is offered. Whoever is against this, will be crushed and defeated . . .” What then does he want? He wants, for example: truth, freedom, justice, equality, reason, virtue, happiness—all in all, happiness! The absolute happiness of all, that condition toward which the human race is gloriously moving, that only now will become the condition of true humanity, and that the politician describes as “very beautiful and thoroughly serene.” The guide to this goal is the intellect: the politician’s intellect, of course, the political intellect, the politicized intellect, a heartfelt, inseparable, generous combination of politics and beautiful literature, of agitation and beautiful eloquence. But for spirit, this spirit, to dominate, it needs a certain social constitution that has not yet been perfectly established everywhere, least of all in Germany, and the politician’s attention must therefore always be directed toward its establishment, for it signifies in the true sense of the word the preliminary step and foretaste of that final, desirable, “very beautiful and completely serene” condition of the human race. This state and social constitution is the radical republic, the republic of lawyers and literati with love of mankind and writing skill. But let us say it more correctly: love of mankind and writing skill, these are the republic, for the republic means nothing else than the dominance of politics, the unconditional and total politicization of minds and hearts—while, for its part, politics is nothing more than love of mankind and writing skill. We cannot make it more emphatic: love of mankind and writing skill, this is the definition of politics, it is the definition of the republic, it is also the definition of literature, of civilization, of progress, of humanitarianism. All these are one; yes, not only are literature and civilization one, as we recognized earlier on our own, literature and politics, literature and republic are also one. And this whole brilliant, philanthropically buoyant unity of ideas and purposeful efforts, with everything that goes with it, and what we will soon have to analyze more closely, the politician brings together in a name, a word, his special and favorite word, his war cry and hosanna, his magical formula for happiness that he tirelessly repeats like a fakir to the point of his own insensibility: he calls it democracy.
It will not have escaped the attentive reader that we are here renewing an old acquaintanceship, that the hero of the present lines, this man of will and savior from aestheticism, is none other than our entente friend and partisan of justice, the German Westerner, the opponent of Germany’s “special nature,” the follower of the rhetorical democracy that is so heartlifting and humanly worthy, in a word: civilization’s literary man! After such a long digression, this chapter is really nothing more than a continuation of that early one that was baptized in the name of civilization’s literary man. But before we continue in the study of this significant type, we must, in order to avoid confusion, differentiate, and hold apart, with our intellectual hearing, voices that are mingled in the noise of the times. It is the word “democracy” that forces such a differentiation and such polyphonic hearing, for many voices of the times are united by this word—united in noise and not in music, for they know nothing of one another.
We thought about Schopenhauer’s disdainful rejection of every patriotic fervor (a rejection that only reverted to passionate partisanship where the German language was concerned), and we found that like everyone else at that time he equated patriotism and democracy, and that he could not and did not want to be a patriot and a “German brother” because he could not and did not want to be a political democrat, because his individualistic aristocratic feeling made him despise democracy. We remembered that Wagner never tired of declaring democracy in some sort of Western sense to be alien and un-German, that he hated it, indeed with the same hatred he had for politics itself, for everything political; because to him politics itself seemed un-German, anti-German, and nothing was more inimical to the wishes and dreams of this man of ’48 than the democratic politicization of his people, whose talents were in his opinion called to higher things than politics. We saw, on the other hand, that the finest examples of Germany’s burgherly-prebourgeois epoch, intellects such as Uhland and Storm, did not lack political passion, but that their politics, their commitment to democracy, that is, was obviously entirely at one with their national feeling, with their love for the fatherland; that they were politicians and democrats as far as they were patriots, and that these three words: politics, democracy, fatherland, signified for them, as for all political burgherdom, one and the same passion, one and the same longing and challenge. Nothing is more simple, and still it needs to be emphasized at this moment. Political freedom, in contrast to metaphysical freedom, means nothing other than the freedom of the patriot to take part in politics, his freedom to work on and in the state. If, as Wagner’s case, as many others, as basically the whole burgherly age of our history proves, this was a cultural age and not a political one: if it is indeed altogether possible in Germany to be nationally but unpolitically, yes, even antipolitically disposed, then the opposite is logically not possible: it is not possible, or at least it should not be possible, to demand politics and democracy and at the same time to cherish antinational, antipatriotic opinions. Mazzini, the democrat and republican, in 1830 the pioneer of the present Italian war against Austria, demanded furiously that Austria be “struck in the heart by divesting her of the best of her territories”; as Italy’s northern boundary he demanded “the upper range of the Alps”; he demanded Trieste. I call that a patriot and a democrat. Börne was liberal, radically so, in the spirit of political enlightenment; but he was a patriot, indeed so much so that Heine could say disdainfully of him: “The fatherland is his whole love.” Herwegh was not only national, not only a patriot, he was an imperialist, he sang the “Song of the Fleet” to young Germany. If one wants to be like them today, if one wants to be a democratic politician, then one must declare oneself above all to be a patriot. But to call for democracy and to put on airs against all patriotism, all national feeling, this is not at all consistent. Democracy is nothing more than the right to be active as a patriot. Freedom and fatherland belong together. Or is this not so?
The great majority of those today who demand the politicization of the German people, that is, who demand that the German governmental system become democratic, really do this as eager patriots, yes, in the interest of German power: foreign policy completely determines their domestic political will—even if I admittedly think that they are not as clearly aware as would be desirable of the intimate connection, or rather of the identical significance, of “politicization” and “democratization.” In the second year of the war, I could attend a meeting in Munich to organize a “Society for the Study of World Politics,” one of those societies that set themselves the task of spreading political knowledge, understanding, and enthusiasm in the German people. One of the first rules they decided to put into the bylaws was absolute nonpartisanship, absolute political tolerance and indifference: conservative, liberal, socialistic, one might be what one wanted, membership in this organization for the propagation of political thought was to be open to everyone. I had the correspondent of a leftist newspaper beside me at table. I said to him:
“If I may say so, I think that politicization and democratization are really one and the same thing.”
“Why, that is what I always say!” he cried happily.
“Yes,” I continued, “but the German conservatives know this as well as you, and that is why they say: Politics spoils character. This is a truly conservative way of speaking; recently some Junker or other used it to a great uproar in the parliament. Therefore if you want democracy by wanting politicization, you ought not to consider yourselves nonpartisan and invite conservatives to take part.”
For the moment at least he did not know what to reply. And then also it seems to me that the logical objection I made then was well taken: I said that “political social studies” were essentially democratic arrangements whose political tolerance and all-inclusiveness was a conscious or unconscious deception. Strictly speaking, of course, the German desire for politicization, the insight into the necessity of politicization, is nothing new, not from yesterday; it would be wrong to date this will and insight even just from the formation of the Reich, and to make its founder, Bismarck, unilaterally responsible for this new will to politics and “reality,” as Nietzsche always does: especially in that brilliant passage where he ironically hypothesizes a statesman who “would bring his nation to the point of having to continue dealing in grand politics even though it was by nature ill-disposed and ill-prepared to do so; so that it would have to sacrifice its old and reliable virtues to a new, doubtful mediocrity,” and continues:
Assuming that a statesman would condemn his nation to politics at all when up to then it had had better things to do and think, and when in its heart of hearts it could not rid itself of a cautious disgust [oh, magnificent!] for the unrest, emptiness, and noisy quarrelsomeness of the truly political nations:—assuming that such a statesman were to spur the sleeping passions and covetousness of his people, to make a fault of its former timidity and desire to stand apart, to call its affinity for things foreign and its secret infinity an error, to debase its most cherished inclinations, to confuse its conscience, to narrow its spirit, to make its taste “national”—what! A stateman who did all this, a statesman for whom his nation would have to atone throughout its entire future, if it had a future, would such a statesman be great?
Well, no matter how magnificent the sentence construction, the guilt, the act of violence hypothesized here is wrong; for it is wrong to act as if the German will had been violated in 1870 by Bismarck and forced into previously foreign and distasteful paths; as if to a great extent Bismarck had not been more its mandatary and executor. We know very well that the transformation of this will goes back a long way, at least ten years before 1870, that Bismarckian power politics and the “German idea” came together to the most remarkable degree around 1860. The Germany that at that time moved from her idealistic into her realistic period, and that would have done this even without Bismarck, was quite ready and willing “to sacrifice her old and reliable virtues to a new, doubtful mediocrity”; she scarcely needed to be “condemned” to politics, scarcely to be “goaded” into greediness. It was at this time that what one can call the realization, hardening, or also the politicization of Germany set in powerfully, that poetry and philosophy abdicated, natural sciences and history rose, all minds turned toward the foundation of the German state—and that the idea of freedom, which the liberal enlightenment had always been ready to place above that of unity, made its peace in the “national union” with the Prussian power principle. Of course it is true that Bismarck put Germany “into the saddle,” but she already had one foot in the stirrup, and it looks as if Nietzsche, in his musical-Dionsyian dreams of culture, had noticed nothing of this at all.
His polemic against Bismarck and the power empire has a somewhat mixed nature for us today, yes, confused, something both outmoded and anticipatory; it deals with conditions, I think, that, as he saw them, in part no longer exist and in part are impending—possibly. People have found that in his hatred for Bismarck, whom he is philosopher enough to accuse of lack of philosophical education, he became untrue to his own superman-ideal; and this is largely correct. In general, people censured his position on the national question as abstract and inconsistent: they said the military virtues he honored were bound to the national idea, and his internationalism was a regression into enlightenment. This is also true. But what Nietzsche really had in his heart against Bismarck and the “Reich” was not bitterness toward militarism, lordliness, and power. What could he of all people have against power? He did not have anything against German power, either; for somewhere, for example, he expresses the wish for Germany to gain control of Mexico in order to set the fashion for the world with a new, exemplary forest culture in the conservative interest of the future of the human race. What he fought against was twofold: When he says, “The era of Bismarck (the era of German stultification), the exclusive interest devoted currently in Germany to questions of power, to trade in general, and—last but not least—to ‘good living,’ ” then German culture itself is protesting through him, German cultural idealism, or, as strange as the words may seem here, German cultural liberalism, which actually determined his relationship to Bismarck’s empire, and in which he did not nearly stand as alone as he wanted to convince himself he did, for people such as Mommsen and Virchow entered the opposition at that time—his German philosophical nature, the best and most fundamental part of his being, protested against the German conditions of the seventies and eighties, against the joint, interlocked nature of national self-righteousness and materialistic reaction, of the corrupt flowering of industry, of French farce and David Strauß-like contentment, which not only characterized the early years—in a word, this protest, which was the protest of a “burgher” in the most German meaning of the word, was directed against the perversion, hardening, and falsification of a stateless culture into a cultureless state.
Was it philistine-satisfaction, ten years before the war, to find this aspect of Nietzsche’s criticism of the “Reich” to be out of date? In a counterargument to myself I made every concession to the doctrine of Germany’s hardening and loss of soul—a little academically, for personally, of course, my awakening to conscious intellectual life occurred in new, in different times—it occurred in the eighties, the time of the literary revolution and of the invasion of the naturalists; at eighteen I was a contributor to Conrad’s Gesellschaft, when I was twenty, my stories appeared in the Neue deutsche Rundschau, which had just recently been formed from the provocative magazine, Die freie Bühne, and the literary—if not also the psychological—cosmopolitanism of Buddenbrooks marked me as a genuine child of this epoch, of an epoch of cultural revolution whose essence was opposition to precisely that Germany that the lonely Nietzsche had decried. The likes of me, it is true, never hated Bismarck or rejected him; I was always little inclined to play Goethe off against Bismarck, as disconcerted foreign countries and German radical literary men did. I found it foolish not to recognize the one in the other. I saw in Bismarck a powerful expression of the German character, a second Luther, a very great event in the history of the German self-experience, a gigantic German fact, set defiantly against European repugnance. But this affirmation was for his personality; I, too, opposed his work, or the spirit of his work, or at least the working of this man in areas where, in my opinion, it did not belong—as an example of this I may refer to my criticism of the Prussianization and dehumanization of the new German Gymnasium in Buddenbrooks.
Did not a movement begin as early as with the “latest Germany,” to which, after all, I belonged, that has not come to rest since? And was it not that of a new idealism? I hardly include the social legislation here. I consider it to be German to combine social tidiness with deep disgust for every overvaluation of social life. Just the same, it is not bad to read that at the beginning of this century a German American could call social justice the ideal of present-day Germany, social work the basic demand of the new German education. But the sociopolitical, the welfare ideal is secondary. It had to do with something more spiritual. It had to do with the German spirit’s rediscovery of itself, with something like reanimation, a redirection to an earlier path, a subsiding of natural sciences in all higher significance, no matter how gloriously the victorious advance of the monistic enlightenment might be perfected just at the time; a revitalization of philosophy, a seeking and finding of contact with the idealistic traditions of German thought, an urgent self-searching in religion, new possibilities in mysticism itself. Was this so, or not? Scheler’s writings did not have much similarity to “beer-hall evangelism” anymore. And just before the beginning of the war, almost in the war, there appeared in 1914 a book that to me seemed to sum up recent Germany, the Germany that had to enter the war, and not the Germany of 1875 anymore, seemed to present it intellectually in an astounding synthesis: The Main Questions of Modern Culture by Emil Hammacher, the young philosopher from Bonn who was killed in France, whom I would very much like to call my posthumous friend.
But Nietzsche continues: “. . . the rise of parliamentary stupidity, of newspaper reading, and of the participation of everyone in the literarylike discussion of everything . . . the growing rise of democratic man, and of the stultification of Europe and the diminution of European man brought about by this rise—” and with this continuation and turn of his criticism of the Reich, no matter how much here again it is German culture that is opposing, and indeed, opposing in the conservative interest: with this continuation of our quotation we are suddenly in quite another sphere; here Nietzsche not only does not seem to be surpassed, if he seemed to be so in the beginning, here his polemic anticipates, anticipates a development he saw connected with almost complete inevitability to the life work of Bismarck, which at the time, however, was in its unpretentious beginnings, and which only after the expiration of the Bismarckian era, in a new epoch of German civilization and imperialism, could become clear in its meaning and goal: Germany’s development to democracy.
Again it is important not to understand this word incorrectly, and not merely superficially, either: otherwise one could ask what there is to fear or to demand about the democratization of the world. In fact, small differences in forms of government do not prevent the world today from being democratized to the last corner; democracy is scarcely struggling anymore; it is triumphant; even in Tsarist Russia people speak correctly of “our democratic-burgherly society”—correctly, that is, as far as we live in a business epoch that is dependent upon the principle of utility, whose main motive is the drive for prosperity and whose rank-conferring ruler is money. Plutocracy and enthusiasm for prosperity: if this is the exact definition of democracy, then one may still maintain that refractory Germany is in this aspect, too, a bit behind the general development—but this Germany was still a true child of her time and shows herself to be loyal to it today as well. The speculator, the food profiteer during the war—what spirit does he belong to, anyway, other than to democracy, which has stamped money, profit, and business as the highest values: the rulers, too, whose boundless awe of business makes them extremely hesitant to take action against speculative insolence. But as far as political freedom is concerned, seen even slightly from above, it of course rules more or less to the same extent everywhere today, and Gustaf Steffen, the Swedish sociologist, is probably right when he says that “in her way” Germany “practices just as great an amount of democracy through her army and through the widespread self-rule in her communities, cities and federal states,” as the Western countries do.
But there is no talk of this when one teaches and demands that Germany be politicized and democratized—because, of course, it would not have to be so urgently demanded if it were already completed, or had at least progressed a long way. It is rather a matter of a real change in the structure of the German spirit, of the tendency to make Germany “free and equal,” not so much at home as abroad, as in international relations, of a process of European leveling that is less economic and political than spiritual, a development that is leveling all national culture into a homogeneous civilization, yes, of nothing else than the total realization and final establishment of the world imperium of civilization that we spoke of at the beginning of our reflections: and Nietzsche, without detriment to his internationalism, which neither knows nor recognizes the national medium between the individual and the human race; without detriment, either, to the support that he himself, by the nature of his writing, as a writer who furthered a European style, gave to this development—Nietzsche was German enough, had a powerful enough “conservative interest” in Germany’s special and refractory nature, to resist most vehemently the leveling process that he saw being connected to Bismarck’s political foundation.
This is quite evident in all his statements on Germany’s political and intellectual fate; the protest against the nationalization of Germany, in which he saw at the same time a denationalization, internationalization, and democratization, runs through his entire work from beginning to end, and it is a protest in the name of philosophy against politics—an extremely German protest, therefore, in which Nietzsche may possibly have had an “untimely,” but in no way alien, impact, in which he was plainly a national spokesman, yes, in which he concurs precisely with all exemplary German thought and desire.
In 1870 a strange man died in Thorn in Prussia, Bogumil Goltz by name, humorist, philosopher, and critic of the times, a writer who thought deeply and wrote much about Germany and the German character: The Germans, On the Character and Natural History of the German Genius, and more of the same. Somewhere he says:
While in the Romance and Slavic nations only the masses bear a stamp, and only the “masses” think of themselves as a people, the German shows, as an individual, a particular intellectual physiognomy, a divine conscience and a disposition in which the history of the human race moves and is embodied. From a dozen Frenchmen, Russians, Poles, and Italians, one can more easily draw a sketch of these four nations than one can understand the German people after having studied a thousand Germans. In every individual the German human being signifies a separate world; more than any other, he is a person; he is in the deepest sense of the word a human being with character, simply because compared with individuals of other nations, he is a person, a genius, an original, a person of feeling, because he is not a figurant, not a social or a political animal in the French sense, who, at the moment when one no longer regards him nationally but as an individual, reveals himself to be as lacking in character and feeling as possible. The German nation can have no character the way other nations can, because through literature and education in reason it has generalized and ennobled itself as a nation of the world that all humanity is beginning to recognize as its teacher and educator. Yes, we are, we were, we remain the schoolmasters, the philosophers, the theosophists, the religious teachers of Europe and of the whole world. This is our genius, our ideal national unity, honor, and mission, which we must not trade for the thing or phantom that the French or the English call nation. We are and remain a world-burgherly, world-historical people in a privileged sense, and for this very reason we cannot be a stupidly proud people that is brought together like animals and glued together, that, like wild geese, flies together in a “V” formation,” that, like the French and the Poles, crystallizes itself in every meeting into a practice revolution or into a one-day republic.
This was written in the 1860s, at the time, that is, when the German spirit was quite automatically preparing in national meetings to allow itself to be condemned to politics by Bismarck; and I have inserted the passage, which I really like, early to give resonance to what I will still have to say about politics. To come back to Nietzsche, it would undoubtedly have gone against his critical taste to call the individual German a genius, an original and a feeling person, and in contrast to call the individual Frenchman a person without character or feeling; but beyond doubt his own opinion about Germany agreed in all essential points with that of the good Bogumil Goltz. What Nietzsche, who called himself the “last nonpolitical German,” hated in Bismarck was certainly not that Bismarck was a great man who denigrated the average man, a masterful man, a man of power. He hated him and doubted his greatness, if not also his strength, because he saw him working on the change of Germany’s intellectual structure, on Germany’s nationalization and politicization—and thereby on her democratization and simplification in the sense of homogeneous civilization. That is clear. But it is also clear that the great majority of those who for patriotic reasons call for politicization and civic education are not at all as aware of these connections as they should be—while the most important thing here is simply a clarity that distinguishes between what is necessary and what is desirable, and that does not automatically with fatalistic, uncritical enthusiasm acclaim what is necessary as what is desirable.
A giant put Germany into the saddle; now she must ride, for she must not fall off. This sentence seems to me to be the most calm, precise paraphrase, omitting all desirability or undesirability, of what I call the necessary part of the development. Those who today demand a democratic Germany that the Reichskanzler promises raise this demand not for doctrinaire, theoretical reasons, but for completely practical ones; first so that Germany can live, and second so that she can live powerfully and masterfully—to which, according to her heartfelt belief, she has the highest claim. These reasons, however, reasons that point toward an interest in life and power, are not those of domestic, but of foreign policy; for all strictly domestic policy is pedagogical, moral, not to say virtuous; it has no connections to the idea of power, and is only very loosely connected to that of life; it lives from a radical idea and is intent on nothing more than the high-minded realization of this idea. There is no talk of this at all in Germany. At most, the democratic thesis takes on a theoretical, domestic political character when it is expressed somewhat in the following manner: “The war has shown the German people to be a state people. The logical consequence of this is the demand for a Volksstaat appropriate to the high moral and political level and to the civic virtues of such a people.” This is the serious and honest voice of the national democratic man, and it does not sound at all repugnant to my ear—for I must hasten to say that my ear in no way misses how much the good and honest word, Volksstaat, differs in sound and sense from the word “democracy,” with its humbug-like side noises. Here, then, the demand for a democratic Reich is morally justified because the democratization, the politicization, that is, of the nation is decreed as a domestically accomplished fact that honesty requires one to live up to through institutions. Here, then, the democratization of the state is regarded as the logical and moral consequence of the politicization of the people brought about by the war. Is the premise quite solid? One could doubt it. One could seriously doubt that in the course of thirty months the German people really have become a “genuinely political people” whose intellectual makeup demands institutions appropriate and peculiar to such peoples. By the way, however, the arguments of these patriotic democrats are also of a “foreign” nature, even when they seem related to domestic policy; they are those of practice, those of necessity. One says something like: “We must have people’s politics, that is, politics whose subject—and not whose object—is the people; people’s politics for the sake of the Reich, to keep the Reich and the state strong and vital!” Whereby characteristically, if not quite logically, strength is placed before vitality; where the idea of power not only does not follow that of life, but for the sake of clarity is placed above and before it as its sense and purpose. Then one continues with something like:
The Reich has only been able to endure the enormous test of the war because in the storm of the times people and state have become one. But the tasks of peace will be no less enormous than those of war, and they will only be fulfilled when we succeed in salvaging and transferring the accomplishments of war into times of peace, when the unity of people and state is preserved. Domestic strength is the precondition of a strong foreign policy, which will be necessary after the conclusion of peace. A state organization is necessary, therefore, that is established exclusively for the greatest national capacity for achievement; a state organization, that is, that the people can regard as their very own construction, and in which political rights assure them of participation and cooperation. We do not demand such a state organization for the sake of some sort of theory and doctrine, but for the sake of the life and of the global tasks that we earnestly believe the war’s outcome will confirm for our people. Therefore let all education be education for citizenship: we say that it includes, without exception, all the purposes and goals of human education! The politicization, the democratization of all minds and hearts is necessary because—
Because, one may complete the sentence, Germany must ride and must not fall off.
This patriotic, opportunity-democracy, which equally combines “domestic” and “foreign” arguments according to the idea of life and at the same time of power, seems to me to be the predominant political opinion in Germany today. I will venture the attempt of a critique by sketching, in a few words, my relationship to the state as it existed instinctively before the war and as, with some reading and reflection, I have now become consciously aware of it.
As a boy I liked to personify the state to myself in my imagination; I thought of it as a stern, stiff figure in a dress coat, with a full black beard, with a star on its breast, and decked out with a mixture of military-academic titles that appropriately symbolized its power and legality: as General Doktor von Staat. The state (which here can be equated with its administrator, the government) probably appears in this image to young artists and sons of the muses, whose libertinism it threatens with punishment and strict discipline. And their sense of irony, which comes from a bad but still cheerful conscience, is not lacking in justice and dignity. The truth of their lives, the truth from which they live, is, of course, quite actually that there is a sphere that is undoubtedly superior to the state and to political life, that sphere to which art, religion, the humanities, and all deeper morality belong, a sphere of the most personally characteristic values and accomplishments. To be sure, of course, the one who is at home in this sphere will concede the state’s qualification and authority to grant formal assistance, although he may find that His Excellency cuts a rather clumsy figure in the process. But, in accordance with his disposition, he will either passionately reject or disdainfully ignore every attempt at substantial regulation: in the one case because he sees that the state does not have the right to regulate in this way, and in the other because he knows that above all, and in the end, the power to do so is lacking.
This may be well and good. And yet, for all the estrangement, for all the stern distrust on the one side and all the irony on the other, they are related, have something in common. There is an extreme solidarity between the representative of the suprapolitical sphere, the sphere of the personality, and the state, as far as the state is the legal power of a national community—and the hour may come when both, the libertine and even the state as well, will become aware of this solidarity in the clearest way. It is true: what characterizes the human being as a social being is not what is actually admirable in him. The human being is not only a social but also a metaphysical being; in other words, he is not only an individual but also a personality. It is therefore wrong to confuse the supraindividual element with the social one, to place it completely in the social sphere: in the process one neglects the metaphysical supraindividual element; for the personality, not the mass, is the actual bearer of the general element. But is this not exactly the same with the nation—and therefore with the state as far as the latter is the crystallization of national life? The nation, too, is not only a social but also a metaphysical being; the nation, not “the human race” as the sum of the individuals, is the bearer of the general, of the human quality; and the value of the intellectual-artistic-religious product that one calls national culture, that cannot be grasped by scientific methods, that develops out of the organic depth of national life—the value, dignity, and charm of all national culture, therefore, definitely lies in what distinguishes it from all others, for only this distinctive element is culture, in contrast to what all nations have in common, which is only civilization. Here we have the difference between individual and personality, civilization and culture, social and metaphysical life. The individualistic mass is democratic, the nation aristocratic. The former is international, the latter a mythical personality of the most characteristic stamp. It is wrong to place the supraindividual element in the sum of the individuals, to place the national and the human quality in the social mass. The metaphysical nation is the bearer of the general element. It is therefore intellectually wrong to pursue politics in the spirit and sense of the mass. It should be pursued in the spirit and sense of the nation so that there is at least the possibility of experiencing a unified political and national life, even if in the process it goes beyond the understanding of the mass as such. This demand, however, is today condemned to remain a theory. The advance of democracy is victorious and unstoppable. Only mass politics, democratic politics, that is, a politics that has little or nothing to do with the higher intellectual life of the nation, is possible today—this is the knowledge that the government of the German Reich has acquired in the course of the war.
The interest of the artist and the intellectual in the state, then, his relationship and solidarity with it, goes as far as the metaphysical character of the state goes. Admittedly, things are developing in such a way that the state is giving up more and more of its metaphysical character and appears about to take on a merely social one. In truth, the modern state is not particularly worthy of admiration. As egalitarian and as tolerant as it is, it no longer represents a definite worldview, but rather presents itself as well as it can as an agency for the adjustment of class interests. A correspondence of political and—to use the most extensive word—religious life cannot be determined—and what would be the sense of the complete consummation of the personality in the state? A hundred forces are working on the disintegration of national culture and on the internationalization of life; and if one once said that the merit of militarism was to hinder the creation of a purely utilitarian culture, the sinking of the people into mere civilization, this merit finds little recognition today: the meaning, the teleological function of war, to serve the preservation of national character, seems invalid. Its connection with economic interests stands out obtrusively—a connection that admittedly has existed in all times and that has never prevented the honor of a nation from being more than the ideological glorification and embellishment of economic interests. But if this honor today really does not seem to be anything else; if earlier economic means seem to have become ends in themselves, so that war can generally be perceived as immoral and barbaric, and if here the last thing falls away that leads the masses, in a culture of expediency, to sacrifice themselves for supraindividual goals, for idealism—then it would be dishonest to conceal the fact that it is democracy that has caused this impression and that has taken away the dignity and spirit of war: internationalistic democracy is not waging war for spiritual reasons, for the protection and the honor of independent national culture, not for the sake of the German idea. It is waging it without ideas, really, only for export and therefore also with a bad conscience, midst pacifistic tears—whereby it swears that it only got into the war because it was “badly governed.” Whoever, out of sympathy for the mythical individual “German nation” and its heroic struggle, whoever has any sort of positive attitude toward this war, must properly cherish conservative, that is, national ideas, and participate in the war in their name. Democracy, which is basically of one mind with the civilization-entente, and which only “wants to do business where another is already doing business,” as George says, is conducting a war without ideas, and therefore, as it itself feels, an immoral stock-exchange war. It is not even an idea as democracy, but only pure opportunism. “Under a democratic constitution one can do business better,” is the way they argue. It can in no way be denied that the idea, and therefore the idealism, in this war is with the conservatives, and the criticism in democracy’s mouth that the conservatives only want power is hardly correct—democracy obviously also wants power, indeed so urgently that it does not want to wait for the end of the war to secure it, because then the voice of the people or of the masses might be less favorable to the realization of democracy’s will to power. The ruling concept is also implied in the word “democracy,” and we know that it is not the people, but persons who “rule” in the democratic state. But as far as idealism is concerned, the conservative-national idea is still an idea, even if it has perhaps seen its day; but export is not one. When the conservatives assert that if universal suffrage is introduced into Prussia, Germany will have lost the war, they are beyond doubt serious. That they exaggerate in this is another matter to which we will return.
For the present, we repeat that the metaphysical character of the state is retreating more and more in favor of the social one, that the separation of the intellectual and the national elements from political life cannot be stopped. Naturally, this cannot be conducive to political participation by the intellectual and the artist. But there is still enough left to bind him not only logically but also emotionally to the state. Schopenhauer says in his “uncrowned prize essay” on the foundation of morality that the state is indispensable because thanks only to it the limitless egotism of almost everyone, the malice of many, and the cruelty of some cannot come to the fore: if one wants to learn what the human being actually is in a moral sense, he says, one must read crime stories and descriptions of anarchic conditions; and these thousands who mingle before us in peaceful intercourse must be viewed as just so many tigers and wolves whose jaws are well controlled by a strong muzzle, by the force of law, that is, and by the necessity of civic honor. This is a justification of the power of the state whose grim pessimism and skepticism admittedly hardly make it fit to be awarded a prize by academies. But it is valid, and individual love of mankind is no reason not to agree with it literally. Today, the monstrous, life-endangering, external threat to the state is bringing about domestic conditions that in part and in some ways approach anarchy, and immediately it is becoming clear what human beings in the great majority—for there are a few consoling exceptions who preserve one’s faith—“actually are” from a moral point of view. Never has the difference between the people as a mystical character and the individualistic mass appeared more visibly; and no sense of awe for the former, no heartfelt participation in its heroic struggle, protects one from seeing the basically miserable nature of the latter, its cowardice, impudence, wickedness, lack of character, and meanness. On the contrary, there has never been a better opportunity to convince oneself what sort of pressure of force, fear, and authority is necessary to hold the great majority of human beings in moral propriety. The democratic addition of the human race is not so much the addition of the good as of the bad in the human being, and the larger the sum, the more it approaches the bestial. Morally, the social sphere is a very questionable field; it has the air of the menagerie about it.
But there are of course more and still higher logical arguments for the affirmation of the state. It is the state that sets definite limits to human activity, to all human life and striving, and only within these limits can the human being prove his worth. It is the state that attempts to settle social conflicts, brings them closer to a reconciliation, and here it shows itself to be a necessary condition of culture. The artist, too, who needs a secure basis to develop his particular abilities, just as everyone else does, will not withhold reasonable recognition of this logical state role. Beyond this, however, he sees, at least when the times sharpen his perspective as forcefully as they do today, that the state, in spite of all its socialization, has not lost, and can never lose, a considerable remainder of metaphysical dignity and significance.
A nation’s historical tradition, that treasure of experience from earlier periods of its intellectual development that is in itself a cultural value, cannot be completely appreciated and cared for by any other nation. The state, the supraindividual community, is beyond doubt the guardian of this treasure. But also, as far as the present is concerned, in spite of all internationalism, there is a radical difference between the experiences of philosophy, art, and religion, and the progress of the homogeneous-international sciences. Even today these experiences are still dependent upon nationality in some kind of theoretical but admittedly indefinable way, and it remains the metaphysical task of the state to defend them—whereby it is completely immaterial whether its leaders approve of these experiences, or whether they even know about them. To speak particularly of art, the likes of me knows very well how much it has been subject to the general process of democratic internationalization. Palpably national art, patriotic art, so-called native art, cannot very well be considered to be higher art. But the highest art—does it not even today still have a deep connection with national life, even though the connection is difficult to ascertain? Every artistic patriotism in times of war has its origin and justification in this awareness that before had only been a neglected emotion and that was only raised to consciousness by the war. It is true, we saw very well that more and more one was forced to separate national from political life; and still the mind of the individual became aware at this time of a deep and unquestioned union between state and intellectual life: as has been perceived and said a hundred times, the German idea of the state and of freedom bears in it the mark of its essential intellectual and cultural origin just as clearly as the English idea contains its Puritan origin and the French idea its revolutionary one. When the war broke out, one could feel that the German state, as it is, had taken in much of the German intellectual character, and as far as intellect felt any national cohesion and solidity at all, as far, that is, as it did not find itself irrevocably democratized and internationalized, it could join itself emotionally to this fearfully threatened state—I say: It could do so. I do not say that it definitely had to do so; for even in this case it is quite possible in Germany that not only indifference to the state’s destiny exists, but also that its humiliation even belongs to the intellectual desirabilities.
This has its basis in the specifically German antithesis of power and intellect; in the fact, namely, that seen historically these two, intellect and power, seem to miss each other with apparent regularity, that blossoming of the state and blossoming of culture seem to exclude one another—and this is why the conviction could and did settle among artists and believers in culture that a politically powerful Germany would necessarily be opposed to intellect and culture, that German intellectual blossoming would never be united with the flowering of the state. When Goethe defined culture as “the intellectualization of the political and military spheres,” he was thinking in grand terms, holding himself to a more general norm, and gazing sovereignly beyond German conditions and realities. Nevertheless, the higher validity of his definition of the concept of culture justifies the conjecture or hope that German disbelief in the possibility of a synthesis of power and intellect is a prejudiced disbelief. Perhaps nowhere is it written that things always have to be the way they usually have been; that Germany cannot desire power when she desires intellect. Bismarck’s epoch was not a cultural epoch. But the real, general enthusiasm of the Germans at the outbreak of this war was of course that one was now stepping out of this epoch and into another—into what kind? Into one that would possibly give the lie to the old, antithetical prejudice that an unhappy history had firmly established. Was this not true? Today, to be sure, the belief seems rather to be widespread that after this war the whole idea of power in the world will come to an end, and that only the intellect, in the form of justice, will swing its scepter over a completely moralized earth—another German belief that, as far as I can see, is hardly shared anywhere else.
So much for the state in general. How do things stand now with our politics? With our opinion, that is, on how the state should be organized? I say “our” because in political matters it is of course presumptuous and wrong to speak in the first person singular. Here one never stands alone. There is no political originality. One takes sides, and one may only say, “We believe,” or “I, too, believe.” This stamps the political sphere, therefore, as inferior, because it is a nonpersonal sphere; in it opinions prevail, and opinions do not confer rank. Political opinions lie on the street: Pick one up and attach yourself to it, and to many, possibly to yourself, too, you will seem more respectable than before, but this is based on illusion. The fact that a person is conservative says nothing about his rank and worth; any idiot can be conservative. Neither does the fact that a person is a democrat signify anything about his worth and rank; every idiot is a democrat today. On the other hand, it would be erroneous to conclude from a man’s high, nonpolitical achievements anything about his political insight, ability, and calling to join the discussion—just as erroneous as the reverse would be, to take proven political competency as a sign of a generally significant man. There is no extrapolitical criterion of political calling. Politics is the sphere of the (democratic) individual, not of the (aristocratic) personality. And as proof that an opinion about politics is already a political opinion, I offer the opinion that the only true and real justification of political democracy lies here, to wit, in the principle that can be summed up: “Where it is impossible to give each his own, everyone shall be given the same.”
With this, we might actually already be finished. But to reach the goal too easily is not to reach the goal properly. We must begin again.
Every nonrhetorical person who loves truth and embraces a respectable pessimism will calmly recognize the irrevocable conflict between individual and society. He will recognize that social life is and remains the sphere of necessity, of compromise, of insoluble antinomies. He will declare it to be an unctuous betrayal of the people when positivistic enlightenment promises the realization of a harmony of individual and social interests by means of that impossible delineation of the “rights” of the individual in relation to the same “rights” of the others, that therefore promises “freedom,” “individual prosperity,” and “happiness.” In practice, this is no reason to twiddle one’s thumbs, but it is a reason to deny intellectual support to political enlightenment. Its unctuous high-mindedness, its self-satisfied confidence, will disgust such a person, not only because he sees that the “happiness” promised by this enlightenment is impossible to attain, but because it does not seem to him at all desirable; it seems unworthy of a human being, repulsive to intellect and culture, bovine-peaceful-cud-chewing, and without soul. He knows that politics, namely enlightenment, social contract, republic, progress toward the “greatest good for the greatest number,” is no way at all to reconcile social life; that this reconciliation can be achieved only in the sphere of personality, never in that of the individual, only on a spiritual path, that is, never on a political one, and that it is insane to want to raise social life even the slightest bit toward religious consecration. It is precisely this tendency, however, that has existed in all positivism from time immemorial, and never has this tendency been clearer than today, when under the name of culture-religion, of religion of the “intellect,” positivism is celebrating a triumphant risorgimento—while still remaining what it was, to wit, the morality of utility and nothing better.
Seen from without, the question of the human being presents itself in a twofold way: as a metaphysical and a social question, a moral and a political, a personal and a social one. In truth, it is only one, and politics, that is, utilitarian enlightenment and the humanitarianism of happiness, is not the means to its solution. The opposite belief is that of the European West, of rhetorical democracy, and Germany, which has resisted this belief up to now because she knew that one cannot at all separate the political question from the question of the human being, that on the contrary the former, even as a political question, can still find its solution only in inwardness, only in the soul of the human being—Germany is about to go over to this belief, thinking that as she does so she is “politicizing” herself—as if a policy that in the long run is not compatible with any governmental form were worthy of its name. For no governmental form is compatible with the principles of utilitarian enlightenment. What they are creating is that vicious circle in which anarchy and dictatorship meet, and which a national, that is, an antidemocratic German statesman, who has admittedly become very old-fashioned today, namely Bismarck, did not wish for Germany. Neither anarchy nor despotism makes up a state at all, and in despotism it is immaterial whether “power” is based on the bayonet or, as in Kerensky’s Russia, on “freedom,” or rather whether freedom is held up “with blood and iron.” To differentiate here is one of the most remarkable manifestations of human folly.
Since, as I have said, politics, social life, is the sphere of necessity and compromises, genuinely reasonable behavior in this sphere will always be moderate-middle, not to say: mediocre behavior, a middle-of-the-road policy. In many other spheres such as morality and art, radicalism may be permissible or necessary; in politics it is mischief. “Take sides! Take sides! Let us all take sides!” Herwegh sang—if one can call something like that song. At least once the apolitical Goethe took sides: when he said to Eckermann, that is, that every reasonable human being was a moderate liberal. And in his mouth this means about the same as “a moderate conservative.” For as we understand him, by liberalism he did not mean enlightenment, egalitarian individualism, republic, and “progress,” not some kind of abstract ethics of human rights and duties and that ideal of “free competition,” to which one owes the world-dominance of economic interests. No, Goethe did not believe in freedom “and” equality. He did not declare himself to be a democrat when he called himself a liberal. We hope, we fancy, we can define his “moderate liberalism” as we define our own in the following lines.
His cause is that of intellectual and social freedom. He is the enemy of democracy insofar as it behaves like a doctrinaire end in itself and not like a means. As a means, however, namely of aristocratic selection in the interest of the state, it is precisely what one calls social freedom, or more properly, social mobility: In an aphorism from Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche discusses the possibility of exchange between the two castes, the forced worker and the free worker castes: an exchange of the type “that the duller, less intellectual families and individuals from the upper caste are put down into the lower one, and on the other hand, the freer people from the lower caste attain access to the higher one.” Nietzsche thought that culture should be vitally concerned with this possibility. But the state is also concerned with it. Beyond doubt, it is important for the state to have the greatest possible concurrence between personal and social rank. Therefore one must seek ways to thwart the educational privilege of property. The first, if not the best, method would be social tax legislation. But in this impairment of hereditary rights one must be particularly careful to spare the small and middle property owners, for culture has gained a hundred times from the fact that someone at twenty, by means of his inherited income, which might be a meager pittance, has been assured social freedom; and as far as real riches are concerned, there is justice in the reservation that certain values not only of a cultural but also of a political nature are bound to them. A happier solution, which is also, in a good psychological sense, more radical than the demand for social-democratic tax legislation, is the one that calls for the democratization of the means of education. This is the real way to assure that no one of special talent will be hindered any longer because of birth from following a higher career, and every public-spirited person will recommend this method, even if he does not forget that there are cultural values resulting from inheritance and breeding. The freest opportunity for education! This is very important. Democracy as a fact is nothing more than the continually growing public nature of modern life, and the spiritual-human dangers of this increasing democracy, the danger, that is, of a complete leveling, of a journalistic-rhetorical stultification and vulgarization, can only be met with an education whose dominating concept would have to be, as Goethe demanded in the Pedagogical Province, reverence: Goethe, this pedagogue by birth, this passionate educator who knew well that culture, education in the spirit of reverence, will be the only urgently needed corrective to the forthcoming democracy. And why is it this, finally? Because in the educational idea, the social-political question is put back where it belongs, namely into the inner sphere of the personality; because this idea puts the social-political question back into the sphere that it never should have left, into the spiritual-moral, the human sphere. The social-religiosity of the educational idea can bring reconciliation to social life. Only real, that is, metaphysical religion can do this by teaching that in the end the social element is subordinate. Or, if one does not want to speak of religion, then let one substitute education for it (whereby, naturally, we cannot mean scientific half education), or goodness, or humanity, or freedom. Politics makes one rough, vulgar, and stupid. Envy, impudence, covetousness, is all it teaches. Only spiritual education liberates. Institutions are of little importance; character is all-important. Become better yourself! And everything will be better.
So much for the concept of social freedom in our liberalism. As far as its concept of intellectual freedom is concerned, it is derived from the insight that the separation of intellectual life from the state cannot be rejected. For the state, as it is, cannot be the bearer of personal life. The absence of a state-directed cultural unity means that there is no complete human satisfaction in political life—from which, among other things, it follows that the doctrine of civic education as the education is rather bad romanticism. It is liberal to deny the agreement of intellectual and political life, or rather: to recognize their nonagreement. Human dangers lie here, too; but even if they are perhaps greatest of all in Germany, the German is also the most capable of resisting them, thanks especially to the Reformation, which taught him more generally to bear metaphysical freedom. Hegel said that France would never come to rest because she missed the Reformation. And Carlyle shows in his heroic-humorous way how the French Revolution was only a vengeful return of the Protestantism that had been rejected two hundred years earlier.
The democracy that our liberalism affirms is not a doctrine and not a rhetorical philosophy of virtue from the eighteenth century. It is twofold. In its public nature, which is still spreading, it is a fact of modern life that is not without psychological and intellectual danger; and in its social mobility and method for aristocratic selection it is a technical desirability for the state. It is therefore not something to be enthusiastic about but something to recognize calmly and reasonably. It has nothing at all to do with “intellect” or with virtue. But as a fact and as a desirability it is not only compatible with a strong monarchical government, such a government actually forms its necessary corrective. Political opinions are volitional opinions; this lies in their nature; and since, if the word combination can seriously be allowed, we are dealing here with a “political confession,” I will therefore say what I want politically—and particularly what I do not want. I want the monarchy, I want a tolerably independent government, because it alone guarantees political freedom, both in the intellectual and in the economic spheres. I want it because it was the separation of the monarchical state government from the monied interests that gave the Germans leadership in social policy. I do not want the parliamentary and party economic system that causes the pollution of all national life with politics. I do not want Dreyfus to be condemned and then acquitted for political reasons—for the acquittal of an innocent person for political reasons is no less repulsive than his conviction on the same basis. I do not want the lungs of the petit sucrier condemned to a chamber quarrel, the tubercular man condemned to military service and to death because of reverse class justice, because the public beast’s foaming jaws “of justice” demand a sacrificial lamb. I do not want politics. I want objectivity, order, and decency. If this is philistine, then I want to be a philistine. If it is German, then in God’s name I want to be called a German, although this does not bring honor in Germany. And then, since we are talking about German character and politics, I also want to say two or even three words about the question of German or Prussian suffrage, which has again become a burning question, from the point of view of the German character and that of politics, two points of view that in my opinion must be well differentiated.
The democrats maintain that the resistance of the conservatives to the introduction of universal suffrage into the leading federal German state, which takes up three-fifths of the total area of the Reich, comes from interest in personal power. I argued against this that the conservatives are doubtless serious in their assertion that when Germany condescends to Western democracy, she has lost the war spiritually. They have this opinion because they are conservatives. Being conservative does not mean wanting to preserve everything that exists: the conservatives assert their readiness for reforms. Being conservative means: wanting to keep Germany German—and this is not exactly democracy’s will. The self-contradiction of the so-called “Fatherland’s Party” is that it ostensibly wants to “keep its distance” from domestic policy, and, using the word “party” in a nonpartisan, nonpolitical sense, only wants to bring Pan-Germany together in foreign policy. I call this a self-contradiction: for when one combines “Pan-Germany,” including, that is, all those who are intellectually, and not just economically, nationally minded and nationally inclined, one does not include democracy at all, but leaves it, as the hostile element, outside; this itself is taking sides in a domestic and conservative way; for conservative and national are one and the same—just as surely as democratic and international are one and the same—no matter what democracy may say against this.
In certain cases, democracy claims for itself the best German traditions. It finds its origins in German humanism, in the cosmopolitan burgherly nature of our great literary epoch. But German humanism is something different from democratic “human rights”; cosmopolitanism is something different from internationalism; the German cosmopolitan burgher is not a political burgher, he is not political—while democracy is not only political, it is politics itself. Politics, however, democracy, is in itself something un-German, anti-German; and the self-contradiction of democracy, or at least of a certain democracy, is that it wants to be both democratic and national at the same time, that it declares the name “Fatherland’s Party” to be an affront, and is mortally offended when anyone gives an indication of considering it less nationally reliable than the conservatives. In truth, it may be patriotic in its honest concern for the economic welfare of Germany, for her happiness and even for her power (for economics is of course a means and an expression of power) and in its opinion that Germany’s industrial blossoming is only served by democratic “understanding”—it is not national and cannot be so: its abstract concept of humanity, its whole intellectual tradition, gives the lie to this claim. “Today,” Rousseau has already said, “there are no more Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, or Englishmen to speak of; there are only Europeans who all have the same tastes, the same passions, the same customs, because none has received a national stamp from special institutions.” Here is the tradition of all intellectual democracy that is not just opportunistic-political. The joining of the democratic with the national idea is today an inadmissible liberality, an intellectual impurity: I say “today,” for seventy years ago that patriotic democracy, that politicism of the “German Brothers,” which Schopenhauer despised, was obviously something intellectually possible. Not today. Intellectual possibilities also have their lifetimes; they are exposed to destruction. Have the times become stricter, more divisive, inexorable, and radical in intellectual matters? They probably have; for in 1915 it is impossible to perceive the intellectual form of the national democratic man other than as an obsolete and faded form. It may be that those like me are from 1880. But national democracy is from 1848, and it only seems possible because every today finds the day before yesterday more elegant than yesterday.
I have mentioned the self-contradiction of the “Fatherland’s Party” and that of the national democratic man. Let no one say that I am suppressing my own self-contradiction and that of those like me. It is a German self-contradiction: it grows out of the antithesis between German tradition and political character, out of this national antithesis that was represented in 1813 by Goethe, in 1848 by Schopenhauer, and after 1871 by Nietzsche against the passion of the politicizing masses, and that still remains in force today, no matter how much it may be denied by the advocates of the politicization, that is: of the democratization of Germany. The one and only possibility in Germany is for national affirmation to imply negation of politics and democracy—and vice versa. When one sees things in a conservative way, one sees them antipolitically. On the other hand, one is not a politician and a democrat without being antinational, without being a cosmopolitan radical. In the intellectual sphere, the call for Germany’s politicization does not at all mean Germany’s call to power—we learn this every day. It means rather the will to revolution and to the political dissolution of Germany. On the other hand, it is possible that that same national sympathy and attachment that makes one wish for Germany’s victory, power, and historical greatness, also psychologically unquestioningly prescribes for one an antipolitical attitude, and makes one adopt completely the words that Overbeck wrote to Treitschke in 1873:
If our German past is really so bad, if it really has repeatedly shown us in such a deplorable way our political inability, as you, not least of all, have demonstrated to us, then one may well doubt whether it is precisely in politics that our fortune awaits us, and whether we have not again fallen into a bad situation with our present political fever.
This yes-and-still-no is my case. I have myself to blame for this self-contradiction that is reconciled not in logic but in national feeling, just as my opponent’s is reconciled in antinational feeling: it is the self-contradiction of this book, which at most presumes to present it, not to solve it.
So much for me. But as far as that democracy is concerned that gets hot-headed as soon as one accuses it of having less national interest than the conservatives, its sensitivity on this point is at best ignorance of its own deeper will—as far as it is not hypocrisy and tactics. At the right moment I notice a newspaper item that speaks quite remarkably to the point. It concerns a petition to both houses of the Prussian state parliament; it is from the German occupants of the Prussian eastern marches, and it has found more than sixty thousand signatures. The petition, it says, expresses the “deep concern” the eastern march Germans have about the imperial government’s policy; that “the imminent change in Prussian suffrage and its logical consequence, the change in communal suffrage, will lead to a strengthening of the Polish influence in the Prussian state parliament and to the complete Polonization of the hitherto German administration of the great majority of our cities.” This appeared in a little south German paper that reprinted the report, perhaps innocently, from a conservative Berlin organ; it did not appear in any of the large leftist-liberal papers—the report would have been tactically inopportune, and even if it has to do with the realization of “justice,” still the nationality of the eastern march city administration, the “deep concern” of the threatened Germans in these areas, is something of complete indifference to democracy.
I wanted to note and record this little-known fact, and with it I am again at the more narrow theme of this section: the question of suffrage, on which a position must be taken for better or worse. I will admit, then, that the moral and intellectual arguments in favor of equal suffrage seem to me to be weak and not very sound. One says, for example, that democratic conviction, the will to participation in the state in the democratic spirit and in democratic forms, has been powerfully promoted by the war, on the basis of the sacrifices the people have made, that is. But every conviction and every opinion has been promoted and strengthened by this war: the conservative-national one not less than the democratic one; and to say “not less” is to say too little. I know people, I even know German women, who have sacrificed their loved ones in the war: lost them, that is, and who during these years, instead of moving toward the “left,” have moved a good bit farther toward the “right.” Whoever would claim that this is not an exception but even the rule—and indeed precisely in those classes that are in the end the intellectually important ones, the upper social classes, not to say: the educated ones—would scarcely claim too much; and the increase in membership that the “Fatherland’s Party” is enjoying is only insufficiently explained by its campaign expenditures. Whoever travels and knows how to listen in Germany today will not return home with the conviction that the political opinion of the German people has been “democratized”—I am speaking from personal experience, and it has taught me rather the opposite. Let one visit the businessman, the academician, the artist (of course I do not mean the literary, intellectual one)—even the representative German artist of world fame, the musician; let one question the Pfitzners and the Straußes about their good wishes toward democracy and toward “equal suffrage,” one will be very surprised and not at all in a liberal way. One will see that radicalism in artistic tradition and a politically quite conservative attitude get along admirably together. I heard a famous conductor exclaim: “It will reach the point where the orchestra will vote on whether to play a passage piano or mezzoforte!” Let him who does not think this is serious read what Nietzsche says in Human, All Too Human, about the exemplary nature of the relationship between people and government for the intercourse between teacher and pupil, master and servant, father and family, army commander and soldier, master and apprentice.
Now the large newspapers say, to be sure, that it is the politically naive, the laymen, dilettantes, and idiots in politicis who are caught in the web of the “Fatherland’s Party” and resist democracy. But is it not precisely democracy that teaches that politics is “no secret science” and that there is no such thing as political dilettantism and a political laity? Does political maturity exist only in the press? Or should we rather stick to Wagner’s truth that it is democracy that in our country “only exists in the press”? By the way, the necessity of granting us democracy is based precisely on the fact that we have shown ourselves to be “ripe” for it. Ripe for democracy? Ripe for the republic? What stupidity! A people is either suited for this or that state and social form, or it is not. It is created for it, or it is not created for it. It never becomes “ripe” for it; and certain South American nations do not have a republic and “freedom” because they were “ripe” for it earlier.
The principle of general and equal suffrage is the principle of the plebiscite, and even dyed-in-the-wool democrats would prefer to reject this, assuming, for example, it involves debatable territorial questions. The plebiscite is then seen as a doctrinaire demand; one is of the hesitating opinion that there will be great difficulties in carrying it out, one doubts whether it would give the true picture of the people’s will. Large groups, one says, would always be found that would call the result of the vote wrong and unjust, a strong minority perhaps, and who knows whether it would not include the truly decisive elements? In a word, one is not consistent, one forgets that the same doubts apply to general and equal suffrage, too, even if the territorial questions concern a population that is 75 percent illiterate and the question of suffrage concerns a well-educated mass. If a people is “more than the sum of its parts,” then the people has not spoken when one has questioned the parts individually. It is not intellectual playfulness to say that the will of the people can be something else than that of the “sum” of the mass. A mechanical-democratic plebiscite in the Germany of the third year of the war would with lamentable probability produce an overwhelming majority in favor of an immediate and unconditional, that is, a ruinous peace. But here the principle of the plebiscite is carried ad absurdum, for that would by no means be the will of the people. The will of a historically rising people is one with its fate.
I repeat that all positive arguments in favor of equal suffrage, as far as they have intellectual and moral pretensions, seem untenable to me. What I for my part put in its place is the conclusion that in a sphere in which it is impossible to give each his own, nothing else remains but to give everyone the same. This is not just, but it has popular simplicity, and we live in a time that is not suited for the best thought-out justice but for the most easily comprehensible one. For me, there is no doubt that it is precisely in a differentiated people of great intellectual disparity such as the German that a multivote suffrage law tempered with wisdom and taking into account accomplishment, age, degree of education, and intellectual rank, as well as whether one had sons and therefore had not only an egotistical-personal interest in the formation of the state but also a farther-looking one—that such a suffrage law could be relatively more just than the universal one: for in all human efforts, there can of course only be a question of relative justice. But the more thought-through, aristocratic, ingeniously graduated, and inventive in its approximation to justice such a voting law would be, the less it would be able to seem to be the right one to the masses, who, you see, only consider the most simple, the clumsiest, and the most primitive type of justice, the one that without much ado gives everyone the same, to be the right one. The fact that they even consider it to be absolutely just puts them in the moral position of resisting every aristocratic right with a fervor unattainable for those who realize the imperfection of every system of law, and with which they must carry off the victory. And politics can only be pursued today with the masses and their primitive, antiaristocratic enthusiasm for justice. All the political efforts of intellect, wisdom, and high acumen, such as we find in political thinkers, for example, like Adam Müller, whose reflections on political science are perhaps the most brilliant and true ones ever made on this matter—all this, I say, seems like a beautiful, luxurious, and fruitless game in the face of the real, unchangeable, and unstoppable course of political development that is leading directly into what is more and more suited to the mass-primitive element, into the radical democratic world. This can be established, and with that respect that one owes to fate, acknowledged. But precisely because of the fact that intellect, philosophy, and valuable thought quite clearly have nothing more to do and say in politics, there follows the necessity of separating intellectual from political life, of letting the latter take its fatal path and of raising the former above such fatality to serene independence. As things stand, no demand is more ridiculous and impudent than the one calling for the “politicization of intellect”—as if intellect had to be politicized because politics is not capable of intellect and is degenerating more and more into a type of rhetorical vulgarization. But intellectual life is national life, and it is this one must separate from political life—a decision that may and must admittedly seem difficult or impossible to the conservative politician. But let them consider that the national culture not only can reach out more extensively than the state, than public, legally organized life (it does so in the case of the German Reich, which, of course, does not at all encompass the German cultural area), but that it also—and this in any case—is more extensive, more personal than the legal system, and this is why one would do an injustice to ascribe to the latter an exaggerated importance for the higher and true life of the nation. It is just as much an intellectual impossibility for the personality to be completely absorbed in the state today (precisely because the state is giving up more and more of its metaphysical character and it is becoming less and less possible to maintain an agreement between political and religious life)—as it is for the legal system to absorb and transmit the personal element of a higher category, the national culture. The truth that the conservative politician finds so difficult to accept, and that he nevertheless will have to accept, is that the state, the legal system for the most part, or to a great extent, is a matter of international civilization and not of national culture. Are perhaps those people right who oppose the legalization of a specifically “German” freedom? “Freedom,” says Büchner’s Danton—and I cite the passage certainly not for the last time—“freedom and a whore are the most cosmopolitan things under the sun.” It would therefore probably be too much to demand that freedom recognize nationality. On the other hand, there are expressions about freedom that prove that the insight into the unpoliticizability of the absolute is not a German privilege. “Liberty is the most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms,” Ruskin wrote in 1849 in his book The Seven Lamps of Architecture. “There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.” This could have come from Goethe or Schopenhauer, or even Adalbert Stifter; and comes nevertheless from a person at home in the land where political freedom originated. One should perhaps not wish to treat politics all too nationally. It is not the material for it, it is not worth it.
To separate intellectual, national life from political life, and to differentiate between them is, however, a thoroughly German, a Kantian way of separating and differentiating. The difference between intellect and politics is that of pure and practical reason; and, far from even being able to be an object of intellectual enthusiasm, the granting of universal and equal suffrage to Prussia seems also to me, today, to be a postulate of practical reason. Faced with the decision, I will also vote for it. It could have been avoided if the government had in good time shown itself ready for reforms; as things stand today, it can scarcely be avoided without endangering the state itself, and its thwarting for intellectual reasons of principle would probably be, in quite a similar way, a sign of Germany’s political nonviability and lack of a future, like an ideologically determined peace by resignation in foreign policy. That patriotic idea of expediency-democracy, no matter how illicit it may be from an intellectual point of view, has, in the end, its good, practical-political justification; and the intellectual and artist who, out of national sympathy or attachment, wishes Germany’s political greatness, should not be prevented by this attachment, but moved by it, to advocate a democratic form of government in Germany today: realizing that one should not overestimate the significance of legal order for national life, with all intellectual reservations, by the way, and in the quiet confidence that the German Volksstaat will show important and quite national differences from the democracy of the rhetorical bourgeois.
I do not need more. This is the quantum of “politics” I need for everyday use. In it one notices some opposition to the principle that civic education is education itself. This principle is not German, no matter how honest the voices may sound that express it. Education is the formation of human beings, and never will the German spirit understand “the human being” to be exclusively or even predominantly the social human being. He will also never believe that culture is a means, that it amounts to something like the mastering of nature and to the greatest possible equal distribution of goods attained in this manner; he will rather hold fast to the opinion that culture is an “end in itself”; he will not cease to accord goals to it that have meaning in themselves, without regard, for example, to utility or to the state. Besides, nothing in these principles contradicts the demand, called forth by the war, for the Volksstaat. If it is truly a demand of the people, then it has ceased to be mere demand. The Volksstaat is nothing to be granted; it is here when the people are here who think and perceive of the state in this way. And my heart and my reason would be with the young people returning from the war who have to bring about the acknowledgement of a political fact, yes, have to force it. I want to leave no doubt about this here, either for myself or for anyone else.
The Volksstaat, the politicization of the people, to say it once more, is necessary because Germany has been put “into the saddle” and must not fall off; it is necessary for the sake of the governmental tasks she feels called to. But the thought is completely unbearable to me that it could even appear that democratic progress in the sense, say, of English ministerial speeches, had been forced upon us from outside, as if Germany had had to yield and to submit intellectually. And nevertheless, the national danger seems to me to lie in the fact that the Volksstaat in its domestic and foreign realization will be confused with democracy in the Western sense and understanding—even more that it could prove to be impossible to realize it in any other way than in the intellectual and political forms of the West; yes, that it would develop according to the minds of those who understand by the politicization of Germany not just a more popular formation of our public institutions, a more passionate, genuine, and growing intimacy of the relationship between nation and state—who would not find this as desirable as necessary!—but rather the complete politicization and republicanization of the nation; and this would really mean that change in the structure of the German spirit that many would prefer to recognize as a necessity rather than a desirability; its leveling, narrowing, impoverishing, that is, the transformation of a world people into a political one, one “that flies in a ‘V’ formation,” that “crystallizes in every meeting into a practice revolution or a one-day republic.” In this case, democratization would be external conformance, conformance to the world level of civilization; nationalization in this sense would be denationalization, it would be the stultification of the German into a social and political animal, it would be de-Germanization—and what purpose in the whole world could German leadership tasks have after this?
Impossible? Such a process is not impossible! It is taking place, it is related to Bismarck’s life work, who, to be sure, completed this work with aristocratic-conservative and not with democratic-liberal means. State and nation were not at all identical concepts for him, and he had no liking for the idea of Greater Germany, which was democratic. Admittedly, there is no Greater German state, and democracy is not at once the logically necessary appendage of the Small-German state. Nevertheless, Bismarck, too, in spite of his antiliberalism, considered democracy to be a part of his national state to the extent that he placed universal military duty alongside general suffrage; the development of his continental power-Reich followed a more centralist, imperialistic direction; and the phase of German politicization and democratization that has been achieved today, or that people are urgently being beseeched to achieve, is nothing other than just a new phase of that process that Bismarck started and that Nietzsche rejected “in the conservative interest” in order to preserve German tradition. But that this process will be accomplished in ways other than the prepatterned, traditional ones, even if they have in no way been proven successful, that it will be able to be anything different and more than a copying and hobbling after what is not just doubtful but notoriously unproven—is unlikely; for all demands that extend beyond the most general ones that are being expressed today have to do with continuous, mechanical democratization, the reform of suffrage, the formation of parliamentarianism.
“On the whole, however, I wish,” Nietzsche writes, “that the idiocy of numbers and the superstitious belief in majorities would not yet become established in Germany as it has in the Latin races; and that one would finally invent something in politicis! There is little sense and much danger in allowing the habit of general suffrage, whose roots are still short-lived and easy to destroy, to become more deeply embedded, for its introduction was only an emergency and a momentary measure.” The “habit” is no longer short and no longer “easy to destroy,” I believe. But Paul de Lagarde, who observed things from a less precipitous height than Nietzsche, who did not pass judgment on them so casually and condescendingly, but who rather stood among his own people as a straightforward but also passionate patriot, expressed himself in a very similar way on suffrage and on the will of the people.
“One must understand quite completely,” he says,
that a nation does not consist of primordial voters. It does this just as little as a picture by Raphael is composed of canvas and bits of color. . . . The individuals stand as such, as egoisms, that is, even in contrast to the nation. . . . The nation does not speak at all when the single individuals who make up the nation speak. The nation only speaks when the nationhood (I am happy to use Goethe’s very appropriate but forgotten expression) is expressed in the individuals: that is—
let this beautiful phrase be introduced for the second time; I love it very much because it seems to me to express perfectly how far politics is at all appropriate and permissible for the people and the artist, the intellectual—
that is, when the consciousness of a common basic and tribal nature of all individuals awakens and clearly sees its relationship to great deeds of history. In wars such as those of 1866 and 1870, the nation speaks even when one only questions the sum of its individual members . . . in individual laws and individual administrative regulations, the nation remains quite silent, even if one goes from man to man for his opinion, and receives an answer man for man. As a totality, the nation thinks only about totalities . . . Where general suffrage is the last word of wisdom, one does not weigh the votes, one counts them. My pupils shall recognize this immoral way of reaching a conclusion to be immoral.
Thus Lagarde. And in all this, he begins unambiguously with the idea, which is democratic, if you will, that the nation itself has a voice in matters that affect it. Nevertheless, one can call him a conservative; for to be German-conservatively disposed does not mean: to preserve everything that exists, but it means: to want to keep Germany German, nothing more. And above all, it is German not to confuse the nation with the mass that is composed of individuals-atoms. “The principles of 1789,” Lagarde says,
have been transplanted to Germany, and one calls their representatives liberals. . . . Naturally, these principles can be even less successfully applied to Germany than to France. For if they arise altogether from theory, not from necessity and truth, if, as early as under Louis Philippe, they forfeited the most ruthless honesty of their raving, murdering, and dying fathers, then they have no more right anywhere on earth to be principles: their specific and very original Celtic flavor from the Paris of 1789 has made them neither more agreeable nor more justified to Germany, because Germany is basically aristocratic and could only become more un-German and therefore more unhappy from all that Celtic egalitarian nonsense.
To be sure, this does not sound democratic. But the aristocracy and conservatism of the praeceptor Germaniae are combined quite effortlessly with the most definite affection for his people, and nothing can be more national than this synthesis. When he demands “that one admit openly that in present-day Germany the possibility of freedom and self-government does not yet exist, that at present there is only government; that one, however, by seriously undertaking the genuine education of a few, selected not according to birth but according to their ethical and intellectual capacity, create a class that, appointed by and working for this people, and respected for this voluntary work, supplementing itself freely from below, can at some time in the future undertake self-government”; when he demands further “that one increase the wealth of the country so that such a class would also have the external means that makes it independent, without which self-government is a laughable farce or a martyrdom”; that one “put an end” to the parliament that has no power yet talks and votes and does not represent the people, then such demands do not seem to be from 1878 but from 1917: they are of the greatest timeliness today, and they have never ceased quietly to be timely; they are one with the demands for social freedom, unrestricted social mobility, and aristocratic selection that take precedence today over all merely political demands for freedom; they are national; but not democratic; and when Lagarde judges that paths other than those of the counting of votes must be taken to support the idea that the people themselves have the right to speak on matters concerning them, to help them to their rights, then this is only another formulation of Nietzsche’s wish “that at long last one would invent something new in politicis.”
The European philosopher does not say what this new element would consist of, and the national politician presents little to define those institutions that would unfold the true nature of the Germans. How could an artist who is taken away from his real, eccentric-personal tasks by the violent character of the times to reflect on his people’s fate dare to contribute more than they! He can only repeat from deepest personal conviction what the great ones of his nation, say, the Nietzsches, Lagardes, and Wagners, that democracy in the Western sense and taste is alien to us, an imported creature that “only exists in the press,” and can never become German life and German truth.
“Germany must become politicized!” But would she become politicized by copying the political institutions of others, introducing a parliament, and then, without belief or hope, by hobbling after the Western nations into the area that is recognized as unproven? If the Germans do not possess enough political ability to create their own original, that is, national institutions, their own national type of freedom, or, as far as it exists, to maintain it; if, on the contrary, they find they must copy the “genuinely political nations,” then they should not imagine that they are called to politics at all. What is freedom, anyway? Everyone answers me: it means to be allowed to live according to one’s own laws of life. But no matter whether one calls it scholarly, burgherly, backward, or tasteless—it is still true and will never cease being so that to politicize the German concept of freedom is already to falsify it. Our religious and philosophical history impresses itself so strongly on even the most unlearned person that he, forced to national consciousness by this war, cannot think and feel otherwise. There is a symbol for the German separation of intellect and politics, of radical theory and life, of “pure” and “practical” thinking: the two separate volumes of Kant’s twofold critique that stand side by side. I know well that the fastidious person resists rethinking a thought, no matter how true it may be, that has been thought a hundred times. But here it is not a matter of the novelty and unusualness of the thought, but of the simple and lasting truth in it. And even if truths age and die; if it is disgraceful to fight new things with worn-out truths, there are still truths that do not become obsolete, do not become banal and despicable—or that can only become so for snobs and political aesthetes: facts of the national spirit, bound to the structure of this spirit and incapable of aging. In my opinion, such a fact and unpretentious-unshakable truth is that the German concept of freedom will always be of a spiritual nature: an individualism that in order to reveal itself politically must create institutions other than those barren-abstract ones of the political West and of “human rights.” Lagarde says that since it is important to achieve Germany’s inner unity, one must reach back to the genuine German individualism of our fathers, for, enclosed within solid boundaries, this individualism will do no more harm. “All that matters,” he says, “is granting the individual human being his rights, and for him to obtain these rights, there must, on the one hand, be institutions that will lift him above himself, while on the other hand all institutions that prevent him from developing his genuine individuality must be destroyed: the first thing to be done is to do away with the Prussian educational system.” Here I pride myself a little that the only political criticism I have exercised within my literary production was directed against the Prussian secondary school!
Away, then, with the alien and repulsive slogan, “democratic!” Never will the mechanical-democratic state of the West be naturalized with us. Let one Germanize the word, let one say “national” instead of “democratic”—and one names and grasps the exact opposite: for German-national means “free”—inwardly and outwardly, but it does not mean “equal”—neither inwardly nor outwardly. Who would want to resist a more national organization of the Reich’s and of the public’s affairs? None of those, I guarantee, who in a certain sense resist with the most intense repugnance the democratization, the politicization of Germany. Germany as res publica—there is no objection. But Germany as a republic, as a virtue-state with a social contract, a democratic people’s government and the “complete absorption of the individual in the totality”; Germany as a state and nothing more, and the German human being as a Jacobin and citoyen vertueux with the citizen’s certificate in his pocket—this would be a fright! And especially: it would no longer be Germany. Evolution, development, originality, manifoldness, and richness of individuality have always been the basic law of German life. This life has always resisted centralization, has never received its customs from a principal, central point. The German has been free and unequal, that is, aristocratic. The Reformation was admittedly a democratic event: for the emancipation of the layman is democracy, and in the political area it is precisely what Nietzsche calls “a literary-like joining in the discussion of everyone about everything.” But Luther’s most original and profound impact, too, was of an aristocratic nature: he perfected the freedom and self-authority of the German human being by internalizing them and thus removing them forever from the sphere of the political argument. Protestantism took the intellectual sting from politics. It made politics into a matter of practice. From Kant we have the belief in the predominance of “practical reason,” of ethics. From him we have the social imperative. But the coming of Goethe was a new confirmation of the legitimacy of the individual being, it was Germany’s great artistic experience after the metaphysical-religious one that Luther had brought: an experience of culture and sensuality, completely human, foreign to all abstraction, hostile to all ideology, to patriotic ideology first, to all political ideology in general. A nation does not experience an intellect such as this, it does not even create one, without always having had and continuing to have a different attitude than the others toward those generous, magical-fraudulent words: mankind, freedom, equality, revolution, and progress.
Freedom, duty, and freedom again, that is Germany. One says to be sure that epochs of individualistic and of social thought alternate in history; but for the German intellectual constitution there is no conflict here and no necessity to shift and fluctuate between two hostile principles. It remains the peculiarity of German individualism that it gets along very well with ethical socialism, which one calls state socialism, and which is something different from the human-rights, Marxist type. For the social principle is only hostilely opposed by the individualism of the enlightenment, the liberal individualism of the West. There is an anti-individualism that includes the freedom of the individual, and to negate the individualistic enlightenment does not mean to favor the socialization of the individual and his absorption in the state—as one in all likelihood has believed in the West and as one will, we hope, never start believing here. “Organization”—a highly intellectual word! “Organism”—truly a word of life! For an organism is more than the sum of its parts, and precisely this “more” is spirit, is life. But if “organization,” this other political slogan of today, is to mean enslavement of the individual by the state, state absolutism, that is, even if it is the absolutism of the Volksstaat, yes, even if it is precisely this—then down with it, too! For nothing would be more anti-German and antihuman than such an organizational absolutism: princely absolutism, under which the individual seldom came off badly, would be preferred with just as much calm as resoluteness to the unlimited rule of the state, even to that of the Volksstaat, if by such a state one means a Jacobin-virtue republic!
Truly, with the voices of those excessive adherents of state piousness in my ears, voices that categorically hold that human nature exists to be “organized,” completely organized and socialized, and to be unconditionally absorbed in the state-social unit, I can hardly resist the temptation to select some of Lagarde’s sharpest words about state and nation, state and freedom, state and human nature; and if I do not resist it, my possible readers should not reproach me for overloading this “book” with quotations. It has no claim to the form and appearance, or even to the name, “book”: the likes of me naturally looks around for help at every step in order, in a work of anguish and pain such as this, to find authoritative support for his feeling; it is difficult enough for him even with it; he is full of gratitude for everything offered him, and he does not worry much about the readability of his composition. Lagarde, for his part, cites Madame de Staël, referring with bitterness to her statement that there are three qualities on which the superiority of the German character over the French rests: the independence of the spirit, the love of loneliness, and the special nature of the individual human being. Yes, this makes one feel good! This man abhorred politics and “politicization” as much as any great German before him; he wanted no politics in the state, but what he called the “selfless service of the ethos, that is, the full realization of the basic principle that the state stands in the same relationship to the nation as the housewife to the master of the house, that it has to take care of all external matters so that the nation can look closely at the really essential part of life and deal with it.” He demanded “that one make religion, science and art independent because all these things only exist when they are independent.” He demanded “a Reich that is only a state to the extent that the nation cannot do without the state,” and “the recognition, education, and transfiguration of our own nature.” He fumed against Hegel with a scorn and hatred such as before him only Schopenhauer had done; he protested against the idolatry of the state, against the teaching that the state is the highest form of human life—protested against this Roman and heathen viewpoint in the name of evangelical and Germanic freedom. He wanted to have the state looked upon “as an ancillary machine vis-à-vis which the issue was not at all conservative, liberal, freethinking, or Catholic, but only whether it worked to our contentment, and, if possible, with modest costs.” He wanted no career politicians in parliament. He wanted the government supervised only by those “who have already learned on a small scale to judge and to direct public life before they begin to judge and direct it on a grand scale.” That is, he wanted no literary-like “joining in the discussion by everyone about everything.” In his opinion,
it is everywhere a matter of know-how, and to the extent that the people outside the civil service have this know-how, they may exercise a check on the government, but neither should those who do not have this know-how be so bold as to speak up, nor should those, who by the nature of things have learned all the ins and outs of their particular governmental specialties, be subject to the judgment of the uninformed.
There wouldn’t be much of a Volksstaat, it would be rather an unnational, everyday dummy state, if all one meant by it were parliamentary democracy. It would be an abomination of politicization and organization if it meant the absorption of the nation in the state and the “absorption of the individual in the whole.” The human being is not only a social, but also a metaphysical being; the German human being first of all.
The economic situation the war has produced will mean that for decades after the war everyone will have to work and earn almost exclusively for the state. Should the human being, therefore, not be allowed to belong to himself at least intellectually, spiritually? Will not the need for spiritual independence grow tremendously in the unprecedented social constraint and compulsory serfdom that will come? The tenderest cultivation and care of the aristocratic-individual element, the highest curiosity and sympathy for the unique individual soul, the special spiritual value—are indispensable as a counterweight to the organized socialism in the state of the future: or life will not be worth a shilling anymore.
Voices of the times—they join together to make noise, not music, for they know nothing of one another. One must separate them, one must listen to them separately to understand them. When two people say “democracy,” it is from the first probable that they mean something quite different; one must discuss things with them individually. If our hero and friend, civilization’s literary man, demands “politicization,” and “organization”—and he does so—he has something completely different in mind from the democratic patriot and the patriotic democrat whom we just heard using the same words. The difference, for example, between the southwest-German, Frenchifying liberalism of the thirties and forties of the last century, and the liberalism of the wars of liberation, that of Stein and Arndt, is small compared to the difference between the democratic theory of civilization’s literary man and that of the patriotic national statesman. To be sure, we found that democracy is nothing more than the individual’s right to be active as a patriot, and that it logically should not be possible to demand general politicization and democracy and at the same time to pay homage to antipatriotic, antinational attitudes. This logical postulate, however, is not fulfilled by reality. The democratic type, on whom we will now reflect again, namely civilization’s literary man, has nothing to do with the patriotic democrat who is moved by reason and current events to demand the identity of people and state, the politicization of minds and hearts, so that Germany can live, so that she can live powerfully and masterfully. Civilization’s literary man does not demand democracy because Germany “must ride and must not fall off,” and because whoever wants the end must also want the means; he wants it for its own sake. For him, Germany’s politicization is not so much necessity as desirability as such, as progress itself—progress, that is, on the way to European equalization, to that leveling development in the sense of the homogeneous civilization of which we spoke—this progress that Nietzsche himself, modern Germany’s greatest prophetic spirit, certainly furthered, if not intentionally, although on the other hand he still opposed it in the “conservative” interest: a Janus-faced behavior in which he shows double loyalty, by which it is explained and made possible, that today, too, in one and the same individual, there can be just as much tendency to give this progress actual support as to argue against it.
No, our civilization politician is not concerned with any sort of German mission to live powerfully and masterfully! It is not enough to say that he does not warm up to the idea: he flatly rejects it, and would be quite agreeable to have the Rhine as a boundary: agreeable for no other reason but that the restitution of the Rhine border would also mean the restitution of the continent-wide, intellectual-political predominance of France, of the homeland of his soul. Truly, if he were not such an exemplary Frenchman, one would have to call him a German idealist, and indeed, one is not only tempted, but even forced to recognize in him a German idealist and nothing else when one hears the answer, the nobly evasive answer he gives without fail when one seriously presses him on the Rhine border question, when one urges him to say clearly whether he really could seriously desire its definite restitution. He will answer: “At that time Germany had a great literature.”
That she had. But first of all, of course, it has not been lost. I even hear it said that this literature had something or other to do with the unification of Germany, with the establishment of the Reich, that is—for the Small-German Reich is, after all, the form in which the unification of Germany was completed. I hear it said that never in all the history of nations has a literature played such a role as German literature from 1750 on did for a whole century. Thus while other nations, out of patriotism, to further the progress of the country, have created for themselves a tendentious literature, while their art and poetry have served politics from the very beginning so that the artistic value of a work was probably of secondary importance to the purpose: while this is approximately what happened in other places, in Germany, science, literature, and art have existed only for their own sake alone—l’art pour l’art it is called in French; I hear that all forces, all the sympathetic participation of the culturally educated people, have aimed for this goal; to be sure, they said it was always national, but never political, and that it pursued no other purpose than to serve truth and beauty. But the very strange thing was that German art, precisely because it “wanted” nothing else but honest accomplishment in its sphere, precisely for this reason, as the burgher, Freytag, says, its pure flame glowed through the tender heart of the Germans until it was hardened for a great political battle. What am I thinking of? Our classical literature politically without will, art for art’s sake, egotistical, unburgherly in the public sense and “burgherly” only in a completely different, parasitic sense—was it nevertheless a political tool that served to prepare German unity? Could one therefore be an “aesthete” and still have a national-political effect—could one even do this better if one did not stultify oneself by becoming an activistic democrat, but simply worked educationally in freedom, educationally in the sense of forming, of perfecting the individual? This would be the overthrow of all moral order! In the meantime, those I hear talking in this way could call to witness the grand sovereign of that literary cultural epoch, Goethe, who, it is true, at first declared in the conversation with the historian, Luden, that in art and science, before which national boundaries disappear, he had found the wings on which he could raise himself above Germany’s political misery, but who then added that the consolation they provided was only a miserable consolation and did not replace the proud consciousness of belonging to a great, strong, respected, and feared (he said brutally, “feared”) nation; and, after he had expressed his belief in the future political power of Germany, finished with the words:
All that remains for us as individuals in the meantime is for each according to his talents, his inclination, and his position, to further, to strengthen the nation’s culture, and to spread it throughout the people in all directions, as much, and preferably more, to the upper levels as to the lower ones, so that our nation will not stay behind the others, but will at least be ahead of them in this point, so that our spirit will not become stunted, but will remain fresh and cheerful, so that it will not despair and become faint-hearted, but will remain capable of every great deed when the day of glory dawns.
This last turn of phrase has an embarrassingly French quality. But does not all this look as if Goethe thought of the great cultural epoch he dominated as nothing more than a preparatory epoch—as if with his aesthetic, politically quietist artistic practice, he had almost consciously, no, quite consciously prepared the “day of glory,” the day of German unity and rule?
“At that time Germany had a great literature.” Oh, yes, that she had. But after one has considered whether the restitution of the Rhine border would provide a definite guarantee for the reappearance of a classical literature, one can finally no longer keep from asking who is really the “aesthete” here, the one who wishes at the bottom of his progressive heart that Germany, so that she can once again throw herself into the arms of beautiful literature, be deprived of power, broken up, and set back a hundred years—or the one who not only affirms Goethe but also Bismarck because he believes that in the end Bismarck understood and reembodied Goethe better than the civilization democrat? We want to be honest! In the thought of leading Germany back to her previous nonpolitical, suprapolitical condition, there is a deep, emotional temptation for every intellectual German that we must neither misjudge nor underestimate. What advantages for the spirit the restitution of this old condition would entail! What superiority there is in standing apart, in observing, in not being involved, in not wanting, in the cynical philosophizing that only bids Alexander get out of the sun—what freedom, irony, cheerfulness, purity, humanity would be won in this way, even if the national reality would again be depressed, wretched, and without worldly dignity as before! But can one avoid admiring and defending this nation’s universal will, its will to reality and influence, justified and demonstrated as it is by the most earnest application, by mighty deeds and stupendous accomplishments? No radical literary man is necessary to teach us that the “man of power,” Bismarck, was a misfortune, or to express it in a somewhat more reverential, positive way, a destiny, not only for the peace and quiet of the dear old cultural empires of Europe, but also in a very definite sense for Germany, and that the reality of his Reich was not exactly the governmental form to further the national tendency to pure humanity, spiritualization, and intellectuality, as did the abstract condition of Germany a hundred years ago. But since civilization’s literary man is definitely a shrewd politician and not a frivolous aesthete—can he wish and demand that his people return to the nonpolitical humanity, to the egotistical atomism, to the egocentric culture of the Goethean epoch? Who, I repeat, is the aesthete here, anyway? Civilization’s literary man does not, on the whole, like Goethe very much, the antirevolutionary, the quietist, the servant of princes. A hundred times he has played Voltaire off against him, the man of the Calas affair against the one who dared to say that he would rather tolerate injustice than disorder. But he plays Goethe off against the Reich and agrees quite uncritically with everybody’s democratic opinion that the power Reich is an affront to the spirit of Weimar. Should he not rather conclude from the equal aversion he cherishes against them both, against Goethe and Bismarck, that the two are related and belong together? Should he not conclude from this equal aversion that they both are powerfully characteristic examples—more like outbreaks—of that cursed, refractory German tradition that is inimical to literature, yes, that Goethe was this way, too, in spite of his refractoriness to the wars of liberation and his liking for Napoleon—outbreaks of German tradition, I say, that disgust civilization’s literary man, and into the midst of which he should neither bring himself nor presume to interpose himself as a political preceptor? Politics! The creation of the Reich was in an extremely German, that is, antiradical sense a “political” creation, a work of practical reason, a concession of thought to matter, so that reality, so that “life,” could come into existence, and life is indeed not beautiful literature. The Reich is not less a German realization than, for example, the France of today is the realization of the French philosophy of the eighteenth century—a living Reich, with all the dross, errors, and baseness of life, yes indeed. But if civilization’s literary man absolutely must have the question answered of whether Goethe would have approved of the “Reich,” then one might counter with the question of whether Rousseau, for example, or that pedantic, murderous philistine who called himself his disciple, would have agreed with the reality of the république française as it presents itself today to the delighted gaze of civilization’s literary man.
We have digressed. This book is a constant digressing, that lies in its nature—I wanted to say that the democratic type we are now considering would not allow Herweghian naval songs to cross his lips. Democracy and imperialism—this combination may be admissible somewhere else, may be intellectually possible in France and England—and indeed, in a way that the democracy sanctifies the imperialism—in Germany it is not permissible and downright impossible. For uppermost to Germany, uppermost to the German radical literary man, at least, is the antithesis that we, if I am not mistaken, characterized earlier as the supreme, the general antithesis of this sharp and passionately ingenious thinker: the antithesis of power and intellect.
In the end, one must see that the necessity and inviolability of this thesis for Germany can also be disputed. A passage in one of Adalbert Stifter’s letters from 1859 comes to mind that does not recognize it, that obviously knows nothing about it. “And Germany,” it says there,
should she, standing at the top of the world in intellect and power, matching the divine image of Hellas, which she really does match in depth of thought, youthful warmth, high-mindedness, and enthusiasm, shall she also, like the Greek image, be shattered by the disunity of her members?
Never, nowhere, have intellect and power formed an antithesis in the life of nations, for the basis of this life, what creates a state, has always been something spiritual, something like a religious idea, and the state has always been an institution to assure power to the national, intellectual treasury of ideas at home, and to assure it peace, expansion, and triumph abroad. No matter. The “and” is no longer a copula; today it opposes, it separates the good from the definitely bad, it puts one before the choice, at the moral crossroads, when the democratic politician of civilization expresses it: For his antithesis of intellect and power—let us look at it more carefully! Is it not a political antithesis? And should one not also give it a political name? “Intellect and power,” this is nothing other than “domestic policy and foreign affairs.” But while in the honest opinion of the patriotic democrat, of the man of the Volksstaat, domestic policy and foreign affairs are inseparably connected, yes, while to him the democratization of the state, a national domestic policy, seems to be directed mainly toward the establishment of a strong foreign policy, civilization’s literary man, when he says “politics,” means purely domestic policy: for him, it is politics—not only “par excellence,” but also politics itself, in toto. What one calls “foreign policy,” in order not to call it plainly, “power politics,” does not, in his opinion, at all deserve the name of politics, but only that of wrong, brutality, and crime; and it would be nothing else than this, nothing else than injustice, brutality, and crime, to permit the so-called foreign policy, the idea of power, to have the slightest influence on the true, domestic policy: On the contrary, domestic policy must be regulated exclusively by the radical intellect; it must—passages in dix-huitième taste are the only proper style here—“steadfastly take the principles of reason and justice as a guide.”
The politician of civilization, as we have already said, is the man of intellect, of pure, beautiful, radical, and literary intellect; he is the man of domestic policy, and indeed, to such an extent that the present demand for “politicization” means nothing other in his mouth than the most complete concentration of all minds and hearts on domestic policy—and on what a policy! “World-political study societies,” and similar organizations for the political education of the German people, cannot please him at all; from the beginning they are bound to have for him the odor—not so much of democracy, but of imperialism. But politics, domestic policy, democratic policy, is not imperialism and the misuse of power, it is morality—and the politician of civilization is, above all, a moralist, nothing but a moralist—that is, a political one.
Now it must be admitted unquestioningly that in foreign policy, morality almost always gets the short straw. When Macaulay says: “The principles of politics are so constituted that the basest thief would be afraid even to hint at them to his closest accomplice”—he undoubtedly means, with this amusing rhetorical flourish, foreign policy; and one knows of founders of states who, after their work had been completed, said they did not know whether they could still be reckoned among men of honor. To be sure, any smart aleck could ask whether domestic policy is any more moral, whether it is not, on the contrary, even five times dirtier than foreign policy, and whether anyone has ever come out of it “with a pure soul.” However, this would only be dialectical teasing and would have no relevance in this connection. More serious doubts could be raised about the unity of domestic policy and morality—about this unity represented and embodied by civilization’s literary man—when one runs across differentiations in the literature such as, for example: “individual-moral—general-political.” Things like this do occur. It happens in intellectual life that one finds the concepts “moral” and “political” being treated as opposites, as, for example, in that important passage where Taine compares the revolutionary Frenchman with his English counterpart, the Puritan, whose activity, he says, is above all directed inward, with self-denial as its first purpose; it is moral before it becomes political. The French type shows the opposite picture. He worries first of all about the political, not the moral side of things; he places much more emphasis upon his rights than on his duties; and instead of being a spur to his conscience, his doctrine flatters his pride. This is, as I have said, extremely important and interesting. It is a psychological antithesis that great writers have often treated independently of one another: Dostoyevsky did it in the deepest and most magnificent way in his immortal and unbelievably timely—timely for Russia and Germany—polemic against the liberal Professor Gradovsky—an enchantingly brilliant treatise on the social ideal and personal ethics, on politics and Christianity. One finds it, together with other vitally timely things, in the volume Literary Writings, from the German complete edition of his works, and we will probably have to return to it.
But for now it is fortunate that we can stay in Russia for the preliminary maintenance of the antithesis, “moral” and “political,” so that we may see things from the other side, from the opposing party’s point of view. I promise that in the process we will come upon a short, lively, and accurate formula for our antithesis, a formula we will be able to use gratefully every time we need it.
Around the middle of the last century, at the time when Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons appeared, a politicizing, radical group of young men appeared in Russia that “went to the people,” young men to whom “everything not concerned with politics seemed ridiculous and even absurd.” All of them were “literary activists,” as the aesthete, Turgenev, called them, all of them propagandists and demonstrators who would not pardon the aforementioned aesthete because even though he did, to be sure, politicize in his masterwork, he only did so in a poetic, that is, in a human way; they would not pardon him for having been just to the conservatives, to the “reactionary mob,” to the high tory, Paul Petrovich Kirzanov, as well as to the revolutionary and radical, Basarov—just and critical; for giving to both characters from his soul, his problematic soul that was both conservative, yes, reactionary and radical, both aristocratic and democratic, doubting and disciplined, melancholy and truth loving—yes, they even accused him of obscurantism and of abuse of progress, they found Basarov to be an attack, a lampoon, an insult, and what they said about Basarov’s friend, the young Kirzanov, they meant also for the undependable aesthete, Turgenev himself: “Kirzanov’s son has, of course, neither impudence nor malice; people like him will not go beyond well-born humility or well-born indignation, both are hoaxes; we want to fight; you want to criticize yourselves; we want to criticize others and to break them; you just remain the soft, liberal, spoiled son of the ruling class.” That is the formula! “You want to criticize yourselves; we want to criticize others and to break them,” that is a good, clear, ever-valid differentiation and definition; it is the definition of the antithesis between personal ethics and social-humanitarianism, between puritanism and Jacobinism, between duty and right, between Christianity and socialism, between domestic policy and foreign affairs; and our hero, civilization’s literary man, the political activist, the humanitarian who posits the antithesis of power and spirit, and the savior from aestheticism, he who does not want to criticize himself at all, but who wants to criticize others and to break them—might he, then, in a moral sense, not be what he claims, the man of domestic policy, but rather much more of foreign affairs? Yes, so it is! The complicated and captivating difference between the belligerent politician and his opposite, whom we can only give the name of aesthete, is this: the humanitarian is from a political point of view a decided follower of domestic policy (of the “intellect”); from a moral point of view, however, he is completely a man of foreign affairs (“wants to criticize and break others”). The aesthete, on the other hand, becomes political at most for the sake of foreign affairs (of “power”) that is, in moments “when the national character speaks in the individuals”; but from a moral point of view, his sympathy belongs completely to domestic policy—(“wants to criticize and break himself”)—and foreign affairs, that is, social life, the question of “institutions,” is definitely of secondary importance for him: He thinks the latter has little weight, but that character, culture, goodness, humanity, and individual morality are all-important. And he disapproves of the pessimism, the misanthropy that believes it has to mechanize all human intercourse and to regulate and insure it with institutions in the spirit of abstract ideology.
I have created confusion. I am afraid that the gentle reader does not know anymore where his head is and what he is now really to understand by “domestic policy” and by “foreign affairs.” The simple facts of the case are that one can understand the antithesis between domestic policy and foreign affairs morally or politically. The type we are speaking of understands it politically—well, after all, he is a politician! By “domestic policy,” yes, by “politics” in general, yes, even by “morality,” he understands exactly what the aesthete understands by foreign affairs: the politician’s morality is directed outward, aggressive, agaçant, revolutionary, a combination of agitation and excellent rhetoric, as we said. Revolt is for him the one and only condition worthy of a human being, as an outburst of the “dignity of the human spirit”; and we have here a significant clue for the understanding of what civilization’s literary man actually means by the call for politicization: politicization is education to revolt. But revolt, he says, is above all something extremely European, and every time, for example, when it happens that the Indians revolt against their British masters, they should realize that it is not their own feelings but European feelings acting through them, that it was the Englishmen who “awakened their souls”—one can also say: politicized them. Whoever finds this objectionable will still have to find much literary wit in it—no wonder, because we are definitely dealing here with a man who is not only a master of literary sentimental rhetoric, of dash and corn, but also especially of literary wit. For what leads to the ideal goal, to political revolt, that is, what prepares the mind and heart of the nation, of the people, of the citizens for it, prepares both in a preliminary and in a final way, is of course humor, satire, the principle and element of decomposition, criticism, and education to politics, above all—we know this from before—education in criticism.
What is criticism, anyway? Nothing other than morality. Nothing other than “domestic policy.” But we must again remember that the politician understands precisely by “domestic” policy what the aesthete means by “foreign affairs.” The politician’s critical activity, too, like his morality in general, is directed morally toward the outside, it is aggressive, for he himself is right, he himself is unassailable, the man of progress and of moral security: only the others need criticism, the community, the nation; the literary politician’s criticism is the pedagogical mockery and satire of his own people.
Let one not be rash now and object that such an outwardly directed criticism is not the true one, that all criticism must begin with self-criticism, that only the latter is moral, that the purely self-righteous moral judge is not a very moral one, but a presumptuous figure, and that the question: “Where does he get the right?” remains unanswered. This would indeed have something on its side, but not everything. It would only apply to one side of the matter. For precisely because the literary politician’s criticism and satire is national criticism and satire, precisely because it is directed politically inwardly, it is of course self-criticism—political satire is the self-criticism of the nation by its writers.
Here I will not forgo once again calling attention to the intertwining and crossing of intentions, to the insoluble entanglement and relativity of all intellectual-moral life. Civilization’s literary man and democrat, as we know him, is of course generally not an advocate of nationalism. He does not want it, he denies it, he recognizes it in no way as a mediator between the individual and the human race, he is an enthusiastic, direct lover of the human race itself and of its homogeneous civilization; in a word, he is a politician of the human race—while his opposite type, whom we call a little figuratively but of necessity the “aesthete,” is significantly cooler toward civilization, and, let us be frank, even toward the abstraction, “the human race,” and becomes political precisely “when the national character speaks in the individuals.” But seen from the point of view of criticism and self-criticism, of criticism as morality, things are quite the opposite. As a critic and satirist, civilization’s literary man absolutely needs the national instrument; his criticism does not really penetrate the general human level, or it only reaches it in its special political manifestation—precisely in the national manifestation, and his “self-criticism” consists in the literary chastisement of his own people: whom he finds in principle wrong and the others right in all matters, both in peace, and indeed especially in war—and here one must consider that in order to be permitted to call someone wrong, one must be right; and the politician is right. Especially in war, we say, does he behave in this way; for even if he is in no way unwarlike in attitude, his concept of politics is still too close to that of domestic policy, of morality, of national self-criticism, for him not to have to recognize in civil war the only moral form of war—and to consider its manifestation in this form to be highly desirable, highly worth supporting. The “aesthete” is completely different. The aesthete, as a critic—and why should criticism not be for him, too, a felt need of and almost the meaning of language?—has little inclination to consider the national, the political-social element, as a mediator between the ego and the human race. His criticism is also self-criticism, not in the political, but in the moral sense; it is directed inwardly but not toward the political inner part of the nation, but toward his own individual inner side, and when it meets the ego, it meets the human element itself quite directly. Therefore if the politician appears to be arrogant because he chastises and judges as a dogmatist and as one whose “intellectualization has raised him above his compatriots,” and indeed, in the name of the human race whose cause he champions, then the arrogance of the aesthete lies in his insinuating his own ego as a symbol of general human nature, in his both loving and censuring, affirming and denying human nature through his own ego. His criticism, when it makes use of the comic, does not actually become satire in doing so—assuming, that is, that satire means the ridiculing of political and social conditions. The aesthete is much more a humorist, humanity’s tragicomedian; and by passing over and excluding the national element in his criticism, he is not suggesting that only his own people are miserable and laughable, while the others are happy and noble—an idea that the political critic almost always at least seems to cherish, and always runs the greatest risk of awakening.
Finally, it is no wonder that there are at times reproaches against him because of such a misunderstanding—if it is a misunderstanding. One says that when he scorns and negates his own people he exposes them to the others; that he agrees with everything the others say, plays into their hands, gives them weapons and arguments against his people, reinforces them in their prejudices, in their delusion of being far superior to his people in happiness and virtue, in matters of truth, freedom, and justice, and it is said that he has thus contributed not a little to their moral courage in the war of annihilation against his own people. I do not like such accusations. I do not like accusations at all; and this is admittedly an aversion the politician hardly shares. I reject the above accusation because I understand that the politician as a critical moralist feels himself nationally bound, that political satire is a form of patriotism, a national function, nothing else, as I have said, than the self-criticism of the nation through its man of letters whom it itself has created for this very purpose—and that every misuse, every international exploitation of this self-criticism, signifies a disloyalty that one may despise.
This would be well and good, but Germany’s case—and it is the one we are concerned with—is a special case, not constituted exactly as the others are, and German self-criticism is a special one that again and again seems to be essentially different from that of other nations. It may be because this nation’s literary-moral organ is particularly sensitive, or because it really exceeds all others in inner coarseness, stupidity, ugliness, meanness, and ridiculousness; there may be other reasons that we have perhaps already alluded to: the fact remains that German self-criticism is baser, more malicious, more radical and spiteful than that of any other nation, a cuttingly unjust kind of justice, an unbridled degrading without sympathy or love for one’s own country, together with fervent, uncritical admiration of others, such as, for example, noble—no, this is not ironic defense!—doubtlessly very noble France: an expression of loathing—of self-loathing, remember!—which may signify generosity, freedom, boldness, depth, every imaginable moral virtue, but which one simply cannot designate as smart, as pedagogical in relation to the others, as political, therefore. Perhaps it would be better to call it—excessively aesthetic. But this is a word too much here.
It seems to me that one shows one is not on such bad terms with criticism and satire when one confesses one’s liking for Russian literature. Well, until 1917, when she rose up to become a democratic republic, Russia was considered generally to be a country particularly in need of political-social self-criticism; and tell me who can measure the depths of bitterness and sorrow from which the comedy of Dead Souls grew! Strange, however; in this book the great writer’s national ties are not simply expressed as despairing comedy and satire; on at least two or three occasions they are expressed as something positive and heartfelt, as love—yes, religious love for grand little Mother Russia, resounds more than once like a hymn from the book, it is the original source of bitterness and sorrow, and we feel strongly in such moments that it is what justifies the bloodiest and cruelest satire, yes, what sanctifies it. Imagine such license of feeling in Germany! Imagine hymns rising up out of the satirical novels of a German writer—hymns to Germany! One cannot. Disgust chokes such fantasy. The simple word, “love,” already has an embarrassing enough effect in this connection—it seems like the most impossible tastelessness under the sun. A German satire in which any emotion other than alien spitefulness, alien gloating, were even alluded to would not be acceptable from a literary point of view, that much is certain.
But let us leave Russia as a state, society, or as politics. Let us take a critique of the Russian human being in Russian literature that is in a certain sense a devastating critique. Let us take Goncharov’s Oblomov! Truly, what a painful, hopeless figure! What weariness, clumsiness, laziness, indolence, what incapacity for life, what slovenly melancholy! Unhappy Russia, this is your human being! And yet—is it possible not to love Ilya Oblomov, this bloated impossibility of a human being? He has a national opposite number, the German, Stolz, a model of intelligence, prudence, conscientiousness, dignity, and efficiency. But what amount of pharisaical pedantry would be necessary to read this book and not—as the writer does, too, secretly, but absolutely beyond all doubt—to prefer fat Ilya to his energetic comrade, and finally not to feel and to admit the deeper beauty, purity, and lovableness of his human nature? Unhappy Russia? Happy, happy Russia—who, in all her misery and hopelessness, must know that she is so beautiful and lovable in her innermost being that she, compelled by her literary conscience to satirical self-personification, puts an Oblomov into the world—or rather lays him on a bed of laziness! As for Germany, the satirical self-criticism she exercises on herself through her literary men leaves no doubt that she feels herself to be the truly ugly country, the country of ugly people: This is the manifestation of her “intellect”—which will then never be able to desire “power” with a clear conscience; this is her morality, her “domestic policy.”
We realized earlier that a “coming to the fore of the social novel in the public interest would be the exact measure” of the progress of that process of Germany’s literarization, democratization, and humanization, the process that civilization’s literary man finds his mission in spurring on. Here we add the opposite: Democracy, that is, the state that has been humanized and made capable of having a literature, that has become a society—and indeed, an amusing society—democracy, then, is the fertile soil in which political satire really begins to thrive; the social-critical novel is even an integrating unit, an important part of the inventory of democracy, of the amusing state, that is; even more than that: it is a power in it, a political power, stated quite practically, even a path to political power—so that in the amusing state the novelist can at any time become a minister, something he perhaps does not want to become, but still wishes to be able to become; and this is why the political moralist, the radical literary domestic politician, demands democracy, the republic of lawyers and literati in the Western style: it offers his kind that optimum of conditions of life that every earthly being instinctively strives for. Granted this is a skeptical interpretation of his will and essence, instead of a grandiloquent one that may seem uniquely appropriate to it, the reader will at least agree with me that here a beneficial interaction, a mutual assistance and promotion, is taking place: Civilization’s literary man educates people to democracy by agitation and beautiful rhetoric, and democracy, for its part, the amusing state, the intellectually thoroughly politicized society, nourishes and stimulates the organ of social criticism, of social-psychological writing, to the point of hypertrophy, so that finally, through such reciprocity on the path of brilliant amusement, something extreme, a condition of scornful anarchy, world despair, and social-critical corrosion is reached that civilization’s literary man is celebrating in advance as the goal, as the condition of true humanity, as a “very beautiful, completely serene” condition. But the progress toward this condition, which, no one will deny, is boundlessly serene, is progress itself, and there is no other.
In the course of these reflections, I have often expressed the conviction that Germany is on this progressive path. Yes, we will have it, democracy, the state for novelists, and we will be happy, or at least entertained! That evil, abstract, inhuman, and therefore very boring form of government that once tried to fool us by claiming to preserve the interest of the whole and to remove administration from the tumult of party campaigns will lie behind us in an unreal light; that form of government in which special knowledge, talent, and professional training were considered indispensable for the assumption of office. No more of that! Professional civil service has become a myth. Self-government! Rotation in office! To the victor belong the spoils! Whoever has the desire and two strong elbows can get to the state trough sooner or later—previous experience unnecessary. We have reached the stage where every office is open to every citizen, and only the obsolete dogma of the “expert,” this bastard of humility and conceit, has prevented it from being reached long ago. Oh, what a cringingly faint-hearted stupidity of a dogma that was! Did it not cause political passivity in the best people—in the artist, for example? The person engaged in artistic activity is most deeply imbued with a regard for ability and mastery, with a disgust for bungling: sovereign mastery of the subject seems to him the prerequisite of all art, for to him, art is the absorption of the material by the form. Is it surprising that he was only too ready to succumb to the German dogma of the “expert” and to fall prey to political quietism? Nevertheless, he is precisely the one who is indispensable to democracy—indispensable in the struggle against that dogma that inhibits progress, because he does have certain qualities that counterbalance his disgust for bungling. Is he not almost always an arrangeur by instinct? Does he not understand how to hoodwink people? Does he not know how to make a lot out of a little—like his foster brother, the journalist, this experienced saucemaker who sets up a lead article of five columns from the scantiest bit of information? An actor’s ability: is this finally not one of his basic instincts? As a novelist, for example—does he not, if it seems to him to strengthen the composition, write a whole chapter on national economy that looks as if he had never done anything else? Add a little pleasure in rhetorical intercostal breathing, a little talent for dash and sentimentality—what more is needed for the democratic politician, for the conqueror of the “expert”?
Democracy means the dominance of politics; politics means a minimum of objectivity. But the expert is objective, that is, nonpolitical, that is, undemocratic. Away with him! His successors are the lawyer as the owner of a weekly, the journalist, the rhetorically talented artist. They do things with a little spirit—and this is what democratic tradition wants. “Every Frenchman,” we read in the memoirs of a contemporary of the Great Revolution,
considers himself capable of overcoming all difficulties with a little spirit. Never did so many people imagine they were all lawmakers, that their task was to correct all the mistakes of the past, to remove all delusions of the human mind, to insure the happiness of coming generations. There was no room in their minds for doubt . . .
Is there any condition more horrible than the one in which there is no more room left in the mind for doubt? An obscurant’s question! We will have it, the nondoubting and belletristic political system. We will have it, democracy—which as such is equality and therefore hatred, ineradicable and jealous republican hatred of every superiority, every expert authority. Who will make an industrialist Minister of Commerce? One puts a comedy writer or a cabaret entertainer in the position, and the principle is saved. It will be thought wrong to fill the ministries of agriculture and culture with other than lawyers and scribbling stockbrokers. And as far as military affairs are concerned, it would be a slap in democracy’s face to make an exception for their sake. In military matters, ask the military! But that would be dominance of the saber! That would be corruption, the most extreme danger to the radical republic! For authority is not just hateful when it is of an unreasonable nature, based on tradition, birth, and privileges; no, it is hateful because the radical principle makes it so in general, in every case, even when it is derived from knowledge, efficiency, proven-practical superiority, and expert ability.
Once more: democracy means the dominance of politics. Nothing may, nothing will exist—no thought, work, or life—in which politics does not play a part, where political feelings and connections are not maintained. Politics as atmosphere, permeating all vital air so that with every breath drawn it forms the main element of all psychological structure; politics as the displacer of music, which up to then had usurped the highest position in the social-artistic interest of the nation—as its displacer, I say, in alliance with literature, which is to be understood as the twin sister of politics, if not as identical with it, and its natural ally in the fight against the predominance of music; politics, then, together with literature, to the extent that the latter is gregarious, that is, rhetorical, psychological, and erotic—a mixture of both, politics perfumed with literature, literature spiced with politics as national atmosphere and life’s breath: That is democracy, the amusing state, the state for novelists, and we will have it! Yes, civilization’s literary man has recognized that Germany’s literary morality, the literarization and psychologization of Germany that was powerfully furthered by geniuses such as Heine and Nietzsche, and whose promotion we all, I, too, whether consciously and intentionally or not, made it our business to further—that this literary morality has progressed to the point where it must change into politics, where the connection between psychological thinking and formal elegance steps out openly with political freedom. This is his hour, the hour of civilization’s literary man; it is here; it is giving him those national rights that he has long enjoyed in other nations.
The first demand of this hour must be for the establishment of a German Academy—I have quietly promoted it for a long time. The German Academy, or at least something like a counterpart to the Roman “Dante Alighieri Language Club,” whose chairman is Prime Minister Boselli; the establishment and yearly presentation of a “Grand Prize for Rhetoric”—such things are necessary components of the literary-political, parliamentary epoch we are entering. Let literature become official. Let the literary man become official—that is the demand of the political moment. We will have that humbug-dominance of the intellect that will perhaps manifest itself in saloon signs such as “A l’Idée du Monde.” The “Café Schopenhauer” as the center of the cattle trade in a little German market town will not be bad, and when French fishing boats are christened “Pensée” and “Honneur et dévouement moderne,” this must be translated into German, even though it may be difficult—intellect will no longer tolerate the shabbiness of our bearing names such as “Klaas” or “Schlutupp” on the bow; under its announced rule our armored cruisers will not be called “Blücher” and “ ,” but “Goethe,” “Lichtenberg,” and perhaps also “E. T. A. Hoffmann,” or “Wackenroder”—and if many find it more depressing when “Goethe” rather than some sort of Father Blücher is torpedoed to the bottom, this will only be a stirring of that lingering sensitivity that also takes offense when thieves are discovered in the “Philosophy” or the “Justice” hotel.
I beg pardon if instead of generously characterizing the splendid and cheerful condition that is awaiting us, I have lost myself in details. They are not unsuited for conveying a breath of the generous, political-literary atmosphere from which our national life will be reborn, by which it will then constantly be wafted. Two phases must be differentiated, wherever and whenever we are dealing with the realization of people’s sovereignty and democracy. The first is the revolutionary phase: we will have to pass through it; I can add: we are about to cross its threshold. Who could today (I write in April 1917) misinterpret the revolutionary mood of the German mind? The Volksstaat that young and old are eager for—and strive for with undeniable temporal justification—what is it other than Rousseau’s united will of the community represented in the state that is the actual state-forming element! Publicists speak of nothing else than Voltaire, Figaro, “mankind”; Marquis Posa is very much in fashion; and plays whose academic, revolutionary passion is only half-disguised by psychology, aestheticism, and hysterical eroticism, find the frenzied approval of the intelligentsia. The first phase, we say, is the revolutionary one, where the belief that now the realm of justice and happiness has dawned and is flaming up dazzlingly, and the passion for politics is taking control of every single mind, even the most foolish and uneducated one. Taine describes the condition by citing a chronicle of 1790:
Every shop clerk who has read the New Heloise, every schoolmaster who has translated a few pages of Livius, every artist who has leafed through Rollin’s works, every aesthete who has become a journalist by memorizing the unclear language of Rousseau’s social contract, is writing a constitution . . .
And Taine himself adds:
With the help of eight or ten phrases made palatable by the six-sous-catechisms distributed by the thousands in the country’s suburbs, the village lawyer, the customs official, the ticket collector, and the guardhouse sergeant are becoming lawmakers and philosophers . . . The result is that they give lectures about all sorts of people and things that earlier seemed forever beyond them. They talk about them to the people, make petitions, are applauded and are proud of themselves for their ability to argue in such an excellent and high-sounding way . . . Every sensible conversation has been swept aside by preference for controversy, fault-finding, and sophistry. Swindlers talk about morality, hetaerae about civic virtue, and the most depraved subjects about the dignity of the human race . . .
This, as I have said, is the first phase. It is not beautiful, not beneficial, not particularly humane. For the general political excitement of stupidity has an embarrassing and humanly depressing effect—at least in our country, where in fact (and I am thinking here again of my friend, of the man in the service coat) there is the most instinctive dislike for this condition. At any rate, it will pass; and what follows will be a system rich in renunciation, an amusing-melancholy compromise, the “realization” of the principle, which obviously cannot be anything else than such a compromise, a condition that the great majority of the citizens, who are careful not to follow the general political line and who leave this to those who make a questionable and unseemly profession of it, will look upon with scorn and unconcealed skepticism—but precisely this frame of mind is a welcome one, for it contains the revolt within it, it turns the lifeless, anti-intellectual burgher into a lively and inflammable element, it makes him into a European, makes him into a human being. But the spectacle he observes in this progressive frame of mind is precisely the amusing state that has now been reached, the republic of the comrades and the arrivistes, the glitteringly rotating miracle of the annual fair and the merry-go-round of newspapers, women, legislatures, adventurers, the oligarchy of a “society” that is not exactly the “good” one, but that is certainly a literary bonanza, an extremely human-lively research area for the authors of satirical comedies and skeptical novels. The humanized state, literarized, erotically animated politics with a “psychological way of thinking” and with formal elegance, politics with ladies-in-waiting—we will have it! One hardly understands democracy if one does not understand its feminine touch. “Freedom and a whore are the most cosmopolitan things under the sun.” What international held on even during the World War? The horizontal one. Up to now, the political-social ideals of our radical literary man have been realized more in Bucharest than in Paris. We will follow. We will also have the judicial acquittals of interesting murderesses—out of gallantry or out of party politics, or for both reasons. For what cause and question at all will not immediately degenerate into a trial of strength for the parties? Which ones will not immediately stand in the falsifying, distorting light of politics, of party politics, that is? Politics as a source of perception through which all things are seen; the administration—skilled in the spirit of the ruling parliamentary majority of the time; the officer corps—politically demoralized; the justice department—politically poisoned; creative writing—tendentious theater and psychology on the basis of social comparison, carried to the point of tout-est-dit; and affairs, scandals, political-symbolic conflicts of the times, magnificent ones that elevate and inflame the burgher in alternating dances, a new one every year—this is the way we will have it, this is the way we will live every day.
One tells me that this is impossible; that a general outbreak of disgust would prevent the realization of such images of the future in Germany. For here the belief cannot be uprooted that what has grown organically, what has developed from tradition and history, is with all its faults preferable to the product of reflection and of the dogma of reason. Humanity is at work both there and here; but the humanity of what has grown has something venerable, while that of the product of reason incites scorn and contempt. Good, good, I want to believe it, I know that this is the German emotional judgment. Nevertheless, it is impossible to hide from oneself that the development of German affairs as I have described it is taking place at this moment, and for the time being it is moving in the described direction under the sharp whiplashes of civilization’s literary man. Second, however, I have already indicated that civilization’s literary man strongly desires “scorn and contempt” as the generally pervasive attitude against the state and the government, that he desires this in a thoroughly planned way—and indeed, to such a degree that he tends to confuse this attitude with “intellect” itself, that for him poisonous hatred and scorn for everything that rules clearly signifies the criterion of intellectuality. He is a politician, yes; but he is a politician against the state, and he knows just as well as the young Nietzsche, yes, if he does not know it from him, that democracy is the decadent form of the state. “Disdain, decline, and death of the state,” Nietzsche said in Human, All Too Human, where he casts an eye at politics,
the unleashing of the private person (I am careful not to say: of the individual) is the consequence of the democratic state concept; here lies its mission . . . to work on the propagation and realization of this idea is admittedly something else: one must be arrogantly proud of one’s reasoning ability, and one must scarcely half-understand history to put one’s hand to the plow right now—when no one can yet point to the seeds that will afterward be strewn on the prepared soil. Let us therefore trust to the intelligence and self-interest of the people that the state will still last a good while, and that destructive attempts of overeager and rash, half-informed people will be rejected!
This was the still-youthful Nietzsche whom civilization’s literary man claims to admire, while in truth he has made the later, grotesque Nietzsche, who had become fanatic, much more his own, in spirit if not also in substance. As far as he, civilization’s literary man, is concerned, he thinks highly enough of his reasoning ability and understands history well enough to put his hand to the plow with all the “resoluteness” appropriate to his love of humanity: to bring about the disdain, decline, and death of the state as soon as possible seems to him to be the task of “intellect,” and in this sense, we must admit, “democracy” is for him only a means and a transition—just as he longs for and demands the amusing, humanized state more in his capacity as an artist and novelist then in his second one, namely as a prophet. Let us finally appreciate him in this capacity! Let us briefly present his teaching! It is simple, axiomatically simple, and even if we are already partially aware of it, it will still be useful to reduce it here to its most pithy and compact formula.
Literature and politics, he teaches, both have the human being as their subject; they are, therefore, if not identical, then at least inseparably correlated: one cannot (must not) deal with the one without the other. And since there is—can be—may be—only one politics: the humanitarian—democratic one, the one of progress, there is and may be therefore only one literature: the one directed toward humanitarianism and democracy—the one that, in all its conceptions, incessantly pursues humanitarian-democratic progress, insinuates the concept of democracy into every work, into every beautiful creation, into all art, leaves this didactic-voluntaristic-political intention half-hidden and half-evident. There is no other literature, or no other may come into consideration. What is otherwise at times claimed for literature is immoral aestheticism, decorative work at best, not what is necessary. What is necessary is at bottom not art at all but the manifesto, the absolute manifesto in favor of progress, the proclamation of the intellectuals through intellect. Art in and for itself and for its own sake, l’art pour l’art, once a cry against the philistines, has today become a burgherly concept. Art as life, art as the mastered, liberated, and liberating knowledge of life through form—has been rejected, is to be rejected. What good is knowledge to us, and what good is form? The action is what matters—the intellectual action. The manifesto that calls to the action, that already is action, is more important than a hundred “forming” works. Art, as far as it wants to endure, as far as it wants to be considered, must be the tool of progress, of humanitarian-democratic politics. It has discovered its principal duty in moving consciously, purposefully, and gravely with political responsibility toward world improvement. If it does not do this, if it serves at best only a decorative culture, but not civilization, then it is only a question of temperament whether one calls it a type of frivolous philistinism or villainy; and since the political prophet counts not only reason and humanity, but also passion among his prerogatives, he will usually choose the latter judgment. From his dogma, however, that there is, can be, and may be, only one reason, one politics, one intellect, namely his, there results for him the conclusion and the demand for what he calls the “solidarity of all intellectuals,” the “organization of all intellectuals,” for the conquest of power, for the propagation of truth, of justice, of freedom, of happiness—in a word, of the democratic republic.
The conquest of power? And indeed, by the intellect? And the highest of all antitheses, that of power and intellect—what of it? But let us not get involved here in this contradiction! Let us free ourselves for now by saying that this antithesis is obviously extinguished and destroyed when it is precisely intellect that seizes power—political power. We have to go on. There are a few things to criticize in the teaching that we have presented in proxy; its rare combination of limitation and fanaticism even gives cause for amazement. It speaks of “what is necessary” and of the manifesto. But if what is necessary is supposed to be freedom, then the manifesto may be an extremely doubtful means of obtaining it. For a manifesto, if it is strong, may at most fanaticize, but only a work of art can liberate. The political prophet is beyond doubt a great free spirit, a libre-penseur and esprit fort of the first water, his contemptuous relationship to the national element proves it. But a free spirit of the type that prepared for the Europe of the end of the nineteenth century the most tragic and most heroic spectacle of world history, a spectacle of critical self-crucifixion—oh, no, that he is not. He has picked up a few grotesque accents and violent gestures from it, just as the feuilletonists picked up Heine’s “facility” earlier, but he has not experienced the severe heroic epic of this life, and if he has ever experienced it, he has “overcome” it. How? By politics! No, it is not freedom he has in mind. What is the good, he asks, of freedom? It is just as worthless as knowledge and form! His cause is much more resoluteness; his cause is—now I present the most terrible combination of words ever invented, the overpowering tastelessness of which assures its inventor, civilization’s literary man and political prophet, immortality—his cause is “resolute love of humanity.” But it is resoluteness, and nothing more, purposeful self-stultification and logical shadowboxing in the service of progress, that is, when he insists, for example, upon the identity or inseparable correlation of literature and politics, because, you see, “the human being” is the subject of both—a sophism that is so obvious and impudent that repugnance deadens our critical sensitivity. For we do not intend to bore ourselves and others by explaining polemically that the “human being” whom politics has as its subject is nothing more than the social human being in the sense and taste of Western civilisation and civilization—and that the type of “literature” and creative writing that has, to be sure, this subject in common with politics, is nothing more than the social novel according to the model of this same civilisation or civilization—the social novel that the German radical literary man proclaims to be the literature, whose spirit and essence he proclaims to be the spirit and essence of art, of creative writing in general, and this at the very moment when France, with the bitter taste of tout-est-dit in her mouth, wants to find something better, older, stronger—and indeed not at all solely in the person of Romain Rolland. “Le roman m’a toujours semblé une sorte de confession,” Charles Louis Philippe wrote in 1905.
Il faut d’ailleurs qu’une oeuvre soit l’espression de la vie de l’écrivain . . . Pour moi, je conçois le roman, non comme le développement d’une idée, mais comme quelque chose d’animé, de vivant, de réel, comme une main qui bouge, des yeux qui regardent, comme le développement de tout un corps. Aussi le roman à thèse me paraît extraordinaire. Je trouve vraiment extraordinaire qu’on ose faire du roman un prétexte d’études sociales ou psychologiques . . .
Thus we Germans are to begin to see in the “human being” the social animal, and in the novel a pretext for social criticism, at the very moment when France is completely fed up with doing so!
Art and politics! Art and the manifesto! Is not exactly the same thing happening to us that happened in the Russia of the fifties and sixties to which “everything that did not belong to politics seemed incongruous and even absurd,” and that, because Fathers and Sons was not a manifesto, burned Turgenev’s photograph “with a cold smile”? The most sophisticated comment at the time came from a lady. “The true title of your story,” she said, “should be ‘Neither Fathers nor Sons’—and you yourself are a nihilist.” “I will be careful not to answer this,” Turgenev muttered; “perhaps the lady was right.” But she was not right, because a person who respects life as he does is not a nihilist. An aesthete perhaps; he probably was an aesthete—someone, that is, who tended more to “criticize himself” than to “criticize and break others”; and then he was a great lover of freedom! Does this sound loose and undisciplined? But the remarkable thing is that in the artistic sphere freedom and discipline mean one and the same thing. One knows that Turgenev, for his part, was a “zapadnik,” a Westerner and anti-Slavophile, a believing follower of European culture; as an artiste he was a friend of the French; as an intellectual he came from Goethe and Schopenhauer. What did he do? He created for himself an ape, the Westerner Panshin, in A Nest of Gentle Folk, a changing parody of his own character, a fop of such tastelessness that he delivers himself of tirades of enlightenment such as: “All nations are basically the same; one need only introduce good institutions, and things will be fine!”—in short, a chatterer whom it is easy for the Slavophile Lavretsky “to refute in all points.” This is almost incomprehensible. Turgenev’s expressed principles, principles such as: “My personal inclinations mean nothing,” “The strictest conscientiousness is to be required of the artist,” “Love of truth, inexorable love of truth, is necessary in dealing with one’s own feelings; freedom of observation and opinion are necessary; nowhere is freedom so necessary as in matters of art, of poetry: not for nothing do we hear of ‘liberal’ arts even in the official language of the government”—such phrases are not a sufficient explanation for this excess of self-discipline in which the love of truth does a somersault and becomes a persiflage of his own ideal. This is no longer simple “impassibilité,” it is castigation, asceticism, it is art as the will “to criticize and to break oneself,” it is an example on a small scale and with a humorous stamp—of that ethic of self-destruction that we Germans only saw toward the end of the century in a much greater, much more tragic-terrible example, in a philosophical one—and every kind of “resoluteness,” every political voluntarism in a work of art, is by comparison with it nothing more than intellectual voluptuousness.
“No matter what youth may say,” Turgenev wrote at the time to a friend, “art cannot die, and service to it according to one’s ability will always bind people closely together.” Was this a confession of aestheticism? Politicization of art! As if art were not, no matter how much it is a matter of the lonely soul, of conscience, of protestantism, and of God’s immediate presence—as if it were not in and for itself and in all ways a social power that “always binds people closely together”! Since historical examples teach that politically irresolute art that seemed to exist only for itself, and in any case only wanted to exist for itself, can nevertheless become a political tool in the grandest style and bring about the spiritual unity of a people; since personal examples teach that an art that never liked to assume a social attitude, a parasitic, nonpolitical art of personal ethics, can still help the human being to live: what have I to do with the call for the politicization of art and with the impudent and stupid differentiation of the “private writer” from the “responsible writer” that one likes to make today? Where is the insipid fool who believes that a productive drive could ever have an unsocial, antisocial character? The productive person’s grudge against the receptive-idle one, his feeling of disdain for him, his inability even to understand how one likes to and can live in a receptive-idle way: does this not prove the social-moral sense of the productive drive? If our manifesto writers and “belletrists of action” knew how much they were distancing themselves from all German culture with their antithesis of “aestheticism” and “activism,” with their confusion of uselessness with wickedness—perhaps, but of course not at all certainly, their voices and courage would sink a bit. In an essay on Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt said:
It is deeply ingrained in German character and feeling to allocate the high and solemn place I spoke of above to poetry among human endeavors and to defend it against the petty and trite opinions—the former mistake its dignity and the latter its individuality—that either make it into a trifling decoration and ornamentation of life or demand direct moral effect and enlightenment from it.
And Schiller himself said: “The human being is only completely human when he is playing.”
German culture! German character! Goethe was delighted when he read Guizot’s words: “The ancient Germans brought us the idea of personal freedom, which was above all characteristic of this people.” “Is this not very pleasing,” Goethe said, “and is he not completely right, and does this thought not still prevail for us today? The Reformation came from this source . . . and the manifold nature of our literature . . .” Oh, yes, this too. And precisely this protestant-individualistic, manifold nature is an abomination in the eyes of the political prophet—who in national affairs clearly greatly prefers “freedom” to “unity,” but who cares little for freedom in intellectual matters, only thinking of the unity, militaristic organization, and political striking power of the intellect. But who could be surprised that by “politicization of art” he quite obviously, as if it had to be so, understands its politicization in the democratic spirit? The politicization of the German concept of art would itself of course mean its democratization, a most important feature of the democratic leveling and assimilation of Germany! It is no less pleasant to realize that all politicized artistic sense is opposed to nondemocratic greatness. The social-religious, aged Tolstoy (still gigantic, by the way, even then—but this did not give him any collegial feelings) called Shakespeare an immoral savage; Mr. Bernard Shaw agreed with this assessment; he said the author of Coriolanus was in no way timely, and had little to say to us moderns, because his hostility to the people and his undemocratic attitude were all too obvious. One cannot judge more honestly. In Germany, where reverence is still too much in vogue, it is important to work more with innuendos, and since Goethe often said things such as, for example, “. . . for a good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand moral intentions from the artist is to ruin his work,” it is doubtless with an innuendo toward him that civilization’s literary man declares that the aesthete is not even venerable in old age, that he has no maturity, authority, venerableness, that every great human impact is to be found in the moralist, that is, in the political moralist. Goethe—not venerable in old age, lacking authority as well, just a rather frivolous, senile aesthete. Zola, on the other hand—Zola in his little garden, Zola with his hair half-long in the nape of his neck, a transfigured teacher of democracy. German artistic sense! Irritated, I once let the sentence slip out that art was a form of morality, but not a moral expedient. I was told that the words were obscure. Nevertheless, Fichte said that the German—and only he—practiced art as a virtue and a religion—which says the same thing and is an ever valid translation of the l’art pour l’art formula into German.
Politicization of art! Well, we have seen the like. Some seventy years ago we had the liberalism that became literature, the activistic Young Germany that overthrew romanticism, the aestheticism of the time; the works that resulted from it were not exactly immortal. The experts do not credit it with extravagant conquests in the realms of the soul and of beauty. German romanticism, national but nonpolitical as it was, will always be celebrated as one of the most magical events of European intellectual and art history. As far as the young liberal writing of 1840 was concerned, it certainly powerfully furthered our political enlightenment. But what happens when the tenth muse, to wit, that of freedom, begins to sing, we see from those verses that Georg Herwegh wrote in the glow of the Alps:
Mountain to mountain, fire to fire
Flame up here together;
What a glow!—ha! thus stood
Ilium once in flames.
A sinking royal house
Smoking before my eyes
And I cry out into the land:
Vive la république!13
The rhyme is unsatisfactory; and I would like to think that our activists of today tend to deny the burning passion of this strange impression of nature. But what a difference in taste and in artistic subtlety also separates them from their predecessors, no matter how much care they take to conceal politics, past recognition and understanding, under psychological skepticism and sexual pathology—the “warm ethic,” on which their superiority over all aesthetic inhumanity rests, can be summed up completely in the cry in which the arsonist’s song of power finally breaks out, in the cry: “Long live the Republic!”—and indeed, in French.
Politicization of art! Finally: what should the person to whom music, for example, is the purest paradigm, the sacred and fundamental type of all art, have to do with this idea? And is it not really the truly moral art that is art precisely because morality takes form in it, and that the German has preferred to practice all along “as a virtue and a religion”—the German l’art pour l’art? I want to have a musician intercede, Grillparzer’s Poor Fiddler. “The eternal blessing,” he says,
and grace of tone and resonance, its miraculous harmony with the eager, languishing ear—that the third tone agrees with the first, and the fifth also, and the nota sensibilis rises like a fulfilled hope, the dissonance is bent down like a conscious malice or an impudent pride, and the miracle of ligature and conversion in which the musical second also reaches grace in the bosom of harmony . . . And the fuga and the punctum contra punctum, and the canon a due, a tre, and so forth, a whole heavenly structure, one striking the other, joined without mortar, and held by the hand of God.
And he speaks for absolute music, he wants no words and no “program”: “Lord,” he says, “speech is as necessary to the human being as food, but one should also keep the drink that comes from God pure.” This is not literary, it is German. I have acquaintances among musicians, I know none who would not have felt nationally in this war and taken a national stand—yes, there were naive-political forms of expression for this declaration, such as the defiant and effusive act of Hans Pfitzner in dedicating his latest opus to Fleet Admiral von Tirpitz. This is nothing to be surprised about. The war forced the national feeling of the artist to politicize itself insofar as the political, patriotic element had remained in him from before. And the politicization of the artist—is it not true, master? We still prefer it to the politicization of art!
There is, I say, nothing strange in the fact that civilization’s literary man is quite ill-disposed toward music—German music, that is—since it recently has even entertained a relationship with Fleet Admiral von Tirpitz; on the other hand, it is understandable that every mind in any way musically attuned and inclined is opposed “in the conservative interest” to the progressive plans of civilization’s literary man, to his declared will to replace the national supremacy of music with the democratic dominance of politics and literature. I have been very exhaustive, I have covered pages to clarify for myself and for any imagined reader where I get the right to patriotism, to political national feeling, I could have expressed myself briefly and limited myself to the fact that I am, to be sure, a literary man but even more a musician, and that my life has stood for this very reason under the magical sign of that “three-star-constellation” and will always stand there because all three, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, were the same: literary men and musicians, but more the latter. Yes, I have a right to quotations such as those from Grillparzer’s story: judge what I have done, my works of art, as you will and must, but they were always good scores, one like the other; musicians have also loved them; Gustav Mahler, for example, loved them, and I have often wanted to have musicians as public judges of them. Art as ethics in sound, as fuga and punctum contra punctum, as a serene and earnest piety. Like a building of nonprofane purpose where one thing intertwines with another, thoughtfully, sensibly, and bound without mortar and held “by God’s hand”—this l’art pour l’art is truly my ideal of art that I by no means represent, but that I will always try to approach. If this is German, then all the better—and worse; for it does not bestow a disposition toward progress, and it makes communication with civilization’s literary man extremely difficult, because to him, music is the political cantilena, the tenor’s aria accompanied by brass unisono in the Italian style—and for the rest, he hates music with his whole soul, thinking of it as a national stultifying drink and instrument of quietism. How could he feel otherwise, since he is interested in Germany’s denationalization, in her integration in the world empire of civilization, and since this goal cannot be reached as long as music’s national power is not broken? No small project! For it is clearly a power deeply rooted in four hundred years of history that has to be broken, a power as old as Protestantism and in eternal alliance with it: the education of the Germans to music began with Martin Luther, a pedagogue of defiantly national character, theosophist, religion teacher, and musician in one person, and so much in one that musicality and religiosity can scarcely be separated in him, that in his soul the one stands for the other—as the German character has remained ever since. “I have always loved music,” he said, “it is a beautiful, affectionate gift of God and close to theology.” He also said that this art was “a semidiscipline and taskmaster that makes people softer and more gentle, more moral and more reasonable,” and: “A school-master must be able to sing, otherwise I will not consider him.” Luther gave the artistic culture of his Germans the natural direction toward music, and it was in his spirit that Melanchton’s school system in Saxony provided for four hours a day of musical training. The Saxon children must really have liked going to school at that time. Of course the church hymn also came from Luther, the German spiritual song that replaced the Gregorian singsong, so that it was a mockery and a scandal to the Catholics the way the Protestants praised God with such bad barrack-room singing, lewd favorites, and spinning-room warbling. Ever since Luther’s religious-musical influence, however, German music from Bach to Reger has been the punctum contra punctum, the great fugue, not only the resonant expression of the Protestant ethic, but with its powerfully polyphonic joining of self-will and subordination, the image and the artistic-spiritual reflection of German life itself. How should civilization’s literary man, the man of Western “rights,” not hate all this? And what, once again, would a musician do with his “teaching”?
No, one must not be musical if one is to qualify as an adept disciple of this teaching. The man whose ears are not offended by such dissonances as “resolute love of humanity” or “progress of the human heart” should cheer up; he can accomplish something in this school—providing his logic does not thwart him at the last moment and cause him to founder at the dogma—or the postulate, I do not really know what it is—of the “solidarity of all intellectuals,” the “organization of all intellectuals.” “Organization!” There it is again, the second key word and slogan of the moment, as a word common to all heroes of the times, even if not at all as sense and meaning. We know the literary infatuation with the word “political”; we know that in the literary-sphere it has become a constant refrain, the highest praise; the cry for “organization” is no different. In it, too, the rhetorically trained voice of civilization’s literary man joins with the lesser trained one of a democratic patriotism—even if the literary man does not exactly mean it patriotically. “The organization of the intellect,” he cries, “must be completed! And indeed on the basis of the solidarity of all intellectuals!”
On the basis of obvious absurdity then, to give our critical opinion, of absurdity that is transparent to the most burgherly human understanding. When one hears the politician of “intellect,” no, of the intellect, speak, one is inevitably reminded of Schopenhauer’s furious attack on the “crude insolence” of the Hegelians, who,
in all their writings, without much ado and introduction, talk long and extensively about the so-called “intellect,” confident that the listeners will be much too much nonplussed by their balderdash for one, as would be proper, to take on the professor and ask him: “Intellect? Who is that fellow, anyway? And where did you get to know him? Is he not perhaps just an arbitrary and convenient hypostasis that you are not even defining, not to speak of deducing or proving? Do you think you have an audience of old women before you?”
“That would be,” Schopenhauer said, “the proper language against such a fake philosopher.” We are far from making it our own. But we cannot possibly help being amazed and taking some offense when the heralds of the “solidarity of all intellectuals” act as if there were only one type of intellect, an intellect in itself, claiming it to be theirs, namely the intellect of the enlightenment and of progress. But this simply cannot be completely correct. Was Aristophanes not an intellectual? But he was conservative, an obscurant, if you like, a follower of the “old gods,” the mortal enemy of the “corruptor of youth,” enlightener and preexistent radical literary man who was called Socrates. Was Dostoyevsky not an intellectual? But although he did not neglect the “human heart,” neither was he exactly what one would call a man of progress. Are intellect and progress identical? Granted that democracy in relation to monarchy means political if not always historical progress: is democracy more intellectual than monarchy? Is our monism a more intellectual worldview than that of the Christian church? One disputes it. Solidarity of all intellectuals! But it does not exist! To assert or to demand it would be to assert or demand the solidarity of intellects such as Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. They hated each other. Where is the solidarity of intellects such as France and Claudel? They would have to hate one another if they ever even took notice of one another. Intellect is perhaps nothing more than hatred, and in no way humanity, solidarity, fraternity.
Nevertheless, there is a “solidarity of all intellectuals,” but it is not of an intellectual nature, let alone a democratic one. This solidarity is organic, it is constitutional. It rests on the homogeneity of the form of existence, on a higher, more tender form of existence that is more capable of suffering, more willing to suffer, more foreign to comfort than the ordinary one. It is comradeship in nobility, brotherliness in pain. Here is the source of all tolerance, conscientiousness, all courtesy of the heart and gallantry, in short, of all morality of the intellect. Here is also the source of what should be the deepest and most unconquerable disgust of every intellectual, of the disgust for dogmatism. The fact that the politician, precisely as a politician, does not feel this disgust, or has, for the sake of the “good cause,” forcibly broken himself of it—should this not be an argument against his humanity, no matter how much he may insist on his claim to “humanity”? “Ceux qui souffrent,” a French writer has said, “ont besoin d’avoir raison.” This is beautiful and tender, it lays a soothing hand on all sickly obstinacy. But would it not be less sickly, would it not even be more proper, to suffer and still not to have to be right? An intellect in which the will, the political-dogmatic will, had the absolute upper hand over contemplation—aesthetic, independent contemplation—would such an intellect be an “intellect” at all? Is it intellectual to find every opposition, every doubt even, to be a sign of depravity, to exclude it coldly, haughtily, and clearly from one’s own sphere of virtue? Oh, the politician is stern, he is of firm character! He is very far from that lax morality of the intellect that still sees the comrade and brother in the opposing or skeptically resisting brother and comrade. Between himself and every intellectual who opposes the “teaching,” he places the whole abyss that separates virtue from depravity. Over there are the aesthetes, the selfish ones, the egocentrics, the bad citizens; here, however, are the activists, the ones who follow a manifesto, the democrats, the men of principle, the politicians. A clear separation is imperative for the sake of the “cause.” Tolerance, courtesy of the heart, individual human friendliness, would be betrayal of it, would besmirch its existence. His respect for freedom of the intellect is politically conditional. His solidarity and brotherliness with all intellectuals is a very exclusive solidarity and brotherliness; it excludes, strictly excludes, what he is not, what doubts and opposes. The important things for him are not equality of rank and nobility, not humanity, but rather identity and reliability of opinion. Thus he surrounds himself with subalterns, with those who, even though they are not his equals, still hold the same opinion, and from whom he therefore does not have to worry about any opposition, any disturbance and insult. Il a besoin d’avoir raison. In this way, however, his conscience is completely lulled to sleep, his sense of truth and justice decays, and quickly that degree of demoralization and bigotry is reached where everyone who does not swear to the “teaching” is given the choice of being called villainous or idiotic. This is the intellectual freedom of the politician. This is the “solidarity of all intellectuals” that he means. This stiff and cold pharisaism preaches humanity.
But let us grant his premise. Let us follow the credo quia absurdum and recognize the dogma of the intellectual solidarity of all intellectuals: What about the final inference and final summons that the political prophet derives from it? The inference and summons, that is, of the organization of the intellect in order to seize power? Bad, bad! There is something to the antithesis of power and intellect: if for its sake we take the politician at his word, it is not to nail him in a seemingly logical contradiction, a sham contradiction. Does he not know that “intellect” declines as soon as it assumes power? That it does so faster and more thoroughly the more power it gets? It is not necessary to delve deeply into history! It is quite sufficient to observe the fate of the intellect that the politician quite obviously, quite doubtlessly, means when he speaks of “intellect”: the fate of the enlightenment. What does all enlightenment want? The older, the new, and the newest of all? Well, happiness! The famous “greatest good for the greatest number.” It is social eudaemonism, the morality of utility, the teaching of the “true benefit” of the human being. Definitely not anything else. But what is happiness? No one knows this, and no one can define happiness for everybody: Happiness is something completely relative and personal; it is “in you” or it is not in you, but it is doubtful that it can come from outside. Yes, it is doubtful that social conditions can promote happiness or hinder it, that social progress has increased the sum of happiness on earth. Was there no happiness in the ghetto? I am convinced that there was some. Is there no happiness in the Siberian deportation camps? I have always perceived the “death house” as a life-form, in God’s name, as a life-form in the sense that European prisons or even barracks are not—Dostoyevsky himself doubtlessly perceived it so, for neither when he suffered this form of life nor later did ever a word of accusation or of revolt pass his lips: it made him impatient when one spoke to him later of the “sufferings” he had had to bear. “What suffering, then . . .” he said, gruffly breaking off and beginning to joke about inconsequential things—Strakhov tells the story. A life form, I say, and every life form that is at all humanly bearable is in the end something acceptable, life fills it out as it is in its mixture, its relativity of pain and comfort, desire and torment. It is undeniably true that even to think such a thought as this is a luxury made possible only by favorable social conditions, and that to have the desire and the strength to think it one must have a warm breakfast in one’s stomach. But does one disparage the human race when one says that for the overwhelming majority of all human beings—and not just those who are starving—“happiness” is gorging and boozing—or, to say it more politely and scientifically: “the greatest enjoyment of economic goods”? This is the way things are beyond all doubt. But the result of this is that all enlightenment morality, every teaching of the “true benefit” of the human being, no matter how intellectual it is to begin with, even if in the beginning it defines the true benefit of the human being to be “life in God,” definitely comes down to the same degree, that is, materializes, becomes economic and despiritualized, as it attains power and takes on the attitude of the mob; and that on the other hand the masses of human beings who believe in it definitely become more and more greedy, discontented, stupid, and irreligious. Yes, more irreligious. Liberalism errs when it believes it can separate religion from politics: Without religion, politics—domestic, social politics, that is—is in the long run impossible. For the human being is so formed that having lost metaphysical religion, he puts the religious element into the social sphere, elevates social life to religious consecration, and this leads either to an anticultural, social plaintiveness, or, since social antagonism is inevitable and the promised happiness does not appear, to eternal disputes about utility, and to despair. Religiosity is quite compatible with social conscience, with the need for social tidiness. But it begins only at the moment when the overestimation of social life ends, that is: with the insight that the reconciliation is to be sought elsewhere than in the social sphere; and it ends, it flees and leaves nothing more than despairing discord behind, where that overestimation takes possession of the minds, where the unconditional apotheosis of social life begins.
This is the way it is with all antimetaphysical enlightenment: No matter how “intellectual” it may be in the beginning, it descends, descends to monism and even much deeper, when it attains “power,” conquers the common man. For “quand la populace se méle de raisonner, tout est perdu.” Voltaire, my dear democrats! But as long as one does not show me the essential difference between the spirit of “resolute love of humanity” and that of the utilitarian enlightenment morality that actually does not have to scream for power anymore because it has already progressed much too far in its acquisition of power and in “democratization”—I will not find the connection, God help me; and it amazes me how one could dare recently to designate this intellect as “the” intellect, and precisely in its name to proclaim the solidarity of all intellectuals.
“Happiness” is a chimera. Never will the harmony of individual interests come down to that of the community, the unequal distribution of benefit will never end, and you cannot explain to the people why some remain masters and the others servants. But the principle of democratic enlightenment, once enthroned, will not suffer limits on its rule; it would have to admit defeat if it feared any logical conclusion. Let it achieve the realm of individual mass socialism—it will revolt against the hardship and constraint that even then—and precisely then—the individual person will have to suffer, and it will march forward to anarchy, to the “autonomous individual removed from all tradition.” In the long run no governmental form is compatible with the principle of the enlightenment, and as it fulfills itself logically, it leads to the destruction of the conditions of all cultural life.
It is fortunate that the intellect is quicker than reality, that it does not have to actualize things in order to understand. A Frenchman, Sorel, realized early what others only saw at the outbreak of the war: to wit, that the parliamentary workers’ movement can only strengthen the present-day state, that it has actually only strengthened it. He understood the danger of reconciliation, of the corruption of the “intellect” by the political attainment of power. At the same time he anticipated the knowledge of the tyrannical strain of socialism and founded, as he began to teach unpolitical-anarchic class struggle, the so-called “revolutionary syndicalism.” Please pay attention! This final consequence of the principle of enlightenment, this step beyond radical socialism, signified at the same time the first step toward reaction. For what is the title of Sorel’s programmatic work? It is: Les illusions du progrès. Well, this could be enough. But what does it say? It says that democracy leads to the destruction of greatness and to the dominance of mediocrity; that it also, by the establishment of an unavoidable central authority, makes itself illusory. It says more! It says that one must break every bond between the people and the literature of the eighteenth century, to avoid the danger of its becoming established in burgherly life. The man had insight. The day came, it had to come, when he realized the impossibility of his “syndicalism” as well (which could no more do without leaders than democracy could earlier), realized it with all the vehement honesty within him, and—went over to the monarchist party. To religion, too? To a more relaxed evaluation of social life and to the realization that politics without metaphysical religiosity is impossible? I do not know, but it is probable. But do you see the circle? From the most extreme radicalism to the most extreme conservatism is only one step. But the human spirit does not want to turn back. Whoever has been a syndicalistic anarchist cannot become a socialist anymore. He will make the step “forward,” to where—in France—the Catholic church stands.
Admittedly, this danger is more significant in the realm of pure theory than in that of action. The homme d’action may not even perceive the corruption of the intellect by power, he may not even perceive his own corruption. Do you know the story of M. Briand? “It makes no difference, you could hear it again,” Pedro says in the Preciosa. The lawyer was thirty-nine years old when he defended M. Hervé against the accusation of antimilitary agitation. At the time he said: “Like Hervé I am of the opinion that we cannot be satisfied with an idle critique of the standing armies, but that rather, in order to uproot the plague of militarism, we must seize the evil by the roots, I mean by what the bourgeois calls the fatherland.” That was “the intellect”! But since M. Briand was a talented man, he became Minister of Education four years later, shortly thereafter Minister of Justice, and now that he has even become Minister President—but everyone who values the French parliamentary reports as entertaining reading knows well enough with what an iron fist he defended “what the bourgeois calls the fatherland” against the domestic enemy—against the domestic one for the time being! Did he even have an idea of his decline? No, probably not. For one does not betray the revolution when one behaves like a bourgeois, and decline is very difficult to differentiate from development. Concepts also develop: the concept of revolution, for example. For all times it stands written on the bronze tablet of history what Le temps once wrote about income tax. “Against it,” it wrote, “our fathers made that revolution that has the immortal honor of having brought the spirit of freedom to the world.” There we realized what “intellect” meant by freedom, after it had attained power.
Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man? One will only find the word accurate in the figurative sense. But no matter how much appearances speak against it—I don’t side with any party; truly I am not fighting democracy. I was twenty years old when I first read the sentences:
If the object of all politics is to make life bearable for as many as possible, then these many as possible should logically decide what they understand to be a bearable life; if they trust intellect to find the right means to this goal, what good would it do to doubt the efficacy of this path? The fact is, they want to be the makers of their own happiness or unhappiness; and if this feeling of self-determination, the pride in the five or six concepts their minds contain and bring forth, actually makes life so pleasant for them that they will gladly bear the fatal results of their limitation: then little can be said against it.
This comes from Human, All Too Human, and at that time they were just good, intelligent sentences, not very timely, that one consented to in a schoolboy way because of their graceful-noble resignation. No doubt they lived on in me while I was preoccupied with other things, and when the forty-year-old looks them up again under vexing circumstances, he finds that they describe his relationship to politics today, too, in the briefest and most complete manner. Or perhaps not completely? Can we really only have a negative, purely resigned attitude toward what we feel comes from necessity? Is it not positive, does it not at least gain a bit of color and warmth from our disapproval of the absurdity of thinking of trying to prevent the inevitable? Admittedly, events such as those of today reinforce every tendency, and the war cannot fail, must not fail, to supply the conservative, delaying forces, and all irrationalism, all “reaction” as well, richly with new spirit, new blood. But I knew on the day of its outbreak that the war would above all signify a powerful step forward for Germany on the path to democracy, and I said so to the most bitter opposition from the political literary man who expected only the blackest things from it.
Just as Germany’s political order has undergone many and great changes since the patriarchical police and vassal state of the seventeenth century, it is certain she must continue to go forward according to the exigencies of time and development. Just like anyone else I am convinced that much in our state order has gradually become disorder, is no longer to be tolerated, but must be set right, that unavoidable consequences must be drawn from so many social, economic, and world-political changes, that rights result from the democratic educational institutions of general obligatory schooling and military service, rights of self-determination and co-determination of the people that need political, orderly expression, and that the state that refused to recognize reality would certainly fall. I repeat: it is not the coming democracy, which I hope will appear in a bearably German and not an altogether too humbug-like form, not the realization of some kind of German Volksstaat, which, of course, carefully considered, will neither have to be a mob state nor a state of literary men, that I reject. What infuriates me is the appearance of the intellectual satisfait who has systematized the world under the sign of democratic thought and now lives as a dogmatist, as one who is right. What galls me and what I struggle against is the secure virtue, the self-righteous and tyrannical thickheadedness of civilization’s literary man who has found the bottom that eternally holds his anchor, and who announces that every talent must wither that does not quickly politicize itself democratically—his bold enterprise, that is, to commit intellect and art to a democratic doctrine of salvation. But what not only offends my intellectual need for freedom and decency but also particularly embitters my natural feeling for justice to its very foundations is the “objectivity,” that is: the infatuated absurdity with which this all-too-German man morally supports the enemy civilizations against his country and people; it is his truly shameless doctrine of the “higher moral level of democracy,” this doctrine from which he does not hesitate to draw the hidden or open conclusion that Germany, precisely because she has not been democratic, bears the guilt for the war, that the war and her defeat will break her mania for dominance, her crude advocacy of aristocracy, that she will be proved wrong, disciplined, broken, that she must and will be brought to the reason and virtue—of the others. If he called the war a chastisement, yes, a self-chastisement of all suffering nations; if he wanted to see in it an unconscious and religious attempt of all of them to purify themselves and to do penance for the sins and vices of the comfortable peace—I would be silent, I would even agree with him. Who has not had moments when he has been completely unable to regard the nations that are flaying one another as enemies? When he thinks he understands that all this has to do basically with a common European action—with a common attempt, even though perhaps with highly improper means, to renew our world and our soul? What Dostoyevsky said of his beloved nation:
And just recently, when it seemed almost to be decaying from sin, drunkenness and immorality, it rose up in new spiritual elation and freshness and fought out the last war for the belief in Christ that the Moslems had trampled upon. It accepted the war, it reached out for it, as it were, as if for a possibility of purifying itself from its sins and vices by sacrifice; and it sent its sons there to fight and if need be to die for the holy cause, and it did not lament that the ruble was sinking and the price of food was rising . . .
does this not apply a little, does it not, compared with other things, apply very much to the warlike uprising of every nation, and also to this total uprising that is so thoroughly bewailed by humanitarians as a disgraceful “relapse”?
But what does the German radical literary man mean by “chastisement”?
When the German workers have overthrown the military and Junker party, when they have hanged the Kaiser, the von Bernhardis, the von Tirpitzes and the others in this caste in a long row Unter den Linden, when they actually have begun to construct a democratic republic, then we will assume that they have delivered the proof of their wish and their intention to punish the criminal perpetrators of this war.
To be exact: it was not our radical literary man, it was the French social democrat, M. Hervé, who wrote that. But it comes to the same thing. Civilization’s literary man also says exactly the same thing: not only in the same sense, but also in the same words, in the same wild and insipid sansculotte jargon. The arrogance with which the Celto-Romanic democracy, including the Anglo-Saxon one, “judges” German conditions, with which it insists upon “improving Germany internally,” is infantile, hair-raising, foolish to the point of grotesqueness. This arrogance has never even received so much as a smile from civilization’s literary man, let alone driven the blood to his temples. He encourages it, he gives his assent, in his own heart-stirring thieves’ Latin he agrees with everything that comes from its impudent mouth. For democracy has “the higher moral level.” And we, we have “masters.”
Well, the others have masters, too, it seems. “You have no idea of the cowardice of your masters,” Rolland has his Christophe say to the French. “You let yourselves be oppressed, insulted, stepped on by a handful of rogues.” But these rogues and masters are democratic rogues and masters, and therefore they may still be rogues—they are not really such genuine “masters”; while on the other hand the Germans are possibly more masters than rogues. More exactly, however, there is still something else about them: to wit, that civilization’s literary man is not only a prophet, but also an artist, and as such a decidedly wrong-headed thinker who has read too much in Michelet’s History of the Revolution, just as Don Quixote did in his books of chivalry, and who is now fighting against flocks of sheep and windmills, which he has, for the sake of noble feeling, convinced himself are knights and giants—even though he probably does not really think they are. We have long known that he has been living and working intellectually in an epoch of one hundred and thirty years ago, in that of the French Revolution: the result is that he is quite playfully transferring the circumstances of that time into present-day Germany, dreaming them in. Since he hates the prerevolutionary seigneurs with his whole heart, hates them as a sansculotte of 1790 did, and since he does not simply wish to combat them historically but also rhetorically as if they were truly contemporary, he translates them into German as he is wont to do with all things, and calls them “the masters.” We have masters; they are the military, the saber-Junkers who retain “power” in Germany, who represent “power” as such in contrast to “intellect,” and one has absolutely no idea at all how depraved this master and warrior caste is until one has learned about it from civilization’s literary man. To be sure, during forty years of peace they “attempted” nothing—started no war, that is—and accomplished nothing, but instead of this they have abetted the class struggle and the chronic civil war, and they have caused international crises, whether because of ineptness or cunning one seldom knew, and have derived benefit for themselves from the disunity of the nation and from its fears. The nation means nothing to them, it is the raw material of their rule, and only naked self-interest has kept them from destroying us, the raw material, completely. Yes, these are masters—seldom has one seen the like. But if the German people tolerated them, if they (literally) “suffered humiliation from them for generations,” then the reason is that (and here the psychology of the literary man becomes “deep”—it is always “deep” when it has reached the point of sexuality and presents a mixture of Nietzsche and Krafft-Ebing)—that the misanthropy of the tyrants “appeals to all perverse instincts.” One sees that it is quite simply and disgustingly an alternating game of sadism on the one side and masochism on the other. For perverse reasons the people have even done well under their “masters,” and the “struggle” (l’effort) against the “masters” is really a “struggle” of the nation against itself, as it were. Nevertheless, the enormous affairs of Köpenick and Saverne have, in spite of all their masochism, raised a storm in the German people against their masters, that storm “that stirs up the deepest feelings”—and what does one call a government, civilization’s literary man asks, that has the will of the whole nation against it? One calls it foreign domination, he answers quick-wittedly; and the nation would have given itself up and deserved to collapse if in the face of power it had become silent once and for all.
This Dionsyian galimatias—why I call it Dionsyian, I will certainly yet explain—was presented before the war, but it would be superfluous fairness to emphasize this: one would be wrong in assuming that the war had changed the literary man the least bit in his view of Germany. He would, he does, speak today as he spoke in May 1914. Foreign nations that seriously believed the German nation had been thrust into the war by the fists of its “masters,” and that it longed to be liberated by the armies of civilization from these “masters,” have been taught better by a few months of war. They have long known, every single one, that in this war they are dealing with Germany herself, with the people as an embodiment, with the nation, and not with any sort of ghostly “masters” of the country. A Frenchman of a refractory mood, who was opposed to the dominant spirit of his homeland, said to his bourgeois compatriots that they did not understand anything of “this heroic people.” Another, the ex-Minister Hanotaux, spoke in the newspaper of “this terrible people” that had “dreamed of world mastery”—and if he was wrong in this, he was still wrong in a more correct way than the German radical literary man, who believes with all the fire of his talent in an alien dominance of masters in Germany, a rule under which the people voluptuously pant and moan; and since he knows how to express his literary scorn and hatred in such a passionate rhythm, we should therefore believe him when he says that a nation of masochistic slaves has performed the deeds of this war. A real politician, a politician, that is, who pays a little attention to reality and who does not look upon politics as a means of intoxication and a cheap opportunity for passion, the democratic representative Konrad Haußmann, said in a democratic magazine: “No trace,” he said, “no trace of a contradiction exists between army and people in the supposedly militaristic Germany. The field gray has replaced the ‘bicolored uniform’ . . . The accomplishments of the reserve, the militia, and the home guard are worthy of those of the officers and men of the regulars.” This is without doubt philistinism, but it is the truth; while the songs of civilization’s literary man admittedly have talent and passion in their favor, they show little regard for truth, which in political matters, if not in expressionistic art, must finally have a little to do with reality. No matter how the nation may have behaved toward its masters, it does not really seem to have merited the “collapse” that civilization’s literary man was not far from prophesying, for today it is putting up a resistance for which no mechanistic explanations are sufficient and at which the world has not yet learned to be properly amazed. One day it will become aware; and however the war may now end—it can certainly no longer bring a German defeat in any moral sense. What barker’s spiel could have argued more powerfully for the right of this nation to take part in administering the earth than its present accomplishment? But if the laughter at the Köpenick farce, if our burgherly displeasure at the Saverne affair, had been “the deepest feelings” that could be “stirred up” in the German people, then they would have been less deep than one believed. In my opinion, the deepest feelings in the human being cannot be stirred up at all by politics. The deepest feelings of a nation, however, are stirred up by a decisive spiritual and physical struggle such as the one today—and not by any Saverne affair.
I am as little tempted to make an apology for the political leaders of Germany as it is my job to do so. Nevertheless, I believe that in this point, too, I am on better terms with justice than are those who have justice as their battle cry. I do not believe that our leaders and masters have shown themselves to be humanly inferior to those of hostile nations, and indeed, precisely for the reason that, as the terrible situation in Germany in the summer of 1914 proved, they have shown themselves to be so very much inferior to them politically. Moreover it is a priori probable to me that this inferiority actually existed: for in the end, a people has the leaders it “deserves,” that it is ordinarily able to produce; and no matter how much these war years have “politicized” the German people—up to 1914 they were considered to be a politically untalented people, and they did not object to being considered so. Leaders, I think, are to be looked upon as exponents; basically one criticizes oneself when one criticizes them, and perhaps one would therefore do better to criticize oneself straight out. After one has done so, one may, by way of apology, make allowance for the vicious trickiness of foreign policy that one has faced so ineptly since one has been an empire—and one may precisely for this reason feel oneself driven to allow one’s inborn sense of efficiency and accomplishment to hold sway, particularly in questions of leadership, and to think about finding surer methods of selection for all national offices. This would be well and good. But I detest the accusing, banishing into the desert, and the angry political squabbling with those “responsible”—the Roman gutter politics of “Piove? Abbasso il governo!” Germany’s leaders may have conducted the empire’s business very badly; they may have lacked all tact in the treatment of foreigners, used harmful words, made harmful gestures, and above all awakened the disastrous idea that Germany had become fat and cowardly and would, if she only saw herself opposed to a strong counteralliance, under no circumstances accept the war: one says all this, and it may well be true. In the essential thing, however, in the main thing that has to do with direction and goal, they have led Germany as she wanted to be led, namely on the imperial path—which, if a new and greater Bismarck did not show the way, and perhaps even then, had to lead to a collision with those who had “older rights.” It would be silly to be deceived at the measure of aggressiveness that lay in the will of the nation to be led in this way. One should not deny this aggressiveness, not act as if the German people had not wished for anything better for themselves than to raise their cabbage in contented limitation, and not write—as I have read verbatim: that the predominant feeling of this German people at the outbreak of the war was “dread of the coming horror.” We know different. What happened after the disaster of Echterdingen14 was a strong portent. And the indescribable uprising in the summer of 1914 was an uprising of belief, of boundless readiness. Need? Oh, yes, it was the passion of the moment. But need is, as we have already explained to M. Rolland, neither mere “nécessité” nor desperado boldness; need is the solemn name for a creative emotion in which elements of defense are strongly mixed with those of attack. A nation does not rise up in this way, millions of its youth do not take up arms in this way, before they are called, if that nation wants nothing, nothing at all but peace, and if it is being seduced into lawbreaking and misdeeds by cunning “masters.” The world nation of the spirit, strengthened to exuberant physical power, had taken a long drink at the fountain of ambition; it wanted to become a world nation as God had called it to be, the world nation of reality—if necessary (and obviously it was necessary) by means of a violent breakthrough. Had not Spain, France, and England had their moments of grandeur and honor? When the war broke out, Germany believed fervently that her own time had come, the moment of trial and of greatness. Whoever does not admit this today, whoever prattles about the “dread of the coming horror,” is lying. The German people, as a people, completely heroically attuned, prepared to take guilt upon themselves and not inclined to moral pussyfooting, have not whined about what the radically merciless enemies have done to them in turn, but in an emergency they have not doubted their right to revolutionary measures, either; they have approved of such measures, and more than approved. They approved of the march into Belgium, and found nothing to criticize in it other than the words of the Chancellor about the wrong one was committing. They approved of the destruction of that impudent symbol of English mastery of the sea and of a still comfortable civilization, the sinking of the gigantic pleasure ship, the “Lusitania,” and they defied the world-resounding hullabaloo that humanitarian hypocrisy raised. And they have not only approved of unlimited submarine warfare, they have cried for it and were bitter with their leaders almost to the point of rebellion when they hesitated to allow it to go on. It suits the democratic orthodoxy of the enemies, for whom “the people” naturally must be “good,” just as it suits their political cleverness, to differentiate between the fine German people and their detestable “masters”; not us. And no matter how the war may now end: let us take the German share of the “guilt” upon us, each individual, with the exception, perhaps, of a handful of pacifists and literary saints—and not make some chance functionaries into scapegoats.
In spite of its aesthetic attraction, the ghastly picture civilization’s literary man draws of the psychology of the German “masters” reveals undeniable obscurities and contradictions. For forty years they attempted nothing, these crafty ones; that is, they did not go to war, but only, as they brewed international crises, threatened war and frightened the people in order to be able to hold them down more easily, the cunning ones. This is how we read it before the war. No sooner had it broken out than we heard that they had contrived it, and indeed, for the same purpose. For it is certain that masters of their type, executioners of democracy, that is, are never drawn into a war that they have not contrived first of all for the suppression of their own people. What, contrived? And at the most unfavorable moment, under the most difficult circumstances? After they had let pass one opportunity after another for decades to conduct it under much easier circumstances as a real “preventive war”? They threw themselves into the risky venture only after it had become gigantic—while they had shunned it when its success had seemed as good as certain? If it then failed, what would become of them and their tyranny? And what would become of it if Germany were victorious? Did they believe they would be better able to suppress the people more certainly with the help of a victorious war? Which social class would be the one to gain the main advantage from Germany’s victory, anyway—which one other than the one that is called the “people” in the narrower sense, the German workers? Does one suppress the people by raising them up, enriching them, giving them an interest in the state? What even the likes of me with a politically untrained eye saw: that a people’s war such as this one had to lead irrefutably, unconditionally, and even independently of its conclusion, to democracy—had not the “masters” seen this? But then, they were not only rascals, they were clearly so stupid, so stupid it cannot be expressed!
But stupid or sly or both—why should the masters not have contrived the war, since they, of course, and only they, were so disgustingly prepared for the murderous work? At least civilization’s literary man has shown us the French enemy, who concerns him so much, in that bad condition “that all Germany’s enemies were in at the beginning of the war and that German newspapers were aware of”: the tattered peacetime uniform, the pack cord from which the sidearm hung, the cracked patent-leather shoes. And as he, the politician, suddenly shoves the individual-human element before the political one, he has the ghost of the peaceful Jean Bonhomme from the rustic Café Voltaire whisper melodramatically to his murderer: “I hated you and your countrymen much less than I did the fellow who wanted to take my girlfriend away from me.” He could just as well have had the ghost of a German farmer who was stretched out in the mud speak to the “enemy.” He prefers the opposite, in honor of the Café Voltaire. Is it proper to misuse individual innocence with such tearful bliss, and the innocence of the “enemy,” at that, when the lives of nations are at stake? “It has been firmly established,” the Dutch Attorney General said in his argument against the editor of the Telegraaf, “that the entente’s expenditures for armaments before the war exceeded those of the Central Powers.” If this is true, what happened to these expenditures that Jean Bonhomme must wear such pitifully cracked patent-leather shoes? What about the “archiprêt” that was megaphoned over the Rhine at every opportunity from the great Café Voltaire? What about the warlike rejoicing over France’s head start in air power “that the French newspapers were aware of,” about the newly rekindled offensive spirit in general? Did Austria find herself at the beginning of the war facing a terrible Russian superior force or not? Did Germany have to suffer the invasion of East Prussia or not? If she prepared herself well—the tasks that would come to her in the war had given her good reason to do so. In the theaters of war at the end of 1916 her armies had a front of one thousand, eight hundred kilometers; the French six hundred, the English two hundred and fifty. Preparation! If it is French to say: “On n’est pas prêt et on se bat tout de même”—is it our fault? It was the same in 1870, too; but this time you were given time, lots of time to meet the height of the requirements—which everyone had very old-fashioned ideas about. Was perhaps the German preparation adequate for it? Did it reach as far as the colonies? Did it not fail more than once in Europe itself? Everyone was prepared for a war, indeed abundantly so. But no one was prepared for this war, that is the point, and the reason it could come is that everyone nevertheless believed that he was prepared for it.
In 1875, Theodor Mommsen, a highly liberal academician, a noble representative of German intellectuality, said the following words as Rector of the University of Berlin in a speech at the commemoration of its foundation:
Of course we also know that the Kaiser above all, but every German statesman as well, shares this wish to be protected from further victories. Yes, beyond doubt the greater one’s influence, the deeper one’s insight, the more one shares this wish, the more seriously one strives for the suppression of every flare-up of temper even if it is justified, of every even apparent misuse of the newly won position of power, the more one is willing to risk everything, except the right and honor of the nation, on the creation of a lasting state of peace . . . When a nation such as ours exposes the highly educated segment of its youth to the dangers of war to the same extent, yes, if one considers the ratio of officers to men, even to a greater extent than the less-educated segment, when it necessarily carries part of its best flowering to the grave, then there certainly lies in this enormous stake a warning against the game of war itself that no German statesman and above all no German ruler ever can and will ignore. Wars such as the ones the last French emperor mischievously began on distant shores and then against us, and often just as mischievously broke off, are formally possible according to our political system, but in fact impossible . . . Under the Hohenzollern dynasty it has happened that to the greatest detriment to the nation necessary wars have not been waged; no Hohenzollern has ever waged an unnecessary war, and he cannot wage one!
Ah, yes, the German masters; what bloodhounds. Does one have a sense of harmony? Would one like to hear a few bloodhounds howling right here and now? “Our people,” the Quartermaster General and later Minister of War von Stein wrote on New Year’s Day 1915,
Our people would not have been well served by rapid and easy victories. The abuses that occurred after the successes of the campaigns of 1870–71 would have had an even greater impact. Since that time the violent upswing has caused a greater turn toward the material direction. The balance had not yet been reached between spiritual and material forces.
Oh, what a vile, doglike voice! How the desire resounds from it to bring us to generations of humiliation. Quiet now, the second one is howling. A letter appeared in the newspapers last year that the younger Moltke, a “master” beyond doubt, had sent to the editor of a magazine. “It was clear to me,” he says,
long before this war placed our nation on the gold balance of world development, that we are desperately in need of a renewal of spiritual life, and I have hoped with my whole heart that the nation might show itself worthy of the high task that world leadership has given it. It is spiritual weapons that are concerned here; only with them can the future be conquered. There is such an infinite amount of idealism, of upward striving in the soul of our people. It was long suppressed by the thick layer of material life; it broke through this when the war caused the externals of existence to disappear before the idealistic storm of love for the fatherland that swept through all hearts . . . Divided into classes, split up into parties, we scarcely knew each other before the war. We want to remove the barriers that the egotism of individual existence has erected between us and bring human being close to human being. We must help nobility of soul conquer the business mentality . . . We will soon perish, but our nation shall live into the coming centuries. It shall live upwardly . . .
Gianettino Doria’s rustic voice. A look into the atavistic mentality of one of those power louts and systematists of terror from whom the burgher “has suffered generations of humiliations.” But is it not striking that he is speaking his language, this man of the saber—the language of German-burgherly culture and humanity? To “live upwardly . . . to help nobility of soul conquer the business mentality . . .” Have we heard such war aims from any other country? From England, perhaps, where master morality, master rights, master pride are truly at home together with democracy? His war aims are not exactly politically competitive; they might sound foreign to the ear of a bourgeois-imperialist. The knight is old-fashioned—well, that is why he is a knight. But when, in an old-fashioned way, he idealizes the meaning and goal of this war, which is, of course, to a great extent a war of bourgeois competition—there is no lack of reason to believe that the likes of him does not much approve of the outer stamp of modern warfare. A chemical industrialist makes a circle of high military men acquainted with a newly discovered lethal gas. He experiments a little, describes and recommends in a glib lecture the annihilating effects of his ozone. One of the officers has listened with a slightly displeased look on his face. Finally he turns on his heel and goes to a corner of the room, comes back and says: “Really quite atrocious. Really no longer beautiful . . . as a weapon . . . I cannot help it . . .” The chemist shrugs his shoulders. “Well, does His Excellency wish us to produce a harmless gas? We can do that, too.” He had the laughter on his side.
It is true, then, they are sometimes old-fashioned, the masters. As far as modern trends are concerned, though, they are well-meaning to a fault. When Herr Delbrück with his hereditary nobility left civil service, the conservative press said he not only had no feeling for agriculture, but that he had also demonstrated more and more radical tendencies in social policy; they said that in his aversion to any special legislation protecting those willing to work he went so far as to reject the ban on picketing. A regime of masters and sabers! It seems that during the war the German people have wanted more of this than they have gotten. For it was not popular with the great majority when Dr. von Bethmann Hollweg defeated Tirpitz together with the whole iron party; and it is still remarkable that while in the France of Briand, the man of the right, a newspaper like Action française was pampered from on high, in our country there were complaints that the leftist-liberal, Western and internationally minded press was the one that the censor favored to the disadvantage of the conservative-national one. Others may check the justification of such complaints. At any rate, the main organ of burgherly culture in Germany, the Frankfurter Zeitung, defended itself in vain against the public opinion that it was semiofficial; and English loyalty saw to it that Bertrand Russell, a scholar who at the beginning of the war had resisted the wild atrocity propaganda against Germany, not only received no passport to America, but also lost his chair in Cambridge, while the pacifist and Christian Professor Foerster enjoyed complete freedom to travel and to teach.
This is approximately the way it was with the German iron fist regime, with the Junker and military despotism during the war. How was it before? I do not want to speak of social policy—of which I have heard that the education and the welfare of the people have been relatively decently advanced. But did the arts and sciences lie bound and gagged on the ground in Germany? Did the club swing at bold ventures of the mind? Terrible awakening! I, who thought of myself as quite thin-skinned, quite excitable and needing freedom, I have become forty years old in Germany without knowing, without noticing that I was a slave under the thumb of the “masters.” Indeed, I lived in a country where a book could appear unsuppressed and uncontested that ends with the words: “I call Christianity mankind’s one immortal disgrace.” Such a country seemed free to me.
“Mankind’s one immortal disgrace.” Does one know the sound, the style, the gesture, the monstrous accent? Does one recognize it? Truly, it has by now become such daily nourishment for us, our ear has gradually become so deadened to it, that we are scarcely curious anymore about how it ever could have been dared in an unfree country that was hostile to the intellect. Admittedly, at the time the sulfuric curse was originally hurled with the most intense, most spiritual, most abstract passion in the titanic struggle against a moral value system that was to be delivered over to the contempt of intellect as belittling and slanderous to life. The terrible and ecstatic height of the polemic passion, the horrible intensity of the accent that was no longer critical but religious-execrating, corresponded to the sublimity of the sphere and of the subject. Moreover, it corresponded to a personal, psychological state of extreme and most terrible over-tension and excitement, the final stage of an ineffably venerable life tragedy that truly “awoke fear and pity,” in which the giggling of clinical megalomania already resounded perceptibly, and which was followed directly by psychic collapse, the onset of spiritual darkness. Since then we have seen the democratic exploitation of this late style for literary—what am I saying, for daily political use. Dionsyian criticism—have we not already spoken of it? And have we not already noticed that our radical literary man has appropriated much more of the spirit, if not also of the substance, of the older Nietzsche, who had become grotesque and fanatic, than of the younger one who found “that everyone who violently represents opinions in word and deed should be perceived as an enemy of our present culture, or at least as one who has been left behind”?
It is a peculiarity of intellectual-technical development that imitative, exploitive talent holds mainly to the late and old-age works of the masters—as if the final results of personal development were really decisive for development in greatness, and as if it were not a childish masquerade when an artist at the beginning of his individual destiny speaks the language of a high age level, only because it seems to him to be the ultimate achievement. Thus twenty-year-olds have imitated Beethoven’s last chamber music, thus Ibsen’s and Wagner’s late styles have had the greatest effect on the times, and thus it was not the Nietzsche of the early, ripening period who had the most influence, but the oldest one, whose methods and accents to be sure were not those of advanced age, but of a daemonic phosphorescence of decay and of a psychological phase that preceded insanity.
Our political literary man has learned a medley of things from Nietzsche. Overbeck called his great friend, in comparison with Pascal and Schopenhauer, a rhetorician in the pejorative sense; and it is true: a powerful strengthening, yes, actually the first legitimization of the prose-rhetorical element in Germany, came from Nietzsche—we recognized a basic element of democracy in it, and we see well that Nietzsche’s rhetoric is the point where the Western-politicizing literary man possibly touches German spiritual life. Nietzsche’s brilliant tendency toward satire was also politically exploitable (is not the best in Zarathustra satire?)—above all, however, what goes with it, his caricature-like late style in psychologicis: Nietzsche as a critic was finally completely a caricaturist and artist of the grotesque, his psychology of Christianity, of Wagner, and of the German character, for example, was a grotesquely distorted, a fanatic’s psychology, and our literary-political criticism has its gestures, its monstrously ludicrous accent, from it. Christianity was finally “mankind’s one immortal disgrace”—and how much is lacking, then, for civilization’s literary man to hurl the same judgment against Germany, or at least against the regime of the German masters? He would scarcely have revealed to us that we had “taken” generations of “humiliation” under the masters if the New Testament critic had not previously called himself an “assailant of two thousand years of perversion and human defilement.”
Is there anything more intolerable than titanic passion that is transplanted and democratically dissipated? The over-tensed, tortured language of a spirit reaching up to its full height to destroy and set anew the highest values—applied to political criticism, misused in practiced passion, but still in a completely secure state of mind for the purpose of democratic agitation! Truly, the fanaticism, the grotesque, caricature-like nature of the political prophet’s criticism need make no one worry about this critic’s psychological health; it is not a sign of genuine, excruciating eccentricity and of excessive tension leading to a collapse. Insanity is not behind it—quite honestly, nothing is behind it except perhaps a completely irresponsible artistic pleasure in gesture. Sobriety goes very well with this heat, with a critically grotesque style that is not destructive passion but rather—literary school that one can live comfortably and successfully on. Tsarism and the Russian police state were at any rate something different from our “master” establishment, and Dostoyevsky had suffered. But never did a word against his government cross his lips or issue from his pen, nor did he lose faith in Russia. What in the world has the German literary man had to suffer politically, and how have German “conditions” hurt him? When he invited us to orgies of cerebral eroticism—the jailer kept a respectful distance. Unmolested, without risking anything, without even having to think about any kind of Siberia, the politician decreed his radical manifestos in favor of the republic, of the ideal of truth—and in doing so he speaks against the Reich, power, and the “masters,” using Nietzsche’s language against Christianity.
That is laughable. And it does not become less laughable by the fact that the great majority of Germans paid little attention to these manifestos. Is it unpardonable if one did not take them objectively seriously—if one took them as artistic diversions and escapades? If we had had forty-five years of arrest warrants, lits de justice, Bastille, Deer Park,15 a parasitic court, a physically and spiritually pauperized people, in short, all the abuses of the Bourbon regime, then the despair of civilization’s literary man over what the nation “took” from its masters could not have raged more monstrously. When, however, he assured us at the time, the limit is reached; when even this apathetic people’s patience comes to an end, and they proceed to a reckoning with the “masters”—then this judgment will be highly extraordinary and terrible! I do not believe this. History and its interpreters teach us that the fury and horror of a revolution always correspond exactly to the frightfulness of the misrule that finally caused it. All the terror and madness of the Grand Revolution, the childish helplessness of the “constituting” convention, the theoretical stupidities and practical crimes, of which the government of the literary men and humanitarians was full—they were the necessary consequence of the limitless political immaturity of the nation, they corresponded to the intellectual state of a people that had been made ignorant and cruel by oppression. Assuming that in the Germany of today or tomorrow a constitutional change of the extent and even of the outer form of a revolution would take place: I do not believe that the terrible threats of civilization’s literary man would be fulfilled. I believe, rather, that to his gaze, which is lost in the vision of noyades, fusillades, guillotines, heads on spikes, and similar orgies of reason, there would present itself the image of a people that was well prepared for new freedoms by those it already had, and that would run little risk of falling into the hands of theoreticians, petty peddlers of generalities, dogmatists, revolutionary schoolmasters, freedom priests, inquisition democrats, and organizers of humanitarian masquerades.
Truthfully, then, one was not particularly moved by that rhetoric, one took it to be “an end in itself,” an expression of temperament, political l’art pour l’art; one found no real connection between it and reality, for one found, for example, that there had been a “saber regime” at times in France, but never in Germany. One did not know that the German radical literary man, when he spoke of a saber regime, German slavery, miserable serfdom, and generations of humiliation, had expressed nothing more than the democratic world opinion of Germany that was and is his own: This became clear only at the outbreak of the war when the liberal press of all continents repeated practically word for word what he had always said—and then to be sure one felt oneself forced to defend oneself. I say that every German self-contemplation, that the subjective consciousness of the nation, the domestic facts, strictly contradicted those declamations. I did not rely upon myself at the time—it could be that I was thick-skinned and not alert. But I have searched well, made many inquiries of people who were competent to judge, whom I had a right to trust, from whom it can hurt no one to learn—there were quite radical heads among them—and their verdict, their verdict that contradicted the raging of civilization’s literary man—ensued with a unanimity that must mean something.
“We do not want to allow our pleasant, secure, clean, orderly homeland, in which we are freer than almost all so-called democratic peoples, to be abused . . .” That was Oppenheimer, an otherwise not very amiable scholar who wants to completely do away with large estates; and the italics are not originally mine, but his. But this is the way it resounded from all sides.
“Nowhere do personal freedom and human dignity suffer in our country.”
“The freedom of the citizenry from governmental arbitrariness is protected just as well or better than anywhere else.”
“All talk of a despotic German militarism hostile to culture is the talk of people who have or want to have no knowledge of our domestic circumstances.”
“A free and proud people that feels itself borne up by great future powers . . .”
The most colossal self-deception? But no, this feeling of freedom, power and future was objectified, of course, in gigantic deeds, it was confirmed by the victory that can no longer, we repeat, result in a defeat in any higher sense; and wherever, among combatants and noncombatants, undeluded intelligence looks things in the eye, where historical instinct is active, there the pioneering, leading nature of the German character, which is completely unslavish and somehow pregnant with the future, is anticipated or recognized, whether with joy or with worry and bad conscience.
Since the outbreak of hostilities, of course, there has been no doubt that Germany has had world liberalism, which has thoughtlessly confused itself with world progress, against her, and that only conservative powers have given her moral support. But of course this was a highly confusing and misleading phenomenon that basically proves nothing more than the emptiness of political terminology. Georg Brandes, who certainly had always been a liberal, but especially a free, man, published in Germany during the war an essay entitled “Berlin Memories,” in which he said:
When Bismarck’s decisive break with the Manchester principles occurred, the way the freethinkers conducted their campaign against him seemed so ridiculous to me that I published an article four years after my immigration to Germany, “The Opponents of State Socialism,” in which, in spite of strong reservations, I had to agree with him against them. In it I wrote: “It would be rigid dogmatism if, in the political economic dispute, one wanted to call the government absolutely reactionary simply because of its position on religious reaction and because of its utilization of old prejudices of lineage and class, and to believe that progressiveness in this case means progress. On the contrary! This time it is Bismarck who represents the modern point of view, or, stated more correctly, the revolution, above all, the initiative, the brilliant risk, while the Progressive Party members represent the conservatism that is infertile and poor in thought.”
It was not by chance that the clever old gentleman published this suggestive anecdote in a German magazine at that time. He wanted to say that progressivism does not mean progress in this war, either; he wanted to point out where in truth the “more modern position,” the “revolution,” the “initiative,” the “brilliant risk”—and where the “infertile conservatism” were; and really, if world liberalism (“civilization”) still represented progress, had the future on its side, then it would not have the whole world on its side and would not have pushed forward to the savages who are already enthusiastic for “freedom.” Whatever the state of Germany’s spiritual power of resistance may be today (May 1917), in 1914 she had recognized as superstition the belief that the Western ideas were still the leading, victorious, and revolutionary ones; she was convinced that progress, modernity, youth, genius, and novelty were on the German side; she thought it patently clear that compared with the conservatism of the “immortal principles,” her own psychological conservatism signified something truly revolutionary.
This belief, I say, was objectified in deed and in victory; it had the power, at least momentarily, to cause world liberalism to lose faith in itself. What was becoming clear to the authors of the Manchester Guardian when they, on the occasion of the voyage of the “Appam,” compared the inventive daring of the German sailors with the accomplishments of the English sea powers and found that the latter “seldom distinguished themselves with that refreshing, restless, revolutionary attitude that alone causes great changes in the world”? What was becoming clear to that Roman journalist who wrote: “For wherever one’s sympathies may lie, one still cannot ignore the fact that the Germans have shown a decisive initiative in all areas, and that the role of the other powers has been generally limited to copying the Germans”? What was becoming clear, finally, to Citizen Hervé when in his newspaper he called the Germans an enemy that “disgusted” France but that was renewing all the qualities of our fathers from the time of the Revolution; organizational ability, power of decision, daring—“everything that we seem to be lacking today”? If qualities such as those he listed are not the firm possession of a nation, but if they go over from one nation to the other; what is it, who is it, that at the moment gives these qualities to the one nation, awakens them in it, and causes them to work in it and from it? Is it not the time, history, that shows such a remarkably talented people that its hand is over them at the moment?
This is how Germany thought in 1914, and rightly so. If she can no longer think in this way today; if she is about to capitulate intellectually-psychologically before she capitulates physically; then it is not completely because the pressure from outside was too strong, not only because she is unnerved by suffering. The unnerving comes to a good and worse part from within: I do not believe that I am paying too much respect to the effect of civilization’s literary man when I assert that the process of decay that is spreading out is in good part his work, the effect of his teaching that we are in need of “reforming”—not, for example, as everyone else needs it, but reforming in the sense of the others, reforming by the others; of his teaching of democracy’s “higher moral level.” To repeat, I do not believe that with this claim I am exaggerating his influence; for when I am told that our psychological attrition is only the result of our national weakness, of the German tendency to self-betrayal, then I reply that one can recognize in civilization’s literary man precisely the tool and the expression of this weakness and tendency. And the “higher moral level”? What about it? Shall we, in order to pass the difficult time, look it a bit critically in the eye?
The world was in a bad way before the war—who denies it? Whether it will ever be less badly off, whether it will not always be badly off, only in different ways, I do not know, yes, I confess that I do not have enough rhetorical high-mindedness to suggest this as definitely likely. It is certain that the forms of its sinfulness were gross and repulsive. It had sunk into senseless worship of affluence. The economy was its one and all, and the name, type, and form of its economy was capitalism, or rather the imperialism that one could also call “capitalistic militarism”—the literary man, I believe, calls it this. Now admittedly I do not deny that the manner of this saint, when he speaks of capitalism and imperialism as if they were the most depraved works of the devil and a crime against the human race, has always seemed a bit laughable to me. As if, I said to myself, capitalistic expansion were not a necessary stage of development in economic life. As if, furthermore, there were any prospect that there would be, after this war, less “imperialism” than before: the future will, if everything is not deceptive, see a few gigantic world empires, which—whether Germany is one of them or not—will have divided the administration of the globe among themselves; and the phrase, “rights of small nations,” will then generally be treated as the deceitful sentimental phrase it already is today. And especially: as if democracy were in any way a contradiction of imperialism or capitalism—as if it were not rather almost in solidarity and identity with them. But wherever it is, or wherever it is in a rhetorically acceptable manner alleged to be, there it covers, in the eyes of civilization’s literary man, all imperialistic sins with the veil of “beauty.”
This is, in short, doctrinaire mendacity. It is not the free, just, and true manliness that the liberal belief was quite capable of up to a short while ago. Just recently the newspapers published one of Theodor Mommsen’s letters from 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War. “In my youth,” he said,
the belief was rather general that the world order was continually improving, and that this progress would be expressed by the more and more general introduction of the republic. One has gradually gotten rid of this youthful stupidity after one has had the opportunity to actually experience such transformations. But one was not prepared for the bitter disappointment that this war has brought to the friends of the republic. The hypocritical humanitarianism, the violation of the weaker ones, the waging of war for the sake of speculation and hoped-for stock manipulation, give this American enterprise a stamp that is even less worthy than that of the worst so-called cabinet wars, and are well suited to disenchant the last republican.
Truly, it is good to hear the language of painful honesty after one has heard for six years or longer the language of a hysterical doctrinairism and beautiful-souled democracy ringing in one’s ears! Where was the protest of the literary saint when Italy, with truly villainous frivolity, improvised the conquest of Libya “without anyone,” as Guglielmo Ferrero wrote at the beginning of the World War, “giving a thought to the effects that such a severe affront to international law and such a sudden disturbance of the European equilibrium could have had”? Since it was a matter of the will of democracy—where was the anti-imperialistic anger of our radical literary man? He found words of tender psychological understanding for Italy’s last-minute panic that for her the colonial gates would be closed, that was all. Where was his anti-imperialistic moralism when France, backed by England, with a mood no less impudent than that of before 1870, “penetrated” Morocco, unabashedly violating treaties? He admired France, he admired with one eye closed France’s powerful colonial empire, he admired the imperialistic democracy. Disgusted with the brutal injustice of the Boer War, Germany’s popular feeling was in agreement with France’s; but at the time, our literary man probably still remained on the aesthetic level and took no moral side. Did he ever take offense at the fact that England, without needing a defensive force, kept a mercenary army solely for wars of aggression and conquest? Never. This was quite all right. One cannot point out enough that the conscience, the moral sensitivity of this declared cosmopolite and friend of mankind has always shown itself to be intimately national. For the sins of others it has nothing but excuses; for what would not be excused, embellished, and glorified by the name of democracy!
But as we toss out this rhetorical question, we find ourselves coming to the realization that “democracy” actually means the synthesis and reconciliation of power and intellect. We are at the point of realizing that civilization’s literary man, this supposed preacher of the antithesis of power and intellect, as a political educator, really wants a synthesis of power and intellect under the banner of democracy. Let us take a good look: the oldest representatives of democracy are England and France, the classical country of political economy and the classical country of revolution. But political economy and revolution, these are profit and virtue, and precisely the name that brings these two together is “democracy.” It is also “politics.” It is also “civilization.” Yes, all these are again just names for something even higher and more general, for Europeanism. “The European,” according to a passage from the “teaching,” “wants first of all to do business; but as he does his business, he wants secondly to bring about something moral as well, that is, something progressive-humanitarian.” This is the definition of Europeanism; it is at the same time that of politics and civilization. What civilization’s literary man wants to teach us Germans is the priceless psychological ability to see morality and business, humanity and exploitation, virtue and profit in one, to make them one—this is precisely what politicization consists of. During the war he celebrated the English spirit as the embodiment of this Europeanism. “The East India Company,” he said, consisted of money men, but they were humanitarian money men, prepared to profit by making people happy. And if up to today they and their successors have been the harshest of exploiters—is there any doubt that they have been proven right and that a relative human happiness, even if only the greater security for their very lives, would never have come to the dark masses of India without England?
God forbid us to doubt it! In India the mortality rate has risen in the last thirty years from twenty-four to thirty-four percent—I have read it. And indeed, this happened thanks to plague and famine, in which the cold-blooded English masters see providence’s remedy for overpopulation. “Just think!” the former American Secretary of State, W. J. Bryan, said one day,
The English administration is justified because it prevents the Indians from killing one another, while the plague is praised because it carries away the ones the government has protected from being murdered.
So much for “relative human happiness” and “greater security for their very lives,” this humanitarian accompaniment to the economic fact that roughly a hundred million dollars a year flows from India to England. But after all, we are dealing here with Asia, with “dark masses,” with niggers. One is a “European” and an aristocrat toward other continents, even if a democrat at home. Meanwhile, Ireland lies in Europe, a beautiful, fertile country that has been conquered by a related, neighboring people, raped, annexed in our times, in the second half of the nineteenth century, whittled down to half its one-time population. How unimportant to mention it! Self-criticism! Self-criticism! Put your own house in order, patriot! But I find nothing! By my immortal soul I find nothing in German history that can be compared to England’s treatment of Ireland; for valid reasons I can refuse to compare Schleswig-Holstein and Alsace-Lorraine to it, and I must leave it to antinational foreign nationalists who are also students of a rhetoric class to prove the moral plus and the relative human happiness in the Irish case, to prove it to be among the other high-minded endeavors of democracy’s drive for enrichment: in the Boer War, in the Opium War, in the Spanish-American War, where Mommsen’s Teutonic understanding could not discover it. Business and virtue! The nation of humanitarian moneymen has risen up in this war to slay a dragon that answers to the name of German militarism, to protect the small nations, to protect freedom and justice. But it has seized the opportunity not only to occupy with the greatest care and precision all important European and non-European points for the maintenance and expansion of its world mastery, beginning with Calais, but also to gain possession of worldwide business secrets through extensive postal espionage, to destroy German foreign trade, to eliminate the German overseas enterprises, to complete and to make permanent Germany’s economic isolation by entangling all possible countries, including those of no military significance, in the war, and to organize a lasting economic blockade through the decisions of the Paris Conference of June 1916. This is how one profits while making people happy.
“While the Germans torture themselves with the solution of philosophical problems,” Goethe said to Eckermann,
the English with their great practical sense laugh at us and win the world. Everyone knows their declamations against the slave trade, and even though they would have us believe that humane maxims motivate this policy, we now see that their true motive is a real purpose, without which the English, as is well known, never do anything, and which we should have understood. They themselves use the negroes in their large possessions on the western coast of Africa, and it is against their interest to export them. In America they have founded large negro colonies, which are very productive and which deliver a great many blacks every year. With them they supply the North American demand, and since they are thus carrying on such a thriving trade, importation from the outside would be quite contrary to their mercantile interests, and they therefore preach, not without purpose, against the inhumane trade. At the Congress of Vienna, the English delegate still argued quite vigorously against it, but the Portuguese delegate was clever enough to answer quite calmly that he had not been aware that the purpose of the meeting was to deliver a general judgment on the world or to establish the foundations of morality. He knew the English purpose very well, and he also had his own, which he knew how to speak for and to attain.
This is the Goethe who, as I said, showed more Bismarckian traits than the Weimar-Potsdam dialecticians want to admit. However, it is highly unlikely that there will be a German delegate at the world peace conference who will answer the Englishmen as the Portuguese representative did.
If the English spirit, to wit, the happy instinct “not to act” before the “humane maxim” has been joined to the “real purpose”—if this spirit is the embodiment of Europeanism, then America is not far behind England in European spirit. Right now she is providing a splendid example of the democratic art of the good conscience, of the political synthesis of intellect and power, morality and business, by opportunely making herself, for the sake of “justice,” and midst the praise of the democratic world, into a great world power through militarization and fleet construction. To learn how to become skilled in the laughable-miserable archswindle of the instinctive, naive reconciliation of virtue and profit that has long since ceased being hypocritical: again, that is democracy, that is what politicization consists of, and it is that to which civilizations literary man has been sent to educate his people.
The world, we say, was in a bad way before the war, and Germany with it. After she opted for reality and power, Germany took part in the general intellectual attitude that is most generally called “materialism.” We were materialists. Were we more so than others? I ask this because we are talking about democracy’s “higher moral level.” If it is true, as it seemed to us, namely that in Germany the coming of the war was mainly perceived with a certain feeling of moral liberation as a disciplinary measure against materialism—(it may be, it is even probable, that some people in all countries thought of it in this way, but mainly, as I have said, it seemed to us in Germany to be true): if this is true, then—would this not be an indication that more resistance to materialism had remained alive in Germany than anywhere else? Was not money in France, in England, in America, in the trois pays libres, a greater, more decisive, more absolute power than it had ever been in our country? “Freedom” and the dominance of money have always been very closely connected. This was less true in our country because a few things, a few wavering forces, resisted the complete realization of democracy. Or is this not so? If materialism, and indeed materialism as morality as well as materialism as a philosophical attitude, marked the epoch—was this not precisely because it was a commercial epoch determined by the utility principle, in short, a democratic epoch whose predominant instinct was by far the drive for affluence? Seen from one side, the war is of course a result of this way of thinking, planned as democracy’s competitive struggle for affluence. And still one can say that it probably would not have come, that it would nevertheless probably not have been psychologically possible, if theoretical materialism, materialism as a philosophy and as an epistemology, had not been on its last legs. How do things stand now? Do we not have good reason to doubt that this is what civilization’s literary man really wanted and wants? No matter how “spiritual” the herald of a social message of happiness may act, must he not feel the strongest anxiety in the face of a growing, almost complete withdrawal from a materialistic explanation of the world? If his political activism sees in every metaphysical system an opiate of the people, then it is clear that every move toward religious rebirth must be met with his utmost invective, with the dismal word of terror, “reaction!” That monarchical wish of sovereign simplicity that religion be “preserved” for the people only seems anachronistic precisely because religion was taken away from the people long ago—midst endless rejoicing, while the unshakable truth remains that without metaphysical religiosity, this sphere of true humanity, social reconciliation is forever impossible. But let one ask the literary man—no, one would do better not to ask him—if he would approve of any efforts to give back to the people—if not religion, then at least something like religiosity! He is a monist, certainly not in a strict sense, but a monist just the same. For all antimetaphysical enlightenment, all democratic adoration of happiness, of utility, of science and of work, is different only in degree from the registered and documented monism, only insignificantly, only in gesture and in literary accent. Now, of course, there has been no lack of attempts in modern philosophy to reconsider a duality of body and soul, to see in the brain-organ only an instrument—but I can assure you that an accident almost took place when civilization’s literary man heard of it. He saw red and used inelegant, unrefined language. “Just go ahead! Just go ahead!” he cried. “Just bring back the ‘soul’ again by underhanded means! That will do it! We will have the whole mess again!” One understands, I hope. But to return to materialism: can civilization’s literary man logically oppose it? No, he cannot. Practical materialism, plutocracy, enthusiasm for affluence, form the basic character of democratic epochs; and without theoretical materialism, the “whole mess” comes back.
It will succeed, it has already succeeded, the effort to convince us Germans of the vital necessity of the psychological reconciliation of virtue and profit, of morality and business, in short of the necessity for democracy. We have seen that without democracy in the world no business can be done anymore, that one must Anglicize oneself in order to do business—the opportunistic desire for German democracy comes from this insight. But the further attempts of the democratic dogmatist and systematist to win intellect and art for this democratic teaching, this democratic doctrine of salvation, will scarcely succeed; if I may judge by myself, there is still some liberal defiance and resistance to this. At the bottom of this—one must say it: of this completely bigoted, impudent effort that is hostile to freedom, there is, as far as art is concerned, an excessive overestimation of politics altogether: as if artistic progress and bold invention were only possible together with political progress, as if the revolutionary principle in politics ever favored the revolutionary element in art in the least. Who was the first to have Tannhäuser performed in Paris? A despot. The same despot whose coup d'état forced the immortal desperate sigh from the gentlemen, Bouvard and Pécuchet: “Hein, le progrès, quelle blague! Et la politique, une belle saleté!”—this expression of a psychological mood that is the infallible means of producing general politicization. On the other hand, French romanticism, which was the new, progressive element, developed under the protection of the monarchy, while the liberals and republicans stubbornly and conservatively defended classicism—it is clear why: because of virtue, you see. And Cézanne? A bold innovator beyond doubt! But he thoroughly despised Émile Zola, the worshipper of the masses, the prophet and servant of democracy, who called the public “our highest master”; he was far from all futurism and all “progressiveness”; he sneered at new principles, theories, and movements in art, convinced like our Hans Pfitzner that there was only one art, precisely the one that lives in all master works of the past, and that a work of this one art cannot be “surpassed” by anything; he was a conservative, pious Catholic; to him, everything traditional, the monarchy, the army, the church, were inviolable. Was he therefore a wretch? Did his talent dry up in this attitude toward life and intellect? I know nothing about painting, but I think I can confidently leave the answer to the experts.
It is the monstrous and inflexible delusion of civilization’s literary man to believe that conservatism and talent mutually exclude one another. But the connections between art and politics, if there are any, are completely different from what civilization’s literary man would have us believe! In Gogol’s magnificent story, The Portrait, there are the words:
The monarchical governments are not at all the ones that suppress high and noble sentiments of the soul: works of intellect, of poetry and art are in no way despised and persecuted under such rule; monarchs are rather their natural protectors, only under their high-minded protection does a Shakespeare or a Molière arise—while on the other hand, a Dante could find no peace in his republican fatherland. True geniuses develop only in the splendid ages of powerful kings and kingdoms and not under the influence of ugly political events and terroristic republics, which have up to now not given the world one single poet.
It is an empress that Gogol has say this, and he has her add:
One must richly reward and honor poets and artists, for they give the soul rest and peace and protect it from ugly passions and rebellion; the scholars, the poets, and all creative artists are the pearls and diamonds in the imperial crown: they are the highest decoration that crowns the age of a great ruler and grants him a magnificent splendor.
When the empress spoke these words, she was infinitely beautiful and divine, Gogol concludes, and I believe it, for noble naiveté always has a beautiful and divine effect, and the somewhat ladylike words of the empress are at bottom completely true: even those about art giving the soul rest and peace and protecting it from ugly passions. Schopenhauer said this, too, although in a less imperial way; and no one will dare defend the idea that political terrorism, the terrorism of politics, favors art.
Does it favor the spirit? A “no” to this question is not enough. One must add that all political terrorism has long been intellectually impossible. Politics has brought itself to ruin by mismanagement. No longer will political life be able to rule intellectual life; never more will there be a political power that gags intellect and brings it to the funeral pyre. This is impossible, and least of all will the democratic doctrine of salvation be able to do so. What stubbornness to believe anything else—to want, for example, to make the democratic doctrine master over the minds out of love of “freedom”! Before the war, the idea that democracy provided more freedom was recognized as nonsense. One had realized that the rule of the people made life completely public, that it only could be represented by all sorts of laws and rules; that it therefore meant limitation of freedom, increase of bureaucracy, continual control, power of the majority over the minority, of those who are probably stupid over those who are probably smart, that is. Today, in order to justify political expediencies intellectually, or in order to brag about the strength of one’s belief, one seeks, in spite of the fact that one knows better, to raise the democratic theory to a dogma. Truly, democracy as dogma of the intellect! And here it is certain that equality not only does not mean freedom, but that it is excellently suited, yes, it all by itself, to be a pedestal of grandeur, of the master, of the tyrant—of whom civilization’s literary man speaks so badly!
The democratic republic, he says—will finally allow the trial to begin that will decide the fate of great men—of these monsters, of the bane of the little people whose share they gobble up, of these offenders and oppressors of the human race. The great man must be eliminated, rooted out, brought back to the common denominator, brother among brothers: may the democratic republic help us with this! It is impossible not to admire the circumspection, the radical-logical consistency, with which this truly systematic intellect follows his principle, thinking it through to the end; how should our insight, our assuredly very clear insight into the essential hostility to Germany of his whole ideological system, change anything at all in this admiration? The literary man knows only too well that Germany is quite truly the land of great men—knows it as well as the poet who speaks to the Germans in “Star of the Covenant”:
. . . Mediocre growth blossoms and increases
Over there more fully, more fragrantly than with you . . . :
The most noble of the noble thrive only here.16
But the desire to get rid of the great man is as old as the wishful image of civilization itself, first conceived by the Chinese, among whom the saying goes: “The great man is a public misfortune.” But it could just be that civilization’s method of fulfilling this wish is unreliable—that the belief that leveling hinders the rise of the master is a mistake. “Yet I found no reason for discouragement,” Nietzsche says in Will to Power.
Whoever has instilled himself with a strong will and maintained it, together with an extensive mind, has more favorable chances than ever before. For people have become quite trainable in this democratic Europe; people who learn quickly, who conform easily, are the rule: the herd animal, highly intelligent even, has been prepared. Whoever can command finds those who must obey: I am thinking, for example, of Napoleon and Bismarck. The competition with strong and unintelligent wills, which thwarts things the most, is small . . .
The leveling of intelligent ones, not, for example, as a means against the “great man,” but precisely as the native soil that leads directly to Caesarism—may one beg civilization’s literary man to take note of this point of view for the sake of his intellectual freedom? Does he prefer Caesarism to monarchy? That would speak for his taste, without being consistent. But German reality once knew—oh, it is like a dream!—a combination of both, of monarchy and Caesarism, it knew the genius as “a loyal German servant of his master”—and that was politically the most fortunate time for Germany, yes, it is easy to predict that Germany will not be happy again until this blessed constellation has been reestablished. But if in its absence and expectation one wanted to make Marshal Hindenburg, an Eckart-figure of monumental loyalty and objectivity, the Imperial Chancellor, let no one expect me to oppose such a rule of the saber out of devotion to “intellect.” On the contrary: only under a leader who has the characteristics of a great man of German stamp will the Volksstaat offer a bearable appearance and be anything else than the humbug-democracy we do not “love.”
Democracy, no matter how one may now slice and twist it, means rule of the people; and the belief in it, the belief, that is, that it is the most noble, most just type of rule that brings the greatest happiness, is as old as the state itself—and as old as the opposite belief. It would be impossible to think up new arguments for or against it. If the struggle could be decided, it would have been decided long ago; and it is amazing how political principles maintain their youthful freshness and energy in spite of all the wear and tear of history, of thought and practice, how they suddenly, by dint of a change in lighting, appear new and splendid to mankind, and are jubilantly seized as the “truth.”
Rule of the people. The phrase has its terror. But let us observe all the same that it sounds least terrible by far in German. It is not just patriotic prejudice when one imagines and perceives in the strangely organic, unforced, and poetic word combination, deutsches Volk, something not only national, but also essentially different, better, higher, purer, yes, holier than in the expression, “English people,” or “French people.” Volk is a truly holy sound. But does it not in any event still have a living meaning just by its connection with the word deutsch? The breakdown of our concept of Volk by the foreign spirit, by Marxism, this mixture of French revolutionism and English national economy, has gone far enough. And yet the German people have remained a people more than any other; they have degenerated least of all into class and mass; and on this emotional basis, therefore, those whose instinct is repelled by the cry for democracy may prick up their ears sympathetically to the word Volksstaat.
Rights of the people. Truly, it would not be very fitting for a German today to dispute the right of the German people, the hero of this war, to take part in and to have a voice in the life of the nation. To be sure, it seems to me that this right and this beautiful possibility is not to be “expanded”—for it scarcely existed—but only to be created, and that nothing, or only what is harmful, is accomplished by the mechanical “expansion” of existing rights. At any rate, I have an open ear for warnings that come to me from the front and run something like: at every rejection of democratic uncleanliness, at every intervention against those who would use democracy to come to power, against impotent literary men and dirty mobs, I would unfailingly have the best ones on my side: but if I did not want to be completely alone, I should be careful not to impugn and denigrate the average man, “The German industrial worker who is winning the war and who is a magnificent fellow, devoid of hatred, full of humanity, with a deep feeling for justice and deprivation of justice, and with an inborn robustness and efficiency that is fully proven and is equal to any situation . . .” I am thankful for such words that bring life and reality closer to me and whose sentiment I proudly and happily share. But am I therefore obliged to forget everything human nobility ever felt in its heart and expressed with eternal sincerity against the people as a political monster, against the “animal with many heads,” the “fickle, dirty mob”? Has Coriolanic perception become unnatural horror that a healthy mental attitude must shun?
He loves your people;
But tie him not to be their bedfellow. —
. . .
—but your people,
I love them as they weigh.
. . .
Master of the people,
Your multiplying spawn how can he flatter
That’s thousand to one good one —
. . .
Bid them wash their faces,
And keep their teeth clean. — So, here comes a brace.
. . .
Behold, these are the tribunes of the people,
The tongues o’ th’ common mouth: I do despise them —
. . .
It is a purpos’d thing, and grows by plot,
To curb the will of the nobility:
Suffer’t, and live with such as cannot rule,
Nor ever will be rul’d.
. . .
I say again,
In soothing them, we nourish ’gainst our senate
The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition,
Which we ourselves have plough’d for, sow’d, and scatter’d,
By mingling them with us, the honour’d number;
Who lack not virtue, no, nor power, but that
Which they have given to beggars —
Was this perhaps simply an “indirect character sketch”? Was it not stinging lyric and does it not stand there for eternity? Close to two hundred years later a man wrote with pen and paper: “The people are just, wise, and good. Everything they do is virtuous and true, nothing exaggerated, mistaken, or criminal.” It was Robespierre. Have we reached this point again? Is our understanding, which has been so tyrannized by the times, again at the point of taking this miserable hypocrisy for the truth?
Still, it was progress. For social-political progress is only a result of the people discovering their strength. Disraeli answered it: “The people are never strong, the people can never be strong. The attempts of the people to assert their rights will only end in suffering and confusion. It is good breeding that has brought about that change and that continues to bring it about; it is what teaches the educated person his social duties.” I would have to be a liar and a hypocrite if I were to suppress and deny, for the literary man’s sake, my convinced agreement with these words and the immediate applause they awaken in me.
My God, the people! Do they have honor, pride—not to speak of understanding? It is the people who sing and clamor in the streets when the war starts, but who begin to grumble and whimper and to call war a swindle when it lasts a long time and imposes sacrifices. Where they can, they revolt; but not on their own; for revolutions require intellect, and the people are completely without intellect. They have nothing but force, combined with ignorance, stupidity, and injustice. They can revolt; but they would never bring about a revolution by themselves if intellect from above did not come to their aid, as in 1789 when they were encouraged in everything by an intellect that was not their own, and thanks to this intellect, which prevailed in the upper classes, they encountered no resistance at all.
Are the people perhaps more noble and better than the rulers? Are they more just because they demand justice? Justice is not demanded at all, it is practiced (for example by a ruling class that decides for the sake of propriety to grant the subject class equal rights)—otherwise it is called envy and greed, and not a virtue. Are the people more high-minded, do they believe more easily and better than the bourgeois in voluntary action, unselfishness, and higher humanity? Do they pander less to the cult of goods, of the economy, of utility, and has not the conviction that everything in the world is done only out of calculation and for the sake of money become remarkably quickly their axiom, a basic fact of life that they show little tendency to dispute?
You think the people have a progressive attitude? “The tendency of the herd,” Nietzsche says, “is toward inactivity and preservation; there is nothing creative in it.” This is a teaching that agrees with the often observed fact that nowhere is there more tendency toward inertia than in the lower classes, that the ideal of absolute inactivity is quite characteristically the ideal of the “working class,” which certainly earns this title quite involuntarily. I remember I heard a man of the people say, when he saw a dog run by: “If I could run like that, I wouldn’t do any more work either!” It was precisely the logical senselessness of the remark that impressed itself so amusingly on my mind. What pleasure the man must have had in the thought of doing nothing, how foremost and alive this thought must have been in his head for him to seize such a logically insufficient opportunity to talk about it! But inertia has nothing to do with progress, change, and revolutionary new events; work must be loved, one must stand in awe of inventive agility, if the world is to go “forward”; and precisely the “dignity of work” is not at all a popular concept, but a burgherly one: one needs intellect to be able to grasp it.
You also think the people love enlightenment and want it? That is an error. The people are as little inclined by nature toward enlightenment and progress as they actually perceive democratically—they have the most natural feeling for distance and rank: just as the greatest men of the people, on the other hand, were conservative, yes, from the point of view of the enlightenment, obscurantists. The aforementioned Aristophanes and Dostoyevsky were true men of the people (I pride myself a little on this combination), these defenders of religion, these archenemies of progress, of “nihilism”; and “Seigneur de Ferney” was no man of the people. Are the people, after all, intellectually and morally prepared for the enlightenment? M. Barrès wrote one day: “There would be many a surprise if the old church were to disappear from the midst of the houses that it dominates. Just listen to what the Catholic and the Protestant clerics and the country doctor say to you. They unanimously state and assure that the ground lost by Christianity will not be conquered, for example, by rationalist culture but by paganism in its basest forms: as magic, witchcraft, theosophic aberrations, spiritualistic swindle.” And if not by this, then by the lowest utilitarianism and materialism, by the unconditional belief in profit, and by insatiable greed.
The rule of the people ensures peace and justice? The most certain safeguard of peace is “democratic control”? That’s what I’d like to know! I would like to know whether in the hands of the masses the decision on war and peace is more secure than in those of a minister like Herr von Bethmann Hollweg. Do we not have the example of Italy for those who consider the “people” to be a conscientious, enlightened, controlled protector of peace? Who caused the Italian war if not the “street,” the “piazza,” the democracy, the people, or those whom the people did not prevent from claiming to be the people? Did you see, August 1914, the London mob dancing around the Nelson column? Even a convinced socialist like the Swede Steffen rejects with a shrug of his shoulders the doctrine that the antagonisms, the discord of the nations, and therefore the causes of war, would disappear by themselves as soon as the proletariat exercised political power. Responsibility! And since when has a divided responsibility gained in seriousness and weight—placed upon many, upon all shoulders? Every experience teaches that in this way responsibility disappears altogether. Now, to be sure, the people have long wanted peace, indeed unconditionally; they probably want it everywhere, most recklessly-unconditionally, as one must believe, in Germany: not only because there it is least supported by the word, the phrase, but especially because here the national element is a force and accomplishment of unpolitical burgherdom, while the politicized people remained nationally weak and took and take the Socialist International more seriously than anywhere else. I have no doubt at all that today the great majority of the army at the front would immediately approve without debate the surrender of Alsace-Lorraine. “For,” so adds the observer who gave me this to think about, “if the people and their elected representatives are to establish political goals, then the needs of the moment and of the present generation will always be decisive, and the people will always overlook the fact that the ‘people’ also have a temporal extension, because they know that their kind like to resign themselves to the given situation.” There is no doubt, then: the realization of the Volksstaat as a government of the people would, in the midst of the war, mean immediate peace and the triumph of France and England—but just try to make the “common man” understand that this would be an unpatriotic peace! And just try to convince us, too, that such a peace would be a proof of the ability of the people to rule themselves! On the other hand, they do not want to be ruled anymore, that is clear; they are too suspicious to believe in a “government of the people” and in its good will: precisely because the deeper down the social scale the materialistic-economic conviction goes, the more solid it is. Scarcely have the “emancipated,” the “enlightened,” the “thinking” masses submitted to the leadership of their elected representatives than they intend to take them to task. But must the so-called ruling classes reproach themselves for having themselves plowed, sown, spread, and raised the weeds of rebellion, impudence, and mutiny, and for having raised impossible half masters for themselves when they needed something quite different? The people as a creature that neither can rule nor allows itself to be ruled is not a modern creation. It has always existed and will always exist. This plight is timeless and international. And international are the palliatives that one makes use of against it: they are called domestic policy, parliament, “democracy.” But what the likes of me worry about in the idiotic, intellectual overvaluation of these miserable necessities that have become popular again today has—why do I trouble myself!—already been said in the best possible way; it has been summarized once and for all in Schopenhauer’s essay “On Jurisprudence and Politics,” with which I shall close this chapter by quoting, and which runs briefly and forcefully:
Everywhere and at all times there has been much dissatisfaction with governments, laws, and public institutions; but this has largely been because people have always been ready to blame the governments for the misery that is inseparable from human existence itself; for the misery that is, to speak mythically, the curse that Adam received, and with him his whole race. But never has this false accusation been made in a more deceitful and impudent way than by the demagogues of the “present.” As enemies of Christianity, namely, they are optimists: the world is for them an “end in itself,” and therefore in itself—in its natural state, that is—quite excellently arranged, a real dwelling place of happiness. They ascribe the colossal evils of the world, which completely contradict this idea, to governments: if the latter would only do their duty, there would be heaven on earth, that is, everyone would, without effort or difficulty, be able to booze and gorge and breed to his heart’s content, and then to croak: for this is the paraphrase of their “end in itself” and the goal of the “infinite progress of the human race” that they tirelessly proclaim in pompous phrases.