There is considerable self-restraint in Dostoyevsky’s description of the Germans as a “great, proud, and special people,” for we know that he was far from loving Germany—not because of enormous sympathy for the countries farther west, but because to him, Germany, despite her protestantism, was still part of that “frivolous” Europe that he hated to the depths of his soul. Considerable self-restraint and appropriate moderation, then, the result of great, free, historical intuition, underlie his way of speaking about Germany. For instead of “proud, and special,” he could just as easily have said “stubborn, callous, malicious”—terms that would, of course, have been mild in comparison to those that the Roman West, with its excellent manners, has used against us during the war. Indeed, Dostoyevsky’s formulation of the German character, of German primeval individuality, of what is eternally German, contains the whole basis and explanation of the lonely German position between East and West, of Germany’s offensiveness to the world, of the antipathy, the hatred she must endure and defend herself against—in bewilderment and pain at this universal hatred that she does not understand because she knows little about herself and has not developed very far at all in matters of psychological understanding—the basis and explanation also of her enormous courage that she has unflinchingly displayed to the surrounding world, the world of the Roman West that today is almost everywhere, in the East, the South, even in the North and across the ocean where the new Capitol stands—of that blind-heroic courage with which Germany is striking out everywhere with a gigantic reach. And it also explains the good sense of the charge of “barbarism,” a charge that one cannot logically reject with indignation, because the heirs of Rome, articulate as they are, could indeed find no better, simpler, more effective, more persuasive word than precisely this one to characterize those who have instinctively, from time immemorial, protested against their world. For the worst thing was not that Germany never wanted to combine her word and will with that of Roman civilization: she only opposed it with her will, her disturbing, stubborn, obstinate, “special” will—but not with her word, because she had no word. She was speechless, she did not love words, and she did not believe in them as did civilization; she engaged in a silent, inarticulate resistance, and there is no doubt that it was not so much Germany’s resistance itself as her wordlessness and inarticulateness that were perceived by civilization to be “barbaric” and hate-inspiring. The word, the formulation of the will, as with everything that has to do with form, has a conciliatory, winning effect, it can reconcile itself eventually with every type of will, especially when it is beautiful, generous, convincing, and clearly programmatic. The word is absolutely necessary to win sympathy. What good is great courage without the generous word? What good the stubborn conviction that “one will once again be in a position to speak one’s word and to lead mankind with it” if one cannot or will not utter it at the crucial moment? (For it comes to the same thing: ability comes from desire; fluency comes from love of words, and vice versa.) One cannot lead mankind without the word. Gigantic courage is barbaric without a well-articulated ideal to guide it. Only the word makes life worthy of a human being. To be without words is not worthy of a human being, is inhumane. In the innate and eternal conviction of Roman civilization, not only humanism—humanitarianism in general, human dignity, respect for human beings, and human self-respect, are inextricably bound to literature. Not to music—or at least in no way necessarily to it. On the contrary, the relationship of music to humanitarianism is so much looser than that of literature that the musical attitude seems to the literary moral sense at the very least to be undependable, at the very least, suspicious. Nor to poetry, where the relationship is too much like that of music; in it words and intellect play a much too indirect, cunning, irresponsible, and therefore also undependable role. Rather expressly to literature, to linguistically articulated intellect—civilization and literature are one and the same.
The Roman West is literary: this separates it from the Germanic—or more exactly—from the German world, which, whatever else it is, is definitely not literary. Literary humanitarianism, the legacy of Rome, the classical spirit, classical reason, the generous word to which the generous gesture belongs, the beautiful, heart-stirring phrase that is worthy of a human being and that celebrates his beauty and dignity, the academic rhetoric in honor of the human race—this is what makes life worth living in the Roman West, what makes the human being human. It is the spirit that was at its height during the Revolution; it was its spirit, its “classic form,” that spirit that in the Jacobin hardened into a scholastic-literary formula, into a murderous doctrine, a tyrannical, schoolmasterly pedantry. Its champions are the lawyer and the literary man, the spokesmen of the “Third Estate,” and of its emancipation, the spokesmen of the Enlightenment, of reason, of progress, of “the philosophy,” against the seigneurs, against authority, tradition, history, “power,” kingdom, and church—the spokesmen of the spirit that they consider to be the unconditional, sole, and dazzlingly true one, spirit itself, spirit in itself, while it is really just the political spirit of the middle-class revolution that they mean and understand. It is a historical fact that cannot be denied that “spirit” in this political-civilizing sense is a middle-class concern, even if it is not a middle-class invention (for spirit and culture in France are not originally of the middle class, but of noble-seigneurial descent; the middle class only usurped them). Its representative is actually the eloquent citizen, the literary lawyer of the Third Estate, as I have said, the representative of its spiritual as well as, not to forget, of its material interests. The victorious advance of this spirit, its expansive process, which is the result of colossal, turbulent, explosive forces within it, can be defined as a process involving the simultaneous conquest of the world by the middle class and by literature. What we call “civilization,” and what calls itself civilization, is nothing more than precisely this victorious advance, this propagation of the politicized and literarized middle-class spirit, its colonization of the inhabited areas of the globe. The imperialism of civilization is the last form of the Roman idea of unification against which Germany is “protesting,” and she has never done so more passionately against any of its other manifestations; she has never had a more terrible battle to wage than against this one. The agreement and unity of all those communities that belong to the imperium of the middle-class spirit today is the “entente”—a French name, how proper—and it is truly an entente cordiale, a unity full of the most heartfelt, spiritual, essential agreement despite many differences in temperament and despite divergencies in power politics: directed against Germany, which is protesting the final completion and conclusive establishment of this imperium. The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, the struggles against the Roman pope, Wittenberg, 1813, 1870—all this was mere child’s play compared to the terrible, perilous, and, in the most magnificent sense, irrational struggle against the world entente of civilization, a struggle that Germany has accepted with a truly Germanic obedience to her fate—or, to put it somewhat more actively, to her mission, her eternal and innate mission.