It is an article of the modern faith—an article all the more hotly held for its dubiety—that there is no such thing as national character. Nothing may be said about a whole people, e.g., in America about Negroes, Jews, or Catholics. This article, like others of older faiths, may, of course, be (and everywhere is) suspended for the duration of war. George Washington said that the New Englanders were “an exceedingly dirty and nasty people”; Alexander I of Russia said that the French were “the common enemy of Humanity”; and Dr. Joseph Goebbels said that the English “are a race of people with whom you can talk only after you have first knocked out their teeth.” That such things are said not merely by civilized people in uncivilized times or by uncivilized people in civilized times may be seen in the observation of General Nathan DeWitt, the West Coast Area Commander of the United States Army, in 1942: “A Jap is a Jap. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not You can’t change him by giving him a piece of paper. The Japanese race is an enemy race.”
Between 1933 and 1945 the most curious things—some of them wrong, as things said in partisan passion sometimes are—were said of the whole German people. While the political consequences of some of the things that were said were unfortunate, I think it was right to generalize about the Germans. There is such a thing as national character, even though the Nazis said there is.
This is not to say that the character is bounded by national, racial, or religious boundaries or that every member of the nation, race, or religion involved displays the character in the same degree or even in any degree. It is only to say that a sufficiently pronounced outlook—and inlook—is to be found in a sufficiently large proportion of Slobovians everywhere to manifest itself decisively in the behavior of Slobovians generally and of Slobovia as a nation; and this in spite of the radical differences among the Slobovian tribes themselves. It is only to say that we are justified in at least looking for something common, and even peculiarly common, in, say, the Germans.
What we find, in the way of national character, certainly does not entitle any whole people to do anything to any other whole people, no whole people having shown any moral superiority over any other during the whole of their collective existence. The woman who made a lampshade of the skin of innocent Jews was a German, but the man who made a blanket of the scalps of innocent Indians was an American. If every American did not so distinguish himself, neither did every German. And, if there were only one innocent German or one innocent American, the greatest wrong would inhere in associating the fact of national character with the right or, worse yet, the duty to do something to all of the nationals. Burke did not say, in behalf of the American colonists, that he could not bring himself to characterize a whole people; he said that he could not bring himself to indict them.
Nor does it follow from the fact of national character that the characteristics are either innate or indelible. The Roman character certainly changed between Romulus and Romulus Augustus. The Spaniards were the terror of the world, a few centuries back; and so, a little later, were the Swedes. And the Americans were once sober, devout, and penurious. “Much learned trifling,” says Gibbon in one of his savage little footnotes, “might be spared, if our antiquarians would condescend to reflect that similar manners will naturally be produced by similar conditions.”
The distinguished Englishman who not so long since accused the German people of congenital criminality overlooked the view of respectable English historians that the main stream of the English character is not Celtic at all but Germanic, not to mention the London Times of November 11, 1870, which carried the following Letter to the Editor:
“That noble, patient, deep, pious and solid Germany should be at length welded into a Nation, and become Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and over-sensitive France, seems to me the hopefulest public fact that has occurred in my time.—I remain, Sir, Yours truly, T. Carlyle.”
It is not necessarily mischievous to speculate about the cause and the cure of the Germans, nor need such speculation involve either Germanophilia or Germanophobia. As the dust unsettles in Europe, Germany and the Germans have again emerged as the first order of unfinished, and probably unfinishable, business. If, in the present division of the world, Germany were united, for despotism or for constitutional government, there would be a substantial basis for predicting the near future of Europe and perhaps of the world. But Germany is divided, the Germans are divided, and the German is divided. Sixty million Germans are the bloodless battleground of prewar peace. The battlers have no time to inquire into the character of the prize they pursue, even though such inquiry might facilitate their pursuit. To them, in their respective hurries, Germany is so many bases, so much production or production potential, and so many units of so many men. But Germany, like Russia, America, or Slobovia, is something special. Germany is the Germans.
The national behavior of Germany between 1933 and 1945—and, it would seem, of most Germans—indicates a character that is just about as unattractive as a character can be. Among the million or so who ran, or tried to run, away from National Socialism, there were many who opposed it on principle. Maybe a million more fought it, or tried to fight it, from within. A few million more didn’t like it. But so many Germans liked it (and not just some of it, but all of it) that it may justly be said to have represented the predominant national character of the time. And National Socialism, made in Germany, out of the German character, is the worst thing that modern man has made.
Worse, certainly, than Communism; for it is not the performance of political systems which justifies or condemns them, but their principles. Communism, in principle, supposes itself to represent the wretched of the earth and bars no man by nature from Communist redemption; the Nazis, in categorical contrast, took themselves to be the elite of the earth and consigned whole categories of men to perdition by their nature. The distinctions between these two totalitarianisms may not command much interest in the present temper of the Western Christian; they are still distinctions.
National Socialism could have happened elsewhere in the modern world, but it hasn’t yet. Up to now it is unique to Germany. And the deception and self-deception it required were required of a people whose civilization, by common measurement, was very highly advanced. German music and art, German belles-lettres and philosophy, German science and technology, German theology and education (especially at the highest levels) were part and parcel of Western achievement. German honesty, industry, family virtue, and civil government were the pride of other Western countries where Germans settled. “I think,” says Professor Carl Hermann, who never left his homeland, “that even now the outside world does not realize how surprised we non-Nazis were in 1933. When mass dictatorship occurred in Russia, and then in Italy, we said to one another, ‘That is what happens in backward countries. We are fortunate, for all our troubles, that it cannot happen here.’ But it did, worse even than elsewhere, and I think that all the explanations leave some mystery. When I think of it all, I still say, with unbelief, ‘Germany—no, not Germany.’”
The Germans resist all ready-to-hand analysis of social behavior. Every important factor in their development has been present in the development of other peoples who have not, at least recently, behaved themselves as badly as the Germans. To say that they were Christianized late is too easy; so were the Scandinavians. To say that the notion of equality, connected or unconnected with Christianity, is new to Germany will not do, either; the Peasant Wars of the sixteenth century were certainly egalitarian. The Germans were nationalized late, it is true, but so were the Swiss, comparatively, and the Italians were just as late. Industrialism was a century late coming to Germany, but it was later still coming to Czechoslovakia and Finland, and it hasn’t reached India yet.
All these tardinesses are, applied to the Germans, marginal or, at best, inconclusive. There is only one easy inference left—that there is something not just different, but uniquely different, about the Germans. The minor consequence of this easy inference is the proliferation of theories about the Germans, and of studies to bolster or undo them. This proliferation has reached the point where being studied is the most crowded single profession in Germany. The foreigner (except the Frenchman, who is immune to the Germans) cannot spend a week in the country without coming down with a pernicious case of theory.
But the major consequence of this inference is something much more dreadful—namely, its acceptance by the Germans themselves. And the Germans do not, as we know, go half-hog about anything. The theory—passion, rather; for that is what theory becomes when it falls into German hands—that there is something different about the Germans was the wellspring of National Socialism. But it pervades German culture, Nazi, non-Nazi, anti-Nazi, and pre-Nazi. It posits the existence of a “German spirit” as something apart and, above all, very interesting. Croce, a “confessed Germanophile,” observing everywhere in Germany the inscriptions deutsche Treue, deutsche Tapferkeit, deutsche Grossmut, German fidelity, German valor, German generosity, wryly decided that the Germans had “confiscated for themselves all the common human virtues.”
And, as Germans ascribed a spirit to themselves, so they infused other peoples with other, non-German and (on the basis of local pride) inferior spirits. The behavior of Jews was not to be understood in mundane terms or differentiated as between Jew and Jew; the “Jewish spirit,” a notion nebulously supported by misreading the ancients from Moses to Esdras, was adequate to explain the behavior of Jews. And when the behavior of a Jew—or of an Englishman or of a crocodile—was good, as it once in a great while was, and could not be explained by the spirit peculiar to the species involved, it was dismissed as aberration. The rest of the world, falling victim to the “German spirit” fantasy, finally, in an equal and opposite reaction, accepted it as something existent, apart, very interesting, and, on the whole, objectionable.
This “German spirit,” taken to the German heart as innate and indelible, created, as any such concept must, a world independent of common sense and of common experience. This “German spirit” created German philosophic idealism uninhibited by history as surely as it created German racism uninhibited by biology. But what created the “German spirit”?