Treitschke, his doctrine of German destiny and of international relations, together with a study of his life and work

Foreword

GREAT national movements and national passions or enthusiasms since the Middle Ages have always been connected with the names of leaders (preachers, writers, or statesmen) , and not infrequently, with that of one particular leader whose words have acted upon the people as an inspiration, and who has given the keynote and character to the movement. It is probable (Carlyle to the contrary notwithstanding) that each of these national movements would have taken place, even although the particular individual and leader had not existed. When, however, a revolution or an outbreak of any kind shapes itself on the lines of some given teaching, it is proper to study the character and the doctrines of the teacher. The history of the French Revolution could not be considered without analysis of Rousseau and his writings, and, in like manner, the present action of Germany, which amounts to a revolution, in initiating the European War of 1 91 4, will always be connected in history with the teachings of Treitschke. Americans are called upon at this time to arrive at an opinion in regard to the causation of the "war, the nature of the issues that are being fought over, and the factors

iii iv Foreword

which are influencing the combatants. It is important, on more grounds than one, to arrive at an understanding of the influences which are directing the present poHcy of Germany, and which have imbued, not only the Imperial Government, but the mass of Germans back of the Emperor and his counsellors, with the craze for world domination and with the conviction that it is their duty to enforce German Kultur (a very different thing from what we understand by culture) upon all civilized communities.

Treitschke has been called "the Machiavelli of the Nineteenth Century," but his words were directed not only to monarchs and to other leaders of the State, but to the people as a whole. The greed for domination dates from the time when Treitschke began to write and to lecture on national politics and on German ideals. The cry of Deutschland uber alles was to him more than an ideal, it was a religion, and through his forcible teaching it has become the burning faith of the nation as a whole. Throughout the whole of Treitschke's writings his conviction of the necessity for the supremacy of Germans over all other peoples is enforced with all the vigour and skill at his command. To England he directs his most venomous outpouring. "English policy," says Treitschke, "which aims at the unreasonable goal of world supremacy, has always, as its foundation principle, reckoned on the misfortunes of other nations."

Foreword v

It seems evident that the instigation to the curious hate of England and to the conviction that for the development of Germany the destruction of the British Empire was essential, is due to Treitschke. He died, in Berlin, in 1896, and it is his pupils, the middle-aged men of to-day, Bemhardi and others, who have planned the present fight of Germany for the domination of Europe. Bismarck was Treitschke's valued friend, and William II has been nurtured on his teachings. These teachings give the philosophy for the present political and military action. The essays contained in this volume present the opinions of Treitschke on the policy and the destiny of Germany, while the critical biography, written with the full sympathy of a close friend, gives an insight into the character of the man himself.

Professor J. H. Morgan says:

''If Treitschke was a casuist at all (and as a rule he is refreshingly, if brutally, frank), his was the supreme casuistry of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. That the means may 'corrupt the end or become an end in themselves he never fairly realized. He honestly believed that war was the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise. He feared the commercialism of modem times, and despised England because he judged her wars to have been always undertaken with a view to the conquest of markets. He sneers at the Englishman who 'scatters the blessings of civilization with a Bible in one hand vi Foreword

and an opium pipe in the other.* He honestly beHeved that Germany exhibited a purity of domestic Hfe, a pastoral simplicity, and a deep religious faith to which no European country could approach. He has written passages of noble and tender sentiment, in which he celebrates the piety of the peasant, whose religious exercises were hallowed wherever the German tongue was spoken, by the massive faith in Luther's great hymn. Those who would understand the strength of Treitschke's influence on his generation must not lose sight of these purer elements in his teachings. He was the first preacher of the doctrine that Germany must become a power across the sea. He became indeed the champion of the Junkers, and his history is a kind of hagiography of the Hohenzollerns. He rested his hopes for Germany on the bureaucracy and the army. By a quite natural transition he was led on from his championship of the unity of Germany to a conception of her role as a world-power. He is the true father of Weltpolitiky

Like Mommsen, Treitschke insisted that the people of the conquered provinces must be *' forced to be free, " that Morality and History (which for him are much the same thing) proclaim they are German without knowing it. He says:

" We Germans, who know Germany and France, know better what is good for Alsace than the unhappy people themselves who through their French associations have lived in ignorance of the

Foreword vii

new Germany. We have in the enormous changes of these times too often seen in glad astonishment the immortal working of the moral forces of History {'das unsterbliche Fortwirken der sittlichen Mdchte der Geschichte') to be able to believe in the unconditional value on this matter of a Referendum. We invoke the men of the past against the present.*'

The ruthless pedantry of this is characteristically Prussian. It is easy to appeal to the past against the present, to the dead against the living. Dead men tell no tales. Treitschke admitted that the Alsatians did not love the Germans; there was, he ruefully confessed, something rather unlovely about the civilizing methods of Prussia.

Lord Acton, writing in 1886, pronounced Treitschke to be "the one writer of history who was more brilliant and more powerful than Droysen. " ''He writes," says Acton, "with the force and fire of Mommsen, and he accounts for the motives that stir a nation as well as for the councils that govern it. "

One of Treitschke 's pupils writes of him: "His style is full of colour and of movement; it is brilliant and thought-abounding; nervous, energetic feeling swings the reader along, while vast learning is digested and bent to the purposes of the author. " Germans quote Treitschke as no historian has ever been quoted by English or by French ; one may say that, in the interpretation of history, Treitschke is to the present generation of Germans viii Foreword

an inspired scripture, a bible. The political leaders refer to him as final authority. Treitschke, at his death, looked forward with confidence to the day when the world would find healing at the touch of the German character. *'God will see to it that war always recurs as a drastic medicine for the human race." Says Treitschke's pupil Bemhardi : "War is essential not merely as a means to political ambition and territorial aggrandizement, but as a moral discipline, almost in fact as a spiritual inspiration. "

Treitschke had a keen dislike and distrust for America. He says, ''Germany can learn nothing from the United States." This is a natural utterance for a man who was the fiercest opponent in his generation of democracy and of democratic institutions.

Treitschke's pupil Clausewitz quotes his master as saying in substance: "Self-imposed restrictions, almost imperceptible and hardly worth mentioning, termed Usages of International Law, accompany violence without essentially impairing its value. "

In the introduction to the Politik, Treitschke says in regard to the sanctity of war: "It is to be conceived as an ordinance set by God. It is the most powerful maker of nations; it is politics par excellence . " " What a perv^ersion of morality , ' ' says Treitschke, "it would be if one struck out of humanity heroism" (Heldentum). But Treitschke's Heldentum is a different thing from what the civilized world has understood as heroism.

Foreword ix

He forgets the caution of his contemporary Mommsen, who says: ''Have a care, lest in this State, which has been at once a power in arms and a power in intelHgence, the intelHgence should vanish, and there should remain nothing but the pure military condition." The fruits of Heldenturn are Louvain smoking in ashes to the sky. The philosophy of Treitschke is to-day the philosophy of the Prussian Government and of Germany behind Prussia; it is the philosophy under which the attempt is being made to crush France and to break up the British Empire. It is the teaching that has desolated Belgium and that has brought war upon the world.

Geo. Haven Putnam.

November 15, 1914.

Contents

PAGE

The Life of Treitschke . . . i

First Attempts at German Colonization . 195

I

THERE are some names which we instinctively connect with eternal youth. Those of Achilles and Young Siegfried we cannot conceive otherwise than as belonging to youth itself. If amongst the more recent ones we count Hoelty, Theodore Koerner, and Novalis the divine youth, this is due to death having overtaken them while yet young in years. But if involuntarily we also include Heinrich von Treitschke, the reason for it lies not in the age attained by him but in his unfading freshness. Treitschke died at the age of sixty-two, older or nearly of the same age as his teachers — Hausser, Mathy, and Gervinus, all of whom we invariably regard as venerable old men. And yet he seemed to us like Young Siegfried with his never ageing, gay temperament, his apparently inexhaustible virility. To his students he seemed new at every half term, and living amongst young people he remained young with them. Hopeful of the future and possessed of a fighting spirit, he retained within him the joy and sunshine of eternal youth. Thus Death, when he came, appeared not as an inexorable gleaner gathering the withered blades in the barn of his Lord, but rather as a negligent servant destroying in senseless fashion a rare plant which might yet have yielded much delicious fruit.

We cannot, therefore, call it a happy inspiration which prompted the representation of Treitschke as a robed figure in the statue about to be erected in the University in Berlin.

It is, of course, not the figure of a Privy Councillor, who has assumed some resemblance with Gambetta, but that of a tall, distinguished-looking strong youth, with elastic muscles, whose every movement attests health and virility, a figure such as students and citizens were wont to see in Leipzig and Heidelberg, and which would have served an artist as the happiest design for monumental glorification. But to represent the opponent of all academic red-tapeism in robe is analogous with Hermann Grimm's proposal to portray the first Chancellor of the German Empire as Napoleon in the Court of the Brera — that is to say, in the full nude. Nevertheless, we greet with joy the high-spirited decision to honour Treitschke by a statue. In the same way as the name of Hutten will be connected with the revolt against the Pope, and the name of Koemer with that againsc Napoleon, so the name of Treitschke will always be connected with the redemption of our people from the disgrace of the times of Confederation to the magnificence of 1870.

It was in August, 1863, that I heard the name of Treitschke for the first time, when, before an innumerable audience, he spoke at the Gymnastic Tournament in Leipzig, in commemoration of the Battle of Leipzig. A youth of twenty-nine, a private University lecturer, and the son of a highly-placed officer related to Saxon nobility, he proclaimed with resounding force what in his family circle was considered demagogical machination and enmity against illustrious personages, and as such was generally tabooed. But the principal idea underlying his argument — that what a people aspires to it will infallibly attain — • found a respondent chord in many a breast; and I, like many another who read the verbatim report of the speech in the South German Journal B raters, resolved to read in future everything put into print by this man.

We were overjoyed when, in the autumn of 1863, the Government of Baden appointed Treitschke as University Deputy Professor for Political Science. It was so certain that at the same time he would give historic lectures that, on hearing of Treitschke's appointment, Wegele of Wiirzburg ■ — who had already accepted the position of Professor of History at Freiburg — immediately asked to be released from his engagement, as henceforth he could no longer rely on securing pupils. The new arrival was pleased with his first impressions of Baden. From his room he overlooked green gardens stretching towards the River Miinster. In the University he gave lectures on politics and on the Encyclopedia of Political Science ; but before a much larger audience he spoke in the Auditory of Anatomy, and later on in the Aula, on German History, the History of Reformation, and similar subjects, creating a sensation not only at the University but also in Society. It was his phenomenal eloquence — not North-German verbosity, but fertility of thought surging with genius and flowing like an inexhaustible fountain — which drew his audience at public lectures and festivities. His success with students gave him less cause for gratification. Possibly Science, on which he lectured for practically the first time, offered inadequate facilities for the development of his best faculties, but the principal fault seems to have rested with his audience. ''The students," he wrote to Freytag, "are very childish, and, as usual in Universities, suffer from drowsy drunkenness."

It can be imagined how this failure affected and depressed the eager young professor, for whose subsistence the Leipzig students had sent a deputation to Dresden, and whom they had honoured on his departure with a torchlight procession. To me he said: "The Freiburg students are lazy — abominably lazy." More than once he had been compelled to write to truant-playing pupils asking whether they intended hearing lectures at all in; future, since he could well employ his time to better advantage. It was only natural that these experiences biassed his opinion of the whole population, and he judged the fathers' qualities by those of their dissolute sons. Society also left him discontented, and to his father he wrote: '*I do not find it easy to adjust myself to the social conditions of this small hole; anybody with as little talent for gossiping as I possess suffers from an ignorance of individual peculiarities, and stumbles at every moment." The Freiburg nobility being not only strictly Catholic, but also thoroughly Austrian, he, with his outspoken Prussian tendencies and attacks against the priests, stirred up a good deal of unrest. Among his colleagues, he associated principally with Mangold, the private lecturer von Weech, the lawyer Schmidt, and the University steward Frey, all of whom were of Prussian descent. The letter in which he informs his godfather, Gutschmid, that he had again been asked to act as godfather is, from the point of view of phraseology, truly ^'Treitschkean": "A few weeks ago I again acted as godfather, to a daughter of M., and on this occasion silently implored the immortals that the child might turn out better than her uncommonly good-for-nothing brothers. For my godchild in Kiel this prayer was superfluous; in my presence at least, your Crown Prince always behaved as an educated child of educated parents." Through his Bonn relatives, the two Nokk, he became acquainted with Freiherr von Bodman, the fatherin-law of Wilhelm Nokk. Especially welcome was he at the house of von Woringen, the Doctor of Law, where he saw a good deal of Emma von Bodman, who subsequently became his wife, and at that of von Hillem, the Superior Court Judge, whose wife, the daughter of Charlotte Birchpfeiffer, consulted him in regard to her poetical creations. Already, after the first half term, the deaf young professor was the most discussed person in local Society, and he himself boasted to my wife that for his benefit several Freiburg ladies learned the deaf-and-dumb language. They waxed enthusiastic over the young and handsome scholar, and in their admiration for him sent for his poems, only to be subsequently shocked, like Psyche before Cupid. Yet it is characteristic that he started his literary career with historic ballads which he called Patriotic Poems (1856), and Studies (1857).

The political life of the Badenese, which at that time principally turned upon the educational question, was not to his taste. The Ultramontanes he simply found coarse and stupid, and he writes: "It is empty talk to speak of doctrinal freedom and freedom to learn in a University with a Catholic faculty. All Professors of Theology are clerks in holy orders, and so utterly dependent upon their superiors that only recently the archbishop asked the brave old Senator Maier to produce the books of his pupils. Furthermore, the students of Theology are locked in a convent,

f and true to old Jesuitic tradition are watched step by step by mutual secret control. That is what is called academic liberty." But here, also, is his opinion regarding others: "The grand-ducal Badenese liberalism is nothing but cheap charlatanism without real vigour"; nay, he calls *'particularist liberalism" the most contemptible of all parties which, however, unfortunately, would play an important part in the near future. ''Look for instance at this National Coalition. Has ever a great nation seen such a monster?" In his opinion it sides with the Imperial Constitution of 1849, although the leaders themselves are convinced of their inability to carry through the programme, and at the same time the future political configuration of Germany is declared to be an open question, consequently it has on the whole no programme at all.

Soon I was destined to make the personal acquaintance of the much-admired and muchcriticized one. It was at an "At Home" at Mathy's. Scarcely had I entered the vestibule when I heard a very loud voice in the drawing-room slowly emphasizing every syllable in the style of a State Councillor. "This is Treitschke, of Freiburg," I said immediately, and it was really he. The Freiburg ladies had by no means exaggerated his handsome appearance. A tall, broadshouldered figure, dark hair and dark complexion, dark, pensive eyes, now dreamy, now vividly glistening — unmistakably Slav. With his black hair, the heavy moustache, which he still wore at that time, and his vivid gesticulations, he could not conceal his Slav origin. He looked like a Polish nobleman, and his knightly frame reminded one of a Hussite, a Ziska for instance. Later, he told me , of his exiled ancestors — Czech Protestants of the name of Trschky, referred to by Schiller in Wallenstein, although the editions mostly spoke of Terzky's Regiments. At about midnight, when wending our way through the silent town, a policeman approached us, intending to warn the loud, strange gentleman to moderate his voice. The arm of the law, however, quickly retired when, in company of the disturber of the peace, he recognized Herr von Roggenbach and several Ministerial Secretaries. As Treitschke at that time made use of the Karlsruhe Archives, he from time to time came to Karlsruhe, where he sought the society of Mathy, Nokk, von Weech, and Baumgarten.

Under Mathy's influence a gradual change took place in him, which transmitted itself to all of us. At first he was an eager adherent of Augustenburg, and the first money received for his lectures in Freiburg he invested in the Ducal Loan. Through Freytag he had likewise recommended his friend, von Weech, to the Duke of Augustenburg with a view to his securing an appointment in Kiel for publicistic purposes. After that his attitude totally changed. When he realized that Bismarck earnestly aspired gaining for Prussia the dominating power in the East and North Sea, he frankly declared the strengthening of Prussia to be the supreme national duty. Hausser intended to pin him down with his former views by citing Treitschke's first Augustenburg dissertations in the Review of the Prussian Annuals of 1864. Treitschke, however, by way of reply, in an essay on the solution of the Schleswig-Holstein question, proved that the compliance with the Augustenburg demands was detrimental to Germany's welfare. Again he had spoken the decisive word, and all writers of our circle now advocated annexation. We were nicknamed ''Mamelukes and Renegades" by our Heidelberg colleague Pickford, then editor of the Konstanzer Zeitung. Treitschke was now as violently against, as formerly for, the Duke. Now he sees the latter as ''the miserable pretender, whom he despises from the bottom of his heart. Not only has he not come to the noble decision which Germany is entitled to expect from him, but by his unscrupulous demagogical agitations he has utterly imsettled his country. ' ' In Karlsruhe, the quiet town of officials, such a political point of view was perhaps admissible; not so, however, in the high coimtry filled with animosity against Prussia. Every child was convinced that Prussia now, as formerly, intended handing over the dukedoms to the King of the Danes. Junker Voland, who had persuaded the King to break with the Constitution, was, of course, bribed long ago by England and Russia to again restore the dukedoms to Danish supremacy.

Everything that had happened after the short, hopeful glimpse of Prussia's new era was an object of sarcasm for the South German population. When a boy talked very stupidly, his comrades would call out : " Go to Konigsberg and have yourself crowned"; and at Mass the beggar-women, pointing with their sticks to the Prince's image, shrieked out mocking insults.

This coarseness of the street and the tone of the Freiburg democratic journals against Prussia filled the politician, so inconsiderate against his own Saxony, with immense indignation. In a letter to Freytag he finds the Badenese ''quite steeped in the quagmire of phrases and foul language. Examining these parties, the moral value of both sides seems identical; the meaningless mendacity of our average liberalism fills me with deep disgust. How long shall we labour ere we again are able to speak of German faith? If I am now to choose between the two parties, I select that of Bismarck, since he struggles for Prussian power for our legitimate position on the North and East Sea." He considered as impossible the peaceful conversion of the Badenese to Prussia. "Amid this abominable South German particularism it has become perfectly evident to me that our fate will clearly be decided by conquest. Six years of my life I have spent in the South, and here I have gained the sad conviction that even with a Cabinet composed of men of the type of Stein and Humboldt, the hatred and jeal-

His Life and Work ii

ousy of the South Germans against Prussia would not diminish. I am longing for the North, to which I belong with all my heart, and where also our fate will be decided." His public lectures were very largely frequented. "But," he says, *'the Philistines are prejudiced when entering the Aula, and are firmly determined to consider as untrue every word I say about Prussia. The opinion is prevalent that the South Germans are the most modest of our people. I say they are the most arrogant; to a man they consider themselves the real Germans, and the North a country half of which is still steeped in barbarity, this quite apart from a dissolute braggadocio the mere thought of which fills me with disgust. Believe me, only the trusty sword of the conqueror can weld together these countries with the North." Later on, when I conversed with him every evening at a round table in the Heidelberg Museum, I realized the reasons for his lack of understanding of our people. We seemed to him lukewarm, because we did not strike the national chord with the power which he expected of a good German. But why should we do that? In the Saxony of Herr von Beust, and in Prussia's time of reaction, national ideas were tabooed, and that is why the patriots felt compelled to bear witness in season and out of season. But we lived in a free country, under a Prince harbouring German sentiments, and where it would have been an easy matter to feign patriotism quite apart from the fact that we

South Germans do not care discussing our sentiments. I told him that in the same way as I, despite my warmest feeHngs for my family, could not bring myself to proclaim pomipously the excellence of my wife and child, so was I reluctant to publicly praise my Fatherland; and subsequently I reminded him of the Yankee who declared that immediately a man spoke to him of patriotism he knew him to be a rascal. In regard to our sympathy for France, which he reviled as the Rhine Confederation sentimentality, it would be difficult for him to place himself in our position. During the last century we had received nothing but kindness from France, namely, deliverance from the Palatine Bavarian regime, from Jesuits and Lazarists, from episcopal and Junker rule, from guild restrictions and compulsory service: all this and the very existence of the coimtry which we enjoyed we owed directly or indirectly to Napoleon and the Code Napoleon, from which the hatred of the French arose. This, it is true, I found quite natural, considering Napoleon weakened Prussia and abused Saxony. He was indignant when he noticed in corridors of inns and even in parlours the small lithographs which, under the First Empire, were poured out in thousands from Paris even across the States of the Rhine Convention, representing the Victor of Marengo, the Sun of Austerlitz, Napoleon's Battle at the Pyramids, etc., and which, owing to the conservative spirit of the peasantry, decorated the walls, tin til moths, rust, and wood- worms graduallybrought about their destruction.

He even took offence at the attitude displayed by Frenchmen in the Black Forest watering places, and in Baden- Baden. When, finally, a Heidelberg lawyer declared in the Reichstag that for him the cultured Frenchman is still the most amiable of all European beings, Treitschke stigmatized us as incorrigible partisans of the Rhine Confederation. But a glance at the letters of Frau Rat Goethe, in Frankfort, who prayed God that French and not Prussian soldiers should be quartered in her house, might have taught him that the expressions of a long historical epoch find expression in these remarks, which could not be effaced by proud words. Furthermore, when the Prussian Ministry trampled on the Budget rights of Parliament, and by a sophistical theory about a defect in the Constitution exasperated the sense of justice of every honest-thinking German, when the most extraordinary verdicts of the Supreme Court, accompanied by the removal from office of the most capable officials, provoked the population, it was really not the time to stimulate among South Germans the desire to become incorporated with Prussia. The moment was, therefore, most unpropitious for his propaganda. In those days even such old admirers of a Union with Prussia as Brater became converts to the triad-idea, and Treitschke's friend, Freytag, commented on it in merely the following manner: "It is always very sad and unpleasant when intelligent people so easily become asses.'* Why, therefore, should the unintelligent masses be judged as harshly as was done by Treitschke? In regard to our clericalpolitical struggles — and this was the second reason for his lack of understanding of our population — he found himself in the position of a guest who enters a room in which a heated discussion has been going on for hours past and, not having been present from the beginning, is unable to appreciate the intensity of the contending parties. Even at that time I was annoyed at the haughty tone with which he and his non-Badenese friends — Baumgarten in particular — discussed the Badenese struggles. They considered the educational problem trivial compared with the mighty national question at stake ; and overlooked the fact that to get rid of the clerical party was to be the primary condition for joining hands with Protestant Prussia. They knew less of the situation as far as the population was concerned than of events in the Ministry and at Court. Thus they constantly looked behind the scenes, and thereby missed the part which was being played on the stage. That is why none of the North German politicians achieved a really cordial understanding with their citizens, while Bluntschli of the South, in spite of his suspicious political past, could boast of great respect among the Liberals.

In the autumn of 1868 Treitschke made a long stay at Karlsruhe; he spent his days mostly in the Archives, and the evenings found him either in the family circle of his friends or hard at work. He had not become more favourably impressed with the "townlet of clericals," and expressed the desire more and more frequently to be nearer a town where there were controversy and quarrelling, and where the mind was exercised, and deeds were done. Nevertheless, few towns in Germany could have been found at that time where he could express so freely his political opinions without interference from headquarters, as is proved by the publication of his famous dissertation on "Union of States and Single State." In regard to this he himself thought it "extraordinary" that it could have been published in Freiburg. That the German Confederation is not a Coalition of States, but a Coalition of Rulers, that Austria cannot be called a German State, and that the Minor Powers are no States at all, lacking as they do power of self-determination: all these axioms to-day have become commonplace, but at that time the particularist press raised a fierce outcry against them. Although an official of a Small State himself, he nevertheless put into print that a ship a span in length is no ship at all, and that, should the Small States of Prussia be annexed, what would happen to them was only what they themselves in times gone by had done to smaller territories; for they owed their existence to annexations. Of the German Princes he said: "The majority of the illustrious heads show an alarming family resemblance; well-meaning mediocrity predominates almost everywhere.