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Henry Morgenthau, The German Character
Five chapters from Morgenthau’s book, Germany is our Problem, here published with an introductory note by Ellopos. Emphasis, in bold or italic letters, by Ellopos. Complete book in print.
52 Pages
Page 35
Referring to the then most revered German sages, he warned: Thought goes before the deed as lightning before the thunder. German thunder is indeed German, and not in a hurry, and it comes rolling slowly onward; but come it will, and when ye hear the crash as naught ever crashed before in the whole history of the world, then know that der Deutsche Donner, our German thunder, has at last hit the mark. And again: It is the fairest merit of Christianity that it somewhat mitigated that brutal German gaudium certaminis or joy of battle, but it could not destroy it, and should that subduing talisman, the Cross, break, then will come crashing and roaring forth the wild madness of the old champions, the insane berserker rage of which Northern poets say and sing. That talisman is brittle, and the day will come when it will pitifully break. The old stone gods will rise from long forgotten ruin, and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and Thor, leaping to life with his giant hammer, will smash the Gothic cathedrals!
The poet drew this remarkably accurate prophecy from his reading of the German mind quite as much as from his reading of the German philosophers. But for one hundred years Germans in Germany have preferred Hegel to Heine. Anyone who has tried both will understand why the German taste appears too mysterious to others, why a greater German even than Heine was dismayed by the paradox in the native character as he saw it. "I have often felt a bitter pang," wrote Goethe, "at the thought of the German people, so estimable as individuals and so wretched in the whole." The reason was that Germans were not so much uneducated as they were elaborately and deliberately miseducated.
The medieval belief that war was not only the sole profession fit for a gentleman but that it was also the best trade for a common fellow survived in Germany long after it had been outmoded in all the rest of Europe that passed for civilized. It survives today. To that belief was added and is still added a sedulously fostered conviction that the German is not only a better man than any foreigner—other peoples have indulged the same conceit—but that the German is destined to rule over the inferior people, too. The conception of that rule as a civilizing mission was notable by its absence. Germany was to dominate the world with lash and club for the sole comfort and enrichment of Germans. Of course other nations have had their share of megalomaniacs. Glorification of war for its own sake, theories of a master race, the blasphemy that God made some peoples as servants for others have cropped up in the writings of almost every country. But outside Germany they were confined to a little-heeded minority, a lunatic fringe. Inside Germany, the same teachings were if anything more lunatic, and they were also official, all-pervading and finally accepted without question.
Cf. H. Arendt: totalitarianism reduces men to impersonal natural forces * German philosophers in support of Nazism * Beethoven and Mauthausen * The Superior Race of Germans * Kalergi, European Spirit must Precede Europe's Political Unification * La Construction de l'Europe selon Jean Monnet * Plan Fouchet * Mitterrand and Kohl urge European Political Union * Il Manifesto di Ventotene
