Blog ||| Special Homages: Meister Eckhart / David Copperfield
| |
|
|
|
|
|
Start |||
The
Philosophical Europe ||| The Political Progress ||| European Witness ||| EU News
Blog ||| Special Homages: Meister Eckhart / David Copperfield |
|
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 38
Germans alone will govern ... they alone will exercise political rights; they alone will serve in the army and in the navy; they alone will have the right to become land-owners; thus they will acquire the conviction that, as in the Middle Ages, the Germans are a people of rulers. However, they will condescend so far as to delegate inferior tasks to foreign subjects who live among them.
Five years later, when The Hague Conference was groping vainly for a formula for peace and disarmament, the Pan-German magazine Heimdall was objecting:
"For us Germans the abolition of war can become possible only—if at all—when the German Reich, that is, the Pan-German Reich in the widest sense, has become the Super-State, the supreme power, in the world."
As a new century was ushered in, most peoples of the world were hoping it would be one of profound peace. But the German Admiral von Tirpitz was talking earnestly about the possibility of seizing a naval base for Germany in the Caribbean. The Pan-German leader, Dr. Wintzer, spoke about protecting the interests of Germans overseas, referred magniloquently to "the universal mission of the German race" and demanded that Germans everywhere recognize their "duty to work for a policy of systematic expansion."
From this time until 1914, Germany was carrying on a war of nerves—although the term had not yet been invented—to the tune of pretty general applause from her people. They thrilled to their bellicose Kaiser Wilhelm when in a speech at Tangier in 1905, while using French claims to Morocco as a sounding board for aggressive German designs, he cried: "We are the salt of the earth ... God has created us so that we should civilize the world." Germans thought he meant by that what Professor Ernest Hasse wrote in his The German Reich as a National State, published that same year: Who, in the future, is to do the heavy and dirty work which every national community based on labor will always need? ... The solution consists in our condemning alien European stock, the Poles, Czechs, Jews, Italians and so on, who live under us, or find their way to us, to these slaves' conceptions.
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
