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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 40
"Remember that you are the chosen people! The spirit of the Lord has descended upon me, because I am Emperor of the Germans! I am the instrument of the Most High. I am His sword. His representative... . May all the enemies of the German people perish! God demands their destruction. God, who through my mouth, commands you to execute His will."
Wilhelm was not uniquely mad, as many readers in Allied lands supposed from reading his proclamations. Heinrich von Treitschke was considered the chief living German historian. What his science had taught him, he wrote in 1916, was "that war is both justifiable and moral, and that the ideal of perpetual peace is not only impossible but immoral as well ... Anyone with a knowledge of history realizes that to expel war from the universe would be to mutilate German freedom... . War must be conceived as an institution ordained by God."
Nor was this a war-induced hysteria. Twenty years before, in the midst of peace, Treitschke had remarked that "those who preach the nonsense of eternal peace do not understand Aryan national life."
After 1918, it seemed impossible to the victors that the vanquished could take seriously the sort of rhetoric their Kaiser and their sages had dished out to them. But an idea cannot be beaten by a battle. There is no common meeting ground for conflict. An idea needs to be beaten by another idea, and their military defeat had given birth to no new ideas among the Germans.
Mere loss of a war, especially one in which they had held the field for years against a coalition of all the chief powers of the world, did not seem to Germans any reason for doubting the truth of Fichte and Hegel, Treitschke and the Kaiser. They were inclined to remember—and their orators, writers and teachers reminded them—how close they had been to victory.
They had missed taking Paris in 1914 by sheer bad luck, the German version runs, and the men of the Weimar Republic could reflect wistfully on the glories that might have been if the French capital had succumbed. If Oswald Spengler, the philosopher author of "The Decline of the West", could learn nothing from defeat, how could the world reasonably expect average citizens to unlearn two or three lifetimes of miseducation? And Spengler could write in 1921: "A genuine international is only possible through the victory of the idea of one race over all others... we Germans ... have rich unspent possibilities within us and huge tasks before us ... The real international is imperialism."
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
