Here
under follows the transcription of chapter 6 of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's
The
Foundations of the 19th Century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane, The
Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
494
SIXTH CHAPTER
THE ENTRANCE OF THE GERMANIC PEOPLE INTO
THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Mon devoir est mon Dieu
suprême. — FREDERICK THE
GREAT. (Letter to Voltaire on
June 12, 1740.)
THE
TERM “GERMANIC“
THE entrance of
the Jew into European history had, as Herder said, signified the entrance
of an alien element — alien to that which Europe had already achieved,
alien to all it was still to accomplish; but it was the very reverse with
the Germanic peoples. This barbarian, who would rush naked to battle, this
savage, who suddenly sprang out of woods and marshes to inspire into a
civilised and cultivated world the terrors of a violent conquest won by
the strong hand alone, was nevertheless the lawful heir of the Hellene
and the Roman, blood of their blood and spirit of their spirit. It was
his own property which he, unwitting, snatched from the alien hand. But
for him the sun of the Indo-European must have set. The Asiatic and African
slave had by assassination wormed his way to the very throne of the Roman
Empire, the Syrian mongrel had made himself master of the law, the Jew
was using the library at Alexandria to adapt Hellenic philosophy to the
Mosaic law, the Egyptian to embalm and bury for boundless ages the fresh
bloom of natural science in the ostentatious pyramids of scientific systematisation;
soon, too, the beautiful flowers of old Aryan life — Indian thought, Indian
poetry — were to be trodden
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under foot by the savage bloodthirsty
Mongolian, and the Bedouin, with his mad delusions bred of the desert,
was to reduce to an everlasting wilderness that garden of Eden, Erania,
in which for centuries all the symbolism of the world had grown; art had
long since vanished; there were nothing but replicas for the rich, and
for the poor the circus: accordingly, to use that expression of Schiller
which I quoted at the beginning of the first chapter, there were no longer
men but only creatures. It was high time for the Saviour to appear. He
certainly did not enter into history in the form in which combining, constructive
reason, if consulted, would have chosen for the guardian angel, the harbinger
of a new day of humanity; but to-day, when a glance back over past centuries
teaches us wisdom, we have only one thing to regret, that the Teuton did
not destroy with more thoroughness, wherever his victorious arm penetrated,
and that as a consequence of his moderation the so-called “Latinising,“
that is, the fusion with the chaos of peoples, once more gradually robbed
wide districts of the one quickening influence of pure blood and unbroken
youthful vigour, and at the same time deprived them of the rule of those
who possessed the highest talents. At any rate it is only shameful indolence
of thought, or disgraceful historical falsehood, that can fail to see in
the entrance of the Germanic tribes into the history of the world the rescuing
of agonising humanity from the clutches of the everlastingly bestial.
If I here use the
word “Germanic,“ I do so, as I have already remarked in the introduction
to this division, for the sake of simplification — a simplification which
expresses the truth, which must otherwise remain veiled. But this expression,
whether taken in the wide or the narrow sense, seems somewhat elastic,
perhaps inadmissible, particularly so because it was late before any people,
at any rate we ourselves, became conscious of such
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a thing as the specifically “Germanic“
character. There never has been a people that called itself “Germanic,“
and never — from their first appearance on the stage of history to the
present day — have the whole of the Germanic peoples unitedly opposed themselves
to the non-Germanic; on the contrary, from the beginning we find them continually
at feud with one another, displaying towards no one such hostility as towards
their own blood. During Christ‘s lifetime Inguiomer betrays his nearest
relative, the great Hermann, to the Marcomanni, and thereby hinders the
process of union among the northern tribes and the total destruction of
the Roman; Tiberius already could recommend no safer policy to adopt with
the Germans than to “leave them to their own internal quarrels“; all the
great wars of the following age, with the exception of the Crusades, were
wars between Germanic princes; the same thing holds in the main for the
nineteenth century. But a foreigner had at once recognised the uniformity
of the various tribes, and instead of the indistinguishable babel of names,
Chatti, Chanki, Cheruski, Gambrivii, Suevi, Vendales, Goti, Marcomanni,
Lugii, Langobardi, Sachsi, Frisii, Hermunduri, &c., he had created
for the luxuriant offshoots of this strong race the uniform comprehensive
term “Germanic,“ and that because his eye had at the first glance discerned
their common stock. Tacitus, after growing tired of enumerating names,
says, “the physical characteristics of all these men are the same“; this
was the correct empiric basis for the second and correct judgment, “I am
convinced that the various tribes of Germania, unpolluted by marriages
with alien peoples, have from time immemorial been a special, unmixed people,
resembling itself alone“ (Germania 4). It is peculiar how much more
clearly the stranger, who is not biased by details, sees the great connection
of phenomena, than the man who is directly interested in them!
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But to-day it is
not merely bias which prevents us from using the word “Germanic“ in its
geographical and racial sense with the simplicity of Tacitus: those “various
Germanic stems“ which he regarded as an unmixed, comparatively uniform
people have, since his day, like their predecessors, the Hellenes, entered
into all kinds of unions among each other, and only a portion remains “unpolluted
by marriages with strange peoples“; moreover in consequence of the great
migrations, they have been subjected to particular cultural influences,
resulting from geographical position, climatic conditions, the standard
of civilisation among the nearest neighbours, and so forth. That alone
would have sufficed to break up any unity. But the state of things becomes
still more confused when we supplement the teaching of political history,
on the one hand by more minute, comparative researches in the department
of national psychology, philosophy and the history of art, and on the other
by the results of the prehistoric and anthropological investigations of
the last fifty years. For then we see that we may and must give a much
wider meaning to the word “Germanic“ than Tacitus did, but at the same
time we notice necessary limitations of which he, with the defective knowledge
of his time, could not have dreamt. To understand our past and our present,
we must follow the example of Tacitus, and like him, collect material and
sift it, but upon the broader basis of our modern knowledge. It is only
by the exact definition of a new term “Germanic“ that our study of the
entrance of these peoples into history acquires practical worth. It is
the object of this chapter to give such a descriptive definition as briefly
as may be. How far does the stem-relationship extend? Where do we meet
“Arya“ (i.e., those who belong to the friends)? Where do we first
find the alien element, which, according to Goethe, we “must not tolerate“?
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EXTENSION
OF THE IDEA
I have said that we
must give the expression “Germanic“ a wider and at the same time a narrower
signification than that of Tacitus. Both the extension and the narrowing
are the results of historical and anthropological considerations.
The expression is
widened by the knowledge that no clear distinction can be drawn physically
and mentally between the “German“ of Tacitus and his predecessor in history,
the “Celt,“ or his successor whom we are wont even more audaciously to
sum up as the “Slav.“ In view of their physical characteristics the scientist
would not hesitate to look upon these three races as varieties of a common
stock. The Gauls who in the year 389 B.C. conquered Rome answer exactly
to the description which Tacitus gives of the Germanic race: “bright blue
eyes, reddish hair, tall figures“; and, on the other hand, the skulls which
have been found in the graves of the oldest heroic Slavonic ages have shown
to the astonishment of the whole scientific world that the Slavs from the
time of the migrations were just as distinctly dolichocephalous (i.e.,
long-skulled) and as tall as the other Germanic tribes of that time and
those of pure race to-day. * Moreover, Virchow‘s comprehensive investigations
into the colour of hair and of eyes have revealed the fact that the Slavs
were originally and still are in certain districts just as fair as the
Germanic races. Quite apart, therefore, from the general conception “Indo-European,“
which is a mere theoretical and hypothetical term, it appears that we have
every reason for considerably extending the idea “Germanic“ which we
* Cf.
the summary in Ranke: Der Mensch, 2nd ed. ii. 297. It is not possible
that these excavations revealed facts limited to the Norman Waregians,
since the investigations embrace subjects from the most various places,
not only in Russia, but also in Germany.
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have got from Tacitus and which we have
hitherto for philological reasons been inclined to make narrower and narrower.
*
THE
CELT
Let us speak first
of the Celts.
Misled chiefly by
philological considerations, the Celtic languages being supposed to be
more nearly related to the Italian and Greek than to the Germanic, we have
been used to overlook the very decisive physical, and still more decisive
moral influence. † We group the Celt with the Graeco-Italians, with whom
he is manifestly only distantly connected, while he is intimately related
to the Germanic peoples. Though the completely Romanised Gaul may have
presented a direct contrast to his conqueror, the Burgundian or Frank,
yet that original conqueror of Rome, indeed even the later Gaul who had
been settled for centuries in Northern Italy,
* In
consequence the anthropologists of to-day use the expression homo europaeus
(see p. 373) in a much
more definite sense than Linnaeus had done; but such a nomenclature is
much too abstract for the historian, who has therefore hitherto taken no
notice of it. In order to awaken intelligent interest in wide circles,
one must employ the existing, well-known terminology and suit it to new
needs. This is here done by widening the idea “Germanic,“ a procedure which
will justify itself step by step in the course of this work; it is only
by this that the history of the last two thousand years and especially
of the nineteenth century becomes intelligible. That Celts, Slavs and Teutons
are descended from a single pure stock may to-day be regarded as certain
in the light of anthropology and ancient history. (Cf. the final
summary of Dr. G. Beck; Der Urmensch, Basel, 1899, p. 46 f.). In
addition we have historical evidence of the mutual mixing of these different
stems. Thus, for instance, H. d‘Arbois de Jubainville, Professor at the
Collège de France, arrives in his book Les Celtes, 1904,
at the conclusion: Il y a probablement en Allemagne plus de sang Gaulois
qu‘en France.
† Schleicher,
for instance, in his famous, universally copied genealogy of the Indo-Germanic
languages (cf. Die Deutsche Sprache, 1861, p. 82) makes one group
of the Italo-Celtic languages, which he thinks branched off in very early
times from the “North European mother tongue“; also such divergent views
as the well-known “wave-theory“ of Johannes Schmidt continue to represent
the Celt as if he were the furthest removed of all Indo-Europeans from
the Germanic peoples.
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and whom Florus still describes as “superhuman“
(corpora plus quam humana erant, ii. 4) clearly resembles the Teuton
physically; but not only physically, for his love of wandering, his delight
in war, which leads him (as the Goths at a later time) even to Asia in
the service of any master who gives him an opportunity of fighting, his
love of song... all these things are essential features of this same relationship,
whereas one would be at a loss to prove the points of connection with the
Graeco-Italians. The Germanic peoples in the narrower, Tacitean sense of
the word enter history for the first time * mixed with Celts and led by
Celts; the word “Germanic“ is Celtic. Do we not still meet those tall figures
with blue eyes and reddish hair in North-West Scotland, in Wales, &c.,
and are they not more like a Teuton than a Southern European? Do we not
yet see how the Bretons as daring mariners rival the feats of the old Norsemen?
But no less an authority than Julius Caesar has told us, in the first chapter
of the first book of his Gallic War, how this wild Celto-Germanic mind
becomes everywhere gradually effeminate through contact with Roman civilisation.
†
More striking and
more decisive for my theory is the relationship of Celt and Teuton in the
deeper mental qualities. History gives us ample proof of this, of the relationship
of those finer features that make up individuality. Are we to believe —
to dive deeply into the subject — that it is an accident that St. Paul‘s
epistle on redemption by faith, on the gospel of freedom (in contrast to
the
* At
the invasion of the Cimbri and Teutons, 114 B.C.
† Regarding
the physical identity of Celts and Germanic peoples Professor Gabriel de
Mortillet has lately collected such comprehensive material, anthropological
facts, as well as the testimonies of old Roman writers, that it is sufficient
if I refer to his Formation de la nation française, 1897
(p. 114 f.). His final words are “La caractéristique des deux
groupes est donc exactement la même et s‘applique aussi bien au groupe
qui a reçu le nom de Gaulois (synonymous with Celts, see
p. 92) qu‘au groupe qui depuis les invasions des Cimbres a pris le nom
de Germains“.
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“slavish yoke“ of the Church law), on
the importance of religion as not consisting in works but in regeneration
“to a new creature“ — was addressed to the Galatians, those “Gallic Greeks“
of Asia Minor who had remained almost pure Celts — an epistle in which
we seem to hear a Martin Luther speaking to Germans credulous indeed but
yet incomparably gifted for understanding the deepest mysteries? * I for
my part do not believe that there is any room for chance in such matters;
I believe it all the less in this case, because I notice in what a different
way the same man speaks, what endless roundabout paths he chooses when
teaching the same truths to a community of Jews and the children of the
chaos of peoples, as in the Epistle to the Romans. But our judgment
does not rest merely on such a hypothetical basis, nor does it rest solely
upon the relationship between old Celtic and old Germanic mythical religion,
but upon observation of the relationship between the mental qualities generally,
to which the whole cultured history of Europe up to the present day testifies
— wherever the Celt has kept his blood pure. Thus, for example, we find
in the genuinely Celtic parts of Ireland in former times — taking the five
hundred years from the Celt Scotus Erigena to the Celt Dons Scotus — splendid
theologians with high philosophical gifts, whose independence of thought
and keen desire to investigate brought upon them the persecution of the
Roman Church; in the heart of Bretagne was born that intellectual pioneer
Peter Abelard, and let it be carefully noted that what distinguishes him,
like those others, is not merely independent thought and striving after
freedom, but above all the holy earnestness of his life, a thoroughly “Germanic
quality.“ These Celtic minds of former centuries, teeming
* Mommsen
testifies that Galatia was “a Celtic island amidst the floods of the Eastern
peoples,“ in which even the Celtic language maintained itself for a long
time: Roman History, 3rd ed. v. 311 f.
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with strength, are not merely free,
and not merely pious, any more than the Breton seaman of to-day, but they
are both free and pious, and it is this very combination that expresses
what is specifically “Germanic,“ as we observe it from Charlemagne and
King Alfred to Cromwell and Queen Louise, from the daring anti-Roman troubadours
and the Minnesingers so politically independent, to Schiller and Richard
Wagner. And when we see, for example, Abelard contending from profound
religious conviction against the sale of indulgences (Theologia Christiana),
and at the same time putting the Hellenes in every respect far above the
Jews, declaring the morals of their philosophers to be superior to the
Jewish sanctity of law, Plato‘s view of life more sublime than that of
Moses — yes, when we actually find him in his Dialogus inter philosophum,
Judaeum et Christianum, making the recognition of the transcendental
ideality of the conception of space the basis of religious thought, so
that man stands directly before God‘s countenance not by entering into
an empirical heaven but solely by an inner conversion of mind: are we not
forced to recognise that this mind is characteristically Indo-European
in contrast to the Semitic and the late Roman, and that, moreover, an individuality
here reveals itself, which in every single one of those plis de la pensée
(of which I spoke in the previous
chapter) betrays the specifically Germanic character? I do not say
German but Germanic character, and I am not speaking of to-day, when differentiation
has led to the formation of very clearly defined national characters, but
of a man who lived almost a thousand years ago; and I assert that so far
as the whole tendency of his thought and feeling is concerned this Breton
might right well have been born in the heart of Germania. A typical Celt
in the gloomy passionateness of his nature, a new Tristan in his love,
he is flesh of our flesh and blood of our Teutonic blood; he is Germanic.
Just as Germanic
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as these so-called “pure German“ populations
of Swabia and the Black Forest, the home of Schiller, Mozart and many others
of the greatest of Germany‘s sons, who owe their peculiar character and
uncommon poetical gifts to the strong admixture of Celtic blood. * We recognise
this same spirit of Abelard at work wherever it can be proved that the
Celts were present in large numbers, as in the home of the unfortunate
Albigenses in the South of France, or as they still are in the homeland
of the Methodists, Wales. We recognise it also in the so-called typically
Catholic country Bretagne, for Catholicism and Protestantism are, after
all, mere words; the religiosity of the Breton is genuine, but in its colour
it is really “heathen“ rather than Christian; primeval popular religion
lived on here under the mask of Catholicism; moreover, who would not see
in the ineradicable loyalty of this people to the throne a Germanic characteristic
which is just as common as the love of war and loyalty to the flag among
the Irish, who in politics agitate against England, but at the same time
voluntarily furnish a large proportion of the English Army, and go abroad
to die for the same alien king, to whom they are so hostile at home? But
the close relationship between Celts and Germanic peoples (in the narrower
sense of the word) reveals itself most strikingly in their poetry. From
the first Frankish, German and English poetry were closely allied to genuine
Celtic, not that the former people did not possess motives of their own,
but they adopted the Celtic ones as being originally akin to them, and
in these there is a something strange, something not quite understood,
because half-forgotten, which lends them increased piquancy and charm.
Celtic poetry is incomparably profound, inexhaustibly rich in symbolical
meaning; it was manifestly in its far distant origin intimately connected
* Wilhelm
Henke: Der Typus des germanischen Menschen (Tübingen, 1895).
Similarly Treitschke: Politik i. 279.
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with music, the soul of our Germanic
poetry. If we examine the works which were written when the poetic impulse
once more awoke to life, about the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
in all Germanic lands, but above all in the lands of the Franks — when
we on the one hand consider the Geste de Charlemagne, the Rolandslied,
the Berte aus grans piès, Ogier le Danois &c., all independent
efforts of Frankish imaginative power, and on the other hand see Celtic
poetry live again in the legends of the Queste du Graal, Artus‘ Tafelrunde,
Tristan und Isolde, Parzival, &c., we cannot for a moment doubt
where the deeper, richer, more genuine and poetically inexhaustible wealth
of imagination and thought is to be found. And this Celtic poetry of the
thirteenth century was at a disadvantage, since it appeared not in its
own form, but robbed of the wings of song, expanded to romance form, quickened
with knightly, Roman and Christian beliefs, its genuine poetical kernel
almost as much obscured by alien accrescences as the Norse myths in the
German Nibelungenlied. The further back we go, the more clearly
do we recognise — in spite of all individual differences — the intimate
relationship between old Celtic and old Germanic poetical tendency; from
stage to stage backwards something is lost, so that, for example, although
Gottfried‘s Tristan as a poem undoubtedly surpasses the French versions
of the same subject, yet several of the deepest and finest traits, upon
which this incomparable, poetical, mythical and symbolical legend is based,
are lacking in it, while the old French romance possesses them and Chrestien
de Troyes had at least given a suggestion of them; the same is true of
Wolfram‘s Parzival. * But this relationship reveals itself most
convincingly and impressively when we see that in reality it was only
* In
this place I have used the results of some of my own studies (cf.Notes
sur Parsifal and Notes sur Tristan in the Revue Wagnérienne,
1886 and 1887).
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German music that was able to awaken
to new life the old Celtic and old Germanic poetry in their original intention
and significance; this we have learnt from the artistic achievements of
the nineteenth century, which at the same time revealed the close relationship
between both these sources.
THE
GERMANIC SLAV
Of the genuine Slav
there is less to be said, since we are at a loss where to look for him,
and are sure of only one thing, that in his case there has been a transformation
of the type, so that the thick-set body, round head, high cheek-bones,
dark hair, which we to-day consider to be typically Slavonic, were certainly
not characteristics of the Slav at the time when he entered European history.
But even to-day the fair type predominates in the north and east of European
Russia, and the Pole, too, is distinguished from the southern Slav by the
colour of his skin (Virchow). In Bosnia one is struck with the tallness
of the men and the prevalence of fair hair. The so-called Slavonic type
which merges into the Mongolian I have not once met in a journey of several
months across that country, any more than the characteristic “potato-face“
of the Czech peasant; the same may be said of the splendid race of the
Montenegrins. * In spite, therefore, of the universal prejudice, there
are, as we see, enough physical indications that the Germanic man, when
he entered history, had, in addition to an elder brother in
* On
the other hand the shape of the skull has undergone a gradual change: among
the present inhabitants of Bosnia we find not quite 1½ per cent.
of long heads, while there are, on the other hand, 84 per cent. of distinctly
round heads; the oldest graves show 29 per cent. of long heads and 34 per
cent. of round ones, and graves from the time of the Middle Ages 21 per
cent. of long heads. (See Weisbach: Altbosnische Schädel,
in the Mitteilungen der anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien,
1897.) It is interesting to hear that the formation of the face, in spite
of the change of skull, has remained “leptoprosop,“ i.e., long in
shape.
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the west, a younger in the east who
was not so very unlike himself. But on the other hand it is exceedingly
difficult to unravel the confused skein of what was originally Slavonic,
owing to the manifest fact that this branch of the Germanic family was
at a very early time almost completely destroyed by other tribes, much
earlier and more thoroughly and more mysteriously than the Celts; but this
fact should not deter us from recognising and admitting the related features
and attempting to sift them out from the mass of what is alien.
But here again our
best help will lie in searching the depths of the soul. If I may judge
from the one Slavonic language of which I have a slight knowledge, the
Servian, I should be inclined to think that a strong family resemblance
in poetical gifts to the Celts and Germanic peoples could be proved. The
heroic cycle which celebrates the great battle of Kossovopolje (1383),
but which beyond doubt goes further back in its poetical motives, reminds
one of Celtic and Germanic lyric and epic poetry by the sentiments to which
it gives utterance — loyalty unto death, heroic courage, heroic women,
as well as the high respect which these enjoy, the contempt for all possessions
in comparison with personal honour. I read in histories of literature that
such poems, and heroic figures like Marco Kraljevich are common to all
popular poetry; but this is not true, and can only appear so to one whose
excess of learning has blinded him to the fine features of individuality.
Rama is an essentially different hero from Achilles, and he, again, quite
different from Siegfried; while on the other hand the Celtic Tristan betrays
in many features direct relationship to the German Siegfried, and that
not merely in the external ornaments of the knightly romance (fights with
dragons, &c.), which may to some extent be a later addition, but rather
in those old, popular creations where Tristan is still a shepherd and Siegfried
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not yet a hero at the Burgundian Court.
It is here that we see clearly that, apart from extraordinary strength
and the magic charm of invincibility and more such general attributes of
heroes, definite ideals form the basis of the poems; and it is in these,
not in the former, that the character of a people is reflected. So it is
in the case of Tristan and Siegfried: loyalty as the basis of the idea
of honour, the significance of maidenhood, victory in downfall (in other
words, the true heroism centred in the inner motive, not in the outward
success). Such features distinguish a Siegfried, a Tristan, a Parzival
not only from a Semitic Samson whose heroism lies in his hair, but equally
from the more closely related Achilles. Purity is strange to the Hellenes;
faith is not a principle of honour, but only of love (Patroclos); the hero
defies death; he does not overcome it, as we can say of the heroes of whom
we have spoken. These are just the traits of true relationship which, in
spite of all divergences of form, I find in Servian poetry. The fact alone
that their heroic cycle groups itself around, not a victory, but a greet
defeat, the fatal battle of Kossovo, is of great significance; for the
Servians have won victories enough and had been under Stephan Duschan a
powerful State. Here, then, beyond question we find a special tendency
of character, and we may with certainty conclude that the rich store of
such poetical motives — all referring to destruction, death, everlasting
separation of lovers — did not spring up only after that unfortunate battle
and under the brutalising rule of Mohammedanism, but is an old legacy,
exactly as the Fate of the Nibelungs, “aller Leid Ende,“ and not the Fortune
of the Nibelungs, was the German legacy, and exactly as Celtic and Frankish
poets neglected a hundred famous victors to sing of the obscure conquered
Roland, and to let primitive poetical inspiration once more live through
him, in a half-historical new youth. Such things tell their tale. And just
as decisive
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is the peculiar way in which woman is
represented among the Servians — so delicate, brave and chaste — also the
very great part which poetry assigns to her. On the other hand, only a
specialist can decide whether the two ravens that fly up over Kossovo at
the end of the battle, to proclaim to the Servian people its downfall,
are related to Wotan‘s ravens, or whether we have here a general Indo-Germanic
motive, a relic of the nature myths, a case of borrowing, a coincidence.
And so, too, in reference to a thousand details. But fortunately here,
as everywhere, the element that is really important is manifest to every
unbiased observer. In Russian poetry we seem to find little but legends,
fairy tales and songs of the olden time; but here too the melancholy on
the one hand and on the other the intimate relation to nature, particularly
to the animal world (Bodenstedt: Poetische Ukraine), are unmistakably
Germanic.
It is not my intention
to carry this investigation further; want of space as well as my plan forbids
me. Let criticism put to the test the truth of what unerring feeling will
reveal to every one who has the sense of poetry; that is the critic‘s duty.
I must, however, mention the second manifestation of the soul-life by which
the Germanic element in the Slav clearly reveals itself — Religion.
In whatever direction
we glance, we behold the Slav, especially in early times, distinguished
by earnestness and independence in religious matters. And one of the principal
features of this religiosity is the fact that it is saturated with patriotic
feelings. As early as the ninth century, even before the parting between
east and west had taken place for ever, we see the Bulgarians in the interest
of questions of dogma maintaining equally friendly relations with Rome
and with Constantinople. What they demand is solely the recognition of
the independence of their Church; Rome refuses it, Byzantium
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grants it. And thus in the first half
of the tenth century is founded the first Christian Church which has an
independent constitution. * The immense importance of such an event must
be immediately manifest to every one. With Michael of Bulgaria it was no
question of divergences of faith; he was a Christian, and ready to believe
everything that the priests proclaimed as Christian truth. In his case
it was solely a question of constitution; he wanted to see his Bulgarian
Church managed by a Bulgarian Patriarch with complete independence; no
Prince of the Church in Rome or Byzantium should interfere. This may seem
to many to be merely an administrative question, but in reality it is the
rising of the Germanic spirit of free individuality against the last incorporation
of the imperium which was born of the chaos, and represented the anti-national,
anti-individual and levelling principle. This is not the place to enter
more fully into this subject; that can be done only in the two following
chapters. But when we encounter the same process everywhere among the Slavs,
we cannot deny its significance as a symptom to aid our judgment of their
original character. No sooner had the Servians established their kingdom
than they made for themselves an autonomous Church; and the great Czar
Stephan Duschan defended his patriarch against the suzerain pretensions
of the Byzantine Church and forced the latter to recognise him legally.
There, too, it was not a matter of faith; for at that time (the middle
of the fourteenth century) the schism between Rome and Constantinople was
a fact of long standing and the Servians were already as they are to-day,
fanatically orthodox members of the Greek Church; but just as the Bulgarians
resisted the interference of Rome, so the Servians resisted that of Constantinople.
The principle is the same — the maintenance of nationality. The Russian
Church certainly took much
* Cf.
Hergenröther: Photius ii. 614.
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longer to free itself; indeed only long
after the destruction of the Byzantine Empire did it do so. But Russia
can only in a very qualified and un-Germanic sense be called a Slavonic
land, and yet it and England are the only pre-eminent nations of modern
Europe that possess an absolutely national Church with a national head.
It is, further, a specially striking fact that the Slavs are the only Christians
(with the exception of the Czechs, who are subject to German influence)
who have never tolerated divine service in any language but their own!
The great “Slavonic apostles“ Cyrillus and Methodius had trouble on this
account; though persecuted by the German prelates who clung to the “three
sacred languages“ (Greek, Latin, Hebrew), though denounced as heretics
by the Roman Pope, they yet succeeded in gaining this point as a special
right: the strictly Roman Catholic Slavs had also their Slavonic Mass,
and even in the last years of the nineteenth century Rome had not succeeded
in wresting this privilege from the Dalmatians. But all this forms only
one side of Slavonic religion, the external (though hardly external in
reality); the other side is still more striking. In Russia, in those parts
where we find the greatest percentage of genuine Slavs (that is in Little
Russia, the home of that beautiful poetry which I have alluded to above),
there manifests itself to-day by the never-ceasing formation of sects an
intensive inner religious life similar to that of Würtemberg and Scandinavia.
The relationship is striking. Of this in the so-called “Latin“ countries
there is no trace. It is in such matters that the inmost nature of the
soul is reflected. And here, too, it is a question of a lasting quality,
which asserted itself in every century despite all blood-mixtures. The
extreme trouble experienced in converting the Slavs to Christianity is
a testimony to their deeply religious nature: Italians and Gauls were the
easiest to convert, Saxons could be won only by the power of the sword,
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but it took long years and fearful cruelties
to make the Slavs give up the faith of their fathers. * The notorious persecutions
of the heathen lasted, in fact, to the century of Gutenberg. Very characteristic
is the attitude here also of those genuine, still almost pure Slavs in
Bosnia and Herzogovina. At an earlier period the influential part of the
nation adopted the doctrines of Bogumil (allied to those of the Catharists
or Patarenes); that is, they rejected everything Jewish in Christianity
and retained besides the New Testament only the Prophets and the Psalms,
they recognised no sacraments and above all no priesthood. Though unceasingly
opposed, oppressed and crushed from two sides simultaneously — by the orthodox
Servians and the Hungarians who obeyed every sign of the Roman Pope — though
they were thus the bloody victims of a double and continuous crusade, this
little people nevertheless clung to its faith for centuries; the graves
of the heroic followers of Bogumil still adorn the peaks of the hills,
to which the corpses were borne to avoid the danger of desecration. It
was the Mohammedans who, by forcible conversion, first did away with this
sect. The same spirit, which animated a brave but ignorant people in a
remote corner of the earth, in other places bore richer fruits, whereby
the Slavonic branch distinguished itself just as much as the other branches
of the Germanic family.
THE
REFORMATION
The most important
event in the nineteen centuries that have passed is undoubtedly the so-called
“Reformation“: at the bottom of it there is a double principle, a national
and a religious; common to both is the freeing
* The
first division of the sixth book of Neander‘s Allgemeine Geschichte
der Christlichen Religion und Kirche shows how difficult it was to
convert the Wends and Poles to Christianity.
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from the alien yoke, the shaking off
of that “dead hand“ of the extinct Roman Empire, which stretched not only
over the goods and money, but also over the thoughts and feelings and faith
and hope of humanity. Nowhere does the organic unity of Slavonic Germanicism
manifest itself more convincingly than in this revolt against Rome. To
understand this movement from the standpoint of national psychology, one
must, to begin with, pay no attention to any dogmatic disputes concerning
creed; it is not what people consider the truth in regard to the nature
of the Communion that is important, it is a question solely of two directly
contradictory principles, freedom and slavery. The greatest of the reformers
points out that so far as he is concerned he is not contending for political
rights, and he goes on to say, “but in spirit and conscience we are of
all men the most independent: here we believe no one, trust no one, fear
no one, but Christ alone.“ This signifies the freeing of the individual
as well as of the nation. And when we have thus learned that the “Reformation“
should be regarded not as a purely ecclesiastical affair but as a revolt
of our whole nature against alien rule, of the Germanic soul against un-Germanic
spiritual tyranny, we must at the same time admit that the “reform“ began
as soon as the Germanic peoples by culture and leisure had awakened to
consciousness, and that this revolt still goes on. * Scotus Erigena (in
the ninth century) is a reformer, since he refuses to obey the commands
of Rome, and prefers to die by the dagger of the assassin than give up
an iota of his “freedom of mind and conscience“; Abelard in the eleventh
century is a reformer, since with all his orthodoxy he refuses to be deprived
of the freedom of his religious conceptions and attacks in addition the
administration of the Roman Church, the
* The
anthropologist Lapouge says in his purely scientific definition of the
Homo
europaeus: „en religion il est protestant.“ See Dépopulation
de la France, p. 79.
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sale of indulgences, &c.; and in
exactly the same way such lights of the Catholic Church as Döllinger
and Reusch in the nineteenth century are reformers; not a single dogmatic
question separated them from Rome, except the one question, freedom. In
this momentous movement not only the Germanic peoples in the narrower sense
of the word, not only the Celts, but also the Slavs distinguished themselves.
What I said in the last paragraph about their refusing to permit alien
interference in their Church administration, and their regarding the mother
tongue as their most sacred legacy, should be repeated here; both signify
the denial of the essential principles of Rome. But these endeavours were
more deeply rooted; in the depth of their hearts it was a question of religion,
not merely of nation. And as soon as the Reformation had gained a strong
hold — which happened first in distant England — the Slavonic Catholics
crowded to Oxford, drawn thither by the affinity of the most sacred feelings.
It is quite certain that without the great Martin Luther the Reformation
would never have become what it did — our most modern historians may say
what they like, nature knows no greater power than that of one great strong
man — but the soil on which this German could develop his full strength,
the atmosphere in which alone his cause could prosper, were primarily the
creations of Bohemia and of England. * Even a hundred years before the
birth of Luther every third man in England was an anti-Papist, and Wyclif‘s
translation of the Bible was known throughout the whole land. Bohemia did
not lag behind; already in the thirteenth century the New Testament was
read in the Czech language, and at the beginning of the fifteenth century
Hus edited the complete Bible in the language of the people. But the most
quickening influence was
* Luther
writes to Spalatin, February 1520: „Vide monstra, quaeso, in quae venimus
sine duce et doctore Bohemico.“
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that of Wyclif; he was the first to
open the eyes of the Slavs to evangelic truth, so that Hieronymus of Prague
could say of him: “Hitherto we have had only the shell, Wyclif has revealed
the kernel.“ * We get an altogether false idea of the Slavonic reformation
if we direct attention principally to Hus and the Hussite wars; the predominance
of political combinations, as well as of the enmity between Czechs and
Germans from that time forth confused men‘s minds and obscured the pure
object of their endeavour which at first had been so clear. Even a hundred
years before Hus lived Milic, who, though an orthodox Catholic and disinclined
by his interest in practical ministry to all speculation concerning dogma,
invented the expression Antichrist for the Roman Church; in the prison
at Rome he wrote his treatise, De Antichristo, in which he shows
that the Antichrist will not come in the future, but is already there,
he is heaping up “clerical“ riches, buying prebends and selling sacraments.
Mathias von Janow then expands this thought and thus paves the way for
the real theological Reformation; he certainly champions the one sacred
Church, but it must be thoroughly purified and built up anew: “It remains
for us now only to wish that the Reformation may be made possible by the
destruction of the Antichrist; let us raise our heads, for salvation is
already near at hand!“ (1389). He is followed by Stanislaus von Znaim,
who defends before the University of Prague the forty-five theses of Wyclif;
Hus, who makes a clear distinction between the “Apostolic“ and the “Papal“
and declares that he will obey the former, but the latter only in as far
as it agrees with the Apostolic; Nikolaus von Welenowic, who denies the
position of the priests as privileged intercessors with God; Hieronymus,
that splendid knight and martyr, who moved even the indifferent Papal secretary
Poggio, who was more interested in Hellenic
* Neander,
ix. 314.
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literature than in Christianity and
chiefly known as a collector and editor of obscene anecdotes, to utter
the words, “O what a man, worthy of immortal fame!“ And many others. Clearly
we have not the achievement of a single, perhaps erratic mind in all this;
on the contrary it is the soul of a nation — at least everything that was
genuine and noble in that people — that expresses itself. lt is well known
what fate overcame this noble section, how it was wiped off the face of
the earth. The Pope and the Roman bishops had bribed the army of international
mercenaries, and from them it received its death-blow at the White Mountain.
* Nor is it a question of a Czech idiosyncrasy; the other Catholic Slavs
adopted exactly the same attitude. Thus, for example, the hymns of Wyclif
were printed in the first Polish printing-press; Poland sent to the Council
of Trent bishops whose sympathies were so distinctly Protestant that the
Pope accused them before the king of being rabid heretics. But the Polish
Parliament was not intimidated; it demanded from the King a complete reorganisation
of the Polish Church upon the one basis of the Holy Scriptures. At the
same time it demanded — mirabile dictu! — the “equal rights of all
sects.“ The nobility of Poland and all the intellectual aristocracy were
Protestant. But the Jesuits profited by the political confusion, which
soon arose, to gain a firm footing in the land, and they were supported
by France and Austria; the process was not “bloody and speedy,“ as Canisius
had demanded, but the Protestants were nevertheless persecuted more and
more cruelly and finally banished; with the downfall of its religion the
Polish nation also fell. †
* Döllinger:
Das
Haus Wittelsbach, Akad. Vorträge i. 38.
† Read
the exceedingly interesting work of Count Valerian Krasinski: Geschichte
des Ursprungs, Fortschritts und Verfalls der Reformation in Polen,
Leipzig, 1841. Nowhere else, perhaps, is to be found so complete, abundant,
convincing and perfectly treated material as in Poland, to see how religious
intolerance and especially the influence of the Jesuits completely ruined
a land which was advancing
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As these facts are
not universally known, I have had to emphasise them in some detail, sufficiently,
I hope, to pave the way for the conviction that the genuine Teuton, the
genuine Celt, and the genuine Slav are originally and intimately related.
At the moment when these races enter history, we do not find three ethnical
souls side by side, but one uniform soul. Though the Celts have in many
places, but not everywhere as I have shown above, undergone such physical
changes by assimilating Virchow‘s hypothetical “Pre-Celts“ and elements
from the Latin chaos of peoples, that the so-called Celt of to-day is the
very contrary of the original Celtic type; though a like fate may, to a
still more regrettable degree, have overtaken the tall fair Slavs, who
remind us of Norsemen, yet throughout the centuries we have seen the working
of that distinct and thoroughly individual spirit, which I unhesitatingly
call the Germanic, because the genuine Teuton, in the usual, limited sense
of the word,
towards a brilliant future
in every intellectual and industrial sphere. We can best see the attitude
of the Poles to Rome before the time of Luther in the speech delivered
by Johann Ostrorog in the assembly of the States in the year 1459, in which
he said, “We cannot object to the recommending of this land as a Catholic
one to the protection of the Pope, but it is unbecoming to promise him
unbounded obedience. The King of Poland is subject to no one, and only
God is over him; he is not the vassal of Rome... &c. &c.“; then
he inveighs against the shameless simony of the Papal stool, the sale of
indulgences, the greed of the priests and monks, &c. (see p.
36 ff.). This whole Polish movement is, like the Bohemian, distinguished
by a fresh breath of independence and national feeling and at the same
time indifference to and depreciation of dogmatic questions (the Poles
never were Utraquists); and (just as in Bohemia) it is born Germans who
contend for Rome and gain the victory over religious and political freedom.
Hosen (Cardinal Hosius) — the man who sends Cardinal de Guise a letter
of congratulation on the murder of Admiral Coligny and who “thanks God
for the great gift that France has received through the night of St. Bartholomew
and prays that God may look upon Poland with equal mercy“ — this same Hosen
is at the head of the anti-national reaction, he introduces the Jesuits
into the land, he forbids the reading of Holy Scripture, he teaches that
the subject has absolutely no rights in reference to his prince, &c.
If such a man is Germanic, and those champions of freedom are not, then
this name is purely and simply a term of reproach.
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in spite of all blood crossings, preserved
this spirit in its purest and therefore most powerful form. This is not
hair-splitting but a question of historical insight in the widest sense;
I have no intention of putting down to the Germanic races, or indeed to
the German, achievements which they did not accomplish, or of assigning
to them fame which belongs to others. On the contrary, I wish to call to
life again the feeling for the great northern brotherhood, and that, too,
without binding myself to any racial or prehistoric hypothesis whatever,
but solely by relying upon what is clear to every eye. I do not even postulate
the blood-relationship; indeed I believe in it, but I am too well aware
of the extreme complexity of this problem, I see too clearly that the true
progress of science has here chiefly consisted in the discovery of our
boundless ignorance and the inadequacy of all hypotheses hitherto formulated,
to have any desire on my own part to continue building new castles in the
air, when every genuine scientist is beginning to keep silence. “Everything
is simpler than we can think, and at the same time more complicated than
we can comprehend,“ as Goethe says. In the meantime we have met with relations
in spirit, in sentiment and physical form: that may satisfy us. We have
a definite something in hand, and since this something is not a definition,
but consists of living men, I refer the reader to the study of the real
Celts, Teutons and Slavs, that he may learn what is the true Germanic character.
LIMITATIONS
OF THE NOTION
I think I have now
shown what is to be understood by the necessary extension of the idea;
but in what does the limitation which I described as equally necessary
consist? Here, too, the answer will be twofold, referring to physical qualities
on the one hand, to intellectual
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on the other; but fundamentally these
two things are really manifestations of the same thing.
The physical consideration
must not be undervalued; indeed it would perhaps be difficult to over-estimate
it. I have tried to show the reason, in the discussion of the race question
in the previous chapter but one; besides this fact is one of those which
mere instinct — that thin silken thread of connection with the tissue of
nature — lets us directly feel, without learned proof. For just as the
dissimilarity of human individuals can be read in their physiognomy, so
the dissimilarity of human races can be read in the structure of their
bones, the colour of their skin, their muscular system and the formation
of their skull; there is perhaps not a single anatomical fact upon which
race has not impressed its special distinguishing stamp. As is well known,
even our nose, this organ of ours which has grown rigid and frostily motionless
and which, according to certain followers of Darwin, is on the way to even
greater monumentalisation by complete ossification — even our nose, which
in city life to-day is a dispenser of discomforts rather than of joys,
a mere burdensome appendage, stands from the cradle to the grave in the
centre of our countenance as a witness to our race! We must therefore,
in the first place, strongly emphasise the fact that these North Europeans
— the Celts, Teutons and Slavs — were physically different from the other
Indo-Europeans, distinguished from the Southern Europeans in stature, “and
like to themselves only,“ * but we must at once make the first limitation
here, namely, that whoever does not possess these physical characteristics,
no matter though he were born in the very heart of Germania
* During
the last years the conviction is growing among the learned that the Germanic
peoples did not emigrate from Asia to Europe, but were settled in Europe
from earliest times (see Wilser: Stammbaum der arischen Völker,
1889 (Naturw. Wochenschr.); Schrader: Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte,
2. Auflage, 1890; Taylor: The Origin of the Aryans, 1890. Beck:
Der
Urmensch, 1899, &c.).
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speaking a Germanic tongue from childhood,
cannot be regarded as genuinely Germanic. The importance of this physical
motive power is easier to prove in the case of great national phenomena
than in individuals, for it may happen that an especially gifted individual
assimilates an alien culture and then, just because of his different nature,
achieves something new and profitable; on the other hand, the particular
value of race becomes clear as soon as it is a question of collective achievements,
as I can impress at once upon the German reader when I tell him in the
words of a recognised authority that “the privileged great statesmen and
military leaders of the time of the founding of the new empire are mostly
of the purest Germanic descent,“ like the “storm-tried seamen of the North
Sea coast and the keen chamois-hunters of the Alps.“ * These are facts
which should be pondered long and carefully. In their presence the senselessness
of the well-known phrases of natural scientists, Parliamentarians, &c.,
concerning the equality of the human races † becomes so plain that one
is almost ashamed of having listened to them even with one ear. They let
us also see in what definitely conditional sense the well-known remark
of that thorough Teuton, Paul de Lagarde, may claim validity, namely, that
“Germanism does not lie in the blood, but in the mind.“ In the case of
the individual, the mind may indeed rule the blood, and the idea conquer,
but it is not so with the great mass. And in order to measure the importance
of the physical element, as well as its limitation, one should remember
further that that which may be called the Germanic idea is a very delicately
constructed, many-jointed organism. One requires only to look at the Jewish
idea by way of comparison, this infancy of art, the whole cunning of which
lies in binding the human
* Henke:
Der
Typus des germanischen Menschen, p. 33.
† See
pp. 259 ff., 392
note 2, 531.
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soul as tightly as Chinese ladies do
their feet, the only difference being that these ladies can no longer move
about, whereas a half-throttled soul is easier to carry and causes the
busied body less trouble than a fully developed one, laden with its dreams.
In consequence of this it is comparatively easy “to become a Jew,“ difficult,
on the contrary, almost to the verge of impossibility “to become Germanic“;
here as everywhere the power of the idea is supreme; but one should guard
against following a true principle so far as to overlook the connection
of natural phenomena. The richer the mind, the more closely and manifoldly
is it connected with the substructure of a definitely formed blood. It
is self-evident that in the unfolding of human qualities, the further their
development has advanced, the higher must the differentiation in the physical
substratum of our mental life have become, and the more and more delicate
its tissues. Thus we saw in the former chapter how the noble Amorite disappeared
from the world: by fusion with unrelated races his physiognomy was, as
it were, wiped away, his gigantic form shrunk together, his spirit fled:
the simple homo syriacus is, on the other hand, the same to-day
as he was a thousand years ago and the mongrel Semite has to his perpetual
contentment come out of the mixture in the crystallised form of the “Jew.“
The same has happened everywhere. What a magnificent people the Spaniards
were! For centuries the West Goths were strictly forbidden to marry “Romans“
(as the rest of the inhabitants were called), whereby a feeling of race
nobility was developed, which long prevented mixing even at a time when
such a fusion of the population was desired and enforced by the authorities;
but gradually ever deeper and deeper breaches were made in the dam, and
after mingling with Iberians, with the numerous remnants of the Roman chaos
of peoples, with Africans of the most various origin,
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with Arabs and Jews, they lost all that
the Germanic people had brought with them: their military superiority,
their unconditional loyalty (see Calderon!)‚ their high religious
ideal, their capacity for organising, their rich artistic creative power;
we see to-day what remained over, when the Germanic “blood,“ as the physical
substratum, was destroyed. * Let us therefore not be in too great a hurry
to assert that Germanicism does not lie in blood; it does lie in it; not
in the sense that this blood guarantees Germanic sentiment and capacity,
but that it makes these possible.
This limitation is
therefore a very clear one: as a rule that man only is Germanic who is
descended from Germanic ancestors.
I must, however,
immediately call attention to the necessity of the previous extension of
the idea, in order that this limitation may be intelligibly applied. Otherwise
we must arrive at such comical conclusions as even Henke is guilty of in
the pamphlet already quoted, when he says that Luther was not genuinely
Germanic or that the Swabians, who are rightly regarded in the whole world
as the finest representatives of pure Germanicism, are likewise not genuinely
Germanic! A man whose descent and countenance prove him to be the product
of a mixture
* Cf.
Savigny‘s Geschichte des römischen Rechtes im Mittelalter,
i., chaps. iii. v. This keeping of the Germanic race pure for centuries,
in the midst of an inferior population, is seen not only in Spain but also
in Northern Italy, where the Teutons lived under separate laws into the
fourteenth century. See details below and in vol. ii. chap. ix.
When criticising this book, Professor Dr. Paul Barth wrote in the Vierteljahrsschrift
für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 1901, p. 75, “Chamberlain might
have gone further than he does into the influence of Semitic blood in Spain.
By the addition of Semitic blood the Spaniards have become fanatical, they
have carried every idea to its extreme, so that it loses all its reason
and sense: religious devotion even to “cadaver-obedience“ towards their
superiors, politeness which is painful, ceremonious etiquette, honour which
has become the most insane sensitiveness, pride which is ridiculous grandezza,
so that Spanish in popular speech among us has become almost equivalent
to absurd.“
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of genuine German and genuine Slavonic
blood, as Henke demonstrates in Luther‘s case, is genuinely Germanic, the
child of a fortunate union; the same can be said of the Swabians, in whose
case a close union of Celts and Germans has taken place and laid the foundation
of rich poetical powers and remarkable strength of character. I have already
spoken of the great advantages of crossing between nearly related peoples
(chap. iv., pp. 277-283); this
law proved its validity everywhere in the case of the Teutons: among the
French, where the most manifold crossings of Germanic types produced a
superabundance of rich talents, and where even to-day, in consequence of
the existence of many centres of the most diverse pure race cultures, rich
life manifests itself, among the English, the Saxons, the Prussians, &c.
Treitschke calls attention to the fact that the “State-building power of
Germany“ has never lain in the pure German stems. “The true pioneers and
promoters of culture in Germany were in the Middle Ages the South Germans,
who are mixed with Celtic elements; in modern history it is the North Germans
who are mixed with Slavs. * These results are at the same time a proof
of the close relationship of the North Europeans, that human type which
we can with Lapouge and Linnaeus call the homo europaeus, but better
and more simply the Teuton. Now and only now we learn how in reference
to ourselves we should distinguish between crossing and crossing. By crossing
with each other Germanic peoples suffer no harm — rather the reverse; but
when they cross with aliens they gradually deteriorate.
FAIR
HAIR
But this limitation,
which is so clear in the general definition, is unfortunately very difficult
to apply in individual cases. For it will be asked: By what physical
* Politik
i. 279.
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characteristics can one recognise the
Teuton? Is, for example, fairness really a characteristic feature of all
Germanic peoples? This seems to form a fundamental dogma, not only for
the old historians, but also for the most modern anthropologists, and yet
certain facts make me doubt it very much. In the first place there is the
fact, which naturally is ignored by Virchow and his colleagues, blinded
as they are by political prejudice; I mean the prevalence of dark colour
among the members of the most genuine old Germanic nobility. In England
this is quite striking. Tall, spare-built figures, long skulls, long countenances,
the well-known Moltke type with the large nose and the clean-cut profile
(which Henke too considers characteristically “pure Germanic“), genealogies
which go back to the Norman period, in short, beyond doubt genuine Teutons
in physique and history — but black hair. Eckermann was struck by the brown
eyes of Wellington. * In Germany I have noted the same in various families
of old hereditary nobility. Moreover it has appeared to me remarkable that
poets from the extreme north of Germany pretty frequently speak of dark
hair as a characteristic feature not only of the nobility but also of the
people; thus, for example, in Theodor Storm‘s story, Hans und Heinz
Kirch, those genuine defiant Germanic seamen have both “dark brown
hair,“ and of another daring figure, Hasselfritz, the poet says that he
has brown eyes and brown hair; those genuine Teutons therefore resemble
Achilles with his “brown hair.“ How often, too, in the folksongs do “dark
brown eyes“ occur! Burns, too, the Scottish peasant-poet, loves the “nut-brown
maidens“ of his home. † Once while on a voyage in Norway north of the 70th
degree I was driven out of my course to a group of islands rarely visited
by strangers, and to my astonishment
* Gespräche
mit Goethe, 16.2.1826.
† Goethe,
too, makes “black hair“ and “black eyes“ heroic attributes.
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I found among the fair fishing population
individuals who corresponded exactly to that type: remarkably finely built
men with noble, imposing Viking physiognomy, and in addition almost raven-black
hair. Later I met this type in the south-east of Europe, in the German
colonies of Slavonia, which, settled there for centuries, have kept their
German race stainlessly pure amid the Slavs: the figure, the Moltke type
(or, as the English say, the Wellington type), and the black hair distinguish
these people from their neighbours, who are chiefly fair and have more
or less expressionless countenances. However, we do not require to go so
far; we find this type almost the predominant one in German Tyrol, whose
inhabitants Henke says “represent the true type of the primeval Teuton.“
The same scholar explains their having, for the most part, dark and often
black hair by the fact that the “sun has burned them black,“ and is of
opinion that colour is “the quality which changes most easily with time.“
But Virchow‘s researches had long ago proved the opposite (see p.
385)
and we might answer this assertion with a question, Why was David fair?
Why did the Jews take from the Amorites a certain tendency to auburn hair
and nothing more? What sun has darkened the hair of the English nobility
and of the Norwegian in the far north, where the sun is not seen for months?
No, certainly we have here to deal with other conditions, which must first
be cleared up physiologically, for, so far as I am aware, it has not yet
been done. * Just as certain red flowers at certain places or under the
influence of conditions which are hidden from human observation grow up
blue in colour (sometimes red and blue on the same stem), and black animal
species sometimes produce white varieties, so it is not unthinkable that
the colour of the hair in a certain
* At
least I can find nothing on this point either in the text-books of physiology
or in such special works as Waldeyer‘s.
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human type is as a rule light, but may
under certain conditions incline to the opposite extreme of the colour
scale. What is decisive in this case is that we find this dark hair in
individuals whose genuine Germanic origin is established beyond doubt,
not only in the wider but also in the narrower Tacitean sense of the word,
and moreover confirmed by their whole outward and inner personality. However,
as soon as we look around, we see this very type — tall, spare-built, long-skulled,
with Moltke physiognomy, and a “Germanic nature“ — on the southern slopes
of the Maritime Alps, for example; we need only go from Cannes and Nice,
peopled with the descendants of the chaos, two hours northwards to more
remote parts of the mountains: here, too, one finds the black hair. Are
they Celts? Are they Goths? Are they Langobardians? I do not know: they
are at any rate brothers of the races just named. In the mountains of Northern
Italy one finds them also, alternating with the small, round-skulled un-Aryan
homo
alpinus. Regarding the Celts, Virchow has already said that he is “not
disinclined to suppose that the original Celtic population was not fair-Aryan
but brown-Aryan,“ and armed with this daring “inclination to suppose“ he
declares all dark hair to be a sign of an admixture of Celtic blood. But
the ancients describe the original Celts as strikingly fair and “red-haired,“
and we can still see them with our own eyes, in Scotland and Wales; this
hypothesis stands therefore on but one leg, that the Celts, besides being
fair, may also be brown — or rather dark-haired, which is not quite the
same thing — and among the pure Celts we can find proofs enough of this.
We have therefore here exactly the same phenomenon as in the case of the
Germanic peoples. Of the Slavs I can only say one thing, that Virchow declares
them to have been “originally fair.“ But not only were they fair, they
still are so; we only
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need to let a Bosnian regiment file
past to be convinced of it. The map showing the result of Virchow‘s investigations
in the case of school children proves that the whole of Posen, as well
as Silesia east of the Elbe, shows the same small percentage of dark people
(10-15 per cent.) as the countries that lie farther to the west; the greatest
percentage of brown people is found in districts which never a Slav entered,
namely, Switzerland, Alsace, and the old German Salzkammergut. Whether
or not there are genuine Slavs in whom black hair occurs, I do not know.
From these facts
one can draw the irrefutable conclusion that fair hair cannot be arbitrarily
assigned to the Teuton, as is so often done; the most genuine sons of this
race may be black-haired. The presence of fair hair will certainly always
allow us to conjecture Germanic blood (in the wide sense of the term),
even though it be a very distant admixture, but the absence of light colour
does not justify the opposite conclusion. One must therefore be careful
in the application of this limitation; the hair alone is not a sufficient
criterion, the other physical characteristics must also be taken into consideration.
THE
SHAPE OF THE SKULL
This brings us to
the further, equally difficult question: that of the form of skull. Here
it appears as if a boundary could and must be drawn. For, however complex
matters are to-day, in old times they were very simple: the old Germanic
peoples of Tacitus, as well as the Slavs, were for the most part distinctly
long-skulled; the long skull and the long face beneath it are such unmistakable
marks of race that one may well ask whether he who does not possess them
may be regarded as belonging to the race. In the Germanic graves of the
time of the Migrations one finds half of the skulls long, that is, with
a
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breadth which stands to the length in
the relation of 75 (or less) to 100, and with few exceptions the rest of
the skulls come near to this artificially chosen proportion; real round
skulls (see p. 374) hardly
occur at all. In the old Slavonic graves the proportion is still more in
favour of the extremely long skulls. Little is known regarding the old
Celts; but the tendency to long skulls among the Gaels of North Scotland
and the Cymbrians of Wales also lends support to the same supposition in
their case. * Since then this has changed very much, at least in many countries.
It is not so up in the north, in Scandinavia, in Northern Germany (excluding
the towns) and in England; on the contrary, the long skulls seem more prevalent
in Denmark than among the Germanic peoples of the time of the Migrations:
there there are 60 long skulls to the hundred, only six genuine and short
ones. But the Slavs of Russia show (according to Kollman) scarcely three
long skulls to the hundred, but 72 short skulls and the remainder incline
to be short. And the old Bavarians! Johannes Ranke found by measuring the
skulls of 1000 living individuals that only one in a hundred possessed
the old Germanic skull, while 95 had genuine short skulls! Measurements
of the Hellenic skulls of the Classical age and of to-day have produced
similar results, but even in the case of the former the middle form of
head was predominant; yet a third of them had long skulls, and in their
graves fewer genuine short skulls are found than in Germanic graves; to-day,
however, more than half are short skulls. That in these phenomena we see
the effects of the infiltration of an Un-Germanic race, a race which does
not belong at all to the Indo-European circle, but to the raceless chaos,
can scarcely be doubted. Much trouble has been taken to sweep aside this
conclusion. For instance, Kollmann (Professor in Basle) has sought to emphasise
the countenance rather than the skull and to
* Cf.
Ranke: Der Mensch ii. 298.
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ENTRANCE
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make the distinction one between long
faces and short ones; * Johannes Ranke took up the idea and constructed
as the specifically Germanic type a long face under a short skull; Henke
again would fain believe that there has here been a gradual development,
by which the length of the front of the head has increased rather than
decreased, while the back has become shorter and shorter; that in consequence
the long skull is still present in the case of the Germanic peoples with
short skulls, only that it is concealed, &c. But however worthy of
consideration all these views may be, the fact still remains that the Germanic
peoples, wherever they have not crossed with others or only to a small
extent, as in the north, are long-skulled and fair (or, it may be, dark)
while this character disappears, first, the nearer one comes to the Alps,
secondly, wherever it has been historically proved that there was much
crossing with races from the south or with degenerate Celto-Germanic or
Slavo-Germanic races.
Naturally the crossings
known to history had the quickest influence (Italy, Spain, Southern France,
&c., are well-known examples); but besides these mixtures — and where
they did not occur this was the sole influence — there was another factor
at work, namely, the existence of one or perhaps several prehistoric races,
who never (or only indefinitely) appeared in history as races, and who,
standing on a lower stage of civilisation, were at an early time conquered
and assimilated by the various branches of the Indo-Germanic peoples. This,
perhaps, contributes even at the present day to the process of ungermanising.
For example, Wilhelm von Humboldt supposed that formerly the Iberians were
spread over Europe, and this view has lately been championed by Hommel
and others. Even though only a small portion saved itself by fleeing to
the extreme west, the home of
* Correspondenzblatt
der deutschen anthropologischen Gesellschaft, 1883, No. II.
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the Basques to-day, and though the majority
of the men died perhaps by the sword of the enemy, yet one seldom finds
complete extinction of the poor and helpless; they are kept as slaves,
and the women become the property of the victors. In the Alps the same
or perhaps a different race, but at any rate an Un-Germanic and non-Indo-European
one had its abode, or at least fled thither as to a last place of security;
one is forced to this supposition by the fact that to-day the Alps are
the centre of the Un-Germanic, short-skulled, dark type, and that from
here they radiate to north and south; the Rhaetian race, which anthropology
has shown to be distinct, is perhaps a fairly genuine remnant of those
former lake-dwellers and perhaps identical with Virchow‘s pre-Celts. In
the wide districts of Eastern Europe we must also presuppose a special,
probably Mongoloid race, to account for the specific deformation which
so rapidly transforms the majority of the Germanic Slavs into inferior
“Slavonics.“ How could we then bring ourselves to regard those Europeans
who are descended from this altogether Un-Germanic type as “Germanic,“
simply because they speak an Indo-European language and have assimilated
Indo-European culture? I consider it, on the contrary, a most important
duty to make a clear distinction here, if we wish to understand past and
present history. It is by distinguishing between peoples that we come to
recognise the ideas in their special individuality. This is all the more
necessary, as we have among us men who are half, a quarter, or perhaps
a sixth Germanic, &c., and in consequence we have a mass of ideas and
ways of thinking which are Germanic to the extent of a half, a fourth,
a sixth, &c., or on the other hand are directly Anti-Germanic. And
only by practice in distinguishing between the pure Germanic and the absolutely
Un-Germanic can we find our way out of the confusion of this growing chaos.
Chaos is everywhere the most dangerous enemy. In
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facing it thought must develop into
action; towards this, clearness of conception is the first necessary step;
and in the sphere in which we are at present, clearness consists in the
recognition that Germanicism to-day contains a large number of Un-Germanic
elements, and in the endeavour to separate what is pure from that which
contains alien, and in no sense Germanic, ingredients.
Yet, justifiable
as it may be to emphasise anatomical research, I am afraid that anatomy
alone will not suffice here; on the contrary, it is just on this point
that science is at present like a helpless barque tossing to and fro on
a troubled sea; whoever is led away by its illusions is doomed sooner or
later to sink. For that which I have just demonstrated concerning the various
races who survived in Europe from pre-Aryan times, the Iberians, Rhaetians,
&c., although indeed essentially correct, represents only the most
elementary simplification of the innumerable hypotheses which, at the present
moment, are afloat in the air, and every day the matter becomes more complicated.
Thus — to give the layman only one example — long and careful researches
have led to the conclusion that in Scotland, in the earliest stone age,
there existed a long-skulled race, but that in the stone age there appeared
another exceedingly broad-headed race, which after fusion with the former
and with mixed forms was typical of the bronze age; all this took place
in the remote past, long before the arrival of the Celts; when these appeared
as the vanguard of the Germanic peoples, it can scarcely be doubted that
they underwent changes through contact with the race settled there before
them, since even to-day, after so many and so strong waves of immigration
have swept over that land, we find in many individuals characteristics
which, an authority tells us, point back directly and unmistakably to that
prehistoric race of the bronze age which sprang
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from the mixing of long skulls and short
ones! * Now how can we estimate anatomically the craniological influence
of such long-settled races upon the Germanic peoples, if they themselves
already possessed long skulls, short skulls, and skulls that are between
the two? And why is it that to-day only the short skulls tend to increase?
But here again come other men of science who sing a different song: some
authorities hold that we have no strong reason for believing in the immigration
of the Indo-European. It is their opinion that he was already there in
the stone age, was even then distinguished by his long skull from another
short-skulled race, and struggled with it for the mastery; that this Long-skull
of the stone age was no other than the Germanic individual! Virchow‘s view,
based upon anatomical material, is, that even the oldest Troglodytes of
Europe might have been of Aryan descent, at least that no one could prove
the contrary. † But with the younger school such cautious and hesitating
judgments find no favour; under the pretext of strictly scientific simplification
they wave aloft the standard of the chaos and degrade the whole history
of humanity as lies. These modern theories have been most clearly expressed
by Professor Kollmann. He reduces all the peoples living in Europe to four
types: long skulls with long faces, long skulls with short faces, short
skulls with short faces, and short skulls with long faces; these four races
he supposes to have lived with and beside each other for centuries and
to do so still. And now comes the devil‘s hoof: all that history teaches
us about the Migrations, nationalities, mental differences, great creative
works of art, which were executed solely by single national individualities
and at best merely taken over by others,
* Sir
William Turner: Early Man in Scotland. Speech delivered before the
Royal Institution in London on January 13, 1898.
† Ranke:
Der
Mensch ii. 578.
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and about the war still waged among
us between those elements that advance and those that retard culture...
all this is put aside as rubbish and we are called upon to believe the
following dogma: “The development of culture is manifestly the common achievement
of all these types. All European races, so far as we have penetrated into
the secret of the nature of race, are equally gifted for every task of
culture.“ * Equally gifted? One can scarcely believe one‘s eyes! “Equally
gifted“ for “every“ task! I shall have to return to this point soon; I
did not wish to leave the question of craniometry without having pointed
out, first, how difficult it is here, too, to separate the Germanic from
the non-Germanic by formulas, by the compass and the ruler; secondly, upon
what a dangerous path these worthies take us, when they suddenly interrupt
their discussion of “chameprosopic, platyrrhinous, mesoconchic, prognathic,
proophryocephalous, ooidic, brachyklitometopic, hypsistegobregmatic Dolichocephali“
in order to link on to it general remarks about history and culture. The
layman understands little or nothing of the remainder; he wades hopelessly
about in this barbaric jargon of neoscholastic natural science; only the
one point is printed in all the newspapers of Europe as the visible result
of such a congress: that the most learned gentlemen in Europe have solemnly
protocolled the fact that all the races bear an equal share in the development
of culture; there never have been Greeks, Romans, Germanic peoples, Jews,
but from time immemorial there have lived peacefully side by side or, it
may be, devouring each other, leptoprosopic Dolichocephali, chameprosopic
Dolichocephali, leptoprosopic Brachycephali and chameprosopic Brachycephali,
“all working unitedly at the furtherance of culture“ (sic!). It
provokes a smile! But crimes
* Allgemeine
Versammlung der deutschen anthropologischen Gesellschaft, 1892.
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against history are really too serious
to be punished merely by being laughed at; the sound common sense of all
intelligent men must step vigorously in and put a stop to this: we must
say to these worthies, “Cobbler, stick to your last!“ *
How utterly unscientific
such a proceeding as that of Kollmann must be is quite manifest. Far-reaching
simplification is a law of artistic creating, but not a law of nature;
the characteristic thing here is rather endless complexity. What should
we say of a botanist who wished to class plants in families according to
the length and breadth of their leaves, or according to any other one characteristic?
Kollmann‘s method is a retrograde step as compared with old Theophrastus.
As long as men attempted artificial classifications, the systematic knowledge
of the plant world did not advance one step; but then came men of genius
of the nature of Ray, Jussieu, De Candolle, who by observation united to
creative intuition established the chief families of plants and only then
discovered the characteristics — mostly very concealed ones — which enabled
us to demonstrate the relationship anatomically as well. The same is true
of the animal world. All other procedure is absolutely artificial and consequently
mere fooling. And hence in the case of man we cannot, as Kollmann does,
build up at the anatomist‘s bidding a system into which facts then have
to be fitted as well as may be; we must ascertain precisely what groups
actually exist as individualised, morally and intellectually distinguishable
races, and then see whether there are any anatomical characteristics which
will aid us in classification.
* Cf.
the splendid satire by M. Buchner on modern craniometry in the supplement
to the Munich Allgemeine Zeitung, 1899, No. 282-284. — In the meantime
J. Deniker has proposed a new division of all Europeans into six chief
and four subordinate races. Thus the picture changes every year!
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RATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY
This digression into
the sphere of anatomical science has had the one good result of revealing
to us how little sure help and how little useful or practical instruction
we may expect from that source. We are either walking upon sandy and shifting
ground or in a quagmire, where we sink at the first step and stick fast,
or we must spring from point to point on the exceedingly sharp edges of
dogma and at any moment fall into the abyss. The digression has moreover
positive advantages: it enriches the material of our knowledge and teaches
us to see more clearly. Both history and daily observation teach us that
the races are not equally gifted, any more than individuals are; and anthropology
shows us further (in spite of Professor Kollmann) that in the case of races
which have achieved certain results, a definite physical conformation predominates.
The mistake lies in operating with haphazard numbers of objects of comparison
and in measuring according to arbitrarily chosen relations. Thus, for example,
it is considered a fixed rule that as soon as the breadth of a skull bears
the relation of 75:100 or less, then it is “dolichocephalous,“ with 76
or even 75¼ it is “mesocephalous“ and from 80 onwards “brachycephalous.“
Who is the authority? Why should there be a special magic in the number
75? Any other magic than that of my own convenience and laziness? I understand
quite well that we cannot get on in daily practice without termini technici
and limitations, but what I cannot understand is that they should be taken
for anything but arbitrary limits and arbitrary words. *
* Very
remarkable in this connection are the researches of Dr. G. Walcher, which
show that the position of the head of the new-born child exercises a definite
influence upon the shape of the skull. In the case of twins from one embryo
by this means the one was developed into a distinct dolichocephalous, the
other to a brachycephalous child. (See Zentralblatt für Gynäkologie,
1905, No. 7.)
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This applies to the high and low countenances
just as well as to the long and short skulls; everywhere it is a question
of relations which merge by degrees into each other. But it is the nature
of life to be plastically mutable; the living principle of creation is
fundamentally different from the crystalline principle in this, that it
does not shape according to unchangeable relations of numbers but that
it in a way freely creates, while observing the harmony of parts and retaining
the fundamental scheme which is given by the nature of the thing itself.
No two individuals are like each other. To survey the physical structure
of a race at any given moment, I should require to have before me all the
representatives of that race and seek out in this crowd the uniform and
uniting idea, the predominant specific tendency of physical conformation,
which is peculiar to this race as race; I should see it with my eyes. If
I had had, say at the time of Tacitus, all the Germanic peoples before
my eyes: the still unmixed Celts, the Teutons and the Germanic Slavs, I
should certainly have seen a harmonious whole, in which a certain law of
structure predominated, and round it the most manifold and varying conformations
would have grouped themselves. Probably there would not have been a single
individual who united in himself all the specific characteristics of this
plastic idea of race (in the way in which it would have appeared to my
thinking brain) in the highest potentiality and in perfect harmony: the
great radiant heavenly eyes, the golden hair, the gigantic stature, the
symmetrical muscular development, the lengthened skull (which an ever-active
brain, tortured by longing, had changed from the round lines of animal
contentedness and extended towards the front), the lofty countenance, required
by an elevated spiritual life as the seat of its expression — certainly
no single individual would have possessed all these features. Were one
feature perfect the other would be merely
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indicated. Here and there, too, nature,
which is ever experimenting and never repeating itself, would have broken
the law of harmony, an overgrown giant would swing his club over dull eyes,
under too long a skull would be seen a face proportionately too short,
glorious eyes would beam from beneath a fine lofty forehead, but in comparison,
the body would be strikingly small, &c. &c., ad infinitum.
In other groups again secret laws of the correlation of growth must have
manifested themselves; here, for example, families with black hair, but
at the same time with particularly large daring aquiline noses and more
slender build, there red hair with remarkably white freckled skin and countenance
somewhat broader in the upper part... for the slightest change in the conformation
causes other changes. Still more numerous must those figures have been
from which in their average commonplaceness no specific law of structure
could have been derived, if they had not appeared as portions of a large
whole, in which their place was definitely fixed, so that we could see
from the way in which they fitted in that organically they did belong to
it. Darwin himself, who worked all his life with compass, ruler and weighing
machine, is always in his studies on artificial breeding calling attention
to the fact that the eye of the born and experienced breeder discovers
things of which figures give not the slightest confirmation, and which
the breeder himself can hardly ever express in words; he notices that this
and that distinguishes the one organism from the other, and makes his selection
for breeding accordingly; this is an intuition born of ceaseless observation.
This power of observation we can acquire only by practice; the survey of
the Germanic peoples in the time of Tacitus would have served our purpose.
We should certainly not have found that in the case of all these men the
breadth of the head bore to the length the proportion of 75:100; nature
knows
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no such limitations; in the unlimited
complexity of all thinkable intermediate forms, as well as of forms of
greater development towards this or that extreme, we should probably here
and there have encountered distinct brachycephali; discoveries in graves
make it probable, and why should the plasticity of creative powers not
have brought it about? We should, moreover, not have seen nothing but “giants“
and be able to say that he who did not exceed six feet high was not Germanic:
on the other hand, we might quite well have made the seemingly paradoxical
statement, that the small men of this group are tall, for they belong to
a tall race, and for the same reason those short skulls are long; if we
look more closely we shall soon see that outwardly and inwardly they have
specific characteristics of the Germanic people. The hieroglyphs of nature‘s
language are in fact not so logically mathematical, so mechanically explicable
as many an investigator likes to fancy. Life is needed to understand life.
And here a fact occurs to me which I have received from various sources,
viz., that very small children, especially girls, frequently have quite
a marked instinct for race. It frequently happens that children who have
no conception of what “Jew“ means, or that there is any such thing in the
world, begin to cry as soon as a genuine Jew or Jewess comes near them!
The learned can frequently not tell a Jew from a non-Jew; the child that
scarcely knows how to speak notices the difference. Is not that something?
To me it seems worth as much as a whole anthropological congress or at
least a whole speech of Professor Kollmann. There is still something in
the world besides compass and yard-measure. Where the learned fails with
his artificial constructions, one single unbiased glance can illuminate
the truth like a sunbeam.
-
Und was kein Verstand der Verständigen
sieht,
-
Das übet in Einfalt ein kindlich Gemüt.
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We shall not interfere
with the craniologists any longer than is necessary; however, we shall
not despise the material collected by their diligence: it will be a valuable
addition to our knowledge of what is Germanic and an earnest warning in
regard to the intrusion amongst us of that which is non-Germanic.
The very necessary
limitation of the name “Germanic“ to those who are really Teutons or at
least have much Germanic blood in their veins can therefore never be carried
out with mathematical exactness, but will always require, as it were, the
eye of the breeder and the eye of the child. Much knowledge must, of course,
be useful, but seeing and feeling is still more indispensable. And with
this we transfer our investigation into the necessary limitation of the
word “Germanic“ to the mental element, in which history teaches us on every
hand to separate the Germanic from the non-Germanic, and at the same time
thereby to recognise the physical element and value it at its true worth.
SCIENCE
OF PHYSIOGNOMY
The science of physiognomy,
which is at once spirit and body, mirror of the soul and anatomical “factum,“
next claims our attention. Look, for example, at the countenance of Dante
Alighieri; we shall learn as much from it as from his poems. * That is
a characteristically
* That
Dante is Germanic and not a son of the chaos becomes in my opinion so clear
from his personality and his work that proof of it is absolutely superfluous.
But it is nevertheless interesting to know that the name Alighieri is Gothic,
a corruption of Aldiger; it belongs to those German proper names, at the
basis of which lies the word “ger“ = spear, as in Gerhard, Gertrude, &c.
(a fact which in reference to Shake-speare might have given the visionaries
much to think about!). This name came into the family through Dante‘s grandmother
on the father‘s side, a Goth from Ferrara, whose name was Aldigiero. With
regard to the origin of the paternal grandfather and of the poet‘s mother
only the one fact to-day is known, that the attempt to derive him from
Roman families is a pure invention of the Italian biographers who thought
it more illustrious to belong to Rome than to Germania;
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Germanic countenance! Not a feature
in it reminds us of any Hellenic or Roman type, much less of any of the
Asiatic or African physiognomies which the Pyramids have faithfully preserved.
A new being has entered into the history of the world! Nature in the fulness
of her power has produced a new soul: look at it, here she reflects herself
in a countenance such as never was seen before! “Above the mental hurricane
expressed in the countenance rose nobly the peaceful brow arching like
a marble dome.“ * Yes, yes, Balzac is right. Hurricane and marble dome!
If he had only told us that Dante was a leptoprosopic Dolichocephalous,
we should not have been much wiser. At
DANTE
any rate we shall never find a second
Dante, but a walk through the collection of busts in the Berlin Museum
will convince us how firmly established this type was in Northern Italy,
which had been thoroughly germanised by Goths, Langobards and Franks.
but since the grandfather
was a warrior, knighted by the Emperor Conrad, and Dante himself tells
us that he belongs to the petty nobility, then his descent from pure Germanic
parentage is as good as proven (cf. Franz Xaver Kraus: Dante,
Berlin, 1897, pp. 21-25). Even to the beginning of the fifteenth century
many Italians are described in old documents as Alemanni, Langobardi, &c.,
ex
alamanorum genere, egibus vivens Langobardorum, &c. (and that though
the majority of them had adopted Roman law, whereby the documentary evidence
of their descent usually disappeared); so thoroughly saturated with Germanic
blood (and that too its sole creative element) was that people which the
so-called “Roman Culture“ to-day wishes to regard as its source (see
Savigny: Geschichte des römischen Rechtes im Mittelalter, i.,
chap. iii.).
* Balzac:
Les
Proscrits.
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To this day we see the closest unmistakable
physiognomical relationship in the German Tyrolese mentioned above, as
also in Norway, and individual kindred features wherever genuine Teutons
are to be found. However, if we look at the greatest Germanic men, we shall
not find one but numerous physiognomic conformations; the dazing powerfully
curved nose predominates; we find,
LUTHER
however, all thinkable combinations,
even to that powerful head which in every particular is the very opposite
of Dante‘s and by this very fact betrays the intimate relationship: I mean
the head of Martin Luther. Here the hurricane, of which Balzac spoke, embraces
forehead, eyes and nose, no marble dome is arched above it; but this flaming
volcano of energy and thoughtfulness rests upon mouth and chin as upon
a rock of granite. Even the smallest feature of the powerful face testifies
to energy and thirst for achievement; when one looks at this countenance
the words of Dante rise to one‘s memory:
-
Colà dove si puote
-
Ciò che si vuole.
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This man can do what he wills and his
whole will is directed to great deeds: in this head there is no studying
for mere learning‘s sake, but to find out truth, truth for life; the man
does not sing to charm the ear, but because song elevates and strengthens
the heart; he could not, like Dante, have lived proudly apart and unknown,
trusting his fame to future generations — what does such a countenance
care for fame? “Love is the pulse-beat of our life,“ he said. And where
love is strong, there too there is strong hatred. It is absolutely false
to say, as Henke does, that such a countenance represents the North German
Slavonic type. * So mighty a personality towers high above such specifications;
it shows us the outward expression of one of the astonishingly rich possibilities
of development of the Germanic spirit in its highest and richest form.
Luther‘s countenance, like Dante‘s, belongs to all Germanic peoples. One
finds this type in England, where no Slav ever made his abode; one meets
it also among the most active politicians of France. One can picture to
oneself this man fifteen hundred years ago, on horseback, swinging his
battle-axe to protect his beloved northern home, and then again at his
own fireside with his children crowding round him, or at the banquet of
the men, draining the horn of mead to the last drop and singing heroic
songs in praise of his ancestors. Dante and Luther are the extremes of
the rich physiognomical scale of great Germanic men. As Tacitus said: they
resemble themselves alone. But every attempt to localise the type, to the
north or to the south, to the Celtic west or the Slavonic east, is manifestly
futile, futile at least when one looks especially at the more important
and therefore more characteristic men, and disregards the chance details
of habit, especially of the manner of wearing the beard.
* As
above, p. 20. What is here said about Luther has since been verified by
the strictly anthropological researches of Dr. Ludwig Woltmann; see
the Politisch-anthropologische Revue, 1905, p. 683 f.
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Goethe, for example, might be the child
of any Germanic stem judging by the cast of his face, as might also Johann
Sebastian Bach and Immanuel Kant.
FREEDOM
AND LOYALTY
Let us attempt a glance
into the depths of the soul. What are the specific intellectual and moral
characteristics of this Germanic race? Certain anthropologists would fain
teach us that all races are equally gifted; we point to history and answer:
that is a lie! The races of mankind are markedly different in the nature
and also in the extent of their gifts, and the Germanic races belong to
the most highly gifted group, the group usually termed Aryan. Is this human
family united and uniform by bonds of blood? Do these stems really all
spring from the same root? I do not know and I do not much care; no affinity
binds more closely than elective affinity, and in this sense the Indo-European
Aryans certainly form a family. In his Politics Aristotle writes
(i. 5): “If there were men who in physical stature alone were so pre-eminent
as the representatives of the Gods, then every one would admit that other
men by right must be subject unto them. If this, however, is true in reference
to the body, then there is still greater justification for distinguishing
between pre-eminent and commonplace souls.“ Physically and mentally the
Aryans are pre-eminent among all peoples; for that reason they are by right,
as the Stagirite expresses it, the lords of the world. Aristotle puts the
matter still more concisely when he says, “Some men are by nature free,
others slaves“; this perfectly expresses the moral aspect. For freedom
is by no means an abstract thing, to which every human being has fundamentally
a claim; a right to freedom must evidently depend upon capacity for it,
and this again presupposes
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physical and intellectual power. One
may make the assertion, that even the mere conception of freedom is quite
unknown to most men. Do we not see the homo syriacus develop just
as well and as happily in the position of slave as of master? Do the Chinese
not show us another example of the same nature? Do not all historians tell
us that the Semites and half-Semites, in spite of their great intelligence,
never succeeded in founding a State that lasted, and that because every
one always endeavoured to grasp all power for himself, thus showing that
their capabilities were limited to despotism and anarchy, the two opposites
of freedom? * And here we see at once what great gifts a man must have
in order that one may say of him, he is “by nature free,“ for the first
condition of this is the power of creating. Only a State-building race
can be free; the gifts which make the individual an artist and philosopher
are essentially the same as those which, spread through the whole mass
as instinct, found States and give to the individual that which hitherto
had remained unknown to all nature: the idea of freedom. As soon as we
understand this, the near affinity of the Germanic peoples to the Greeks
and Romans strikes us, and at the same time we recognise what separates
them. In the case of the Greeks the individualistic creative character
predominates, even in the forming of constitutions; in the case of the
Romans it is communistic legislation and military authority that predominate;
the Germanic races, on the other hand, have individually and collectively
perhaps less creative power, but they possess a harmony of qualities, maintaining
the balance between the instinct of individual freedom, which finds its
highest expression in creative art, † and the instinct of public freedom
which creates the State; and in this way they prove themselves to be the
equals of their great predecessors. Art more perfect in its creations,
* Cf.
p. 404.
† See
pp. 14, 25,
33,
&c.
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so far as form is concerned, there may
have been, but no art has ever been more powerful in its creations than
that which includes the whole range of things human between the winged
pen of Shakespeare and the etching-tool of Albrecht Dürer, and which
in its own special language — music — penetrates deeper into the heart
than any previous attempt to create immortality out of that which is mortal
— to transform matter into spirit. And in the meantime the European States,
founded by Germanic peoples, in spite of their, so to speak, improvised,
always provisional and changeable character — or rather perhaps thanks
to this character — proved themselves to be the most enduring as well as
the most powerful in the world. In spite of all storms of war, in spite
of the deceptions of that ancestral enemy, the chaos of peoples, which
carried its poison into the very heart of our nation, Freedom and its correlative,
the State, remained, through all the ages the creating and saving ideal,
even though the balance between the two often seemed to be upset: we recognise
that more clearly to-day than ever.
In order that this
might be so, that fundamental and common “Aryan“ capacity of free creative
power had to be supplemented by another quality, the incomparable and altogether
peculiar Germanic loyalty (Treue). If that intellectual and physical
development which leads to the idea of freedom and which produces on the
one hand art, philosophy, science, on the other constitutions (as well
as all the phenomena of culture which this word implies), is common to
the Hellenes and Romans as well as to the Germanic peoples, so also is
the extravagant conception of loyalty a specific characteristic of the
Teuton. As the venerable Johann Fischart sings:
-
Standhaft und treu, und treu und standhaft,
-
Die machen ein recht teutsch Verwandtschaft!
Julius Caesar at once recognised not only
the military prowess but also the unexampled loyalty of the Teutons
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and hired from among them as many cavalrymen
as he could possibly get. In the battle of Pharsalus, which was so decisive
for the history of the world, they fought for him; the Romanised Gauls
had abandoned their commander in the hour of need, the Germanic troops
proved themselves as faithful as they were brave. This loyalty to a master
chosen of their own free will is the most prominent feature in the Germanic
character; from it we can tell whether pure Germanic blood flows in the
veins or not. The German mercenary troops have often been made the object
of ridicule, but it is in them that the genuine costly metal of this race
reveals itself. The very first autocratic Emperor, Augustus, formed his
personal bodyguard of Teutons; where else could he have found unconditional
loyalty? During the whole time that the Roman Empire in the east and the
west lasted, this same post of honour was filled by the same people, but
they were always brought from farther and farther north, because with the
so-called “Latin culture“ the plague of disloyalty had crept more deeply
into the country; finally, a thousand years after Augustus, we find Anglo-Saxons
and Normans in this post, standing on guard around the throne of Byzantium.
Hapless Germanic Lifeguardsman! Of the political principles, which forcibly
held together the chaotic world in a semblance of order, he understood
just as little as he did of the quarrels concerning the nature of the Trinity,
which cost him many a drop of blood: but one thing he understood: to be
loyal to the master he had himself chosen. When in the time of Nero the
Frisian delegates left the back seats which had been assigned to them in
the Circus and proudly sat down on the front benches of the senators among
the richly adorned foreign delegates, what was it that gave these poor
men, who came to Rome to beg for land to cultivate, such a bold spirit
of independence? Of what alone could they boast?
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“That no one in the world surpassed
the Teuton in loyalty.“ * Karl Lamprecht has written so beautifully about
this great fundamental characteristic of loyalty in its historical significance
that I should reproach myself if I did not quote him here. He has just
spoken of the “retainers“ who in the old German State pledge themselves
to their chief to be true unto death and prove so, and then he adds: “In
the formation of this body of retainers we see one of the most magnificent
features of the specifically Germanic view of life, the feature of loyalty.
Not understood by the Roman but indispensable to the Teuton, the need of
loyalty existed even at that time, that ever-recurring German need of closest
personal attachment, of complete devotion to each other, perfect community
of hopes, efforts and destinies. Loyalty never was to our ancestors a special
virtue, it was the breath of life of everything good and great; upon it
rested the feudal State of the Early and the co-operative system of the
Later Middle Ages, and who could conceive the military monarchy of the
present day without loyalty?... Not only were songs sung about loyalty,
men lived in it. The retinue of the King of the Franks, the courtiers of
the great Karolingians, the civil and military ministers of our mediaeval
Emperors, the officials of the centres of administration under our Princes
since the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries are merely new forms of
the old Germanic conception. For the wonderful vitality of such institutions
consisted in this, that they were not rooted in changing political or even
moral conditions, but in the primary source of Germanicism itself, the
need of loyalty.“ †
However true and
beautiful every word that Lamprecht has here written, I do not think that
he has made quite clear the “primary source.“ Loyalty, though distinguish-
* Tacitus:
Annals
xiii. 54.
† Lamprecht:
Deut.
Gesch., 2nd ed. i. 136.
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ing the Teutons from mongrel races,
is not altogether a specific Germanic trait. One finds it in almost all
purely bred races, nowhere more than among the negroes, for example, and
— I would ask — what man could be more faithful than the noble dog? No,
in order to reveal that “primary source of Germanicism,“ we must show what
is the nature of this Germanic loyalty, and we can only succeed in doing
so if we have grasped the fact that freedom is the intellectual basis of
the whole Germanic nature. For the characteristic feature of this loyalty
is its free self-determination. The human character resembles the nature
of God as the theologians represent it: complex and yet indiscernible,
an inseparable unity. This loyalty and this freedom do not grow the one
out of the other, they are two manifestations of the same character which
reveals itself to us on one occasion more from the intellectual on another
more from the moral side. The negro and the dog serve their masters, whoever
they maybe: that is the morality of the weak, or, as Aristotle says, of
the man who is born to be a slave; the Teuton chooses his master, and his
loyalty is therefore loyalty to himself: that is the morality of the man
who is born free. But loyalty as displayed by the Teuton was unexampled.
The disloyalty of the extravagantly gifted proclaimer of poetical and political
freedom, i.e., of the Hellene, was proverbial from time immemorial;
the Roman was loyal only in the defence of his own, German loyalty remained,
Lamprecht says, “incomprehensible to him“; here, as everywhere in the sphere
of morals, we see an affinity with the Indo-Aryans; but these latter people
so markedly lacked the artistic sense which urges men on to adventure and
to the establishment of a free life, that their loyalty never reached that
creative importance in the world‘s history which the same quality attained
under the influence of the Germanic races. Here again, as before, in the
consideration of the feeling of freedom, we find a higher
548 ENTRANCE
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harmony of character in the Teuton;
hence we may say that no one in the world, not even the greatest, has surpassed
him. One thing is certain: if we wish to sum up in a single word the historic
greatness of the Teuton — always a perilous undertaking, since everything
living is of Protean nature — we must name his loyalty. That is the central
point from which we can survey his whole character, or better, his personality.
But we must remember that this loyalty is not the primary source, as Lamprecht
thinks, not the root but the blossom — the fruit by which we recognise
the tree. Hence it is that this loyalty is the finest touchstone for distinguishing
between genuine and false Germanicism; for it is not by the roots but by
the fruit that we distinguish the species; we should not forget that with
unfavourable weather many a tree has no blossoms or only poor ones, and
this often happens in the case of hard-pressed Teutons. The root of their
particular character is beyond all doubt that power of imagination which
is common to all Aryans and peculiar to them alone and which appeared in
greatest luxuriance among the Hellenes. I spoke of this in the beginning
of the chapter on Hellenic art and philosophy (see p. 14
f.); from that root everything springs, art, philosophy, politics,
science; hence, too, comes the peculiar sap which tinges the flower of
loyalty. The stem then is formed by the positive strength — the physical
and the intellectual, which can never be separated; in the case of the
Romans, to whom we owe the firm bases of family and State, this stem was
powerfully developed. But the real blossoms of such a tree are those which
mind and sentiment bring to maturity. Freedom is an expansive power which
scatters men, Germanic loyalty is the bond which by its inner power binds
men more closely than the fear of the tyrant‘s sword: freedom signifies
thirst after direct self-discovered truth, loyalty the reverence for that
which has appeared to our an-
549
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PEOPLE
cestors to be true; freedom decides
its own destiny and loyalty holds that decision unswervingly and for ever.
Loyalty to the loved one, to friend, parents, and fatherland we find in
many places; but here, in the case of the Teuton, something is added, which
makes the great instinct become a profoundly deep spiritual power, a principle
of life. Shakespeare represents the father giving his son as the best advice
for his path through life, as the one admonition which includes all others,
these words:
-
This above all: to thine own self be true!
The principle of Germanic
loyalty is evidently not the necessity of attachment, as Lamprecht thinks,
but on the contrary the necessity of constancy within a man‘s own autonomous
circle; self-determination testifies to it; in it freedom proves itself;
by it the vassal, the member of the guild, the official, the officer asserts
his independence. For the free man, to serve means to command himself.
“It was the Germanic races who first introduced into the world the idea
of personal freedom,“ says Goethe. What in the case of the Hindoos was
metaphysics and in so far necessarily negative, seclusive, has been here
transferred to life as an ideal of mind, it is the “breath of life of everything
great and good,“ a star in the night, to the weary a spur, to the storm-tossed
an anchor of safety. * In the construction of the Germanic character loyalty
is the necessary perfection of the personality, which without it falls
to pieces. Immanuel Kant has given a daring, genuinely Germanic definition
of personality: it is, he says, “freedom and independence of the mechanism
of all nature“; and what it achieves he has summed up as follows: “That
which elevates man above himself (as part of the world of sense), attaches
him to an order of things which only the understanding can conceive,
* But
quite analogous to Indian sentiment, in so far as here the regulative principle
is transferred to our inmost hearts.
550 ENTRANCE
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and which has the whole world of sense
subject to it, is Personality.“ But without loyalty this elevation would
be fatal: thanks to it alone the impulse of freedom can develop and bring
blessing instead of a curse. Loyalty in this Germanic sense cannot originate
without freedom, but it is impossible to see how an unlimited, creative
impulse to freedom could exist without loyalty. Childish attachment to
nature is a proof of loyalty: it enables man to raise himself above nature,
without falling shattered to the ground, like the Hellenic Phaethon. Therefore
it is that Goethe writes: “Loyalty preserves personality!“ Germanic loyalty
is the girdle that gives immortal beauty to the ephemeral individual, it
is the sun without which no knowledge can ripen to wisdom, the charm which
alone bestows upon the free individual‘s passionate action the blessing
of permanent achievement.
IDEAL
AND PRACTICE
These few simplified
remarks should, I think, enable us to understand the essential characteristics,
intellectual and moral, of the Germanic races. Simplification might easily
fill a whole book and it would only be amplification. If we wish clearly
to distinguish the Teuton from his nearest kinsmen we should study the
inmost being of both and compare a Kant as an ethical teacher with an Aristotle.
For Kant “the autonomy of the will is the highest principle of morality“;
a “moral personality“ exists for him only from the moment when “a man is
subject to no other laws than those which he gives to himself.“ And according
to what principles shall this autonomous personality give itself laws?
We must suppose that there is an unprovable “realm of impulses — certainly
only an ideal!“ An ideal is therefore to determine life! And in a note
to the same book (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten) Kant in
a
551 ENTRANCE
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few words contrasts this new, specifically
Germanic philosophy with the Hellenic: “There the realm of impulses is
a theoretical idea, to explain that which is; here (in the case of the
Teutons) it is a practical idea to bring about by our active and passive
attitude that which is not, but yet may be.“ What daring, to create by
our will a moral realm which is not, to cause it “actually“ to come into
existence! What a dangerous piece of daring if loyalty were not at work,
which is so thoroughly characteristic of Kant‘s own mental physiognomy!
And we should carefully note this contrast: here (in the case of the Teuton)
Ideal and at the same time Practice, there (in the case of the Hellene)
sober Reality and, as its associate, Theory. The great captain of the powers
of the chaos laughed at the German “ideologists,“ as he called them: a
proof of ignorance, for they were more practical men than he himself. It
is not the ideal that is in the clouds but theory. The Ideal is, as Kant
here wishes it to be understood, a practical idea as distinguished from
a theoretical one. And that which we see here, on the heights of metaphysics,
in clear-cut outlines, we find again everywhere: the Teuton is the most
ideal, but at the same time the most practical, man in the world, and that
because here we have not dissimilarity, but on the contrary identity. A
Teuton writes a Critique of Pure Reason, but at the same time a
Teuton invents the railway; the century of Bessemer and of Edison is at
the same time the century of Beethoven and of Richard Wagner. Whoever does
not feel the unity of the impulse here, whoever considers it a riddle that
the astronomer Newton should interrupt his mathematical investigations
to write a commentary to the Revelation of St. John, that Crompton invented
the spinning machine merely to give himself more leisure for his beloved
music, and that Bismarck, the statesman of blood and iron, caused Beethoven‘s
sonatas to be played
552 ENTRANCE
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to him in the decisive moments of his
life, understands nothing at all of the nature of the Teuton, and cannot
in consequence rightly judge the part he plays in the history of the world
in the past and at the present time.
TEUTON
AND ANTI-TEUTON
So much for this important
subject. We have seen who the Teuton is; * let us now see how he entered
into history.
I am not qualified
and do not wish in this work to give a history of the Germanic races; but
we cannot understand and value the nineteenth century either in so far
as it is a product of the preceding ones nor in its own gigantic expansive
power, if we do not possess clear conceptions, not only concerning the
nature of the Teuton, but also concerning the conflict which has been raging
between him and the non-Teuton for fifteen hundred years. To-day is the
child of yesterday: what we have is partly the legacy of pre-Germanic antiquity,
what we are is altogether the work of the early Teuton, who is wont to
be represented to us as a “barbarian,“ as if barbarism were a question
of relative civilisation and did not simply denote a rudeness of mind.
One hundred and fifty years ago Montesquieu brilliantly cleared up this
confusion of ideas. After showing that all the States that make up Europe
to-day (America, Africa and Australia were then out of the question) were
the work of Germanic barbarians who suddenly appeared from unknown wilds,
he continues, “But in reality these peoples were not barbarians, since
they
were free: they became barbarians later when, dominated by the absolute
power, they lost their liberty.“ † In these words we read not only the
character
* The
whole ninth chapter, which tries to describe Germanic civilisation and
culture in its principal lines, forms a supplement to what is as briefly
as possible sketched here.
† Lettres
persanes, chap. cxxxvi.
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ENTRANCE
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of the Teutons, but also the fate against
which they were destined continually to struggle. For it is not possible
to say what uniform and independent culture might have arisen on a purely
Germanic soil; instead of this the Teuton entered into a history which
was already perfectly shaped, a history with which he had hitherto not
come in contact. As soon as the bare struggle for existence gave him leisure,
he grasped with the fervour of passion the two constructive ideas which
the “old world“ now tumbling to pieces had tried in its last agony to develop:
imperialism and Christianity. Was this a piece of luck? Who will venture
to affirm it? He received no great thoughts of antiquity in pure form,
all were transmitted by the sterile, shallow spirits of the chaos that
shunned the light and hated freedom. But the Teuton had no choice. In order
to live, he had in the first place to assimilate alien customs and thoughts
as they were presented to him; he had to be apprenticed to a civilisation
which in truth was no longer worthy to loosen the latchet of his shoes;
the Hellenic creative impulse, Roman legislation, the sublime simple doctrine
of Christ, which would have had the greatest affinity to his nature, were
completely removed from his eyes, to be dug up centuries later by his own
diligence. In his adoption of the alien he was greatly aided by his perilous
power of assimilation, and also by that “modesty“ which Luther praises
as “the sure sign of a pious god-fearing heart,“ but which in its extravagant
estimation of the merit of others leads to many a foolish delusion. Hence
it is that a sharp critical eye is needed to separate in the motives and
thoughts of those old heroic generations what is genuinely Germanic from
that which has been deflected from its natural course, sometimes for ever.
Take, for example, the absolute religious toleration of the Goths, when
they had become masters of that Roman empire where the principle of intolerance
had long
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been predominant: it is just as characteristic
of Germanic sentiment as the protection which they gave to the monuments
of art. * We see here at once these two features, freedom and loyalty.
Characteristic, too, is the constancy with which the Goths clung to Arianism.
Dahn is certainly right in saying that it is a chance that the Goths were
induced to join the sect of the Arians and not of the Athanasians; but
chance ceases where loyalty begins. Thanks to the great Wulfila, the Goths
possessed the whole Bible in their mother tongue, and Dahn‘s mockery of
the incapacity of these rough men for theological disputes is somewhat
out of place in view of the fact that this living book was the source of
their religious faith — a thing that not every Christian of the nineteenth
century could say of himself. † And now comes the really important matter
— not the dreary quarrel about Homo-ousian and Homoi-ousian, which even
the Emperor Constantine declared to be idle — but the loyal clinging to
what has once been chosen, the emphasising of Germanic individuality, and
the right of free-agency in dealing with the foreigner. If the Teutons
had been as Dahn represents them, mere barbarians with no will, as ready
to adopt the cult of Osiris as any other faith, how does it come that all
of them (Longobardians, Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, &c.) in the fourth
century adopted Arianism and that, while elsewhere it scarcely survived
fifty years,
* See
above, p. 322, and cf.
Gibbon: Roman Empire, chap. xxxix., and Clarac: Manuel de l‘histoire
de l‘art chez les Anciens jusqu‘à la fin du 6me siècle de
notre ère, ii, 857 f. The mongrel races destroyed the monuments,
partly from religious fanaticism, partly because the statues provided the
best lime for building and the temples furnished splendid dressed stones.
Where are the true barbarians?
† We
can see in Neander‘s Kirchengeschichte, 4th ed. iii. 199, how characteristic
of the Goths was the reading of the Bible. Neander quotes a letter in which
Hieronymus expresses his astonishment at the manner in which “the barbaric
tongue of the Goths seeks after the pure sense of the Hebraic original,“
while in the south “no one troubles about the matter.“ That was already
in the year 403!
555 ENTRANCE
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they remained true to it for centuries?
I see nothing theological in this and I do not attach the slightest importance
to those subtleties which can be twisted out of every little trifle to
prove a preconceived thesis; I direct my attention solely to the great
facts of character and here again I see loyalty and independence. I see
the Germanic peoples instinctively carrying out the emancipation from Rome
a thousand years before Wyclif, at a time when the religious idea of Rome
had not been clearly separated from the Roman imperialism, and in such
a phenomenon I can see nothing accidental. * It is clear from Karl Müller‘s
account in his Kirchengeschichte (1892, i. 263) how far from unimportant
this phenomenon was; he says of the Arian Teutons: “Each Empire has its
own Church. There are no Church unions in the manner of the Catholic Church
... the new priests ... have been component parts of the organisation of
the race and the people. The standard of culture in the ministry is naturally
quite different from that among the Catholics: purely national and Germanic,
without being influenced by the ecclesiastical and profane culture of the
old world. On the other hand, according to all Christian testimony the
customs and morals of the Teutons are immeasurably higher than those of
the Catholic Romance peoples. It is the moral purity of a still uncorrupted
people as opposed to an absolutely rotten culture.“ Tolerant, evangelical,
morally pure: that is what the Teutons were before they came under the
influence of Rome.
Now it is peculiar
that the Teutons at a later period allowed themselves to be ensnared and
created knights of the Anti-Germanic powers; I am afraid that this too
is a genuinely Germanic feature, for everything living bears in itself
the germ of its own ruin and death. Certainly Charlemagne never even in
his dreams thought of serving
* Dahn,
2te Auflage von Wietersheim‘s Völkerwanderung ii. 6o.
556 ENTRANCE
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the Bishop of Rome; on the contrary,
he wanted to make the Bishop‘s power subordinate to his own; he treats
the Pope as a master treats his subject, * he is called by his contemporaries
a “reformer“ of the Church and carries his point against Rome even in matters
of dogma, as in the worship of images, to which he as genuine Teuton objected.
But all this did not hinder him from strengthening the Papacy by bestowing
on the head of the Roman Church power and dignity, and furthering the amalgamation
of the German monarchy with a Roman Christianity, hitherto unheard of,
but which thenceforth weighed like a nightmare upon Germany. Imagine how
matters would have developed if the Franks, too, had become Arians or if
they as Catholics had early renounced Rome, say under Charlemagne, and
had founded nationally organised churches like most of the Slavs! When
the Popes urgently appealed to Charlemagne‘s predecessors, Charles Martel
and Pépin, for help, Rome‘s position as a world-power was lost;
the decisive rejection of her pretensions would have destroyed her influence
for ever. Indeed, if Charlemagne‘s efforts to get the Imperial Crown conferred
by Byzantium and not by Rome had been successful, the ecclesiastical independence
of the Teutons would never have been endangered. Charlemagne‘s whole activity
testifies to such distinctly German nationalism that we see that Germanisation
was his object, and not only his object but also his life-work, in spite
of all appearances and many consequences which seem to point to the contrary;
for he is the founder of Germany, the man who, as the venerable Widukind
said, made quasi una gens of the Germans, and in so far he is the
originator of the no longer “Holy Roman“ but “Holy German“ empire of to-day.
The Roman Church, on the
* That
the Pope was actually the subject of the Emperor is proved by civil and
by public law, so that the passionate dissertations for and against are
aimless. (See Savigny; Geschichte des römischen Rechtes
im Mittelalter i. chap. v.).
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other hand, was unavoidably the shield-
and armour-bearer of all Anti-Germanic movements; this was the part which
it played from the beginning — more and more openly as time went on, so
that it never was more Anti-Germanic than at the present day. And yet it
owes its existence to the Teutons! I am not speaking of matters of faith
at all, but of the Papacy as an ideal, secular power; orthodox Catholics,
whom I honour in my heart, have understood and admitted this. To give only
one example, which is linked with what I have written above: we have seen
that religious toleration is natural to the Teuton as a man who has sentiments
of freedom and to whom religion is an inner experience; before the Roman
Empire was seized by the Goths persecution had been the order of the day,
but then it ceased for a long time, for the Teutons put an end to it. It
was only after the doctrines and passions of the races had estranged the
Teuton from himself that the Frank began to preach Christianity to the
Saxon sword in hand. It was the De Civitate Dei which impressed
upon Charlemagne the duty of conversion by force, * and to this the Pope,
who bestowed on him the title of Christianissimus Rex unceasingly
urged him; hence it was that the first Thirty Years War raged among Germanic
brothers, laying waste, destroying, sowing undying hatred, not because
they, but because Rome so wished it. It was exactly the same nine hundred
years later in the second Thirty Years War, which in some parts of Germany
only a fiftieth part of the population survived — certainly a practical
way for getting rid of the Teutons, to make them destroy each other. And
in the meantime the doctrine of Augustine, the African half-breed, the
dogma of systematic intolerance and of the punishment by death of heterodoxy
had entered the Church; and, as soon as the Germanic element had been sufficiently
weakened and the Anti-Germanic
* Hodgkin:
Charles
the Great, 1897, pp. 107, 248.
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element sufficiently strengthened, that
dogma solemnly declared to be law and to the everlasting disgrace of humanity
was put in practice for five hundred years, in the midst of a civilisation
which otherwise was advancing everywhere. How does one of the most eminent
Catholics of the nineteenth century judge this remarkable event, this brutalisation
of men, who had formerly shown themselves so humane, in the days when they
were supposed to be barbarians? “It was,“ he says, “a victory which the
old Roman Imperial law gained over the Germanic spirit.“ *
If we wish to carry
out the necessary limitation of the expression “Germanic,“ that is, separate
the Germanic from the Un-Germanic, we must in the first place endeavour,
as I did in the beginning of this chapter, to realise the fundamental qualities
of mind and character of the Teutons, and then, as has just been shown
by an example, we must with a critical eye follow the course of history.
Such “victories over the Germanic spirit“ were frequently won, many of
them with only temporary success, many so thorough that noble races falling
into a progressive degeneracy disappeared for ever from the German family.
For this Teuton who entered into history under such complex, contradictory
and absolutely obsolete conditions had become estranged from himself. Every
power was set in motion to delude him: not only the passions, the greed,
the lust of power, all the evil vices, which he had in common with others,
even his better qualities were played upon to serve this purpose: his mystical
tendencies, his thirst for knowledge, his force of faith, his impulse to
create, his high organising abilities, his noble ambition, his need of
ideals — everything possible was used against himself. The Teuton had entered
history not as a barbarian but as a child — as a
* Döllinger:
Die
Geschichte der religiösen Freiheit (in his Academic Lectures,
iii. 278).
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child that falls into the hands of old
experienced libertines, Hence it is that we find Un-Germanic qualities
nestling in the heart of the best Teutons, where, thanks to Germanic earnestness
and loyalty, they often took firmer root than anywhere else; hence, too,
the great difficulty of solving the riddle of our history. Montesquieu
told us that the Teuton had become barbarian through the loss of his freedom:
but who robbed him of it? The chaos of races in conjunction with himself.
Dietrich of Berne had rejected the title and the crown of Imperator; he
was too proud to wish to be more than King of the East Goths. Later Teutons,
on the other hand, imbued as they were by Un-Germanic ideas, were dazzled
by the Imperial purple with the power of a magic talisman. For in the meantime
the Jurisconsults of the late degenerate Roman law had come and whispered
in the ear of the German Princes wonders concerning the kingly prerogatives;
and the Roman Church, which was the most powerful disseminator of Justinian
law, * taught that this law was sacred and given by God; † and down came
the Pope declaring himself to be lord and master of all crowns; he alone,
as Christ‘s representative on earth, could grant or remove, ‡ and the emperor
as mere rex regum was subject to the servus servorum. But
if the Pope bestowed or ratified regal power, every King was King by the
grace of God, and when the legal authorities declared that the bearer of
the crown was the rightful owner of the whole land, and had unlimited authority
over his subjects, the transformation was complete, and in place of a nation
of free men there now stood a nation of slaves. This is what Montesquieu
rightly calls barbarism. The Germanic Princes, who had made this
* Savigny:
Geschichte
des römischen Rechts i. chap. iii.
† “The
Middle Ages put Roman Law as revealed reason in matters of justice (ratio
scripta) side by side with Christianity as revealed religion“ (Jhering:
Vorgeschichte
der Indo-europäer, p. 302).
‡ Phillips:
Lehrbuch
des Kirchenrechtes, 1881 (!), § 102, &c.
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contract not merely from lust of power
and wealth, but also out of misunderstanding, had unconsciously sold themselves
to the hostile powers; thenceforth they became the pillars of Anti-Germanicism.
One more victory had been gained over the Germanic spirit!
I leave to the reader‘s
own study other examples of the way in which the Teuton was estranged from
himself. Once he had lost the freedom to act and the freedom to believe,
the basis of his particular, incomparable nature was undermined in such
a way that only the most violent revolt could save him from complete downfall.
How free and daring had been the religious speculation of the first Norse
schoolmen, full of personality and life; how enslaved and gagged such speculation
appeared subsequently to Thomas Aquinas, who to the present day stands
as law to all Catholic schools! * How touching it is to think of the Goths
in possession of their Gothic Bible, listening awestruck to the words of
Christ which they but imperfectly understood and which seemed to them the
words of some ancestral almost forgotten tale, or perhaps a distant voice
penetrating to their ear, and calling them to a beautiful inconceivable
future; so that we find them sinking on their knees in the simply hewn
house of God or in the tent that served the same purpose, † and praying
with childlike simplicity for all that is nearest and dearest to them!
But now all that had disappeared: the Bible was to be read solely in the
Latin vulgate — that is, only by scholars — and was soon so little known
to even priests and monks that even Charlemagne had to admonish the bishops
to pay more earnest heed to
* We
must also remember that Thomas Aquinas was descended on his mother‘s side
from the house of Stauffen and early came under the influence of German
knowledge and thought (Albertus Magnus). Where would the chaos have achieved
anything great — and the achievements of Aquinas deserve our admiration
for their strength and greatness — without the help of the Teutons?
† See
Hieronymus: Epistola ad Laetam.
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the study of the sacred writings; *
the sacred worship could henceforth be held only in a language which no
layman understood. † How brilliantly clear, on the
* Döllinger:
Das
Kaisertum Karls des Grossen, Acad. Lectures, iii. 102.
† It
is interesting in this connection to call attention to the fact that Pope
Leo XIII., by the constitution officiorum numerum of January 25,
1897, has “not inconsiderably intensified the strictness“ of the Index
of forbidden books (so says the orthodox-Roman commentator Professor Hollweck
in his book Das kirchliche Bücherverbot, 2nd ed., 1897, p.
15). The old Germanic spirit of freedom had in fact begun to assert itself
in France and Germany in the nineteenth century; ecclesiastical teachers
asserted that the Index was not valid for those countries, bishops demanded
great changes in the direction of freedom, laymen (Coblenz. 1869) united
in sending addresses, in which they demanded the complete abolition of
the Index (see pp. 13, 14); Rome‘s answer was to make it stricter
than ever, as every layman can find from the book quoted above, which has
the episcopal sanction. According to this law the orthodox Roman Catholic
is forbidden to read practically all the literature of the world, and even
such authors as Dante he can read only in drastically expurgated, “episcopally
approved“ editions. It is an interesting fact in connection with the strictness
of the new Index constitution that henceforth not merely books which touch
upon theological questions must be episcopally approved but also that,
according to pp. 42 and 43, such as treat of natural science and art may
not be read by orthodox Catholics absque praevia Ordinariorum venia.
But it is specially noteworthy that the reading of the Bible in a faithful
complete edition, even when this has been edited by Catholics, is forbidden
as “grievous sin“! Only those editions may be read which have been specially
revised, provided with notes and approved by the Papal stool (p. 29). This
care, however, is exercised only for minds already wavering, for during
religious instruction as well as at other times the young are warned so
strongly against reading the Scriptures that I have lived for twenty years
in Catholic countries without encountering a single Catholic layman who
ever had had the complete Bible even in his hand; in other cases the Index
librorum prohibitorum finds little or no application in practical life;
with unerring instinct Rome has felt that the one really dangerous book
for it is that in which we find the simple figure of Christ. Before the
Council of Trent, i.e., at a time when the later “Protestant“ had
not yet visibly separated from the later “Catholics,“ this was not so in
Germany; by means of that pioneer of the Reformation, the “German art“
of book-printing, in a short time (and in spite of the then existing ecclesiastical
prohibition), the Bible in “right common German“ had become the most popular
book in the land (Janssen: Geschichte des deutschen Volkes i. 20).
But the Council of Trent for ever put an end to this state of affairs by
its Decretum de editione et usu sacrorum librorum. Immanuel Kant
admired, however, the strong consistency of the Roman Church and looked
upon the prohibition to read the
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other hand, does the idea of pure science
appear in Roger Bacon at the beginning of the thirteenth century — observation
of nature, philology to be studied scientifically, mathematics! But his
works are condemned by Rome and destroyed, he himself in the prime of his
life is imprisoned in a cloister, so that all earnest investigation of
nature was held back for centuries and then opposed at every step. That
such lights of science as Copernicus and Galilei were good Catholics, and
such pioneers of new cosmological and philosophical conceptions as Krebs
(Nicolaus of Cusa), Bruno, Campanella and Gassendi, actually Cardinals,
monks and priests, only proves that in the case of all these men it is
not a question of difference of faith but of the struggle between two philosophies,
or better still, between two human natures, the Germanic and the Anti-Germanic,
which also was proved by the fact that most of these men were persecuted,
or that at least their writings were condemned, * Cardinal Nicolaus of
Cusa, the confidant of Popes, who was fortunate enough to live before the
retrograde movement introduced by the Council of Trent, proved his genuinely
Germanic nature by the fact that he was the first to reveal the forgery
of the Decretalia of Isidor and the would-be donation of Constantine, and
that he as an active reformer of the Church untiringly, though unsuccessfully,
strove to bring about what had later to be obtained by force. The man who
exposes forgeries cannot possibly be morally identical with him who commits
them. And
Bible as its “corner-stone“
(Hasse: Letzte Aüsserungen Kant‘s, 1804. p. 29). At the same
time he was wont to laugh at the Protestants, “who say: study the Scriptures
diligently, but you must not find anything there but what we find“ (Reicke:
Lose
Blätter aus Kant‘s Nachlass ii. 34).
* It
is very remarkable that such original and free-thinking philosophers as
Bruno and Campanella belong to the extreme south of Italy, where even to-day,
according to anthropological verifications, the Indo-Germanic, distinct
dolichocephalous type is most strongly represented in the Peninsula (see
Ranke; Der Mensch ii. 299).
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so we cannot make religious denominations
any more than nationalities the test by which to distinguish between that
which is genuinely Germanic and that which is Anti-Germanic. Not only is
it difficult before the Council of Trent to distinguish between the Roman
Christians and others, inasmuch as many of the great teachers of the Church
like Origenes and many Catholic doctors had gone much further than a Luther
or a Hus in accepting tenets and views which from that time forth were
reckoned to be heretical — but in later times and down to the present day
we see pre-eminently German minds remain obedient to Rome from deep conviction
and loyal attachment to the great idea of a universal Church, and yet prove
themselves most genuine Teutons; while on the other hand the man in whom
the revolt against the Anti-Germanic powers was most powerfully expressed,
Martin Luther, quotes the testimony of Augustine, to urge the Princes to
rebellion, and Calvin burns the great doctor Michel Lervet because of his
dogmatic views, receiving for this the approval of the humane Melancthon.
We cannot therefore put down individual men as representatives of the Teutons;
but as soon as they have become subject to the Non-Germanic influence in
education, surroundings, &c. — and who was not so influenced during
at least a thousand years? — we must learn to distinguish carefully between
that which grows out of the genuine pure Germanic nature, be it for good
or for evil, as a living component of the personality, and that which is
forcibly grafted on or bound up with it.
It is clear that,
in a certain sense, we may regard the intellectual and moral history of
Europe from the moment of the entry of the Teuton to the present day as
a struggle between Teuton and non-Teuton, between Germanic sentiment and
Anti-Germanic disposition, as a struggle which is waged partly externally,
philosophy against philosophy, partly internally, in the breast of the
Teuton
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himself. But here I am trespassing upon
the following division. What has been said here I shall summarise by referring
to the perfect type of the Anti-Germanic; this is, I think, the most valuable
supplement to the positive picture.
IGNATIUS
OF LOYOLA
The struggle against
the Germanic spirit has in a way embodied itself in one of the most extraordinary
men of history; here as elsewhere a single great personality has, by its
example and by the sum of living power which it brought into the world,
been able to do more than all the councils and all the solemn resolutions
of great societies. And it is a good thing to see our enemy before us in
a form which deserves respect, otherwise hatred or contempt is apt to dim
our judgment. I do not know who would be justified in refusing honest admiration
to Ignatius of Loyola. He bears physical pain like a hero, * is just as
fearless morally, his will is of iron, his action direct, his powers of
thinking spoiled by no pedantry and artificiality; he is an acute, practical
man, who never stumbles over trifles and yet assures to his influence a
far-reaching future, by seizing the needs of the moment and making them
the basis of his activity; he is in addition unassuming, an enemy of phrases,
and no comedian; a soldier and a nobleman; the priesthood is rather his
instrument than his natural vocation. Now this man was a Basque; not only
was he born in the pure Basque part of Spain, but his biographers assure
us that he was of genuine unmixed Basque descent, that is, he belonged
to a race which was not only Un-Germanic but absolutely distinct from the
whole Indo-European
* His
leg had been shattered in battle and after it was completely healed he
had it broken again because it had become shorter than the other and so
rendered him unsuitable for military service.
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group. * In Spain since the time of
the Celtic immigration the mixed Celtiberians formed a considerable portion
of the population, but in certain northern parts the Iberian Basques have
remained unmixed to the present day and Ignatius, really Iñigo,
is said to be a “genuine son of the enigmatical, taciturn, energetic and
fantastic stem of the Basques.“ † It is, by the way (as an illustration
of the incomparable importance of race), exceedingly remarkable that the
man, to whom principally must be ascribed the maintenance of the specifically
Romish, Anti-Germanic influence for centuries to come, was not himself
a child of the chaos but a man of pure descent. Hence the simplicity and
power which strike us as so wonderful when in the midst of the Babel of
the sixteenth century, just as the Germanic spirit of independence is being
reawakened (the true Renaissance!) and all voices mingle in the hoarse
and confused din of fear, we see this one man, who, standing apart, calm
and unconcerned about what others decide and endeavour to attain (except
in so far as it affects his plans), goes his own way and without precipitation,
in full control of his natural passionate temperament, forms the plan of
campaign, fixes the tactics to be employed, drills the troops to the most
carefully conceived and therefore most dangerous attack that was ever made
against Germanicism — or rather against Aryanism as a whole. Whoever considers
it a coincidence that this personality was a Basque, whoever considers
it a coincidence that this Basque, although he soon found capable and perfectly
devoted assistants from all nationalities, yet at the summit of his power
made an intimate, indeed almost inseparable friend of one sole man, consulted
with him, and proclaimed his will through him, and that this one man was
by race
* See
Bastian:
Das
Beständige in den Menschenrassen, p. 110; Peschel:
Völkerkunde,
7th ed. p. 539.
† Gothein:
Ignatius
von Loyola und die Gegenreformation, 1895, p. 209.
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a pure Jew (Polanco) who had been converted
to Christianity at a later period of his life — whoever, I say, passes
such phenomena by unheeded, has no feeling for the majesty of facts. *
If we gain access to the innermost mental life of this remarkable man,
as we can easily do by his Exercitia spiritualia (a fundamental
text-book of the Jesuits to the present day) we seem to be entering an
absolutely strange world. At first I felt myself in a Mohammedan atmosphere
set out with Christian decorations: † the absolute materialism of the conceptions
— for example, that we can feel the stench of hell and the glow of its
flames, the idea that sins are transgressions of a “paragraphic“ law, so
that we can keep an account of them and should do so according to a definitely
prescribed scheme, and so on — reminds us of Semitic religions; but we
should be doing the latter an injustice if we identified them with the
thinly varnished Fetishism of Loyola. The fundamental principle of the
religion of Ignatius is opposition to every kind of symbolism. He has been
called a mystic and an attempt has been made to prove the influence of
mysticism upon his thought, but this intellect is quite incapable of even
grasping the idea of mysticism in the Indo-European sense; for all mysticism
from Yâjñavalkya to Jacob Böhme signifies the attempt
to discard the dross of empiricism and surrender to a transcendental, empirically
inconceivable untruth, ‡ while Loyola‘s whole endeavour is to represent
all mysteries of religion as concrete manifest
* It
also deserves mention that the first two men who joined Ignatius and helped
to found his Order were likewise not Indo-Europeans: Franz Xavier was a
genuine Basque, Faber a genuine, superstitious Savoyard (see p.
373
note 2).
† Since
the above was written, a book by Hermann Müller has appeared, Les
Origines de la compagnie de Jésus, in which it is proved that
Ignatius had studied very carefully the organisation of the Mohammedan
secret leagues and in his Exercises in many ways followed Mohammedan
views. In truth this man is the personification of all that is Un-Germanic.
‡ See
chap. ix., Division “Philosophy.“
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facts in direct contrast to mysticism.
We are to see, hear, taste, smell and touch them! His Exercitia
are not an introduction to mystical contemplation, but rather the systematic
development of the hysterical tendencies present in us all. The purely
sensuous element of imagination is developed at the expense of reason and
judgment and brought to the point of its greatest capacity; in this way
the animal nature proves victorious over the will and henceforth the will
is not broken, as is generally asserted, but fettered. In a normal human
being, understanding forms the counterpoise of will; Loyola‘s idea directs
itself, therefore, first against understanding, as the source of freedom
and the creative impulse; in one of his latest proclamations he expresses
it concisely: he characterises the “renunciation of will and the negation
of our own judgment“ as the “source of the virtues.“ * In the Exercitia
also, the first rule of orthodoxy is “the destruction of every judgment
of our own“ (see the Regulae ad sentiendum vere cum ecclesia,
reg. i.). †
* See
the last writing to the Portuguese, analysed and quoted by Gothian, p.
450.
† The
Jesuit father Bernhard Duhr has devoted a paragraph of the fourth edition
of his well-known book Jesuiten-Fabeln to my “Foundations.“ As the
expression of a different point of view is always suggestive and instructive,
I would gladly recommend this criticism to my readers, just as I have taken
every opportunity to refer to the pamphlet of the Catholic theologian Professor
Dr. Albert Ehrhard against these “Foundations“ (Heft 4. der Vorträge
der Leogesellschaft). But I must unfortunately point out that my Jesuit
opponent does not hesitate at an untruth, whereby he makes his task indeed
easier, but spoils its effect on sensible independently thinking readers.
As a refutation point for point would lead me too far, I choose two examples;
they will suffice. On page 936 Duhr says (in reference to what I asserted
on p. 566): Nowhere in the Exercitia is any attempt made
to destroy the judgment of the individual, on the contrary, a number
of directions are given for extending our knowledge and so forming our
judgment rightly. In the rule quoted by Chamberlain also all that is said
is: “Putting aside our own judgment we must be prepared to obey in everything
the true bride of Christ, the Church.“ Now this interpretation is a frivolous
sophism; for when I “put aside“ my own opinion to obey “in everything“
the judgment of the Church, then I no longer have an opinion of my own.
But in the literal trans-
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By this the will is not broken, but
only freed from obedience to its natural master, the individual; but what
now controls him is the whip of the Exercitia. By these, exactly
as in the case of the Fakirs, only in much more carefully planned and therefore
more successful manner, a pathological condition of the whole individual
is produced (and by yearly repetitions and still more frequent ones in
the case of persons whose capacity of resistance is greater, it is always
strengthened anew), and this condition has exactly the same effect as every
other form of hysteria. Modern medicine sums up these psycho-pathological
conditions in the term “forced neurosis“ and well knows that the person
affected does not indeed lose his will, but certainly within the circle
of the forced conceptions all free control of it! Naturally I cannot here
enter more fully into this highly complex matter,
lation of the Spanish original,
published by the Jesuits themselves, versio literalis ex autographo
hispanico, we read as follows: “Primo, deposito omni judicio proprio,
debemus tenere animum paratum et promptum ad obediendum in omnibus verae
sponsae Christi domini nostri, quae est nostra sancta mater ecclesia hierarchica,
quae romana est.“ And in the other passage adduced by me, Loyola‘s
epistle to the Portuguese, the words are (S. 21): “[vos ego per Christum
dominum nostrum obtestor ut....] voluntatem dico atque judicium
expugnare et subjicere studeatis.“ Are these words not clear enough?
Do “deponere,“ “expugnare“ and “subjicere“ really only mean “to put aside“?
The second instance is still worse. On page 157
of the second volume I have quoted a sentence of the Jesuit Jouvancy concerning
and against occupation with the mother tongue; Duhr boldly answers, “So
foolish an assertion Jouvancy has nowhere made.“ In refutation of this
I beg the reader to take up the following book: Bibliothek der katholischen
Pädagogik, founded with the assistance of P. C. Dr. L. Kellner,
Suffragan Bishop Dr. Knecht, Spiritual Councillor Dr. Hermann Rolfus and
published by F. X. Kunz, vol. x., Der Jesuiten Sacchini, Juvencius und
Kropf Erlauterungsschriften zur Studienordnung der Gesellschaft Jesu,
trans. by J. Stier, R. Schwickerath, F. Zorell, members of the same society,
Freiburg i. B., Herder, 1898. Pages 209 to 322 contain the translation
into German of Jouvancy‘s Lern- und Lehrmethode. And here we read on p.
229, “We must take this opportunity of calling attention to a cliff which
is especially dangerous to young teachers, namely, too much reading of
works in the mother tongue, especially poetical ones. This is not only
a waste of time but may very easily cause shipwreck to the soul.“
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which, especially in the second half
of the nineteenth century, has been in so far cleared up by the experiments
of Charcot and others as well as by scientific psychology that the problem
is now clearly grasped and the fearful power of Physis over Psyche recognised;
* it is sufficient if I have proved the destruction of the physical basis
of freedom to have been Loyola‘s first purpose. This direct attack upon
the body of the individual, not for the purpose of subjecting the body
to the spirit, but to seize and conquer the spirit by means of the body,
reveals a sentiment which is the negation of all that we Indo-Europeans
have ever called religion. For Loyola‘s system has nothing in common with
asceticism; on the contrary, he hates asceticism and forbids it, and rightly
so from his standpoint: for asceticism increases the intellectual capacities
and culminates, when carried out with absolute consistency, in the complete
conquest of the senses; these may then continue, so to speak, as material
for the imagination, to serve the mystical devotion of a Saint Theresa
or the mystical metaphysics of the author of Chândogya; from that
time forth they are senses rendered subject to will, elevated and purified
by the power of the mind, and this the Hindoo teacher expresses when he
writes: “the man of understanding is already in his lifetime bodiless.“
† On the other hand, as I have said, Loyola‘s method actually prescribes
a gymnastic course for the sensitive faculty, by which, as he himself describes
his aim, the will and the judgment may be enslaved. While true asceticism
is possible only
* To
the most interesting summaries of late years belong the essays of Dr. Siegmund
Freud: Über die Ätiologie der Hysterie and Die Sexualität
in der Ätiologie der Neurosen, in the Vienna Klinische Rundschau
in 1896 and 1898. I am convinced that every strong stimulus of the outward
activity of sense from purely inner excitement, even when it does not occur
in sexual form, is an exacerbation of the sense-life, the seat of which
is the brain, and from it results a corresponding paralysis.
† Çankara:
Die
Sûtra‘s des Vedânta i, I, 4.
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to a few chosen individuals, since moral
determination must obviously form the basis and constantly hold the reins
in this matter, these so-called “mental exercises“ of Loyola, which must
never last more than four weeks (but may be shortened or adapted by the
teacher to each individual) will find an impressionable subject in almost
every one, especially in younger years. The suggestive power of such a
grossly mechanical method planned with supreme art for exciting the whole
individual is so great that no one can get quite out of it. I too feel
my senses tremble when I give myself up to these Exercitia; but
it is not the anatomically cut out heart of Jesus that I see (as if the
muscular apparatus called “heart“ had anything in common with divine love!)‚
I see the ravenous ursus spelaeus lying in wait for its prey; and
when Loyola speaks of the fear of God and teaches that it is not “childlike
fear“ that should satisfy us, but that we should tremble with “that other
fear, called timor servilis,“ that is, the tottering fear of helpless
slaves, then I hear that mighty bear of the cave roar, and I shudder as
did the men of the diluvial age, when poor, naked and defenceless, surrounded
by danger day and night, they trembled at that voice. * The whole mental
disposition of this Basque points backwards thousands of years; of the
intellectual culture acquired by humanity he has adopted some externals
but the inner
* Regulae
ad sentiendum cum ecclesia, No. 18. It is very remarkable in connection
with this fundamental doctrine of Ignatius (and all Jesuitism) that the
Church father Augustine considered the timor servilis a proof that
the man who felt it did not know God! Of such people he says: “They fear
God with that slavish fear which proves the absence of love, for complete
love knows no fear“ — “Quoniam timent quidem Deum, sed illo timore servili,
qui non est in charitate, quia perfecta charitas foras mittit timorem“
(De civitate Dei xxi. 24). Goethe has clearly expressed in his Wanderjahre
(Bk. ii. chap. i.) what should be the sacred rule of every Teuton in this
matter: “no religion which is based on fear, is respected among us.“ Diderot
makes the fine remark: “Il y a des gens dont il ne faut pas dire qu‘ils
craignent Dieu, mais bien qu‘ils en ont peur“ (Pensées philosophiques,
viii.).
571 ENTRANCE
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growing and strengthening, that great
emancipation of man from fear, that gradual tearing down of the tyranny
of sense, which was formerly a condition of existence and hindered the
development of every other quality, that “entrance of mankind into the
daylight of life“ with the awakening of his freely creative power, that
tendency to seek ideals, which one does not first smell and taste in order
to believe in them, but which one “really allows to grow up,“ because man,
who has become a moral being, so wills it, that divine doctrine that the
kingdom of Heaven comes not with outward signs but is within us like a
hidden treasure * — all this left absolutely no impression upon this man;
standing apart from the restlessly hurrying waters which flow together
to the great stream of Aryanism, his forefathers have lived since time
immemorial, proud of their individuality, organically incapable of ever
attaining to an intimate knowledge of that other nature. And do not imagine
that Ignatius is in this respect a unique phenomenon! There are hundreds
of thousands of people in Europe who speak our Indo-European tongues, wear
the same clothes, take part in our life, and are excellent people in their
way, but are just as far removed from us Teutons as if they lived on another
planet; here it is not a question of a cleft such as separates us in many
respects from the Jew, and which may be bridged at this point and that,
but of a wall which is insurmountable and separates the one land from the
other. The exceptional importance of Loyola lies in his pre-eminent greatness
of character; in such a man therefore we see the Un-Germanic and the necessarily
Anti-Germanic in a clear and great form, whereas at other times, whether
it be owing to apparent unimportance or the indefiniteness of the half-breed
character, it is easily overlooked or at least difficult to analyse. I
said “greatness of character,“ for as a matter of
* See
pp. 187, 188.
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fact other greatness is here out of
the question: we note in the case of Loyola neither philosophical nor artistic
thoughts and just as little real inventive power; even his Exercitia
are in their outlines borrowed from former cloister exercises * and merely
“materialised“ by him, and his great fundamental principle of uncompromising
obedience is an old soldier‘s thoughtlessly brutal transference of a military
virtue of necessity to the domain of mind. His activity as an organiser
and agitator bespeaks the subtlest cunning and a precise knowledge of mediocrities
(very important or original people he systematically excluded from the
Order), but nowhere is there evidence of depth. To prevent misunderstandings
and misinterpretations I must add that I do not ascribe to him as an intention
what has come to pass as the result of his action. Loyola did not call
his order into existence with the object of opposing the Reformation —
so at least the Jesuits assure us — much less can the word “Germanic“ have
been associated in his mind with any definite conception, nor can he have
viewed his struggle against Germanicism as a life-purpose. We might just
as well assert that that race of the Basques which had been pursued, driven
and persecuted ever further and further by the encroachment of the Indo-Europeans
had wished to avenge itself on the victor through him. But in this book,
where we are occupying ourselves not with chronicles but with the discovery
of fundamental facts of history, we should emphasise the amount of truth
that lies concealed behind these utterances which are untenable from the
point of view of chronology. For it is not in what he wished to do but
in what he had to do that the greatness of this extraordinary man lies.
Father Bernhard Duhr may assure us in his most excited tone † that the
founding of the Order of
* See,
too, the above note about the influence of Mohammedanism upon the composition
of the Exercitia.
† See
Jesuitenfabeln,
2nd ed. pp. 1-11.
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the Jesuits had nothing to do with opposition
to Protestantism; its activity culminated from the very first so manifestly
and so successfully in the prosecution of this one aim that even the earliest
biographers of Loyola bestow on him the title of honour “Anti-Luther.“
And whoever says “Anti-Luther“ says Anti-Germanic — whether he is conscious
of this or not. But with regard to the question of race-revenge, the fact
that those physically strong but mentally inferior and Anti-Germanic races,
which were never quite destroyed but withdrew into the mountains, are reviving
and increasing, is engaging more and more the attention not of visionaries
but of the most earnest natural scientists. *
With Ignatius of
Loyola I place the type of the Anti-Germanic spirit before the reader and
I think I have thereby illustrated the necessary limitation of the Germanic
idea which at the beginning of the chapter was taken in as comprehensive
a sense as possible. I cannot imagine a definition of the Teuton put down
in paragraphs — as we have seen that is not even possible with physical
man — but rather as something vividly conceived, which qualifies us to
give an independent judgment. Here more than anywhere else we must guard
against letting the conception stiffen in the definition. † Such living
definitions of ideas are not like mathematical ones: it is not sufficient
to say that this or that is so and so, it is only by means of the negative
supplement, not so and not
* I
should perhaps have pointed out more emphatically that from the first the
activity of the Jesuits has been exercised chiefly in opposition to the
Reformation. Thus, for example, two of the direct pupils and friends of
Ignatius, Salmeron and Lainez, took care to arrogate to themselves the
decisive positions at the Council of Trent, the one as opener of each debate,
the other as the last speaker in each case. Little wonder that the “freedom
of the Christian,“ concerning which Luther had written such beautiful words,
was fettered once for all at this Council! The great Catholic Church already
entered upon that course which was gradually to lower it to a Jesuit sect.
† Cf.
Goethe: Geschichte der Farbenlehre, under Scaliger.
574 ENTRANCE
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so, that the positive representation
is put in relief and the idea freed from the fetters of words.
BACKWARD
GLANCE
Freedom and loyalty
then are the two roots of the Germanic nature, or, if you will, the two
pinions that bear it heavenwards. These are not meaningless words, each
one of them embraces a wide complex of vivid conceptions, experiences and
historical facts. Such a simplification has outwardly only been justified
by the fact that we have proved that rich endowments were the inevitable
basis of these two things: physical health and strength, great intelligence,
luxuriant imagination, untiring impulse to create. And like all true powers
of nature, freedom and loyalty flowed into each other: the specifically
Germanic loyalty was a manifestation of the most elevated freedom — the
maintenance of that freedom, loyalty to our own nature. Here too the specifically
Germanic significance of the idea of duty becomes clear. Goethe says in
one passage — he is speaking of taste in art, but the remark holds for
all spheres: “to maintain courageously our position on the height of our
barbarian advantages is our duty.“ * This is Shakespeare‘s “to thine own
self be true!“ This is Nelson‘s signal on the morning of the Battle of
Trafalgar “England expects every man to do his duty!“ His duty? Loyalty
to himself, the maintenance of his barbarian advantages, i.e. (as
Montesquieu teaches us), of the freedom that is born in him. In contrast
to this we behold a man who proclaims as the highest law the destruction
of freedom,
i.e., of freedom of will, of understanding, of creative
work — and who replaces loyalty (which would be meaningless without freedom)
by obedience. The individual shall become — as Loyola says word for word
in the constitutions of
* Anmerkungen
zu Rameau‘s Neffe.
575
ENTRANCE
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his Order — “as it were a corpse which
lets itself be turned on any side and never resists the hand laid upon
it, or like the staff of an old man which everywhere helps him who holds
it, no matter how and where he wishes to employ it.“ * I think it would
be impossible to make the contrast to all Aryan thought and feeling more
clear than it is in these words: on the one hand sunny, proud, mad delight
in creating, men who fearlessly grasp the right hand of the God to whom
they pray (p. 243); on the other
a corpse, upon which the “destruction of all independent judgment“ is impressed
as the first rule in life and for which “cowering slavish fear“ is the
basis of all religion.
FORWARD
GLANCE
I sometimes regret
that, in a book like this, moralising would be so out of place as to be
almost an offence against good taste. When we see those splendid “barbarians“
glowing with youth, free, making their entry into history endowed with
all those qualities which fit them for the very highest place; when next
we realise how they, the conquerors, the true “Freeborn“ of Aristotle,
contaminate their pure blood by mixture with the impure races of the slave-born;
how they accept their schooling from the unworthy descendants of noble
progenitors, and force their way with untold toil out of the night of this
Chaos towards a new dawn; — then we have to acknowledge the further fact
that every day adds new enemies and new dangers to those which already
exist — that these new enemies, like the former ones, are received by the
Teutons with open arms, that the voice of warning is carelessly laughed
at, and that while every enemy of our race, with full consciousness and
the
* “Perinde
ac si cadaver essent, quod quoquoversus ferri, et quacunque ratione tractare
se sinit: vel similiter atque senis baculus, qui obicumque et quacumque
in re velit eo uti, qui cum manu tenet, ei inservit.“
576
ENTRANCE
OF THE GERMANIC PEOPLE
perfection of cunning, follows his own
designs, we — still great, innocent barbarians — concentrate ourselves
upon earthly and heavenly ideals, upon property, discoveries, inventions,
brewing, art, metaphysics, love, and heaven knows what else! and with it
all there is ever a tinge of the impossible, of that which cannot be brought
to perfection, of the world beyond, otherwise we should remain lying idle
on our bear-skins! Who could help moralising when he sees how we, without
weapons, without defence, unconscious of any danger, go on our way, constantly
befooled, ever ready to set a high price on what is foreign and to set
small store by what is our own — we, the most learned of all men, and yet
ignorant beyond all others of the world around us, the greatest discoverers
and yet stricken with chronic blindness! Who could help crying with Ulrich
von Hutten: “Oh! unhappy Germany, unhappy by thine own choice! thou that
with eyes to see seest not, and with clear understanding understandest
not!“ But I will not do it. I feel that this is not my business, and to
tell the truth this haughty pococurantism is so characteristic a feature
that I should regret its loss. The Teuton is no pessimist like the Hindoo,
he is no good critic; he really thinks little in comparison with other
Aryans; his gifts impel him to act and to feel. To call the Germans a “nation
of thinkers“ is bitter irony; a nation of soldiers and shopkeepers would
certainly be more correct, or of scholars and artists — but of thinkers?
— these are thinly sown. * Hence it was that Luther went so far as to call
the Germans “blind people“; the rest of the Germanic races are the same
in scarcely less degree; for analytical thought belongs to seeing, and
to that again capacity, time, practice. The Teuton is occupied with other
things; he has not yet completed his “entrance into the history
* Herder
says (Journal, 1769, near the end: “The Germans think much and nothing.“
577 ENTRANCE
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of the world“; he must first have taken
possession of the whole earth, investigated nature on all sides, made its
powers subject to him; he must first have developed the expression of art
to a perfection yet unknown, and have collected an enormous store of historical
knowledge — then perhaps he will have time to ask himself what is going
on immediately around him. Till then he will continue to walk on the edge
of the precipice with the same calmness as on a flowering meadow. That
cannot be changed, for this pococurantism is, as I said above, characteristic
of the Teuton. The Greeks and the Romans were not unlike this: the former
continued to think and invent artistically, the latter to add conquest
to conquest without ever becoming conscious of themselves like the Jews,
without ever noticing in the least how the course of events was gradually
wiping them from off the face of the earth; they did not fall dead like
other nations; they descended slowly into Hades full of life to the last,
vigorous to the last, in the proud consciousness of victory. *
And I, a modest historian,
who can neither influence the course of events nor possess the power of
looking clearly into the future, must be satisfied if in fulfilling the
purpose of this book I have succeeded in showing the distinction between
the Germanic and the Non-Germanic. That the Teuton is one of the greatest,
perhaps the very greatest power in the history of mankind, no one will
wish to deny, but in order to arrive at a correct appreciation of the present
time, it behoved us to settle once for all who could and who could not
be regarded as Teuton. In the nineteenth century, as in all former centuries,
but of course with widely different grouping and with con-
* This
reminds us of what Goethe called “after all the most magnificent symbol“:
a setting sun on a sea, with the legend “even when setting it remains the
same“ (Unterhaltungen mit dem Kanzler von Müller, March 24,
1824.)
578 ENTRANCE
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stantly changing relative power, there
stood side by side in Europe these “Heirs“ — the chaos of half-breeds,
relics of the former Roman Empire, the Germanising of which is falling
off — the Jews — and the Germans, whose contamination by mixture with the
half-breeds and the descendants of other Non-Aryan races is on the increase.
No arguing about “humanity“ can alter the fact that this means a struggle.
Where the struggle is not waged with cannon-balls, it goes on silently
in the heart of society by marriages, by the annihilation of distances
which furthers intercourse, by the varying powers of resistance in the
different types of mankind, by the shifting of wealth, by the birth of
new influences and the disappearance of others, and by many other motive
powers. But this struggle, silent though it be, is above all others a struggle
for life and death.
END OF VOL. I
End of page. Last update:
March 17th, 2004.
