by Peter Watson
Each of these critiques, beneath their contempt (or alleged contempt) for Britain and France (and America), exhibit a revulsion at the profound changes that industrial growth had wrought on society. Many across the world shared this view. Where the Germans differed, according to Roger Chickering and others, is that the educated class in particular believed that the state should intervene to “check the materialistic excesses of self-seeking minorities in the interests of the general good.”16
Not for the first time, it is a relief to turn away from this airless atmosphere, which was, in any case—and not to mince words—wrong. To jump ahead of ourselves for a moment, in 1961 the German historian Fritz Fischer published his book Griff nach der Weltmacht (translated as Germany’s Aims in the First World War; 1967). In the 1950s he had been given access to the East German archives in Potsdam, where he came across an “explosive” set of files that, he claimed, showed that imperial Germany had aggressive annexation plans before World War I, and that, among other things, in December 1912, at an infamous “war council,” Wilhelm II and his military advisers “had made a decision to trigger a major war by the summer of 1914 and to use the intervening months to prepare the country for this settling of account.”17 Fischer claimed that there was a new kind of nationalism abroad in Germany from 1890 on that had racial overtones, that many of the country’s historians and intellectuals supported the great expansion of naval hardware, that Nietzsche’s “will to power” was a view agreed on by these very same people as an important psychological factor in modern life, that there was in imperial Germany very little difference between business interests and political interests, that Germany’s main aim was to wipe out France and to keep Britain neutral. He further found that such a view was always unrealistic, that Germany initiated the arms race, that the Kaiser and his advisers came to the view that the time for diplomacy was over, believing “inter-racial conflict” was inevitable in the “settling of accounts.”18 Fischer also concluded that it was Germany who most seriously misjudged the fighting abilities of her enemies or potential enemies.
Fischer’s work will be discussed more fully in a later section of the book (he was accused of “treason” by fellow German historians). For now we can confine ourselves to the remarks of Fritz Stern who, in commenting on Fischer’s book, said that if one factor can account for World War I, it is the constant miscalculations of Germany’s prewar policies, stemming from “a chronic blindness,” a false estimation of themselves and of others, “a rare combination of Angst, arrogance and—in assessing the non-German world—political ignorance and insecurity.”19
The Manifesto of the 93 provoked a fierce reaction in both France and Britain. French scholars were revolted by what they saw as the “intellectual servility, lack of objectivity, and craven spirit” of the scholars who signed the manifesto. Nevertheless, William Keylor concluded of the French academics that they too “rapidly abandoned their pre-war commitment to higher truths in the summer of 1914 and surrendered to the basest form of jingoist hysteria during the next five years.”20
That was perhaps overstating the case. Three questions concerned the French: (1) What remained worthy of respect within German culture? (2) Did France owe more to nineteenth-century German culture than to ancient Greece and Rome? (3) Was German science related to German Kultur, or were the undoubted successes of German science rooted in the philosophical traditions of France and Britain?
At the center was the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The conservatives and Catholics in France disparaged Kant because they regarded his ethics and epistemology as the foundations of “unrestrained individualism, subjectivism, and atheism.” These, in their turn, were seen by the same conservatives as the bases of republicanism, fostering notions of rights and duties. Their opponents favored Kant because of his theory of moral obligation and individual responsibility, which, in the years before the war, had been made the cornerstone of (republican) civics in the French schools. Kant also lay at the heart of French theories about the “two Germanies.” Living next door, the French had long been uneasily aware of the two faces of their neighbor—immensely cultured and inward, but at the same time militaristic and expansionist. This view had been sharpened in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. In December 1870, E. Caro, writing in the Revue des deux mondes, had advanced the idea of the two Germanies, one “mystical and metaphysical,” the other “materialistic and militaristic.” Kant, he said, was the apotheosis of the former, the French defeat at Sedan of the latter which, in the end, had gained the ascendancy. This second tradition, said Caro, originated with Hegel.
As Martha Hanna has pointed out, at the beginning of the war there was also a belief, widely held in France as elsewhere, that science was “if not uniquely, then at least especially, a German enterprise.” This had the unfortunate side effect that, after war broke out, science became suspect in France, a view reinforced when, in April 1915, the German army became the first to use poison gas. Science was now seen as “the regrettable product” of a materialist ethos. Hanna says French scientists worked hard to counter this belief, arguing that science was just as much a French and British activity as it was German.21
In Britain before the war there was widespread agreement about a “knowledge revolution” and the “institutionalisation of the German influence” in scholarship, and though some British academics, visiting Germany at that time, were repelled by the belligerent atmosphere, far more were attracted by the ideology of Wissenschaft, which was “virtually a way of life.”22 Stuart Wallace, in his study of British academics in World War I, published a list of fifty-six prominent British scholars who had studied in Germany, including Lord Acton, E. V. Arnold, James Bryce, H. M. Chadwick, William McDougall, A. S. Napier, W. H. R. Rivers, R. W. Seton-Watson, Henry Sidgwick, and W. R. Sorley. On August 1, 1914, the London Times carried a letter by nine scholars supporting Germany as the more civilized country in its struggle with Russia. After the invasion of Belgium this attitude was completely reversed (on August 29 the German Wolff news agency announced: “the ancient town of Louvain, rich in art treasures, no longer exists today”) and in December 1914 the Times published a letter by A. H. Sayce, professor of Assyriology at Oxford, arguing that, in science, “none of the great names” was German, that apart from Goethe there were no great names in German literature, that Schiller was a “milk-and-water Longfellow” and Kant “more than half Scottish.”23
Other scholars, writers, and artists, like the French, “perceived the war against Germany as a war…in defence of civilisation, against a barbarous, many-headed enemy.” At one extreme were those ardent patriots who believed that not even Brahms should be played in wartime Britain. Like the French, British scholars described their horror at the intellectual subservience to the state shown by German academics, though they too helped fashion propaganda. Again like the French, British scholars had long admired German scholarship, but esteem for the German way of doing things quickly withered. Philosophers found it more of a problem. “Hegelianism had indelibly marked British Idealism, the most influential school of philosophical thought in Britain before 1914.”24
The war infected scholarship in a different way where archaeology was concerned. The budget for the Deutsche Archaeologische Institut was increased between 1915 and 1916, excavations continued in Babylonia, at Tiryn, Dipylon, and Olympia and commenced at Laon, Arras, and Sois-sons in occupied France.25 Attempts, ultimately unsuccessful, were also made to “corner” the excavation market in the Ottoman Empire. Because archaeology was so close to the Kaiser’s heart, and several leading archaeologists were welcomed at his court, archaeologists, classicists, and philologists became a hot-bed of “monarchist nostalgia and apoplectic reaction” after the war.26
FROM EDEN TO BERLIN
In America, the response was more measured than in France or Great Britain (the United States did not join the war as a belligerent until April 1917). Most notably, in 1915 two leading American intellectuals—John Dewey and George Sant
ayana—both published their assessments of German philosophy and scholarship. Each was a short, pithy book.
John Dewey, then professor of philosophy at Columbia University, achieved a clear synthesis of German philosophy, linking the history of the country’s thought to the war, in an analysis that still reads well and is all the more impressive for having been written nearly twenty years before the events that led to the Holocaust. The book began life as three one-hour lectures and was given the title German Philosophy and Politics. It was also, in part, a reply to General Friedrich von Bernhardi’s book Deutschland und der nächste Krieg (Germany and the Next War), published in 1911, which had famously claimed: “Two great movements were born from German intellectual life, on which, henceforth, all the intellectual and moral progress of mankind must rest:—The Reformation and the critical philosophy…whose deepest significance consists in the attempt to reconcile the result of free inquiry with the religious needs of the heart, and thus to lay a foundation for the harmonious organisation of mankind…To no nation except the German has it been given to enjoy in its inner self ‘that which is given to mankind as a whole’…It is this quality which especially fits us for leadership in the intellectual domain and imposes on us the obligation to maintain that position.”27
Dewey’s first point was that history has shown that to think in abstract terms is dangerous, “it elevates ideas beyond the situations in which they were born and charges them with we know not what menace for the future.” He observed that British philosophy, from Francis Bacon to John Stuart Mill, had been cultivated by men of affairs rather than professors, as had happened in Germany (Kant, Fichte, Hegel). He thought there was always a connection between abstract thought and “the tendencies of collective life” and that the Germans “have philosophy in their blood.”28 In particular, he thought that Germany—and its well-trained bureaucracy—had “ready-made channels through which philosophic ideas may flow on their way to practical affairs,” and that Germany differed from the United States and Britain in that this channel was the universities rather than the newspapers. He noticed a crucial difference, he said, in that whereas most nations are proud of their great men, “Germany is proud of itself for producing Luther…A belief in the universal character of his genius thus naturally is converted into a belief of the essentially universal quality of the people who produced him.”29
Dewey attached most importance to the achievements of Kant and his idea that the two realms of science and morals are what matter most in life, that each has its own “final and authoritative constitution.” The chief mark of “distinctively German civilisation,” Dewey said, is its combination of “self-conscious idealism with unsurpassed technical efficiency and organisation…The more the Germans accomplish in the way of material conquest, the more they are conscious of fulfilling an ideal mission,” so that the “distinguishing mark of the German spirit” is a supreme regard for inner truth and the inner meaning of things, “as against, say, the externality of the Latin spirit or the utilitarianism of Angla-Saxondom.”30 Dewey conceded: “It does seem to be true that the Germans, more readily than other peoples, can withdraw themselves from the exigencies and contingencies of life into a region of Innerlichkeit, which at least seems boundless; and which can rarely be successfully uttered save through music, and a frail and tender poetry, sometimes domestic, sometimes lyric, but always full of mysterious charm.”31
A second achievement of Kant, said Dewey, after the separation of the realms, came in “the gospel of duty,” Kant’s idea of self-imposed duty as stern but noble, as a phenomenon that separates us from the animals. Equally important, however, Dewey felt that Kant had told us to do our duty without specifying what those duties were, or are.32
He also thought the distinction made in Germany between society and state was important, as was that between civilization and culture. “Civilisation is a natural and largely unconscious or involuntary growth. It is, so to speak, a by-product of the needs engendered when people live close together…Culture, on the other hand, is deliberate and conscious. It is a fruit not of man’s natural motives, but of natural motives that have been transformed by the inner spirit…And the real significance of the term ‘culture’ becomes more obvious when [Kant] adds that it involves the slow toil of education of the Inner Life, and that the attainment of culture on the part of an individual depends upon long effort by the community to which he belongs.”33
Dewey went on to examine the ideas of society and the state. In American and British usage, he said, “the state” generally refers to society “in its more organised aspects,” one government agency or another. But in Germany, “the State, if not avowedly something mystic and transcendental, is at least a moral entity, the creation of self-consciousness operating in behalf of the spiritual and ideal interests of its members. Its function is cultural, educative…its purpose is the furtherance of an ideal community…Hence the peculiar destiny of the German scholar and the German State. It was the duty and mission of German science and philosophy to contribute to the…spiritual emancipation of humanity…The scholar…is, in a peculiar sense, the direct manifestation of God in the world—the true priest…”34
This was, one can now see, a perceptive analysis of the achievements of nineteenth-century Germany and a delicate and eloquent exploration of how Germany differed from, say, France, Britain, and the United States. Dewey’s final point was that there had been an unfolding of a great sequence in that same nineteenth-century Germany—1815, 1864, 1866, 1870–71—which he put alongside the fact that Germans had accepted the idea of evolution long before Darwin came up with natural selection. Added to this, “The very fact that Germany for centuries has had no external unity proves that its selfhood is metaphysical, not a gift of circumstance…”35
In contrast, a parallel and simultaneous work by George Santayana, while not devoid of numerous perceptive comments, was written with such sarcasm and bile that the author’s attitude repeatedly got in the way of what he was trying to say. Santayana (1863–1952), born in Madrid, studied in Germany under Paulsen, and then became one of the best teachers Harvard ever had (his pupils included Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Walter Lippmann, Felix Frankfurter, and Samuel Eliot Morison). He retired back to Europe, from where he published Egotism in German Philosophy in 1916, covering much the same ground as Dewey—Kant, Fichte, Hegel—but adding Schopenhauer and Nietzsche for good measure.
Santayana didn’t think much of any of them. He thought transcendental theory was a set of “desperate delusions,” even that there was “something sinister” at work beneath it all, close to a (false) religion.36 He admitted there was “an obvious animus pervading these pages, which it was a pleasure for me to vent.”37 He conceded that the direction in which German philosophy was profound was its inwardness, its consciousness of “inward light and of absolute duties” but he thought this was egotistical, and egotism he defined as “subjectivism become proud of itself.” He thought there was “something diabolical about its courage, something satanic in its courage,” amounting to a “moral disease.”38 He thought German Idealism had inherited from Protestantism an earnestness and pious intention, that notions of the spirit or will resembled the notion of Providence. He dismissed Kant because he did not live up to his beliefs, that though he was mild-mannered himself, “his moral doctrine was in principle a perfect frame for fanaticism.”39
Hegel, he thought, had retracted all belief in a real world and set in its place his knowledge of it—a “monstrous egotism” that enabled him to pass off the prejudices of his time and country “as the real thing.” This was the wrong way round, making things conform to words, not words to things.40 He felt there was something “immature” about German thought (Nietzsche in particular): “They have not taken the trouble to decipher human nature, which is an endowment, something many-sided, unconscious, with a margin of variation, and have started instead with the will, which is only an attitude…”41 “Ideal” aims, he sa
id, were not necessarily “higher” than personal ones, indeed they were more likely to be “conventional humbug.” He pilloried the absurdity of Hegelianism by paraphrasing its message, saying that history had begun in Eden and had its end in Berlin. Nietzsche he dismissed similarly for using an abstraction, the Will to Power. But “what power would be when attained and exercised remains entirely beyond his horizon.”42 He described German philosophy as a work of genius but then qualified it in this way: “Idealism simply overlooks the all-important fact that our whole life is a compromise, an incipient loose harmony between the passions of the soul and the forces of nature.”43
BETTER FIGHTERS, WHO LOST THE WAR
So far then, in this account of World War I, the German genius has taken rather a battering. But there are other ways of looking at the events of 1914–18 and in his study of the German army and general staff, A Genius for War: The German Army and General Staff, 1807–1945 (1977), Colonel Trevor Dupuy concluded “that the Germans, uniquely, discovered the secret of institutionalising military excellence.” Particularly in World War I, Dupuy showed that although Germany was on the losing side, its defeat was due to superior numbers of the enemy and that, in most battles, and man-for-man, the Germans were better fighters. 44
