The Germans in History 9780231894173

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgment
Contents
1. The Occident: Thesis of World History
2. Tacitus and the Germans
3. The City and the World
4. The City and the World
5. Rome Has Fallen: Rome Has Triumphed
6. The Crown of Charlemagne
7. Sacred Roman Empire of the German Nation
8. Germanic Hellas on the Palatine
9. The Estates of the Empire
10. Imperium and Sacerdotium
11. The Greatest Frederick
12. Dante and the Seamless Robe
13. The Inward Path
14. The Protest Against History
15. The First Thirty Years War
16. The Categoric Imperative
17. The Second Fall of the Empire
18. The Spirit of World History
19. The City of the World
20. The Revolution of 1848
21. The Victory of Particularism
22. Bismarck as Heir of the Paulskirche
23. Prussia’s German Mandate
24. The Solution of the German Question
25. The Hall of Mirrors
26. The Statesman of Europe
27. The Black and the Red
28. Dropping the Pilot
29. National Realm of Supranationalism
30. The Second Thirty Years War
31. The Last of the Paladins
32. The Cannae of Europe
33. Republic of the Germans
34. Springtime of Europe
35. The Secret Germany
36. Ten Years After
37. Nor by the Will of the People
38. The Years of Captivity
39. The Occident: Synthesis of World History
List of Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

THE GERMANS IN HISTORY

+ USI

THE GERMANS IN HISTORY by PRINCE HUBERTUS ZU LOEWENSTEIN

AMS PRESS NEW YORK

Reprinted with the permission of Columbia University Press From the edition of 1945, New York First AMS EDITION published 1969 Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 78-95395

AMS PRESS, INC. NEW YORK, N.Y. 10003

To NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER PRESIDENT O F COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CHAMPION OF INTERNATIONAL UNDERSTANDING PHILOSOPHER, TEACHER, AND STATESMAN WHOSE WISDOM AND FRIENDSHIP HAVE GUIDED M E FOR MANY YEARS AND ANEW THROUGH T H E PAGES O F THIS HISTORY

PREFACE book was begun at Newfoundland, New Jersey, on January 4, 1943. The first handwritten draft was completed at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, on October 16 of the same year. Another eighteen months were given to revisions and corrections to bring the text to its present form. Much of the material for the book was collected in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland before 1933, and later in France, England, and the United States. Wherever it was physically possible I have gone back to the original sources of historic knowledge, the documents, chronicles, and official publications of the respective periods. It is my hope that this may help the book to become a faithful and trusted companion, since it is intended as such for all to whom the word "student" is a proud and coveted designation. The basic ideas of my conception of European and German history presented in this book have been part of my thinking since an early age. They were developed during years of study at the Universities of Munich, Hamburg, Geneva, and Berlin, and later during the period of my work as a student of constitutional and international affairs. However, it is particularly to the seven years I spent teaching history, philosophy, and international relations at over thirty universities and colleges in the United States and Canada, that I owe the present state of my historical and philosophical world view. I was constantly confronted with the problem of presenting to my students, as well as to the general public, a comprehensive picture of the spirit of Europe and of the Germans in history. I observed the need for a deeper understanding of the religious and historic forces which have given form and continuity to the events of the last two thousand years. To demonstrate the inner logic and some of the perennial traits of Occidental history, which a current pragmatic and agnostic viewpoint fails to recognize, appeared to me as a most urgent task. Precisely at this time, when the very foundations of the Christian-Occidental heritage seem so deeply shaken, we have to recall to the minds of the rash and the ill-advised that man's progress through the ages has been due to his inner certainty of a reasonable principle underlying all outward events, and of a definite telos, of a freedom more consciously willed toward which history is moving. Such a concept presupposes, of course, the existence of a stable moral order which no seeming retrogression in the conduct of the peoples, no war, no revolutionary change or any other human force will ever be able to destroy. This philosophy of history I take from the living and ever valid traditions handed down to us from Apostolic times, through Saint Augustine, the thinkers of the Carolingian and the Ottoman age, the scholastics, the THIS

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Neoplatonists o the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, Dante Alighieri, and their successors to the very threshold of modem time. It is a philosophy that results necessarily from the truths contained in the deposit of the faith. The fact that it was so widely abandoned has led directly to the totalitarian destruction of the dignity of man which we have witnessed today, and has caused the moral and international anarchy of our age, which has so mistakenly considered itself one of enlightened progress. The totalitarian aberration of the mind, the racialistic and naturalist perversion of the spirit in the forms of National Socialism, liberalistic agnosticism, and left-wing socialism have been detrimental to the historic consciousness of our time. This may explain at least part of the appalling nonsense that is produced every day with regard to the simplest facts of German and European history. That the charlatanism of the many self-styled experts on past and contemporary history is often dressed up as philosophical profundity only makes matters worse, for on a just appraisal of the spirit of Europe and of the nature of the German people and its position within the framework of the Occidental community may well depend the success or failure of international reconstruction. It is part of the ailment of our civilization that political propaganda of a self-seeking and irresponsible kind is permitted to cater to the instincts of the market place, while the tribunal of historic honesty and truth is shunned, if not disdained. Ours is an age of journalism and superficial education when even those who are men of good will may be carried away by the fanfare of organized publicity. It must be our hope that the dangers to world peace and the continuity of our civilization which have arisen out of this widespread attitude may perhaps be met by a dispassionate and well-documented presentation of the historic and spiritual reality. In line with so many of the convenient but flimsy analyses of world affairs presented today it has become customary to speak of "two Germanies," one inherently wicked, the other redeemable. It depends on the mood of the interpreter and on the currents of the hour which of the two is at one time or another regarded as the major force. In contrast to this, the present book is the story of the One Germany as it has gone through the ages. Nations, like individuals, if affected by illness or a widespread epidemic still retain their individuality and oneness. Illness is never part of the essence of a being. Of course, Germany, like any other nation, is not today what she was when the light of history fell first upon her. The man is not the child of thirty years ago, and yet there remains an identity of personality and spirit. It was not, and could not possibly have been, my intention to engage in a race between the printing press and the latest events, or to compose a detailed account of recent German and foreign affairs. Rather I aimed at presenting what must be regarded as typical according to our historic knowlf

PREFACE

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edge, and to point with some degree of accuracy, I hope, towards a possible solution of the European and German problem. However, the student may find the references and the carefully selected list of books which I have used helpful in guiding him toward further study. The responsibility for all philosophical and historical views and the factual material presented in this book is, of course, entirely my own. Others have, however, generously lent their aid in its preparation. I am anxious to express my deepest and most heartfelt gratitude to Dr. William Bridgwater, excellent scholar, Associate Editor of Columbia University Press, to whom I owe the splendid and thorough editing of the manuscript. His criticism and his unfailing help and advice, coming from the depth of his embracing historical and philosophical knowledge, have contributed to this book. I am also indebted to him for the translation of some of the poetry. Warmest thanks and all my gratitude are due to my friend and assistant, Volkmar ZuehlsdorfF, Doctor of Law of Innsbruck University, whose untiring collaboration over the years has made the writing and the completion of this book possible. His well-trained, scientific mind and sure appraisal of the things that matter within the enormous complex of two thousand years of history has been essential in the collecting and sifting of the basic factual material. The annotation of the book is also largely his work. Father Berard Vogt, O.F.M., Dean of the School of Philosophy of the Franciscan Fathers at Butler, New Jersey, has throughout the writing acted as a trusted and untiring adviser in all questions of a dogmatic and philosophical nature. Through him I received access to the Franciscan Library and to individual publications of the Scotist school of thought that are usually difficult to obtain. I am grateful to Mr. Padraic Colum, the celebrated Irish poet, who translated for publication in this book the poems "Buonaparte" by Friedrich Hölderlin and "Der Widerchrist" by Stefan George. The life work and the personal friendship of Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, heir and representative of the proud American and German democratic tradition of 1848 as well as of modern humanitarianism and republican thought, have been a source of steady inspiration. Through him my belief in the rebirth of German freedom and in the eventual triumph of international justice has been greatly strengthened. I also want to thank him warmly for the many valuable books, monographs, and pamphlets he has £iven me. It is to fulfill a debt of gratitude that I mention at this place the name of Dr. G. P. Gooch, the brilliant British historian and former member of the House of Commons, with whose friendship I have been honored for many years. The clarity of his views on historic and international affairs, his studies

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of diplomatic history, his profound ethical concept of the duties of righteous government, and his faith in morality and reason as the beacons of all human endeavor are among the most valuable and encouraging forces which have helped me to steer through the darkness and the apparent hopelessness of this last decade. Nor can I forget that it was his introduction which opened for me the gates of the American academic world. I feel deeply indebted to the officials and personnel of the libraries where I worked, particularly the New York Public Library, the Library of Columbia University, the Carnegie Library at Oberlin College, the Library of the Franciscan Fathers at Butler, New Jersey, and the British Museum in London, all of whom have extended to me their unfailing courtesy, advice, and help. Finally, to the American academic world in general, the faculties of all the colleges and universities where I have taught, and particularly Hamline University, Saint Paul, Minnesota, my adopted American Alma Mater, I want to express my gratitude. The interest, the confidence, and the many pertinent questions of my students, who attended my classes and special courses in European and German history and philosophy have enabled me to clarify in my own mind many of the problems which I am now ready to present to the public. Thus, this book is also a tribute to the eagerness and friendship which I have found among the thousands of young Americans whose teacher I was for so many years. Newfoundland, New Jersey July IS, 1945 Die Sancii Henrict Imperatoria

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LOEWENSTDN

ACKNOWLEDGMENT is made of the kindness of the following publishers for permission to quote material from books issued under their imprint: D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc., for Philipp Scheidemann, The Making of a New Germany, translated by J. E. Micheli; The Bruce Publishing Company, for Max Jordan, Beyond All Fronts; a By standest Notes on This Thirty Years War; Crown Publishers, for Rudolf Olden, Hitler, translated by Walter Ettinghaus; The John Day Company, Inc., for H. N. Brailsford, Our Settlement with Germany; Duell, Sloan & Ρearce, Inc., for Denis de Rougemont and Charlotte Muret, The Heart of Europe; E. P. Dutton & Company, Inc., for Rudolf Olden, Stresemann, translated by R. T. Clark, for Saint Augustine, The City of God, translated by John Healey, for The Latin Works of Dante, translated by A. G. Ferrers Howell and Philip H. Wicksteed, and for The Germania of Tacitus, translated by Arthur Murphy; Harper & Brothers, for The Kaiser's Memoirs, translated by Thomas R. Ybarra; Harvard University Press, for Tacitus: The Histories; The Annals, Volume II, translated by John Jackson and Clifford H. Moore; Henry Holt and Company, for Select Documents of European History, 8001920 A.D., edited and translated by Robert G. D. Laffan and others; International Publishers, for Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, translated by M. J. Olgin; Longmans, Green & Co., Inc., for G. P. Gooch, Studies in Diplomacy and Statecraft and Studies in Modem History, and for H. I. D. Ryder, Essays; The Macmillan Company, for Prince Chlodwig of Hohenlohe-Schillingfurst, Memoirs, and for Burt Estes Howard, The German Empire; William Morrow & Company, Inc., for John W. WheelerBennett, Wooden Titan: Hindenburg in Twenty Years of German History; National Catholic Welfare Conference, for Sixteen Encyclicals of His Holiness Pope Pius XI, 1926-1937; Pantheon Books, Inc., for Stefan George, Poems, translated by Carol North Valhope and Ernst Morwitz; Charles Scribner's Sons, for Nicholas Murray Butler, Across the Busy Years, Looking Forward, and The Path to Peace, and for Prince Max of Baden, Memoirs, translated by W. M. Calder and C. W. H. Sutton; Sheed and Ward, for Saint Thomas Aquinas, On the Governance of Rulers, translated by Gerald B. Phelan; Survey Associates, Inc., for Survey Graphic, Vol. XIV, issue of February, 1929; The Vanguard Press, for Friedrich Gundolf, The Mantle of Caesar, translated by Jacob Wittmer Hartmann; George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., for William Harbutt Dawson, The German Empire, 1867-1914, and the Unity Movement, and for Veit Valentin, 1848: Chapters of German G R A T E F U L ACKNOWLEDGMENT

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT

History, translated by Ethel Talbot Scheffauer; G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., for Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, translated by Ernest Flagg Henderson; The Clarendon Press, for G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, translated by T. M. Knox; Constable and Company, Ltd., for Antonina Vallentin, Stresemann, translated by Eric Sutton; William Heinemann, Ltd., for Theodore Wolff, Through Two Decades, translated by E. W. Dickes; Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., for G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, translated by E. B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson, and Lectures on the History of Philosophy, translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson; Lawrence & Wishart, Ltd., for Karl Marx, Selected Works; and MacMillan & Co., Ltd., for Gustav Stresemann, His Diaries, Letters, and Papers, translated by Eric Sutton. Full bibliographical material is given in the List of Works Cited at the end of the volume.

CONTENTS 1.

T H E OCCIDENT: THESIS OF W O R L D HISTORY

1

2.

T A C I T U S AND T H E G E R M A N S

13

3.

T H E C I T Y AND T H E W O R L D

24

4.

T H E CITY OF G O D

31

5.

ROME HAS FALLEN: R O M E H A S TRIUMPHED

42

6.

T H E CROWN OF CHARLEMAGNE

54

7.

SACRED R O M A N E M P I R E O F T H E G E R M A N N A T I O N

67

8.

G E R M A N I C H E L L A S ON T H E P A L A T I N E

76

9.

T H E ESTATES OF THE E M P I R E

89

10.

I M P E R I U M AND SACERDOTIUM

100

11.

T H E G R E A T E S T FREDERICK

114

12.

D A N T E AND T H E S E A M L E S S R O B E

126

13.

T H E INWARD P A T H

141

14.

T H E P R O T E S T AGAINST H I S T O R Y

157

15.

T H E F I R S T T H I R T Y YEARS W A R

174

16.

T H E CATEGORIC IMPERATIVE

189

17.

T H E SECOND F A L L OF T H E E M P I R E

206

18.

T H E SPIRIT OF W O R L D HISTORY

224

19.

T H E C I T Y OF T H E W O R L D

241

20.

T H E REVOLUTION O F 1 8 4 8

254

21.

T H E VICTORY O F PARTICULARISM

266

22.

BISMARCK AS H E I R O F T H E PAULS KJRCHE

278

23.

PRUSSIA'S G E R M A N M A N D A T E

288

24.

T H E SOLUTION O F T H E G E R M A N QUESTION

298

25.

T H E H A L L OF MIRRORS

313

26.

T H E STATESMAN O F E U R O P E

325

27.

T H E BLACK AND T H E R E D

340

28.

DROPPING T H E P I L O T

357

29.

NATIONAL R E A L M O F SUPRANATIONALEM

371

30.

T H E SECOND T H I R T Y YEARS W A R

388

31.

T H E L A S T OF T H E PALADINS

402

32.

T H E C A N N A E OF E U R O P E

415

33.

REPUBLIC OF T H E G E R M A N S

427

34.

SPRINGTIME O F E U R O P E

440

35.

T H E SECRET G E R M A N Y

454

36.

T E N YEARS A F T E R

463

37.

N O R BY THE W I L L O F T H E P E O P L E

477

38.

T H E YEARS O F CAPTIVITY

488

39.

T H E OCCIDENT: SYNTHESIS O F W O R L D HISTORY

501

L I S T O F W O R K S CITED

513

INDEX

545

Gentibm est alüs teUus data limite certo: Romanae spatium est urbis et orbis idem. OVID, Fasti π. 683-84

1 THE OCCIDENT: THESIS OF WORLD HISTORY l dare to contend that, had the Romans not existed, the whole of history would be worthless. RANKE TO KING MAXIMILIAN I I OF BAVARIA. E V E R since man awoke to consciousness of his unique position within the created world, history has occupied his mind, because it touches upon his innermost nature. If history were nothing but a chaotic agglomeration of incoherent events determined by a blind fate, if it were not endowed with a rational meaning or moving toward a definite telos of justice and developed morality, then obviously man's life also could have no deeper import—a thought which reason rejects, conscience dreads, and a dispassionate weighing of the known facts unmistakably disowns. Hence, to perceive in history, no less than in the starry sky above us and the moral law in our hearts, the working of a supreme and personal Wisdom is an intrinsic part of the fundamental concepts of organized mankind. T h e process of history," Ernest Barker remarks in his introduction to St Augustine's City of God, "is a process making for His Kingdom."1 In similar words this idea, inherent in the human mind itself, has been expressed throughout the ages. "God governs the world," Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel says in his Philosophy of History, "the actual working of His government—the carrying out of His plan—is the History of the World."2 In times like ours, when the very foundations of our culture, our traditions —even our faith—seem shaken beyond the hope of restitution, only such a belief can guide us through the utter darkness of contemporary events—a darkness so huge that it threatens to engulf the established order of the past, together with all the guideposts of the future. Historic pessimism, or rather, historic nihilism, is not, it seems to us, supported by the facts. Experience, enlightened by faith and philosophy, teaches that through all errors and defeats and in spite of many retrogressions the historic process moves towards greater reason in organized society and towards greater liberty as well. Man is learning to will more freely what is morally good.

The City of God, p. xxxii. Philosophie der Welt-Geschichte, in Sämtliche Werke, Vili, 55; English translation by J. Sibree, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 38. 1

2

2

THE OCCIDENT

It is patent that World Reason cannot be identical with the universe but must transcend its appearance and essence. A purely immanent Spirit would reduce reality to a phantasm, or lose self-consciousness and thereby become self-contradictory. This fact we may recognize with our own reason, a selfconscious principle that knows of its individual existence. Plato, in the sixth book of the Republic, has put the relationship between the human mind and the "Supreme Idea" into classic expression in the parable of the human eye, which, though not the sun, is sunlike.* In the realm of the spirit, the relation between our reason and the Supreme Cood is similar: the latter is the pristine source of all our knowledge, and of truth, which the human spirit conceives. Goethe must have been thinking of the Platonic argument when in his Science of Colors he wrote these verses: War' nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, Wie könnten wir das Licht erblicken? Lebt' nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft, Wie könnt' uns Göttliches entzücken? Were the eye not to the sun akin, How could we see the light in splendor shine? And if the word of God dwelt not within, How could we savor things divine?4 Montesquieu, to whom modem constitutional law owes its very foundations, made this idea the starting point for his analysis. "They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we behold in the world," he wrote in The Spirit of Laws, "talk very absurdly; for can any thing be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive of intelligent beings?" 0 The world of reason, he rightly argues, no less than the world of matter, must have its stable laws, without which neither could exist. These laws, however, are not mechanical, nor do they nullify man's most precious gift, freedom of the will. We may compare them to a ship sailing on a charted course. On board, men may move freely wherever they wish; they may think and work and plan, or retire into sleep or inactivity. They may even leave the ship. But the waves will not carry them for long, while the ship will continue its voyage without them, undisturbed. From this point of view, past, present, and future are not separate categories, for history is also the ever-present memory of mankind, within which we may move freely in all directions. Nothing is really past; what has once » Politeti VI. 9. 4 Entwurf einer Farbenlehre, Introduction, in Goethes Werke, Zweite Abteilung, I, p. xxxi. 5 De Γ esprit des lois, Book I, Chap. 1, in Oeuvres complètes, III, 90; English translation by Thomas Nugent, The Spirit of Laws, I, 1.

THE OCCIDENT

3

been still remains, no less indestructible th^n matter and energy in the physical world. While world history should by definition mean the history of mankind, we are justified in applying that term also to the significant parts of history alone —to those, in particular, which are conscious of the historic process and assume a universal representation of the whole. It belongs to the telos of history that the entire human race will eventually be brought into the orbit of historic self-consciousness, and we shall call "world-historic" those peoples and individuals whose ideas and actions have clearly worked toward that end. The twofold aspect of mankind should be borne in mind. For Christian thought, humanity is the one mystical body of Christ; but, in its proper category, it also possesses physical reality as a temporal and natural entity. The same Spirit has created and sustains mankind both spiritually and physically. There is no irreconcilable dualism of absolute principles, but a dialectical conflict within mankind itself, caused by the twofold citizenship of its members. This conflict can be recognized as one of the moving forces of history. The telos of history, when fulfilled, may present a synthesis of both orders —a belief which, at least since Charlemagne, has been a forceful impulse in shaping the political order of Europe and the Mediterranean world. The historic, moral, and cultural entity of the European-Mediterranean orbit we shall call the "Occident." And the Occident is the thesis of world history. It was here that the idea of human oneness was first realized. The antithesis to the one Occidental realm is found in the national aspirations of its peoples, whether they arose within the Occident itself or were carried into it from outside. This statement of the thesis and antithesis (it need hardly be said) is not intended to pass judgment on what is good or bad. History itself is the law and the judge, and outward standards of subjective preferences, noble and exalted though they may be, are inadequate arguments against its verdicts. In spite of all the hardships, the destruction, and the apparent retrogressions caused by the dialectical conflict between the Occident and the nations, this tension has proved to be the chief moving force in the development of our world. Nor is the conflict confined to the wider European plane; it is repeated, on a smaller scale, within the nations themselves, particularly within the German nation, which for better or worse has been ever since its birth integrally bound to the idea of the Occident. What is usually called the conflict between the universal and the nationalistic trends in German thought, politics, and history has its origin in the two possible attitudes towards the Occidental community. Here we shall, therefore, treat alternately with the theses and antitheses of both European and German history, their origins, development, and mutual relations of dialectical conflicts and syntheses.

4

THE OCCIDENT

Before the power of Rome extended over the known world, a great number of independent communities had established themselves around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Their independence expressed itself not only in politics and social life but also in the spheres of culture and religion. While a certain notion of a supreme and supranational Being, of which traces can be found among many peoples in the pagan world, was never totally obscured, practical worship was characterized by local rituals and an identification of the deities with the spirit of the political community—the tribe, the city, the state, the kingdom. During these periods, antecedent to world history in the proper sense, nations and peoples received their first impulses toward development of their self-consciousness, while their neighborly relations, affinities of cult, and social concepts prepared them for a wider community to come. The time for this was ripe after the Punic Wars, and it was then that our world, as we know it, began to take shape. "How suddenly did the earth become desolated of free nations," Leopold von Ranke remarks in his History of the Popes ( a work praised by scholars of all denominations). "The subjugation of the state necessarily involved the downfall of the national religion. . . . The worship of Isis was doubtless intelligible in Egypt . . . in Rome this worship became a senseless idolatry. . . . However deeply we may sympathize with the fall of so many free states, we cannot fail to perceive that a new life sprang immediately from their ruins." · The elimination of national independence destroyed all barriers of exclusive nationality. The nations were conquered by Rome, but this very act blended and united them. The subjects of the empire, which came to be regarded as comprising the whole world, learned to consider themselves as one people and to recognize their freedom in this new, greater concept. "From this moment," Ranke rightly concludes, "the human family began to acquire the consciousness of its universal brotherhood. It was at that time of world development that Jesus Christ was bom." With this event, the seeds of another unity, implanted into the creation from the beginning, could mature. Rome, with all its might and law, had not been able to overcome its own natural limitations. But it had achieved a secular préfiguration of that greater unity to come—a concept of the Roman Empire which like a silver thread runs through the centuries of Christian history. It was Roman legal and cultural supranationalism which not only prepared the first political body for a Power cuius regni non erit finis/ but also rendered men capable of receiving the message of St. Paul to the Athe• Die Römischen Päpste in den letzten vier Jahrhunderten, in Sämmtliche XXXVII, 4-5; English translation by E. Fowler, History of the Popes, I, 4. 7 Nicene Creed.

Werke,

THE OCCIDENT

o

nians: that God had made from one common origin every race of men to dwell upon the whole face of the earth.' It is the "cunning of the Idea" * that it uses human desires, human passions even, to promote and realize its own true designs. The Roman Empire, which was to fulfill a world-historic mission, had grown out of a small Italic town. Its citizens had pushed the borders of their community farther and farther, for reasons of self-defense and with the natural instinct for conquest inherent in all young nations, rather than with any consciousness of a future universal mandate. Yet Virgil was justified in projecting a teleological and ethical idea into Rome's legendary beginnings. I refer to the familiar prophecy of Anchises in the Aeneid: Tu regere imperio populos Romane memento. Hae tibi erunt artes, pacisque imponere morem Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.10 "Roman, be thou mindful of swaying the peoples with dominion. These be thy arts: to impose the customs of peace, to spare the vanquished and to humble the proud with might." There is a double, intentional anachronism in these verses. At the time of Anchises, there were as yet no "Romans"; and when Virgil conceived this poem, "Roman" had almost ceased to be a purely national designation. It already stood for a universal, necessary order, just as Imperium no longer signified military command and domination but organized mankind ministered to by Roman law and arms. Virgil, the greatest poet and most representative thinker of his age, Dante Alighieri's guide through the Inferno and Purgatory, had in no uncertain terms announced the coming of a kingdom even greater than the Roman universe. His prophecy in the Fourth Eclogue was read with reverence throughout the Middle Ages and helped to link medieval thought with its classic foundations. Writing a short time before the birth of Christ, the poet conjured up the vision of a Messianic realm that was at hand. A wondrous Child would soon be born, a Son of Cod. "Begin to assume, I pray, your sovereign honours, (the time will soon arrive), dear offspring of the gods, majestic child of Jove," Virgil addresses Him who, "with his father's virtues shall rule a reconciled world."11 At that time, the Emperor Augustus could close the gates of the temple of Janus; there was universal peace for the first time in centuries. In the long Acts 17:20. • The expression is that of Hegel: "Man kann es die List der Vernunft nennen, dass sie die Leidenschaften für sich wirken lässt." Philosophie der Web-Geschichte, in Sämtliche Werke, VIII, 83. io Aeneis vi. 851-53. 11 Bucolica IV. 17, 48—49; English translation by James Lonsdale and Samuel Lee, The Eclogues or Bucolics, in The Classics, Greek and Latin, Latin, II, 34-35. 8

THE OCCIDENT

β

period of peace that was still to follow, the new creed could spread "like a sunbeam over the face of the earth," as Eusebius wrote,12 beyond the historic bounds of the empire to those peoples who one day would hold the mandate of perpetuating the mission that was Rome's. Chieftains and popular leaders not under the wings of the eagle vied for the honors which the Roman Senate had to bestow. Among them was Ariovistus, ruler of the Germanic Suevians, who, probably on Caesar's initiative, had in 59 B.C. received the titles of king and "friend of the Roman people." A year later, Caesar was to meet him on the field of battle. In Caesar's later campaigns, we find Germanic auxiliaries among his troops. With their help he defeated Vercingetorix at Alesia and won the worldhistoric battle of Pharsalus (48 B.C.). On that day, the rising monarchy won its decisive victory over the aristocratic republicanism of Pompey, and the foundations were laid for the structure of a Europe which was to endure for centuries. Thus, at the very threshold of imperial Occidental history, we find the sons of Germany fighting on both sides: as opponents of the empire, defending their own rights, and as the instruments of that selfsame empire. There is a tradition (to which I give not the slightest credence) that Ariovistus was the founder of the house of Wittelsbach. If I perform the mental experiment of looking at things through the eyes of this, my legendary ancestor, I can well understand his ambivalent attitude towards the power of Rome. I, too, would have felt attracted and repelled at the same time. Rome stood for everything that was great, mighty, modem; its dominion reached from sea to sea; Roman traders, numerous in the province of Southem Gaul (where the Suevians had settled after crossing the Rhine under Ariovistus, perhaps as early as 73 or 71 B.C.), had brought many unheard-of luxuries from Italy and the Orient; and Roman arms were superior to all others. Yet Rome was also the power that had subjugated the peoples; Roman emissaries were busy planting the seeds of discord among those still un· conquered. The provinces were forced to pay heavy tribute and taxes, and more money went into the pockets of the administrators. Was it not well known that Julius Caesar himself intended to use his proconsulship in Gaul, as he had used his propraetorship in Spain, to enrich himself and pay off the debts incurred in Roman luxury and in the quest for power? In the character of the Germans there has always been a paradoxical tendency to admire, and yet disdain, the things that are foreign; to look wistfully across the frontiers, and yet take pride in being simpler, purer, less corrupt than their neighbors. In modem times, this has only too frequently led Germans to abuse others for their commercial spirit, while at the same time longing to do exactly the things so haughtily contemned. 12

Historia ecclesiastica π. 3, in Migne, Patrologiae cursus complétas, Greek, XX, 142.

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7

Ariovistus, so he told Caesar, had moved across the Rhine not for love of conquest, but on the urgent request of the Sequani, a Gallic tribe. This claim one need take no more seriously than Caesar's contention that he opposed the Germanic ruler only because his heart had been moved by the pleas of the Druid Diviciacus of the Aeduan tribe. Since time immemorial men have tried to avoid the blame of aggressive warfare; hypocritical as they may be, such excuses are a sign of awakening moral conscience. No doubt Ariovistus and his one hundred and twenty thousand men ( if we accept Caesar's figure as correct) coveted the fertile Alsatian fields, after they had tasted in their westward migration the mild climate of the region surrounding the present Heidelberg. Since the Roman Senate, always masterful in its policy of divide and rule and of appeasement until the time chosen for war, kept on friendly terms with him no less than with the Aeduans, Ariovistus may have believed that an armed conflict need never come.1' But the downfall of Ariovistus was inevitable. He, a minorfigure,the ruler of a people whose historic mandate had not yet begun, could not stand in the path of the great man whose triumph was needed by history. Caesar's conquest of Gaul opened the future heartlands of Europe. "The deeds of great men," Hegel writes in his Philosophy of History, "who are the Individuals of the World's History [that is, those whose personal impulses serve at the same time an historic necessity], thus appear not only justified in view of that intrinsic result of which they were not conscious, but also from the point of view of the secular moralist. . . . The Litany of private virtues—modesty, humility, philanthropy and forbearance—must not be raised against them."14 "Caesar was contending for the maintenance of his position, honour, and safety," Hegel explains; "and, since the power of his opponents included the sovereignty over the provinces of the Roman Empire, his victory secured for him the conquest of that entire Empire. . . . That which secured for him the execution of a design, which in the first instance was of a negative import— the Autocracy of Rome,—was, however, at the same time an independently necessary feature in the history of Rome and of the world."15 We know Caesar much as he himself wanted to be seen, and his Commentaries have throughout the ages remained the classic expression of a genius whose universal richness allowed him to be brief and factual. More even than Augustus, Caesar, whose ambitions forwarded the designs of history, lives on as founder of the ecumenical empire, who preserved the republic by overcoming it, the Pantocrator over all tribes and particular dominions. The defeat of a Germanic tribe by Kaiser Julius was perhaps the first his" For specific facts cited in this and the preceding paragraph, see Commentarti ι. 31, 31-33, 44. » Philosophie der Welt-Geschichte, in Sämtliche Werke, Vili, 153-54; English translation by J. Sibree, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 70. » Ibid., VIII, 67-68; English, p. 31.

8

THE OCCIDENT

tone impube for the later development of the Germans toward a supranational commonwealth. It seems to be part of the laws of history that the force which destroys at the same time creates the forms needed for new life. In one summer, from June to September of the year 58 B.C.—as Caesar could report back to Rome, to his hopeful friends and to the jealous Senatorial party—he had completed two major wars. With armies greatly inferior in numbers to his enemies, he had defeated the Helvetians and driven the Suevians back across the Rhine. "No doubt Caesars fame," Friedrich Gundolf remarks, "had spread northward from the Rhine even over the Teutonic forests and farms as early as the time of Ariovistus."14 Caesar, the victor over Ariovistus, became for the Nordic peoples the symbol of the world conqueror. His name spread awe and amazement, and to demonstrate the legitimacy of their claims as universal rulers all the Roman and Roman-German emperors called themselves Caesar, the supreme name of earthly power. How persistent the regard for the name was may be seen in a work composed in the twelfth century, in the reign of Emperor Henry IV. This was the Anno Lied, which deals in medieval language with world history and with God's government of the world.17 We are indebted to Herders historic vision for drawing interest anew to this important work, which is of immeasurable value for understanding German political psychology. It mirrors with great clarity the ambivalent German attitude toward the empire: pride in the rebellion against the conqueror, equal pride in the Germanic contribution to Caesar's glory.18 Pharsalus is described with poetic vigor, and Caesar, at first the enemy of the German freemen, becomes their guide to the gates of the universal kingdom, Dos Reich, of which all nations should form self-conscious parts. Caesar's two crossings of the Rhine, in 55 and 53 B.C., did not mature into lasting conquests. Nor were they so intended. They were military demonstrations lasting only a few weeks—extended commando raids, so to speak, le Caesar; Geschichte seines Ruhms, p. 59; English translation by Jacob Wittmer Hartmann, The Mantle of Caesar, p. 70. 17 A song of praise for St. Anno, archbishop of Cologne, guardian of the child emperor Henry IV, it was composed by a Francoman clergyman shortly after Anno's death, probably in 1105, and was no doubt intended to prepare the way for his canonization. It was first published by Martin Opitz, in 1639, from a manuscript that has since been lost. The authoritative edition is by Max Roediger in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores qui vernacula lingua usi sunt, Vol. I, Part 1, pp. 64-132. " Chapters 18-24, ibid., pp. 121-25. 'The noble Caesar, after whom until this day kings are called Kaiser," conquers the Suevians, Bavarians, Saxons, and Franks. But when the Roman Senate refuses him entry into the city, he returns to Germany to make known his plight "to all the lords that were in the Reich," asking for their help, which they grant with such ready enthusiasm that before the might of his army from Germany and Gaul, Cato, Pompey, and the Senate flee to Egypt. After defeating them, Caesar returns to Rome in triumph, assumes imperial power, ana becomes the teacher of the Germans, who "since that time were welcome and honored in Rome."

THE OCCIDENT

9

which yet had a constructive psychological purpose. He impressed upon the Germans that for him and his trained military engineers the Rhine was no serious obstacle. At the same time, he strengthened the bonds of friendship with the Ubians, one of the Germanic tribes whom the Suevians had made tributary. During both expeditions, Caesar tried in vain to locate the Suevians; they liad evacuated their populated places and withdrawn far inland. Through the years to the campaign against Russia in 1941, such strategy has time and again proved the wisest defense against a militarily superior army invading a vast territory. In the year 9 A.D., it was to prove fatal to the legions of P. Quintilius Varus, annihilated in the battle in the Teutoburg Forest. But Caesar was too wise to expose himself to the vicissitudes of a strange soil and a rigorous climate favorable to his enemies. Indeed, he thought so highly of the Suevians* military tactics that he, the master of strategy, adopted from them an important change in the disposition of battle order. Like them, he interspersed agile footmen among his cavalry. This rearrangement could be compared in modern warfare to the coordination of infantry and mechanized units. Such tactics were to contribute to Caesar s victory at Pharsalus. Caesar's second expedition into Germany gave him firsthand knowledge of that vast country, which embraced about one third of Europe. German tribes inhabited more than Central Europe; they reached out eastward far into the present Poland. Later, when the Goths left their Nordic homes, the eastern borders must have run along the Don and the northern shores of the Sea of Azov. Scandinavia was also called "Germany" by the Romans, and German tribes lived all along the Danube. Toward the end of his report on his second expedition, just when the sensation-hungry readers of the capital may have begun to wonder why no further conquests had been added to his exploits, Caesar, with masterful psychology, inserted his description of the lands and customs of the Gauls and Germans.1* The scion of the Julian house which traced its descent from the gods must have been genuinely interested in the religious and social modes of life he had encountered. His tone is never that of the moralist; he is neither shocked nor indignant, not even when he speaks of blood-darkened practices. Nor does he assume an air of condescension when he describes barbarous customs. The world outside the empire was so full of oddities that a true Roman could not possibly pass judgment; his own superiority seemed so much beyond dispute that he need not underline it by talking down to peoples who were inferior by the very fact that they were barbarians. At times, it seems to me, one may notice a faint smile on Caesar's lips—as when he speaks of the Germans' chastity, or satisfies the curiosity of his Roman readers by serving them the tales they would like to hear. Later Emperor Claudius was to find it necessary to suppress the practices " Commentarti

vi. 1 1 - 2 8 .

10

THE OCCIDENT

of the Druid priesthood in Caul. The power of the Druids over hidden forces, their human sacrifices, and their political influence may have made it necessary for the wise and educated old man to take such a step. Caesar writes about the Druids dispassionately and in matter-of-fact manner. Unlike Claudius, he had no fear for the safety of the Roman deities. Later, at the Ptolemaic court in Egypt, he was to accept the quasidivine honors paid to him with the same detachment he showed in writing on the Druids, their belief in reincarnation, and their knowledge of the stars and celestial orbits. Caesar's remarks on the religion of the Germans are brief, and we must turn to Tacitus and other sources for more illuminating information. "The Germans," Caesar writes in his Commentaries, "have neither Druids to preside over sacred offices, nor do they pay great regard to sacrifices.20 They rank in the number of the gods those alone whom they behold, and by whose instrumentality they are obviously benefited, namely, the sun, fire, and the moon; they have not heard of the other deities even by report."21 As a country, Germany cannot have been attractive to Caesar. He mentions the almost limitless woods, the "Hercynian Forest," at least nine days in breadth even for a quick traveler; no person living in Western Germany had ever reached the eastern extremity of that forest, even though some had journeyed for as many as sixty days.22 In this forest, Caesar tells his startled readers in faraway Rome, there lives many a strange animal. There are elks without joints or ligatures in their legs, so that they never he down, for if they did, they could not get up again. To sleep, these creatures lean against trees, reclining only slightly. There is, too, an amazing ox that looks like a stag and has a single enormous horn upon his forehead—a horn branching out at the top like a palmtree. Still another strange denizen of the forest is only a little smaller than an elephant but has the shape of a bull.23 Instead of having rigid private property, the Germans practiced a kind of primitive agrarian socialism. The reasons they gave for this system, according to Caesar, seem of some timely interest today. They argued that in this way men may be prevented from acquiring large estates and the more powerful are kept from driving the weaker out of their possessions; thus, no division or 20 "We must keep in mind that Caesar never really stayed on German soil and that he had intelligence of these tilings only by hearsay from the Germans and Gauls in his army. Only this fact can explain his statement that uie Germans knew neither priests nor sacrifices." Prince Max zu Loewenstein, Der Gallische Krieg von C. Julius Caesar, note, p. 193. 21 Commentarli vi. 21; English translation by W. A. McDewitte, Commentaries, in The Classics, Greek and Latin, Latin, V, 44. 22 Commentarti vi. 25. "I see that it was known by report to Eratosthenes and some other Creeks, who called it the Orcynian Forest," Caesar remarks in parenthesis. It is quite probable that he had with him at his headquarters a copy of the Geographica ( the main work of this Alexandrian philosopher of the third century B.c., the founder of astronomical geography) together with other works that might be useful in his campaigns. 23 Ibid. vi. 26-28.

THE OCCIDENT

11

disorder can be caused by difference of wealth. Moreover, the common people are less easily dissatisfied, because their property is equal to that of the most powerful." The Germans are, Caesar states, a militant people, devoted to the arts of war and hunting and inured to fatigue.2® It seems probable that the long, cold winter of the country must have contributed to their desire for lands of sun and plenty. In these respects, too, the common ancestors of the modem Germans, British, Netherlanders, and Scandinavians shared many traits with the warring and hunting tribes of North America. Yet, the restlessness in the souls of the Nordics cannot be explained simply by climatic reasons. The West and South exerted a powerful attraction, which had brought Ariovistus into conflict with the lord of the next half millennium, Rome, and was to continue throughout European history, long after England, Germany, and the northern countries had becomeflourishingcenters of culture. But the migration of peoples and warlike enterprises had been transformed into the Roman-German synthesis of culture, which characterizes all later developments. This longing for the classic soil has not died down in modem times. We have only to think of Winckelmann's and Goethe's journeys to Italy—journeys that bore rich fruit for world culture—or of Lord Byron, Shelley, Wagner, and countless other poets, painters, musicians, and scientists. Caesar exalts the ancient Germans' virtue of hospitality. "To injure guests," he says, "they regard as impious; they defend from wrong those who have come to them for any purpose whatever, and deem them inviolable; to them the houses of all are open and maintenance is freely supplied."2* Tacitus confirmed this a hundred and fifty years later. "Hospitality and convivial pleasure," he writes in his Germania, "are no where so liberally enjoyed. To refuse admittance to a guest were an outrage against humanity." " To so eminently political a mind as Caesar's, it must have seemed strange that this people had no common magistrate in time of peace. The chiefs of provinces or cantons administered justice and settled controversies among their own people—a sign of localism that may point toward a sort of early federal structure. Probably not many men among the educated classes failed to read Caesar's Commentaries; through excerpts, public speeches, and extended references the work certainly became widely known among the people of Rome and throughout the empire. We may assume that when Augustus succeeded to the honors of his adoptive father, the knowledge of the northern people who » Ibid. vi. 23-24. « Ibid., vi. 22. 2« Ibid., vi. 23; English, V, 45. Germania XXI; English translation by Arthur Murphy, in The Classics, Greek and Latin, Latín, V, 383-84. 27

12

T H E OCCIDENT

had already twice challenged Rome, first at the time of Caius Marius, Caesar's uncle by marriage, and now again, a people who had nevertheless recently helped to establish Roman power, must have been extremely widespread. And soon the Germans came to be known throughout the Roman empire by more than hearsay. "Who is there among you that hath not heard of the great number of Germans?" King Herod Agrippa could address his people, shortly before the outbreak of the Jewish War (66-73 A . D . ) . " Y O U have, to be sure, yourselves seen them to be strong and tall, and that frequently." They live in an immense country bounded by the Rhine, and they are fierce in battle. And the Jewish king added, not without admiration: "These Germans . . . have minds greater than their bodies, and a soul that despises death." 2" Counting on the sympathies of Hermann the Cheruscian ( called in Latin, Arminius), who had received a Roman education, Augustus' general P. Quintilius Varus ventured more deeply into Germany than the great Julius had deemed wise. The battle of Teutoburg that ensued was an event decisive for German-Roman relations and, in fact, decisive for the future trend of European history. 2 8 Josephus Flavius, De beilo Judaico π. 16; English translation by William Whiston, The Jewish War, in The Works of Josephtu, III, 516-17.

2 TACITUS AND THE GERMANS We have triumphed, and Germany is still

unconquered. TACITUS, Germania xxxvn.

IT WAS due to the victory of Arminius, "undoubtedly the liberator of Germany," as Tacitus calls him in his Annals,1 that the Rhine, rather than the Elbe, or perhaps even the Vistula and the Baltic Sea, became the permanent frontier of the empire. This fact the victorious campaigns of Tiberius and Germanicus could not change, though with the eagles of the defeated legions they recovered the honor of the Roman arms. Only a loose chain of Roman forts and trading posts was established along the Elbe, probably as far inland as the Sudeten Mountains, and the Frisian coast was covered by a thin surface of Roman culture. Domitian completed in 83 the conquest of the Agri Decumati up to Coblenz (including present-day Baden, Württemberg, and parts of Hesse), which Vespasian had begun in 73-74 A.D. But these new provinces were regarded only as a glacis for the better defense of the empire. The great system of Roman walls, the Limes of Upper Germany and Rhaetia running from the lower Rhine to the Danube, indicated that here the eagle had found his outermost resting place. The ruins of these forts, camps, and entrenchments, impregnated with the aura of a living past, still convey a feeling of their Once world-historic importance. The battle of the year 9 A.D. had other, even greater consequences. Arminius and some of his lieutenants had learned the art of warfare in Rome, but their warriors, at whose hands the proud legions had met disaster, were mere barbarians who dwelled in the midst of an anarchical vastness. Mithridates, the king of Pontus, as Hannibal before him, had defeated Roman armies; the Parthians had slain Crassus, Caesar's triumvir—but all these were powers whom Romans could acknowledge as their equals. No such standard could apply to the Germanic tribes. What was the use of carrying Arminius' wife and son and hosts of other golden-haired barbarians in triumph through the streets of Rome? One could not lay hand upon the formidable woods and hills or upon all those tribes 1 Annates n. 88. "A man who," Tacitus continues this praise of Arminius, "not in its infancy as captains and kings before him, but in the high noon of its sovereignty, threw down the challenge to the Roman nation, in battle with ambiguous results, in war without defeat; he completed thirty-seven years of life, twelve of power, and to this day is sung in tribal lays." English translation by John Jackson, The Annals, II, 519.

TACITUS AND THE GERMANS 14 whose homes, as Tacitus put it, extended to the very limits of nature.2 The numbers of the three legions, whom Quintilius Varus could not bring back to his emperor, never again appeared in the Roman army—a sign to show how deeply the empire must have felt the shock. For the first time it was confronted with an unknown, and the imperial leaders were too honest and too sober not to realize that a limit to their power had been reached, not merely geographically. It is, of course, futile to speculate on what course European history might have taken had the verdict of Teutoburg been different. Perhaps it was a wrong verdict after all (for history can err in its partial judgments, which are influenced by human doings; only the final verdict is infallible). If Arminius had been defeated, the Rhine for hundreds of years would not have been a boundary but a river link between the Roman-Celtic and the Germanic worlds. However, for the sake of a just historic appraisal it should be said that Teutoburg, through legend and tradition, has been an important factor in the Germanic development toward self-consciousness, from which all tribes profited, including those in Rritain and Scandinavia. The influx of Germans into the Roman army and into the border provinces continued. Germanic pride with regard to things Roman has at no time prevented the Nordic peoples from drawing all possible benefits from the empire—a statement which would need no emphasis, had not foolish and nationalistic modern propaganda distorted these facts, too. Nor was there any racial contempt towards the barbarians on the part of the Romans. It was characteristic of their statesmanship that, untroubled by hatred or prejudice, moved only by expediency, they either fought an enemy or assimilated and used him. They did not indulge in national dislikes or allow preferences to determine their policies. Even had they done so, their bias would probably have been all in favor of the Germans. To Roman men and women alike, the Germans soon became the ideal of human beauty. Roman ladies dyed their hair to imitate the Nordic gold, and men looked with envy on the strength, the proportions, even the natural grace of the barbarians. Rome, by subjugating the nations, had lost its own national features. Even in its administration, it was not the Latin descent that mattered but the acceptance of the Roman idea, the honor of the state, service to the universal dominion of Rome. Thirteen centuries later, Petrarch could still write to Emperor Charles IV that through Rome all nationalities were changed and transformed; its touch meant a second birth into a supranational nation. Nerva (96-98 A.D.) was the last Roman in the strict sense of the word to hold the universal throne. His successor, Emperor Trajan (in whose reign Tacitus wrote the Germania, the source of most of our information on the Germans of the Antonine period) was a Spaniard. After him, other colonials, barbarians, even an Arab, were to hold the supreme office. ' Germania XLV.

TACITOS AND THE GERMANS

15

Trajan, when he received the news that through Nerva's adoption he had succeeded to the throne after the emperor's death, was with his legions in Lower Germany. At this post he remained for a whole year before visiting the capital. Hence, it is perhaps fair to assume that Roman interest in the Germans must have been intense. Hegel has warned us against exaggerating the virtue of primitivity. Those forests of Germany, he says, "have always passed for the abodes of free peoples, and Tacitus sketched his celebrated picture of Germany with a certain love and longing—contrasting it with the corruption and artificiality of that world to which he himself belonged. But we must not on this account regard such a state of barbarism as an exalted one, or fall into some such error as Rousseau's, who represents the condition of the American savages as one in which man is in possession of true freedom." * I shall, however, deal with Tacitus at some length, partly because so much inexcusable nonsense has recently been written about the Germania by men who obviously relied on the laziness of their readers to keep them from looking up the original source, partly because some of Tacitus' observations are essential to our interpretation of European-German history. As Hegel so rightly remarked, Tacitus had an educational purpose in mind, apart from being urged as an historian to deal with a most timely subject. As a moralist—in this way quite different from Caesar—he held out to Roman society, which he considered degenerate and badly in need of the warlike virtues of earlier days, the strength and the simple mode of life of a yet unspoiled people. As a country, Germany seemed to him even less attractive than it had to Caesar. Only the affection of a native for his mother country, he writes, could make life there supportable. Certainly the Germans must be an indigenous race, for who would want to leave the softer climates of Asia, Africa, or Italy to settle where nature offers only scenes of deformity?4 He could not know that the Germanic tribes; as members of the same Indo-European family, were closely akin to the Latin nations. Still less could it occur to him that the barbarous tongues of Germany and Britain—the latter conquered by Agricola, Tacitus' father-in-law—had the same roots as Greek and Latin. He thought that the general characteristics of the Germans, their yellow hair and stern blue eyes, were due to a pure race free from intermarriages 5—an understandable error, since to a foreigner all the members of another nation usually look alike. Only years of intimate knowledge will enable a European to distinguish the individual features of Japanese or Chinese as easily as among his own people. » Philosophie der Welt-Geschichte, in Sämtliche Werke, Vili, 775; English translation by J. Sibree, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 360. * Germania π. « Ibid. TV.

16

TACITUS AND THE GERMANS

The Germanic myths tell us about brown- and black-haired men. In the time of Tacitus a great deal of intermarriage must already have taken place in the border provinces of the empire and the adjacent regions. In Noricum and all the Alpine provinces we stillfindstrong Celtic and Dinarian ( probably Asiatic) influences. In the Rhineland, the Roman and Mediterranean heritage is unmistakable in the faces of the people. In later centuries, after the Germanic tribes had lost all the land east of the Elbe to the onrushing Slavs and were reconquering it only by a slow and arduous process, more mixed blood was introduced in abundance into the Germanic national body. Perhaps the climate of Central Europe then was colder than it is today; Tacitus calls even Western Germany moist and swampy." Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, notes the interesting fact that the Rhine and Danube were frequently frozen, permitting cavalry and heavy wagons to pass over the ice. The reindeer, which needs a climate far colder than that of modern Central Europe, then lived in great numbers south of the Baltic Sea. Gibbon thinks that eighteenth-century Canada may have had climatic conditions somewhat like those of Tacitus' Germany7—a very true remark, I believe, since climates are partly man-made and change with the hewing down of the woods, the tilling of the soil, and other physical-cultural factors. But by the third century, Emperor Probus was already planting the first vineyards on the Rhenish hills, and to judge from the sumptuous villas, palaces, and cities that in Roman times filled the bland valley I am inclined to think that Tacitus may have been guilty of too sweeping a generalization. Gold, silver, and iron had probably not yet been discovered in any significant amounts. German arms were inferior to those of the Romans; they had darts and clubs and pointed stones, but few swords and lances. Very soon, of course, Roman merchants sold or bartered to them whatever arms they desired—in this respect, human conduct has not greatly changed. And the Germans who had served as Roman soldiers frequently returned with their arms. Banquets the Germans considered the best occasions for transacting business and discussing all important matters such as family alliances, the election of chiefs, and even questions of war or peace.6 This custom has more or less disappeared in Germany, but a foreigner might maintain, with some bewilderment, that it is still observed in America. Germanic drinking habits, according to Tacitus, were of the lowest type.· Their main beverage seems to have been not unlike a mixture of beer and whisky—Tacitus could be no clearer on the subject than a Continental European could be today on Anglo-Saxon mixed drinks. Foggy, humid climates and chilly houses seem to make for strong beverages, while more fortunate lands can get along with sunshine and light wine. » Ibid. v. » The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I, 209-10, Chap. 9. * Tacitus, Germania xxn. · Ibid.

TACITUS AND T H E GERMANS

17

T h e passion for gambling, which led the ancient Germans to throwing dice, is today perhaps more often satisfied in the white man's world by cards, roulette, or race-track betting. 10 What matters is not the means, but the thrill of trying one's fortune by speculating on the laws of probability. While much of the public treasury of Rome went to meet the expenses of popular spectacles, the Germans had as a similar pastime only the dances of their youths, who, naked, moved rhythmically between pointed swords and javelins. 11 As soon as he rises in the morning, Tacitus says, every German takes a warm bath. 12 This, although in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was still considered a luxury to bathe in hot water twice a week. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the washing facilities at Versailles and Trianon were the contrary of extravagant. Again and again Tacitus stresses the warlike character of the Germanic tribes, in his eyes a virtue, not a vice. One wonders how such excessive drinking could be reconciled with a bellicose life and nature. Would it not undermine the strength of even a Nordic Hercules? Tacitus, aware of this apparent contradiction, explains it as a freak of nature. According to tradition, the god Terminus refused to yield his place even to Jupiter himself when King Tarquinius founded the Capitol. This was taken as an auspicious portent that the boundaries of Rome would never recede. 1 * Tacitus' emphasis on German military strength was a timely warning addressed to the contemporary Romans, who left the defense of the state to the soldiers while enjoying all the fruits of victory which the legions had thrown into their laps. A didactic tendency also underlies his remarks on the moral life of the barbarians: "Vice," he writes, "is not treated by the Germans as a subject of raillery, nor is the profligacy of corrupting and being corrupted called the fashion of the age." Roman society must have offered, under a splendid surface, many parallels to the declining moral status of modern Western culture. What distinguishes these two epochs from others is their complete moral pragmatism and a primitive ignorance of moral virtues which could almost be called touching. Both epochs show the loss of religious and metaphysical insight and are, in conséquence, characterized by a vast and horrifying emptiness that lies open to the gaze of anyone who peers beneath the surface. To the educated, the gods had become at best philosophical symbols; to others, objects of scorn or superstition. There is no doubt in my mind that the continuity of Western culture would have been broken when the outward power of Rome collapsed, had there not been young and virginal peoples capable of taking over where their older kinsmen had left off. On the subject of chastity, which Caesar had passed over with a few matterof-fact remarks, Tacitus dwells at great length. "The virtue of the woman," 1 0 I am told that I underrate the popularity of dice in the United States, and that "craps," as any American soldier would confirm, is definitely also a white man's game.

11

Tacitus, Germania xxiv.

12

Ibid. xxn.

13

Ovid, Fasti n. 667-84.

18

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he says, "is guarded from seduction; no public spectacles to seduce her; no banquets to inflame her passions; no baits of pleasure to disarm her virtue. . . . Adultery is rarely heard of: when detected the punishment is instant." In words that sound almost like a free translation from the New Testament, he explains: "With one husband, as with one life, one mind, one body, every woman is satisfied; in him her happiness is centered. . . . The principle is not only an affection for the husband's person, but a reverence for the married state." Marriage was considered a strict and sacred institution. While Roman society disintegrated under the scourge of birth control, the barbarians considered it a disgraceful crime to set limits to the population by rearing only a certain number of children. "Among the savages of Germany," Tacitus sighs, "virtuous manners operate more than good laws in other countries." Women were held in high esteem and with their husbands shared in the guidance of public affairs, even in time of war. The loose federal structure that existed among many German tribes provided for abundant local and regional autonomy. The territorial units, cantons, or tribes were subdivided into groups of one or several hundred families. Tacitus, a civil administrator of great merit, was a republican by conviction. He accepted the monarchy as an historic necessity, but feared its abuses of which he had seen many. The Germans, even though he did not know of their ethnic affinity to the Romans, must have appeared to him like "contemporary ancestors." To study their institutions must have helped him to a better understanding of Rome's own past, its republican traditions, and its original patriarchal kingship. In this respect, the Germanic division between civil and military power was most interesting. "The kings in Germany," Tacitus says, "owe their election to the nobility of their birth; the generals are chosen for their valour. The power of the former is not arbitrary or unlimited; the latter command more by warlike example than by their authority [of office]. . . . Jurisdiction is vested in the priests." The last remark contradicts Caesar's assertion that there was no established priesthood; possibly, it had developed more clearly in the century and a half which had passed since Caesar's time.14 The priests alone possessed power to inflict punishment, and we read with satisfaction that their justice was marked neither by vindictiveness nor by military execution. Rather were their sentences of a religious nature, inflicted with the sanction of the gods. The limitation of the princely power is known from Caesar's Commentaries, where King Ambiorix of the Eburonian tribe informs the Roman generals Sabinus and Cotta that his authority was limited by the people's assembly.1' 1 4 The quotations in this and the preceding paragraphs are from Germania xix, vi; English, pp. 378, 379, 380, 361-63. 15 Commentant v. 27. The statement about the lack of an established priesthood is at vi. 21.

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The German chiefs apparently had only a delegated authority. They decided "in matters of inferior moment," Tacitus states; important questions are reserved to the community, the agenda being prepared in advance by the chiefs.1· The general assembly, the supreme legislative body, was composed of all male full citizens, that is, those who had already been properly inducted into the assembly. Sessions were held at regular intervals and had fixed periods. In the assemblies, the division of power, a primitive anticipation of the principle of the "three branches of government," was again apparent. The priests, who continued to hold their judicial power during the sessions, first ordered silence. Then the king—in republican communities, the chief—opened the debate. After him, everyone, according to precedence of nobility, age, and fame could take the floor. "No man dictates to the assembly," Tacitus says; "he may persuade, but cannot command." The election of kings and chiefs and their assistants took place in the assemblies.17 "In perusing the admirable treatise of Tacitus O n the Manners of the Germans,' we find it is from that nation the English have borrowed the idea of their political government. This beautiful system was invented first in the woods." 18 Despite Hegel's cautioning words one should not hesitate to recognize these historic relationships. When Germanic freemen later joined together to form what is known as the Franks, many of their original institutions were carried westward across the Rhine; others came later with the Burgundians, the Suevians, and the Goths and spread to all parts of Europe. The great political genius and constitutional creativeness of the Normans is universally known; the foundations they laid for states in Russia, Northern France, Britain, and Sicily bear witness to their deeds. All these elements, the Frankish ones through Charlemagne's heritage, the Suevian, Burgundian, and finally the Norman through the Sicilian kingdom, combined with the Latin spirit in the Restored Roman-German Empire. Of the Suiones, the ancestors of the Normans, Tacitus reports that they possessed a naval power of considerable strength. They had developed a hereditary, highly centralized monarchy.19 It must remain a matter of conjecture just how far this heritage was responsible for the constitution of the Sicilian state with its centralized authority and its first rudimentary traces of a modern civil service. This Norman background of power enabled Emperor Frederick II, one of the greatest Occidental rulers, to yield to the Germania χι; English, p. 36S. "Assistants are appointed from the body of the people, to the number of a hundred, who attend to give their advice, and to strengthen the nands of justice." Ibid.; English, p. 371. The quotation in the text is also from Chap, xi; English, p. J69. 18 De Tesprit des lois, Book XI, Chap, β, in Œuvres complètes, IV, 22-23; English translation by Thomas Nugent, The Spirit of Laws, I, 161. 1β

17

" Germania

XLIV.

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particularistic ambitions of the princes in the German kingdom and yet to maintain his universal position. Many of the tribes which appear in the Germania are still distinct units. Some, such as the Frisians, have even remained in their old homes. Of their neighbors, the Chaucians, Tacitus thought very highly: 'Their grandeur rests upon the surest foundation, the love of justice; wanting no extension of territory, free from avarice and ambition . . . they provoke no wars." The divide-and-rule principle of the Romans was of course always applied to the great variety of tribes and nations. It seemed to be in the interest of the empire to prevent at all costs a unification of the North, or even a strengthening of the already existing federations. We can rest assured that bribes, intrigues, promises, and honors and all other means were probably used abundantly for such purpose. To the hypocritical moralist, the excuse would simply have been that these divided barbarians were not capable of reasonable self-government and hence required the guiding hand of Rome to prevent them from destroying each other and to reward them with the benefits it could bestow. The moral imperialist, secure in the favor of the gods, took a more "realistic view." "Perhaps, the event," Tacitus comments on a terrific slaughter that resulted from clashes among Germanic tribes, "was providentially ordained in favour of the Roman people. . . . Sixty thousand of the enemy fell a sacrifice, not to the arms of Rome, but, more magnificent still! to the rage of their own internal discord. . . . May this continue to be the fate of foreign nations! If not the friends of Rome, let them be enemies to themselves. For in the present tide of our affairs, what can fortune have in store so devoutly to be wished for as civil dissension amongst our enemies?" Friends of the Romans enjoyed special privileges, like the Hermundurians in Southern Germany, "our splendid colony of Rhaetia." They were even permitted to view the Roman houses and villas, which they regarded without avarice. Several of the great German cities, centers of culture and of wealth such as Augsburg, are Rpman foundations. Salzburg (in Latin called Iuvavum) is still referred to as the "German Rome." Regensburg, Passau, Vienna, all go back to the time of antiquity, and deep into Germany we still travel on Roman roads and drink water from Roman wells. Imperial Trier, Cologne, Mainz, Coblenz, and many others bear witness to an early regional synthesis of two complementary cultures. For Tacitus, the palaces and towns on the Rhine and the Moselle and in the south were, of course, just Roman, as the whole earth ought to be, whether the provinces had once been German, British, or Spanish. The concept that what took place was a synthesis, a gradual influence exerted on Rome itself by the subjugated nations would never have entered his mind. But Germany held a unique position: for two hundred and ten years it withstood the might of Rome, which was more powerful than any other

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GERMAN'S

21

c o u n t r y in the world. "Not the Samnite, nor the republic of C a r t h a g e , nor S p a i n , nor Gaul, nor even t h e P a r t h i a n , " h e says not without admiration, " h a s given such frequent lessons to the R o m a n people. T h e power of t h e A r s a c i d a e was not so formidable as G e r m a n liberty." After enumerating the m a n y struggles and G e r m a n i c victories, he concludes: " W e have triumphed, a n d G e r m a n y is still u n c o n q u e r e d . " 20 I m p o r t a n t as the function of the G e r m a n i c priests must h a v e been, it seems t h a t , unlike the Druids, they did not develop a theological and cosmogonie system. T h e similarity b e t w e e n the Druidical doctrines on the migration of t h e soul and Pythagoras' metempsychosis has often b e e n observed. According to Caesar, Gallic youth were instructed b y the priests on the stars, the extent and the mysteries of the universe, and " t h e power and the majesty of the immortal gods." 21 I t would seem to m e that the G e r m a n i c priests in a certain sense anticip a t e d the Ghibelline doctrine on the separation and coordination of the t e m p o r a l and the spiritual powers. T h o u g h entrusted with important duties, t h e y apparently did not interfere with the legislative and executive functions of the community—if such terms m a y b e applied to a primitive state. W h e t h e r or not there was a female priesthood as a peculiar caste of its own is difficult to determine. But it is affirmed b y T a c i t u s that the ancient Germans a t t r i b u t e d to the f e m a l e sex a sacred character. T h e advice of w o m e n was always heard, they were frequently consulted, and their responses w e r e d e e m e d oracular.- 2 F r o m Caesar's report on the war against Ariovistus w e know that the "wise mothers," to w h o m the gift of prophecy was attributed, had warned the Suevians not to fight b e f o r e the new moon.- 3 T a c i t u s mentions " t h e famous V e l e d a [the oracle of Claudius Civilis, the Batavian chief w h o revolted against R o m e ] , revered as a divinity b y her countrymen." B e fore h e r time, Aurinia and others w e r e held in equal veneration; b u t this veneration was a sentiment "free from that servile adulation which pretends to people heaven with human deities." 24 T h e G e r m a n s had neither images nor statues of their gods, for to represent them under any kind of s e m b l a n c e to the human form they considered incompatible with t h e majesty of superior beings. T h i s is an extremely interesting trait, shared in the ancient world, according to m y knowledge, only by t h e H e b r e w s on whom the Mosaic law had imposed the well-known injunction. 2 5 A thoughtful contemplation of the G e r m a n i c and of the J e w i s h c h a r a c t e r and destiny would reveal still further points of contact. T o the speculative m i n d The quotations in this and the preceding paragraphs are from Germania xxxv, xxxin, 408. by W. A. McDewitte, Commentaries, in The Classics, Greek and Latin, Latin, V, 41. 22 Germania vm. 23 Commentarti ι. 50. 24 Germania vin; English, p. 365. 25 Exodus 20:23; 34:17. 20

X U , X X X V I I ; English, pp. 403, 400, 413, 406, 21 Commentarti vi. 14; English translation

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22

it is an interesting fact that St. Michael, who, according to the Book of Daniel, was the guardian spirit of the Jewish people,2" became in Christian centuries the symbolic representative of the Germans. On countless hills and mountain tops his chapels and statues have replaced the sanctuaries of the pagan gods. Woods and groves were the Germanic places of sacrifice. Where St. Michael's chapels stand today, Wotan was once venerated—the "Allfather," the "Wanderer," whom we know from the Merseburger Zaubersprüche, which were discovered in 1841 in the Cathedral Library of Merseburg.27 His name also occurs in a Christian formula of abjuration of about 775 in Saxony; the catechumen swears to gainsay "all the works and words of the devil of Thor and Wotan and Saxnot, and all the demons who are their companions." 28 Wotan is described in later Icelandic sagas as wearing a blue mantle 29 ( symbolizing the firmament ) and as one-eyed 30 ( perhaps symbolizing the sun ). From these sagas we also deduce that the gods were not free, but under the rule of Fate or some higher, unknown Divine Power. The Semnones, who claimed to be "the most ancient and respectable of the Suevian nation," and in Tacitus' time lived on the Oder river, were credited with a monotheistic concept. They believed in a "supreme God of the universe, who holds every thing else in chain or dependence on his will and pleasure." 31 The deity most venerated among the other German tribes Tacitus calls "Mercury." In parts of the Suevian territory the worship of "Isis" was established. It is a matter of conjecture as to whether this was the same goddess whom the Nordic peoples called Frikka, the wife of Wotan (or Odin), the mother of the gods and protector of the hearth. "Isis" was frequently represented as bearing the female moon above her head. Perhaps Frikka was the goddess of the moon wedded to the sun, and Tacitus chose the Egyptian name in order to make himself understood among his fellow countrymen.32 However, from the Merseburger Zaubersprüche we also know of a sun goddess, Sunna (the word sun is feminine in German) and of her sister, Sinthgunt, as well as of Freia, traditionally identified with the goddess of Daniel 12:1. By Georg Waitz. First published by Jacob Grimm, Ueber zwei entdeckte Gedichte aus der Zeit des deutschen Heidenthums (Berlin, F. Dümmler, 1844), in Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Abhandlungen, Philologische und historische Klasse, 1842, pp. 1-24; Kleinere Schriften, II, 1-29. 28 K. Müllenhoff and W. Scherer, Denkmäler deutscher Poesie und Prosa aus dem VIII-X1I Jahrhundert, I, 198, No. 51; Wilhelm Braune, Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, p. 155, No. 46. 29 See the prose introduction to Grimnismál (The lay of Grimnir), in Sophus Bugge, ed., Norroen Fomkvaeíi, p. 76, English translation by Benjamin Thorpe, in The Elder Edda of Saemund Sigfusson and the Younger Edda of Snorre Sturleson, p. 19. 30 See the Völuspä (The Vala's Prophecy), ibid., p. 41; English, p. 22. s¡ Germania χχχιχ; English, pp. 409-10. 32 Ibid. ». 26

27

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23

love, and her sister Volla, the goddess of abundance corresponding to the Latin Fortuna. Wotan and Balder (here called Phol) are also mentioned." Some tribes considered the earth goddess Erda (Gea in Greek) as universal mother. Another god is called Tuisto, and was born of the earth, and still another, Mannus, was his son." Perhaps the changes that were believed to have taken place in the government of the world are indicative of the development of all Indo-European religions toward an ever more personalized and monotheistic conception of the Godhead, and, paralleling it, of the development of the Aryan peoples toward higher self-consciousness. The dynasty Mannus-Tuisto-Wotan would parallel that of Uranos-Chronos-Zeus. In every religion there is at least a spark of the original revelation, though it may have become obscured and degenerated into polytheism. From Caesar's remarks on the Druids " I would deduce that the higher orders of the Celtic and Germanic priesthood did not have in mind so much the physical astral bodies as the spiritual principles behind their appearance. Most of the Greek and Roman gods degenerated, at least in popular religion, into such imperfect beings that one would not want to meet them socially if they were men. These gods dug their own graves, to be supplanted, first by the god wearing the diadem and the purple on the Palatine Hill, then by the true Godhead. While in the imperial sphere it was the disintegration of the republic of the gods which prepared the victory of Christianity, in the Germanic world the exact opposite, namely, the comparative purity of the gods served the designs of Providence. The amazingly short time needed to lead the Germanic tribes from their undeveloped and crude religion into the sanctuary of the sublimest is still one of the most astounding happenings in world history. The Goths embraced Christianity as early as the third century, the Burgundians in the fifth, as did the Franks, who were converted immediately to the orthodox Athanasian form. Had there been too great a discrepancy in the time of their conversion, it might have endangered the European progress of Christianity and the continuity of the universal concept. 39 Müllenhoff and Scherer, Denkmaler deutscher Poesie und Prosa aus dem VIIl-Xll Jahrhundert, I, 1Θ, No. 4, and II, 46-47; Wilhelm Braune, Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, p. 81, No. 21. »« Germania n. » Commentarti vi. 14.

3 THE CITY AND THE WORLD Divine assistance . . . is already on the side of the Romans; for it is impossible that so vast an empire should be settled without God's providence. JOSEPHUS F L A V I U S , De bello Judaico ii. xvi. Pius XI, in his encyclical of March 19, 1937, has put the fundamental tenet of pre-Christian religious sentiments into this short formula: it is "the promise of a Redeemer . . . that accompanied the human race on its weary journey," ever since the loss of Paradise.' The elements in all pagan religions pointing toward Christ, usually obscured and hidden, are at times clearly manifest, as in the Icelandic sagas, the two Eddas (to employ the name that has become customary for both these great collections ). The Younger Edda, in prose, a work of the Icelandic skald Snorri Sturluson (1178-1241), is rich in quotations from skaldic poetrv of the period from the ninth to the twelfth century. The Elder Edda, some thirty epic poems of Nordic mythology and ethics and Germanic hero sagas, was also written down in the thirteenth century; but its basic material dates back to much earlier centuries. Even at that time, Graeco-Roman and Christian influences may certainly have been at work; yet, the religious cosmological heritage of the ancient Germanic tribes is unmistakable. Through Richard Wagner's grandiose drama, The Ring of the Niblung, it has bccome the common property of the educated world.2 We must look to Siegfried to recognize the true ethos of the Germanic religion; it is toward him that the creation of the world was ordered. Even the gods, though his birth, life, and death were to spell their doom, must minister to his coming. Wotan's words in Wagner's version, "One only shall set the bride free, One freer than I, the God," s are the key to understanding the drama. The realm of guilt, and necessity comes to an end, and the kingdom of freedom begins. There is nothing in the treasures of Germanic antiquity that would glorify one race or nation above others. On the contrary, the early writings are distinguished by their wide cosmic scope: injustice must be avenged; and love conquers death. POPE

1 March 19, 1937; English translation by Vatican Press, On Atheist Communism, in Sixteen Encyclicals of His Holiness Pope Pius XI, No. XIV, p. 1. 2 There are several good editions of both Eddas. For the Elder, I have used that by Sophus Bugge, Norroeη FornkvaeSi; for the Younger, that by the Ame Magnaean Society, Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, in 3 vols.; and the English translation by Benjamin Thorpe and I. A. Blackwell, The Elder Edda of Saemund Sigfusson and the Younger Edda of Snorre Sturleson. 8 Richard Wagner, Die Walküre, Act m; English translation by Margaret Armour, The Valkyrie, in The Ring of the Niblung, p. 158.

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The early church never denied the real existence of the supernatural beings of the pagan cults. As tempters, as demons, and as devils they lived on long after Valhalla was destroyed and shrines of St. Michael had replaced the sanctuaries of old. But if we look on paganism as one stage within the continued development of religious consciousness, we may understand that certain of its forces lingered on in the soul of the peoples—darkly as primitive and hidden mental trends which under certain circumstances can reawaken to a ghoulish existence and brightly in legends and folklore, which are the repositories of ancient knowledge. Much of it was Christianized and in that new form has survived. Between the Druid stones of Camac move today the processions of the Blessed Sacrament. In Southern Germany, the fires of St. John that flame from all mountain tops on Midsummer Night have replaced the pagan solstice celebrations. In fairy tales and legends— the first mental food of the children in all Occidental countries—groves, woods, wells, trees, and meadows are still populated by elves, pucks, fairies, and other little folk. The names of the days of the week, in German, English, French, and most other European languages, preserve the names of the ancient gods. The Germania was written in an era that was one of the most happy and peaceful in the history of Western man. During that age of the Antonine emperors the Augustan work was consummated, and the still-expanding commonwealth achieved the consolidation of its many peoples into one selfconscious nation. The importance of the excellent Roman roads and of the safety of commerce on land and sea for the perpetuation of unity through the storms of war and internal upheaval and finally of the Great Migration, can never be stressed too often or too emphatically. During the Antonine age, one could travel from Ostia, the port of Rome, to Gibraltar in seven days, to Alexandria in nine or ten. Three main roads traversed the Western Alps, via Mont Genèvre and the Greater and the Lesser St. Bernard. The road over the Brenner Pass is first mentioned at the end of the second century. Altogether there must have been more than twenty roads from Italy to Gaul and Germany. Tirol, the land of my birth, was crossed by the Claudian Road, begun in 15 B.C. It ran from Trent over the Rechenscheideck Pass, then down into the valley of the Inn. Ludwig Friedlaender, in his Sittengeschichte Roms is certainly correct when he states that not till the end of the eighteenth century were the Alps again as easily accessible as in the age of the Caesars.4 Historical maps of the whole Roman road system, from York to the Egyptian Thebes, from Lisbon to Rostov, seem almost like a modern railroad map. Prosperity and political order were supreme, and were not confined to the Mediterranean world. Ptolemy, only fifty years after Tacitus, enumerates in 4 1, 325; English, Roman Life and Manners, I, 274. Friedlaender is here quoting Nissen, Italische Landeskunde, I, 166.

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THE CITY AND THE WORLD

his System of Geography 110 less than ninety cities in Germany.® Since Emperor Probus had brought the grape to the banks of the Rhine, vineyards had appeared in Champagne and on the Main, and later spread over the soft plains of the Danube north of Vienna. The apple, originally a Mediterranean plant, was brought across the Alps, and so were many other fruit trees, including the peach and the cherry (first imported from Asia by Lucullus). Improved nutrition and better agricultural conditions softened and civilized the manners of many Germanic tribes, probably long before they were entrusted with world-historic tasks. The fullness of the imperial power was created by the personal union of the supreme military command and the people's tribunate. The first made the emperor administrator of the border provinces, which, because of their exposed frontiers, were still governed by martial law. ( In Italy itself, no legions had been stationed for some time. ) This, in particular, put at his disposal the resources of Egypt, the granary of the still-powerful Roman city mob. But the roots of Occidental monarchy lie in the people's tribunate rather than in the office of imperator; only his tribunician status vested the emperor with representation of the people and with sacrosanctity. Among the objections of the secular moralist to the Roman monarchy is the reproach that gradually it leveled all citizens to a state of practical servitude. The extension of Roman citizenship by the Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 to include all the freeborn meant little, because citizenship had lost its value in the face of the overwhelming power of the rising Dominate.· Even so, it is an undeniable fact that this development served the progress of historic reason. Before the throne of the emperor, social distinctions dividing the high from the lowly among his subjects became of little importance; these distinctions were infinitely small compared to the gap which separated the emperor from the highest after him. In relation to the Dominus, all subjects began to consider themselves as one social and legal unit. And what was despotism among pagans could be transformed into an organism of mutual obligations as soon as the supreme office itself should become subject to the Christian allpervading and all-dominant moral law. • Geographla n. 10. This work is now for the first time available in a splendid English edition: Claudius Ptolemy, Geography, translated into English and edited by Edward Luther Stevenson, based upon Greek and Latin manuscripts and important late fifteenth and early sixteenth century printed editions, including reproductions of the maps from the Ebner Manuscript, ca. 1460, with an introduction by Professor Joseph Fischer, S.J. (New York, The New York Public Library, 1932). See pp. 64-65, and the map of Greater Germany, Europe, Map VI. * The term Dominate, in accordance with the meaning given it by the German historians, is used for the autocratic form of the later Roman monarchy, culminating in the absolutism of Diocletian and his successors. It is in contrast to the earlier Principóte (as it has been called since Theodor Mommsen), the monarchy since Augustus, which, with the forms of the republic, had preserved many of its constitutional elements.

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Though the Germanic infiltration into the Roman Empire and the number of mixed marriages increased during the Antonine age, the opposition of the Germans outside the empire never abated. The national treason (if that expression may be used anachronistically ) to which many German chieftains were seduced by Roman bribes and honors increased rather than diminished that opposition—by a very understandable psychological reaction, namely, consciousness of guilt and therefore moral indignation against the corrupter whose corruption was coveted. Roman cunning and faithlessness have remained proverbial among the Germans, in Britain and on the Continent. It would be interesting to analyze how far the sentiments of the Reformation were due to such half-forgotten or deeply subconscious memories from pagan times galvanized into rebellion against Christian Rome. Tacitus' resigned reflection on "Germany unconquered" contained a prediction. At the time of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, almost all German tribes from the mouth of the Rhine to the Danube were in revolt. The Marcomanni and other kindred tribes, who in the Augustan age had settled in Bohemia, even crossed the Danube. This rebellion ended in defeat at the hands of the philosopher-emperor. The Quadi and Marcomanni were forced to deliver the flower of their youth to the Romans; they were sent to Britain as hostages. The league of the tribes was dissolved. But the death of the emperor at Vienna prevented him from reducing the trans-Danubian lands to a dependent province. Germany, defeated, once more remained unconquered. Marcus Aurelius devised on a larger scale than hitherto the settlement of Germanic tribesmen in the border provinces of the empire. The imperial disciple of Stoicism, who looked upon his office as representing, in the secular sphere, historic reason and the general interests of mankind, may have felt that the only conquest possible was a developing synthesis of the existing antithetical forces: empire and Germanism. Had Marcus Aurelius' policy been permitted to mature into permanent success, the world would have been spared centuries of bloodshed and misery. It was defeated not so much by the failure of Romans or Germans to adjust themselves to a novel form of community as by the anti-Occidental storm from Asia, the Hunnish invasion, which was to upset the whole of the European structure. At the time of Emperor Trajan, the empire had reached its greatest expansion. With his death the eagles began to recede, and the pride of the god Terminus no longer was of avail. In 180 A.D., when Marcus Aurelius died, the line of great rulers of the period of adoptive successorship came to an end, and from then on the chroniclers of the age were to devote much space to the lust and tyranny that sullied the supreme office. If we believe all these stories of despotic extravagance, of public orgies of the strangest kind, of gluttony and wantonness—and historic evidence compels us to believe a fair part

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of them—the survival of the empire becomes more remarkable still. It proves the power of the idea no less than the excellence of Roman administration, which could be exalted by a wise ruler but could not be destroyed by one debauched. The names of three great jurists, Papinian, Paul, and Ulpian, whose work was immortalized in the Corpus Juris Civilis and in the practice of law among countless millions of all centuries, races, and continents, adom the reign of the Severi. Yet it is customary to remember the bloody niaiseries of Caracalla and the turmoils after his death rather than the legal system which was then formulated with such great perfection. As a legislator, Caracalla's name appears in two hundred constitutions of the code. The many excellent men who again and again rose out of the upheavals of those centuries are at least as remarkable as all the oddities which are still pictured to our schoolboys to impress them with the righteousness of their own elders. The great Septimius Severus (193-211), who rigorously reformed law and administration; Decius, who died defending the empire against the Goths; Claudius Gothicus; Domitius Aurelian (270-75), the Restitutor Orbis; and finally Diocletian himself—they all, in spite of many stains on their character, deserve the gratitude of the Western world. That Caesar's office could be held by so colorful a host of successors— Mauretanians, a high priest of Emesa, Syrians, Thracians—betrays its sanctity above nations and personal passions. Though debased, prostituted, and sold, the imperial purple continued to exercise its magic power over the mind of the world. The Orientalization, symbolized since Diocletian's days by the diadem of silk and pearls and by the ceremony of adoration, has traditionally become an object of scorn and reproach. Yet it is that period of history to which we trace many of our own forms and titles of administration, of diplomacy, and of society. The Dominate, which left the sober forms of the Augustan principate far behind, was made possible by the general apathy of the people—a trait which Tacitus had already recognized as dangerous to traditional liberty. It is surprising how persistently men and women in self-governing commonwealths have cared little for their own states. Once policy becomes politics, the end of the original institutions of civic pride is at hand. Since no organized community can subsist on anarchy, it is precisely the responsible leaders who, though not tending toward autocracy by nature, will be ready to accept it consciously, while the masses tolerate it passively. From the republican Tacitus to the great jurists of the third to the sixth century, a strong central authority was rightly considered more beneficial to liberty than the disintegration of the public order at the hands of a licentious mob, high and low alike. It was more than flattery and Byzantinism when a man like Theophilus at the court of Emperor Justinian, after scourging the corruptions of the republican magistrates of old, exalted the governance of a virtuous prince:

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Since out of the fullness of his earthly power he may bestow graces or revoke favors, there is no need for him, in order to satisfy private passions, to have recourse to the violation of justice. 7 Anarchy and history are not antithetical but antagonistic principles; they are mutually exclusive. Anarchy, as the term is used here, must not be understood as chaos, pregnant with new life (out of which, as Nietzsche said, "a star may be b o m " " ) , but in the literal sense: the cessation of order and historic consciousness, the reduction of the state and government to nothingness. For this, the best-known examples are the Goths and the Jews, who, after the destruction of their states, never again had a history of their own. A society that drifts into chaos becomes antihistoric and destroys the continuity of history itself. That such a dangerous state of affairs has been reached is often indicated, in our time as well as in late Roman days, by the appearance of military government superseding civil authority. Military government always proves that the forces of life in a state have been weakened and become subservient to death, "man's true master," as Hegel once said. 9 There are, of course, periods of crisis, when the military power remains as the only integrating factor of the community. But this is always an indication that the state, the recipient of living history, is falling back into anarchy. It is a symptom of modern confusion that the emperors and kings of the last centuries have taken to the uniform, the garb of the warrior caste, to which by their office they should be infinitely superior. T h e spirit of history has a profound horror vacui, it will compel a society which, although threatened by anarchy, is potentially still capable of serving worthwhile designs, to overcome disintegration. In such a phase of political development, necessity speaks in favor of concentrating all power in one hand, because this will make its redemption and return to a reorganized and historically rejuvenated people more feasible. Diocletian laid the foundation for the later permanent division between Eastern and Western Empire. His reforms of the administration made the immense body once more manageable. If they could not stave off the eventual breakdown, at least they gave to the whole a new lease on life needed to save the idea of a universal realm through the dangers of the approaching 7 Theophilus Antecessor, Paraphrases ad Institutiones i. ii. 7 ( De jure honorario ). These arguments in favor of the superiority of monarchy over the government by republican magistrates susceptible to bribes, favoritism, and other vices pertaining to "politicians," recur in Saint Thomas Aquinas' De regimine principum (ι. 5), there applied to the governance of territorial kingdoms. Dante, the greatest Ghibelline thinker of imperial Europe, lifted the conception of monarchy again above the rival factions of kings and princes—in their multitude almost another host of republican magistrates—to a universal and perennial plane (De monarchia ι. 11). Concerning this, see below, Chapter Twelve. 8 Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für alle und keinen, in Werke, VI, 19. 9 Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Sämtliche Werke, II, 324.

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Migration. At the beginning of the fourth century, no nation was sufficiently prepared to take the helm, if the empire had dissolved in general warfare between the rival candidates and legions. Emperor worship, still repulsive to our feelings as Christians, pertained therefore to a sacramental dignity rather than to the man believed to be its vessel. It expressed the longing of a yet unconverted mankind denuded of its own dignity for the union of a finite being with the Absolute—a union through which all might attain to redemption and the consciousness of freedom. At the same time, the absorption of all individual rights by one man marks the lowest point that could possibly be reached. Humanity's dignity so fully lost could be regained only by restoring it fully. The head of the world, a Man, had in life to assume divinity—only God assuming the nature of man could through His death restore the world to humanity. The rightful historic heirs of Diocletian were Constantine and Theodosius the Great, who by bending their own power under the Cross reached out to the world's real ends and consummated the greatest spiritual, andfinallypolitical and social, revolution of which history has ever been capable. The worship of the emperor had most effectively uprooted and destroyed all local idolatries; they were overwhelmed and absorbed by the one embracing cult of the imperial Genius, the only one common to the whole empire. Christianity, which the god-emperors had tried to destroy, was dialectically ministered to by their own acts. At the end of the fourth century, hardly two generations after Diocletian, the golden mouth of St. John Chrysostom, patriarch of Constantinople, could declare that paganism by its own acts had extinguished the error of idolatry. It appeared to him as a fallen city whose walls were beaten down, whose halls and public buildings were destroyed by fire, and whose defenders have fallen by the sword.10 Yet, far from breaking apart, the empire resurged in new power. "A new vitality," Ranke says, "awoke in the bosom of the freshened earth, she became fructified for the development of new productions. At this moment was exhibited the contrast between the earthly and the spiritual, between freedom and servitude—a gradual decay and a life-breathing and vigorous renovation." 11 The new world could no longer worship at the altars of its human founders. But Christian Europe, mindful of their teleological sanction, could forever gratefully preserve the fruits of their work. This makes it understandable that Dante, a thousand years after Diocletian's death, could relegate Brutus, the murderer of the founder of the imperial order, to the lowest circle of Hell. He must share it with Judas Iscariot, who betrayed the true Ruler of the Universe.11 10 11

Quoted in Ranke, History of the Popes, I, 7. ibid, » Divitxt Comedia, Inferno xxxjv, βΧ-ββ.

4 THE CITY OF GOD Then the end, when He hands over the Kingdom to God and the Father, when He abolishes all other sovereignty, authority and power. For He must reign until He puts all His enemies under His feet. I CORINTHIANS

15:24-25.

IT is characteristic of the dialectical working of the spirit of history that the Incarnation of the Cod-Man—the most universal being in His humanity also—should proceed from the most segregated people of the ancient world. To the Jews their austere monotheism, which excluded them from all the enjoyments and lighthearted vices of a still youthful world, had been the very symbol_and content of national pride. And yet this most national of all religions was to become the Introitus to the Christian-universal Mass of the earth. Even the agnostic and the upholder of the racist heresy must admit that it was the moral essence of Judaism which enabled the unconquered German tribes—in Germany proper, in the newly occupied lands south and west of the old river barriers, and in Britain—to blend into the Roman Empire. That moral essence was what protected the Western world against spiritual annihilation, then and later. Isaias had foretold a Messianic realm that would embrace Israelites and Gentiles alike, and a notion of universal expiation for universal guilt had pervaded all strata of the chosen people. But the promise pertained to the seed of Abraham, and later, more specifically, to a son of David. It is humanly understandable that the Jews should have identified the salvation of Israel with the salvation of the world and the future glory of the Messiah with the exaltation of their own race, from which He was to come. The years of servitude strengthened the belief that this particular bondage had to be broken so that all bondage might be broken. According to the Gospel of St. Luke not even the apostles, though they had partaken of all the teachings and mysteries of Christ, were free from such notions.1 Even after the Resurrection, according to the Acts, they asked the question: "Lord, wilt Thou at this time restore the Kingdom of Israel?" 2 But their very naïveté bespeaks the almost superhuman burden that world-historic peoples must iCf. Luke 24:21. Acts 1:6. The translation of this passage, as of all following quotations from the New Testament, is by the Very Rev. Francis Aloysius Spencer, O.P., The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, translated from the original Greek, edited by Charles J. Callan, O.P., and John A. McHugh, O.P. (New York, Macmillan, 1937). Quotations from the Old Testament are taken from the Rheims-Douay version. 2

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cany. Then it was the Jewish people whom God had harnessed to the chariot of history, while a pagan world around them could live for the bright and passing day; now it was a handful of men, the kernel of an entirely new, a supranational, people, who for the sake of their chosenness had to sever all their national attachments. "Christ," Hegel writes in his Philosophy of Religion, "calls Himself the Son of God and the Son of Man; these titles are to be taken in their strict meaning. The Arabs mutually describe themselves as the son of a certain tribe; Christ belongs to the human race; that is His tribe."3 The tribe of Judah is thereby established in identity with the tribus humanitatis. By taking the full reality of His human body from the tribe of Judah, the Eternal Logos has raised Israel to the very representation of our entire race. The exclusive character of the blood as bearer of a particular consciousness has been overcome; a Blood common to all men has become the bearer, not of an exclusive and particular spirit, but of the Holy Spirit within the universal church, the one Mystical Body of the risen Lord. The True Israel of the New Dispensation became one with the church itself in all its aspects, militant, suffering, and triumphant. Hegel has a classic description of this spiritual, and therefore total, revolution that transformed the world: "Rome was the Fate that crushed down the gods and all genial life in its hard service, while it was the power that purified the human heart from all speciality. Its entire condition is therefore analogous to a place of birth, and its pain is like the travail-throes of another and higher Spirit, which manifested itself in connection with the Christian Religion* Hegel points to the atomization of the Roman world as the cause of its misery: the direct rule of the emperor, dominus, wielder of direct, personal domination over every individual under which each is utterly crushed. Yet out of this contradiction between personality and its reduction to nothingness—a process of great suffering— emerged also the "Discipline of the World. 'Zucht' (discipline) is derived from 'ziehen' (to draw). This 'drawing' must be towards something; there must be some fixed unity in the background in whose direction that drawing takes place." • This Something is the union of man with Christ in the incarnation of God as a "definite positive being . . . unique in its kind," a "Man who is God,—God who is Man; and thereby peace and reconciliation have accrued to the World." · » Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, edited by Philipp Marheineke ( Berlin, Duncker und Humblot, 1840), in Werke: Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten, XII, 294; English translation by E. Β. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, III, 85. I am quoting here from the Marheineke edition, as Lasson has this passage only in the abbreviated rendering of Hegel's lecture script. * Philosophie der Welt-Geschichte, in Sämtliche Werke, IX, 721; English translation by J. Sibree, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 330. » Ibid., p. 724; English, p. 332. · Ibid., p. 735-36; English, p. 336-37.

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But the full recognition of man's misery, the pain caused by the knowledge of being in himself a divided and discordant being, had to come from a center outside the Roman world proper, and this, Hegel says, "gives to the Jewish people their World-Historical importance and weight." W e may conclude with him that the reason for so swift and thorough a victory lies in the fact that "it is the very grandeur of the Christian religion that, with all its profundity, it is easy of comprehension by our consciousness . . . while, at the same time, it summons us to penetrate deeper. It is thus adapted to every grade of culture, and yet satisfies the highest requirements." 1 These are words that breathe the truly Pauline spirit by which the world was changed. The triune concept of the Godhead, in which man rediscovered his true self, is therefore truly the axis on which the history of the world turns; "it is the goal and the starting point of History." 8 Therefore it follows inevitably that Christ's Incarnation must have been absolutely predestined, and the whole of the created world—nature, man, and history—ordered toward this goal. The relationship between Hegel's and Duns Scotus' Christo-centric views on the philosophy of history becomes apparent. But even before it was first formulated by the Subde Doctor and reiterated by the Philosopher of Reason, we may assume that such knowledge, intuitive or through faith, must outside the Thomistic school have determined the course of Christian thought and its political avenues as well. It may be helpful, in order to understand the transformative process to which the world was subjected, to recognize this speculative deduction as a motivating psychological factor, growing in intensity the more the pagan world became aware of its own moral helplessness. This process was accomplished though Christianity took no immediate concern in things political. To this day the church has not set up any one particular secular order as absolutely superior to all others. The value of governmental forms can be measured only by relative standards, while their positive content may perhaps be established by eliminating the negative elements—the elements which, by ignoring man as man and as endowed with a dignity of his own, would set up a reign of wickedness. Thus, though slavery did not disappear at once, Christ's example and the meaning of His teaching inevitably led to the conclusion that it was incompatible with the new order of things. Since we are all one, nobody can be a slave without all becoming slaves, and as "freedom in Christ" became the pillar of all philosophy, the same oneness stringently demanded that all be free. Christianity never indulged in a sentimentalizing slave cult, for slavery was the lowest point to which man could possibly fall. The elimination of its causes and of the institution itself, even before individual slavery altogether disappeared, emancipated all other strata of society as well. ' Ibid., pp. 727, 743; English, pp. 333, 344.

» Ibid., p. 722; English, p. 331.

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THE CITY OF GOD

The painful memory of schooldays and examination papers haunts most men today when they read of the struggles of the early church—the controversies about the Trinity, the nature of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, about the Arian, the Donatist, the Manichaean, and other heresies—as well as of church councils and p>olitical dissension over the most subtle distinctions within the sphere of faith and dogma. The revelations on the nature of the Godhead, the plan of redemption, and the other basic tenets every child learns with the Apostolic and the Nicene Creeds contain knowledge and philosophy infinitely wider than any ever attained by the highest initiates of the pre-Christian world.' What Plato declared the most difficult thing to accomplish, namely, to find out God, says Tertullian, is today achieved by every Christian workman with certainty.10 We may still not know much, but we do know about the fundamental categories of the world, and, obviously, it required centuries for this knowledge to be sifted, defined, and realized. Though the deposit of faith is closed, all its implications are not yet fully understood. It is this living treasure which becomes more and more our own as time proceeds, and its very existence endows us with increasing understanding. The work—and its consequences for all branches of human life—that was done during the first centuries by theologians, thinkers, and the common people in elaborating the given truth was great beyond description. Though things divine are most simple, when projected into the human world they branch out into countless spheres and lead to the most unexpected consequences. No wonder that mankind, after emerging from paganism, centered his interest upon understanding the new knowledge. There is the "simple" fact of the Incarnation. How much stemmed from it for human society! The liberation of slaves; the birth of democracy; the ideas of social and international justice; the appreciation of the proper importance of the physical world, whereby the development of the intellectual forces became possible. From the authors of the Gospels, from the Pauline Christology to the patristic writings, from the early councils to the schoolmen, from Origen and St. Augustine to Hegel, religious and philosophic thinkers agTeed that both on the mystic and on the purely human plane only the hypostatic union between true God and true man could have had such far-reaching effects. Only then could the physical world receive an importance of its own and the gap between Spirit and Nature (between freedom and gravity) be bridged. To render account to our own minds on the revealed relationship between the Persons within the Triune Godhead, the proceeding of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, as Hegel proved, has been essential to our philosophy • And such knowledge, the foundation not only of our religion but of our whole culture, is withheld from our children in the modem system of secularized education! 19 Apologeticum xlvi, in Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Latin, I, 574.

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of the spirit and thereby to the philosophical establishment of the principle of inalienable human freedom. Today the categories and terms derived from orthodox faith have become part of the mental process of mankind, among believers and agnostics alike. It is permissible to say that almost every great heresy constituted either a possible erroneous attitude of mind that would have influenced deeply the intellectual and moral development of man, or a component of the human spirit that, if rampant and uncontrolled, would have produced what we might call neurotic phenomena on the social plane. In the case of Arianism, to which most Germanic tribes fell prey, and of Manichaeism, which reappeared among the Albigensians of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, this fact is very clear. The Platonists of the Alexandrian school, around 100 B.C., had conceived a prefigurating notion of the Logos, the Reason of the World. Plato himself, of whom St. Augustine wrote that he came near to perceiving Christ himself, may even have attained to the concept of the triune nature of the Prime Cause, as the Reason, the Soul, and the Mind of the universe. St. John's words in the prologue to his Gospel are Platonic in form and spirit. Yet they establish a relationship that was unknown before, namely, the identity between the Logos and a concrete Man, and also between the Logos and the creative substance of the Godhead. In the verses from "In the beginning was the Word," to "and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us," 11 we find the basis of the philosophy of history. The Arian heresy, which denied the co-eternity and equality of the Logos with the Father, and the Docetic views of Gnosticism, which reduced the Man in Christ's nature to a phantasm, are the polar aspects of the same problem. In Christianity, different therein from all other religions, the human spirit attains to freedom by returning to itself in Christ, and so does mankind as a collective body without impairing the freedom of its component elements, the individuals. All this, however, depends on the identity of the Absolute Spirit with the incarnated Christ and his union with humanity, real and integrally whole in its individual physical and mental nature. Hence, the metaphysics of freedom stand or fall with the orthodox definition of Christ Jesus, since freedom necessitates its own identity with Supreme Reason that is capable of willing itself. Hegel is probably the only modem mind who fully understood the infinite importance of the struggle of the church for orthodoxy. "The Arians," he said, "since they did not recognize God in Christ, did away with the idea of the Trinity, and consequently with the principle of all speculative philosophy." " John 1:1-14. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, edited by Carl Ludwig Michelet (Berlin, Duncker und Humblot, 1844), in Werke: Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten, XV, 104; English translation by Elizabeth S. Hal11 12

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The Docetic dissolution of the human nature of the incarnated Logos would rend reality and destroy the reconciliation between the subjectivity of the spirit and the material world. Undue emphasis would thus be placed on the spirit, unrelated to the physical reality, which is its necessary antithesis. Had Christ, the Logos, not become man, human reason would have no way out of the unfree and barren realm of existence in the physical and intellectual categories. It was the Docetic notion of Christ, logically extended to the whole of the physical world and parts of the moral one, which would have made the Manichaean Persian-Christian syncretism a dangerous poison for early Occidental thought. The "prophet" Mani began preaching his doctrines in the middle of the third century, at first as a reformer of the religion of Zoroaster. He was supposed to be the promised Paraclete, or, as some of his supporters believed, a reincarnation of the youth of Nain whom Christ had raised from the dead. His views on the world were dualistic. Two powers of equal rank, diametrically opposed to each other, face one another from eternity: the realm of Light and the realm of Darkness. Had the Darkness not invaded the realm of Light, there would have been eternal balance between the two powers and creation would not have taken place. In man as well as in the whole of creation, which resulted from the cosmic struggle between the two principles, light and dark elements are interwoven. The goal must be to liberate the principles of light by dissolving creation and bringing life on earth to a close. A deeply hostile attitude towards life itself and a disdain for the physical reality of the world, for the moral law, and for sacramental life pervades their whole creed. Christ, they taught, after Manichaeism had come in touch with Christianity, had had no real human incarnation; to assume that he had would degrade him, since physical bodies are impregnated with evil. He had only been clothed in the appearance of flesh and blood, a mere phantasm. Since evil possesses real existence, man's will is not free; he is forced to sin in a predestined order—a doctrine that foreshadows the ideas of Calvinism. The sacraments, bound to a physical substance, are of no avail, least of all matrimony, which is called "the experiment of the serpent," "the impediment that separates from the Lord," "the beginning of disobedience," "the end of life," "the gift of death." 13 The icy wind of gloomy magic and scurrilous superstition breathes through the apocryphal Acts of John and dane and Frances H. Simson, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, III, 20. This passage, too, is quoted from the early Hegel edition, as no complete copy of the Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie in Lasson-Hoffmeister's critical edition is yet available. ** This is from the heretical Acts of John, which were adopted by the Manichaeans. The passage is preserved by quotation in the apocryphal Epistle of Titus, extant in one manuscript from the eighth century at Würzburg, ana printed by Dom Donatien de Bruyne, in Revue Bénédictine XXV ( 1908), 149-60. Twenty-nine further invectives against marriage follow in the passage! The Acts of John and Thomas, together with many other apocryphal gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses, have been published in one volume, translated and edited by

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37

Thomas, which, together with some others, were substituted by the Manichaeans for the canonical books. Had such notions taken root in Europe, they would have altered the very course of European history, because, from the Manichaean viewpoint, the telos of history could consist only in the reduction of human affairs to nothingness. Such a philosophy might have weakened decisively the intellectual and physical vitality of the Occident and rendered it defenseless against the onslaught of the dynamic power of the Islam. The victory of Christianity in the empire was miraculously rapid.14 Only seven years after the gruesome persecution of the Christians under Diocletian, the Edict of Milan was issued in 312. This edict, the Magna Carta of Christianity, granted tolerance. When the Edict of Theodosius established Christianity in its Athanasian form as the religion of the empire, paganism was vanquished, at least in its outward forms. St. Augustine had this swift development before his eyes when he conceived his fundamental work of Christian philosophy of history. Its very name, De civitate Dei has remained proverbial, a symbol expressing a definite attitude towards human and spiritual affairs. St. Augustine has rightly been called the preceptor of the Occident. While we cannot deal with his grandiose world of thought at any length, a few remarks will have to remind us of all that the whole of Occidental philosophy owes to him. Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas, Duns Scotus, Dante, Descartes, Kant, Hegel—they and countless others have drunk from the springs of his thought without exhausting them. Even the founders of heretical churches have tried to invoke the father of orthodoxy in support of their particular creeds, which utilized scraps of his doctrine while neglecting the organic harmony of the whole. Recently, on the occasion of the fifteen hundredth anniversary of his death, St. Augustine was once more brought sharply before the mind of the Montague Rhodes James ( The Apocryphal New Testament, Oxford University Press, 1924). In addition to its scholarly merits, the book should serve the excellent purpose of confounding certain intellectual snobs rampant today (as they already were in the time of St. Augustine) who reject the clear simplicity of the orthodox gospels for the sake of weird and pretentious apocryphal writings—many of them forged and heretical—which, they allege, were arbitrarily suppressed by the Church. Nothing of course is further from the truth, and anyone leafing through these writings should fina them a convincing prool a contrarío of the authenticity and inspiration of the canon. 14 According to Tertullian, Tiberius, "having himself received intelligence from Palestine of events which had clearly shown the truth of Christ's divinity, brought the matter before the senate, with his own decision in favour of Christ." However, he was not successful. "The senate, because it had not given the approval itself, rejected his proposal. Caesar held to his opinion, threatening wrath against all accusers of the Christians." Apologeticum v, in Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Latin, I, 290-92; English translation by S. Thelwall, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918), III, 21-22.

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world by the Encyclical of Pope Pius XI dedicated to the life and work of the saint." It was St. Augustine who established man's personality as a rational and social being endowed with free will and capable of choosing what is morally good. His own way to Christianity, after an agnostic youth and nine years of Manichaean aberration, is well known from his autobiographical Confessions. Those Manichaean years and successful fight against the heresy opened Augustine's eyes to the conflict in history; he realized that man's path through time and space was not determined by two principles of equal substance. The moving power, the source of conflict and of eventual triumph lay in the double citizenship of man, in his membership in two orders—the divine and the human, the latter influenced by passion and the lower will. The Zucht, the immanent direction of world history was towards the goal of Supreme Goodness; the process of history was one of developing freedom and of morality as a conscious principle. The lower order, Civitas Terrena, with all its wickedness, errors, and snares, still had to serve immanent and transcending Reason, and hence was endowed with its proper prudence and justification. Fourteen hundred years before Hegel, St. Augustine described the providentially created dialectic of history and human nature as the moving power behind the phenomenal world. It is from this point of view that the apparently insoluble problem of man's free will, acting under a binding divine constitution, receives its proper answer. St. Augustine, whose roots were sunk in classic ground, was at the same time the first "medieval" thinker. His mind reaches forth into timeless spheres, and it will remain modern as long as an Occidental world exists. The circumstances under which in the years 412-26 he wrote the twenty-two books of the De civitate Dei are part of general knowledge. Two years before he began writing, Rome, the invincible queen and mistress of the world, had fallen to the Germanic Visigoths under their youthful king, Alaric. We can well appreciate what this event must have meant to men then living. Though Rome had been abandoned as a capital for some generations, replaced first by Milan in Diocletian's time and later by Ravenna, it was still the city on the Seven Hills, the cradle of the world empire, which preserved a name more magic and powerful than any other. As the threshold of the Apostles and as the universal see, it ranked above all other cities of the earth. In the midst of the calamities which have in our own day befallen the world, men of the older generation may look about them and feel that the very foundations of the temporal order are dissolving and that history is coming to an end. Such disquieting sentiments are not new beneath the sun. Similar feelings have prevailed not infrequently in the past, as during the Thirty Years » Encyclical Letter Ad salutem, April 20, 1930.

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War and in the bloody events of the French and the Russian Revolutions. Perhaps they appeared for the first time in the minds of thinking men in the year 410. Rome, the invincible, whose name had stood for all the world, had fallen. What, then, could still be stable? Assuredly, only the Kingdom of God, a kingdom that was not of this world but was, nevertheless, in this world. To analyze the relations of that kingdom to the world around us must supply the answer to the most deep-lying questions about man's way through history. The essence of all relations and of all communities is love. Where there is no object to be loved, man will at least love his power to love—amor amoris.1β Without love, St. Augustine said, we would be immobile, dead, abominable. 17 Yet to love, means to establish relationships on the basis of equality—either to lift the beloved to one's own plane, or to attain to a higher plane in union with him.18 The community men form in accordance with their love for temporal interests is the Earthly City, the Civitas Terrena; the community formed by their love for God is the Civitas Dei.1' These two cities are divided spiritually, not materially. Both have a special object, namely, peace. Even wars prove that this is true, for they are waged for the sake of peace, not war. The aggressor, the breaker of peace, still desires it—his peace. 20 The prerequisite of peace is order, a system of right relations.21 In the City of God they are of absolute righteousness; in the Earthly City they are relative, since its will is directed towards temporal peace which can never be perfect. Yet, in this relative sense they nevertheless serve a good purpose.22 The human race is vitiated from the beginning, a massa damnata that would be lost forever and incapable of re-entering the community of God unless helped by grace. Human civilization is founded on pride and selfishness, and human kingdoms are breakers of peace rather than its upholders. His famous words, "Remove righteousness, and what are kingdoms but great bands of brigands?" continue, "What are bands of brigands but little kingdoms?" 23 Thus it might appear that St. Augustine condemned all secular institutions as predominantly wicked. But evil, as he recognized in overcoming Manichaeism, has no real existence; it is only the absence of good. As a disciple of classic philosophy, the saint knew that the state is rooted in man's nature; he also knew that Christ submitted to the jurisdiction of Caesar. Nothing that Saint Augustine, Confessiones m. i. 1. Ennaratio in Psalmum XXXI n. 5, in Migne, Patrohgiae cursus completus, Latin, XXXVI, 260. 18 In Epistolam Johannis tractatus, vui. 4 - 5 ; in Migne, Latin, XXXV, 2038; also De Trinitate vin. x. 14, in Migne, Latin, XLII, 960. 10 Saint Augustine, De civitate Dei xrv. 28. 20 Ibid., XIX. 12. ¡bid., χιχ. 13. « Ibid., χιχ. 17. 23 Ibid., IV. 4; the translation is by Ernest Barker, in his introduction to The City of God, p. xxiii. 18 17

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results from nature—is nature—can be intrinsically wicked. It is the corruption of nature, the driving out of the good, which causes wickedness.24 Since wickedness is a defect of nature, a category of unreality, whatever is real must be good. But what is good must also be reasonable, for reason is positive and real. This is in nuce what Hegel, in his Philosophy of Right, has put into the formula: "Whatever is reasonable is real, and what is real is reasonable." 25 This is indeed St. Augustine's central thought; it is the hinge of his entire philosophy, which he illustrates with examples taken from biblical and profane history. The City of God, as we have seen, is not confined to the community of blessed spirits; it reaches down to earth, too, since it comprises the church (though not necessarily all its members). Its citizens partake in the whole process of this world. 'The 'celestial society'," Augustine says, "while it is here on earth, increases itself out of all languages, never respecting the temporal laws that arc made against so good and religious a practice: yet not breaking, but observing their diversity in divers nations, all which do tend unto the preservation of earthly peace, if they oppose not the adoration of one only God. So that you see, the 'Heavenly City' observes and respects this temporal peace here on earth, and the coherence of men's wills in honest morality, as far as it may with a safe conscience; yea, and so far desires it, making use of it for the attainment of the peace eternal." 26 There exists, therefore, an order of interdependence between the cities: against its will, the Civitas Terrería serves the purpose of the Civitas Dei (which uses the former's relative peace and its system of relative righteousness), and by so doing it is gradually transformed and redeemed. This Earthly City possesses a justifia of its own; its antithetical nature advances the cause of an ultimate synthesis of Divine Reason with the overcome and yet preserved results of the human pilgrimage.27 This dialectical conflict has been present from the beginning; Cain and Abel are, for St. Augustine, the first representatives of the two forces that shape our history. Could we not speculate that it was for the necessary service rendered by the antithesis that Cain was placed under the special protection of the king of the Heavenly City? 28 A potent antidote to national pride, with which the armies of the new nations might have poisoned the universal conception of the Roman-Christian order, is contained in St. Augustine's ideas. Since the Civitas Dei calls upon men of all races and nations who are desirous of peace and righteousness, no nation can be more than an interdependent part of the great drama of the journey of mankind towards God. Ibid., xa. 13. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Sämtliche Werke, VI, 14: "Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig." 26 De civitate Dei xix. 17; English translation by John Healey, The City of God, III, 153-54. "Ibid. « Genesis 4:15. 24 25

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Closest to the nature and desires of the Heavenly City should be a temporal order that reflects its structure, one that, like the Heavenly City, embraces men of all nations and unites them by a common love; it should strive for the highest degree of justitia, and put its power at the service of the kingdom. This consequence was indeed drawn from Augustinian thought: the coexistence of two orders that are ordained toward the same goal, one directly, the other dialectically. "As hardly any other doctrine," Etienne Gilson and Philotheus Böhner say in their history of Christian philosophy, "St. Augustine's theology of history has transformed the countenance of the world. The Sacrum Imperium Romanum Nationis Germanicae, though not St. Augustine's conception, was not bom without the political interpretation of his idea of the Kingdom of God." *· St. Augustine died in 430, while his episcopal see of Hippo was besieged by the Germanic Vandals. His courage and confidence never left him, though the whole world seemed to be falling apart. From the southernmost province of the ancient Roman commonwealth, he was yet destined one day to become the teacher also of those peoples of the North who in his own generation had battered down the temporal order that had been considered immutable forever. " Die Geschichte der christlichen Philosophie, ρ. 21β.

5 ROME HAS FALLEN: ROME HAS TRIUMPHED Some of the Germans had served Rome, some had submitted to it, others had fought and defeated it: all believed in the Roman Empire. RICARDA H U C I I , Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation. THE legions of the Capitoline Jupiter had defeated the Germans, but Germany had remained unconquered; the deterts had only been partial. Countless tribes and the vast lands beyond the Roman walls and the great rivers were hardly touched by the might of the Caesars. Conquest came after Jupiter had yielded to the same Conqueror of Whom the Germanic mythology may dimly have known—"One who is freer than the gods." It was consummated in a process stretching ovf*r many centuries, after the Germans themselves bccame identified with the transfigured Roman idea and suppressed the tribal, blood, and race-bound atavisms in their own hearts and their own lands. The searchlight of history, wandering over the stage of Europe, centers first on the Gothic nation. After the Goths, of the tribes who were in due time to create most of the states of modern Europe, the Franks were next to emerge into world-historic importance. But the Goths must be granted precedence, even though the Frankish kings were more favored by lasting fortune. At the end of the Antonine period, the Goths were still settled between the Oder and the Vistula rivers. After they had moved to the shores of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, they split into the Western and Eastern Goths, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the latter settling on the lower Dnieper and the western shores of the Sea of Azov, once a thoroughly Greco-Romanized country. By the close of the fifth century, the Goths had successfully challenged the power of both Romes, suffered and survived defeats that had seemed crushing, and established Christian kingdoms in Italy, Southern France, and Spain. Though it is not easy to understand without a dictionary, I am sensitive to a living German sound when I read the Arian Bishop Ulfilas' Gothic translation of the Bible. Ulfilas was born in 311, and while still young he distinguished himself as a representative and leader of his people. At the age of twenty-five he pleaded their cause at the court of Constantinople. He is the author of the first Gothic alphabet, which employed the Greek and the Latin letters and some runes to express the Gothic sounds. His Bible is the most

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ancient document of any Germanic language. In this translation, the wordcreative power is amazing; it shows both the mind of a genius and the great and formative language which was at his disposal. The Lords Prayer, the Sermon on the Mount, and the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians anticipate the great masterpieces of German and English Bibles in far later centuries. The migrations and the wars of the Goths need not be described. A few notes will suffice to clarify the state of Europe in those centuries. The awesome Huns, after a long journey from the northern borders of China across the huge plains of Asia, had reached the ramparts of Europe in the fourth century. In 372, they destroyed the realm of the great Ostrogothic king, Hermanne, whose domains had extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and only a few Goths escaped to join forces with their kinsmen, the Visigoths. The main body of the people was subjected to the Hunnish yoke and did not regain its freedom until about 454, after the death of Attila. In 376, Emperor Valens permitted the Visigoths—two hundred thousand warriors, or almost a million people—to cross the lower Danube. The Dnieper line had become untenable. Wise government might have made loyal and powerful allies of the Goths, who were bitterly needed against the Hunnish danger. Instead, inconsiderate treatment and exploitation by the imperial government and the subordinate officials brought on revolt. The Goths had been asked to give up most of their youth, who were dispersed as hostages among the provinces of Asia. Some years later, according to a prearranged plan of the Roman master general of the troops, forty thousand of the young hostages were slaughtered.1 On August 9, 378, a day still memorable in the annals of Europe, the imperial army was decisively defeated in the battle of Adrianople. Emperor Valens, who had proudly disdained escape, fell fighting in the midst of his soldiers. Disastrous as it was for the empire, this battle by no means sealed its end. Even less did it mean the "crushing of Latin civilization" by barbarians, as has been suggested with more rhetoric than historical accuracy. Theodosius the Great, whom Emperor Gratian had raised to the imperial office of the East shortly after Adrianople, arranged honorable terms with the Goths. He even won young King Alaric, of the ancient house of the Balthas, to his side, and an early Germanic-Roman understanding seemed possible. After the emperor's death in 395, however, the flames of the Gothic war burst forth once more. Theodosius had been the last ruler to head an empire once more undivided in its highest office. His death left the eagle double-headed for a long time 1

Jomandes, De origine actibusque Getarum xxiv; and Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum gestarum libri qui supersunt xxxi. xvi. 8, in Ammianus Marcellinus, III, 502—4.

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to come. His sons, who succeeded him, Arcadius in the East, Honorius in the West, were minors. To Honorius' domains belonged Italy, Africa, Gaul, Spain, Britain, Noricum, Pannonia, and Dalmatia. As the emperor was a weak and indolent ruler, true governmental power rested in the hands of Stilicho, a Vandal by descent. He was married to a niece of Theodosius, and his daughter Maria became the wife of Honorius—a striking proof that there existed no racial lines, not even in the highest spheres of the empire. This Vandal of humble origin became the strongest shield and spear of the Roman realm against the Visigoths. His Roman adoption proved stronger than his Germanic birth. He was a man of unimpeachable character, a military genius, and a brilliant administrator. After Theodosius' death, he acted, in accordance with the last will of his sovereign, as the guardian of the two imperial youths, an office that he exercised with impartial justice. His first act of government led him across the Alps in the middle of winter; he descended the Rhine down to the marshes of Holland, strengthened the imperial defenses everywhere, and subdued unruly German tribes. Soon he had to meet the enemy on imperial soil. When the Visigoths approached Milan, he alone, and not the emperor, had the courage to act in the defense of the state. He defeated them at Pollentia in 402 and for the time being saved the motherland of the empire. Soon afterward, however, another powerful army of barbarians, driven from their dwelling places by the Hunnish storm, invaded Italy. Stilicho defeated them again between Fiesole and Florence; but this was a pyrrhic victory, accomplished at the price of recalling the legions from Gaul and the northern frontier. The battle of Fiesole led to the loss of Gaul and the provinces of Southern Germany. Across the frozen Rhine, Vandals, Suevians, and Burgundians swept westward. The beautiful palaces and villas—abodes of comfort even by modern standards—which lined the bank of the river, fell to the flames of destruction. So did great towns like Strassburg, Speyer, Mainz, and Rheims. It seemed as if Ariovistus' men were taking a posthumous, frightful revenge. Yet—so strange is the plan of history—this heartland of Europe which Caesar's wars had opened later took over the Christian-Roman heritage, and from there civilization spread out over the darker and more deserted northern and eastern parts of Germany and Europe. This period is an interesting illustration of the interdependence of European affairs, continental and insular, even at a time when communications were slow and therefore the theater of events relatively much wider. The Gothic wars in Italy led to the abandonment of Britain in 407. The, initiator of the imperial world time in Europe, Julius Caesar, had first brought the Roman eagles to that island. Now as dusk descended on the ancient empire, a usurper of the imperial throne, Constantine by name, an officer in the Britannic legions, took advantage of the desperate plight of the state. He led his legions across the Channel to Gaul, whence they were never to return.

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Not long afterwards, the Saxons secured a foothold at the Thames estuary. Roman Britain was no more. Stilicho, for whom the empire filled the horizon of the world, had fostered the union of the Germanic and Latin peoples in order to repel the attacks of those Germans who were not akin to universal traditions and outlook. He is one of the early Germanic representatives of the Occidental viewpoint: Europe, a nation above the nations. His execution, ordered by the unworthy Honorius in 408, 2 not only deprived the commonwealth of its ablest general ; it removed the last support from the floodgates which had held the tribal deluge in check. The flood rushed forth and would certainly have destroyed all the Roman foundations, had they been of human workmanship only. One year after Stilicho's death, Alaric appeared before Rome. Not since the days of Hannibal, 619 years earlier, had a hostile army come within sight of the Eternal City. In the following year, after all negotiations with the shrewd but incapable imperial court at Ravenna had failed, Rome was invested by the Visigoths. It fell after an heroic defense by the people, in whom, despite famine and long degeneracy, the spirit of Romulus, Cato, and Caesar awoke to new life eleven hundred and sixty-three years after the foundation of the city. Alaric was a not unworthy prince. His courage, his talent for leadership, his prudence, even his clemency, are attested by his enemies. The fate that befell the conquered city was harsh, but less so than is generally imagined. Several thousand died, and many statues and other monuments were destroyed; but it seems that the Goths, restrained by the authority of their king, showed a certain moderation that was extraordinary in those days. ( "Those days"—I hate to use so hypocritical an expression, implying that we belong to a more civilized century! ) The treasures belonging to St. Peter were protected against pillage or destruction; Gothic warriors in shining armor carried the sacred vessels of gold and silver to a sanctuary in the Vatican. 3 After one week—according to some, after the third day—the Goths evacuated the city. It seems strange that Alaric should have been insensible to the highest honor of the world, which Rome alone could bestow. 4 But there is no indication that at the sight of the Palatine he was struck by the dream of empire and universal domination. Instead of making Rome his capital and deposing the imperial weakling of Ravenna, he moved southward, urged on by some indefinite longing of his soul. Perhaps the magic garden of Sicily had cast its spell over him from afar, as it has over so many Nordics since his day. His death in Southern Italy and the depositing of his body in the Busento river, - Zctóimus, llistoriae v. 34, in Corj>us scriptorum historiae Byzantinae, 1837, p. 295. 3 It is this marvelous event which St. Augustine glorifies in the first six chapters of De civitatc Dei. 4 Instead, as Procopius relates, he tried to raise a Roman nobleman by name of Attalus to the imperial dignity but soon had to depose him again for inefficiency. De bello Vandalico HI. ii. 28 sqq., in Procopius, II, 18 sqq.

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which his people had diverted from its course, have become the subject of many myths and legends. Alaric's successor was his brother-in-law Athaulf. The character of the new king may be seen in a conversation with a citizen of Narbonne, as reported by Orosius. The historian says: "It seems that at first he ardently desired to blot out the Roman name and to make all the Roman territory a Gothic empire in fact as well as in name, so that, to use the popular expressions, Gothia should take the place of Romania, and he, Athaulf, should become all that Caesar Augustus once had been. Having discovered from long experience that the Goths, because of their unbridled barbarism, were utterly incapable of obeying laws, and yet believing that the state ought not to be deprived of laws without which a state is not a state, he chose to seek for himself at least the glory of restoring and increasing the renown of the Roman name by the power of the Goths, wishing to be looked upon by posterity as the restorer of the Roman Empire, since he could not be its transformer." 5 Faithful to his intention, Athaulf established peace and friendship with Honorius and conducted his people to Southern Gaul. The king married a Roman princess, Galla Placidia, sister of the emperor and daughter of Theodosius the Great. The chroniclers of the day exult in praise of the grace and beauty of the young ruler and of his bride, whose love for the "barbarian" was as genuine as was his love for her. The nuptials were celebrated with imperial pomp." Athaulf was not permitted to see the consolidation of his new dominions; he was assassinated in Barcelona, and for one week his people had to endure the rule of the murderer, a certain Sigeric. Then a noble Goth, Wallia, was chosen king. He avenged the disgrace of the house of Balthas and honorably returned the grieving Queen Placidia to her imperial brother. King Wallia restored Spain, which he conquered from the Suevians and Vandals, to nominal obedience to the empire. It was this success of the Gothic arms which induced the feeble Honorius to celebrate a Roman triumph as if he were Caesar himself. After Wallia's death in 419, the scepter passed to Theodoric, the son of Alaric. Under his rule and that of his son Torismund, the Gothic kingdom reached its widest extent: Spain without Galicia and Northern Portugal, and France west of the Rhone and south of the Loire. When Attila with his host of Huns and auxiliaries, composed of subjugated peoples, moved westward, it fell to the Visigoths to do what their ancestors had done in Eastern Europe. Again it became their destiny to shield the Occident and to sacrifice their 5 Historia adversus paganos VII. 43; English translation by Irving Woodworth Raymond, Seven Books of History against the Pagans, p. 396. 0 Cf. Jomandes, De origine actibusque Getarum xxxi. The feast was repeated later at Narbonne, and the solemnities there are described in great detail by Olympiodorus. Cf. Fhotius, Myriobiblon stve Btbliotheca LXXX, in Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Creek, CIII, 266.

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blood for the perpetuation of European history. Theodoric, whose court was worthy of any educated prince, came to the defense of Gaul and the Romans when they asked him to save "the churches of God and the tombs of the saints." 7 In the battle on the Catalaunian plains—the battle of Châlons—the Visigoths saved the Romans under Aetius, the master of the troops, who only recently had fought against them. King Theodoric's body was found on the battlefield, pierced with many wounds. Though nightfall saved the army of Attila from destruction, its vaunted invincibility was shattered. The truth of the legends and songs that soon exalted the Catalaunian plains far beyond their immediate military importance, history has confirmed. Legends often reflect a subconscious knowledge of the people and express, in their language, the historic import of events more clearly than the chroniclers and military analysts can with facts and dates and figures. Not even death, one legend said, could extinguish the fighting spirit with which the Christians and their enemies had thrown themselves into the battle: in the clouds of the sky their souls pursued the struggle for and against the existence of the Occidental commonwealth. That day on the Catalaunian plains is one of those which have impressed themselves deeply on the memory of Western mankind, for it taught inescapably the importance of the supra· national community of historic destiny. As a perpetuating spiritual force in European tradition and thought, the battle of the Catalaunian plains will always rank high. It may, in psychological power be compared to the battle of Lepanto in 1571, which, though it did not actually break Turkish might, did once again restore to Christendom the consciousness of its indissoluble unity. Little of interest is known concerning those men who are called the last Roman emperors. Palace intrigues, disloyalty, and murder again stained the highest office. Between the reign of Emperor Valentinian III, in whose days the Catalaunian battle was fought, to the memorable year of 476, that is, in about twenty years, nine emperors held the throne in rapid succession. No chronicle could avoid noting what a twisted irony of fate it was that in the name of the last and most powerless of all, Romulus Augustus,8 were united the names of the first Roman king and the first constitutional emperor. Yet there is also a spark of sublime tragedy in the dark ironic symbol—and even more in the only words that all the historians could find to say about that youth, the last offspring of the mighty race of the Caesars—that "he was 7 Cf. Sidonius Appolinaris, Panegyricus Avito Augusto Socero dictus, in Migne, Fabrologtoe cursus comptetus, Latin, LVIII, 678-94; and Jornandes, De origine act ¡busque Getarum xxxvi. 8 1 am, of course, not unaware that even in his time contemporary writers referred to Emperor Romulus by the deprecatory diminutive of "Augustulus." Needless to say, I am ignoring this unseemly slur on the name of the imperial youth, the last Roman Caesar.

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beautiful." This quia pulcher erat, upon which no poet has yet seized, resounds with a nostalgic and redeeming tone of human sweetness and youthful sorrow. It brings to an end one movement of the Eroica of the world, which over five hundred years before had commenced with the two thunder strokes of Pharsalus and Actium. Because of his beauty and youth, his life was spared by the man who deposed him, the Germanic chieftain Odoacer. With this name the new epoch of Europe begins, a Europe apparently overwhelmed by its antithesis of nationalism and yet pregnant with future life. Odoacer, of the Herulian tribe, which had been subjugated by the Huns, was the son of Edecon, known as Attilas ambassador to the court of Theodosius II. On this mission—curious coincidence!—he had been accompanied by the Roman Orestes, father of Romulus Augustus. After Edecon's death, his son had led a wandering life among the German tribes of Noricum. According to tradition, St. Severin had told him to go to Italy where he would win great honors.10 He entered the service of the Western Empire and received a good, though belated, education. His keen mind and his courage raised him to the command of the foreign auxiliaries in Italy. In this position he had ample opportunity to watch the decay of the administration, its corruption and intrigues, and to listen to the murmuring of the suffering people who were crushed by ever-mounting taxes and rendered defenseless by a venal court system. Rome, however, still filled the horizon of the Italians and barbarians to such an extent that Odoacer, like Athaulf, must have resolved to continue rather than destroy its name and symbol. Above the nations and their wars a dome had been vaulted which had no "outside." At the very moment when the empire fell, its destroyer himself proved that already it had long since become inseparably a part of Western mankind itself. The never-conquered savages of whom Tacitus had spoken had bent their necks beneath the idea of the Occident. They had come of age and could now take over to rebuild what in its old form could not be saved. How different was the Germanic conquest from the Hunnish invasion! The Huns had not been borne in Europe's own womb. They were not its antithesis, but its absolute negation, an anti-Occidental power of tremendous magnitude. Their victory could not possibly have established any living synthesis of past and present history. It would have meant the complete destruction of the Occidental order, nothing less. Later, this order was repeatedly endangered by similar forces: the Avars who invaded Europe in the eighth century; the Saracens in Spain and France until their defeat by Karl Martell; the Mongols in the thirteenth century; and, yet more recently, the Turks who 9

9 Anonymus Valesianus, Pars posterior, in Monumenta minora saeculorum IV, V, VI, VII, Vol. I, p. 310. >« Ibid., p. 314-15.

Germaniae

histórica,

Chronica

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advanced against Vienna in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A thoughtful student of contemporary history may perceive today dangers of a similar nature, with their spread again facilitated by wickedness, dissension, and fratricidal wars among the members of the Occidental family of nations. The legal act by which the last emperor of that period was deposed should not be dismissed as an empty and meaningless formula, as we in our time, because we have seen such abominable misuse and inflation of words and treaties, may feel tempted to do. It should be taken as proof of the contention that the empire, in a different manifestation of its idea, has continued to live. Odoacer's power over the youth who was only beautiful and over the whole state was so great that no legal formalism would have been needed to transfer governmental power to its actual holder. The process had occurred time and time again. Nor was there any danger that the Eastern Empire might successfully oppose a declaration of independence by Odoaccr, had he chosen absolute and genuine sovereignty. But instead of pursuing such a course, Odoacer caused Romulus Augustus to advise the Senate of his resignation—that time-honored body which nominally was still the depositary of all sovereignty. The forms of the ancient Roman constitution were preserved to the last. Thereupon the Senate, by unanimous vote, adopted a resolution that was dispatched to the Roman Emperor Zeno in Constantinople. In it, the Senators disclaimed the necessity of continuing the imperial succession in Italy; since, in their opinion, the majesty of "one sole Emperor was sufficient to pervade and protect both realms," the East and the West. The republic, they added, could safely confide in Odoacer, who was well versed in the arts of government and warfare, and they requested the emperor to invest him with the dignity of patricius and with the administration of Italy.11 Henceforth, in name at least, the empire was again one, united under the Eastern Roman crown. As a symbol and as an idea, the ecumenical realm was preserved for future realization on the political plane. For fourteen years, Odoacer ruled as patrician, as lieutenant of the emperor. He apparently never added to his royal title the name of any particular country. Cassiodorus, the historian of that epoch, asserts that he did not assume the purple or any other insignia of sovereignty.12 He even restored the consulship of the West and treated the senators and other illustrious Roman personages with more deference than many of the Caesars had done. Nor was there any lapse in legal continuity. The laws of the empire were strictly enforced, and the administration of Italy was kept in the hands of the traditional magistrates. But Italy was weakened by wars, famine, and the social distress of cen11 Malchus, Excerpta de legationibus gentium ad Romanos, in Corpus scriptorum toriae Byzantinae, 1829, p. 235. 15 Chronicon, in Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Latin, LXIX, 1246.

his-

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tunes. The independent peasant class had long been destroyed, and huge latifundia in the hands of a few covered the land. No legislation, since the days of the Gracchi, had succeeded in introducing lasting reform. The proletariat of Rome—and that of Milan, Naples, and the other big cities—was like a man whose huge stomach went on consuming mightily while his hands were idle. St. Gelasius, who was pope during the last few years of Odoacer's reign, asserts that "whole provinces such as Aemilia and Tuscany had become all but depopulated." " This may be exaggerated, but it must certainly be true that the population of Italy had dropped considerably. Roman traditions, Latinity as an historic and cultural reality, had to replace the ancient Roman blood of which not much could have been left. Odoacer by prudence and statesmanship endeavored to mitigate the general destitution. We may admire his government all the more when we realize that he ruled over an alien country, without having at his disposal a national force of his own. When his historic mandate, namely, to link the Roman with the medieval-German world, was fulfilled, he succumbed to Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths. It was not a mere whim, but the judgment of history that bestowed that epithet on Theodoric. In him there arose a ruler who, if not of world-historic stature in the most ambitious sense, can yet rightly be called a precursor of Charlemagne, whose reign he fore-shadowed centuries before the stars permitted its realization. Theodoric was born near Vienna in 454, the year after Attilas death when the Ostrogoths regained their liberty. He was of the royal house of the Amali, the fifteenth in the lineal line,14 and thus we may assume that he had an awakened historic consciousness that stretched over many generations. At the age of eight, he was sent to the court of Emperor Leo in Constantinople as a hostage and a token of Gothic loyalty. It can be presumed that he received the education proper to a noble Roman youth and a first insight into the art of government. When he was eighteen, he was returned to his people and soon afterwards succeeded to the throne of his father, taking rulership over a dissident branch of his people. He united all Ostrogoths under his reign and then he may have felt that his historic hour had come. He asked the emperor to dispatch him to Italy, where he might wrest power from Odoacer; should he succeed, he would rule in the emperor's name and restore the glory of Rome." Many Ostrogoths who had served in the Eastern Roman army rallied to his standard. This military expedition to Italy was really the exodus of an entire nation with all its women and children. We can only marvel at the success of Epistola adversas Andromachum, in Migne, Latin, LIX, 113. Cf. Jemandes, De origine actibusque Getarvm xiv. "Ibid. lvii. According to Procopius (De beüo Gothico i. i. 10), the suggestion came from Emperor Zeno when the Goths, discontented with their land in Thrace, threatened to take up arms against him. 18

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the enterprise, undertaken by so great a host, traveling a distance of more than seven hundred miles. Odoacer, whom fortune had deserted, was thrice defeated in the field; but his residence of Ravenna, protected by marshes and powerful walls, held out for three years. The assassination of this valiant foe at the hand or by command of Theodoric—a lasting stain on his shield of honor—was an act of unnecessary harshness and perhaps showed the traces in Theodoric of the Ryzantine school of faithlessness and action directe. The territory over which the Ostrogoths extended their rule, unchallenged for almost a whole generation, was far greater than had been Odoacer s. It embraced not only Italy proper, but also Provence, present-day Yugoslavia, Hungary west of the Danube, and parts of Austria. One of Theodoric's daughters was married to the Visigothic king, Atalaric; after the latter's death, Theodoric ruled as guardian and regent for his grandson over his wide Spanish-French kingdom. He kept this power till his own death in 526. Since he was connected by marriage to the rising Frankish kingdom of Clovis and to the Burgundians," his position in the European world was unique for centuries. After the capitulation of Ravenna, Theodoric ruled for thirty-three years. This long period of peace and orderly government gave to Italy the respite so bitterly needed after so much bloodshed and legal anarchy. His court at Ravenna became a center of international politics, art, learned conversation, and diplomacy.17 The king strove for a reconciliation between his Gothic and his Latin subjects. Military matters were largely in Gothic hands; their strict discipline is attested by Procopius.18 These warriors defended the borders of the realm and asserted its authority without oppressing the citizens. They did not impose their will upon the civil administration—a novelty unheard of in previous generations. Like Odoacer before him, Theodoric declined the insignia of imperial dignity and by word and deed recognized the continuity of the empire. 1 ' To 16 Saint Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum n. 28, in Monumenta Germanlae histórica, S criptores rerum Merovingicarum, I, 89-90. Theodoric also arranged for intermarriage between his house and the kings of the Vandals and Thuringians. Jornandes, De origine actibusque Getarum lviii. 17 "Under his [Theodoric's] felicitous rule," Cassiodorus writes with pleasing flattery in his chronicle dedicated to the king, "very many cities were restored, fortified places founded, and marvelous castles erected. The wonders of old were surpassed by his great works." Chronicon, in Migne, Patrologiae cursus completili, Latin, LXIX, 1247. 19 De bello Gothico ι. i. 27 sqq. "He himself committed scarcely a single act of injustice against his subjects," Procopius writes, "nor would he brook such conduct on the part of anyone else who attempted it. . . . In fact he was as truly an emperor as any who have distinguished themselves in this office from the beginning; and love for him among both Goths and Italians grew to be great." English translation by H. B. Dewing, Procopius, 10 111,11-13. Ibid. i. i. 26.

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stress the union of the two parts, two consuls, one from the East and the other from the West, were elected annually. He also followed the example of Odoacer ( and of the Visigothic realm ) in leaving civil administration largely in Latin hands. Since Rome had become the see of the Papacy, it preserved its actual preeminence in addition to its historic prestige. But because of wars and social misery it had suffered greatly. Under Theodoric it regained much of its earlier splendor. In 500 A.D. the king arrived for a prolonged visit and was solemnly received by the Senate and the people. With the conscientious mind of a legitimate successor, the king caused statues and other monuments of the republic and of the Caesars to be preserved and restored, while special edicts protected the citizens against abuses and exploitation. The whole state of the kingdom changed from depression to prosperity. Agriculture, so long prostrate, flourished again; marshes were drained; and gold and silver mines were opened. The government provided for large magazines of corn and fixed the prices of essential commodities. The coasts of Italy were protected by a fleet of a thousand light vessels, which guarded the routes of supply to Egypt and the East. 20 The great legends of Europe, especially the Nibelungenlied, have immortalized Theodoric's name. There he is the invincible Dietrich von Bern (i.e., of Verona, his residence), powerful and just ruler, king and father to his land. An imperial gleam breaks through at certain dramatic moments. In the Chronica regia of Cologne for instance, it is reported that in 1197—at the time of the death of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Henry VI,—a dreadful apparition had frightened the people on the Moselle: a man on a huge black horse, revealing his name as the late Dietrich von Bern, had prophesied misfortune and distress for the Roman Empire. 21 Still later, at the time of the death of Emperor Frederick II, a Franciscan friar told his awe-struck listeners that he had seen a host of five hundred men led by a fair prince riding into the sea. One of them told him that this was Frederick, the emperor, who with his knights was entering Mount Aetna.- 2 This story is almost identical with an early legend of the death of the Ostrogothic-Roman king. Though both Odoacer and Theodoric derived the legitimacy of their govIn religious matters, Theodoric showed the same tolerance as Odoacer before him. Orthodox Catholic worship, pontifical and episcopal administration, enjoyed the full protection of the Arian king. Also in his attitude towards the Jews he proved himself a Christian monarch. He disapproved of their religious obstinacy but safeguarded all their rights, "because nobody can be compelled to believe against his free will·' ( Cassiodorus, Variae ir, No. 27, in Migne, Fatrologiae cursus complétas, Latin, LXIX, 561 ). When mob violence occurred in Milan and other cities and the ring leaders submerged in the crowd, he held the communities responsible for the damage and severely punished those who refused to contribute. 21 Chronica regia Coloniensis, ad annum 1197, in Scriptores rerum Germanicarum «η usum scholarum ex Monumentis Germaniae historicis recusi, p. 159. 2 - Thomas de Eccleston, Liber de adoentu fratrum mtnorum in Angliam, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores, XXVIII, 568. 20

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ernment from the nominal consent of Eastern Rome, the Ostrogothic king pointed towards a larger European legitimacy based on historic necessity. This opened an avenue for the resurgence of an independent Roman idea later when the East was drifting away from the clarity of Occidental thought. The epic battle at Mount Vesuvius, by which the Eastern Roman armies under Narses completed Belisarius' work of conquest, left the fair kingdom of the Goths only an historic memory. One of the most gifted peoples of Europe was wiped from the stage of the world; its remnants submerged themselves in other nations ( according to tradition, some of the Goths settled in the German South Tirol, others were evacuated by the Vikings ) or withdrew into the shadow of historic unconsciousness. Yet it is perhaps still possible to gain some notion of what the Ostrogoths may have been like in contemplating the paintings by El Greco, Velázquez, and others portraying Spanish hidalgos, the descendants of the Visigoths. Though centuries have passed across their faces, one may still perceive the ancient and, it seems, permanent traits in the Spanish nobility, which is proud of its largely Visigothic descent. In the St. Augustine of El Greco's painting The Funeral of Count Orgaz at Toledo, we may recognize the features of men like Bishop Ulfilas: a strong, haggard face with deep-set eyes and an ascetic yet eloquent mouth. There is power in that face, combining earthly prudence and spiritual strength, an uncorrupted virginal mind with a knowledge of God's kingdom on this earth. There is the portrait of Rodrigo de la Fuente, a physician and poet, in the Madrid Prado. If we replaced the sixteenth-century robes with Gothic armor or tunics, we would perhaps have before us one of the wise counselors of Theodoric. St. Jerome in the Frick Collection in New York always calls to my mind a vision of old Hildebrand, the trusted friend of King Theodomer, father of Theodoric. In the stem face of Rodrigo Vázquez we see Latin influence wedded to the Gothic heritage—aquiline nose, dispassionate eyes, and a slight trace of detached skepticism, the result of long years of mastery of frail human beings. The merciless, yet austere, features of the duke of Alba, conqueror of Portugal and governor of the Netherlands, may also conjure up a vision of the Gothic past. This descendant of ancient kings reminds us of that race of conquerors which perpetuated the Roman idea of Virgil: "To spare the vanquished and to humble the proud with might." In Italy, only the tomb of the great king at Ravenna, erected by his daughter, the unhappy Queen Amalasuntha, bears witness to his work. Today it is a ruin, but its huge dome of granite above a circular chapel may still stand as a symbol for his rise and elevation above all Germanic chieftains and princes of his own generation.

6 THE CROWN OF CHARLEMAGNE O Rex mundi triumphator, Jesu Christi conregnator, sis pro nobis exorator, sánete pater Carole. Mass for Saint Charlemagne, Emperor and Confessor, January 28. FOR the defense of Italy, the Goths had been forced to denude Pannonia and Noricum—flourishing under their rule—of troops. As a result, these provinces fell a prey to the uncivilized Gepidae, who in turn were defeated by the Mongolian Avars and their Germanic allies, the Langobards. In 568, under the leadership of their king, Alboin, the Langobards crossed the Julian Alps and in their train brought the Avars to Italy, the heart and the garden of the empire. According to ancient tradition, the Langobards had come on the instigation of Narses, whose pride had been offended by the Byzantine court.1 He had been exarch of the reconquered country for fourteen years. We may wonder about the meaning of this partial verdict of history: Eastem Rome crushing the Goths, only to lose Italy to a tribe infinitely below the Gothic cultural level. Of the Langobards, Tacitus had said that they were of great ferocity.' The Roman historian Caius Velleius Paterculus, bom at the time of Augustus, wrote that they were defeated by the Emperor Tiberius, and he too asserted that their wildness exceeded that of all other tribes.3 Suetonius says that they were driven back across the Elbe by Germanicus. The descent of the Langobards on Italy was a veritable blight not only upon the country but upon historic development for centuries. An uncouth people without loyalty to Roman-Occidental traditions had been tempted to move southward, and it is no exaggeration to say that the very principle of universalnational dialectic suffered a severe defeat. It was not fully-redeemed until Charlemagne in 774 terminated the Langobardian rule; yet even later the remnants and partial dominations of their ancient power proved an alien and disturbing element. It is true that by Charlemagne's day the "long-bearded" Langobards had become the Lombards and had lost the ferocity of their ancestors. Pepin and the great Charles had concluded temporary alliances with them. But for centuries to come, their name remained odious to all champions of the supranational Christian republic. They had shed their tribal nationalism, which had brought them in conflict with the papacy. But basically, I would say, it was the same force that made them set up particularistic powers, the Lombard 1 Cf. Paul Wamefried, Historia Langobardorum •. 5, in Monumenta Cermaniae histórica, Scriptores rerum Langobardicarum et Italicanim saeculorum VI-IX, p. 75. 2 Germania XL. 8 Historia Romana a. 106.

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cities, directed against the empire. In the history of church and empire, scarcely any alliance was more fatal than the one between the papacy and the rebels of Upper Italy. The infectious germs of particularism, which received therefrom so weighty a sanction, were to spread in due time over the world and endanger the unity of faith and of traditions on which the ecumenical realm was built. Rome, Ravenna, Naples, Venice, parts of Tuscany, Southern Italy, and Sardinia remained under Ryzantine sovereignty. In 810, Charlemagne and Emperor Nicephorus stipulated in a treaty of peace that Southern Italy, Venice, and Dalmatia should remain under Eastern Rome. Sicily was lost to the Arabs in the ninth century, while the rising power of the Venetians soon obliterated the last vestiges of Eastern Roman control in the northern Adriatic. That strange and still-mysterious city, which owed its existence to the flight of Aquileian and Padovian citizens before Attila into the marshes, lagoons, and islands near the coast, and which, through its position, was protected against Alboin and his Langobards, was destined to play an important role as the link between Europe and the Near East. The kingdom of the Franks now deserves our attention. To such an extent did it become identified with universal traditions that among the Creeks and Arabs the names of Franks and Romans came to be regarded as synonymous. The Frankish confederacy was originally a league formed around 210 A.D. by the various Germanic tribes living between the Lower Rhine and the Weser. They called themselves the Franks (i. e., the free men) because they were not subject to Roman rule. In their homeland, the ancient fame of Arminius had never died; in songs, in legends, and in tradition it continued to stimulate powerful national sentiments. In the strange process of historic transmutation, a nation whose very name expressed anti-Roman pride of freedom was to be called upon to save and perpetuate the Roman Empire. In 256, at the time of Emperor Valerian and his son Gallienus, who held court at Trier, the Franks crossed the Rhine and pushed westward as far as Tarragona. One hundred years later, Emperor Julian the Apostate battled them anew. Not before the end of the fourth century did they become confederates of Rome. Procopius, in his Gothic War, has called them a perfidious nation whose word could not be trusted.4 Clovis, of the house of the Merovingians, was converted to Christianity in 496.5 He was the first and, for a long period to come, the only Catholic prince * De bello Gothico π. 25. 5 It was during his coronation by St. Remigius that, according to Hincmar of Rheims (Vito Sanati Remíeii xxxviii, in Migne, Latin, CXXV, 1160), a dove brought down from heaven the miraculous Sainte Ampoulle, a small crystal vial filled with balm, with which Clovis and almost all French kings after him were anointed, until, in 1793, it was viciously broken in the public square of Rheims.

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(since even the Byzantine emperors were then not free from heretic tendencies ). As representative of Roman orthodoxy in the midst of Arian Germanic tribes and kings, he could be sure of the support of the papacy and the bishops." At the time of his conversion he had defeated the Burgundians, who had challenged his rule and had conquered a large part of Provence from the Visigoths. His realm now extended over the major part of France and a broad strip Gì land east of the Rhine. In accepting the honorary consulship from the hands of Emperor Anastasius, in 510, he symbolically recognized the precedence of the empire. He was solemnly vested with the purple tunic and mantle, and was acclaimed by the people as consul and even as Augustus.7 Though this did not add actual power to what he had already gained, it certainly expressed the free acceptance of time-honored obligations towards the

Respublica. I cannot leave victorious Clovis without having paid tribute to his defeated adversary, Syagrius, the last Roman governor of Gaul. He, too, has as yet escaped the attention of the dramatists, although he is not unworthy of a master's hand. For ten years after Odoacer had deposed Emperor Romulus Augustus the realm of Syagrius, the last remaining island of the whole Roman world, held out against the might of Clovis. Briefly the rule of Syagrius survived the cataclysm of his time; it was as if the Occident were to fall today and its institutions and glory, in some remote corner of the earth, detached from everything and without apparent hope of renewed growth, might go on living a separate existence. Twenty-five years after Clovis' death, Emperor Justinian formally confirmed the legitimacy of the Frankish possessions beyond the Alps.8 It is again of interest that such formality was deemed at all necessary on the part of the Franks, whose actual power could not be disputed; although they could have reigned with independent sovereignty, they were still anxious to accept their lands from the hands of the emperor. And whoever accepts symbols of dominion from another ruler acknowledges the superiority of the other's office. The Frankish kingdom, frequently divided and reunited under Clovis' descendants, embraced two hundred and fifty years after its foundation the whole of France including Brittany, Switzerland, Belgium, the major part of Holland, the Rhineland, and the bulk of Southern and Central Germany. A system of laws, Salic and Ripuarian, which began to develop out of Germanic custom and Roman influence in the fifth century, was promulgated a hundred years later and knit the huge kingdom into an administrative unit. 8 See, for example, Saint Avitus' letter of praise, in Migne, Patrologiae cursus computus, Latin, LIX, 257-59, No. 41. 7 Saint Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum li. 38, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, I, 102. 8 Procopius, De bello Gothico ι. iii. 33.

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It is here that we find some of the beginnings of the feudal system, which became the basic constitution of all the European countries of the Middle Ages. Simultaneously, in the western parts, the lower classes of Franks and Romans were being blended into a new nation." The French nobility of ancient lineage has to this day preserved much of its Germanic origin. There are periods of history when its material seems to-be woven of a denser texture; such an epoch began with the decline of the Merovingians in the eighth century. The first representative of the new time was Karl Martell, the savior of the Occident, father of the first Carolingian king. That was the only time when the menace to Europe approached from the West. Never again until the writings of Oswald Spengler did Europeans realize or express the fear that such a menace might reappear—this time in form of a spiritual standardization of the Abendland combined with economic control by Americanism in its negative sense. Only seventy years after the death of Mohammed, the Islamic Arabs descended upon Spain and in less than four years annihilated most of the Visigothic kingdom. The new creed had spread like a storm of fire to Syria, to Persia, to Egypt, along the African coast, in the valley of the Nile, and deep into Northern India before a century had passed. The contributions of the Arabic spirit are undeniably great. Its influence on the Gothic style is well known; so are the Arab achievements in the realms of medicine, mathematics, and the natural sciences. The Occident could profit from the Arab gifts, once it had reasserted its own free existence. Then, particularly in the thirteenth century, Christian philosophy could open itself to the influences of Oriental, especially Jewish and Arabic, thought without endangering its independence. But one should bear in mind that the Arabic philosophy that influenced the scholastic school had itself developed from Hellenistic sources. Averroes (Ibn Roschd) wrote commentaries on Aristotle—the "great commentator" Dante called him 10—and in his views on the world, on matter, time, and creation he is largely a disciple of the Neoplatonic school. The Hellenistic-Arabic philosophy helped to form the thought of the great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, to whose philosophy St. Thomas is so deeply indebted. We may say, therefore, that these influences constitute the synthesis be9 It is a fact of deep historical significance that, as Procopius attests, the Franks during their conquest of Gaul received not only other Germanic tribes into their federation but also Roman legions stationed and settled in the province. "Even at the present day," he writes, "they are clearly recognized as belonging to the legions to which they were assigned when they served in ancient times, and they always carry their own standards when they enter battle, and always follow the customs of their fathers. And they preserve the dress of the Romans in every particular." Ibid. i. xii. 18-19; English translation by H. B. Dewing, Procopius, III, 123. 10 Divina Comedia, Inferno iv. 144; "Averrois, c h e ! gran comento feo."

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tween well-established intellectual systems which (like the Greek) had either become independent from their political background, or ( like the Occidental one) had successfully defended it. Pure Arabic philosophy has always remained a handmaid to Islamic theology, and in this form it would have imposed itself on the Occident had not the Mohammedan conquerors from Africa and the East been halted. The Saracens had already crossed the Pyrenees and had conquered half of France. The crescent stood on the banks of the Loire, a thousand-mile march from Gibraltar. The Frankish kingdom was the only organized state that could offer resistance. Had it been destroyed, another thousand miles would have been easy going. The armies of Islam would have arrived at the borders of Poland, and by means of the considerable naval power of the invader could have established Mohammedan rule over Britain as well. "Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford," Gibbon remarks sarcastically, "and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed." 11 The battle of Tours and Poitiers, in 732, in which Karl Martell defeated the Saracens and forced them to retreat, ranks among the foremost world-historic events in Occidental-Christian annals. It belongs in the same category with the battle of the Catalaunian plains, Lepanto, the breaking of the siege of Vienna, and the defeat of the Avars, the Magyars, and the Mongols. And it was not in retrospect only that the full meaning of the battle appeared. For the first time in centuries, Christendom had acted as a unit under a Catholic leader. The peoples of Europe felt strengthened in faith and united in a common cause. Tours is linked by a chain of historic logic with the Crusades and with the reconquest of Spain centuries later. The bravery of East Rhenish Germans who fought in Karl Martell's army contributed largely to the brilliant victory. He who had re-extended the southwestern borders of Christendom was also destined to open up new Christian frontiers east of the Rhine and in the Germanic North. Without the help of the Frankish prince, St. Boniface, the apostle of the Germans, attested in a letter to the bishop of Winchester, his own achievements would hardly have been possible.1' It is at St. Boniface's tomb in Fulda that the German bishops gather for their plenary meetings, which in recent years have dealt with questions of increasing—in fact, of world-wide—importance.13 Over the centuries his name The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, V, 399, Chap. 52. Epistola ad. Danielem episcopum, in Monumenta Germanice histórica, Epistolae, III, 329, No. 63. l a The correspondence between St. Boniface and Pope Zacharias on the foundation of the monastery at Fulda has been preserved to us. "There is a wooded place," St. Boniface writes, in 751, "in the midst of a vast wilderness and at the center of the peoples to whom we are preaching. There we have placed a group of monks living under the rule of St. 11 12

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has remained connected with the fight for the existence of Christianity on German and European soil. And not without justification—for it was the Anglo-Saxon saint who succeeded where Caesar, Tiberius, Marcus Aurelius, and other non-Christian representatives of the empire had failed, namely, in conquering Germany proper for the ecumenical Occident. This conquest constituted a world-historic necessity, if a bulwark were to be erected against Islam, which was still advancing. Boniface knew only too well what had happened in Spain; his apostolic work was the greatest single effort to prevent in Gaul and in Germany a repetition of the events on the Iberian Peninsula. Ricarda Huch, in her work on the Roman Empire of the German Nation, has expressed the opinion that the Anglo-Saxons of the eighth century must have been not unlike the modern English: energetic, strict churchmen (without being devout), excellent organizers, and bom diplomats. Boniface, she says, was an aristocrat to the core and, "like a genuine Englishman," looked upon religion as part of the order of the state.14 He had spent some time in Rome, where then as today there was a permanent English colony. Endorsed by the authority of Pope Gregory II, he returned north to convert the Frisians, the Thuringians, and the Hessians. Everywhere he founded monasteries, the centers and outposts of culture and learning, and cut down the sacred oaks that overshadowed the places of heathen worship. In Swabia and Franconia, Irish monks had founded a number of semi-independent monasteries; most of these clerics he brought into the strict system of Roman church discipline. Like the early missionaries in America, these monks and ministers of the Gospel, intrepid and strong of faith, advanced from their outposts into the woods and fields of the pagans, converting them by the word and the example of their life. The stones of deserted Roman ruins were often used to build the religious strongholds; thus, the monastery of Salzburg rose out of the ancient houses and fortifications of the Roman town Juvavum. Boniface's fascinating personality, which won him the support of the common people, also attracted and enchanted the educated, particularly among youth. They followed him with enthusiasm and found in him the great man for whose sake death would be well worthwhile. In 732, during his third visit to Rome, he was made archbishop by Pope Gregory III, and with the pallium received the right of consecrating bishops. Both the pope and he himself regarded the orthodox organization of the new church provinces as Benedict, who are building a monastery. They are men of strict abstinence, who abstain from meat and wine and spirits, keeping no servants, but content with the labor of their own hands. This place I have acquired by honorable effort, through the help of pious and God-fearing men, especially of Karlmann, formerly prince of the Franks, and have dedicated it in honor of the Holy Savior. Here I am proposing, with your kind permission, to rest my age-worn body for a little time and after my death to be buried here." Ibid., pp. 368-69, No. 86; English translation by Ephraim Emerton, The Letters of Saint Boniface, pp. 158-59. 14 Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation, pp. 7-8.

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bulwarks against the Jewish-Islamic tendencies of the iconoclastic Emperor Leo the Isaurian. The firm link between these provinces and the Holy See, which brought the Frankish realm completely into the spiritual orbit of Rome, was a vital preparation for the policy of Charlemagne and the integration of the Germanic body into the Latin Church. In his seventieth year, Boniface, now archbishop of Mainz, took up once more the apostolic work of his youth. It was then that, at the hands of the pagan Frisians, he received the crown of martyrdom. At the time of this event, Pepin the Short, king of the Franks since 751 and the first to use the formula, "King by the Grace of God," had come to Italy on the pope's invitation to defend "the Holy Church and the Republic of God." He took Ravenna and other places from the Lombards, who had menaced the papacy, and deposited the keys of the conquered cities on the tomb of St. Peter, because, as he said, "for no favor of man had he entered the strife, but from veneration to St. Peter alone, and in the hope of obtaining forgiveness for his sins." 15 Rome itself was not included in his Patrimonium Petri, the foundation for the Papal States. Legally and in strict justice, the exarchate should have been restored to the Eastern Empire. Pepin's policy broke with that of Karl Martell, whose relations with the Lombards had been friendly. This change was a necessity. A unified Lombardie kingdom would have tipped the scales in favor of national states, and instead of centuries of ideological, and often practical, unity an early balanceof-power system might have developed. But, as Ricarda Huch has put it, "the song of the Roman world Empire sounded forth, stronger than the voices of the individual peoples. . . . One cannot doubt that the actual historic development, just because of the dramatic polarity between pope and emperor it brought about and the super-human goal it created, gave to mankind the fullest content of great ideas and of exemplary heroes." 18 Charlemagne achieved the first new synthesis between the antithetical forces of Rome and the nations, though its objective spirit was not yet embodied in a permanent community. It lived only in him and his personal work, and therefore he stands between the two full realizations of the idea: the Roman Empire of the Caesars, and the Restored Empire of Otto the Great and his successors. For a split second of history, Charlemagne's destiny was in the balance. Should he take up his grandfather's pro-Lombard policy again and become the grand king of the German peoples within a system of national kingdoms? Pope Stephen's fears for his own territorial independence served an aim wider than he himself realized. He denounced Charles' alliance with the Lombards and his engagement to the daughter of their king as unworthy of so great 15 1β

Quoted by Ranke, History of the Popes, I, 14. Römisches Reich Deutscher Kation, p. 18.

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a ruler. In the vituperative language of his time, he described the Lombards as a stinking, leprous, perfidious people, in fact as not a people at all.17 After only one year, Charles, for canonic reasons, returned the Lombardie bride to her father, and when Stephen's successor, Pope Hadrian I, again denounced the unnatural alliance and urged the Frankish King to come to his aid, the die was cast for the next centuries. He crossed the Alps, defeated Desiderius, his former father-in-law, and became king of Lombardie Italy in his stead. His domain, which included the city of Rome, now extended southward to the duchy of Benevent. As patrician of Rome, Charles was the chosen defender of the church; adding this to his secular power, he emerged as the foremost prince of Christendom. Like Karl Martell, he turned from the southern to the northern theater of history. In a series of wars, which lasted for over thirty years, he subdued the country of the pagan Saxons and fought off an invasion of their Danish allies. Now his realm reached into regions where the Romans had never succeeded with lasting conquest—to the Elbe and the coast of the Baltic Sea. The city of Magdeburg, which in Emperor Otto the Great's time became an archbishopric and the center of all northern and eastern Christian missionary activity, is a Carolingian foundation. The archbishoprics of Hamburg and Bremen were founded within a few years after Charlemagne's death. Many of the great Westphalian sees, which are still bulwarks of Christianity against pagan influence, were established on his initiative and as fruits of his victory over the Saxons, among them Osnabrück in 783, Münster in 791, Paderborn in 795. But Charlemagne's universal position could not be secure until the strongest particularistic force of his time, the pagan Saxons under their valiant duke Widukind, had submitted to Christianity; after long and fierce wars they were defeated, and in 785 Widukind received baptism.18 The role this German tribe has later played in history is a most instructive example of the working of spiritual dialectic. In so far as the Saxons became one with the great Christian-Roman synthesis of all tribes and peoples, they preserved also their national status; they were in fact to become the force that renewed the empire in the tenth century. In so far as they continued to put their pride in a particularistic attitude antithetical to the Occident, they were not only to play a disruptive part within the whole but ultimately to lose even their position as a powerful German tribe. The immediate importance of the fact that the Saxons were incorporated into the Frankish-Roman orbit can scarcely be exaggerated. It is likely that but for Charlemagne's victory they would have grown into a separate national 17

Codex Carolinas, Epistola 47, in Jaffé, ed., Bibliotheca rerum Gennanicarum, Annales Laurissenses et Einhardi, ad annum 785, in Monumenta Germaniae Scriptores, I, 167, 169. 18

IV, 159. histórica,

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entity, without historic links to the Roman provinces of the ancient empire, but closely tied by bonds of blood to the early British conquerors. As the continental bridgehead of these maritime Anglo-Saxons and in alliance with the Danes, they might have caused the crystallization of two antagonistic Europes. The setting up of a separate Nordic state, a wide empire with a distinct political and moral consciousness of its own, would have rent Europe to its foundations, even though such a Northern Europe would certainly have received Christianity within a few generations. Religious and political power worked together when Boniface preached the Gospel to the Germanic pagans; by becoming Christians, they were automatically drawn into the Roman sphere, and vice versa. In an independent and self-conscious Northern European empire the situation would have been very different; its peoples would have received Christianity while remaining outside the religious and political orbit of Rome, and the establishment of national churches, schismatic, even heretical, might from the start have anticipated the situation of the Reformation. We may consider as a case in point the development of Russian Christianity, which came not from Rome, but from Byzantium, at a time when the latter had already largely withdrawn from the European commonwealth proper. Ever since, Moscow, the "Third Rome," has remained a center of gravity outside the Occident, no matter who ruled in the Kremlin. Before the apostolic conqueror, who politically and religiously served the telos of the world, paganism had to bend its neck. It could no longer have been the paganism of Tacitus' day, but was instead an attitude of negation and obstinacy, combined with weird superstitions denuded of any spirituality. From St. Boniface s complaints we can see that the religious life of the Germanic heathens in his time consisted mainly of magic practices of divination and attempts to influence the weather and the human will. But from purer periods there may have remained some subconscious sentiment that prefigured and facilitated the reception of the truth. Jehovah's works, on which they were instructed according to the pope's special advice to Boniface, may have been familiar to them under the image of the ancient god of storm and thunder who made covenants with men. The New Testament must have appealed to certain Germanic instincts of faith, leadership, and loyalty—Christ the Hero, and the Apostles as loyal freemen following their Lord in life and death. Most revealing in this respect is the great epos on the Heliand (The Saviour), which was composed in the language of Lower Saxony between 822 and 840.19 It begins with a grandiose synchronization of the inspired Gospels with the ethos of the Roman Empire predestined for world dominion. The contents and the doctrines expressed i a The two extant manuscripts are in the British Museum and the Munich State Library. There are several editions. I have used the one by Moritz Heyne, Hêliand, 3d ed., 1883.

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are of irreproachable orthodoxy. One might describe it as the drama of the Ministry and Redemption in strict accordance with the Gospels, but in words that the new converts could most easily understand. They had seen the face of a powerful earthly king; now they become acquainted with One still greater. Christ is presented as the Heerkönig, the Lord of Hosts, to Whom all vassals owe allegiance. Words like thiod-kuning (people's king) and allaro kuningô kraftigôst (the mightiest of all kings) describe Christ's office in human, but profoundly reverent, language. St. Peter is the snel swerd-thegan (keen blade), and the apostles and disciples are the hêlag heri-skepi (sacred warriors), who rally around their divine leader. In 788, the Alpine provinces and the duchy of Bavaria were added to the Frankish realm. The ancient Bavarian dynasty was dethroned. Later, Bavaria was to become the domain of a younger branch of the Saxon imperial house; then, at the time of Barbarossa, the land was given over to the Wittelsbachs, who continued to hold rule there until 1918. Christianity, accompanying the. Roman legions, had made early conquest of these provinces. Under the Gothic scepter its people had embraced the Arian creed; but orthodox Catholic communities must also have been numerous. Today the pre-eminence of the princes-archbishops of Salzburg—prince primates of Germany—still bears witness to earliest medieval traditions. Bavaria, in the days of Charles, embraced the major part of modem German Austria as well. In the south, its border line ran beneath Bozen; in the southwest, at the Adda river, it touched the Lombard kingdom. To make the border secure against the Avars, Charles established the Ostmark ( Eastern March ) between the Enns and the Raab rivers under royal administrators. Soon his power stretched over Bohemia and Hungary and reached down to the Dalmatian coast, where it bordered the Eastern Empire. In two campaigns, the first immortalized by the legends about Roland's defeat at Roncesvalles (the Chanson de Roland), the Saracens were driven back beyond the Pyrenees. The new Spanish march thus created was anchored at Barcelona and on the upper Ebro.20 In 799, when Charlemagne held court at Paderborn, at the foot of the historic Teutoburg Forest, Pope Leo III arrived to invoke his help against the rebellious nobility of the city of Rome, who had tried to take his Ufe. Even now they brought accusations against him before the Frankish king. But 20 In Barcelona I found the memory of the great emperor very much alive, even in our unimperial time. Everyone among the people knows, and likes to tell the stranger, the traditional story about the origin of the Catalan coat of arms. Originally it had been a plain golden shield, until, in 801, during the siege of Barcelona, the margrave ( Rostagne of Gerona, I assume) distinguished himself by his heroism. So Charlemagne, to honor him, dipped four fingers into the margrave's wounds and ran them down his shield; and this is now it received the four vertical red stripes on golden ground which it shows today.

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Charles received the pope with honors, and later, in Rome, permitted him to clear himself by his oath. For, as Alcuin and a synod advised Charlemagne, the Apostolic See "is judged by no man, and this has been the custom from olden time." 21 It is not unlikely that at this meeting at Paderborn the coronation with the imperial crown was discussed. It has never been entirely clear whether he knew of the Pope's plan when the sacred rites were performed; but Ranke and others have rightly argued that the King could not possibly have been unprepared for so important an act. The setting is well known. Charles appeared in the Basilica of St. Peter attired in the solemn robes of the patricius Romanus. After High Mass, Pope Leo III placed a precious crown on his head, and the church reverberated with the acclamation of the people: Karolo, piissimo Augusto a Deo coronato, magno et pacifico imperatori, vita et victorial 22 This complicated formula, which was thrice repeated, must have been previously agreed upon—a further indication that the ceremony could not very well have been improvised. 28 However, it seems likely that Charles did not expect the act of coronation at that particular moment. After the supreme office of the West had been dormant for three hundred and twenty-four years, it was now awakened in the person of the FrankishOccidental ruler. His actual realm on the Continent spanned two thirds of the domains of the Caesars. At the Atlantic coast, he was allied to the Irish kings and the Anglo-Saxons, the former greeting him as lord and master, the latter taking many of his institutions as models for their own. And through the planting of the Christian-Roman-Germanic idea firmly into Spanish soil, an historic horizon far beyond the Atlantic and beyond all the lands known to antiquity was opened for the first time under his future-pregnant rule. It is important to see—in order that certain misconceptions may be dispelled—that Charles did not "receive the empire from the. pope." No one can bestow what is not his own. Nor did the papacy transfer the empire from Byzantium to Rome. In Rome it has always been, although for centuries only as an historic potentiality. It was necessity, that force by which history executes its designs, which bestowed the name and power of the Roman office upon Charles, and with necessity legitimacy cannot argue. The Byzantine emperors in vain refused to recognize the dignity of Charles; as early as 811 Michael I had to acknowledge it. He did so on the basis of the legal fiction that the state of affairs as it had existed at the death of Emperor " Vita Leonis III, in Le Liber Pontificalis, II, 7, No. 98. "To Charles, the most pious and august, the great and peaceful emperor crowned by God: life and victoryI" Vita Leonis III, in Le Liber Pontificalis, II, 7, No. 98. 28 The assertion to the contrary by Charlemagne's biographer, Einhard, notwithstanding. Vita Karoli imperatori xxviii, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores, II, 458. 22

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Theodosius the Great had been restored. According to the Greeks, there was always one empire, now represented once more by the double-headed symbol; the Occident, on the other hand, emerging from the slumber of centuries, became conscious of the universally representative character of its own supreme office. Theodoric had aimed at uniting all Germanic nationalities in a federation that recognized the particular sovereignty of all its members; his concept, to use a modem term, was based on a system of international law. Charles, for the first time since 476, spanned the whole Christian world, integrating all particular dominations into the ecumenical realm. With him, therefore, begins the period of theoretically undivided sovereignty vested in the Occidental commonwealth alone. This theory dominated the Middle Ages and has in our own days found its modern revival, though at the present time only as a postulate for the future. Charlemagne's idea of state and government is frequently referred to as theocratic. For many, such a characterization suffices to relegate his views to purely historic interest, which to our more enlightened age can not possibly have any real meaning. In truth, however, this Carolingian "theocracy" represents the ethical foundation of government; it is the essence of medieval political science—the doctrine (then as always) of things political not so much as they are, but as they ought to be. We have made mention of the connection between St. Augustine and the ethos of the Restored Empire. Charlemagne looked upon De ritritate Dei as the guiding philosophy of his realm, though he reinterpreted many of its tenets. Gilson and Böhner put this process into a clear formula: "While St. Augustine saw in the Heavenly City a mystical community of all who are united with God through grace, and among each other through love, the Church being only the beginning of that Heavenly City, Charles' ideals are characteristic of the fact that he wanted church and state united to one single community. Thereby was born the idea of an all-embracing ChristianOccidental realm. Charlemagne had transformed the spiritual theocracy of St. Augustine into a political one and transplanted the Civitas Dei from heaven to the earth." 24 However, St. Augustine's concept by no means lay entirely beyond the confines of the worldly domain, since many citizens of the Civitas Dei are at the same time still citizens of the Earthly City as well. Virtue, political righteousness, dominion for the sake of peace drew his praise, because such forces the Heavenly City could use for its own ends. We remember that "the 'celestial society,' while it is here on earth, increases itself out of all languages," 25 for the sake of universal peace. It might well be claimed that Charlemagne's realm, which extended over many countries and which had 24 25

Die Geschichte der christlichen Philosophie, pp. 243—44. De civitate Dei xa. 17; English translation by John Healey, The City of God, III, 153.

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thrust the outer limits of the Christian world deep into pagan and Islamic territory, fulfilled this Augustinian definition. Charlemagne is known for his sense of justice, his genius as a lawgiver and as an organizer in every branch of public life. The capitularies he issued in 802 to his "royal messengers" (the misst dominici), who spanned the whole empire and broke down the power of the ancient tribal dukedoms, are most characteristic. The officials were instructed "that, where anything is contained in the law that is otherwise than according to right and justice, they should enquire into this most diligently, and make it known to him : and he, God granting, hopes to better it. . . . And let the messengers diligently investigate all cases where any man claims that injustice has been done to him by any one. . . . And thus altogether and everywhere and in all cases, whether the matter concerns the holy churches of God, or the poor, or wards and widows, or the whole people, let them fully administer law and justice according to the will and to the fear of God." 26 No discussion of his reign should fail to mention the revival of learning and scholarship which it brought. Assisted by the great scholar Alcuin, an AngloSaxon from York, and the abbot Rhabanus Maurus from the Main (Praeceptor Germaniae posterity called him), Charles instituted schools of elementary and higher learning, in which the Continental school systems may still recognize their origins. History, grammar, arithmetic, the classic languages, and philosophy, even spelling, were included in his plan of education. 26 Capitulare missorum generale ( 802 A.D. ), chap, i, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Leges, Section II: Capitularía regum Francorum, p. 92; English translation by Ernest F. Henderson, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, pp. 189-90.

7 SACRED ROMAN EMPIRE OF THE GERMAN NATION Ours, ours is the Roman empire! Ours art thou, Caesar, most august emperoi of the Romans! G E R B E R T , De rationali et rottone uti. IN the union between pope and emperor lay the continuity of the world's history. In the union between the kingship of the Germanic ruler and the imperial office lay Germany's destiny for the ensuing centuries. Celtic Europe now was integrated into the Occident—an achievement the Romans had tried in vain to complete. The same holds true for the East-Central Slavs. Thus the restored empire, though smaller in territory than the Roman, emerged from the slumber into which it had fallen between its two historic embodiments as a fuller and more comprehensive Europe. Pope Leo and Charlemagne have both been received into the host of Saints whose intercession Christendom may invoke. The emperor's sanctity, justified by his apostolic work, is venerated at all the sees founded by him, such as Paderborn, Münster, Hildesheim, and, above all, Aachen. Also in Paris, Rheims, Rouen, and Prague and in many other churches he is reckoned among the saints. He was canonized in 1165 by the Antipope Paschal III, and although this act was never supplemented by insertion of his feast in the Roman Breviary or extension to the Universal Church, his cultus was authorized at Aachen.1 The day of his feast is January 28.2 Perhaps one may hope that one day the veneration of Saint Charlemagne, as a symbol of timeless Christian Europe and a knight in the army of the Church Triumphant, will be extended to the whole of Christendom. By elevating Salzburg and Cologne to be metropolitan sees, St. Leo was also of lasting importance in Germany's internal affairs, ecclesiastical and political. The cathedral at Aachen, erected at the time when the Frankish king rose to the dignity of Roman emperor, transferred Byzantine-Italian elements to Germanic soil. It evokes a notion of Hagia Sophia, and yet it was built by a native genius, Master Odo, and the style of its tomb and its chapel points toward a future Eastem-Nordic synthesis. Charlemagne's name is not preserved only in scholarly tomes; it is im1

Acta Sanctorum, 28 Januarius, II, 874-91. His office is in Henricus Canisius, Thesaurus

monumentorum ecclesiasticorum et historicorum, ν el Lectiones antiquae ad saeculorum ordinem digestae, Vol. Ill, Part 2, p. 2

208.

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mortal in the living memory of all European peoples. From it the Slavonic peoples derived their word for king, Krai—an identification of a man and an office much like the transformation of Caesar's name into the title of Kaiser. Italians, Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Germans may look to Charlemagne as their common historic link and ancestor. His name was even set among the stars. A constellation of the northern skies, Corona Borealis, is called "Charlemagne's Crown." Symbolically, this fulfills Virgil's words about the founder of the supreme office: Imperium Oceano famam qui terminet astris—"whose realm by the ocean is bounded, whose glory alone by the stars." * A thousand years later, when Europe was breaking into fragments, Napoleon, the restorer of Carolingian Caesarism, consciously aligned himself with this heritage. His very title of Empereur was Charlemagne's, the fountainhead of Western Frankish-Roman history. For several generations more, "emperors" still sat on a throne in Vienna, but along with Charlemagne's crown and realm they had abandoned their trust. The last emperor of the West, the final successor to the Caesars, was Napoleon. When he laid the dignity of king of Rome in the cradle of his son, he showed that his plans went further than mere national conquests. A powerless youth, adorned with beauty and the memory of an imperial past, the king of Rome stands at the end of the second realm of the Caesars just as another had stood at the end of the first. In 1848, Switzerland's greatest poet, Gottfried Keller, wrote a poem for revolutionary Vienna which had just shaken off its Habsburg rulers. In his soul youthful, springlike Vienna conjured up the image of a people, imperial by ethos and destiny: high above the earth Charlemagne's Crown would now shine down upon free men and women, and the "child emperor" would be with them in a thousand cradles, some of gold, some of wood.* The imperial diadem at Nürnberg, which is called Charlemagne's crown, actually belongs to a somewhat later age. Its body dates back to the ninth century and was probably the royal crown of Burgundy. J.t became the imperial diadem in the days of the Salian Conrad II, who reunited Burgundy with the empire. This is die edelste Krone der Christenheit, as Ricarda Huch has called it "—the most sublime crown of Christendom, having precedence over all lesser symbols of rulership. In form and appearance this crown is a unique work of art. It consists of eight gold plates, the four larger ones adorned with precious stones, pearls, and filigree, the smaller ones decorated with stones and enamel figures as well. The stones are cabochons, set in openings so that the light falls through them freely—their fire glowing like that of wondrous fruits upon the trees of some enchanted garden. One high arch spans the crown from the front » Aeneis. I. 287. * "Wien" ( 1848), in Gesammelte Werke, IX, 172. « Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation, p. 333.

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to the back, and above it is the Cross. The first enamel plate shows God the Father between cherubim and seraphim; it has the inscription, Per me reges regnant. Two other plates show King Solomon and King David, the fourth Isaías the prophet at the side of ailing King Ezechias. Albrecht Dürer made a water color of the crown and of the other sacred insignia of the empire as studies for his portraits of Charlemagne and Sigismund which the city of Nürnberg had ordered from him in 1510. Most famous among these insignia are the Holy Lance, with a nail from the True Cross; the huge coronation mantle, with fabulous Assyrian and Far Eastern patterns; the Eagle Dalmatic, Chinese in origin; and the sabre of Charlemagne, possibly a present from Harun-al-Rashid. The history of the world, as Hegel said, is not a theater of happiness; periods of happiness are like blank pages, for they are periods of harmony when the antithesis is in abeyance." Only twenty-nine years after Charlemagne's death his empire was divided among his grandsons, and this division was one of the most fateful events in European history. Many of the major wars in Europe can be traced back to this Treaty of Verdun of 843, and even today it still stands in the way of an organic reconstruction. This fact has become more and more apparent as we have learned to think in far wider time-space categories than did the selfcentered, unhistoric age which preceded us. In the Frankish realm, the Rhine had ceased to be a frontier and become an enclosed river. National antagonism could not exist in such a political combination of united Germanic and Romanized tribes. Verdun, however, tore the heart of the European Continent asunder. Out of the two halves grew the French nation and the Germanic East-Rhenish body, which was not to be a nation for a long time to come. The result was not only to obscure their common Germanic-Roman ethnical and cultural origin, but also to cloud the eyes of the two brothers to their indivisible common destiny. Of course these consequences did not become apparent at once. In spite of Verdun, relations between East and West Francia continued for some time. Otto the Great, through his brother Bruno of Cologne, exercised the power of regency in the West, and at the end of the tenth century French nobles who opposed the power of the French episcopate slated his grandson Otto III for the crown of France. Yet the seeds of rivalry and discord were sown and so far nothing has uprooted them. Mighty as the Rhine have flowed the streams of French and German blood spilled in continuous fratricidal wars. But the same force that kindled wars also kindled the French national character and thrust upon Germany its Occidental duties. It has been the power 0 Philosophie der Welt-Geschichte, in Sämtliche Werke, by J. Sibree, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 28.

Vili, 71; English translation

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bringing out the good and the lasting in the character of the individual nations and perhaps thereby preparing a coming synthesis, higher in order because composed of members of more clearly developed individuality. "The Idea of Mankind," Ranke says in his essay on France and Germany, "God has expressed in the different nations." 7 The Frankish-Roman Empire was unique in nature and contrasted with the Roman and Roman-German Empires in that national and universal rule were congruent in it. It stands therefore between the two embodiments of the Occidental idea; it forms the bridge between them, and it had to disappear to make room for a wider concept. The German Carolingian line became extinct in 911 with the death of Ludwig the Child. By then the bonds between East and West, though not cut entirely, had loosened so much that the Eastern nobles would no longer consider a West Frankish Carolingian as a candidate for the Germanic kingship. Instead, they elected Conrad, Duke of (German) Franconia. In the tenth century we have for the first time to deal with Germany proper, though the territory of the kingdom embraced non-German peoples as well. Here is the turning point from "Germanic" to "German." From the very beginning there was manifest a tendency that was to remain a constant factor in Germany for centuries, namely, the grouping of peoples within the national body around regional centers of gravity. When after Charlemagne's death the central focus of the Frankish-Roman Empire paled and finally disappeared, regions, groups, and individuals immediately tended back towards autonomous political existence. The people today looked upon as the protagonist of the Staatsprinzip was probably the most individualistic and astatal of all European nations, from earliest to most recent times. In the tenth century, Germany was put on its own, like a nebula detached from its solar system, a nebula which, left to itself, will tend towards another system of freely moving bodies though the attraction of gravity towards a central sun remains. This greater gravity is the force which keeps the particular planets, planetoids, and moons in the detached nebula mass in balance and prevents them from being thrown off into the limitless space. While in the Western part of the Carolingian realm Franks and Romanized natives could easily blend into a new, French nation, the tribal structure of Germany led to a logical reaction against the control assumed by one tribe, the Franks, over the others, once Charlemagne's dynasty was no more. The stem or tribal dukedoms like Bavaria, Franconia, Swabia, and Saxony, formed again, each with regional loyalties almost as strong as if it were an independent national unit. The German subnationalities, later multiplied but diluted by dynastic forces, played an important role up to the beginning of modern times. They 7

Frankreich und Deutschland, in Sämmtliche Werke, IL, 72.

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still play a part in the minds of would-be mapmakers and bringers of the "true peace" of tomorrow. The tribal structure of the Germanic nations prevented the establishment of a national Germanic hegemony, centralized in its constitution. Spreading out over all parts of the Occident, France, the British Isles, Spain, Portugal, and so on, these tribes, because of their subdivided collective personalities, could develop into free and individualized members of a community of peoples. In the Latin provinces of the old empire they did not overwhelm and destroy, but rejuvenated and preserved the existing culture. Germany, by remaining closest to the original structure of the days of the Germania, has thereby also remained a truthful mirror of that greater supranational community, which in the tenth century it was called upon to represent. But on the other hand, this inner structure of Germany made central government at various periods almost impossible, and in later centuries it encouraged the international game of power politics and aggression. This is the reason why many have regretted that no German king ever dealt with his magnatee and nobles as the French kings did with theirs from the thirteenth century to the crushing of the Fronde by Mazarin. The price France had to pay, however, consisted in undisputed state absolutism to an extent unknown in decentralized Germany. An organized people, St. Augustine said, is the union of a multitude of reasonable creatures, in general communication with the things they love.8 Different loves, or love embracing different objects, have formed Germany in her two aspects: the universal and the national. The same is true of the Germanic body as an entity and its tribal subdivisions. In the Germany conscious of, and devoted to, a universal supranational idea the focus of love lies in a sphere above the nation proper. Here true Germanism consists in being more than German, or as Johann Eduard Erdmann expressed it: "It is un-German to be nothing but German." " This, as he added, postulates, however, a harmony between the cosmopolitan and the national ideas such as did not always exist. The universal attitude in the German mind and community—as a matter not of speculation but of historic record—made it possible for non-German peoples like the Poles, Bohemians, and Hungarians, to form part of the Germanic body as such, not only as bearer of the restored empire. It even made it possible for non-Germans outside the boundaries of Germany to act as "Germans," because this term implied an attitude of mind and not necessarily an ethnic loyalty. The "Ghibelline" party in Italy is one of the most illuminating examples, and in speaking of it we touch upon the sphere where "German" assumed the meaning that "Roman" had once possessed. 8 De civitate Dei xix. 24 : "Populus est coetus multitudinis rationales, rerum quas diligit concordi conununione societafus. '

• Dai Nationalitätsprincip ( 1862), in Ernste Spiele, p. 252.

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The love centered on subdivisions has greatly enhanced German achievement; if properly directed it could even serve the purpose of the universal principle, as we shall see particularly with regard to the imperial cities. Improperly directed, as it often has been, it has led to vilest selfishness at the expense of the empire—behavior of which not a few of the German princes were guilty, from the tenth century to the twentieth. In times of crisis that have threatened the whole of the Germanic body, tribal and regional centers of order and loyalty have proved their value as stabilizing forces of regeneration. During the period with which we are now concerned, Germany and Europe were once again menaced in their very existence by an Eastern Invasion. The Magyars, a pagan Mongol tribe related to the Huns, Turks, Finns, and Avars, had, like the Huns, emerged out of Asia and crossed the Southern Russian steppes. In the late ninth century, while Western Europe was being ravaged by wild Norsemen, the Magyars invaded Italy and Southern France; another band pushed through Southern Germany across the Rhine, and it must have seemed as if the days of Attila had returned. * In 907 Luitpold, count of Bavaria, met them in battle near Pressburg on the Danube. Luitpold, who was margrave of Austria, was a cousin of the Carolingian Emperor Amulf and was descended from the man who was in 770 Carolingian Graf of the Nordgau ( now the section of Bavaria between Regensburg and the Upper Main). With Luitpold began the unbroken line of the house of Wittelsbach, which is so called after one of their castles. He did not prevail against the Magyars. The Bavarians suffered a crushing defeat, and Luitpold himself fell, a sacrifice to the pagans. The danger of the Magyar invasion was first checked by King Henry I (Henry the Fowler), successor to Conrad I and founder of the Saxon dynasty; it was broken by his son, Otto the Great, in 955, in the world-historic battle on the Lechfeld in Southern Bavaria. The German army, joined by a large number of Bohemians, was led by the King himself who, according to the chronicles, carried the Holy Lance as a symbol of the supranational cause of Christendom. The defeat of the Magyars led to their rapid pacification. In 1002, their king, St. Stephen, who had married a Bavarian princess of the Saxon house, converted his people to Christianity. This is the only instance of a pagan, nomadic nation of Mongolian descent which was completely absorbed into the European commonwealth. The difference between them and their kinsmen, the Turks, is striking, for the Turks have always remained outside the Christian community and alien to its traditions. With Henry the Fowler, in whose election the Frankish and Saxon tribes had concurred, the political weight shifted to the former archfoes of Charle-

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magne's Frankish-Christian realm. So strange is the working of historic dialectics that the most particularistic tribe became the heir and renewer of the universal concept. Under Henry's rule a new frontier was opened to Christendom, in the Slavonic lands east of the Elbe to the Havel river: Brandenburg, later the heart of "Prussia" and the cell from which modern Germany grew. Brandenburg had been a primitive Germanic settlement before the Slavs, during the Great Migration, swept over the country. As "Branibor" it was the stronghold of the pagan Luitizes and Wends, who were in alliance with the Magyars. What might seem like an event of minor importance, the crossing of the frozen Havel river in 928 and the storming of Branibor by King Henry's men, in reality wrote world history. In 948 the bishopric of Brandenburg was established, a center of Christianization for the whole region. From there the reconquest of the country proceeded along the upper Elbe to Meissen, then eastward to the Oder and the Vistula. But not before the fourteenth century had all the land as far as Memel and the north-central Baltic been regained and brought under Christian influence. The great cultural centers of the Baltic area: Riga, Reval, Dorpat, and others, bear witness to this intensely important process, which advanced the boundaries of Europe into regions never before reached. Many of the new German towns such as the Saxon cities of Naumburg (now famous for its Gothic cathedral and its statues), Merseburg, and Quedlinburg are Henry's foundations. By this time, the Germans inside the established confines of their realm had begun to look upon the peoples outside much as Tacitus had looked upon the Germans. Henry the Fowler sired a family which gave kings and rulers to Germany, England, France, Lorraine, and Burgundy. He was married to Matilda, a woman of great energy and ambition, descended from Widukind, Charlemagne's greatest foe. Yet, paradoxically enough, it was her son, Otto, who restored the universal realm of Charlemagne, and became one of the few whose immediate world-historic achievements properly earned the epithet of Great. Indeed, the group of such men is small: Alexander, Theodosius, and Charlemagne. The names of Caesar, Augustus, and Napoleon are epithets of such absolute greatness that they stand for themselves and reject any addition. In modern German historiography and philosophic history, Frederick II of Swabia has rightly been called "the Greatest Frederick," though this form has not come into general use as yet. Personally, I feel that another emperor should be added to the list, for the deeds and the genius of Frederick's father, Henry VI, ought to have won for him the title of "the Great," as of the first category. The group of men called "Great" for achievements of indirect world historic importance or within a limited historic sphere is not too large either. Alfred the Great, Theodoric, Peter I of Russia, and Frederick II of Prussia belong here. In most cases it is from the people, or from

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the consent of many peoples, that this highest recognition must emanate. It is an interesting indication of the justice of the historic verdict how sparingly such an honor has been bestowed—though many a ruler would have liked to see himself or his ancestors thus praised. The dominion of Otto the Great reached eastward from the Maas and Scheide to a point on the Oder river. A fair section of Italy belonged to it, and so did the Alpine provinces to a line east of Pressburg. T o this he added Bohemia, whose duke ("Good King Wenceslas" of the English Christmas carols) had in King Henry's day renewed the relationship of vassalage as it had existed under Charlemagne. Wenceslav's policy was one of Christianizing his country; he paid for it with his life on September 28, 935, when he was murdered by the rebellious pagan faction of his family. 10 T h e new duke submitted to the kingdom and to Christianity in 950. In 951, Otto married Adelheid, of Swabian descent, widow of King Lothar of Provence and heiress to her husband's Italian kingdom. The destiny-laden union of North and South was thereby renewed, though at first only in the conjunction of two kingdoms with as yet no supranational structure to embrace them both. From this time on Otto styled himself "King of the Franks and the Lombards," and again "King of the Franks and Italians"—a clear revival of Carolingian, if not yet of Roman, traditions. It has long been the generally accepted legend that when menaced by the Margrave Berengar of Ivrea, who bore the phantom title of "emperor," and by the Roman nobility ( the Frangipani, Orsini, Crescenzi, and so on ), John X I I called upon Otto for help—as Pope Hadrian I had once invited Charlemagne to assist him against the Lombards. Ranke, on good grounds, doubts this story, which goes on to say that John X I I "promised" the empire to Otto as recompense for his help. 11 According to a clumsy but reliable chronicler, the monk Benedict of St. Andrea on Mount Soracte, two Romans in high places, Cardinal-Deacon John and Secretary of State Azzo, horrified by the unedifying life of John X I I , decided that an invitation should be sent to King Otto. Secretly they dispatched an embassy and, according to the same chronicler, were severely punished by the pope when he learned of the deed. 12 Otto's coming saved the papacy from one of the gravest dangers in history. T h e Chair of St. Peter meant nothing to the little local potentates except an instrument of power for their own particular purposes. One shudders to think what would have been the lot of Christendom had Providence permitted the universal spiritual office to be secularized and transformed into an organ of a national Italian government. 10 Widukind of Corwey, Res gestae Sazonicae n. iii, in Scríptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum ex Monumentis Cermaniae historiéis separatim editi, p. 57. 11 Weltgeschichte, VI, 110-11. 12 Chronicon 35, in Monumenta Cermaniae histórica, Scriptores, III, 717.

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Whoever did dispatch the invitation to the king to rescue the church by exercising again the rights of a Roman patrician, one fact seems clear: even if it was John XII, his opponents must have been as anxious as the pope was to welcome Otto in the Eternal City. John XII wanted a powerful supreme ruler who would repel the Italian aspirations of Berengar without encroaching on the sovereign rights of the papacy. His opponents, and with them all self-respecting Italians, wanted the integrity of the papacy restored and Rome and Italy cleansed of internal corruption. Among the best of them the feeling prevailed that it was to the true interest of the Italian nation to be once again part of a universal political body. The man chosen by history for this duty was Otto. Since his coronation with the Lombard crown and his defeat of the Hungarians, his position had become truly universal. His sister Gerberga was married to the West Frankish king Louis d'Outremer, whose royal authority had been restored with Otto's decisive help. When he held court at Aachen, in 949, shortly before going to the aid of Louis, Greek, Italian, and English ambassadors had been present. The papacy and the bishops and nobles of all Europe supported his pacification of the West Frankish realm. Wearing the imperial diadem was the logical sequel, and Otto accepted it in its fullest universal import of power, whatever John XII may have intended. The coronation, which took place on February 2, 962, in St. Peter's, 1 ' constitutes a landmark in the history of the world. It preserved and continued the consciousness of Occidental oneness, and since the situation compounded of time, men, and circumstances had once more become ripe, no European people could deny its logic and justification. Through Otto the Great, Italy, Germany, and the empire became a unit again, while West Francia remained in peaceful and friendly relations with them. It is upon the harmony of these three Continental powers that the Occidental world was founded. The union between Christianity and a temporal order, autonomous in its sphere but mindful of Christian philosophy, had been of decisive influence in civilizing the Germanic tribes and consolidating the German realm. Now, as under Charlemagne, the Germanic world was again in direct contact with the Roman world. It could lend its energies to the restitution of the church and the continuity of the LatinGermanic synthesis which had been part of the very foundations of the ancient empire. 1S Regino of Prüm, Chronicon; Continuât io Trevirensis, ad annum 962, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores, I, 625.

8 GERMANIC HELLAS ON THE PALATINE The full greatness of the Spartan fields, and the full glory of the Ionian shores. S T E F A N G E O R G E , Tage und Taten. IN 1811, five years after the nominal end of the empire, Baron vom Stein wrote to the Hanoverian statesman Count Münster that, could he restore the state of affairs under which Germany blossomed in greatest power, he would choose as his model the period from the tenth to the fifteenth century, when her great emperors upheld the German constitution by their majesty and gave to many non-German peoples the security of the law.1 It is, of course, generally agreed that the national idea belongs to a much later epoch. That idea unfolded slowly in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, flared up during the Reformation, and matured in the French Revolution and the era of Napoleon. How strong the influence of Macchiavelli was upon the birth of the nationalistic state it is difficult to measure. Yet I am inclined to think that his masterfully frank analysis of existing conditions could apply to any kind of government, once the moral law and the basic concept of Christian oneness has been shattered. Particularistic tendencies had always existed, even during the imperial epoch, and indeed before it. To them, for practical purposes of discussion the term "national" may be applied, though always with the understanding that the usage is an anticipation of later developments. Such tendencies were to be found in all parts of Europe, among Latin and Germanic peoples as much as among the Slavs. In Germany, they had substantial influence on the course of history, not because they were determined by blood or race, but because, centered around rulers anxious to preserve their territorial power, they opposed the draining of the national resources to support the Romanuniversal policy of many emperors. Ranke in his World History explains his reasons for abandoning his plan to write a general German history.2 The two spiritual Powers, he says, which appear through the course of events either joined or opposed to each other, cannot be completely explained within such limits. They can be understood only as products of the preceding epoch of universal history. The supreme political power, the Kaisertum, which in the tenth century passed to the Germans, was (in substance) the same imperium the Romans had established when they made subject the peoples of the ancient world. It was still adorned with the name of the greatest ruler antiquity produced, Caesar. The original 1 Prague, October Θ, 1811, in Stein, Briefwechsel, Denkschriften und 2 Weltgeschichte, III, 463. VI, 149-53.

Aufzeichnungen,

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Roman Empire was a power of governance and peace, extending over the Orient and the Occident and embracing also part of the Germanic world. But over such a vast territory, Ranke feels, it could not possibly have continued, for it would have smothered all autonomous life in its component nations. All religious impulses had finally been centralized in the capital, and the emperor had become the vessel of divinity. But the peoples longed for a religion that would kindle anew the inner certainty of a universal brotherly community. This religion came when God was made man with the Incarnation of Christ. Its growth and expansion as a visible body of the faithful proceeded in dialectical opposition to Caesar, until a temporal synthesis of the two kingdoms could be established. The imperial office, at the time of Theodosius the Great, was drawn into the orbit of religion, while the church assumed flesh and blood in becoming part of the organized society of the empire. Thus the relations between church and empire, while remaining dialectical, became a creative interdependence, on which rested the continuity of the Occidental world, which, in turn, Providence used to promote its spiritual designs. New forms of organization could now be agreed on by the two Powers— the spiritual heads assembling in ecumenical councils to define the deposit of faith, while the temporal heads had to bow to the precepts of the moral law. It is the greatness of those centuries—from the fourth to the thirteenth, and with some modifications even onward to the seventeenth—that to mankind, then no less burdened with earthly hardship than we are now, all vital interests, the interests that really mattered to the peoples, were of a spiritual nature. Though politically the center of gravity had shifted to Constantinople, Rome as the seat of the papacy, as the heart of Europe, and as the communicating link between the classic and the Germanic world rose to new glory. Its spiritual precedence, however, could not but lead to the eventual retranslation of the empire back to its Western cradle. That Christendom was saved from the onslaught of Islam was the first result. Charlemagne's realm rested on his own deeds, and those of his ancestors. After his death there became visible for the first time that dangerous trend which later, starting with the downfall of the Hohenstaufen and leading to the loss of religious unity and the Thirty Years War, was to determine so much of our history. Within the universal body, particular powers raised their heads; the spiritual authorities overpowered the temporal order, while at the same time they themselves almost succumbed to local Roman and Italian interests. This twofold danger was checked by Otto the Great. Since Gibbon and Voltaire wrote, it has become customary to say that Otto's empire was "even less Roman" than Charlemagne's—for were not the founder and most of his

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successors German? Yet what does the place of origin matter, if the office and the spirit in which it is exercised are set above the nations? Actually after the time of Nerva not one "Roman" had filled the highest office of the Roman Empire, and of the two hundred and sixty-two Roman pontiffs only one hundred and three were "Romans." The great refuge of liberty, as it retreated before the encroachments of the Roman Dominate, had been the private law. The individual, stripped of his political rights by the absolutism of the prince, could retain his personality only in the private sphere, particularly as owner and disposer of private property. In contrast to this is the feudal system of medieval Europe. For the first time in history there was conceived and established a universal realm based on the Christian knowledge that not one or a few but all are free and relating all its members from the bottom to the top by mutual and interdependent rights and duties. Every man in this society, which was to mirror the constitution of the universe, had his secure position of well-defined obligations and corresponding rights towards both those above and below him. Highest was the emperor—he too, like all others bound by a dual obligation: towards the hierarchically organized people, and towards God and the moral law. At the bottom of the pyramid were the peasants and other workers on the land; but its true foundation was the soil itself, according to Natural Law the property of the whole people given to men by God with not only the right but also the duty of tilling it. The soil is the foundation of liberty within organized society; its use must be service to the good of the whole community. Contrary to a still widespread modern opinion, freedom does not exist if men can dispose of it according to their private good pleasure without regard to public welfare, as if it were merely an object of barter. Without the soil, historic and state consciousness are not possible; the disintegration of modem society is partly due to the resurgence of the nomad's mentality caused by detaching the people from the soil. The highest protector of the soil and the peasants was the emperor. His power, on the other hand, rested on this protection he afforded to the lowest order of the social pyramid, which was thus linked to the highest. Feudalism, with its grandiose concept of freedom for all men, disintegrated only after this immediate relation between head and foundation was broken by the interposing middle powers, princes and feudal lords. Perhaps this dialectical result of the feudal system was inevitable; the rising absolutism of modern times, which denied allegiance to a supranational head of the Christian Respublica as well as the political rights of the people, was the very antithesis to feudalism. But I should like to caution those who pass rash judgment on the feudal order by pointing to its ultimate defeat; I should like to remind them that our own liberal economic order was in a crisis almost as soon as it was bora and has yet to prove its longevity.

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As I have pointed out earlier, Christianity, in contrast to Docetic and Manichaean heresies, always defended the justification of the temporal order and maintained its importance. The physical categories are as real as the moral ones. In its proper sphere the state possesses a justifia of its own bound by the moral law but assigned to specific duties, such as establishing and enforcing positive law and guiding men toward temporal happiness. That it firmly maintained this principle and avoided the chaotic intermingling of matters temporal and spiritual, which was characteristic of the East, remains one of the lasting achievements of the empire. All nations have benefited from this struggle. Pope John XIII, in a bull issued in 967 at the synod of Ravenna, referred to Otto as "the third emperor after Constantine, thrice blessed and most sacred," because it was he who had liberated the spiritual head of Christianity from deepest degradation. Though the term "Holy Roman Empire" does not antedate Frederick Barbarossa's reign, the institution may be said to begin with Otto. The name itself requires a few words of explanation here, since few expressions have created greater confusion and few have offered easier targets to professional wits. The Latin form is Sacrum Imperium Romanum; the German, Heiliges Römisches Reich. Barbarossa, when he added the word Sacrum to the name of the Roman Empire, was simply stressing the close historic and ideological connection of his empire with Roman imperial law. Everything pertaining to the person of the emperors in Rome, whose legal successor he could claim to be, had been designated by that word: Sacra Majestas, Sacrum Palatium, Sacrum Officium, Sacra Munificentia, etc. Things and institutions pertaining to imperial majesty were "set apart" (the original meaning of the word sacer); they were hallowed, distinguished from the ordinary and profane. Probably Barbarossa was acting on the advice of his Italian legal advisers, who were trained in the rediscovered and newly revived Justinian law, when he emphasized the continuity between the two epochs in the new name of the empire. The English word "Holy" is not an adequate translation. Though it is time-honored—and I realize that it is well nigh impossible to uproot an error that has appeared in print for centuries—I should like to suggest that a serious effort be made to remedy this misleading terminology. It may also be noted that the German word heilig here means "sacred"—a word which cannot be rendered into German by any exclusive and specific word. Note also that the Italian form is Sacro Impero, not Santo Impero, and French has, at least alternatively, Empire Sacré. There are, however, additional reasons to justify the epithet of sacred; they lie in the political philosophy of the empire itself. It was considered as being willed by Providence to embrace mankind. In theory it had no limits:

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it reached to the true bounds of nature. All Christian lands, England and France not excluded, recognized its precedence legally and morally, while the non-Christian countries were fields for missionary effort. According to its ethos of government, the whole world was to be brought under the rule of the Cross—a universal constitution based on the fivefold foundations of reason, peace, morality, justice, and liberty. Otto's contemporaries praise his never-ceasing activity, his care for the welfare of all peoples, his sense of humor, and his deep humanitarianism—traits which remind us of Charlemagne. His struggle with the Roman factions in order to liberate and cleanse the papal office won him the applause of Christendom. It was part of his universal planning to secure a closer union with the Eastern Empire by winning the hand of the Greek princess Theophano for his son, later Emperor Otto II. She was the daughter of Romanus II and granddaughter of Constantine Porphyrogenitus ("born to the purple") of the Macedonian dynasty, which according to tradition traced its lineage back to Alexander the Great. Theophano was married to the younger Otto in Rome in 972. Pope John XIII bestowed nuptial blessing upon them, and after the coronation she was greeted and recognized as empress of the Romans. Here was an act of reconciliation between Rome and "New Rome," between the papacy and the Eastern patriarchate. From Rome, the emperor conducted his son back to Germany to present him to the people as the designated successor to the kingdom. It was a triumphant return: the great archbishops of all Europe came to greet him, as did the dukes of Rohemia and Poland, the ambassadors of Hungary and Rulgaria, and a mission from the Caliph Moizz of Egypt. Shortly afterwards, the emperor died at Memleben on the Unstrut, when he was only sixty-one years old. He was buried beside his first wife, Editha, in the cathedral of Magdeburg. Through his efforts, Magdeburg had been raised to an archdiocesé by John XIII, equal in rank, according to a bull of 967, with Constantinople. It is significant that Otto, the heir and conqueror of pagan Saxony, should have found his eternal rest there. In 1207 the cathedral burned down, but over the mighty stone sarcophagus of the restorer of the empire, rose the majestic Gothic edifice that was one of the few, if not the only, building to escape the fire of 1631, when Magdeburg was captured by the imperial general Count Tilly. In the market place of the city stands an equestrian statue of Otto erected around 1240. A superb work of art, it portrays the august yet benignant figure of a ruler as conceived by the Hohenstaufen epoch. Otto the Great's successor, Otto II, died at the age of twenty-nine after a rule of only ten years. He is the only emperor of the Sacred Roman Empire

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to be buried in Rome. Through the centuries his tomb has been honored with wreaths and flowers on every seventh of December, the day of his death. Once when I came to Rome before Christmas, I saw the fresh laurels and was told that the tradition was still kept up by a descendant of one of the Ghibelline families. During his short reign, Otto II asserted the imperial authority powerfully. In Germany he put down tribal and other particularistic tendencies, while in Southern Europe, faithful to his office, he opposed the incursions of the Moslems. Already the Fatimites had conquered Sicily from the Eastern Empire and were setting out for Italy across the Straits of Messina. The whole of the peninsula, even Rome, seemed in the gravest danger. The emperor met the Saracens in battle, but at Rossano in Calabria he was totally defeated. Ranke has likened this battle to the battle of Cannae in the ancient empire; the Carthaginians of old had changed into African Saracens, the Romans into iron-clad Germans; but the clash of world-historic interests between the two realms bordering the Mediterranean was the same. Undismayed, Otto prepared for a new campaign, again like the ancient consuls, who "did not despair of the fate of the republic." At the diet of Verona, Italian and German princes, summoned to prepare the defense of the commonwealth, recognized as future king and emperor the three-vearold son of Otto and Theophano, the later Otto III. Almost immediately afterwards the child came to the throne. Otto II died of fever, exhausted prematurely, we may assume, by the strain of the office in which he had been serving since he was twelve or thirteen, even during the lifetime of Otto the Great. The news of his death at once encouragcd all particularistic interests: revolts flared up among the Slavs, the Danes, the Saxons, and the Franks. The bonds holding the empire and the components of the German kingdom together seemed to snap at a thousand points. In this dark hour of history, it was the genius of Theophano that saved the very existence of the empire. The fact that she was descended from a line considered the noblest in the world gave her added prestige, but without her personal virtue, statesmanship, and energy the fame of the Porphyrogeniti and the memory of Alexander the Great would have been of no avail. While putting down the Slavonic revolts by force of arms, she displayed rare tact in handling the haughty nobles and magnates of Germany and Italy, and she won back the dissenting factions through diplomacy and gentle firmness. It would be fascinating to write a monograph on great women and their influence in European history. Perhaps Germany would be one of the fields richest in examples to show the importance of their role. Could this be considered a permanent trait in the German character, which Tacitus had already praised? In government, in poetry, in the arts and sciences, the influence of women has been from earliest times to the present one of the decisive factors of history. But Theophano's position was perhaps unique. In Italy, she ruled

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as "emperor," keeping the territorial lords in strict obedience. In her castle of Quedlinburg she headed a brilliant court, which shone with Greek splendor and beauty beneath northern skies. The chroniclers tell us that a host of European princes, among them Duke Miesko of Poland, gathered around her at Easter, 991. They all brought presents or tribute and did homage to the resplendent imperial name. She it was who, as the chronicler says, united the whole empire as if with a chain.' When, not long after that Easter celebration, she died at Nymwegen, where she and her small son were presiding over a diet, her death was a tragedy of the first magnitude for the emperor and for the empire. Again paganism raised its head in the northern and eastern parts of the realm. Brandenburg and Havelberg were destroyed, and on heathen altars flowed the blood of slaughtered Christian knights. Hamburg was plundered and bumed by the Slavonic Obotrites, while Danes and Norsemen invaded England and the German coastal regions. A combined Danish-Norse fleet pushed into the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser rivers. Had they been able to establish a permanent foothold there, it is very likely that the entire pagan world would have united under their leadership. Fortunately, an imperial army under the boy-emperor overwhelmed them with a crushing defeat. This grave menace, accentuated by the Islamic danger, did not prevent German magnates—most notable among them Duke Henry of Bavaria, of the Ottoman house—from seeking gain for themselves. It was, in fact, a rare occasion when all members of the imperial-German body submitted to the elected head voluntarily. Ricarda Huch once stated: "The German Reich was never stable; it had always to be founded anew." 4 This situation imposed an enormous strain upon its rulers, who were continually engaged in a struggle with regional, particularistic, and individualistic tendencies. It is significant that, perhaps as a consequence of such overwhelming labor, most of the Roman-German emperors of the Middle Ages died young, many even before they had reached full manhood. It was at one of the most critical moments in the history of Europe that the reins of government passed into the hands of Otto III, the Hellenic-German youth in whom the blood of the Macedonians and Porphyrogeniti united with that of the Burgundian and Saxon kings. In him, the absolute dominance of the universal over the national ( tribal, territorial ) principle found what was probably its clearest expression. For his predecessors, the inherited and augmented might of their territorial kingship was still the main pillar of their Kaisertum. For the grandson of the Restitutor imperii, however, the Ger* Annales Quedlinburgenses, ad annum 991, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores, III, 68. 4 Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation, p. 95.

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manic nation, to which his paternal line belonged, was accidental; das Reich, greater than Germany, Italy, Burgundy, and all other subdivisions, was everything. Consequently, Rome was to him the legitimate center of gravity. From his palace on the Palatine, he set out to rule the imperium, with his claim to universal government resting on his succession to Augustus and to Theodosius the Great. Because of this imperial "dream," following on his ancestors' power, he earned the reproach of having been an immature victim of illusion. Yet in an age of faith his dream was political wisdom too. In the words of Gundolf, who, with Ranke, is almost alone in his just appraisal of the young ruler: ' T h e 'Marvel of the World,' Otto III "—the first who sought to redeem his ephemeral position, with its lack of a people and its all too high ambition grounded on a precarious foundation, through a perfect dream, a radiant ideal of world-ruling authority, justice, and wisdom—was a glowing youth . . . but was endowed also with all the genius and insight of his years. He was by no means a weak daydreamer of muddled mind. The concept of basing his office, in opposition to his vassals' unspiritual lust for dominion, on a spiritual power, such as the papacy had derived in an ever richer measure from Peter, was thoroughly 'political,' and absolutely 'timely.' Caesarism, which Charlemagne had renewed and glorified and rightfully passed on to his successors, was such a spiritual force. Otto consciously bound his office again to Caesar, as the popes tied theirs to Peter." β The founding of two mighty kingdoms, Poland and Hungary, in potential national opposition to the Germans, was the work of Otto. In 999, Duke Boleslaw Chrobry of Poland overthrew the Bohemian rule over large sections of Central Eastern Europe. Cracow and Upper Silesia were detached from the Bohemian dukedom. Then it was his ambition to establish an autonomous archbishopric, independent of the metropolitan see of Magdeburg. To this the emperor consented by founding the archdiocese of Gnesen, which was given jurisdiction over the bishoprics of Kolberg, Cracow, and Breslau. Boleslaw Chrobry greeted him with exuberant joy and elaborate honors on Polish soil, and, according to the Polish chroniclers, received a royal crown from the hands of the emperor. He was also named "friend of the Roman people," asAriovistus and others had been a thousand years earlier. While Otto emancipated the Poles from German sovereignty, he also emphasized the continuity of imperial authority. What he deemed essential was a right relationship between the nations and the universal body, never simply 5 "Mirabilia mundi' he was called by his contemporaries, Bishop Otto of Freising reports: Chronicon vi. 26, in Monumenta Germanicé histórica, Scriptores, XX, 241. There is a complete English edition of this important work of medieval political philosophy and historiography in existence now, the first in any modem language: The Two Cities, A Chronicle of Universal History to the Year 1146 A.D., translated with introduction and notes by Charles Christopher Mierow, edited by Austin P. Evans and Charles Knapp (New York, Columbia University Press, 1928). β Caesar, Geschichte seines Ruhms, pp. 84-85. The translation of this passage is my own.

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the submission of one European kingdom to another. Germany was but one of these kingdoms; it was not identical with the Kaisertum. O ' In similar fashion, Hungary was brought within the framework of the Occidental order. T h e marriage of the heir of the Hungarian realm to a princess of the Saxon house, to which I have already referred, was Otto's work. T h e condition was that the Hungarian prince and his whole people should adopt Christianity, a move implying the recognition of the pre-eminence of the two Powers, empire and papacy. In an address to the Romans, the emperor could rightly claim that he had extended the empire into regions never reached by their ancestors. Never again were the relations so intimate between the two halves of this empire, which were still undivided in the imperial idea. While Otto was winning Hungary and Poland for the West, his cousin in Constantinople brought Russia into the fold of Eastern Christianity. It was as if there were a new Theodosian agreement on the spheres of interests of the Western and Eastern parts of the realm. In 996, when Otto I I I was crowned in Rome, a youth of sixteen received the diadem from a pope twenty-four years old—Gregory V, the emperor's own cousin, whom he had helped to raise to the Chair of St. Peter. It must have been one of the great dramatic moments in the history of the world. A chiliastic fever of anxiety, hope, fear, and expectation had swept over the earth at the end of the first Christian millennium. Christ's second coming was by many held to be imminent, through literal interpretation of certain passages in the Revelation of Saint John. During this period, when the people in all countries prepared themselves for the Awful Judgment, the reins of the world's government were held by two "glowing youths," both filled with highest ideals and conscious of the exalted position of their respective offices. This complete harmony between the spiritual and the temporal orders must have appeared as a foreshadowing of the coming of the Kingdom. But mankind had forgotten that "of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven." 7 Nor had the Gospel been preached to the true limits of nature, and even now we may be yet many ages removed from spiritual fulfillment. It would seem, however, that ever and again humanity must be shaken to the depths of its soul and made conscious of the Power that transcends all matter. Only three years after the coronation Pope Gregory V died. His successor was one of the most remarkable men ever to ascend the chair of St. Peter. This was Gerbert, who had been archbishop of Reims and later of Ravenna. H e was Otto's beloved master, his friend, and his most trusted adviser. T h e Roman-German emperor, himself of Greek descent, had raised to the papal throne the first Frenchman to hold that high position. Gerbert was born in 950 of humble parentage. Pope John X I I I first discov- Matthew 2 4 : 3 6 ; Mark 13:32.

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ered the young man's remarkable talents and introduced him to Otto the Great. At the age of twenty-two, Gerbert became director of the cathedral school at Rheims, which he soon made into one of the most celebrated places of European learning. His reputation as a wise master of youth grew, and Hugh Capet of France entrusted to him the education of his young son, later King Robert II of France. Like Alexander von Humboldt centuries later, Gerbert possessed and mastered the universal knowledge of his time. But there was also a shy whisper that he was a master too of the "occult arts," a magician, a sorcerer, who knew more than mortals ought to know. From Gerbert the timeless symbol of the Occidental soul, Doctor Faustus, was to draw some of his more specific traits. Gerbert was particularly well trained in science and in philosophy, for he had spent much of his youth in the great Spanish centers of Arab learning. It was he who introduced Arabic mathematics and astronomy to Christendom. The curriculum at his school in Reims included arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, and he himself taught Aristotelian philosophy. He was familiar with the writings of Boethius, the Roman Neoplatonist of the days of Theodoric the Great. He may perhaps even be credited with paving the way for the coming synthesis between Hellenic-Arabic thought and Christianity, a reconciliation basic to the scholastic philosophy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Otto II made him abbot of the important Upper Italian monastery of Bobbio, but after the emperor's death he returned to France, where he soon headed the bishops who were the political opponents of the pope. It was then that he received a letter from the boy-emperor, Otto III, and his life entered on a new course which finally brought him to the papacy. The correspondence between Otto and Gerbert is most remarkable in text and spirit. Gerbert's eminent knowledge, wrote the emperor, had always been for him a guiding authority. Though yet unlearned, he was filled with desire for learning and hoped that the great teacher would assist his education and would also become his adviser in all public matters. His blood, he added, was both Saxon and Greek; Gerbert might help him to subdue what remained in him of the Saxon peasant, while cultivating with diligence his Greek heritage: "For if it is kindled, one may discover in us a spark of the spirit of Hellas." 8 Gerbert, overjoyed with this invitation, replied that by instracting his young master he would only give back what he had himself received from the emperor's ancestors. In 997, soon after his arrival in Magdeburg, Gerbert dedicated to Otto an introduction to logic, De rationali et raiione uti. It is strongly influenced by the Neoplatonic philosophy of John Scotus Eriugena, who had lived at the court of the later Carolingians. But what interests us is the dedication to Otto: "Italy should not think that the sacred palace has be8 Epistola ad Cerbertum, 239-40, No. 153.

in Migne, Patrologiae

cursus completus,

Latin, CXXXIX,

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come lifeless," it read. "Greece should not assume that it alone may boast of imperial philosophy and Roman power. Ours, ours is the Roman Empire! Italy, rich in fruit, gives us strength, and so do Gaul and Germania, rich in knights. Ours art thou, most august Caesar, emperor of the Romans, who sprang from the noblest blood of Greece, but surpasseth the Greeks in power —thou, who ruleth the Romans, and who is greater than both in eloquence and spirit."β Because Otto called himself "servant of Jesus Christ" and "servant of the Apostles," and because his life was deeply permeated with religious feeling, many have argued that he was an unworldly penitent, an ascetic dreamer rather than a ruler. His forceful policies in Germany, in Poland, in Bohemia and in Italy belie such notions. The mystic tendency in his life—an undeniable fact—was, rather, timely; applied in the proper way, it was a power as great as the "romantic" philosophy of modem days, which was more potent than any form of rationalism in transforming the world. During his last visit to Germany, Otto had Charlemagne's tomb opened. This act was held against him by his contemporaries, and it still figures in modem textbooks as proof of his unearthly mysticism. If, indeed, he had gone to the tomb to find the spirit of the great Charles, he was doomed to find disappointment only, for in tombs only the dead are at home. But it seems that, instead, he was anxious to provide a more dignified resting place for the founder of the empire, just as one was found a century and a half later when the tomb was opened by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa at the time of Charlemagne's canonization. Otto III died in his twenty-first year at Paterno, near Rome, in 1002. His body was brought back to Germany and laid to rest there at Aachen, alongside the tomb of Charlemagne. His task was done. In spite of the turmoils in Rome and the bitter opposition he met in Germany, he had achieved what in his childhood had seemed an impossible feat—the strengthening and restoration of the central spiritual and temporal authorities. Concerning Otto, Gundolf has coined the saying that he was the St. John of "Catholic emperordom as well as Caesarean Christianity, the true inaugurator of the imperial 'dream.' " 1 0 Perhaps he himself must always remain in the dimness of historic twilight, but from him rays have shone forth to reach and glorify men before and after him from the great Charles and restitutor imperii, forward to Barbarossa and the Greatest Erederick, whose imperium mundi, based on centuries of labor and on the genius of the Hohenstaufen, Otto had so strangely prefigured. But what gives him his unique place in the history of the human spirit is his rank within the group of "eternal youths" who have profoundly influenced » Migne, CXXXIX, 159. io Caesar, Geschichte seines Ruhms, p. 8β; English translation by Jacob Wittmer Hartmann, The Mantle of Caesar, p. 99.

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the trend of the world's events. The Hellenic component of the EuropeanGermanic mind found in him self-conscious embodiment. Throughout Occidental history down to Winckelmann and Goethe, to Lord Byron, Shelley, and Keats, down to the song of Hyperion and Diotima and the elegies of Hölderlin ("the spirit of Greece in a German body," as he was called), down to the nineteenth-century Philhellenics from England and Germany who gave their blood for Greek freedom, and down to the work and spirit of Stefan George, the ancient yet timeless world of Hellas and the Occidental mind have been integrally linked. It is not accidental that so many of our cities have assumed a Grecian aspect, for, as Schiller exclaimed, "Lo, the sun of Homer smiles also down on usi"11 Quite apart from the natural affinity between the Greek mind and the German, the direct influence of Greek philosophy has undoubtedly helped to create further similarities in political and intellectual life. It remains a remarkable fact that this philosophy, enshrined in academic learning throughout the Roman centuries, awoke to life as an active and molding force in patristic days and was carried to its triumph after the Germanic world was constituted. In Otto III this heritage was still immediate, but in his teacher Gerbert "the school" had already been substituted for the traditions of the blood. Only the knowledge of this relationship will enable us to understand certain apparent contradictions in the intellectual, emotional, and political nature of the Germans. The concept of "empire" is Roman, not Greek. Alexander's was a venture of realistic dreams, the work of one glorious youth who set out to reach the confines of the world. This aim was closer to the deeds of an Alaric, an Athaulf, even a Theodoric (Romanized though his character was) than to any act performed in the founding or the expansion of the empire. For the Roman, Rome was everywhere, and he was Roman at all places. The great wall in Scotland, the Limes from the Rhine to the Danube were the outer walls of the city; the Euphrates and the Tigris, the Nile, the Sea of Azov, the Rhine, and the Danube were its moat. The Roman Caesars, including Julius himself, might assume Oriental honors, but that was raison d'état, for they never succumbed to the spell of Eastern magic as did Alexander and many of the Germanic kings. For the Greek, the individual polis was the real state; any larger realm would always be composed of federations of individual poleis. It was the Greek world which gave birth to the very principle of federalism. But as there was then no universal Idea overshadowing and keeping in obedience a wide territory of individual poleis and distinctly personal regions (of which Attica itself is the classic example ), centrifugal forces would not have permitted a world federation. Greek federations were always on a limited Hellenic scale, and necessarily Alexander's Hellenic-Asiatic league collapsed 11

"Der Spaziergang," in Sämmtliche Schriften; historisch-kritische

Ausgabe, XI, 91.

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after the death of its founder. As he did not ( and could not ) have the concept of empire, he fell, instead, under the influence of the autocraticcentralistic doctrines of conquered Persia. T h e German concept of the state is close to that of the Greeks. It builds on tribal, regional, and local communities, united by a common spirit, a common culture, and, especially, a common language rather than welded together by a centralized political will. And the internal structure of the German kingdom has remained "federal," even though the state as a whole has been used, as the historic instrument of the Christian-Roman idea of universalism. Only through the blending of the Roman concept with the Germano-Hellenic could there be established a commonwealth freer and more alive than the ancient empire had been and yet an empire possessing contiguity, central authority, and power such as the all-too-loose federal world of Hellas had not known.

9 THE ESTATES OF THE EMPIRE Honors and prosperity

without freedom

ARCHBISHOP W I C H M A N N ,

would be vile servitude. Charter to the Cobblers Guild.

SAXONS, EAST FRANKS, a n d Bavarians, cities like Magdeburg, Hildesheim, a n d C o l o g n e — t h e s e still crowded the G e r m a n mosaic with contrasting colors and continued to do so for many centuries more. And yet they all were b o u n d together by a powerful interdependence. " I t is not mere coincidence," D i e t r i c h S c h ä f e r said in his inaugural address at the University of J e n a , in 1884, "that the first a p p e a r a n c e of the name of 'Germans' as a designation of our people coincides almost exactly with the founding of the R o m a n E m p i r e of the G e r m a n Nation." 1 A universal task helped to kindle the national idea in the hearts of men. " I t is the opinion always upheld by the representatives of the G e r m a n spirit that the best, the true national consciousness e m b r a c e s also the cosmopolitan ideal of a supranational humanity," Friedrich Mein e c k e expressed it,- and h e added, quoting Johann Eduard E r d m a n n : " I t is un-German to b e nothing but G e r m a n . " 3 However, it is more difficult to define w h a t should b e called German than to say what should not. T h i s much m a y b e said: at no time of history could " G e r m a n " b e defined as a bloodr a c e concept. E n g l a n d is no less G e r m a n i c than Germany; perhaps it is even more so. D e n m a r k and Sweden certainly arc more so than either E n g l a n d or G e r m a n y , and t h e strong Germanie traits in F r a n c e and Italy, in Spain and Portugal, arc well known. G e r m a n y and G e r m a n i s m are terms of history and destiny. T h e y w e r e crcated b y common suffering, common problems, and a common task, rather than by ethnic forces. T h e instability of the German national b o d y — t h e persistent compulsion ever to form it anew and to find with each generation new avenues to its historic destination—is part of the German lot. G e r m a n ism, uncertain of its physical base, is by necessity pressed inwards, whether into personalized territorial communities or into the realm of thought. Since the earliest days G e r m a n y has been the battleground of Europe, and o f E u r o p e against Asia. Struggles here decided whether or not Turks, Avars, and Mongols should triumph, and determined to whom C a n a d a should b e long. After the ninth century, Germany's eastern "frontier" drained the country of much important energy. T h e reclamation of the land bv German settlers; 1 2

Deutsches Nationalbewusstsein im Licht der Geschichte, p. 10. Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat: Studien zur Genesis des deutschen Ν ationalstaates,

p. 20. 3

Das Nationalitätsprincip

( 1862), in Ernste Spiele, p. 252.

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90

the battles of the Teutonic Order against the pagan Cumans attacking Hungary and the pagan Pruzzi threatening Poland; the colonizing of vast areas and the building of villages and towns—all these, of course, created new values; but they also imposed a continual strain upon the resources, moral and material, of the German people as a whole. The calling of the Teutonic Order into Prussia by the Polish Duke Conrad of Masovia has remained of lasting importance and is today once more of timely interest. Poland was then already an integral part of Occidental Christendom fully conscious of its mission, reiterated and confirmed at the time of Emperor Otto III. 4 For a long time the country had been hard pressed by pagan tribes ("Saracens" the documents of that time sometimes called them), and in 1161 the Poles had suffered a serious defeat in the pristine woods and swamps of East Prussia. Under Duke Conrad, a Cistercian monk named Christian from the monastery of Oliva began to missionize the country; he established a small territory, and his right of possession was recognized by the pope, who ordained him bishop of Prussia. But Christian was too weak for the task. An attempt by Conrad to found a local order of knights, the Order of Dobrzyn, also met with little success.8 In this emergency Duke Conrad, whose land had been repeatedly laid waste by the pagans, sent urgent appeals for help to Hermann von Salza, grandmaster of the Teutonic Order.' In quick succession, from 1228 to 1230, he presented Hermann with five documents of donation,T culminating in the Treaty of Kruswica of June, 1230,· turning over the Kulmer Land to the order "as a perpetual possession," · in order that they might settle there and defeat the Pruzzi, whose conquered territory was also to be part of the order's domain. Emperor Frederick II had recognized these arrangements by the Golden Bull of Rimini and had endowed the grandmaster and his successors with the status and privileges of Reichsfürsten.t0 Pope Gregory IX confirmed the donations, including those by Bishop Christian of Prussia.11 The eastern frontier of the empire was a field for true missionary work: See above, p. 83. « See Ranke, Weltgeschichte, VII, 225 sq. • Erich Caspar puts the date of Duke Conrad's first appeal to the Teutonic Order at about the turn of 1225-1226. Hermann von Salza und die Gründung des Deutschordensstaates te Preussen, Exkurs, pp. 103-7. 7 Preussisches Urkundenbuch, Politische (allgemeine) Abteilung, Vol. I, Part 1, pp. 47-48, No. 64 ( 1228); p. 52, No. 71 ( 1229); pp. 55-56, No. 75 ( 1230); pp. 5β-57, No. 76 (1230); pp. 58-60, No. 78 (1230). » Ibid., pp. 58-60, No. 78. • "In perpetuum possidendum." Ibid., p. 55, No. 75. 1 0 March, 1226; in Böhmer, Regesta imperii, Vol. V, edited by Ficker and Winkelmann, p. 324, No. 1598. 1 1 August 27, 1230. Preussisehes Urkundenbuch, Politische (allgemeine) Abteilung, Vol. I, Part 1, p. 60, No. 79. 4

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the overcoming of paganism from the Elbe river to the confines of Russia, already Christianized by Byzantium. Rome and the East are, therefore, the poles of a spiritual axis determining the German destiny. Both had to be ministered to if the Germanic body was to remain faithful to its position as bearer of a nonnationalistic realm. However, since spiritual tasks take place also on the physical, political, and territorial planes, it is understandable why serious conflicts might arise between "eastern" and "Roman" policies, though according to their nature and telos they should have been coordinated. A preponderance of the Roman policy would lead to neglecting the needs of Germany proper; a preponderance of the eastern policy would lead to giving undue weight to the national side of the imperial complex. Historically, the only reproach one can level against the Greatest Frederick lies in his too exclusive commitment to the Roman mission;12 the severest reproof to Welf aspirations, particularly under Henry the Lion, is that in their concern about eastern expansion the Welfs lost sight of Rome, that power which alone justified and sanctified national aims. After Frederick Barbarossa broke the power of the Welfs, the two policies were in perfect balance during the reign of his great son, Emperor Henry VI. In the days of the second Frederick, it was his chancellor and friend, Hermann von Salza, that same grandmaster of the Teutonic Order, who during his lifetime assured the balance. His policy, rather than Frederick's, would have safeguarded Christendom against the Mongolian invasion and would have made their repulse an affair of the united nations of the Occident. Another destiny-laden frontier was the West, though within the Christian universe there should have been no frontier at all. A look at historical maps shows how persistently France pursued her Drang nach Osten, breaking piece after piece off the universal body to incorporate them into her own national state. Though the Frankish borders once lay at the Rhône, the Saône, and the Maas, they finally reached a line running roughly from a point east of Nice to Geneva and the Rhine. In Napoleon's time, the French borders reached all the way to the Elbe. The attitude of France toward the Sacred Roman Empire ( le Saint-Empire, or, as it was also customary to call it, Empire Sacré) has been much clouded in recent centuries. The impression was widely created that France objected to the empire as such—a complete falsehood which has crept into the writings of even so outstanding a man as Jacques Maritain. In his True Humanism he speaks of the opposi1 2 Frederick could not give much attention to the affairs of the German Northeast, a Livonian chronicler remarked, not without an undertone of reproach, "because he was wholly absorbed by the manifold and high affairs of the empire." Heinricus, Chremicon Lyvoniae xxiv, in Monumenta Germanice nistorica, Scriptores, XXIII, 310.

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tion of France to the empire. ' T h e French monarchy," he contends, "would never admit its dependence on any temporal superior." 13 Actually France never denied the empire, if only for the simple reason that she never ccased to aspire to it herself. From the hour when the Cosmocratorian diadem passed to the heirs of the East Franks, to the days of Louis XIV, the pages of history were ever filled with attempts of French kings to conquer it for their own nation, or, failing this, to put close friends, relatives, or allies on the universal throne. In 1306, Pierre Dubois, councilor and crown jurist to Philip the Fair, issued his celebrated work, De recuperatione Terre Sande. T h e universal monarchy, he said, was an outmoded institution; it should be replaced by an international council, meeting on French soil at the initiative of the king of France. 1 4 But in the second part of the book, and, more urgently, upon the death of King Albert I in 1308, he advised Philip to arrogate the universal monarchy to himself, and to translate the empire from the Tiber to the Seine. T h e king of France, he said, should seek coronation by the pope and make the imperial dignity hereditary in his family.''1 It appears that the empire did not seem antiquated to the French after all, provided the king of France became Roman emperor. This idea of an international council foreshadows the Great Design of Henry IV of France and the duke of Sully three hundred years later. Napoleon, whose Frankish-Roman empire stands between the second and the hoped-for third realization of the European idea, as Charlemagne's had stood between the first and the second, finally gained what the West Frankish rulers had covetcd so long. This consistent French policy bears witness to the real value of the much-maligned empire; it also proves anew the supranational character of the empire, which, however, might have been lost under the control of a closely integrated nation. T h e consequences for the empire as well as for Germany, a nation constantly in a spiritual status nascondi, would have been far-reaching and decidedly negative. The German kingdom mirrored in its own structure the full color of the empire. Each embraced a variety of nationalities and different forms of gov13 Humanisme intégral; problèmes temporels et spirituels d'une nouvelle chrétienté, p. 151; English translation by M. R. Adamson, True Humanism, p. 138. To assertions like these, Pope Boniface VIII had already replied in his address in consistory of April 30, 1303, a few weeks after he had excommunicated the ambitious French king Philip the Fair: " T h e King of the Romans whom the Germans elect is to be promoted to be emperor and lord of all kings and princes on earth. And let not Gallic arrogance dare to contend that the French do not recognize any superior authority; for in so doing they would lie, because like all other kings they are and must be by right under the king and emperor of the Romans." Quoted by W. Drumann, Geschichte Bonifacius des Achten ( Königsberg, Gebrüder Borntriiger, 1852), II, SO; see also Potthast, ed., Regesta pontificum Romanorum, 1198-1304, II, 2018, No. 25234. 14 63 (xli), 3 ( i v ) ; in Collection de textes pour servir à l'étude et à l'enseignement de l'histoire, pp. 7, 54. 15 Mémoire à Philippe le Bel, pour l'engager à se faire créer empereur d'Allemagne par manuscrits le pape Clément V ( 1308), edited by Edgard Boutaric, in Notices et extraits des de la Bibliothèque Nationale et autres bibliothèques, Vol. XX, Part 2, pp. 186 sqq.

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ernance, ranging from democratic and aristocratic republics to elective and hereditary, and to constitutional and absolute, principalities and kingdoms. The German word Reich conveys a sense quite different from the implications of the usual English translation, "empire." In root and meaning Reich and Recht are related: a "realm of righteousness," with right as the necessary foundation of governmental power. Reich may also have a moral, a philosophical, even a religious meaning; it is the German word used for "Kingdom" in the Lord's Prayer. An unspeakable regime has abused it along with many other terms, but this fact should not mean discredit. Through the minds of thinkers like Ricarda Huch and Stefan George and through the longing of many who have shed their blood in the fight for liberty it has received a restitutio in integrum. Reich is not identical with "state"; it is a term for great, flexible communities, for cultural bodies rather than for nations."1 Not even in the grip of the Habsburgs did the Reich bccome a state; states were broken off or detached themselves, as the Swiss did, when they chose to remain loyal to the idea of the Christian republic. Along with Italy, Germany was the standard bearer of the universal Reich. The over-all dialectical tension, as I said, may explain some bewildering phenomena as v/ell as many of the political products, personalities, and Reich-conscious communities that were born within the Occident. Let us first turn to the cities, before we trace the result of that tension in the realm of the spirit. The Reich cities were, in their whole attitude, totally different from the anti-imperial communes of Lombardy. They were among the most significant Stände, members, estates, of the empire, and they reflected most clearly the integration of the Germanic spirit into the Roman-universal concept. The highest ambition of every town was to gain Reichsfreihcit, the freedom of the empire. Once they attained this freedom, they became fully selfgoverning republics. The imperial eagle in their coats of arms or upon the shields of their market statues, the Roland, was the seal of their liberty. "City air renders free": the serf who moved into town became free after one year and one day.17 Freedom, as a dialectical process of steady development, found its true soil for growing in the cultural, scientific, and intellectual life, which was much richer in the cities than in the open countiy. It was in the cities that the elements of modern constitutional democracy appeared. There grew up the new estate, which was in due time to share power with the nobility and finally to replace it. ι " Few may be aware that, as chance would have it, the word Reich has become an integral part of the name given to the New World—Ame-rica. Derived as it is from Amerigo, the Italian form for the German Amalrich (the "work ruler"), America may be said to mean "Das Arbeits-Reich," "The Realm of Work." See Pohl, Amerigo Vespucci: Pilot Major, pp. 170 sq. 1 ; Brunner, "Luft macht frei," in Abhandlungen zur Rechtsgeschichte, I, 3 6 6 - 4 1 3 .

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Just as the history of Europe (not only that of Germany) was for a long time the history of the then representative, history-conscious class, the nobility, so were the city governments originally aristocratic oligarchies. The small craftsmen had but little share in the administration. Yet from an early time they took part in it as members of the city's total personality. They could rise to patrician rank. While the formerly free peasants were in the course of time reduced to a state of serfdom by their territorial lords, the cities developed respect for labor and free craftsmen. In the beautiful Rathäuser and cathedrals, architects, often completely anonymous, expressed the collective democratic personality of the town in its developing consciousness. Out of the crowded houses of stone and timber and the busy worldly turmoil of narrow streets and squares, the Gothic cathedrals shot upward like luminous, light-giving fountains from the earth, or like rays of longing and prayer out of the darkness of the human heart. The principles of practical social justice, the care of the poor, developed in these urban communities. At first the guilds saw to it that none of their members succumbed to pauperism. Then the care of underprivileged citizens was taken over by the city collectively. Since the princes had usurped so much power, few of the emperors had the strength to oppose them or to side with their own natural allies, the princes' opponents. The imperial constitution of Charles IV, the Golden Bull of 1356, not only denied the cities admittance to the Reichstag, the imperial diet, but also declared the leagues of cities illegal.18 But such leagues, most prominent among them the northern Hanse and the southwestern Rhenish League, played, and continued to play, an important political and constitutional role. In the career of the embattled, tragic Emperor Henry IV, the cities were from time to time his only allies, for better or for worse. The same was true of the Wittelsbach Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian centuries later, when he was faced by princely and papal opposition. It was always to the interest of the cities to oppose an increase of the papacy's political power, an opposition which was one more link between them and the emperors. Barbarossa, in 1156, granted to Worms an important privilege which was the model for many to follow. The city was guaranteed the right to elect its own councilors and judges. While some towns, like Speyer, voluntarily accepted the guilds into the city government, others were forced to do so by imperial decree. Ludwig the Bavarian, for instance, unseated the city aristocracy in many Alsatian, Swabian and Bavarian towns. The Greatest Frederick, though at times forced to side with the princes, laid the foundation for free-city development in the whole North by granting to Lübeck its celebrated Reichsfreiheit of 1226. He also made Vienna a 18

Titulus XV, De conspiratoribus.

Aller des Heiligen Römischen

Reichs

Reichstag Ordnung, Satzung und Abschied, Aurea bulk Caroli IV, p. viii.

gehaltener

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Reichsstadt in 1237, a privilege retracted by the Habsburgs despite bitter resistance of the citizens. A free-city republic at the eastern gateway of the German kingdom would have been of considerable importance for the preservation of the supranational idea in the Danubian basin; it would have counteracted dynastic domination over non-German peoples. It was probably Hermann von Salza who prevailed upon his emperor to raise Lübeck to the position which it has held ever since. Lübeck law greatly assisted the order in its work. Its high court (Oherhof ) extended its jurisdiction to many towns along the Baltic Sea as far east as Reval and Narva. As the cities were self-contained communities, their law had to deal with all human relations. They were universal in spirit. Without being nationalistic, they developed a sense of a wide national community and culture. It was natural that maritime commercial law should be especially elaborated in places like Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen. When in the nineteenth century Germany adopted a common code of commercial law, the commission on the maritime section moved to Hamburg in order to study at first hand-the practical and legal background of the law there. Magdeburg, though never a Reichsstadt in the strict sense, had a leading influence in matters of culture and law, as in so many other fields. Magdeburg law was considered so progressive and "free" that prospective colonists frequently made its adoption for their settlements a conditio sine qua non—without the concession they would not undertake colonization. The Magdeburg high court came to be one of the most influential in Central and Eastern Europe. Law, like history itself, must be alive. The ageless principles of what is morally good remain, but consciousness of them in the minds of men develops. Furthermore positive law is lawful only if it is adapted to life. This adaptation (and life also depends on the historic process) manifests itself in the gradual perfection of the law. While the spirit of law is righteousness, the dynamics of law making is love, by which all communities are formed, preserved, and developed. The correlates of righteousness, however, are equity and grace.1® Magdeburg law embodied Carolingian and Saxon elements.20 The ancient " Law is spirit objectivized. Government by law proves the truth of our thesis that in the community personalities of medieval Germany a union is achieved between a universal principle and a subjective consciousness. The synthesis of both is consummated in the law. The universal principle dies, so to speak, in the particular community subject, to rise again in the realm of right, that is, of morally ordained and ordered freedom. 20 The first codification of the old Magdeburg law is a constitution given to the city in 1188 by Archbishop Wichmann. He was one of those great men, outstanding in all spheres of life, in whom the Hohenstaufen period was so rich. The privileges which Barbarossa granted to Lübeck, and on which the charter of 1226 was based, were largely Wichmann's work, too. As adviser and friend of the emperor and mediator between empire and papacy, he also played an important role in the affairs of the central government. It was under his rule that Magdeburg, where he held a brilliant court, became one of the cultural centers of the North. As an example of his thoroughly democratic spirit I should like to quote from

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Germanic customs, however, were molded anew by the spirit of ChristianRoman universality. Since Magdeburg law extended over so vast an area, it remained flexible and continued developing. At the height of its influence, it reached out east as far as the Dnieper. Dünaburg, Kiev, and most of Poland adopted it. More than six hundred and fifty places in Poland, including Warsaw, voluntarily introduced Magdeburg law, later called "German law." In the archdiocese of Gnesen alone it was accepted by no less than two hundred and fifteen new settlements between 1285 and 1512. In 1772, the province of Lemberg counted seventy-three towns and ninety-six villages that lived under Magdeburg law. In Podolia, Volhynia, and the Ukraine it was in force till 1831. W e may rightly say, therefore, that the Sacred Roman Empire, like the Roman one, found clear expression in the supranational legal and moral spheres even in regions that were never reached by its political power. In 1498, the imperial cities were definitively admitted as a separate estate to the benches of the Reichstag, and down to our own age places like Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck have preserved with more than usual strength the spirit of opposition toward neodespotism. Within the cities, as within the empire, nationality was a question of minor importance. French, English, Italian, Polish, and other groups lived there as freely as the Germans. T h e trade of the cities, which extended to Lisbon, to Novgorod, to Riga and Smolensk, and out into Siberia, introduced an air of world-wide traffic and cosmopolitanism into the medieval communities. Constantinople in the twelfth century was the center of the trade with India: pepper, ginger, silk, and other exotic products found their way thence to Genoa and Venice and across the Alps to the northernmost shores of Europe. With the exotic goods came rumors of fabulous lands and unknown magic provinces of the East. Eight great roads linked Southern Germany with the countries abroad. And from Nürnberg and Augsburg went forth exports of silver, gold, and other goods, to play an important part in German economy. T h e Meistergesang, the school of painting in fourteenth-century Cologne, the city schools, the dramatic arts—all these products of city life were new links to bind Europe together. T h e inventions of the art of printing and of gunpowder have changed the world—whether for better or worse depends, as in all other human affairs, upon the use made of them. Like other nations, the Jews had a status of their own in the life of the cities as well as in the empire. Their treatment has always been a barometer by which to judge the spirit of an epoch. During the Christian ages it was the the charter granted to the cobblers' guild at his see city: This guild, he said, shall be governed by self-chosen leaders, "for honors and prosperity without freedom would be vile servitude." Hertel, ed., Urkundenbuch der Stadt Magdeburg, in Geschichtsquellcn der Provinz Sachsen und des Freistaates Anhalt, XXVI, 32, No. 62.

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spirit, not the blood or any other natural element of blind determinism, that counted. The Jew who embraced Christianity became a true Israelite and was received into the supranational community of man. Anacletus II, elected antipope in opposition to Innocent II, was of the Jewish family of Pierleoni, and the Popes Gregory VI and VII perhaps belonged to the same house, descendants or relatives of Benedict the Christian, the first of the Pierleoni to adopt Christianity.51 The Jew who remained a Jew was protected by papal and imperial legislation. Though his eyes were still closed to the truth, he was yet of Christ's kinship. The antipagan laws of the emperors were never extended to him. But obviously, since the ethos of earthly society—its one and exclusive raison dêtre—was to advance Christianity and make for the Kingdom, Jews could not hold public office. It was inconceivable that preparation for Christ's return could be made under Jewish guidance of public affairs, as Bismarck in his famous address to the Prussian diet of June 15,1847, pointed out anew.-- This was not "anti-Semitism," but simply a logical consequence of the ethos of governance of Christian states. Some of the Jewish families of our day may possibly be descendants of Jews who came to Germany with the Roman legions. Many settled permanently in the old provinces of the Rhineland, of Rhaetia, and of Noricum. In 212 at the latest, with the Constitutio Antoniniana, they acquired Roman citizenship. Among the oldest Jewish communities are perhaps those at Trier, Mainz, Vienna, and Worms where they probably stayed in the halfruined cities throughout the storms of the Great Migration. To explain the privileged status of the Jews of Worms it was said in the Middle Ages that they had lived there before the birth of Christ and were therefore innocent of His blood. Other Jewish settlements had been established at the time of Charlemagne, and still others in the Ottonian period. Otto the Great placed them, in 965, under the protection of the bishops. In 1090 the Salían Emperor Henry IV signed two privileges for the Jews of Speyer and Worms; their lives, honor, and property and the freedom of their religious worship were guaranteed, and they were allowed to travel freely everywhere. The First Crusade of 1096, in which the German kingdom did not take part, interrupted for a time the friendly relations between the Jewish and the Christian people in Germany. French, English, and Lorraine crusaders, incited by inflammatory speeches exhorting them to exterminate the enemies of Christ at home, carried a wave of gruesome persecution across the Rhine. As soon as the first acts of robbery and murder occurred, the Jews sent special messengers to Emperor Henry, then in Italy. The emperor at once enjoined all princes, bishops, and leaders (among them Godfrey of Bouillon, who had Cf. J. P. Whitney, in Cambridge Medieval History, V, 19, and Reginald L. Poole, "Benedict IX and Gregory VI," British Academy, Proceedings, VIII ( 1917-1918), 223 sqq.; the latter doubts that Pope Gregory was a direct descendant of Benedict the Christian. -- Die gesammelten Werke, X, pp. 8 sqq.

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sworn to avenge the blood of the Saviour with the blood of the Jews) to protect the persecuted by all possible means. In most cases this order was obeyed and carried out effectively. The emperor even permitted Jews who had been forcibly baptized to return to the observance of their law. Of course there were many who did not return to it, and it is safe to assume that then and on many later occasions a considerable amount of Jewish blood must have entered into German families. In 1103, any attack on Jewish life or property was declared a capital crime by the emperor. He placed the Jews under immediate imperial protection, making them reichsunmittelbar. Barbarossa, too, made the slaying of any Jew subject to capital punishment.2® In order to exempt the Jews from local jurisdiction and taxation and to put them under their personal protection, the emperors used the idea that as successors of the Roman Caesars they had inherited the direct guardianship over the Jews acquired after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. 'Therefore we make it known," Frederick I said in his important privilege of 1182 to the Jews of Regensburg, "that the care for all Jews residing in our empire belongs to us alone, for it is patent that through the special prerogatives of our office they pertain to the imperial camera." Hence any violation of Jewish rights, their person or property, was an attack against imperial rights that had to be tried before a court tribunal ( Hofgericht ); it was declared a "federal crime" with competence of the "federal courts," as one might say in American legal language. To interpret the expression that the Jews "pertain to the imperial camera" as a personal servitude, as a few authors have done, means to project backward the ideas of princely absolutism of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries—when all men, not only the Jews, came to be regarded as dependent subjects of the ruler—into the Christian Middle Ages with their unparalleled respect for human rights. For the high ethos of medieval governance Barbarossa's introduction to that privilege of 1182 is significant: "It is the duty of the Imperial Majesty, approved by Right and demanded by Reason, that all of our loyal subjects, not only Christians but also those whose faith differs from ours, may live in accordance with the customs of their forefathers, that they shall receive what is due to them according to equity, and that their customs may endure and their persons and possessions enjoy peace and security." 24 23 For a survey of these laws, see Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im Fränkischen und Deutschen Reiche bis zum Jahre 1273, pp. 55-56, 71-74, 74-77, 82, 92. 97, 123; Nos. 129, 170, 171, 178, 203, 210, 280. The Edictum in faoorem Judaeorum, Worms, April 6, 1157, which appears in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Constitutiones, I, 228, No. 163, provided that anyone injuring a Jew, but not fatally, should pay one pound of gold, or, if he were too poor to pay, he should have his eyes pierced and his right hand hewn off. Baptizing a Jew against his will was also punishable by a heavy penalty. 24 Aronius, Regesten, p. 139. Papal legislation, following the rules laid down by Gregory the Great at the tum of the seventh century, rivaled the emperors in just and protective measures. Pope Calixtus II, in his bull Sicut Judoeis ( ca. 1120 ), forbade forced baptism or

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The end of the Hohenstaufen period marked a turning point in the treatment of the Jews. Yet to the threshold of modern times, signs with this inscription, "Under the protection of His Roman Imperial Majesty and of the Sacred Empire," often proved sufficient to protect Jewish quarters from the threat of persecution. The whole attitude of those ages towards the Jews was based on the innermost knowledge of human oneness. After eighteen hundred years of Christian development, Hegel could express the essence of Occidental humanism in these truly Pauline words: "Man counts as a man in virtue of his manhood alone, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, etc." 25 Events, it seems to me, have proved sufficiently that this spirit, by which the world was once changed, was a truer Magna Carta of human rights, for the Jews and all others, then a shallow liberalism breeding naturalistic apostasies and unbridled nationalism. any violence against life or property of the Jews; the freedom of their religion was guaranteed. The provisions of this bull were confirmed by his successors throughout the Middle Ages. See Stem, Urkundliche Beiträge, Nos. 1, 171. Pope Innocent III, at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, rightly added strict rules against usury. ( Christians were forbidden altogether to talee interest, the penalty being, since the Second Lateran Synod of 1139, lifelong infamy.) " Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §209, in Sämtliche Werke, VI, 1β9; English translation by T. M. Knox, Philosophy of Right, p. 134. Hegel scourges the modern heresy of racial anti-Semitism, a fruit of the rising nationalism which was unknown to the Middle Ages.

10 IMPERIUM AND SACERDOTIUM Two swords has God left on earth for the protection of Christendom. The spiritual swçrd is given to the pope, the temporal to the emperor. Sachsenspiegel, Landrecht I. i:l. of Otto III did not gain unequivocal support in the German kingdom. Far from it. Perhaps it was only his early death which prevented the outbreak of open resistance to his policy of an integral union between the two powers. Among the leaders of the opposition were even such men as St. Willigis of Mainz, once a most loyal supporter of the Ottonian house. Ranke has called the archbishop a representative of the national cause, though, of course, in full awareness that nationalism in its proper sense did not yet exist.1 Nor was the question then one of a struggle for and against the Roman policy of the emperors, as it was to be later in the contest between the Hohenstaufen and the Welfs. But Otto III had exalted the universal idea to the maximum of its potentiality, and there was danger that the natural distinction between the two categories of society, the spiritual and the temporal, might be completely removed. St. Willigis's candidate was Henry, duke of Bavaria (a grandson of Otlo the Great's younger brother, Henry), whose attitude promised greater independence from Rome for the German church and German temporal affairs. The duke succeeded to the Ottonian throne as Henry II. lie was the only German ruler—in the stricter sense of the word German—to be canonized (by Pope Eugene III in 1146). His empress, Kunigunde, was also elevated to sainthood (by Pope Innocent III in 1200). Henry's name has meant much to me ever since my childhood. During the First World War he was included in the special litany of saints and heavenly protectors of all the belligerent countries whose intercession for peace was invoked in th? German churches. The cathedral of Bamberg, famous for its Romanesque-Gothic architecture and for the Reiter, an equestrian statue which perhaps represents some Hohenstaufen prince, was founded by Henry and Kunigunde. It crowns the city height like a royal diadem and stands brightened as if by an inner light when dusk has descended on the old town and the gentle Franconian land. Also St. Michael's Church near Bamberg, the only one in Germanv to be consecrated by a pope, was founded by the two saints on the imperial throne. Henry powerfully asserted the prerogatives of the empire, in Italv. in Burgundy, in the East, and in Germany itself. In view of his stern policy towards spiritual domains and bishoprics, his canonization is a proof of the T H E I M P E R I A L CONCEPT

1

Weltgeschichte,

VI, 195.

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enlightened justice of the time. It shows also the benefits that may accrue to religion through the existence of a self-conscious temporal power. The Bavarian and Frankish nobles had elevated Henry to the kingship. Before the powerful Saxons would recognize him, he had to enter into an agreement with them by which the king solemnly recognized the laws and customs of the Saxons and their share in the central government.2 The German monarchy, absolute in theory, was thereby for the first time subjected to constitutional limitations. The Salían house, which succeeded to the throne after the death of the childless Henry in 1024 was descended from a daughter of Otto the Great, who was the wife of Duke Conrad the Red of Lorraine. The Salían house had already i arnished one pope to the Church in Gregory V, who was Bruno of Carinthia and a cousin of Otto III. The first Salian emperor, Conrad II, firmly reunited Burgundy with the empire. Under his son, Henry III, the empire climbed to one of the peaks of its importance. When the cancer of local intrigues—this time represented by the counts of Tusculum—stretched its tentacles out towards the papacy once again, Henry at the Synod of Sutri in 1046 took appropriate measures. On his initiative and authority, three rival "popes" unworthy of the office were deposed. Shortly afterwards the imperial candidate, Bishop Suidger of Bamberg, was elevated to the papal throne. We read of the Roman people's jubilation when the pope and the imperial couple were simultaneously crowned and it was clearly because the papacy was once more freed from disgraceful pressure. Spontaneously the Romans revived the time-honored title and rights of patricius Romanus. The emperor was to have the decisive voice in all future papal elections. The church dignitaries and the Roman people had, no doubt, recognized that only under universal protectorship could the particularist forces be kept in submission. Henry III exercised his patrician rights repeatedly. Among the popes he endorsed was St. Leo IX, who was Bruno of Toul, a grandnephew of Gregory V. Like most of the other emperors, Henry III died young, in his thirty-ninth year. His son, Henry IV, "of richest destiny," as Stefan George called him,® -' "I am far from wishing to violate your rights," King Henry said, "but will observe them in all respects, and, as far as possible, accede to your reasonable desires." Quoted, ibid., p. 197. "Few words, but of immense importance," Ranke comments. They were the beginning of constitutional limitation of the monarchy, which in its idea was absolute and all-powerful. For Cermany and the empire, this act had the significance which for England is attributed to Magna Carta, granted two hundred years later; these agreements with the princes were repeated with every new election of a German king. However, it is a moderniste superstition to assume that these limitations of royal power exacted by the territorial pnnces were necessarily milestones in the forward march of liberty. Such an uncritically optimistic belief in "progress" ov erlooks the fact that the rights of which the German kings a n i emperors were deprived reverted by no means to the people; rather they served to establish princely absolutism, which finally abolished the liberty of the people formerly represented and protected by the emperors. : "Die Graber in Speier," in Oer Siebente Ring, p. 22.

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was then only six years old. Few of the dramas of world literature approach the drama in this man's life. His epic struggle with Pope Gregory VII; his humiliation at Canossa, which was yet a victory of both the Christian and the imperial ideas; his unbroken steadfastness when the Saxons rose against him and, finally, when his own son revolted—these, and even his amazing childhood, would call for a genius as great as Shakespeare's. More than the Hunnish invasion, more than the Great Migration, the struggle between the two powers which began under Gregory VII and Henry IV shook the foundations of world history. The famous pseudoIsidorian decretals furnished Gregory VII a juridical basis for asserting the supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal power, even in matters that were clearly temporal. The resistance of the German episcopate, still manifest at the election of Henry II, was overwhelmed by the tremendous power which the spiritual idea has always exercised over the German mind. By necessity the undermining of the central, imperial authority unloosed all particularistic, regional, and ultimately nationalistic tendencies. It was partly responsible for Germany's drifting away from the universal concept, which, when misused, appeared in German eyes to create lasting damage to their legitimate national interests. The role of Pope Alexander II in connection with the Norman Conquest of 1066 is well known. This pope had been elected in 1061 upon the initiative of Hildebrand, then chancellor of the Holy Roman Church, without regard to the patrician rights of young Emperor Henry IV, rights which had been reaffirmed by the Lateran synod of 1059. Three papal legates crowned William the Conqueror at Winchester in 1070. As Christianity had been brought to England from Rome, they contended, the Apostolic See possessed special rights over the country.4 The English venture had been preceded by an alliance between the papacy and the Normans in South Italy, a combination brought about by Hildebrand. Their conquests, in 1071 crowned by the complete annexation of all Byzantine domains in Southern Italy, was thus vested with legitimacy.. The pope "released" the Normans from their obedience to the empire ( Eastern and Western alike ), and Robert Guiscard swore fealty to Pope Nicholas and his successors as "by the grace of God and of St. Peter" Duke of Apulia and Calabria and future lord of Sicily.5 This was the first temporal domain of the church outside the Patrimonium Petri. It was the beginning of a policy, which, by taking whole kingdoms from under the imperial overlordship, encouraged the forces of particularism, whose triumph finally led to the destruction of the temporal order of the Occident. And this policy, we may say in historic retrospect, also prepared the way for 4

Ranke, Weltgeschichte, VI, 278. Juramentum fidelitatú Roberti Guiscardi, under the year 1059, in Cesar Baronius and Odoricus Raynaldus, Annales ecclesiastici, XVII, 170, No. 71. 5

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the breaking up of spiritual unity by the schismatic and heretical state churches of the Reformation period. Any local influence on the two universal powers was bound to lead to universal repercussions, just as, vice versa, the universal standing of the German kingship was reflected in the national destiny of Germany itself. This circumstance made the destiny of Germany essentially different from the destinies of the other nations. Henry IV's time witnessed the first great Saxon revolt since the days of Charlemagne. It was almost as if the Saxons, after generations of ministering to the universal empire, had reverted to their isolationist particular interests of pagan days. The weakening of the imperial office resulting from the events in Sicily and England necessarily affected the position of the emperors also as German kings. In view of later developments springing from dynastic misuse of the imperial office, it is interesting to note that the Bohemians were among the most loyal peoples of the empire as long as the empire was supranational. With the imperial cities they were the strongest supporters of Henry IV against papatbans and political revolts. In the reign of Henry IV the name and political symbolism of "Guelfism" for the first time attained prominence. "Guelf" was taken from the name of the Welfs, a princely family of ancient lineage, and the word was from the start a symbol for territorial, anti-universal power; it was only later that it stood for papal, anti-imperial policy. The forefathers of the Welfs had, tradition says, fought in the ranks of Odoacer's men. Widukind was one of their ancestors. A Welfish noblewoman had married Louis the Pious and thus linked the family to the Carolingian house. A Welf of the Italian branch had through marriage acquired Bavaria, and now Henry IV confirmed him as duke, only to find him shortly one of the enemies of the imperial office. At the same time the name of the house of Hohenstaufen emerges into the light of history. This is the house of whose imperial and royal representatives of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Heinrich Heine said that "their splendor was shining gloriously over the world"; irdische Sonnen im deutschen Kaisermantel, "earthly suns in the German imperial mantle." 6 No other house reached greater glory, none suffered a more tragic fall, glorious still in the utter depths of misfortune. The Hohenstaufen name is almost synonymous with the medieval empire itself, indeed almost synonymous with the Imperium Mundi Noci ac Perpetui Ordinis. Like Caesar, Augustus, Charlemagne, Hohenstaufen symbolizes a timeless principle in the drama of mankind. The Hohenstaufen rose to fame and glory within one generation. Frederick of Büren, a Swabian count, came from an ancient, though politically insignificant, family. A loyal supporter of Henry IV, he was given the emperor's « "Der Schwabenspiegel," in Werke, IV, 274.

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daughter Agnes in marriage and was vested with the duchy of Swabia. Its eastern borders started at the Lech, in present-day Bavaria, and followed the course of the river up to its sources in the Swiss Alps. The whole of Eastern Switzerland belonged to it down to the Italian border at Lake Como and the Adda river. In the West, it included Alsace. The sons of Frederick of Büren, Frederick and Conrad, gave efficient assistance to their uncle, Emperor Henry V. While Frederick succeeded his father in the duchy of Swabia, Conrad was vested with the duchy of Franconia. In 1125, at the death of Henry V, the Hohenstaufen, already in possession of Germany's two main duchies, inherited the Salían lands. Their power, prestige, and ambitions made them candidates for the throne, and they came to be regarded as one with the extinct Salian dynasty. At this moment of world history began the proverbial contest between the Hohenstaufen and the Welfs (Ghibellines and Guelfs).7 As a fight between opposing principles, this contest is not yet over, either in Germany or in Europe as a whole. Obviously it would be an error to read into the origins of the contest all of the things that were to develop later for human and political reasons. Yet such a process of meaning shows precisely the way and the cunning of history: that it uses outward circumstances for its own reasonable ends. After the reunion of their two branches ( the younger one had acquired a powerful position in Central Italy ) the Welfs could hope to establish a continental European realm of such proportions as to be almost a medieval Mitteleuropa. Through marriage, the Welfs succeeded to the Tuscan possessions of the Grand Countess Matilda, at whose castle, Canossa, Henry IV did penance before Gregory VII. A remark in the Gesta Frederici, a chronicle of Bishop Otto of Freising, stepbrother of the Hohenstaufen King Conrad III, delineates the ethos and the philosophy of the two houses. "Two families," it says, "have so far achieved great fame in the Roman Empire, in Caul and Gerrnany: one, the . . . Waiblings [Ghibellines], the other, the Welfs . . . ; the first a race of emperors, the latter a race of great dukes." 8 Frederick of Swabia, son of Frederick of Büren, would have been the logical candidate for the throne. But in his stead a count of Supplinburg, Lothar, whom Henry V had vested with the duchy of Saxony, was chosen. The election, promoted by the ecclesiastical enemies of the Salian house, 7 The Welfs had on their side the precedence of ancienneté, the Hohenstaufen their successorship to the great Salian house. According to the place they held in the hierarchy of power, both families were almost equal. But from the beginning the Hohenstaufen seem to have aimed at the purple, the Welfs at increasing their possessions. The purple falling to the Welfs would only help them to increase their holdings still further, for theirs was an attitude which forshadowed the policy of the later Habsburgs, who set about aggrandizing their own power at the expense of the empire. 8 n. 2, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores, XX, 391.

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was most irregular. Lothar had been an opponent of Henry IV ( Frederick of Swabia was his grandson!), and—even more important—the nobles were afraid that by choosing Frederick they would in fact recognize the hereditary character of the supreme office, as he, according to family and private right, could claim successorship to the Salian house. Lothars only daughter married the Welf Duke Henry the Proud of Bavaria, thus raising the Welfs to new prominence. Already Henry's father had established a firm position in the German North; now Welfish power rested on even broader foundations. The Hohenstaufen were placed under the ban of the empire. Thereupon, Conrad of Franconia went to Italy and assumed the title of king, recognized by some of the imperial Italian cities. But he was unable to contend with the power of the Italian Welfs, and finally both he and his elder brother Frederick submitted to Emperor Lothar. In Germany, the Hohenstaufen opposition to Lothar and the Welfs was loyally supported by the towns. The emperor could conquer neither Nürnberg nor Speyer, for breaking determined resistance of well-fortified cities was always a most difficult military operation in the Middle Ages. Peace between the two families was brought about through the intervention of Pope Innocent II, whom Lothar had upheld against Anacletus II of the Pierleoni family. This latter pope, or rather antipope, had won support from the Sicilian Normans by granting a royal crown to Roger II, who had united Apulia with Sicily. Frederick of Swabia bent his knee before the emperor, and Conrad was recognized as standard bearer of the empire. Upon Lothars death, the Welf duke, heir to his father-in-law's Saxon domains, emerged as the most powerful of the German-Italian princes. His dominions, he boasted, reached from one sea to the other, from the Mare Germanicum to the Adriatic; in the north, they stretched from the Rhine to the Baltic coast. But this very position of territorial power induced the princes to choose Conrad of Swabia in his stead. As king, the first Hohenstaufen is known as Conrad III. It is interesting that the Hohenstaufen house, later the exponent of imperial, antipapal, policy, was first elevated with the help of the ecclesiastical party. Innocent II, who owed so much to Lothar and his house, quickly turned to their opponents of lesser political influence. It was a proverb in the Middle Ages ascribed to Frederick II that "no Pope can be a Ghibelline," but neither could he be a Guelf, as soon as a Welf became emperor. Conrad III would have been king in name only had he tolerated the existence of a Welfish counterempire. He transferred the duchy of Saxony at once to the Ascanian margrave, Albrecht the Bear, founder of Brandenburg, and Bavaria to his half brother, the Babenberg margrave, Leopold of Austria. But once again the empire and the German kingdom were torn by

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revolts of the Saxons who, after the death of Henry the Proud, rose in the name of his young son, later Duke Henry the Lion, proverbial exponent of Guelfism in the territorial, antiuniversal sense. T h e power of the German princes in Conrad's day almost overwhelmed the empire, reducing Germany for the first time to the state of an aristocratic oligarchy. Conrad was personally courageous, high-minded, and not unaware of the universal duties of his office. After the luckless Second Crusade, he spent some time in Constantinople. His wife's sister was married to the Eastern emperor, and in the tradition of Otto the Great he planned even more intimate bonds with the East. "Our son [Henry, then eleven years old]," he wrote to his sister-in-law, "will marry one of the nieces of your husband, the most illustrious emperor of the Greeks. T h e choice between these two nieces we shall leave to your wisdom. Send us the better and more beautiful . . . as befits the honor of both empires and the exalted position of your most beloved nephew." 8 This son died before his father. A younger son, Frederick, was still a child, and so the king had the greatness of heart to send the insignia of rulership to his brother's son, who had already distinguished himself as a statesman and leader. This was Frederick I, called Barbarossa. T h e political power of the empire had declined considerably, but its idea had remained, and so had its claim to universal authority. It is entirely the work of the three Hohenstaufen emperors, Frederick Barbarossa, Henry VI, and Frederick II, that once more the idea of the Occident ascended and that its realization in the empire became more than an early medieval concept. T h e power of the papacy had also been greatly weakened in the reign of Conrad I I I , in spite of its influence on the German elections. Against the pope had arisen the Roman republican movement of Arnold of Brescia. This remarkable man, a disciple of the famous French philosopher and dialectician Abelard, seemed almost like a reincarnation of the stem republican spirit of Cato, tinged in Arnold with the imperial red of Caesar's purple. He put his reliance upon Senatus Popidusque Romanus, the senate and the people of Rome, as the only depositories of the world's sovereignty, and felt that they alone should decide on the universal government. Obviously, in such a plan there was no room for the political power of the clergy and the papacy. An amazing restoration of antiquity set in, perhaps the first untimely ripple of the waves of the Renaissance, though not yet marked with the cool and ruthless manner of expediency that characterizes the later epoch. After forcing Pope Eugene I I I to leave the city, the "senate and the people of Rome" invited King Conrad to proceed to Rome, there to assume the imperial diadem at the hands of the "Roman Republic." They reminded the king of all the evil deeds perpetrated against his predecessors by the curia. 9 Wibald of Corvey, Epistolae, 363, No. 243.

in Jaffé, ed., Bibliotheca

rerum Germanicarum, I,

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Now he, Conrad, should vindicate those rights invaded by the clergy and restore to the empire the glory and the power which it held under Constantine and Justinian. "May you establish your residence and power in the City, the head of the world, govern all Italy and the German kingdom . . . and surpass in glory and happiness most of your predecessors." 10 Conrad postponed his reply, whether to gain time or because he thought of accepting we do not know. Acceptance would have brought conflict with the papacy, and the actual power of the city of Rome was small. Moreover, the faithlessness of the Romans had become proverbial. Conrad did, however, thank the citizens of Rome for their love and informed them of his forthcoming visit. He died before his plans, whatever they may have been, could be carried out. T h e only Englishman to become pope, Hadrian I V (Nicholas Break speare), elected in 1154, could not even move into the Lateran. Arnold was still the true master of the city. But Frederick Barbarossa was in league with the pope; in 1155 he took the city and consented to Arnold's extradition into the hands of his enemies. "Too late pity seized the Emperor," the Gesta Friderici in Italia comments on Arnold's execution." This Roman interlude was the first rambling of the earth under the political power of the church. It was a reaction against the papal temporal arrogations, though the motive force was not yet "national," as it was to be four hundred years later in the German, English, and other "reformations." Arnold of Brescia's republic was still filled with the universal notion of the past and sought to defend that idea against papal aspirations toward priestly government. With the German cities the Roman city movement shared a clear imperial loyalty. T h e view of "the emperor as protector of republican freedom" was, indeed, deeply rooted in the nature of the Kaisertum. It was to resurge out of the Habsburg past at the time of Napoleon, the heir and fulfiller of the French Revolution: " L ' E m p e r e u r est républicain!" Barbarossa's name is the very symbol of medieval Roman-German power. Even detractors of the Occidental name, vocally "antifascist" ignoramuses, and National Socialist barbarians use it for their purposes. By them he is called, according to the political opinions of the speaker, either a representative of "German aggressive imperialism throughout the ages," or a "Romish enemy of the German nation." But Barbarossa was deeply imbued with the notion of the universal ethos of his office. He lived and worked for it, and finally, as leader of the Third Crusade, he died for it. A greater love no man can have . . . As a detailed description of his and his successors' reigns is not within 10 Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici I imperatoris i. 28, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores, XX, 367. "Edited by Emesto Monaci, in Fonti per la storia d'Italia (Rome, 1887), Scrittori, Secolo XII, p. 34.

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the scope of our analysis, we must be content with a few significant aspects. In Germany, the power of the territorial princes had risen to threatening dimensions. Barbarossa, as son of a Welf mother and cousin of Henry the Lion, was considered the link between the two houses, the only one who could effect a lasting reconciliation. After Frederick carried on protracted negotiations with the Babenberg Duke Henry of Bavaria (the stepbrother of Frederick's father), Bavaria was returned to the emperor, who immediately bestowed it upon his cousin Henry the Lion. Austria (the ancient Eastern March), until then a province of the duchy of Bavaria, was detached and given as a separate duchy to the Babenberg house. This is the historic birth of Austria, a country entirely German in origin, language, history, and tradition. However, in very recent years, after 1933, it appears that a novel anthropological species was bom on its soil, called Homo Austríacas. Strangely enough, it is not Hitler, but something vaguely desirable that is meant by this term. Exactly what nobody has ever professed to know with certainty. In the so-called Privilegium minus of 1156 Barbarossa affirmed that none of his successors should ever change the status of the new duchy.12 Thus a territory was separated from Bavaria and was set up with too much autonomy at the edge of the German kingdom. Unhappily this creation encouraged separatistic forces within the whole. More fortunate in consequences was the elevation of Duke VVladislaw of Bohemia to the kingship in 1158. This reaffirmed Otto Ill's policy of uniting the nations, German and non-German, by federal ties, while renouncing German national domination over the neighboring countries. Frederick decided a dispute over the succession to the Danish throne in 1152; King Sweyn, whose right he recognized against his cousin Canute, carried the sword before the emperor at Merseburg as his feudal vassal." In 1157, Barbarossa crossed the Oder on a broad front to reinstate Duke Wladislaw of Poland who had unjustly been driven from his country by his brother Boleslaw.1,1 At the various diets held in those years, at Wiirzburg, Besançon, Magdeburg, Regensburg, the princes of Europe appeared in person or sent their ambassadors—Danes, Poles, Hungarians, Bohemians, Burgundians, the English, the 12 Constitutif) ducatus Austriae (Regensburg, September 17, 1156), in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Constitutiones, I, 222, No. 159. 13 Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici I tmperatoris ii. 5, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores, XX, 392; Regesta historiae Westfaliae, edited by H. A. Erhard, II, 66, No. 283. 14 On this short and successful campaign we have a letter by the emperor himself, addressed to the Abbot Wibald of Coney, his trusted adviser in the imperial chancellery, of whom he thought very highly. Boleslaw's large army consisting of Poles, Russians, Pruzzi, and Hungarians, already demoralized by Frederick's unexpected success in crossing the broad Oder River, could not withstand the imperial banner. "Stricken with fear they put fire to their extremely strong castles of Glogau, Beuthen, and others never before subdued by an enemy, and fled before our face." Wibald of Corvey, Epistohe, in Jaffé, ed., Bibliotheca rerum Germanicarum I, 601, No. 470.

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French and the Spanish, legates from Apulia, Tuscany, Venice, and the Lombard cities. There was hardly a principality in Europe that had no representative to do homage to Frederick. An embassy from King Henry II of England brought magnificent presents, and the letter of this then most powerful prince, second only to the emperor, is significant of the imperial spirit of the time: " W e are intent on doing to the best of our ability everything which we may assume will increase your honor," Henry wrote to Emperor Frederick. " W e lay our kingdom and whatever is subject to us at the feet of your majesty, so that everything may be ordered according to your pleasure and the will of your empire be done in all things. . . . In all this, you, whose dignity is exalted above ours, shall command, and we will not be found lacking in the will to obey." 15 Even the Greek emperor was represented at the Diet of Würzburg, and his legation honored Frederick as Roman emperor and lord of the world. 1 · T h e Diet of Roncaglia in Italy, in 1158, was perhaps the most brilliant of all these manifestations of Occidental solidarity. T h e Italian crown jurists of the emperor prompted the assembled princes to reaffirm Roman law as the legal foundation of the Sacred Empire. 17 T h e complete legal and historic continuity between Roman and Sacred Roman Empire was thereby established. W h a t seems at first blush a very modem touch ( though it is the spirit of a Christian age from which we have parted in all but n a m e ) was Frederick's declaration that he "wanted to rule over an empire founded on law, so that everyone's freedom might b e guaranteed." " Caesar's name as that of a sacred office was revived in Barbarossa's day. In conscious alignment with late Roman constitutional forms, he elevated his son Henry ( the later Henry V I ) to the rank of coregent and designated successor with the title of Caesar. Henry's marriage with Constantia, heiress to the South Italian kingdom of Sicily, brought the dreamland of old, with its tremendous wealth and inherent power, again into the orbit of the empire. In the hands of the Hohenstaufen it was to assure their absolute supremacy over all other competitors for the supreme office. One should not speak of Barbarossa without mentioning the name of his chancellor, Count Rainald of Dassel, who vies with Pietro de Vinea of 15 Otto and Ragewinus, Cesta Foderici I imperatoris m. 7, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores, XX, 419. i" ¡bid., m. 6. " "Your will is law," the archbishop of Milan said in his address to the emperor, expressing the general opinion of the assembly, and he quoted Justinian's Corpus iuris civilis ( Institutiones ι. 2. 6) : " 'The pleasure of the prince has the force of law, because the people have conferred all their power and authority upon him.' What the prince orders or judges in a rescriptum, or commands by an edict, that is law. It is also quite natural," the archbishop added, "that the advantages of any thing should accrue to him who must carry its burdens. Therefore you have power and authority over everyone, because on your shoulders rests also the burden of giving protection to all of us." Ibid. iv. 4, p. 446. >" Quoted in Ranke, Weltgeschichte, VII, 108.

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Frederick H's time as the most universal-minded statesman of German history. Just as a monograph might be written on the great women in politics, so would a study of men who were "second in command," chancellors and ministers of state, be a fascinating undertaking. Their weight was often greater than their masters', and the parallelogram of forces in which they stood between their sovereigns and the people, would shed light from a novel angle on the history of their times. Rainald, Pietro, the Baron vom Stein, Hardenberg, Metternich, Bismarck, and Mussolini would fall into this category. Rainald of Dassell, of ancient Saxon lineage, studied at Hildesheim and Paris. At an early age he entered the Hohenstaufen diplomatic service, and in 1156 he became chancellor of the empire. When the papal legate at the diet of Besançon of 1157 referred to the empire as a beneficium, a fief of the papacy, Rainald and Otto of Wittelsbach, later duke of Bavaria, promptly and vigorously asserted the imperial cause.1'·' Shortly afterwards, Rainald seems to have gone so far as to weigh the idea of a German church as autonomous as the French church later became. In 1158, he became archbishop of Cologne. Hadrian IV considered him, who was more Ghibelline than his Ghibelline master, as the main enemy. After the pope's death, Rainald engineered the election of an imperial candidate, Victor IV, against Alexander III. To find support for Victor, Rainald traveled to the courts of France and England and succeeded in winning Henry III for the imperial candidate. With Otto of Wittelsbach, Rainald saved a number of Italian cities, among them Ravenna, for the emperor. A political reorganization of Italian affairs, foreshadowing the grandiose modern administration of Frederick II, was largely Rainald's work. After Victor's death, when there was still hope of ending the schism, the chancellor's iron will forced on the church and the empire another candidate of his choice, Paschal III, who authorized the canonization of Charlemagne. Rainald died before Rome in 1167, a victim of the plague which shattered at one blow the victorious army of the emperor and the concrete hope of actual world governance. Undoubtedly Rainald had been the Alpha and the Omega of such a policy. Like Gerbert, he was in fullest possession of the universal knowledge of his time; he was eloquent, cautious, wise, untiring, and unimpeachably moral.20 His glory and that of his imperial master has been sung by an anonymous genius known only by the title of Archipoeta. He was a protégé of Rainald, 10 Otto and Ragewinus, Gesta Friderici I imperatoris m. 10, in Monumenta Germanice histórica, Scriptores, XX, 422. 20 "A man of marvelous wisdom and energy, who had greatly added to the emperor's honor and fame," the writer of the Chronica regia Cotoniensis says of him, recording his death with sorrow. See Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarvm ex Monumentis Germaniae historiéis recusi, edited by Georg Waitz (Hanover, A. Hahn, 1880), under year 1167, pp. 118-19.

IMPERIUM AND SACERDOHUM 111 apparently always in debt and always in amorous troubles, a Ghibelline Villon. The Archipoeta shows us the human touch in the austere figure of the great chancellor, who forgave to the genius of the poet the many trespasses of the man. It seems that kindred principles of historic philosophy invariably tend to draw two countries into a camp of common activities, no matter how different their conditions may otherwise be. Greater differences could hardly be found than between the Italian anti-imperial cities such as Milan or Alessandria and the autocratic Welf dukes of Saxony and Bavaria. Again, the papacy in its political aspect, the German princes, and the Lombard cities—what could they possibly have in common? Yet, time and again we find the political curia in league with both the Lombard rebels and the unruly German princes. All these heterogeneous forces were ideologically united by their opposition to the Occidental political body; they were particularistic forces, strange as this characterization may appear when applied to the curia. It is as Ecclesia docens that the church is universal, divine, and infallible; with this aspect of the church we are not now concerned. As a political power, the curia did indeed represent a particularistic force, for it undertook to set up political loyalties outside the imperial realm. And as a political power in the strictest sense of the word, the curia was only a small Italian state, guided in its foreign policy by its own limited raison détat. After St. Gregory VII, the curia had not halted its attempts to "mediatize" the empire, to reduce it in practice to one of many temporal powers with only a precedence of honor. Not content to assert indirect political supremacy over all these, namely, through the empire, from which historically and by general recognition all sovereignty was derived, the curia claimed rather that every existing temporal power, individually and directly, was derived from the Chair of St. Peter and subject to its immediate overlordship. This was finally stated in the political section of the bull Unam Sanctam of Pope Boniface VIII in 1302. Thereby, the body political, the Respublica Christiana, was split into countless suzerainties, an anarchical agglomeration of allegedly dependent states, communes, and cities, linked not by the development of the Occidental realm, but depending for their existence upon a power which was by its very nature unpolitical and unhistoric. Politically speaking, the papacy was not a universal power; and as Ecclesia docens it stands outside of time, hence outside of history, because it is eternal. The particularistic tendencies in the policy of the curia and in that of the German princes brought about a "natural" alliance between them. The princes preferred papal overlordship to the supremacy of a central imperial authority for a simple reason: in their domains papal sovereignty was usually exercised by lesser church dignitaries, and they were able to influence the elections of these local churchmen. Obviously the princes lavished little affec-

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tìon upon the minor nobles who had republican tendencies and sought to restrict the power of the magnates, just as the magnates restricted the power of the emperor. Even less did the princes love the communes such as the Lombard cities, with their republican-aristocratic constitutions. Yet the princely and the Lombard revolts both had the same root—opposition to imperial authority. Henry the Lion, the most powerful of the princes (so powerful, in fact, that the other princes sided against him with the emperor), had used the years of reconciliation with the Hohenstaufen to enlarge his possessions and cement firmly his inland and Nordic empire. A "state" was born in a world where states had not existed before. It might even be called a national state, though the national will still resided in its princely absolute ruler. It certainly was a state that would have been capable of a life of its own, independent of the empire which had brought it into being. Henry the Lion represents the historic type of the "small-Germany solution." Frederick's was the "great-Germany solution," which then meant the Roman-Christian-universal one. T h e emperor's Roman policy was to Henry nothing but an unwelcome disturbance of his own territorial plans. In 1176, he flatly refused Barbarossa's request for help against the Lombard rebels. According to the chronicle of Otto of St. Blasien, the emperor asked for this help more humbly than befitted his imperial dignity, 21 but the assistance of the powerful duke could easily have become a question vital for the empire itself. Henry's defection at once inflamed the Lombard cities to determined resistance. The defeat which the insufficient imperial arms suffered on May 29, 1176, in the battle of Legnano at the hands of the Milanese and their allies constituted an event of world-historic importance. T o the citizens of Bologna the Milanese could proudly write: " T h e number of those killed, drowned, and captured is too large to be counted. T h e shield of the emperor, his cross and lance fell into our hands. T h e gold, silver, and other spoils are beyond estimate . . . But this, we will not keep for ourselves; we wish to regard it as common profit with the Lord Pope and all Italians." 22 For the first time the empire had been defeated by particularistic, principally anti-imperial, forces. City republics had triumphed over Caesar. Perhaps this event marks the birth of the Italian nation as a self-conscious entity. It might have marked the beginning of the end for the empire, had not Barbarossa's statesmanship triumphed over the military defeat. T h e peace which he concluded shortly afterwards with Pope Alexander I I I , the Peace of Venice, gave him the necessary backing to deal with Henry the Lion in the appropriate way. 21 Chronici ab Ottone Frisigensi conscripti continuatio xxrn, in Monumenta Germaniaβ histórica, Scriptores, XX, 31Θ. 22 Radulfus de Diceto, Ex ymaginibus hlstoriarum, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica. Scriptores, XXVII, 268.

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The disobedient duke was placed under the ban of the empire, Saxony was dismembered, Bavaria was in 1180 given to Otto of Wittelsbach. Only his personal heritage, Brunswick-Lüneburg, was left to Henry after he had bent his knee before the emperor. It is an interesting sidelight upon European solidarity that neither Henry the Lion's father-in-law, King Henry II of England nor the king of France nor any other non-German ruler would support him against the emperor. However, the emperor's victory was won with the help of the princes, particularly the ecclesiastical ones, and most of Saxony fell into their hands. Cologne, Magdeburg, Bremen, and Minden emerged more powerful than ever from Henry's fall. Thus the Welfish policy, which forced the emperor to accept the aid of other particularistic forces, in its consequences contributed greatly to the inner division of Germany. As leader of the Third Crusade, the emperor received offers from influential princes and chieftains under Byzantine sovereignty to unite their domains with the Sacred Roman Empire. It would have been easy for him to overthrow the weak Eastern Roman government and to restore again the complete unity of the Occidental-Mediterranean world as it had existed under Theodosius the Great. Barbarossa, however, declined all such offers and dismissed the idea of political gains as incompatible with his crusading mission. It was the Holy Sepulchre and not the throne of Constantinople which he had come to seek.

11 THE GREATEST FREDERICK But bright above all others shone the star Of him, conducted on fair Enzio's arm, Called as a guest from far-off southern shores, By the illustrious mother of the Staufian house— The Greatest Frederick, true people's ardent longing. STEFAN GEORGE, "Die Gräber in Speier." IT IS NOT unusual for a great political creation, before it enters upon a period of decline (when it will withdraw from reality and, transfigured into an idea, await the time for a new manifestation), to burst forth once more in a final flourish of power and glory. So it was with the Sacred Roman Empire in the six years when Henry VI ruled and, after a short historic pause, in the reign of the second Frederick. Under Frederick the empire was already commencing its transition into a pure idea, and the first long shadows of a world-historic dusk were slanting across the jeweled crown of Charlemagne. In actual power Henry, "the ninety-fifth emperor since Augustus," 1 far surpassed his more radiant heir, with whom history, legend, and myth have dealt lavishly as they have with few others. For one short hour of destiny, Henry VI had under his sway the realm of Charlemagne, ennobled by the Ottoman dream and the Hohenstaufen ideal of justice. Neither in the German kingdom nor in the empire did the territorial and regional powers prevail against the universal concept during his all too short reign. With merciless consequence he bent the German and Italian nobles under his imperial authority. Even Milan, the old anti-imperial city, obeyed his will. He was lord of all Italy, as Constantia had brought him the heritage of Naples and Sicily, the dreamland of the South coveted for so long. He was, according to Ranke, "master of the Syrian coast and overlord of Armenia and England." 2 As if, like his son and heir, he had read in the stars and had there perceived the shortness of time allotted to him, he devoted every moment, day and night, to the superhuman work of forging the Occident once more into complete unity. It is said that he differed from the other Hohenstaufen rulers in his coolness, his matter-of-fact autocracy, and his willingness to use any means of repression to gain his end. He never smiled; rather, in him always blazed the undying flame of kingship and the ambition of an all-embracing genius. In Sicily I have discovered traces of his name still deeply engrained in the 1 Hermann of Altaich, Armales, in Monumenta Germanice histórica, Scriptores, XVII, 385. t Weltgeschichte, ΥΠ, 161.

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memory of the common people, and this persistence is significant, for in few places of the Occident is the past more present than on that magic island, over which the tidal waves of all great events have swept. Henry conceived the plan of making the imperial crown hereditary in his house. In payment for their renunciation of the right of election, he promised the German princes to transform their fiefs into hereditary domains. This policy was hardly praiseworthy. The elective principle, despite the disadvantages it involved, distinguished the universal throne; in idea at least, sonship and successorship had to be spiritual and not bound by blood, a factor of determination natural and therefore antithetical to the freedom of the spirit. Henry died when he seemed upon the eve of gaining actual domination of the world. He was only thirty-two years old when, as the Annals of Marbach express it, he 'left this corrupt world with a contrite heart." * The whole orb, the chronicle adds, was thrown into confusion by the death of the emperor: many wars and evils arose and endured long after. He was buried in the cathedral of Palermo where, only a short while before, the people, prostrate on the ground, had received him as the triumphant universal king.4 Only three years before his death, Constantia had bome to him Frederick —"to the second storm from Swabia, the third with the last throne," as Dantes famous lines have expressed it.5 I shall not attempt to retell the history of Frederick II, since excellent and exhaustive works on his deeds and personality have been published in our own time. Indeed, as Emst Kantorowicz has pointed out in his great book on Frederick, it is a natural paradox that precisely in a time as nonimperial as ours the interest in him should have reawakened. Kantorowicz tells us that when Italy in May, 1924, celebrated the septcentenary of the University of Naples, which was established by Frederick, a wreath was found on his sarcophagus in Palermo with this inscription: Seinen Kaisern und Helden—Das geheime Deutschland ( To her emperors and heroes —the secret Germany)." This secret Germany is the one that has withdrawn into the mountains of history, longing for liberation from the curse of particularism and for a future realization of the undying universal idea. Frederick, even more notably than his Hohenstaufen, Salian, and Ottoman predecessors, refutes both the glorification and reproach of hegemonial nationalism, which in the opinion of some is prevalent in German history. Perhaps his policy even overstepped A.D. 1197. Monumenta Cermaniae histórica, Scriptores, XVII, 16β. "Over his death the German people and all Teutonic tribes shall mourn in eternity," Otto of St. Blasien wrote. "Had he lived longer, his energy and virtue would yet have made 3

4

the empireflourishanew in its old glory." Chronici ab Ottone Frisigensi conscripto continuano xLv, ibid., p. 328. s Dante, Divina Comedia, Paradiso, m. 119-20. • Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, p. 7.

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the limit where the universal principle becomes incompatible with the national claim. Too great a discrepancy between the national physical body of the idea and the idea itself must invariably react detrimentally on both. Frederick's life story reads like a tale of portents, miracles, and fables, and as such his contemporaries perceived it. It was the wish of his mother, la gran Costanza,7 that he should grow up as one of the "happy kings," who could call the most wonderful kingdom of the earth their own. This opinion of Sicily endured, to appear in Napoleon's last warning to the Bourbons not to forfeit one of the most beautiful kingdoms of the world—an admonition followed by the Schönbrunn decree of December, 1805, which ousted the dynasty from that throne. Constantia's plans, which fortunately for Europe did not succeed, are of the greater interest because they express the exact opposite of what the world had been up to that time accustomed to accept as the valid rule. Since time immemorial, conquerors and highminded heroes had come from the snowcapped mountains and the foggy plains of the North, driven by a subconscious urge for power or by the longing for the island whose fame had flown on golden wings to the farthest confines of nature. Legend placed Merlin's magic garden on Sicilian soil, and back to the days of earliest Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman antiquity rulership of the island had been looked upon as earthly fulfillment or as the stepping stone to still greater power. Alcibiades had contended for the prize, thereby providing one of the reasons why he fell victim to the jealousy of his fellow citizens. The first of the Punic Wars had initiated Roman domination, the second completed it. Alaric had died on his way to the promised land, Ostrogoths and Eastern Romans, Arabs and Normans, the papacy and the Roman-German emperors, had fought for its possession. Frederick was to renounce the greater glory of his imperial heritage, leaving to those outside his kingdom the theater of unhappiness and misfortune, while harmony, the arts, beauty, and the happiness of rulership within its confines would be his lot. But the happiest kingdom could not hold back the chosen emperor from his duties any more than the last Hohenstaufen, Conradin, could renounce Rome and his Sicilian heritage for the sake of his beloved Swabia. As with all phases of Frederick's destiny, legend soon occupied itself with Constantia. It was said that she had been a nun before marrying Henry VI, an historic error repeated by Dante, who places Constantia high in the .hierarchy of heaven, as only against her will had she been torn from her "sweet cell." 8 Of Antichrist it is said that he will be born of a nun, and when Frederick had become the scourge of the church political, what else could his enemies call him but Antichrist? 7 Dante, Divina Comedia, Paradiso, m. 118. β Ibid., line 107.

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Another prophecy was attributed to the Cistercian abbot Joachim of Floris, whose work on the three ages of the world, the Father's, the Son's, and the Holy Spirit's, is not without connections with the Augustinian philosophy of history. According to tradition he told Henry VI that Constantia would bring forth the Antichrist. Constantia herself, it was said, dreamed that she was pregnant with a dragon and would give birth to the flaming torch of Italy." From all these portents it was concluded that the empress had tried to exclude Frederick from the imperial throne, so that, if his power should really be more than human, he might not endanger the life of universal Christendom. Frederick himself in later years exalted the memory of his mother beyond expressions customary for humans. He spoke of her as his "divine mother," while referring to Jesi, the place of his birth, as O u r Bethlehem." 10 From Walther von der Vogelweide's poems as well as the chroniclers of the day we know that Philip of Swabia, who succeeded his brother Emperor Henry VI, was one of the devoutest, most upright men who ever lived.11 Elected by the majority of the German princes in 1198, he accepted the crown to save it for his house against Otto of Poitou, Henry the Lion's youngest son. For the English King Richard Lionheart supported Otto, his nephew, with generous gifts of money and had prevailed upon the princes of Westphalia and the Lower Rhine to make him their candidate; also Pope Innocent III threw the full weight of his authority in his favor. King Philip, unlike his stern brother, was perhaps the mildest ruler ever to reign over Germany. He may have been too mild for his grim time. In 1208, Count Palatine Otto of Wittelsbach assassinated Philip, "the gentle youth," " for reasons of personal vengeance. Now the Welfish candidate, Otto, became supreme. Meanwhile, in the years of confusion since Emperor Henry's death, Germany had almost forgotten the child Frederick, who grew up in faraway Sicily amongst ambitious nobles, sometimes as deeply plunged in misery as any street urchin of Palermo. But Otto, a brutal miser, uncouth and haughty, soon began to alienate even * Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, p. 10, and Ergänzungsband, Quellennachweise und Exkurse, pp. 10-11 (for sources and literature). Certain heretical transgressions of Joachim's teachings on the dogma of the Blessed Trinity—he conceived the oneness of the Three Divine Persons as a mere collective and generic unity—were condemned by the Fourth Lateran Council. Concilium Laterani IV, cgp. "Damnamus," in Heinrich J. D. Denzinger and Clem. Bannwart, Enchiridion symbolorum, 14th-15th ed., pp. 190-92, No. 431. In all these points, however, he submitted laudably to the authority of the church. 10 Huillard-Bréholles, ed., Historia diplomatica Friderici secundi, V, 378. 11 "Philip had a gentle heart and generous character," the provost Burkhard of Ursberg wrote, for example. "He was friendly, kind, of great liberality and wisdom. Though his appearance was youthful, he proved himself of manly virtue in all things within his power. He was fair-haired and of a gentle mien, of medium height, slender rather than robust. . . . He would have ruled no less powerfully than others of his house, had not death embraced him so soon." Burchardus et Cuonradus, Urspergensium chronicon, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores, XXIII, 371. 12 Walther von der Vogelweide, Gedichte, edited by Karl Lachmann and Carl von Kraus, 7th ed. (Berlin, Georg Reimer, 1907), 18. 3Θ.

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his own electors. The pope crowned him in Rome, in 1209, but he also turned against him when Otto embarked on the Ghibelline policy of bringing Sicily under his rule. It was then that Innocent, in condemning the Welf emperor, used the words of the Lord: "I repent that I have created this man." 13 The star of the Puer Aptdiae, as Frederick was called to the end of his life, began to rise. Innocent III, one of the greatest popes who ever ruled, had been Frederick's appointed guardian. His views concerning the dependence of the empire upon the church were not unlike those of Gregory VII. He too proclaimed that the Apostolic See had "translated" the empire from the Greeks to the Germans and that it was from the pope that the imperial prerogatives emanated. In a highhanded manner he had interfered with the election to the imperial throne. Frederick II as a small child had been chosen by the princes to succeed his father, but Innocent by a document full of hair-splitting subtleties had deprived the child of his claims.14 Walther von der Vogelweide expressed a widespread feeling when he complained: "The pope is still too young, Lord God; aid Thou Thy Christendom!" 15 Frederick at the start of his reign was handicapped by the fact that he came to Germany with the reputation of a "parson emperor." The amazing victory of this sixteen-year-old youth over all his enemies soon obliterated this stain. It will remain one of the great ironies of history that this same Frederick was destined to drive the fight between spiritual and temporal power to its very climax. Innocent III, who met his ward only once, may have had some premonition of the future when the fifteen-year-old boy, as soon as the pope's regency was ended, started to assert his own authority in the Sicilian church. A concordat signed by the Empress Constantia had given the papacy wide control over the temporal matters of the kingdom. Frederick, in his youthful eagerness to recover his royal prerogatives, went decidedly too far and encroached upon the rights of the church's spiritual overlordship. In later years Frederick was also bitterly reproached with transgressions of the limits of temporal rulership, and he was often in danger of betraying the very foundation of the Ghibelline philosophy of government, namely, the mutual independence and harmony of the Two Swords, the spiritual and the temporal. Unopposed by the vigor of the great popes of his time, Frederick might have started the Sicilian kingdom, if not the empire, on the evil path of Gallicanism, or even Anglicanism, with its subservience of the church to the state. As so often happened, the destiny of Germany was again decided by foreign " Genesis 6:6. Used in a letter to Bishop Conrad of Regensburg, dated at the Lateran, January 18, 1210. Winkelmann, ed., Acta imperii inedita secuU XIII et XIV; Urkunden und Briefe zur Geschichte des Kaiserreichs und Königreichs von Sizilien, II, 676, No. 1009. " Registrum Innocenta III de negotio imperii, No. 29, in Migne, Patrologie cursus compìetus, Latin, CCXVI, 1025. » Gedichte, 9. 39.

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armies. At the world-historic battle of Bouvines (1214), the English fought on Otto's side, the French with Frederick, and the victory of the French reestablished the Hohenstaufen rule. The Welf Emperor Otto died in 1218, deserted by all his followers and broken in spirit by the papal ban. Two years later, Frederick received in Rome the imperial crown. It is significant that on the very day of his coronation, November 22,1220, he promulgated a decree in the Basilica of St. Peter promising to suppress heresy with all the means at the disposal of the temporal power. "There is nothing more befitting and honorable for the empire, and more praiseworthy for the Roman prince," Frederick wrote, "than to see to it that, after the expurgation of some errors and the removal of some iniquitous laws, the church of God may flourish in full peace and rejoice in the security of freedom." 10 Even sterner laws against heretics are contained in the Constitutions of Melfi, by which the emperor completed the reorganization of Sicily.17 Some have seen this policy as inconsistent in view of Frederick's struggle against the temporal aims of the papacy. Such a reproach, however, demonstrates complete failure to comprehend the nature of the Occidental world. The heretic was a traitor against the very order of the world. He was, in one way, more dangerous than a political rebel. The rebel only violated the law of nature and of reason which demanded an embracing imperial order. He did not deny the law itself, as did the heretic. Heresy was looked upon as more than an aberration from the dogmas of the church; by throwing doubt upon the teachings of Christianity, it questioned the entire Christian order of the world. There was ample freedom within the given order of church and empire, which spanned the universe. The various schools of thought, from the Christian Aristotelianism of St. Thomas Aquinas to the Augustinian Neoplatonic mysticism of Master Eckhard, Tauler, and Suso, bear witness to the wide span allotted to the speculative mind within the range of the beacon of faith. One could also hold a great variety of opinions on church political questions, from Rainald of Dassel's doctrine of imperial supremacy to Dante's strict Two Swords theory and the Swabian Mirror's teaching of papal overlordship even in matters temporal; all these moved within the confines of the accepted and confirmed order. Heresy was diEerent. By casting doubt on the basic teachings of the church it also undermined the foundations of the Sacred Empire, whose raison (Tètre was to minister to the realization of God's Kingdom. Bitter as the struggle between papacy and empire was at times, each of the two powers recognized the other as an institution divinely willed. Heresy made both powers irrelevant. An emperor who tolerated it would have been destroying the base on 19

Constitutio in Basilica Beati Petri, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Constitutiones, II, 108, No. 85. 17 Constitutiones regni Siciliae apud Melfiam editae (Liber Augustalis), in HuillardBréholles, ed., Historia diplomatica Friderici secundi, IV, 1 sqq.

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which the church stood, the foundation from which he derived his own lawgiving power and his moral right to struggle against the political aspirations of the spiritual order in order to gain an equitable balance of both. Frederick was therefore constrained by the reason of empire to ward off the attacks of heretics. The obligation was no less—perhaps it was even greater—than the right of every state to defend itself against the subverters of its legal order. His policy toward the church demonstrated anew that the church was dependent on the temporal arm for the defense of the faith and that only through an essential harmony between the two spheres could peace and welfare of the universal body of mankind be attained. In the decree against heresy in Sicily, this idea is clearly formulated. "The crime of heresy, or of any accursed sect," it says, "under whatever name such sectarians may appear . . . is to be numbered among the crimes against the empire . . . for it constitutes an offense against the Divine Majesty itself." 18 Throughout his life the emperor shunned the help of heretics, valuable as that help might have been to him. Even in his final struggle with the church he avoided such company. How, indeed, could he who was fighting for world unity associate himself with the very forces aiming at world division? On the other hand, to those who stood outside the community of the faith, Saracens and Jews, different measures could be applied. They enjoyed imperial tolerance. In 1235, for example, Frederick assembled a congress of notables from all over Europe, experts on Jewish affairs, to investigate the age-old ritual murder legend which had again appeared. 10 On the basis of their findings the German princes, at the Diet of Augsburg, acquitted the Jews of the accusation. A document containing the verdicts was handed to the Jewish communities in 1236. 20 At the same time, Frederick extended to all Jews throughout the German kingdom the privileges granted to the Jews of Worms by Emperor Henry IV and Frederick Barbarossa. 21 Also, in the year of his coronation Frederick granted privileges of far18 Edictum in regno Siciliae promulgatum (Cremona, May 14, 1238), in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Constitutiones, II, 238, No. 210. " In preparing for this congress, Frederick sent his legates to the princes of Europe asking for scholars on Judaism. We have the letter of reply from Henry III of England, dated Windsor, February 24, 1236, and addressed by the king "To his lord, the great Frederick, by the grace of God ever august Emperor of the Romans." In this he informed Frederick that he nad at once dispatched "two of the most eminent neophytes we could find in our kingdom to the presence of Your Majesty." Huillard-Bréholles, ed., Historia diplomatica Foderici secundi, IV, 809. 20 Privilegium et sententia in favorem Judaeorum (July, 1236), in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Constitutiones, II, 274-76, No. 204. 2 1 See above, pp. 97 sqq. Pope Innocent IV, Frederick's great opponent on the chair of St. Peter, concurred with him fully in his policy and viewpoint on the ritual-murder accusations against the Jews. It was the greatness of those centuries that political dissension between the two heads of Christendom usually did not prevent their collaboration for the common good in matters pertaining to the faith. See Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Epistolae saeculi XIII e regestis pontificum Romanorum selectae, II, 298, No. 409.

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reaching importance to the ecclesiastical princes, as he wished to secure their support for the election of his son Henry as king of the Romans.22 This Henry is one of the tragic figures of world history. Still a child when elected to the kingship, he grew up to find his prerogatives hamstrung by his father to a degree that made his title of king almost a mockery. More clearly than Frederick he understood the primary importance of the German kingdom, where the power of the territorial princes, if it remained unchecked, was bound to undo any central authority. He therefore turned to the cities, natural allies against the aspirations of the princes. But Frederick, in order to carry out his Italian plans undisturbed, was willing to appease the German princes at any cost sacrificing even the prerogatives of the kingship and the position of his son. Assured of the emperor's support, the princes could exact from King Henry far-reaching privileges at the Diet of Worms in 1231.23 A year later, at Cividale, Frederick not only confirmed these privileges, but he humiliated King Henry before the assembled princes, forcing him to swear that he would henceforth treat them with due regard and respect.24 This Constitutio in faüorem principum transformed the whole constitution of Germany. For the first time the princes were called domini terrae (territorial lords)—a designation opening the way to the fatal recognition of "territorial sovereignty" in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Frederick's yielding to the princes can be justified only from the point of view of the absolute supremacy of the universal idea. Germany, in his idea of the empire, played no part distinguishable from that of any other member of the mystical body of Christendom: all were equally subject to the moral supremacy of the Christian Roman Caesar. But this attitude was to lead directly to the disintegration of the historic pillar on which the magnificent edifice had rested since Otto the Great. I have pointed out that Germany (and to a certain degree also Italy) mirrored the structure of the realm universal. Just as the empire was not and could not be a centralized state, but rather only a republic of free nations, so Germany, until the most recent developments after 1933, never truly knew Western state centralism. Germany had always remained Das Reich, a term which originally applied to the community of all nations. Frederick II could not have been unaware of the consequences when he renounced his immediate prerogatives in German affairs. Hence, his unfortunately unsuccessful attempts at transforming Austria into an immediate imperial territory, a "federal district," so to speak. After the extinction of the Babenberg line in 1246, he retained Austria and administered it through 22 Privilegium in favorem principum ecclesiasticorum (Frankfurt, April 26, 1220), in Monumenta Cermaniae histórica, Constitutiones, II, 86, No. 73. « Constitutio in favorem principum (Worms, May 1, 1231), ibid., p. 418, No. 304. "Constitutio in favorem principum (Cividale, May 1232), ibid., pp. 210-11, No. 171.

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his own civil servants. These men, schooled at the University of Naples and in the Sicilian kingdom, were the first such administrators in Europe to be thoroughly trained in the art of government. The privileges granting power to the ecclesiastical and temporal princes have often been compared to the Magna Carta, not without some justification. The rights they subtracted from the German kingship and transferred to the princes and their feudal subjects were similar to the rights which the English barons had wrested from John Lackland. A beginning, as we remember, had been made at the accession of Emperor Henry II. And yet, the difference in results is striking. The English kingdom was only a territorial power and was not burdened, like the German kingship, with universal duties. But the parallel between German and English imperial development became apparent the moment that the overseas territories of the English crown rose to autonomy within the British Empire and became member states, united only by common allegiance to the crown. Originally, as property of the English kingdom, they were subject to royal sovereignty like the motherland. Today they are legally and actually bound only by a voluntarily accepted and almost symbolic authority. It makes it easier to understand the relationship between the German states and the German monarchy after 1232, if one thinks of them as dominions not unlike the present British dominions. Pope Gregory I X ( 1227-1241 ) was great enough to concede to his adversary Frederick I I a rank exalted over all powers of Christendom. On the eve of Frederick's crusade he addressed a letter to the emperor, containing this paragraph: "A threefold crown has been given to you . . . In Germany, who like a mother has nurtured you with her milk and happily raised you, you are crowned with the crown of grace, which you receive . . . by free election of the princes. Lombardy crowns you as a stepmother, who with the Empire from time to time contends for the crown of justice, which is yours by right. The third crown you receive from the father, the Pope; this is the imperial crown, the crown of glory that gives you prééminence over all powers of the world and exalts you in glory and honor above all princes of the world." In this the emperor is like unto Christ, for He too is crowned with a threefold diadem. In his left hand he holds the golden orb as a symbol of charity without beginning or end.2® Not long after writing this letter the pope, when Frederick delayed his crusade, excommunicated the emperor without formal investigation. The anathema was not lifted the next year, when Frederick did undertake the crusade. This was probably the most remarkable of all the Crusades, for it was the only one prompted by reasons of pure historic continuity. It was not the Sepulchre of Christ that he went to seek, but reunion with the land " July 22, 1227. Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Epistolae pontificum, I, 278, No. 3Θ5.

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of Christ, once a province of the Roman Empire. By his negotiations with the Arab princes, whose language and culture he understood, he opened again to Occidental mankind the avenues of thought and history of the East. An amazing scene: the Christian emperor entering Jerusalem, the city of the Lord, which an anti-imperial patriarch had dared to place under the interdict I According to the chronicle of Matthew of Paris, a monk of St. Albans in England, the Knights Templars sent messengers to Sultan Al-Kamil informing him that the emperor would be unprotected on his way to Jerusalem. The Sultan could have him captured and killed there at will. More Christian than the emperors Christian enemies, the sultan was filled with contempt for the "loyalty of the Christians," and on advice of his councilors he sent this message of treason on to the emperor. Matthew of Paris concludes: "From that day on, the souls of the emperor and the sultan were united by an indissoluble bond of love and friendship." " Frederick's self-coronation in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was to be the most memorable until Napoleon's time. As he was under the ban of the pope, he did not take part in the divine service but took the kingly crown of Jerusalem from the alta;· without a religious ceremony, thus symbolizing the immediate derivation of the empire from God." It is patent that for his enemies this was one pretext more for calling him the Antichrist and a blasphemer of the holy. The friendship between the emperor and Sultan Al-Kamil proved important in later years. During the final struggle between papacy and empire, Christendom was stunned by a message of Pope Innocent IV to AlKamil's son. He asked the Saracen ruler to join hands with him, the pope, who had elevated an antiking, against the Christian emperor. This amazing proposal was declined by the sultan in a noble and high-minded letter.2" Friedrich Nietzsche, initiator of the modem era of reawakened interest in the Roman-German Pantocrator, called Frederick "the first of Europeans." 2 ' His reign pointed toward future forms of the European idea, Chronica maiora, in Monumenta Cermaniae histórica, Scriptores, XXVIII, 124. See Hermann von Salza's letter from Jerusalem to an unknown addressee, sometime after March 19, 1229, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Constitutiones, II, 167, No. 123. 28 "We were pleased to give attention to the words of your legate," the sultan wrote very politely to Innocent IV, "and to believe his message on Christ, whose name be praised. . . . But the pope, whom God may preserve, knows that friendship between us and the emperor was already concluded in the time of our father, the sultan. . . . Hence it would not befit us to enter into an agreement with the Christians without having first received his counsel and consent. Therefore we have written to our ambassadors at the court of the emperor, and have informed them on the messages and advice which your legates have conveyed to us." He would act in accordance with the report from his ambassadors staying with Emperor Frederick. Albert of Stade, Annales, a.d. 1246, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores, XVI, 370. 29 Jenseits von Gut und Böse, $200, in Werke VII, 131; English, Beyond Good and Evil, in Complete Works, XII, 122. 28

27

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organized not so much on the basis of feudal dependencies as it had been under his immediate predecessors, but rather with a tendency toward developing a federal community of nations. For Frederick as emperor no "foreign policy" was conceivable in the Christian world, for nothing in it was foreign. Even the lands of the heathen belonged to it potentially, for it was the destination of the Roman Empire to extend ultimately to the limits of nature. A classic formulation of this idea is to be found in the Emperor's Golden Bull of Rimini of 1226, " T o this end God has gloriously constituted our empire above the kings of the world and expanded the boundaries of our jurisdiction into the most diverse zones of the earth: that His name may be magnified through the ages and the faith propagated among all peoples, and that the Sacred Roman Empire may prepare the path for the preaching of the Gospel." 3 0 As temporal head of Christendom he could not accept exclusive alliances with any of its members, such as England proposed at the time of his marriage to Isabella, daughter of John Lackland, nor could he align himself with France or any other European power. If he accepted help from Christian powers, he considered it only as a service to the empire of which they were a part. France, anxious to preserve her territorial autonomy, would not have tolerated an infringement by the empire upon what she considered her rights. Yet, with both these powerful nations, divided by ancient rivalry, Frederick preserved well-balanced friendship, committing himself to neither party. It was fortunate for Frederick that King Louis I X of France, despite the emphasis he placed on the rights of his kingdom, was fully conscious of Occidental unity. Under him France recognized her own necessary ministry towards the whole, and no territorial questions or other matters of minor importance broke the cordial relations between Louis and Frederick. Louis worked incessantly for peace between the two powers, and he, who has been so justly canonized, strictly prohibited in his realm any armed help for the pope against the emperor. He even threatened his prelates with confiscation of their fiefs and other possessions when they tried to raise funds for the fight against Frederick. He instructed them not to vote against him, even if the pope should demand it. Once again it was demonstrated that harmony and peace between the original halves of the ancient Frankish Empire were the prerequisites for any stable order in Europe. Frederick was modem and timeless also in his vision of the community of destiny among all lawful temporal governments in Europe. In his letters, he repeatedly pointed out to the kings and princes of Europe that enemies who threatened his position were their enemies as well. This seems to us like a first warning against world revolutionary tendencies, which would arise later to menace the entire historic order. In one of his letters Frederick " Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores, XIX, 538; Huillard-Bréholles, ed., Historia diplomatica Friderici secundi, II, 550.

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spoke of a "guild of temporal princes," thus sounding a note entirely new, quite different from the more rigid conception of the universal Roman monarchy of Barbarossa's day. In Frederick's century, something like a "European public opinion" had already come into existence. Popes and emperors contended for its favor with floods of open letters. Their conflicting arguments were voiced in countless pulpits, fora, and public meeting places. Some of Walther von der Vogelweide's poems must be regarded as political propaganda in the modem sense. All these things indicate too the awakening of a spirit of critical reason in the mind of Occidental mankind. The age of pure authority was coming to an end, and the Renaissance was beginning to appear over the horizon. The masterly stylist of the imperial chancellery was Petrus de Vinea, for many years the trusted adviser of the emperor. We find him in the forest of suicides in Dante's Inferno, because he took his own life after he had fallen from imperial grace.32 In dramatic pictures and parables the chancellery of the empire could well compete with the style of the curia. "Gregory IX," Ricarda Huch has said, "set alight a red apocalyptic sky over Italy and Germany." 33 The papal bull Ascendit de mare after the excommunication of Frederick in 1239 is one of the most amazing documents that has come down to us from a time when ideas still mattered. The beast from the sea—St. John's apocalyptic vision 34—has emerged, wrote the pope. The beast is Frederick, "the so-called emperor." He it is who undermines the foundations of religion and heaps the most horrid blasphemies upon the sacred dogma. He even contends, we are told, that man should not believe what cannot be proved by reason. Frederick's keen interest in mathematics, medicine, and the sciences is well known. In this way, too, he is the first Renaissance ruler. But it would be erroneous to consider him a rationalist. He was far too deeply rooted in history and, despite occasional papal denials, in the living mysteries of Christendom to yield to a rationalistic cheapening of the values of faith and philosophy. The same man who spent his night hours in scientific research granted an audience to St. Francis of Assisi and, after having assured himself of the true sanctity of the Poverello, accepted his advice and discussed with him the profoundest problems of the contemplative human soul. Since the idea of the universal Empire was embodied in Frederick himself, he could withstand all adversities of fate. Unbroken in spirit by defeats, by curses, and by personal losses (most painful among them the capture of his son Enzio by the Bolognese), the emperor died in December, 1250, at the castle of Fiorentino in Apulia. 31

31 "Corpus saecularium principum." Encyclica accusatoria contra Gregorium IX (April 20, 1239), in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Constitutiones, II, 299, No. 215. 32 Divina Comedia, Inferno, xiu. 32 sqq. 33 Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation, p. 160. S4 Apocalypse 13:1 sqq.

12 DANTE AND THE SEAMLESS ROBE God has prepared a crown for Christ. . . . And the empire shall be wrought into this crown, with filigree and precious stones, down to the youngest peasant boy, each in his dignity according as he has served God. . . . And the Holy Spirit still works on this crown until the end of time. M E C H T H I L D E O F MAGDEBURC, The Flowing Light of the Godhead. " T H E SUN O F T H E WORLD with its bright glory among the peoples, the sun of justice and the palladium of peace, has set," Manfred wrote to King Conrad after their father's death. 1 These words contained a literal truth. With Frederick, the glory of a world empire based on justitia had come to an end. But so rich had been the emperor's personality that generations harvested what he had sown. Gothic art, medieval music and poetry, even scholastic philosophy, received inspiration from him and his learned friends. To the men of that day, it seemed impossible that Frederick's unconquerable soul no longer held command over the destinies of Christendom. His sudden passing in the distant South seemed as miraculous as once his emergence and his triumphant march to glory and power had been. For many years impostors claiming to be Frederick were able to find supporters. The most famous of these false claimants appeared in 1284 and gathered a considerable following in the cities along the Rhine. The last of them was burned at the stake in 1295, forty-five years after the emperor's death.2 To the Nordic peoples, Frederick became the symbol of the just judge sent by God to restore the integrity of the church, to scourge its wicked ministers, and to establish anew the Roman Empire of the German Nation, that realm in which law is administered with justice and the oppressed are made free. Soon legends and myths were woven around him—the tales of the sleeping emperor in the Kyffhäuser Mountain. Almost a century after Frederick's death, a Meistersinger put into words the deep longing for the emperor's return:

When the warfare waxes great, Too much for man to still, The Emperor Frederick, wise and free, Will come again, as is God's will.' 1

811. 1

December, 1250. Huillard-BréhoUes, ed., Historia diplomatica Friderici secundi, VI,

Schultheis, Die deutsche Volkssage vom Fortleben und der Wiederkehr Kaiser Friedrich II, pp. 26-42; Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, pp. 629 sq.; and further literature in Ergänzungsband, p. 251. * In Schultheis, Die deutsche Volkssage, p. 56.

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He will free the Holy Sepulchre in bloodless victory, continues the song; he will restore equality under the law, make subject all pagan lands, reduce the power of the Jews, and break the craft of the clerics. But he will lay down his crown when everything is achieved, mindful of the words of the Apostle to the Corinthians that in the end all sovereignty, authority, and power will be cast aside and the Kingdom delivered unto the Father.4 Not until the sixteenth century was the image of Frederick II replaced in the legends by that of his ancestor Frederick Barbarossa. What the Arthurian legend is for England, the story of Joan of Arc for France, Sebastianismo for Portugal, the Kyffhäuser mystery is for the true Germany. Down to our own day it has remained one of the inspiring symbols which only a sterile and unhistoric agnosticism would disdain. Frederick's son Conrad was fighting unsuccessfully in Italy against papal and territorial enemies when his queen, Elizabeth of Bavaria, bore him an heir, Conradin, the last of the race of the Caesars. Without having seen him, the king died on the feast of the Ascension of Our Lord, in 1254.® By that tfme, the name of Manfred, Frederick's illegitimate son, his favorite next to Enzio, had begun to rise. In genius, character, passion, and statesmanship he must have been most like his father. We know Manfred from many descriptions, most famous among them Dante's verse in the third canto of the Purgatory: Biondo era e bello e dt gentile aspetto. (Blond was he, beautiful, and of noble aspect).· It is the scene where he introduces himself to the Florentine Ghibelline: "Io son Manfredi, nepote di Costanza imperadrice." (I am Manfredi, the grandson of the Empress Costanza.) 7 A fair and beautiful youth of gentle mien, with golden curls and a complexion of snow and roses, Manfred has found a place among the heroes of immortal memory. He reconquered the Sicilian realm with strength, shrewdness, and wisdom, and the grand court became once more, as in his father's time, a center of art and philosophy, a place of song and joyous life. It was Manfred who in 1258 founded the University of Naples anew. Even the imperial diadem seemed none too great a prize for the starryeyed beloved of the gods, but he met an untimely end. He was killed in the battle of Benevento, fighting against Charles of Anjou and his French soldiers who had been called in against that "accursed brood of vipers,"8 the * I Corinthians 15:24. » "Conrad loved peace," Abbot Hermann of Altaich wrote of him, "and was a stern judge. With the exception of the papal partisans, Cermans, Apulians and Lombards deeply mourned his death. . . . After the king's passing, Pope Innocent attacked the Sicilian kingdom and occupied Naples. But while he stayed there, rejoicing over his success and confident of conquering the whole of Sicily, he was summoned by the Lord who defeats the counsels of the princes and changes the thoughts of the peoples. His joy and hope came to nought." Annales, under the year 1254, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores, XVII, 396. • Line 107; English translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Divine Comedy, p. 257. ' Lines 112-13; English, p. 258. 8 Quoted in Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, p. 619.

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Hohenstaufen house. Manfred's sons grew up in chains and perished in the dungeons of the usurper. His daughter Beatrice was freed eighteen years later by the Sicilian Vespers. In that year, 1282, Manfred's daughter Constantia, wife of Peter III of Aragon, ascended the throne of Sicily. It is to her that Manfred's spirit refers in the Divine Comedy: Vadi a mia bella figlia, genitrice de l'onor di Cicilia e d'Aragona, e dichi il vero a lei, s'altro si dice. Go to my daughter beautiful, the mother Of Sicily's honour and of Aragon's, And the truth tell her, if aught else be told.® After the battle of Benevento, King Conrad's son, Conradin of Swabia, king of Jerusalem and Sicily, was the last who might have vindicated the Hohenstaufen claims. His Wittelsbach relatives stood loyally at his side. The hopes of the empire rested upon him, "the fairest child in the land." But unlike Romulus Augustus and the little king of Rome, Napoleon's son, Conradin combined strength, pride, and force of will with his beauty.10 In 1268, the fifteen-year-old king entered Ghibelline Rome in triumph, at the side of his youthful friend Frederick of Baden and Austria. On the way to the Capitol the Romans greeted Conradin jubilantly as their lawful emperor. But Pope Clement IV proclaimed against him a "holy war," and excommunicated him. To be a Hohenstaufen was crime enough. In the battle of Tagliacozzo, Conradin was betrayed and fell into the hands of Charles of Anjou, who had him beheaded on the Mercato Vecchio in Naples, the old market place—an outrageous crime against a royal prisoner of war, a crime unheard of in Christendom. Many of his friends and companions suffered a like fate, among them one Thomas of Aquino. The chronicle of the Friars Minor of Erfurt in 1268 noted that the people of the south seemed to suffer greater pain from Conradin's death and to grieve more over his fate than the Germans did.11 • Purgatorio m. 115-17; English, p. 258. 10 For the history of Conradin see Hampe, Geschichte Konradins von Hohenstaufen ( Innsbruck, Wagner, 1894 ). 11 "Conrad, king of the Holy Land," the chronicler reports, "who was also duke of Swabia, was taken prisoner when he tried to take possession of his inheritance, the kingdom of Sicily. Still a youth, he was treated like a robber by the Frenchman King Charles and executed together with Duke Frederick of Styria, the Count of Pisa, and several others. They made their confessions to a friar of the Franciscan Order, assisted at Mass, and received Holy Communion. After the last rites had been administered, Conrad turned to the executioner. Ί forgive you that you will kill me.' When he had lain down, he thrice made the sign of the cross, and then was beheaded with the other nobles. . . . Presently also Pope Clement IV died at Viterbo." Chronica minor Minoritae Erphordiensis, under the year 1268, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores, XXIV, 206-7.

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The church of Santa Maria del Carmine, founded by Conradin's mother Elizabeth, still stands in the old market place, and in 1847 Maximilian II of Bavaria commissioned Thorwaldsen to make a statue of Conradin which is now in that church. In spite of the turmoil in the interregnum that followed, when William of Holland, Richard of Cornwall, and Alfonso of Castile were kings in name rather than in fact, the idea of the ecumenical empire survived. To find it in undiminished greatness we have only to tum from the realm of politics to that of the spirit. Dante Alighieri rises as its true herald, almost its spiritual verus imperator. He is the mediator between a declining realm and a future toward which even yet mankind may be moving. Henry VII of Luxemburg was elected to the throne as successor to the second Habsburg, Albert I, who had been assassinated in 1308. Like his father, Rudolf, Albert failed to assert the imperial prerogatives. Dante cast upon him and his house a curse that seems like a prophecy of future Habsburg policies, dynastic rather than universal: O Alberto tedesco ch'abbandoni costei ch'è fatta indomita e selvaggia, e dovresti inforcar li suoi arcioni, giusto giudicio da le stelle caggia sovra Ί tuo sangue, e sia novo e aperto, tal che! tuo successor temenza n'aggia! O German Albert! who abandonest Her that has grown recalcitrant and savage, And oughtest to bestride her saddle-bow, May a just judgment from the stars down fall Upon thy blood, and be it new and open, That thy successor may have fear thereof.12 Henry VII was a Netherlander of French nationality. He was fair, well educated, magnanimous, and mild. In him the Ghibellines, Dante most prominent among them, hailed the rebirth of the idea of the supranational office, open not only to Germans, but to all. It is probable that Dante's De monarchia, the greatest treatise ever written on Occidental government, was composed on the occasion of Henry's expedition to Italy in 1310. But we may assume that behind Henry there stood the image of the Greatest Frederick. In the Divine Comedy, Frederick, as an Epicurean who disdained the life beyond, is consigned to the tombs of eternal fire.18 But in the De volgari eloquentia Dante refers to the Swabian princes as "those illustrious heroes Fred12

Divina Comedia, Purgatorio vi. 97-102; English, p. 267. " Infemo χ. 119.

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erick Caesar and his happy-bom son Manfred, displaying the nobility and righteousness of their character, as long as fortune remained favourable, followed what is human, disdaining what is bestial; wherefore those who were of noble heart and endowed with graces strove to attach themselves to the majesty of such great princes; so that in their time, whatever the best Italians attempted first appeared at the court of these mighty sovereigns." 14 In the letter of "Dante Alighieri, the Florentine, exiled counter to his deserts, to the most infamous Florentines within," he passionately reproaches and condemns his native city for resisting the Roman Empire. "For ye first and alone, shunning the yoke of liberty, have murmured against the glory of the Roman prince, the king of the world and the minister of God, and . . . have refused the duty of the submission which ye owed, and have rather risen up in the insanity of rebellion!" Let them repent before it is too late and joyfully submit to the law, obedience to which is true liberty and sweet to bear; for "this divine and triumphant Henry, thirsting not for his own but for the public ease, hath shrunk on our behalf from no arduous task, freely sharing in our sufferings." 15 The term monarchia is synonymous with Imperium, mundi. It means a "unique princedom extending over all persons in time," or "in and over those things that are measured in time." 1β Dante, showing the spirit of St. Augustine ( or should we say the general spirit of the civilized Christian Occident? ), deduces the necessity of an Imperium mundi from the God-willed goal and telos of civilization: "No created being is a final goal in the intention of the Creator, as Creator; but rather is the proper function of that being the goal. Wherefore it comes to pass that the proper function does not come into existence for the sake of the being, but the latter for the sake of the former. There is, then, some function proper to humanity as a whole for which that same totality of men is ordained in so great multitude, to which function neither one man, nor one family, nor one district nor one city-state, nor any individual kingdom may attain." 17 Basically, these arguments are Aristotelian-Thomistic. The state is an indirect product of the divinely willed nature of man. Man must live in groups, St. Thomas says, for unlike all other "animals" man cannot care for 14 I. xii; English translation by A. G. Ferrers Howell, in The Latin Works of Dante pp. 38-39. 15 Written in Tuscany, "under the source of the Amo, in the first year of the most auspicious progress to Italy of Henry [VII] the Caesar," February 28, 1311. In Le opere di Dante; testo crítico della Società Dantesca Italiana, pp. 422 sqq.; English translation by Philip H. Wicksteed, The Latin Works of Dante, pp. 316 sqq. And ad usum temporis nostri we may add Dante's judgment upon the Florentines: "Since then they alone are free who of their own will obey the law, what are ye to think of yourselves who whilst ye make parade of the love of liberty conspire against the universal laws, and against the prince of the laws?" 16 Dante, De monarchia i. ii; English translation by Philip H. Wicksteed, in The Latin Works of Dante, pp. 128-29. 17 Ibid., ι. vii; English, pp. 131-32.

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himself as an individual. While brute beasts may distinguish through inborn skill between the useful and the injurious, man has only a general knowledge of the essentials. He may attain to knowledge of the particular things necessary for human life by reasoning from universal principles, but it is not possible for one man to arrive at a knowledge of all things through his own individual reason. Hence organized society is necessary to man, and the prerequisite of organized society is government." Since the state is, therefore, rooted in the nature of man, it is not false to say that the state is just as divine an institution as man's nature—divine, of course, not in the sense of an identification with the Godhead, but of being willed by Cod and serving His plan of salvation. We shall recall this concept of the state when discussing Hegel's views on the state and government in a subsequent chapter. But Hegel in his later years (at least in practice) restricted his consideration to "the State," a limited human association and neglected the only idea worthy of world history, a world state, an Imperium mundi. This St. Thomas had done from the very beginning; he was insensible to the concept of empire, though the living empire surrounded him. His own house belonged to the most trusted supporters of Emperor Frederick II; many of the family of Aquinas held positions of territorial nilership in Italy and in the central administration of the grand court. Through both his mother and his father, St. Thomas was of Germanic origin and was closely related to the Swabian and the Sicilian Norman houses, which were also the two sources of Frederick's blood; and he was among the first students of the University of Naples founded by the emperor. Yet the political conceptions of this greatest philosopher, who finally and lastingly wedded theology and philosophy, were antithetical if not antagonistic to Frederick's—an all-embracing Respublica unioersae Christianitatis on one side, and on the other a dissolution of the Occident into small city states; here an empire derived from the will of God and immediately under the moral law, there a restricted and overshadowed temporal power; on the one hand, a great historic continuity and a consciousness of the progress of human reason in the dialectics of the world, and on the other, a static and somewhat antihistorical political philosophy modeled after Aristotle, "Plato's inferior indeed." " To St. Thomas it was the individual kingdom, the city state, which mattered, and he gave little attention to the historic process embracing mankind in its political no less than its spiritual unity. And yet the Catholic dogma of the community of saints should have been a guide to an understanding of wider unity, for the souls of the faithful departed of all preceding generations are in unbroken communion with the present. Dante, again akin to St. Augustine, regards universal peace as the first " De regimine principimi i. i.

l*

St. Augustine, De civitate Dei vm. xii.

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prerequisite for attaining the universal goal of mankind.20 Obviously, this aim is best served by a universal society. Such a society requires one government, since the whole human race is ordained toward a single end.21 This argument occurs again and again. All things should strive to resemble God, who is one, and the more nearly they approach unity the closer they will resemble Him. Mankind, one in nature and purpose, should also be one as to its form, that is, united by lawful universal government. Dante postulates a universal umpire—another of those timeless concepts which, because they are timeless, are truly modem. Such an umpire is needed to render judgment whenever contentions have arisen. "Between any two princes," Dante says, "one of whom is in no way subject to the other, contention may arise, either through their own fault or that of their subjects, as is self-evident. Wherefore there must needs be judgment between such. And since the one may not take cognisance of what concerns the other, the one not being subject to the other (for a peer has no rule over his peer), there must needs be a third of wider jurisdiction who, within the compass of his right, has princedom over both." "The world is best disposed when justice is most potent therein," the argument continues. Justice, however, possesses maximum efficiency under a universal government of law. Inimical to justice is covetousness. He who has nothing to desire is free from greed, "for when their objects are destroyed the passions cannot persist. But the monarch has nought that he can desire, for his jurisdiction is bounded by the ocean alone, which is not the case with other princes, since their principalities are bounded by others." With justice is linked freedom, another essential prerequisite for the fulfillment of man's goal. Freedom is "the greatest gift conferred by God on human nature." But we must understand that "that is free which exists 'for the sake of itself and not of some other.' " 2 2 Only under universal government does the human race exist for its own sake, and hence, only there will it be most free. De monarchia i. iv; compare St. Augustine, De civitate Dei xix. χ sqq. De monarchia ι. ν: Totum humanum genus ordinatur ad unum. "Therefore there must be one guiding or ruling power. And this is what we mean by monarch or emperor. Thus it appears that for the well-being of the world there must be a monarchy or empire." English, p. 141. This argument in favor of the superiority of monarchy was common in the Midcue Ages. Compare, for instance, St. Thomas: "Every multitude is derived from unity. Wherefore, artificial things imitate natural things and since a work of art is better according as it attains a closer likeness to what is in nature, it necessarily follows that it is best, in the case of a human multitude, that it be ruled by one person." De regimine principum I. ii; English translation by Gerald B. Phelan, On the Governance of Rulers, pp. 41—42. It was already familiar to antiquity through Isocrates and through Aristotle, whom Dante also quotes (De monarchia ι. χ): "Things love not to be ill-disposed; but a multiplicity of princedoms is ill; therefore one prince." Metaphysics xi. x. 14. And Aristotle had quoted this passage from Homer ( Iliad n. 204 ). 22 Dante's quotation is from Aristotle, Metaphysics I. ii. 11. The passages from De monarchia quoted in the preceding paragraphs are from i. x-xiii; English, pp. 148-58. See also De regimine principum ι. i; English, p. 37. 20 11

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The universal government of which Dante speaks is no mere postulate; nor is it a Utopia. It is real and concrete, established in space and history. It was sanctified by Christ's birth under the Roman and perpetual empire—when the fullness of time came23 ( that is, when the orbit of the world had received general peace), as "witnessed by all the historians, witnessed by illustrious poets." "But what the state of the world has been," Dante exclaims, as if holding up a mirror to the Medusa head of our own age, "since that seamless garment first suffered rending by the nail of covetousness we may read—would that we might not also seel O race of men in what storms and losses, in what shipwrecks must thou needs be tossed, so long as, transformed into a beast of many heads, thou strivest after many things!"24 Dante is not at variance with St. Augustine, the praeceptor occidentis, but is his true disciple when he draws the Romans into the orbit of sacred history.25 They continued where the Jews left off; it was providential that the kingdoms of Israel and Judaea, though preserving their faith, had become Roman provinces before the Saviour was bom. The Roman republic, Dante feels, in anticipation of its future place within the plan of salvation, was sanctified by miracles and direct vocation even in pagan times." A chosen people—chosen historically, not racially—the Romans acquired the imperium mundi by right. Such a belief presupposes the ideal (and hence, real) préexistence of the imperium, at least, in the meaning that St. Augustine gave the phrase, as a "seminal idea" in the mind of God unfolding on earth in the course of time.27 To win the empire "by right" can only mean that the Romans won the right of being its bearers and defenders. From this premise, the Romans are viewed as a world-historic people whose national ambitions and actions coincided with the aims of the Spirit of History, as Hegel would express it. For Dante, there was no essential distinction between the Roman Empire and the Sacred Roman Empire, for underlying both was the idea of the kingdom of man, united in hypostatic union with the Kingdom of Cod. The empire is the seamless garment woven for Christ's Mystical Body. Since the empire was already in pre-Christian days ordained toward that end, it was sacred even then. Dante's arguments from the Christian faith have a specific meaning. "For," he says, "they have been the first in murmuring and meditating vain things against the Roman princedom who call themGalatians 4:4. De monarchia ι. xvi; English, pp. 171-72. 23 See St. Augustine's praise of the Romans and their empire in Book V of De civitate Dei, and expressly in chapter xxi: 'This one God, therefore, that neither stays from judging, nor favouring of mankind, when His pleasure was, and whilst it was His pleasure, let Rome have sovereignty." English translation by John Healey, The City of God, I, 242. 20 De monarchia u. iv. 27 De Trinitate m. viii. 13, in Mime,Patrologie cursus completus, Latin, XLII, 875-76; De Genesi ad litteram vi. vi. 9, ibid., XXXIV, 342-43. 23

24

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selves zealots for the Christian faith." And yet they ought to know that it was Christ Himself who proved the righteousness of the empire, since He chose to b e born "under edict of the Roman authority." He observed and thereby recognized as just the decree of Augustus Caesar, "in order that the Son of God, made man, might be enrolled as a man in that unique register of the human race." 28 This and the ensuing arguments are among the most daring he ever advanced. They are also the most sublime contemplations on the philosophy of history, that is, on the reasonable and God-willed essence of human institutions. Not only did Christ sanction as just the jurisdiction of Caesar Augustus, but the empire emerges as an institution that was necessary for the salvation of man. " I f the Roman empire was not of right, the sin of Adam was not punished in Christ." F o r through the sin of Adam, the whole of the human race fell into sin. Therefore Christ, in order to atone for the sin of all mankind, had to suffer punishment for the sins of the entire human race. But punishment, as Dante says, "does not simply mean penalty inflicted," but penalty "inflicted by one who has penal jurisdiction. Wherefore unless the penalty be inflicted by a qualified judge it should not be looked upon as a punishment, but rather as itself a wrong. . . . If, then, Christ had not suffered under a qualified judge, that suffering would not have been a punishment [atonement]. And the judge could not have been qualified had he not had jurisdiction over the whole human race; since it was the whole human race that was to be punished in that flesh of Christ, who, as the prophet saith, was bearing or sustaining our griefs. And Tiberius Caesar, whose vicar Pilate was, would not have had such jurisdiction unless the Roman empire had been of right." 2 0 This is why God prompted Herod, who was only a territorial king, to return Christ to Pilate, the lawful representative of the universal Caesar. Among the Latin Fathers and the later teachers of the church, there was general agreement that the empire was that "impediment" restraining the coming of Antichrist, of which St. Paul writes in his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians. 30 T h e empire was considered as the "seal of the abyss" mentioned by St. John, which would not break for a thousand years." Only after the downfall of the empire would the great apostasy take place, as ίβ De monarchia li. xii; English, pp. 217-19. See also Dante's letter to "Lord Henry, by divine providence king of the Romans, ever Augustus," April 16, 1311: "If this edict [of Augustus] had not issued from the council chamber of the most righteous princedom, the only begotten Son of God, made man, would never, by way of professing himself subject after his assumed nature to the edict, have chosen that time to be bom." Le opere di Dante; testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana, p. 427; English, p. 326. 29 De monarchia n. xiii; English, pp. 222-23. 80 2:1-12. See, for example, Irenaeus, Contra hereses v. xxvi, in Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Greek, vn, 1192 sqq., or Adso, De Antichristo, in ibid., Latin, CI, 1295. « Apocalypse 20:3.

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prelude to the realm of Antichrist, with its false splendor corrupting and seducing all nations.92 This is a breath-taking thought, which seemed but a mystic phantasy or, at best, a medieval allegory to most of our generation until a few years ago. Yet a thousand years after Charlemagne a time has begun which contains, hidden beneath deceptive material progress, the elements of utter desolation. We may wonder whether our eyes and ears have not been opened today to the language of reality. Many have claimed that there is a "Protestant" tone to Dante's words. But in this case, what does "Protestant" mean? Religiously (and this is all that matters), Dante is unimpeachably orthodox. And the assertion of individual liberty, reason, and conscience and of the independence of the temporal order is by no means proper to Protestantism. It is certainly one of the licit attitudes of the Catholic world view; it is, indeed, the right consequence of well-understood religious orthodoxy. While Protestantism has largely eliminated the natural distinction between the religious and the temporal categories by subjecting religion to the state, the Catholic position, once that of the Ghibellines and since Pope Leo XIII that of the whole church, is founded on the notion of mankind's twofold aims, which require twofold means. Their coordination takes place in the one moral law and in God, the source and end of both societies, the spiritual and the temporal. Dante reveals his greatness in that he was steadily aware that the imperfection of the human element does not taint the content of religious truth. He never went the easy way of heresy to achieve aims of political importance, though the target he had to hit and the viciousness of his opponents were certainly not less powerful than those of Luther's day. Dante unlike Luther and the other "reformers," remained ever conscious of the universal Christian heritage in politicis while he combated the particularistic influence of the curia which threatened dissolution in temporal matters. With all his love for divided, unhappy Italy, he remained universal in his outlook. National salvation, to him, could spring only from the supranational wellhead of justice. Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello, nave sanza nocchiere in gran tempesta, non donna di provincie, ma bordello! Ahi servile Italy, griefs hostelry! A ship without a pilot in great tempest! No Lady thou of Provinces, but brothel! ss Thus the poet Sordello weeps over his fatherland. And he exhorts his people: " II Thessalonians 2:3. » Divina Comedia, Purgatorio vi. 76-78; English, ρ. 2θβ.

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"Let Caesar sit upon the saddle"; only then will the maid Italia, now "lady of brothels, not of provinces," regain her dignity. Friedrich von Schlegel said quite rightly in his Vienna lectures of 1810: "The early Italian patriots of Dante's time, who desired more than anything else a strong German emperor who would love glory and justice and restore Italy and the empire, were on the right track, rather than those later Florentines, false patriots who thought but of the liberation of Italy alone." 85 Dante refuses to argue with those who are "strangers and ignorant in every kind of theology and philosophy"; or with those whose "stubborn greed has put out the light of reason, who declare themselves sons of the church, whereas they are of their father the devil, . . . hating the very name of the most sacred princedom," that is, the Sacred Roman Empire. He addresses only those who, by a certain zeal towards mother church, are led to overlook the precise truth. Christ's supremacy over things spiritual and temporal does not imply an equal supremacy for His vicar, who is "not equipotential with the divine authority." The power of binding and loosing is limited to the things spiritual. It does not include power to "loose the laws and decrees of the empire, and bind laws and decrees for the temporal regimen," as many had believed since the time of Pope Gregory VII. 3 6 If, then, the pope is not above the emperor in matters temporal, the priest obviously cannot be above the prince. All this will sound less academic, less like an outdated controversy between medieval schoolmen, if we consider the very modern, actual importance of the arguments. The one temporal power of the empire has been replaced by the system of modern states and the one sovereignty of the emperor by multiple sovereignties, but the problem is still the same. To see the implications we have only to think of the problems which the Spanish civil war posed for the Catholic world. Thus there is a lasting meaning in the famous symbolism of the Two Swords, to which Dante refers in the ninth chapter of the third book of De monarchia. It was Gregory VII who first invoked the Apostle's words, "Lookl here are two swords," 37 in order to use them in support of his political aspira« Ibid., vi. 91-93; English, p. 267. Ueber die neuere deutsche Geschichte; Vorlesungen gehalten zu Wien im Jahre 1810, in Sämmtliche Werke, XI, 184. 88 De monarchia m. iii, vii, viii; English, pp. 230-31, 247-48. " Luke 22:38. si

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tions. Assuming that this passage had an allegorical rather than a purely literal meaning (as Dante thinks)," the pope stated "Deus non unum sed ducs gladios satis esse dixit." He clearly meant to imply that God had given both the spiritual and the temporal powers, symbolized by the Two Swords, to His apostles and their successors. But the anti-Ghibellines throughout the centuries down to our own day, seem to have overlooked the words of the Lord establishing the fundamental right relationship between spiritual and temporal power, namely, "Pay, therefore, to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God!" ·· We have seen how deeply this theory influenced the affairs of the South Italian Normans, of England, and later of the whole Christian world. Bernard of Clairvaux, John of Salisbury, and all subsequent protagonists of the doctrine of political papal overlordship over the kingdoms and the empire adopted the Gregorian interpretation. Nor was it a mere coincidence that Gregory VII was the originator of the papal Two Swords doctrine; the realities of the political situation would not have allowed it to be advanced at an earlier moment.40 Until Henry III, whose influence on temporal church matters was powerful, the empire had been the one community which, in an Augustinian-Carolingian sense, embraced both the spiritual and the secular orders; it was, in the consciousness of the people, still das Gottesreich. This did not mean an inferior position for the church. On the contrary, just because she confined herself to the spiritual field, as the dispenser of the sacraments and the guardian of evangelical life, she possessed a sacred and supreme glory. The emperor bent his knee before the pope at the coronation or whenever he venerated in him his office as Christ's vicar. But as temporal, ruling bishop of Rome, the pope was under the jurisdiction of the u De monarchia m. ix. Dante devotes the larger part of this chapter to proving that those words of Christ and Peter had only a literal, not a symbolic meaning; "Peter," he thinks, "after his impulsive manner, answered merely to the obvious aspect of things." But even if they "are to be taken typically, they . . . must be taken to refer to that sword of which Matthew writes as follows: Think not that I am come to send peace upon the earth. I am come not to send peace, but a sword; for I am come to set a man against his father' [Matthew 10:34-35], and the rest." Ibid.; English, pp. 254-55. The words, according to Dante, have nothing to do with the symbolism of a spiritual and temporal sword on earth. « Matthew 22:21-22. 40 In 1157, when Pope Hadrian IV appeared to suggest in a letter to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa that he had received the empire as a fief (benefidum) from the papacy, there was such indignation among the princes present at the Diet of Besançon, where the letter was read, that Frederick had to employ his full authority to protect the papal legates; he bade them return to Rome immediately. The German bishops addressed a joint letter to Pope Adrian, "The free crown of our empire we consider to be solely the gift ( benefidum ) of God. . . . We would rather lay down our own crowns than suffer to see the imperial crown and ourselves thus diminished." Adrian sent other legates who explained to the emperor, at the Diet of Augsburg, in 1158, that the pope had not used the word benefidum in the sense of fief but of benefice, a "good deed," meaning only that he had put the imperial crown on Frederick's head, not that he had conferred the empire on him as a fief. Otto and Ragewinus, Gesta Fridertd I imperatoris m. θ sqq., in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Scriptores, XX, 421 sqq.; Constitutiones, I, 229 sqq., Nos. 164, 1Θ5, 167.

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Roman emperor; in this capacity he was the first of the bishops of the empire. The church as church militant, the visible and human institution in all her temporal (not spiritual) aspects, was subject to imperial jurisdiction; the Church was inside the empire, not outside or in contrast to it. Only after Gregory VII, first as chancellor, then as pope, had set up the curia almost as if it were a state equal to the empire could the doctrine arise that pope and emperor were temporal princes of equal rank, and later, that the pope was the feudal overlord of the emperor.41 In Germany, the equality and the coordination of the Two Swords, given by God to the pope and to the emperor respectively, was upheld by the Ghibellines. It was incorporated in the Sachsenspiegel (the Saxon Mirror), a famous private codification of existing laws and customs by the learned nobleman Eyke von Repgow: "Two swords has God left on earth to protect Christendom. The spiritual sword is given to the pope, the temporal to the emperor."12 Perhaps only Archbishop Reinald von Dassel upheld the reverse of the Gregorian doctrine: that both swords were given to the emperor. The Schwabenspiegel (the Swabian Mirror), a Guelf pendant to the Saxon Mirror, said: "God, when ascending to heaven, left two swords behind. . . . Both of them He left to St. Peter, one for spiritual, the other for temporal, judgment. The temporal sword of judgment the pope lends to the emperor." 43 In retrospect it can be said that the world of Occidental man, religiously and politically, would probably have fared infinitely better with the Ghibelline teaching. As soon as the church reached for the temporal sword, that sword could be turned against her. And the undermining of the prestige of the empire ended by shaking the foundations of all temporal order and, finally, even the unity of the faith. In the final chapters of De monarchia, Dante considers whether the empire was or was not founded by an act of the church, and whether the ancient empire did, under Constantine, transfer political power to the papacy. Reading these chapters would be of profit to some modern teachers of history, especially in America, who look on the Sacred Roman Empire as a sort of political offspring of the Catholic church. The empire, says Dante, was clearly prior to the church; the Apostles and Christ himself recognized Caesar's jurisdiction. Nor was the restored empire founded anew by the 41 The papal Two Swords doctrine found its most pointed expression in the political section of the bull Vnam sanctam ( November 18, 1302 ) of Pope Boniface VIII. Under the year 1302 in Caesar Baronius and Odoricus Raynaldus, Annate« ecclesiastici, XXIII, 328, No. 13. An abbreviated English translation is to be found in Ernest Flagg Henderson, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, pp. 435-37. 4 2 Landrecht, Article 1; Sachsenspiegel; Land- und Lehnrecht, edited by Karl August Eckhardt, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Fontes iuris Germanici antiqui, new series, I, 19. 4 3 Landrecht, Article 1; in Zeumer, Quellensammlung zur Geschichte der Deutschen Reichsoerfassung, p. 105, No. 82.

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church, for to refound the empire would have been wholly outside the ecclesiastical competence. Constan tine, it was argued, granted to the church Rome, the traditional seat of the empire, together with other imperial prerogatives. But Constantine had no power to alienate the imperial dignity, either wholly or partially, nor did the church as a spiritual institution have power to receive such temporal authority. "No one is at liberty to do, in virtue of the office deputed to him, things that are counter to that office. . . . But it is counter to the office deputed to the emperor to rend the empire, since it is his office to hold the human race subject to unity in willing and diswilling. . . . Wherefore to rend the empire is not competent to the emperor [ergo scindere imperium imperatori non licet.] If therefore certain dignities were (as they say) alienated from the empire by Constantine and ceded to the power of the church, the seamless tunic was rent, which not even they durst rend who pierced Christ, very God, with the lance." Just as the church has its proper foundation, the Rock of Peter, so also the empire has its own; it is human law, willed by Providence for the realization of the telos of history. "Since, then," Dante concludes, "to rend the empire were to destroy it ( inasmuch as the empire consists in the unity of universal monarchy), it is manifest that he who wields the authority of the empire may not rend the empire." Moreover, every jurisdiction is prior to the judge, for the judge is appointed to the jurisdiction, and not the reverse. The empire is a jurisdiction embracing every temporal jurisdiction in its scope. Therefore, it must be prior to its judge, the emperor, who is appointed to it. Dante's work rises to a climax in his moral philosophy of rulership. The best modern treatises on the ethos of organized states read at times like paraphrases of this great Florentine, but hardly any has attained to the heights reached by his universal soul. Man alone, we read, holds a middle place between corruptibility and incorruptibility, according to his physical and spiritual natures, each ordained to a certain end. It follows that there must be a twofold directive power for man to attain his twofold goal. "Unutterable providence, then, has set two ends before man to be contemplated by him; the blessedness, to wit, of this life, which consists in the exercise of his proper power and isfiguredby the terrestrial paradise, and the blessedness of eternal life, which consists in the fruition of the divine aspect, to which his proper power may not ascend unless assisted by the divine light. And this blessedness is given to be understood by the celestial paradise. . . . To the first we attain by the teachings of philosophy, following them by acting in accordance with the moral and intellectual virtues. To the second by spiritual teachings which transcend human reason, as we follow them by acting according to the theological virtues; faith, hope, to wit, and charity." Therefore a twofold directive power is needed, a twofold ministry to man's

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twofold nature: "the supreme pontiff, to lead the human race, in accordance with things revealed, to eternal life; and the emperor, to direct the human race to temporal felicity in accordance with the teachings of philosophy."44 It was this exalted view of the imperial stewardship towards the whole of mankind which may have induced Dante to address to Emperor Henry VII, when he came to Italy, these famous lines: "I too, who write for myself and for others, have seen thee, as beseems imperial Majesty, most benignant, and have heard thee most clement, when that my hands handled thy feet and my lips paid their debt. Then did my spirit exult in thee, and I spoke silently with myself, 'Behold the Lamb of Godi Behold him who hath taken away the sins of the world.' " " Words which, taken by themselves, sound blasphemous. But it was not of a mortal nor of his temporal office alone that Dante was speaking, but of one who transcended the corruptibility of nature, a sacred and timeless institution, which represented the human soul of man's Mystical Body of Christ. 44 The quotations in preceding paragraphs and here are from De monarchia m. χ, xvi; English, pp. 257, 258, 277-78. See also chapters xiii and xiv. " Letter to Emperor Henry VII, April 1β, 1311, in Le opere di Dante, pp. 426-27; English translation by Philip H. Wicksteed, The Latin Works of Dante, p. 325.

13 THE INWARD PATH The infinite yearning of the soul can never be wholly fulfilled, unless the soul be wholly immersed in the abyss of the Godhead. HEINBICH SUSO, Horologium sapientiae. through the course of their history since Tacitus have made no greater contribution to the idea of mankind than in preparing the way for the Ghibelline philosophy of history. Dante could never have written De monarchia, had not the Ottoman house established the*Sacred Roman Empire, the Salians and the Hohenstaufen developed and perfected it, the thoughts, endeavors, and blood of the German people nurtured it. The idea of the empire had flowered. Now the actual deeds behind it slackened, but the idea took new form and vigor.1 T H E GERMANS

The thirteenth century has been called the greatest of centuries, and with some justice, for it was the time of Innocent III and Frederick II, of St. Francis and St. Albertus Magnus, of St. Thomas and Blessed Duns Scotus. The fourteenth has, on the other hand, earned the epithet of the century of decadence, for historic pauses usually follow on periods of creativeness. Yet the reproach of decadence is not entirely justified. Dante is proof to the contrary. And though the empire had entered a stage of gradual disintegration, it showed renewed strength under the successors of Henry VII, Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria (1314-1347) and Emperor Charles IV (1347-1378). Seven years after Dante's death, his visions seemed to come true under Emperor Ludwig. History threw into his lap what it had denied to the Greatest Frederick. He had the full support of the imperial cities, and his house, Wittelsbach, was then a European power, dominant in Germany. The Palatinate; the duchy of Bavaria and the Tirol; the margraviate of Brandenburg; Holland and Friesland, and large domains in what today is Belgium— all these were under Wittelsbach rule. This was the time of the "Babylonian captivity" of the church in Avignon. Victorious over the Hohenstaufen who were the bearers of the universal empire, the papacy had fallen under the influence of the French national 1 Dante realized, of course, the discrepancy between idea and manifestation; he stresses that he is speaking secundum intentionem, on the pure, undiluted principles of government ( De monarchia ι. ii ). The reproach that the Ghibelline idealism of nis thought no longer reflected the state of affairs 'as they really were" is meaningless. Any worth-while treatise on political matters deals with things, not only as they are but as they ought to be. The Declaration of Independence, Kant's Perpetual Peace, Mill's On Liberty, the League of Nations Covenant, the Atlantic Charter, and so forth are one thing—the actual state of democracy and international anarchy is another.

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monarchy, whose sole ambition was to use it for its political designs. Among them the weakening of Germany, allied with England, then a foe of France, seemed of primary importance, particularly after the battle of Mühldorf, in 1322, when Ludwig had defeated and reconciled his competitor for the throne, Frederick the Handsome of Austria, and thus established his own position more firmly. Pope John XXII in October, 1323, ordered Ludwig to abdicate, since his title of king of the Romans had not received papal confirmation. To concede such a right to the popes in the captivity would of course have meant, indirectly, to allow the French kings to dispose of the German kingship and the empire at will. When Ludwig refused, he was excommunicated in March, 1324. In 1327, King Ludwig went to Rome, supported by the Ghibelline party which was headed by Sciarra Colonna, and in January of the following year he had himself crowned by the representatives of the Roman people.2 But his attempt to bring the papacy back to Rome by declaring Pope John XXII a heretic and deposed, and recognizing Pietro de Corvara, a Franciscan monk elected by the syndics of the city, as "Pope" Nicholas V, was undertaken by wrong and illicit means and was doomed to failure.3 This disastrous deadlock between the two supreme Powers, with the pope threatening excommunication to all who recognized Ludwig, and the emperor threatening the ban on all who did not, shows clearly what spiritual and political devastations had already been caused during the preceding centuries. The undue, exaggerated claims of each of the two Powers, destined to work together under the same law for the benefit of Christendom, could not but hurt the universal standing of both. Had Ludwig, however, been a statesman of higher rank, of moral courage and consistency, rather than merely the bearer of a crown that was sacred despite and not because of him, the Hohenstaufen greatness might yet have been revived in his days. The empire was supported by King Edward III of England and by large sections of the Christian world. All who dreaded the dangers to Christendom implied in the Babylonian captivity flocked to 2 "While the people acclaimed Ludwig by the title of king of the Romans [emperor] and shouted 'Long life and reign to him,' he and his queen were enthroned together on the capítol; and thus was granted to the people and mob of Rome the power to take counsel for the affairs of the Empire and to decide matters of state," Albertinus Mussatus comments: Ludovicus Bavants, in Böhmer, ed., Fontes rerum Germanicarum, I, 174-75; English translation by R. G. D. Laffan, Select Documents of European History, I, 145. This is an example of the surviving force of Roman republicanism, which was the basis of the Principate and Dominate and to which the monarchy may at any time revert. This persistence was exemplified earlier by Arnold of Brescia and later by Cola di Rienzi, who "as a boy of fourteen or fifteen may nave been thrilled by the spectacle of Ludwig's election, the coronations, and the people's assemblies." ( Riezler, Die literarischen Widersacher der Päpste zur Zeit Ludwigs des Baiers, p. 50 n. ). * Albertinus Mussatus, Ludovicus Bavarus, in Fontes, I, 176 sqq.; English, pp. 146 sqq.

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Munich, then the imperial see of the realm. Among Ludwig's supporters was William of Ockham, the great Franciscan philosopher who had escaped from Avignon.4 The words he is said to have spoken at his first meeting with Ludwig beautifully express the alliance between might and the spirit: "Defend me with the sword, o Emperor, and I shall defend you with the word." It was then that, according to Boccaccio's Life of Dante, the De monarchia, which "was scarcely known up to this time," became very famous. William of Ockham, Marsiglio of Padua, Michael Cesena, and Ludwig himself—all could draw their arguments from it. The papal legate, Bertrand du Poïet, a Frenchman, cardinal of San Marcello, later cardinal-bishop of Ostia, condemned it to the flames as a dangerous Ghibelline work.* In 1338, the century-old struggle of the Occident was brought to a decision in favor of the Ghibelline view. "When anyone has been elected King of the Romans by the princes electors of the Empire," the electors assembled at Rense resolved, "or by the majority of them in the case of dispute, he does not need the nomination, approbation, confirmation, assent or authority of the Apostolic See in order to assume the administration of the rights and property of the Empire or the royal title." · At the Diet of Frankfurt, Ludwig confirmed this by a decree, Licet iuris. "The emperor is made true emperor by the election alone of those to whom it pertains," he declared, and, "The imperial dignity and power comes directly from God alone."T This was at the height of the mystical movement, which was of great importance for the understanding of the historic Deutschtum. It originated on the lower Rhine and extended over large parts of Germany proper. It was not a political but a philosophical and religious upsurge. Yet the fateful division between politics and metaphysics did not then yet exist. Political concepts— the realm of justice, freedom, and peace; the ministry of the temporal order to eternal values; the kingdom of God on earth—were at the same time religious. The mystics, who sought union with God, a living ordinatio ad. unum, were naturally devoted to the Respublica Christiana, the Sacred Roman Empire, as the embracing unity composed of many members. Among their most frequently quoted authorities is St. Albertus Magnus, 4 Ockham, like the emperor, considered John XXII on certain points heretical. See Baudry, "La lettre de Cuillaume d'Occam au chapitre d'Assise" ( 1334), in Revue iHistoire Franciscaine, III (1926), pp. 207, 213. For an excellent presentation of Ockham's strictly Ghibelline view of the relations between spiritual and temporal power see Böhner, "Ockham's Political Ideas," in The Review of Politics, V ( 1943), 4Θ2-87. 5 Opere volgari di Giovanni Boccaccio, XV, 77; English translation by James Robinson Smith, The Earliest Lives of Dante, pp. 69-70. * Weistum des Kurvereins zu Rense, July 16, 1338, in Mirbt, ed., Quellen zur Geschichte dei Papsttums und des römischen Katholizismus, p. 223, No. 383; English translation by R. G. D. Laffan, Select Documents of European History, I, 148. 7 August 6, 1338. Ibid., p. 224, No. 384; English translation by Ernest Flagg Henderson, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, pp. 437, 438.

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the teacher of St. Thomas. In political and historical matters, his views were deeper and wider than those of his disciple. St. Albertus recognized the great concordance of history in the sense intended by St. Augustine. In the very concrete terms of legal and constitutional categories he thought about the advancement of the people and of the sacrum imperium mundi, the mirror of the concordance of the universe. "Politically," says Martin Grabmann, "the mystics gave their love and loyalty to the Roman-German emperor-kings." 8 In an earlier chapter, the nature of the imperial cities was pictured as the dialectical product of the tension that existed in Germany between the idea of the Reich and its national antithesis; on their small territories, the cities yet represented Das Reich integrally, not as particularistic forces but as part of the universal force. A similar motive, though on the plane of the pure spirit, has, in my opinion, been at work in the rise of the mystical movement. It resulted from the tension between the universal idea of the church and its reflection in the soul of the individual. In the "spark of the soul" {Seelcnfünklein, as Master Eckhard expressed it), within the created and limited spiritual personality of the individual, the universal idea of the transcendent God is born ever anew. A few popular misconceptions must be corrected first. Mysticism is not a pietistic drowning of the soul in vague ecstasies. As Grabmann, the great scholar on medieval thought, expressed it: mysticism was "an objective attitude (towards God and the human mind), not a fleeting religious sentiment, an undefined Schwärmerei. It is a Catholic movement filled with concrete ideas and speculative thought." · Philosophically, Eckhard, Tauler, and Suso, the three foremost exponents 8 Die Kulturwerte der deutschen Mystik des Mittelalters, p. 37. Rulman Merswin, for example, wrote in his Little Book of the Nine Rocks ( formerly ascribed to Blessed Heinrich Suso ) : "He who was elected to the Roman crown received it with great meekness as from God, and gave the honor to God, and deemed himself His servant. He endeavored to help God, and he strove to increase peace and grace in Christendom. For this he fought valiantly, surrendering to God life ana soul, honor and possessions, that He might do to him as He wished in time and eternity. . . . These emperors and empresses, kings and queens were found loving God and were so truly devout in all their deeds that they worked great things for the betterment of Christendom." Merswins Neun-Felsen-Buch, edited by Philipp Strauch, pp. 39-40. • Die Kulturwerte der deutschen Mystik des Mittehlters, p. 21. Anothei idea, voiced in recent years by a certain Alfred Rosenberg in a book called Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich, Hoheneichen Verlag, 3d ed., 1932), is too grotesque to be touched upon here except in parentheses. He asserts that the mystics, especially Eckhard, "a Nordic wnose judgments sprang from the clear instinct of his soul' (p. 244), were the first representatives of an "Aryan religion," an awakening God-consciousness in "the myth, yea, the religion of the blood" (p. 264) of the "German-Germanic man of the Nordic race" (p. 259). This curious nonsense might have been left to well-deserved oblivion had it not unfortunately been adopted by some of Rosenberg's political opponents abroad. In Germany, an excellent refutation was published by the Archepiscopal Vicarate General of Cologne, as an official supplement to the Kirchlicher Anzeiger für die Erzdiözese Köln entitled Studien zum Mythus des XX. Jahrhunderts (Cologne, J. P. Bachem, 1934).

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of mysticism, stand on the ground of Thomism. All three were Dominicans, high-ranking members of the order. But they are also influenced by Neoplatonic ideas as transmitted by the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Augustine, and John Scotus Eriugena, and their thought shows a notable affinity to that of the Franciscan school of St. Bonaventura and Blessed Duns Scotus—quite naturally so, since that school was itself under the influence of the Neoplatonic-Augustinian heritage. The mystic philosophy of Eckhard, Suso, Tauler, and their schools, with its specific synthesis of individuality and freedom on the one hand and a striving for the universal and the Absolute on the other, is thoroughly ChristianGermanic.10 "The German Spirit," Hegel reminds us, "is the Spirit of the new World. Its aim is the realization of absolute Truth as the unlimited selfdetermination of Freedom. . . . The destiny of the German peoples is, to be the bearers of the Christian principle." 11 Or, as Gilson and Böhner put it, the mystics represented "the treasure of ideas of scholasticism and Neoplatonism united to a synthesis, bearing the typical traits of the Germanic spirit, namely, that innermost sentiment, the fire of thought, a profound thinking-to-the-end of the idea once conceived."12 It is, of course, difficult to determine exactly the limits for applying the term "mystics." There have been men and women who were mystics in the wider sense ever since Plato, and certainly since the transcendent Logos of the World was made flesh. But speaking specifically of the medieval school of mystic philosophy, we may say that one of its earliest representatives was Mechthilde of Magdeburg, "the troubadour of the Holy Spirit," as she was called. The movement culminates in Eckhard, Tauler, and Suso, in David of Augsburg, a Franciscan, and in Dietrich of Regensburg. In the fifteenth century, it finds a late disciple in the great thinker and statesman Nicholas of Cusa. The number of less well-known followers and adherents is, of course, very great. The Königsberg philosopher Karl Rosenkranz has called the mystic school the beginning of German philosophy.13 It had a notable influence on the development of philosophic terminology.14 Words now in common use, such as Dreiheit, Empfindlichkeit, Abfall, begierig, Abgeschiedenheit, were coined by the mystics.19 10 It is with this mystic philosophy of the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century that we are here concerned, not with mysticism in the general sense—an attitude of the mind that naturally has its representatives among all peoples and ages. 11 Philosophie der Welt-Geschichte, in Sämtliche Werke, IX, 763; English translation by J. Sibree, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 354. 12 Die Geschichte der christlichen Philosophie, p. 551. 1 s Zur Geschichte der deutschen Literatur ( Königsberg, 1836 ), pp. 37 sqq. ; Rosenkranz's assertion, however, that the mystics were forerunners of the Reformation and were therefore always persecuted by the church was based on his religious bias rather than historic fact. Encyclopädie der theologischen Wissenschaften, 2d ed. (Halle, 1845), p. 301. 14 Eucken, Geschichte der philosophischen Terminologie, pp. 120 sqq. 1 5 Rattke, Abstraktbildungen auf -heit bei Meister Eckhart und seinen Jüngern,

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The mystic, reaching for the whole, discovers a perfect microcosm in his own soul. In the depths of individual consciousness he finds Him in whose image we are created, in the imago Trinitatis of which St. Augustine spoke.1* The mystics were pervaded by the Augustinian thought of God's being closer to the soul than the soul is to itself; 17 he who wants to find God must enter into himself, for God lives in one's innermost being. This inward path, as Heinrich Böhmer points out, was to lead to healing man's soul—an aim more important than all outward sanctification.1* How very German, indeed! Centuries after Eckhard and Tauler, the king of the German romantics, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), wrote: "Inward goes the mysterious path." " This is the same path that led Hegel to rediscover, and defend (against Kant) the ontological proof for the existence of God, as it had been advanced first by Anselm of Canterbury. "We grant that the truth is that which is not merely thought but which likewise is," Hegel writes. "Undoubtedly Cod would be imperfect, if He were merely thought and did not abo have the determination of Being. But in relation to God we must not take thought as merely subjective; thought here signifies the absolute, pure thought, and thus we must ascribe to Him the quality of Being. . . . On the other hand, if God were merely Being, if He were not conscious of Himself as self-consciousness, He would not be Spirit, a thought that thinks itself." 20 Mechthilde of Magdeburg (who was born in 1212 of noble parentage and died in 1280) was the first German in whom the quest for the union between the subjective and the Absolute found creative expression in thought and art. It is the same quest that on the political plane determined the philosophy of the Sacred Roman Empire of the German Nation, the seeking after a union between an individual nation and the spirit of mankind. Mechthilde, for some years a Beguine, entered the Cistercian monastery at Hefta, near Eisleben, which was later to be made famous by St. Mechthilde of Hackebom, its abbess, and her sister St. Gertrude, both mystic writers of great renown. The elder Mechthilde's work On the Flowing Light of the Godhead is Inauguraldissertation; Fahrner, Wortsinn und Wortschöpfung bei Meister Eckehart, in Beiträge zur deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, 31. ™ De Trinitate xiv, in Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Latin, XLII, 1035 sqq. 1T Confessione} πι. vi. 1Θ: "Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo." Loyola und die deutsche Mystik, in Berichte der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philologisch-historische Klasse, LXXIII, 12 sqq. le The influence of mysticism on Novalis is examined by W. Feilchenfeld, Der Einfltiss Jacob Böhme's auf Novalis (Berlin, E. Ebering, 1922). 20 Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, edited by Carl Ludwig Michelet, in Werke, Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten, XV, 167; English translation by Elizabeth S. Haidane and Frances H. Simon, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, III, 65.

THE INWARD PATH 147 the first important book in the German language.21 Like St. Mechthilde of Hackebora and St. Gertrude, she pleaded for devotion to the Sacred Heart, a cult now adopted by the universal church." It was the "inward way" which initiated this devotion by revealing the Sacred Heart as the very innermost center of the universe, the hearth of love, in which all streams of the Divinehuman blood of the Saviour flowed together. It is the focus of all creation. The Christocentric world view, so characteristic of the Franciscan school, finds in the mystic movement its clearest expression. Its followers were filled with devotion to Christ's sacred humanity, because it is this humanity which alone fulfills in absolute perfection the mystic desire. Man can but strive to become Christlike, while the only true and all-consummating mystic is Christ Himself. For He alone, going the inward way, can truly find God in His human soul, the two united in hypostatic union. Here the perfect synthesis of the subjective and the Absolute is accomplished. St. John was the favorite saint of the German Middle Ages, the beloved disciple who alone could rest his head upon the Master's breast and who came as close to Christ as it was the mystics' ardent desire to be.2' This striving for ever-closer nearness to the incarnate Logos opened their eyes to the philosophy of history, to reasonable, logical thinking, to logic as a rigid discipline. The path of German thought toward modern philosophy has led through the Logos himself. Here is a typical passage from Mechthilde's Flowing Light: ""Lord, I bring thee a jewel,' says the soul, 'greater than the mountains, wider than the world, deeper than the sea, higher than the clouds, fairer than the sun and richer than the stars. It is more than the whole earth.' "You image of my godhead, honored with my humanity, adorned with my holy spirit, what is your jewel?' God asks. 'It is my heart's love. I have denied it to the world, to me and all creatures. Now I can bear it no longer. Lord, where shall I lay it down?" And the Lord said: "Verily, thy heart's love thou shalt lay down at no other place than in my divine heart and in my human breast. There alone shalt thou be comforted in the embrace of my spirit.' " 2 4 This Augustinian faith in the omnipotence of love characterizes all mystics, a love that drove God Himself from His throne down to the earth and to His death on the Cross. 21 It was published in German from the manuscript of Stift Einsiedeln by P. Call Morel, Offenbarungen der Schwester Mechthild von Magdeburg, oder Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit (Regensburg, C. J. Manz, 1869); in Latin by Dom Louis Paquelin, Lux dignitatis, in Revelationes Gertrudianae ac Mechtildianae (Poitiers, Oudm Frères, 1875-77), Vol. II. 22 Spiess, Eine Zeuge mittelalterlicher Mystik in der Schweiz, pp. 314 sqq. 23 See, for example, Mechthilde's glowing vision of St. John's beatitude in heaven. "His body has received so much of the Divine eternity that it is radiant like a fiery crystal." Though he is not yet united with God (this no man can be until the Last Judgment), he is very near to Him, separated only by a thin veil. Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit ιν. xxiii, in Offenbarungen der Schwester Mechthild von Magdeburg, p. 118. 24 Ibid., I. xl—xliii; p. 18.

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Mechthilde's work is a German Divine Comedy. There is the eventual entrance of the soul into Heaven, there is Purgatory and the dreadful abyss of Hell, built in circles as in Dante's vision." T h e Latin translation of the Flowing Light, indeed, came into the hands of the Florentine, and it is probable that, even in detail, he was much influenced by it. " I have seen a city whose name is eternal hatred," was Mechthilde's inscription over the gates of Hell. 2 " Wilhelm Preger, the well-known scholar of medieval history and philosophy, has provided ample evidence of Mechthilde's influence on Dante. 2 1 "Matelda" is Dante's guide through the Earthly Paradise. 2 8 She baptizes him in the waters of the Eunoe, the river that brings back the memory of all good deeds. In this sphere the limits of the sensual world are reached and so are the limits of natural reason. Here blossom trees that have no seeds in the world of matter; here flow rivers, whose springs are not on the physical plane. The realm of the pure spirit has begun. "Matelda," who is Mechthilde of Magdeburg, appears as the mediator of suprasensual knowledge. In Master Eckhard mystic philosophy reaches its most fascinating and controversial, if not its greatest, exponent. His power over souls, his inspired eloquence, his plastic persuasiveness in German and in Latin, and the mystic glow of his love for humanity must have been extraordinary. Evelyn Underbill calls his teachings in the vernacular surprising in their profundity, when we consider the high degree of theological intelligence presupposed on the part of the congregation to whom the sermons were addressed. 29 Born in 1260 of noble descent, he joined the Dominican order at an early age. He was sent to Paris, where he became a master of theology. After his return, he was made provincial of Saxony, then vicar general of Bohemia. In 1311, he became provincial of the Upper German province of his order. After a second journey to Paris, he moved to Cologne, where he died in 1237. Meanwhile enemies had arisen to accuse him of heretical and pantheistic teachings. Some of his formulations were undoubtedly ambiguous, but it is almost generally agreed that subjectively he was in good faith. Two Ibid., m. xxi, p. 82; compare Dante, Divina Comedia, Inferno χι. Ibid. : "Ich habe gesehen ein stat, Ir name ist der ewige hass." Compare Inferno in. 1-3. 27 "Dante's Matelda," in Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophischphilologische und historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, 1873, III, 185-240, and Geschichte der deutschen Mystik im Mittelalter, pp. 103 sqq. See also Philipp Strauch, "Mechthild (von Magdeburg)," in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie XXI, 155-56; Ancelet-Hustache, Mechtäde de Magdebourg, pp. 365 sqq., which also gives a survey on the literature pro and contra, p. 10; and more recently, Spiess, Ein Zeuge mittelalterlicher Mystik in der Schweiz, pp. 329 sqq. Ed. Boehmer believes that in the Divina Commedia both Mechthildes, of Magdeburg and of Hackebom, are united in one person as Dante's Matelda. "Matelda," in Jahrbuch der deutschen Dante-Gesellschaft, III (1871), 101 sqq. 28 Purgatorio xxvrn. 37 sqq. 2 9 "Medieval Mysticism," in Cambridge Medieval History, VII, 799. 25

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years after his death, some of his theses were condemned by Pope John XXII. 50 Eckhard himself had submitted to the authority of the Holy See and recanted in advance whatever this supreme authority should find unorthodox.31 Grabmann, Eucken, Preger, Cilson and Böhner, and most others, testify to Eckhard's complete loyalty to the church. As in Dante's works, a "Protestant" trend has been noted by some in Master Eckhard's, as, for example, when he speaks of the "universal priesthood" or opposes clericalism and warns his readers not to accept as gospel truth everything the priests propound. Ricarda Huch went so far as to say that as soon as the Germans began to speak German, they spoke as Protestants.32 But the fact is rather that the excellent German of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries proves that Germans did not have to await Martin Luther in order to express themselves in the vernacular. In her chapter on Albertus Magnus, the teacher of St. Thomas, Ricarda Huch makes a truer and more pertinent remark, "Catholicism was unconquerably great as long as it still embraced both Protestantism and mysticism." 33 This statement, of course, cannot be accepted in the sense of condoning heresies, such as the denial of certain sacraments and the like. Prior to the split in the unity of faith, all the possible attitudes of the Christian human mind towards the Triune Godhead moved within the one Catholic sphere of the fullness of the faith. The term "Protestantism" when applied within that undivided epoch of history can only signify an attitude of a more direct relationship of some to God, who is immediate to man through Christ. This is a trend which is thoroughly compatible with Catholic orthodoxy. A glance at some of the orders, notably the Dominicans and Franciscans, will convince us of the wide range allotted to individual freedom within the church catholic. The same is true concerning the position of the Ghibellines versus the Guelfs; both parties, much as they differed in matters of church policies, could still claim loyal sonship in the church as Ecclesia docens. What happened during, and as a consequence of, the Reformation was not only a split in the church organization, but in the religious consciousness 80 In agro dominico (March 27, 1329), in Miibt, ed., Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums und des römischen Katholizismus, p. 220, No. 381. Out of Eckhard's voluminous work only twenty-eight sentences were rejected as liable to unorthodox interpretation—a splendid record of orthodoxy, really, if we consider his preference for the dialectical method and the paradox, which lend themselves so easily to bold and all too pointed formulations. 31 "If anything in my writings or words should be wrong that I am not aware of," he wrote in his Defensorium submitted to an ecclesiastical commission, September 26, 1326, "I am ready at any time to accept the truer sense. 'For we small spirits cannot bear such gigantic ideas and thoughts," as Jerome once said [Epistola LX, in Migne, Latin, XXII, 589] 'and we fail when we aare to undertake what is beyond our strength.' I may be in error, yes; but a heretic I can never be, for the first concerns the intellect, the second is a matter of the will." Daniels, ed., Eine lateinische Rechtfertigungsschrift des Meister Eckhart, in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, XXIII, Heft 5, p. 2. 32 Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation, p. 295. 33 Ibid., p. 232.

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of men. Trends, perfectly wholesome and legitimate as long as they remained inside the great synthesis of the faith and bound by it, became independent, disruptive, and heretical elements, creating mass neuroses comparable to the neurotic effects when psychoanalysis is irresponsibly applied to the individual mind.*4 Lake St. Augustine, Eckhard assumed "two countenances of the soul, one turned towards this world, where it creates virtue and art, the other directed towards God": inferior and superior reason.45 The summit (or profoundest depth) of superior reason is reached in the Seelenfünklein, the spark of the soul, the imago Trinitatis, in reason, will, and memory. Properly understood, there is no pantheism in such a notion, though pantheism is frequently called a typically German aberration. St. Augustine's illumination theory, which influenced Eckhard, as it did so many others, may provide the right solution: any "part truth" presupposes a "total truth," which is God. Of truth, however, there is something in the soul of man. To recognize it means to be in touch with it, to embrace it, to become one with its very essence. Hence, to recognize truth implies a union with the Divine." Therefore, Eckhard could teach that one should not be afraid of God, but should dread only being without Him, for He is truth, and without truth no life or light of the soul is conceivable. The spark of the soul where truth resides is also called casteüum animae, the castle of the soul. (Intravit Jesus in quoddam castellum, is the title of one of Eckhard's most famous sermons. ) In this castle, the soul is ready to receive God—like a virgin who is also woman, pregnant with the Divine. "Our Lord Jesus Christ," he said in the Intravit sermon, "went up into a little castle, wherein He was received by a virgin who was a woman." " In this innermost sanctuary of the soul we partake, by grace, in the triune government of the world; here the Father procreates the Son eternally in the Holy Spirit, Who binds and unites them in eternal synthesis." It was this " It is not Protestantism alone that suffers from having broken away from the living body of the church; Catholicism too is harmed by it, not least because of the fact that its position of defense against liberalizing theologians and ministers has fostered rationalism. Fearful of the reproach of "mysticism," Catholics, like Protestants, are tempted to dress the sublimest mysteries in too rational a garb and to neglect the cultivation of mystic teaching among the people. The reaction has been a flood of "occult" and "magic" literature, both Eastern ana native, forming an amazing contrast to the rationalistic front of our age. Even politics have been invaded by this pseudo mysticism, and in the place of the disciples of Plato, the Areopagite, and St. Augustine we must see the soothsayers, theosophists, and occultists of various degrees as advisers of the modem statesmen. *• Quoted in Pfeiffer, Deutsche Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, II, 110. ** St. Augustine, De utÜUate credendi xv. xxxiii, in Migne, Patroloeiae cursus completus, Latin, XLII, 88: "The wise man is in communion with Cod in sucn a way that there is nothing between to separate them." " "Unser herre lesas Kris tus der gienc ûf in ein bürgelin und wart empfangen von einer juncvTouwen, diu ein wip was." Quint, Die Ueberlief erung der deutschen Predigten Meister Eckeharts, II, 24. " "Diu selbe kraft, der abe ich gesprochen hân, di got inne ist bliiejende und griienende

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tradition which Hegel continued when he recognized the dogma of the Triune Godhead as the very foundation of Occidental Christian philosophy, as the source of the self-consciousness of the human spirit and of the return of this spirit and its self-consciousness into the "spirit which knows of itself." The arguments refuting Kant's doctrine on the limits of what is knowable go back to the Neoplatonic-Augustinian tradition, which Eckhard so forcefully expounds. The Son, the eternal and only perfect image of the Father, partakes in the life of the human spirit. But since all things came into existence through the Son," the inner and the outer world are correlated categories. Therefore, the realm of the knowable is not restricted to the phenomenal world. Through our reason we can penetrate to what is behind the phenomena, the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich). In the castellum animae we may attain to knowledge of the real world, the Ding an sich, by grace and illumination. It is to the same grace that we owe both sensual perception and rational thinking. The Logocentric view, as we have seen, is the Alpha and Omega of mystic philosophy. The same is true of philosophic idealism. The mystics recognized that in Christ the aim of creation is attained—the unity of God and the world. Hence Christ would yet have become man, if Adam had not fallen into sin. It is in this belief that the strongest influence of the Franciscan school appears, as well as its synthesis with Thomism. T h e fall of man," Duns S cotus said, "was not the cause of Christ's predestination. Even if neither man nor the angels had fallen, nor any other men been created besides Christ, Christ would still have been thus predestined." 40 It was not the sin of Adam that caused the Incarnation; rather, his sin was the only thing that might have moved God to revoke His plan for Christ and the creation.41 This view of Christ, not as the atoner only, but as the crown of creation, and also, in His human incarnation, as the first-conceived of the Father, throws a bright and all-pervading light on the philosophy of history. Supreme Reason and Supreme Love become one, as do the inward and the outward way. Another, though less far-reaching, point of contact between the basically Thomistic mystics and Duns Scotus consists in the affinity of their historic and political attitudes. With Duns Scotus, as Rudolf Eucken says, Christianity developed a more markedly positive and historic character; he maintained mit aller siner gotheit und der geist in gote, in dirre selber kraft ist der vater gebemde sinen eineebomen sun als gewaerlîche als in im selber, wan er waerliche lebet in dirTe kraft, und der geist gebirt mit dem vater den selben eingebomen sun und sich selber den selben sun und ist der selbe sun in disem liehte und ist diu wârheit." Ibid. « J o h n 1:1-14. 40

Reportata Parisiensia, Book III, Dist. vu. qu. ii. n. 4, in Opera omnia ( Paris, L. Vivès,

1891-1895), XXIII, 303. 41 Fr. Dominic Unger, O.F.M., "Franciscan Christology; Absolute and Universal Primacy of Christ," Franciscan Studies, XXIII (December, 1942), 428 sqq.

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that the individuality cannot be deduced from the universal; and individual being is considered not a defect, but a perfection. 42 The strong social ethos of St. Thomas, his penetrating analysis of the social obligations and the functions of property, receives a dynamic impulse from the work of the mystics. Their passionate love for the poor—for charity as an obligation—and their attitude toward the attainment of individual and national perfection make them pioneers of the later social legislation of the Church. A Franciscan feeling for nature, for animals, and for all classes of men including the peasants and small people, from whom they borrow their motifs and parables, is characteristic of all of them. In the work of Nicholas of Cusa, this attitude was to attain the form of actual constitutional programs, which, had they been carried out, might have staved off the social and political disintegration of the empire. Johannes Tauler (1300-1361), the "Illuminated Doctor," escaped the misunderstandings to which Eckhard's writings and sermons were exposed. Yet his teachings were basically the same. To him the aim of salvation within the historic process consists in making men free, so that they may once again attain to the image of God in which they were created. Man must become by grace what Christ is by nature, a child of God. 43 Tauler's is the first clear presentation of the dialectical self-movement of the human spirit, which in time to come was to play so important a role in romantic philosophy. Though what he calls the "uncreated foundation" is immanent in the soul, it is not identical with the human ego but is coordinated with it. Man's free will should accept its guidance. Permanent refusal to accept that guidance would mean separation of the soul from this divine ground and therefore eternal suffering. T h e lasting merit of the mystics consists, first, in the synthesis they achieved between Thomism and Scotism ( a point which has scarcely ever been noticed), and, second, that they preserved on the spiritual plane the harmony between empire and church. A philosophy of freedom took shape, founded on Christian universal principles and yet fully conscious of individual responsibility, a philosophy that would weather the storms of the Reformation and the ensuing age of naturalism. 42 Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker; eine Entwicklungsgeschichte des Lebensproblems der Menschheit con Plato bis zur Gegenwart, p. 304. 4 5 Then the soul, "stripped of everything that is not God, is immersed in the abyss of the Godhead; self-existence is lost and gone, as it were, and the soul dwells in God alone, and God, in tum, loves and praises the soul and has His delight in it." First Sermon for Passion Sunday, English translation by Very Rev. Walter Elliott, in The Sermons and Conferences of John Tauler, p. 221. Similarly, Heinrich Suso, who speaks of the "unfathomable abyss of the unknown Godhead, wherein they [the blessed souls] are immersed, overflowed, and blended up, so that they desire to have no other will than God's will, and that they become the very same that God is: in other words, that they may be blessed by grace as He is by nature." Horohgium sapientiae, xn; English, Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, pp. 73-74.

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In the arts, the influence of the mystics on the Cologne school of painting, on the Isenheim Altar of Matthias Grünewald is well known. The German language received a notable impulse from the autobiography of Heinrich Suso (1300-1366), the first to be written in the vernacular.44 Officially, the laws and customs compiled by Eyke von Repgow in the Sachsenspiegel (Saxon Mirror) were still in force. At the diet of 1498, indeed, it was said that one third of the nation lived in accordance with them. In Northern Germany, Eyke's work had the validity of law. But while Eckhard, Tauler, and the other representatives of the spirit proclaimed liberty, love, and union of God's grace, what a change had already taken place on the social and political planest "Before God, the rich and the poor are equal," the Landrecht had proclaimed "man belongs to God alone, but can never belong to other men. Servitude did in truth spring from coercion, captivity, or unjust power. This injustice, now a long-standing custom, is presented as if it were right." 4 " The Golden Bull of Charles IV attempted to bring some order out of the growingly chaotic interrelationships of princes and territorial powers. It is a document that by no means deserves the cheap witticism of Lord Bryce, who said: "He [Charles] legalized anarchy and called it a constitution."47 Upon the promulgation of the bull at Metz on Christmas, 1356, the Dauphin of France and his father, King John II (then in English captivity), expressly recognized all imperial prerogatives.4" The spirit and the letter of the bull testify to the survival of the universal idea in the midst of outward decay. Since the empire embraces many peoples, it said, the children of the electors should be carefully instructed, after their seventh year, not only in their mother tongue, but also in the Italian and Slavic languages. The electors are called "seven lights shining in the unity of the sevenfold Spirit over the sacred empire." They should assemble annually to act "for the good of the empire and of the whole world." The empire is regarded as the common heritage of mankind—which reminds us of Dante—and the electors are en44 It was written down by his spiritual daughter, the nun Elsbeth Stagel (or Staglin) of Töss, to whom he had told this story of his life. See Nikolaus Heller, Des Mystikers Heinrich Seuse Deutsche Schriften, Introduction, pp. xxiii sqq. The authoritative edition of Suso's works is by Karl Bihlmeyer, Heinrich Seuse; Deutsche Schriften (Stuttgart, 1907). 48 in. 42, §1, Sachsenspiegel; Land- und Lehnrecht, edited by Karl August Eckhardt, in Monumenta Germaniae histórica, Fontes iuris Germanici antiqui, new series, I, 129. 49 Ibid., §6. 47 The Holy Roman Empire, p. 250. In view of the fact that such opinions prevailed in the Anglo-Saxon world, the monograph by Father Cerald G. Walsh, S.J., of Fordham University, The Emperor Charles TV, 1316-1378; a Study in Holy Roman Imperialism is especially meritorious. It breathes a true understanding of the supranational idee of Kaisertum and Reich, a thing rare to come upon in our day. 4 e Ranke, Weltgeschichte, Vili, 53. The presence of the Dauphin is mentioned in the bull itself, in the introduction to Tit. XXIV.

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joined to assemble after an emperor's death at Frankfurt and not to depart until they have elected "the head of the world and of the Christian people, namely, the king of the Romans who is to be emperor." We also recognize Dante's spirit in the establishment of right as supreme over might. The Golden Bull (Tit. v) sanctions the ancient custom that even the emperor shall not be judge in his own cause. If any man should feel himself wronged by the emperor he may have recourse to a supreme tribunal, headed by the count palatine, elector of the Rhine, who shall be judge over the matter." In the symbolic titles and offices of the electors, their ancient supranational character finds expression. Of the archbishops-electors, Mainz was to be archchancellor of Germany, Cologne archchancellor of Italy, Trier archchancellor of Burgundy. The four temporal electors—the count palatine, duke of Saxony, margrave of Brandenburg and the king of Bohemia—were recognized as grand seneschal, grand marshal, chamberlain, and cupbearer, respectively. Quasi-sovereign rights were conferred on them. Of papal sanction for the election of the Roman-German emperor-king there was no mention. The process of disintegration into countless territories, each of which would soon claim the quasi-sovereign rights granted to the electors, was unfortunately not arrested. It continued and was accompanied by social oppression of the peasant, "the poor man," as he was generally called. The emperor had been the protector of the people. The powers rising between people and emperor were the historic and social enemies of both. As if to symbolize the decay of the Occident, there were, in 1410, three rival popes and three emperors claiming the thrones of the one pontiff and the one monarch."0 Again history bestowed a grace upon men, as it does from time to time, when everything seems most hopeless. Once more a true emperor arose, in Sigismund of Luxemburg, the younger son of Charles IV. Over the Council of Constance (1414-1417), the greatest European congress ever held, he presided with the ancient rights of the dominus mundi and there overcame the division of church and empire and staved off the danger of an internal "Protestant" landslide. Thirty-three cardinals, three hundred and fifty bishops, five hundred and sixty-four abbots, two thousand doctores, many princes and lords, and perhaps as many as ten thousand knights were " The text of the Golden Bull used was that in Aller des Heiligen Römischen Reichs gehaltener Reichstag Ordnung, Satzung und Abschied. «o Both Pope Gregore XII ( 1406-1415) and Antipope Benedict XIV ( 1394-1424), who had been elected by tne French cardinals after the death of the Antipope Clement VII, were declared deposed by the Council of Pisa in 1409. Both refused to recognize the deposition. Alexander V was elected pope, to be succeeded after his death in 1410, by John XXIII. The king-emperors were Wenceslas (1378-1400), deposed in 1400 because of incompetence but refusing to accept the deposition; Rupert of the Palatinate ( 1400-1410), elected in his stead; ana after Rupert's death in 1410, Sigismund, with the antildng, Jobst of Moravia ( 1410-1411 ), as a rival.

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present. It was a combination of an ecumenical council and an imperial diet, a synthesis of spiritual and temporal power. Sigismund lived in the idea of universal Christendom. He had a lofty conception of his imperial dignity. Combined with it, he held the dignities of king of Bohemia and of Hungary. He was also margrave of Brandenburg, until, at Constance, he invested with this office the Burggrave Frederick of Nürnberg, of the South German house of Hohenzollem. In Paris and London, the emperor exercised functions of an imperial arbiter over the kings, and, as leader and protector of Christendom, he fought valiantly, though unsuccessfully, against the Turks." It has long been regarded as a stain on Sigmund's character that he allowed John Huss, the Czech reformer and nationalist leader, to be delivered to the flames, despite an imperial safe-conduct. In its nineteenth session, the council overruled the emperor in his absence by stating in a formal canon that the safe-conduct should not be interpreted to the prejudice of the spiritual power." Sigismund tried hard and honestly to save Huss, but he finally yielded to the argument that the entire council, whose work was essential for the overcoming of the great schism, would break up if Huss were pardoned. The fact remains that the condemnation of that pure and candid man unchained the first nationalistic revolt of the Bohemians against the empire and against Sigismund personally as king of Bohemia. The Hussite wars, which laid waste parts of Bohemia and ran like fire through Brandenburg to the Baltic coast, foreshadowed not only Luther but also the social movements of Luther's time and the dire events of the Thirty Years War. At the Council of Basel in 1433 the fear was expressed that all peasants, and not only the Bohemians, might become Hussites. Furthermore, the small craftsmen and artisans in the cities, whose economic position was steadily deteriorating, tended towards the later Hussite creed of "apostolic communism," anticlericalism, and hatred for the economic and political power of the priests and bishops. Even in towns like Würzburg and Bamberg, pillars of Catholicism, the small people were found in sympathy with the new movement. After the middle of the sixteenth century, there were constant uprisings of the peasants throughout Southern and Western Germany. A world age approached its end. The proud edifice of the empire crumbled. Contempt for the once honored and exalted position of the clergy became almost general and was combined abroad with a growing contempt for the German nation. The learned Italian Poggio, who had participated in 5 1 Eberhard Windecke, who was in the emperor's suite, reported, "I do not believe that ever a king, prince, or any man was seen to be received with greater splendor than was the Roman King Sigismund by the king of England." Eberhard Windecke, Das Leben König Sigmunds (Leipzig. Dyk, 1886), in Die Geschichtschreiber der deutschen Vorzeit, XV. Jahrhundert, I, 46. 5 2 September 23, 1415. Hermann von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concäium (Frankfurt, Christian Censchius, 1696-1700), rv. viii, p. 522.

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the Council of Constance, wrote that once the Germans had been a valiant people; now they were strong only in eating and drinking. "Are they human beings?" he asked. "Great gods, what sleepy, dumb, snoring creatures they arel Never sober, hateful to God and to men." 53 Another Italian called Germany a den of robbers, with the nobles the greatest robbers of all. Once more one must look to the realm of the spirit in order to perceive the continuity of German destiny, for that period of general political and social disintegration was also a period of artistic and cultural creativeness. Gutenberg's printing press of the middle of the fifteenth century was to lead to a more thorough breakdown of social barriers than any constitutional reforms could accomplish. The painters Hans Baldung-Grien, Matthias Griinewald. Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein; the sculptors and carvers Veit Stoss, Tilman Riemenschneider, and Michael Pacher—all of these notable names were crowded into a few decades late in the fifteenth and early in the sixteenth century. The face of the German towns, the aspect which prior to this war's devastations used to charm the foreigner, was shaped then, with the building of imposing Rathäuser and the timber-framed Fachwerkhäuser of the rising Bürgertum and the guilds, with the setting of fountains in the public squares and market places. Reuchlin and Erasmus, Nicholas of Cusa, Ulrich von Hutten, and Franz von Sickingen belonged to that same generation. The "reformation of head and members" of the empire became the battle cry of the intellectual élite. The reforms would have to cut deep into the diseased organism of the German nation. Otherwise, even though they proved that the heritage of the past was still a creative force, the achievements of the spirit stood upon quicksand. Without political and national regeneration, as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were to prove so frightfully, the realm of the spirit also was in danger of collapse.6* 5 3 Rome, November 11, 1431, in EpistoUie, ed. by Thomas de Toneiiis, I, 366, Book iv, No. 24. 0 4 Frequently periods of cultural greatness coincide with the beginnings of political decadence, but it is a very superficial judgment to deduce from this fact that the aecay or decline of national strength is beneficiai to the development of spiritual values. Spirit and body are interdependent. If the body politic falls to corruption, spiritual life may still flourish for a short while—but it will depart before long, unless there is a national rebirth.

14 THE PROTEST AGAINST HISTORY Should the empire fall, freedom

tvill perish.

PETRARCH TO E M P E R O R C H A R L E S I V ,

1353.

left by Emperor Sigismund was the rise in territorial power of the two houses whose contest for supremacy was to determine the later history of Germany: the Habsburgs in Austria and the Danubian basin, and the Hohenzollem in Brandenburg, the most northerly electorate of the empire. Ranke feels that the creation of the Hohenzollem-Brandenburg power by Sigismund was an act of conscious political purpose and that, on the other hand, without him the Habsburgs would not later have attained the topmost-position in the empire.1 The epoch of Emperor Sigismund can therefore be called a turning point in world history, religiously, culturally, and politically—an era comparable to the age of Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII. If it were reasonable to feel regret over historic developments, we might deplore the fact that Sigismunde heritage passed into the hands of his son-in-law, Albert of Habsburg, and, after the early death of that brilliant prince, to his son, the unworthy Frederick III. Frederick has been compared to one of those huge turtles you may see in a zoo, the sort that cause you to pause and wonder whether the creatures are alive or dead.2 So insensible was he to honor and to the duties of his imperial office that the Kaisertum fell asleep during his all too long life. It was never to reawake to its former importance. Under his reign Constantinople, the last remnant of the Eastern Roman Empire, was allowed to fall to the Turks, an event which brought lasting shame to the historic dignity of Occidental Christendom. Under Frederick III, the De monarchia gave way to the Almanach de Gotha. He raised the international status of his family by well-planned marriages,' and by confirming the "authenticity" of one of the clumsiest—yet in its consequences one of the most far-reaching—forgeries known to history: the so-called Privilegium maius, perpetrated by Duke Rudolf of Austria in the reign of his father-in-law, Charles IV. The Golden Bull of 1356 had not conferred the status of an electorate on the duchy of Austria. Therefore its Habsburg rulers attempted by fraud and usurpation to arrogate to themselves privileges like those enjoyed by the P A R T O F T H E HERITAGE

Weltgeschichte, VIII, 76-77. Huch, Das Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung, p. 65. ' There was a famous distich celebrating the fortunate marriages of the house of Habsburg: Bella gérant alii, tu felix Austria, nube! Quae dat Mars auis, dat tibi regna Venus. 1

2

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electors. Rudolf submitted to Emperor Charles IV five privileges, asking for their confirmation. The most important among them (Privilegium maius) was a falsification of the genuine Consti tulio ducatus Austriae of 1156 (socalled Privilegium minus), with an enormous inflation of the privileges granted by Frederick Barbarossa when he had raised the margraviate of Austria to the rank of a duchy; added to this was a "confirmation" of the Maius by Emperor Frederick II. The third document Rudolf ascribed to Emperor Henry IV. It confirmed two "privileges" allegedly conferred by Julius Caesar and Nero, respectively, on the ruler of the Terra orientalis (a clumsy translation of "Eastern March," the Carolingian name for Austria). The rest were ascribed to King Henry and King Rudolf. Caesar, who in the document gives himself the title of Augustus (in prophetic foresight, obviously, since it was first used in 27 B.C., many years after the death of Julius, by his nephew Caesar Octavianus), and Nero, "friend of the gods and propagator of their faith," ruled that Austria should forever be a free country, exempt from all taxes and tributes. The Privilegium maius exempted Austria from any service to the empire, while the empire obligated itself to protect Austria against any molestation and to make no decisions without Austrian consent. The ruler of that land need not even attend the imperial diets. Should he, however, decide to do so, he was to rank above the other princes, directly beneath the electors, and his title was to be "archduke palatine." He was to be exempt from the jurisdiction of the imperial courts. No fiefs of the empire were to be located in Austria, whose duke would enjoy complete sovereignty. And so on.4 Charles IV, a well-educated man, was not deceived by these brazen forgeries. Yet to remove all doubt, he sent the "documents" to Petrarch, whose expert critique is valuable as being the first based on the internal textual evidence of a document, and is amusing in the sovereign irony and scorn shown in unveiling the forgeries. They are so badly done, Petrarch wrote to the emperor, that they are nauseating.' This must also have been the emperor's opinion, for even before he received Petrarch's opinion he forced Rudolf to renounce the usurped title of "archduke palatine." * He had to promise not to use it again.7 Then, at the • These documents, printed from the originals in the Kaiserliches Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, were published by W. Wattenbach, "Die österreichischen Freiheitsbriefe; Prüfung ihrer Echtheit und Forschungen über ihre Entstehung" in Archiv für Kunde österreichischer Geschichtsquellen, VIII (1852), 108-19. • Milan, March 21, 1361. In Petrarcas Briefwechsel mit deutschen Zeitgenossen, edited by Paul Piur and Konrad Burdachs, in Forschungen zur Geschichte der deutschen Bildung, VII, 114-19, No. 23. Petrarch, ridiculing the pompous style, quotes some genuine letters of Caesar in comparison; derides the use of the title of "Augustus"; points out that Austria, as seen from Rome, is north, not east; asks why, if there was such a man as the "uncle" on whom Caesar supposedly conferred Austria, he is never mentioned elsewhere; and concludes that the obvious and puerile falsification is of very recent date. • Huber and Redlich, Geschichte Oesterreichs, II, 265. 1 September 5, 1360. Huber, Ueber die Entstehungszeit der österreichischen Freiheits-

THE PROTEST AGAINST HISTORY 159 Diet of Nürnberg, Charles conferred Austria on him as a fief in the traditional form, without any regard to the special honors and privileges Rudolf had formerly claimed." When later he lapsed once more, the emperor rebuked him and admonished him to desist from using "any such imperial or royal honors, which are unseemly for a duke of Austria." * These "privileges," then, which were to assure the preëminence of the house of Habsburg, Frederick III confirmed.10 In this way the Habsburg princes became "archdukes," and the legend of their ancienneté, which still impresses certain modem politicians, first entered history. During the reign of Frederick III, who failed to assert the imperial prerogatives in so far as they did not pertain directly to family aggrandizement, Guelf influence was supreme. The curia well nigh assumed the rank of partner in a coregency. It drew all secular questions before its tribunal, and handed out hundreds of German bishoprics and other spoils to Italian prelates. Ban and interdict were used so liberally that they lost their former effectiveness. Between 1429 and 1500 five major indulgence expeditions were undertaken in the electorate of Brandenburg alone, each with the usual fund-raising campaign. Popular imagination, of course, did its part to exaggerate the sums that flowed to Rome, particularly when social misery in Germany was mounting. Yet in spite of its unprecedented secular influence, the papacy, too, had declined in prestige since the fall of the Hohenstaufen. When the historic foundations of the universal Christian world were questioned, the papacy, though it had triumphed in the struggle against the empire, became itself subject to doubts and attacks. In a world where Dante's monarch had yielded place to Macchiavelli's prince, respect for the spiritual lumen lighted by God for the guidance of mankind could hardly fail to decline. In the general desire for German and imperial reforms, two princes stood in the forefront of public interest. One was King George Podiebrad of Bohemia, a Czech nobleman who by courage and statesmanship had wrested the throne of his country from the Habsburgs. One of the most outstanding sons of the Czech nation, he intended to reach for the imperial purple. He thought in terms of a European confederation of all princes, and he hoped to expel the Turks from Constantinople. He planned to make himself emperor of an Occidental realm to be united once more, and he could hope to find support from several of the German princes who wished to see him as coregent at the side of the inert Frederick III. briefe, in Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, XXXIV ( I860), 44. 8 November 11, 1360. Werunsky, Geschichte Kaiser Karls IV, III, 229-35. 9 Quoted in Wattenbach, "Die österreichischen Freiheitsbriefe; Prüfung ihrer Echtheit und Forschungen über ihre Entstehung," in Archiv für Kunde österreichischer Geschichtsqueìlen, VIII (1852), 102. 10 January β, 1453. In 1530, Charles V forbade the courts ever to request that the originals of these documents be submitted. Ibid., p. 84.

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The other was Frederick the Victorious, count palatine, elector of the Rhine ( 1425-1476), "a mighty man, well versed in the art of war." 11 He was a grandson of the Roman-German king Rupert of the Palatinate, Sigismunde predecessor; his mother was Mechthilde of Savoy, a close relative of Antipope Felix V, who had been Duke Amadeus of Savoy. Frederick, who was at first regent for his late brother's small son with the consent of the dowager electress, the pope, and all electors, later took over the reins of government. An outstanding ruler, he reformed and modernized the court system and the administration, and his statutes for the University of Heidelberg, the capital of the Palatinate, were to have a decisive influence on the later history of the German universities. After the fall of Constantinople, the Turkish danger to Europe was mounting, but the emperor proved incapable of dealing with it. Frederick the Victorious realized that the empire was in need of fundamental reforms if it was to be strong enough to repel the Turkish onslaught. Yet nothing prevailed against the obstinacy of the emperor, who even tried to prevent the meeting of the Diet at Nürnberg, which Frederick proposed to solve these problems. At this diet (1456), which was attended by papal legates, Frederick appeared in person and was to be elected Roman king. But the electors could not agree among themselves. Thereupon, Frederick threw his support to King George Podiebrad when that ruler advanced his claim to the imperial throne. To protect his nephew's right of succession, the count palatine had promised to remain single, but later he was released from the pledge. In 1472, he married the beautiful Klara Dett, a patrician's daughter from Augsburg. She bore him a son, Frederick of Scharffeneck, who died at the age of sixteen, as canon of Speyer and Worms. In 1476, the year Frederick the Victorious died, he had another son, Ludwig of Bavaria, lord of Scharffeneck, who was vested with the county of Loewenstein and, in 1494, became a count of the Sacred Roman Empire. A portrait of Ludwig by Hans Baldung-Grien in the Deutsche Museum in Berlin shows a countenance with traces of melancholy and suffering. The forehead over his long, hooked nose, the heavy eyelids, and the firmly closed mouth seem to express the conflict natural to a life between two world ages. In 1524, a year before his death, he joined Franz von Sickingen and Ulrich von Hutten in the revolt of the nobility against the oppressive intermediary princely rulers and for a strong imperial power. He felt deeply the need for reform in the midst of decay all around him. Then, as now, a historic epoch was drawing towards its close, and as today, oppression and a feeling of shame over the state of things in Germany were rife. « Ranke, Weltgeschichte, Vili, 122.

THE PROTEST AGAINST HISTORY 161 "O Germany!" exclaimed the poet and humanist Sebastian Brant, who was at times adviser to Emperor Maximilian. "Wrap thyself in mourning, for the scepter will be taken from thy hands. Who will lend tears to my eyes to bewail the fall of the ReichF"12 In a letter to the humanist Konrad Peutinger, he wrote: "There will come, I fear, not better times but worse. . . . Long did I weep over the fate of the Reich; now I have scarcely a tear left, for I perceive how everything proceeds with iron necessity." " Like many other leading minds of his generation, Sebastian Brant had studied the work of the famous jurist Peter von Andlau. The chief of these, the Libelltis de Caesarea monarchia, struck a Dantean note in a Macchiavellian time. His young students must have had an almost uncanny feeling when they heard him quote Virgil's verse "Imperium oceano famam qui terminet astris" as perpetually valid for the empire, which was declining before their very eyes. That states and nations had broken away, Andlau taught, was a fact, but not a right. With the end of the Sacred Roman Empire, the end of the world would come, and the reign of Antichrist would begin—words spoken as parable, of course, but showing insight into the nature of organized mankind, which cannot be rent without destruction of its spirit. During the same epoch, Erasmus of Rotterdam outlined his plan for averting war: each state of the empire should be guaranteed a well-defined territory; no aggrandizement, separate treaties, or antiquated claims should be recognized, and all Christian states should form one great federation.14 His Dutch homeland was still part of the empire and, though estranged from it in many ways, still retained for it an historic, national, and spiritual affinity. When his enemies made it impossible for him to remain at Louvain, he settled at Basel, at another frontier but still within the empire. Erasmus' conception of Europe as an harmonious order, instead of the anarchy that then existed, was close to that of Nicholas of Cusa. Bom in 1401 as son of a poor fisherman on the Moselle, Nicholas Cusanus ran away from home at the age of twelve or fourteen. A count of Manderscheid took him under his protection and sent him to good schools. He studied law, natural sciences, and, later, theology at Padua and Heidelberg. In 1432 he took part in the Council of Basel as a strong proponent of the reform party. 12 "De corrupto ordine vivendi pereuntibus," Figura celi MCCCCCIII, in F. Zamcke, ed., Sebastian Brants Narrenschiff, p. 124. See also chapter 99 in the English translation by Edwin H. Zeydel, The Ship of Fools, p. 320. 13 Strassburg, July, 1504. Konrad Peutinger, Briefwechsel, ed. by Erich König (Munich, C. H. Beck, 1923), pp. 3S-34. 14 See especially his Querela pacts ( Opera omnia, TV, 625-42), and the Institutio principis christiani (ibid., pp. 561-612), dedicated to Charles V, of which he also sent a copy to Henry VIII (September 9, 1517; ibid., Vol. Ill, Part 1, pp. 2θ3-β4, No. 268). See also De bello Turds inferendo consultatio, ibid., V, 345-68. l i i e r e is an English translation of the Querela pacts, by Vicesimus Knox, The Complaint of Peace (London, 1795).

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THE PROTEST AGAINST HISTORY Later he was sent to Constantinople to negotiate the reunion of the Eastern and Western churches. In 1450 he became bishop of Brixen, in the Tirol, and was made a cardinal. Fourteen years later he died. The sources of Cusa's philosophy are Neoplatonic; his closest spiritual kinsmen are the earlier German mystics.15 Underlying his very practical suggestions for a reformation of the imperial constitution (in his De concordantia catholica) is his view of the universe. The world, he teaches in De docta ignorantia, can exist only as an organic unity. No one thing can exist without all others, none could remain in existence without God. The infinite gap between the created world and the infinite God is bridged by Christ, in whom the absolute is wedded to the subjective. He is supreme perfection and He took on Himself deepest humiliation; hence, through Him and Him alone can man attain to the Father. But since individual man cannot achieve equality with the God-Man, the church was instituted, the concordance of all men, the mystical body of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit. The more mankind is united and the more nearly perfect that union is, the closer will man come to Christ, the crown of the universe. Organized world society is mankind's temporal body. Church and empire are its two natural components, different in scope and purpose but ordained towards the same end. In the stage of historic development reached in his own time, Cusa felt, reform had become imperative for both church and empire. For the empire he suggested a constitution endowed with courts of law and a diet which would admit representatives of the classes below the nobility. The empire should be organized in administrative units, and all internal feuds outlawed. The imperial power, he clearly understood, derived from the people, for the electors received their privilege of voting from the concordance of the citizens. Only a strengthening of the imperial authority could prevent the disintegration of the whole. One reason for the decay of the empire he signalized as the hereditary principle for territorial offices and for the titles attached to them. This principle (essentially non-Christian, I would hold, because sonship under Christ, who liberated mankind from the scourge of blood and race, is always spiritual ) had led to the prevailing anarchy, which could be brought back to order only by a reestablished central authority. A standing army should be at the disposal of the emperor, who should also be independent of the princes in financial matters. Nicholas of Cusa believed that for all organic bodies coordination, not 15 While continuing the school of mystic philosophy, Cusanus at the same time went back to the Creek philosophers, particularly Pythagoras and Socrates. As the title of his main work, De docta ignorantia, suggests, he expressly claimed for his philosophy the Socratic motto, "I know that I know nothing." He quoted Pythagoras on the argument that the Absolute must be threefold and eternal: "Unity, equality, and connection are one. And this is that very threefold unity which Pythagoras, the first of all philosophers, the glory of Italy and Greece, held up to adoration." De docta ignorantia ι. vii, edited by E. Hoffmann and R. Klibansky, in Nicolai de Cusa opera omnia, I, 16. For Cusanus' ideas of political reform see De concordantia catholica, ibid., Vol. XIV, especially Book m.

THE PROTEST AGAINST HISTORY 163 centralization, was the principle of life. This led him to teach, a hundred years before Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium celestium, in 1543, that the earth could not stand fixed in the universe, but must be one star in the midst of others.1· To Sigismund he appealed in the hope of having his political ideas put into practice, but the duties confronting the emperor were almost superhuman as they were. Like many other men of genius, who have combined the knowledge of the right solution of difficulties and the wise realization that a declining era must of necessity sink to its own destruction, Cusanus knew that his inspired vision would be without avail. "One will seek the empire among the Germans," he wrote, "and will no longer find it. Strangers will come and take away our soil, which we ourselves have divided, preparing the way for its serfdom under foreign nations." 17 In 1493, the year of Columbus's second voyage, Maximilian, the last emperor of a realm undivided in faith, ascended the throne.1" A knightly figure, he possessed a simple majesty but not the iron grip his iron age required. Yet important reforms were introduced in his reign. In 1495 at the Diet of Worms perpetual public peace was proclaimed. A supreme court, the Reichskammergericht, was established and had, at least in theory, universal jurisdiction.1® (It was to function till the time of Goethe, who worked there as a young man. ) 20 Now that our own day has seen a revival of the conviction that interstate arbitration is necessary, this precedent of an international court system in an earlier period of rising statism has gained timely interest. Germany then consisted of two hundred and forty "states," not counting minor domains. The changing conditions of the era are shown significantly in the fact that the term "state" itself comes from Macchiavelli's writing. In the new world of that day the supreme court would have required in order to enforce its decisions an imperial power as effective as Nicholas Cusanus had suggested. Within this monstrous agglomerate of multistate anarchy, German affairs were further complicated by the readiness of the princes to accept bribes from foreign potentates for services promised or rendered against Germany. If those services were not compensated with gold, they were paid for by patches of land taken from other German princes or cities with the permis1« Ibid., π. xi; p. 100.

Quoted in Huch, Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation, p. 390. "The noble Maximilian,/ He merits well the Roman crown," were the words with which he was greeted by Sebastian Brant, his ardent admirer and poetic herald, in the Narrenschiff, published in 1494. English translation by Edwin H. Zeydel, The Ship of Fools, p. 320. 1 9 Landfrieden zu Worms (August 7, 1495) and Reichskammergerichts-Ordnung (same date) in Aller des Heiligen Römischen Reichs gehaltener Reichstag Ordnung, Satzung und Abschied, pp. 23 sqq., 18 sqq. « Dichtung und Wahrheit, ra. xii, in Goethes Werke, Erste Abteilung, XXVIII, 124 sqq. 17

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síon of the foreign powers. The corruption of German leaders was for centuries to be a valuable political asset for the other European powers. France, England, Russia, Sweden, and other countries always found willing instruments for their policies in Germany itself. From the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century, Tidéologie qui excuse was called deutsche Libertät. It meant the liberty of the princes from emperor and empire. Yet in Napoleon's time, they much too willingly gave him what they had steadily denied to the German central authority, because he had so many grand ducal and royal titles as well as territorial spoils to hand out. Except for the tragic course followed by the Polish nobility in the eighteenth century when they led their country to ruin, no history is more shameful and petty than that of the German states and princes. Their wars were mainly robberies, their military achievements the conquest of bits of territory from neighboring principalities. Their grand policy was the sly plotting of new breaches of faith, and their statesmanship exhausted itself in weighing the possibilities as to who would reward treachery with a higher fee. England had already started on her path to a world empire, and the English nobility had set forth on the seven seas to conquer India and wide dominions on all the coasts of the globe. Meanwhile Germany was eagerly lacerating herself, inviting the cooperation of anyone who was willing to buy a pound of flesh of the national body, asking only that he return a few ounces of the spoils to the vendor. Maximilian died before he could realize that the hammer strokes of Martin Luther, nailing his ninety-five theses on the portals of the Schlosskirche at Wittenberg in 1517, would resound around the world. Luther is among those whose history, if it is not limited to mere outward dates, can never be written with complete objectivity. The reason lies not only in the political, philosophical, and religious attitudes of the writers, which necessarily influence their evaluations, but at least as much in Luther's own personality. The problem remains: Which aspects of this many-sided figure are most significant? Is it the devout and overscrupulous Augustinian monk of his earlier years or the heretic of a later time? The man who declared that he would submit to the authority of an ecumenical council or the subverter of the authority of all of them? Is it the Luther who preached evangelical freedom and apostolic justice or the tool of the princes who in 1525 admonished them to exterminate the revolutionary peasants? Is it the Luther whose masterful German translation of the Bible gave to the people, along with the word of God, the modern national language or the Luther whose later writings, such as Against the Papacy, Instituted by the Devil and Against the Jews and Their Lies, are almost unparalleled in vituperation and coarseness? Is it the faithful believer in the pure Word or the man who added to the text of Holy Writ to bring out his point of justification by

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faith "alone"? Finally, is it the Luther who set out to free the Germans from "Romish servitude" and to reestablish the Invisible Church or the Luther who delivered them to the servitude of their own and foreign despots and opened the way to the narrow intolerance of preachers and quarrelsome pastors and to state control of religious life? Within our fundamental thesis on universalism versus nationalism, Luther holds a peculiar place. The complaints of the Germans against the curia, as we have seen, were real and substantial. The period when the papacy was at Avignon had contributed to further distrust. To the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and perhaps to all educated circles, the stale scholastic casuistics (against which Nicholas of Cusa had fought), the increased power of the inquisition, and the general political disintegration, accentuated by clerical interference, had come to be regarded as intolerable. Even the great Reuchlin, a scholar of unimpeachable religious and moral integrity, had run into serious trouble with the ecclesiastical tribunals and into danger of burning at the stake for refusing to yield to a campaign against all Hebrew writings, which had been instigated by one Johannes Pfefferkorn, a baptized Jew." It is understandable that the prostration of Germany should have led to "national" reaction, the first in German history to deserve the name. It is also understandable that in view of the curial power over German affairs a movement against the curia should have become identified with the "national" cause, and vice versa. In the lay world the Franconian knight Ulrich von Hutten was among the earliest and weightiest spokesmen of the cause. When he abandoned Latin and wrote in German about the grievances 21

2 1 Romans 3:28. Arbitramur en im fusti/icari hominem per fidem line operibus legis, which is literally: "Therefore we hold that a man is justified by faith without the works of the Law." Luther translated: "So halten wyrs nu, das der mensch gerechtfertiget werde, on zu thun der werck des gesetzs, alleyn durch den glawben" ( Werke, Die deutsche Bibel, VII, 38), which is, "Therefore we hold that a man is justified without doing the works of the Law, by faith alone." Luther's version is of course much more pointed than the original, and this was bound to provoke strong criticism, all the more so because the passage concerned one of the cardinal points of Luther's theses. Here is his own apologia in his Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen: "I knew well that the Latin and Greek texts do not have the word sola or solum, and this the papists need not have taught me. It is true that these four letters sola are not written in the text, which letters those asses stare at like cows at a new gate. They do not see that it [the translation] still gives the meaning of the text, and if one wants to render it in a clear and powerful German it [the word atone] must be there. For I wanted to speak German, not Latin or Greek, for it was my purpose in making the translation to speak German. But this is the way of our German language that if there is estion of two things, one of which is affirmed, the other denied, one uses the word

Xne besides not, or no." ( Werke, Vol. XXX, Part 2, pp. 636-37. ) However, this argument

is more strong-worded than cogent, for one may or may not add the word allein in such a case in German, depending only on how strongly one wishes to stress the point. 2 2 "A man who, when he was baptized," the Jesuit Joseph von Hartzheim remarks about him, "developed a reproachable fanaticism witn regard to the writings of the Jews, which he was anxious to see destroyed." Bibliotheca Coloniensis (Cologne, Thomas Odendall, 1747), p. 192.

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of his people, scourging German dissension and clerical arrogance, the youth of the universities, who were already a potent factor in German life, listened eagerly to his words. The printed word had gained a tremendous power over an awakening generation thirsting for instruction and information; in Germany it sounded the fanfare of revolt. Hutten's fight against a blood-stained German despot, the duke of Württemberg, greatly enhanced his prestige as upholder of true German liberty against the arbitrary rule of the princes. The book in which Hutten fulminated most violently against the princes has been lost; only its motto is known. But that motto has since Schiller's revolutionary drama Die Räuber become proverbial: In tyrannos! In 1512 Pope Julius II sought to forestall the rising demand for a reform council by calling a council himself. Neither Emperor Maximilian nor France nor England sent delegates. Only Italian prelates were present, staunch Guelfs who even went so far as to reaffirm the unfortunate political tenets of the Bull Unam Sanctam of 1302, with its theory of absolute papal supremacy over the temporal power. The Lateran Council dealt also with the moral betterment and the theological status and education of the clergy, but the German grievances were completely ignored. In 1517, Pope Leo X, the humanist Medici, closed the council, apparently convinced that he had triumphed over all attempts to restrict the curial power by national or ecumenical councils. It was in the same year that Martin Luther nailed his theses on the portals of the church at Wittenberg. Probably Leo X never quite comprehended the world meaning of this and the events that followed. A vague offer of a cardinal's hat for Luther; then, in 1520, the Bull Exsurge Domine, which threatened the ban against him, and finally his excommunication on January 2,1521, 23 were the only measures the curia could think of to counter the most serious danger in centuries. At first the theses looked like nothing more than a scholarly invitation to further discussion. The administration of indulgences was in the hands of the Dominicans, and when indulgences were attacked they reacted sharply against the Augustinian. A welcome quarrel between two orders, viri obscuri both of them, thought the humanists (Hutten among them) with a smile —let them destroy each other! But then the theses were translated into German and in no time had flown all over the land. Of course, the masses of the people hardly understood the subtle theological points of argument on indulgences, Purgatory, the remission of sins, the justification by faith, etc. But so much they understood: under the veil of Luther's respectful and reverent language, which acquitted the pope of all responsibility for the money business carried on in his name, someone had had the courage to stand up against the power before which princes and emperors had bowed. « BuUarlum magnum Romanum, V, 748 sqq., 761 sqq.

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Luther's further writings also found an understanding audience. There was his appeal to the German nobility; the knights and minor territorial lords took it up and interpreted it in their own way. 24 To the doctrine of universal priesthood and his teaching on the impossibility of conquering concupiscence; many clerics and nuns were induced to break their vows and leave the monasteries. The peasants, the most miserable of the miserable, understood Luther's doctrines of freedom and Christian brotherhood in a revolutionary sense. Even the princes soon began to realize that the Augustinian, by attacking the universal power of the church, had furnished them with arguments for throwing off all spiritual control and for reducing the power of that other universal institution, the empire. Ecclesiastical properties and domains, if secularized, would increase the property of the princes and swell their unrestricted power over their subjects. In 1519, Maximilian's young grandson, Charles V, after shameful bargaining on the part of the German princes ( the campaign cost the emperor more than 900,000.gold guilders) was elected to the throne. The electors of Trier and Brandenburg were completely under the golden influence of King Francis I of France, the other candidate. 55 King Henry VIII of England had also competed for the throne. If the disgraceful financial angle is ignored, it is obvious that the candidacy of the English and French rulers shows conclusively that the German kingship was still looked upon as integrally united to the universal office and as supranational in character. In territorial power Charles V surpassed all his predecessors. From his mother, Joanna, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon and Castile, he had inherited the crown of Spain and its vast American dominions; he was king of Naples and Sicily, lord of the Netherlands and Burgundy, and heir to all the Austrian domains of the Habsburgs. In 1526 and 1527, the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary fell to his brother Ferdinand; they were to remain with the house of Habsburg till 1918. But the empire which vaulted over all these lands was no longer the universal golden dome; it had become only a dynastic superstructure belonging to the Habsburg princedom. It is said that upon Charles's realm the sun never set. Nevertheless, the sun of unity and faith was already low in the 2< An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation von des christlichen Standes Besserung (1520) in Werke; kritische Gesamtausgabe, VI, 381-469; English translation by C. M. Jacobs, An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate, in Works of Martin Luther, II, 55-164. 25 Public opinion favored Charles and turned against the princes who tried to exploit their electoral rights for financial gains. Thus the final and unanimous election of Charles was due, last but not least, to the firm attitude of the proud and warlike citizens of the Swiss Confederacy, who would not accept a French king on the imperial throne. The Swiss wrote to the electors that they had never broken away from the empire, as symbolized by the imperial eagles in their coat of arms; for six hundred years the Kaisertum had been with the Germans, and with them it ought to remain. Switzerland, Die eidgenössischen Abschiede, 1245-1798, ed. by Anthon Philipp Segesser, Vol. III, Part 2, pp. 1146, 1150-52.

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evening sky, even when the emperor was hastening back from Spain to receive the Carolingian-Salian crown at Aachen. Charles's attitude at the Diet of Worms in 1521 is fully understandable. To him, Luther could be nothing but a rebel and a heretic who by denying the supreme jurisdiction of the papacy in matters spiritual was destroying the very foundations of the millennial order spiritually as well as politically. By necessity he had to put Luther and his followers under the ban of the empire. Poets, writers, painters, printers, and merchants were enjoined against lending any more support to the movement, in order that "the illustrious art of printing be used solely for good and praiseworthy ends."2* Luther was referred to as a devil rather than a man—one who had gathered all heresies condemned in previous centuries into one stinking cesspool. His doctrines were declared subversive of all order and leading to license and a bestial life. The last Caesar of the Christian world, Charles, had the choice only of being the Catholic emperor or not being emperor at all. Like those before him, he could struggle against the papacy as a political and particularistic power; but he could not abandon it as a divine institution. Nor can he personally be reproached for his dynastic policy, which was bound to unchain Protestant-territorial reaction. As heir to all his kingdoms, he was bound by necessity to lean on such power as he could derive from them, for in Germany he had no assurance of the loyalty or support of the Catholic princes. The betrayal of the empire and the German kingship in 1552 must be entered high in any list of acts of political treason that had lasting results. In that year the Protestant Duke Maurice of Saxony, the Hohenzollem Elector Albrecht Alcibiades, and other princes concluded with the Catholic King Henry II of France, a ruthless persecutor of Protestantism, a treaty for the protection of German Protestant Libertät. In return for money and soldiers to be used against the empire, they sold him the "vicarship" over the German cities Metz, Toul, Verdun, and Cambrai. Thereby they revived the problem of Alsace-Lorraine, which has cost so much German and French blood ever since the fatal Treaty of Verdun of 843. This work of treason foreshadowed the events of the Thirty Years War, when, for the sake of that same Libertät, Richelieu, the scourge of the French Huguenots, was invited to become the protector of the German Protestants. As an historic force, Protestantism has had from its beginning an antinational influence in Germany, even though it greatly emphasized "German" values as opposed to "Roman" influence. The heritage of the Guelfs—the territorial powers which opposed the universal authority and were, therefore, if not per intentionem at least accidentaliter antinational—fell mainly to the Protestant German princes. Moreover, Protestantism necessarily dimmed the consciousness for Occidental historic continuity, because the « Deutsche Reichstagsakten, Jüngere Reihe, II, 657, No. 92.

THE PROTEST AGAINST HISTORY 169 new creed, to justify itself, interpreted the centuries of the one Catholic church and the one catholic empire as belonging to the world of "Romish wickedness." This is a phenomenon very similar to historic development which came after the founding of the United States. Europeans sometimes erroneously assume that Americans, because they are of European descent (as all Protestants are of Catholic descent), must be conscious of that heritage. Generally speaking, a rupture of historic consciousness has taken place as a consequence of America's breaking away from its European foundations. Not genetically, but psychologically, the United States is indeed as "new" or "young" as the German Protestants are in relation to historic Germany— perhaps the United States is even more freshly new, since between Protestant and Catholic Germany more ties have been preserved than between America and Europe. Whatever the emphasis on the Deutschtum may have been, however, it is historically incorrect to regard the Reformation as the source of German nationalism. Such ideas may have propaganda value and may create an appearance of profundity ("From Luther to Hitler" has become a slogan of the literary and pseudo-philosophical market place), but to the scholar of history and philosophy who studies the facts they reveal themselves as nonsense. The Peasants War of 1525 is the first social revolution of modern times. There had been many uprisings before, but all of a local nature. In 1525 the movement took on a religious philosophy and became general. Many of its leaders, in Alsace, in Franconia, in Swabia, and all over Southern and Southwestern Germany were clerics who had embraced the Lutheran creed. Another revolutionary impulse came from the free imperial knights, the estate of reichsunmittelbaren nobles, who were being crushed by the weight of the territorial princes. It was in the castle of their champion, Franz von Sickingen, that Protestant preachers, outlawed by the edict of Worms, had found shelter and comfort. The knights were the first to advance the revolutionary demand that the huge ecclesiastical estates should be secularized by the empire (not by the princes!), to be used for care of the poor, for schools, and for a standing imperial army in which the knights would serve. For a brief hour of history, as Friedrich Engels said, the nobility was the nationally representative estate. Engels's work on the Peasants War (written in 1850), though it has the heavy bias of his materialistic philosophy of history and his interpretation of events from the angle of class struggle, is an excellent analysis. In the parallels it draws between the movement and modern social problems, it is today less outdated than ever. "The stronger were the imperial power and the unity of Germany, and the weaker and less numerous the princes," Engels states, "the more power-

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ful would the nobility become" " — a logical chain that was equally true in reverse. T h e greater the power of the nobility, the more united Germany became. The interests of the nobles coincided with the interests of Germany and of the empire as a whole. Therefore, the estate of the nobility possessed the historic mandate of the hour. They were, as Engels says, nationally representative; by promoting its own aims and ambitions, their class promoted at the same time the ends of the historic process. The class was, therefore, for the time "world-historic," since it filled the definition applied to "worldhistoric individuals" and there is no reason for denying the term to estates or classes. Such a view has in it nothing peculiar to Marxism, nor does it imply economic determinism; classes and groups, like individuals, serve the designs of history. "It was for that reason," Engels continues, "that the knighthood was generally dissatisfied with the pitiful political situation in Germany, with the powerlessness of the empire in foreign affairs . . . with the intrigues of foreign powers inside of Germany and with the plottings of German princes with foreign countries against the power of the empire. It was for that reason, also, that the demands of the nobility instantly assumed the form of a demand for the reform of the empire, the victims of which were to be the princes and the high clergy." The strengthening of the imperial authority was historically necessary for the continued existence of the form of the Occidental idea. But for that purpose, at that particular hour, national unification was indispensable, lest the physical body of the idea should dissolve altogether. Thus, the national estate was at the same time imperial. Sickingen was killed in 1523, when his castle at Landstuhl was being besieged by the electors of Trier and of the Rhine and the landgrave of Hesse. Had he abandoned his friends, he could have made his peace with the princes. He did not, and two years later, we find many of those friends among the leaders of the peasants. 29 Had the peasants and the nobility been able to overcome class prejudice and unite to win the support of the cities, the destiny of Europe might have been changed. But though they were natural allies, mutual distrust between the three estates was too great, and the leaders who joined the peasants as individuals did not have the strength to carry their social peers along. This unhappy division had proved fatal to the revolt of the knights, for when the fighting started they received no aid from peasants or cities. In 1525 it proved fatal to the peasants. Engels makes approving mention of the Loewensteins, sons of Ludwig of Bavaria, as friends and leaders of the peasants. The counts of Wertheim « Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, p. 79; English translation by M. J. Olgin, The Peasant War in Germany, p. 84. Later quotations are from pp. 79-80, 17-18; English, pp. 94-95, 33. 2 8 Among them were, for example, the counts of Loewenstein, a count of Zollem, a Fürstenberg, and others.

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also receive his implicit praise." This mingling of class interests may seem strange, for it was apparently to the detriment of their own class that these and other Frankish and Swabian dynasts sided with the revolutionary peasants. But after the defeat of the nobility, the national and imperial mandate of history rested with the peasants, and the Ghibelline mentality often triumphed over class interest. The case is not different today, and the same process reappears with only the names altered, as members of the privileged classes embrace the cause of the oppressed. The "poor men" were descended from the free Germanic small landholders of old. In a way all the great dynastic houses had also risen from this same estate. The emperor, heir of the tribunate of the Roman people, representative of the Christian-Germanic idea of mutual social obligations among free and fundamentally equal men, was, so to speak, the "Supreme Peasant." His land was the Germanic kingdom, the land of the free, while his consecrated imperial dignity made him the source of justice and the guardian of fraternity. The great of the realm, the proceres—knights, barons, counts, princes— were the higher steps in the ascending order of the pyramid. The whole pattern after a fashion mirrored the Christian concept of the hierarchies, with upper ranks ministering to the people and themselves a part of the people, and at the same time servants of the "Supreme Peasant." To turn against the people was an implicit revolt against the consecrated majesty of the Roman-German emperor, whom they thereby separated from the base of his all-pervading rights and duties toward history and toward those whose sacrosanct tribune he was. The peasants' charter was the celebrated "Twelve Articles,"30 a moderate and statesmanlike program for constitutional and social reform. The articles included demands for: abolition of servitudes, of the hunting andfishingrights of the nobility, and of unjust feudal services and dues; regulation of agricultural wages; impartial courts, and punishment of crime only in accordance with the written law; obedience to the temporal authority only in so far as 21 The counts of Wertheim, related to Conrad I, the first German king after the extinction of the Carolingians, had traditionally stood by the emperors. They were Ghibellines throughout the centuries, and in perpetual opposition to the bishops of Wiiraburg, who as dukes of Franconia claimed rights of overlordsriip incompatible with the Wertheim's reichsunmittelbarem status, until Emperor Ludwig IV assured their complete independence from the bishops. Wertheim (on the Main) fell to the house of Loewenstein not long afterward, when Ludovicus II ( 1530-1Θ11 ), imperial chancellor under three emperors, manied the heiress to that county. 90 Dye grundtlichen und rechten hauptartikel aller baurschafft unnd hyndersessen der geistlichen und weltlichen oberkayten, von welchen sy sich beschwert vermeinen. See Baumann, Die zwölf Artikel der oberschwäbischen Bauern, 152S, pp. 129-3Θ. An English translation will be found in University of Pennsylvania, Department of History, Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History (published 1895-), Vol. II.

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it was not contrary to conscience and the law of God; and a social and political order conforming to the precepts of the Bible. Some leaders went further. They demanded a thorough reform of the empire, secularization of ecclesiastical property and dominions, trial by lay juries and reform of the court system (such as Nicholas of Cusa had sought), unity of weights and measures, and above all, a strong imperial power to protect the common man. Like so many other European revolutions, the Peasants War broke out in the month of March. It met with great sympathy among the lower classes of the towns and the cities; indeed, many believed that the townsmen had commenced the revolt with the aim of transforming the empire into a federal democratic republic. We need not go into the details of the revolution, which soon swept over the whole of Southern, Western, and Central Germany, parts of Switzerland, and the domains of Austria. From the Rhine to the Adriatic Sea, Germany stood in flames. Engels rightly says: "The German people are by no means lacking in revolutionary tradition. There were times when Germany produced characters that could match the best men in the revolutions of other countries; when the German people manifested an endurance and energy which, in a centralized nation, would have brought the most magnificent results; when the German peasants and plebeians were pregnant with ideas and plans which often made their descendants shudder." Soon after the first bloodshed Luther issued his famous manifesto admonishing the princes to show no mercy, but to shoot, slay, pierce, bludgeon, and massacre the "murderous and rebellious peasants."* 1 Such encouragement was scarcely needed; the princes, temporal and ecclesiastical, with their better arms, with their treacherous and cunning negotiations, and with their better disciplined mercenaries, were easy victors. Clemency after victory was not part of their program. Wholesale executions, accompanied by horrible tortures, brought the number of the dead to at least 130,000. If those killed and executed in smaller uprisings be included, the figure may well be estimated conservatively at more than 200,000. The figures are astronomical, especially shocking in view of the thin population at that time. It was in the midst of this orgy of blood and of deep mourning of the German people that Luther noisily celebrated his marriage with a nun, Catherine von Bora. Once he had been trusted by almost all Germans; now he was hated and despised by many. The reconquest of Southern Germany for the Catholic faith was made possible by the man himself, who had betrayed the oppressed to the oppressors. After 1525 social and political conditions were worse than ever before. Neither the towns nor the nobility nor even the higher clergy gained any 8 1 Wider die mörderischen und räuberischen Rotten der Bauern (1525), in Werke; kritische Gesamtausgabe, XVIII, 358; English translation by C. M. Jacobs, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, in Works of Martin Luthier, IV, 249.

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173 advantage from the defeat of the peasants. Only the princes gained. Many monasteries and other beautiful monuments of the past, countless villages, hundreds of castles, and many cities were destroyed. The idea of secularization for the common good, advanced by the knights and peasants, was taken up by the princely victors for their own enrichment. The free nobles, in whom Reich consciousness had still been alive, were brought under the domination of the princes, who were both antinational and antiuniversal in attitude and interests. Their victory combined these two views, since it was won over the estates which, because of the stage historic development had reached in that age, had represented the rare identity of the national and the universal spirit. Quasi-sovereign "fatherlands" began to pervade all Germany. They were finally to cause its complete disintegration.

15 THE FIRST THIRTY YEARS WAR The Roman Commonwealth, for sure, Now is—Gods pity—a common-poor. S C H I L L E R , Wallenstein, The Camp, Scene vm. tempted to inquire whether it is pure accident or the evidence of yet unknown laws operating through human generations that Occidental history seems to move in cycles of roughly five hundred years each. The first of these cycles extends from the traditional date of the founding of the Roman Republic (c 508 B.C.) to the battle of Actium (31 B.C.); the second, from the birth of Christ and the Augustan era to the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus (476 A . D . ) ; the third, from the period when the first permanent Germanic states began to form in the West to the restitution of the Occidental empire by Otto the Great (962 A . D . ) ; the fourth, to the age of discovery, the Peasants War, and the Reformation. The great changes of that time initiated the fifth cycle, in the final phase of which we are living today. Each of these cycles embraces about fifteen generations. Each seems to be an organic period of history, having its own specific leitmotif, which is developed through crises and solutions in all spheres of life—political, social, economic, artistic, and cultural. This leitmotif is fully worked out in the first fifth of the cycle and, with variations, can be traced through the whole period to the end of the cycle, when often it is already drowned by the melody of the future. The close observer may also discover similar historic tendencies and parallels in the first, the third, and the fifth of these cycles of Occidental history on the one hand, and in the second and fourth on the other. If this should indeed be more than coincidence, it would permit the conclusion that out of the anarchy of unrestricted sovereignties ( which characterizes our fifth cycle) we may be moving toward a new realization of the Occidental idea. Then, for a brief day of history—one of those rare periods of happiness, of which Hegel spoke—the antithesis will be in abeyance. There is no determinism—that is, infringement of the freedom of the human will or of the teleological progress of history—in such a conception, any more than in the various biological and spiritual laws and rhythms of life and development of the individual. Any such laws laid into man, nature, and history by the Creator bear on the freedom of action; the freedom of the will is not thereby affected. Besides, if such cycles should be found to O N E MIGHT F E E L

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exist, they would not be mere repetitions but would move within the path of progressing historic dialectics. Whatever the reason for the cycles of history, it is clear today that a proper understanding of the forces of the present demands thinking in terms of far greater periods of time than an unhistoric modernity, spellbound by its own achievements, has been willing to believe. All the questions pertaining to faith and the limits of reason, to nationalities and commonwealth, to individual and community, to personal responsibility, intellectual freedom and social emancipation—problems which sprang into being at the beginning of our cycle—are still the fundamental problems of the age. They lie beneath the world conflict which has already lasted for a generation and is at present in its second phase. In the flames of this war there are still sparks that as long ago as 1525 and again during the Thirty Years War were reddening the skies of Europe. The years preceding the Thirty Years War and those before the present war show some astounding parallels. Then as now international solidarity had given way to an unbridled quest for power, and large and small states alike aimed at complete independence from the precepts of international and moral law. Ever since the split in the faith, and the loss of historic consciousness of human oneness that accompanied it, political reason and statesmanship have searched for devices to bind anew the severed members of the Occidental body. So far nothing has prevailed against the ever more violent centrifugal forces. The process of secularization of public and private life, apparent since the seventeenth century and later completely triumphant in the politics of agnostic statecraft and historic materialism (practiced by devout or hypocritical statesmen as much as by open advocates), has led to an atomization of society, of international life, and of the categories of thought in the human mind itself.1 When tradition was rejected as a source of faith, a great spring of knowledge, morality, and creative intuition was also sealed. The serious damage which the Protestant viewpoint inflicted on the continuity of human culture has been classically formulated by Hegel. 'This elaborately woven system [of Christian theology] has been entirely pulled to pieces, because men wished to bring Christianity back to the simple lines of the Word of God." The results of centuries of human thought under guidance of the Holy Spirit was thrown overboard. Protestantism assumed for itself the right to ap1 The rejection of tradition as a source of faith by Protestantism corresponds to the modem withdrawal to positions of a pragmatic and positivistic epistemology. The rejection of good works in favor of justification by faith alone finds its counterpart in the unsocial individualism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Faith based only on individual comprehension of the Bible but disdaining the fruit of interpretive thought by the greatest minds of the community of the faithful preserved in the teaching of the church ( an achievement too enormous ever to be completed by an individual ), led quite logically to the dissolution of religion and philosophy into countless sects and schools, and, ultimately, the dissolution of the social fabric into anarchy.

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proach the letter of the Scriptures with individual judgment, while denying the same right to the Church Fathers. And yet the Fathers, Hegel states, "did act upon it [the Word of God] with the Spirit; and it is expressly said that the Spirit dwells within the Church, directs, teaches, and illuminates it." With approval he quotes Anselm of Canterbury, "It appears to me great negligence if we are firm in faith, and do not seek also to comprehend what we believe." Hegel continues, "Now this is declared to be arrogance; immediate knowledge, faith, is held to be higher than knowledge. But Anselm and the scholastics maintained the opposite view. . . . Never have Catholics been such barbarians as to say that there should not be knowledge of the eternal truth, and that it should not be philosophically comprehended." After the middle of the sixteenth century, the foreboding of some overwhelming catastrophe seems to have been general. T h e disaster approached. Statesmen and people proved incapable of warding it off. Catholic and Protestant powers and factions girded for a struggle out of which no good could emerge. T h e imperial authority after Charles V sank to an unprecedented low. The vast dynastic power of the Habsburg line could not prevent this decline, but rather even contributed to it. T h e loss of Holland and Switzerland to the empire may be traced directly (in addition to other causes) to a reaction against the dynastic nature which the imperial house and office had assumed. T h e spark that set off the general conflagration was struck in 1618, at Prague, when the Bohemian estates revoked the election of Ferdinand of Austria, offering the crown of St. Wenceslas to the Calvinistic Wittelsbach Frederick V, elector palatine, instead. Since he was married to Elizabeth of England, the eldest daughter of the Stuart James I, Frederick and the Bohemians could hope for English help. In 1620, at the battle of Bila Hora ( White Hill) Frederick, called "the Winter King," lost his crown when he was defeated by die combined armies of his cousin Maximilian of Bavaria and the Habsburgs. He was placed under the ban of the empire and, without the required consent of the other electors, deprived of his electoral dignity. T h e electorate of the Rhine was transferred to the Bavarian line. In Bohemia began a reign of mass executions and expropriations. Terror struck at the roots of Czech resistance, for religious-national enthusiasm was already exhausted by the sanguinary Hussite wars. All this was done - Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ceschichte der Philosophie, edited by Carl Ludwig Michelet, in Werke; Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten XV, 109-10, 163, 169; English translation by Elizabeth S. Haidane and Frances H. Simson, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, III, 12-13, 62, 67. The quotation from Anselm is a rendering of: "Negligentia mihi videtur, si, postquam confirmati sumus in fide, non studemus, quod credimus, intelligere." Cur Deus homo, i. ii in Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Latin, CLVIII, 362.

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177 with such lightning speed that the Bohemian incident seemed to have closed without bringing on the long-dreaded general war. But some of the lesser leaders of Frederick's faction, notably Count Mansfeld and Prince Christian of Brunswick, kept up local resistance long enough for the big powers to join the struggle: the Danes (1625), subsidies from King James of England (1625), the Swedes (1630), the French (openly in 1635), Spain, the Netherlands, and others. About 1624 the star of Albrecht von Wallenstein, soon to be a prince of the empire and the duke of Friedland, had cometlike begun to rise. Among the leaders of his time, seemingly so rich in great men, he is one of few who possessed world-historic stature, companioned only by King Gustavus Adolphus, his enemy and partner in destiny, and by Richelieu. "Distorted by his partisans or foes,/His character is dimly shadowed, problematical," Friedrich von Schiller said of him in the prologue of his Wallenstein trilogy.® He came from an Utraquist German-Bohemian family but was early converted to Catholicism. Yet his view of the world was magic rather than religious. Only as a principle of life and a means of politics did religion find a place in his calculations. In this he was not so very different from Cardinal Richelieu, to whom religion at home and in foreign affairs were two entirely different matters, though both served his own designs and the French aims in power politics. To keep on good terms with all and to change sides easily was then an accepted principle of politics. Wallenstein, at times the great hope of the suppressed Bohemian nobles, had sided against their elected king. After the battle of Bila Hora he seized the opportunity to enrich himself from the confiscated estates of the rebels. With the immense fortune he netted by such maneuvers and also by marriage to an elderly widow of great wealth, he was able to build up a considerable power of his own. His luxury, the splendor of his castles, his palaces, his art collections, and his magnificent train of servants surpassed those of the emperor himself. Yet he considered these only as instruments of power, for to him power was much more than wealth. What lifted him high above the other generals and adventurers of the epoch was his statesmanship and his imperial planning on a grand scale. He was aware that the imperial authority must be strengthened, and that this end could be accomplished only with the help of the Catholics. But he had no illusions about the Catholic princes; he knew that they were as self-seeking as the Protestants. The latter's treasonable pacts were well known; so were the greed and the faithlessness of the Catholic princes, most prominent among them the new elector, Maximilian of Bavaria. The Protestants thought they had more to expect from a victory of France and Sweden. 3

English translation by Charles J. Hempel, Schiller's Complete Works ( Philadelphia, I. Köhler, 1861),!, 485.

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Even men like the young Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar inevitably played into the hands of the French allies. Bernhard thought that he could win Alsace for himself and save it for Germany, but the final result was that it fell into the hands of the French, who had subsidized his campaigns with money and soldiers. How high Wallenstein set his ambitions historians may never be able to establish. Even in his lifetime there was uncertainty and confusion in judgment of him, and his inscrutable, wavering character securely hid his secret thoughts. Perhaps his ideas changed with the change of events and the expediency of the moment. That he aimed at the crown of Bohemia can hardly be doubted. But did he go beyond that in his secret dreams? He read the future in the stars and felt his own course was bound to theirs. He believed in Necessity as ruler of the world. Could he have failed to see among the stars Charlemagne's Crown, the symbol of the most sublime diadem in the world? Can any man of destiny, any statesman of Europe who has worldhistoric ambition and stature ever fail to be attracted by it? Can he remain unmoved and untempted by this most sacred jewel? There must have been hours when the precious diadem of election hung before Wallenstein's imagination, more radiant than the great planets, more enticing than all conquests of the world. The duke of Friedland ruled his duchy, composed of the large lands and estates that had fallen to him, with vigor and skill; he founded schools, created a civil service, and established an excellent administration. As commander in chief of the imperial armies, the only man of vision in the imperial party, he had a right to look with contempt on the ci-devant princes who considered him an upstart. He has been blamed for his many contradictory negotiations with the Swedes, the Saxons, the French, and the Lutherans. But to him it was not Emperor Ferdinand II who mattered, but rather an early and just peace for the empire. If such a peace did not come soon, Germany would become a blood-drenched wasteland under the rule of puppet princelings always responsive to their foreign paymasters. Another great concept distinguished him: he recognized, as few other inland statesmen did, the importance of sea power. He planned to incorporate the German coastal regions again into the imperial structure, to build a substantial fleet, and to carry the eagle across the waves. That he asked for, and received, the duchy of Mecklenburg from Emperor Ferdinand after its rebellious dukes had been deposed was part of his maritime scheme. The Habsburgs had cared little for the North until then; in this, too, they deviated from the wide-spanning view of the earlier imperial houses. Wallenstein, on the other hand, planned a close alliance between Spain and the Hanse cities under imperial auspices. Trade and sea-borne commerce were to link Germany with the Western world. Had these plans bome fruit, the fate of the empire would have been

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altered, and with it the political character of the German people. The rising territorial power of the electorate of Brandenburg (united with Prussia since the extinction of a branch of the Hohenzollern house in that northeasternmost duchy in 1618), of Mecklenburg, of Oldenburg, and of the Hanseatic League would have been drawn once more into the imperial orbit. They would have been linked anew with the South German and Latin world. Ghibelline would have triumphed over Guelf. At the same time, the fog which had hung heavier and heavier over the German South, and over Bavaria in particular, would have been swept away by a wind from the sea. And by reaching the shores of the ocean in fact as well as in name at a time when the traditional borders of the Occident were expanding, the empire would have gained a new element of universality which could no longer be given by the Continental powers alone. But the whole grandiose scheme was thwarted by Wallenstein's unhappy siege of Stralsund (1628) and by the distrust of cities like Hamburg for the Habsburg dynasty. In 1629, against Wallenstein's advice, Emperor Ferdinand issued the Edict of Restitution. All church property secularized since the Convention of Passau of 1552 was to be returned to the former owners—a demand which involved a practical impossibility and which turned the greater part of the nation, thus far waiting in indecision for the outcome of the struggle, into open enemies of the empire. At the Electoral Assembly of Regensburg in 1630, the emperor yielded to the demands of the princes, led by Maximilian of Bavaria, for Wallenstein's dismissal. At the same time King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden—whose intervention only Wallenstein had anticipated for years—landed on the North German coast. No voice from Germany had invited him to come, but he contended that it was his duty to bring succor and aid to his "Protestant brethren." Now he had arrived with thirty thousand warlike Swedish troops. The Protestants acclaimed him as the "Light from the North." Since he was allied with Catholic France, the motives of pure power politics behind the deeds of the "Lion of Midnight" should have been apparent enough. Gustavus would never have embarked on this venture without the French subsidies which were stipulated in 1613 by a Swedish-French treaty of mutual assistance. The champion of the Protestant cause accepted them with an undisturbed conscience. He believed that be was chosen by God to save the "pure faith," and anyone urged by such a conviction finds it easy to interpret what is of human origin as the stern will of Providence. Gustavus, too, may have thought of the Kaisertum, but historically his undertaking it would have been a contradiction of the very meaning of the word. For a Protestant Kaisertum was by necessity particularistic. The southward invasion evoked memories of Germanic conquests at the time of the Great Migration, and Gustavus, consciously and proudly, used the title King of the Goths. His struggle, to its tragic end, bears some likeness to a re-

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awakening of ancient historic forces from the period when the Germanic world was still not subdivided into Germans, Swedes, Anglo-Saxons, and others. His victory would have reërected the Great Wall separating the Germanic from the Latin-Mediterranean world, but this time the barrier would have been to protect the North against the South—a total reversal of history since Julius Caesar. The confusion and tragedy of the time were heightened by the fact that the chair of St. Peter was not held by a man of universal vision. Aluise Contarmi, Venetian ambassador first at the French court, then in Rome, a keen observer and eloquent informant, remarks in his Relatione della corte di Roma (1632-35): "I speak of this from good authority; I was present at all the negotiations. The Pope's [Urban VIII's] nuncios always favored Richelieu's undertakings, whether they were meant to secure his own safety, or to bring about the union of Bavaria and the league [of Catholic German princes] with France. When the alliance of Richelieu with Holland and the Protestant powers generally was in question, they remained silent, to save themselves from admitting that they approved it. Other popes would perhaps have found this offended their conscience; but the nuncios of Urban VIII obtained, by such means, increased consideration and personal advantages."4 In vain did the emperor ask for assistance, which earlier popes had so often afforded. But Urban refused to declare the struggle against the Protestant powers a war of religion, or to condemn the alliance of France with heretics. "The Pope complains," Contarini writes, "that he is considered a heretic, and accused of delighting in the good progress made by the Protestants; and in fact, they are sometimes not unwelcome to him." 5 The year 1632 was one of the most critical in the modem history of Catholicism. Gustavus Adolphus had swept victoriously through the whole breadth of Germany and had conquered Munich. The imperial ambassadors insisted with utmost concern on the declaration of "religious war" and asserted that this might still produce most beneficial effects; it was not yet altogether impossible to drive back the king of Sweden, who had no more than thirty thousand men. "With thirty thousand men," the Pope replied coolly, "Alexander conquered the world." · Apparently Urban VIII worked for a treaty of neutrality between Bavaria and Sweden and flattered himself that his wise policy would lead to a concordat with Gustavus Adolphus, by which the king would consent * Venetian Archives, quoted in Ranke, Die Römischen Päpste in den letzten vier Jahrhunderten, in Sämmtliche Werke, XXXVIII, 368; English translation by E. Fowler, History of the Popes, II, 387. It should be noted, however, that the reliability of Contarini, which Ranke and Gregorovius considered as established, has been denied by Pastor. Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mitteìalters, XIII, 439n.; English, XXVIII, 292n. « Quoted in Ranke, ibid., p. 369, n. 1; English, ρ. 387η. « Ibid.; English, p. 388.

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to reinstate the ecclesiastical princes who had fled from their territories; like all other Realpolitik, this instance of it was doomed to failure. King Gustavus disappointed Urban VIII thoroughly. After taking Munich, Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar advanced with his Swedish soldiers towards the Tirol. The king began to make his plans for transforming the South German bishoprics into secular principalities. His own royal court was to be at Augsburg. Italy and the Holy See itself lay open to the victorious march of the new king of the Goths. Perhaps only Wallenstein's conquest of Prague on May 25, 1632, and the juncture of his army with that of Maximilian of Bavaria frustrated these plans. In 1636, after the death of the Swedish king, came the first hope of ending the horrible war.7 But Urban VIII did not grasp at it. As Ranke says, "although in practice he had contributed so largely to the defeat of all the plans formed by Catholicism"—and this was the other aspect of such particularistic, destructive policies of expediency—"yet in theory he would not relinquish any portion of his claims; but all he effected was to place the papacy in a position removed from the living and actual interests of the world." 8 And when peace finally came, the papacy could no longer wield much influence on it—a peace which touched on the very foundations of the Christian world. As an international power, the papacy had been integrally linked with the Sacred Roman Empire. When the empire fell, the entire world of man, which had been embraced by the Occidental order, was imperiled. After the landing of Gustavus Adolphus, there was only one man who could stem the disaster: Wallenstein. In him was placed the national as well as the universal mandate of the historic hour. Emperor Ferdinand recalled him to service and had to grant him greater power than before. No general in the Sacred Roman Empire was to act except under his orders; not even the emperor himself could interfere with Wallenstein's appointment of officers or his military measures. The duke alone was to have the right to negotiate peace, and only its final conclusion was to require imperial sanction. But he did not obtain a guarantee against another deposition, and thus Friedland's armies remained the emperor's. The further development of relations between Wallenstein and Emperor Ferdinand is an interesting illustration of the problem of power, that mysterious, almost metaphysical something, which cannot be fully defined in legal terms. To be the fountain of power is more than actually to exercise it. If the holder of delegated power—the prerogatives of which may by far overshadow him who has willingly or unwillingly delegated it—is not prepared to go the whole way and to make himself supreme nominally too, his 7 The story, long given credence, that Urban VIII showed consternation or regret at the news that the great enemy of the empire was dead is categorically declared a fable by Pastor. Geschichte der Päpste, XIII, 459 sq.; English, XXVIII, 319 sq. » Ranke, Die Römischen Päpste, in Sämmtliche Werke, XXXVIII, 372; English, II, 391.

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authority is nothing. For it cannot prevail against the nominal superior, who at any time may retract what the delegate, great as his power may be, possesses only at his sufferance.· Wallenstein had hardly any doubts regarding his position. When he wrested his far-reaching, almost humiliating prerogatives from the emperor, he knew that his life and his position hung on the thin thread of success. He was lost as soon as he was no longer considered indispensable. The fact that he shrank from decisions which would have given him the fullness of power has been explained in different ways—some maintain his general aversion for taking irrevocable steps; others, that his health was breaking under the strain of his campaigns and manifold duties; and so forth. I believe that the ultimate reason which prevented him from reaching for the purple was the spell of legitimacy, vested in Ferdinand, to which he was not insensible. Most of his loyal officers succumbed to it; they were loyal only as long as Friedland held the grace of the emperor. Here there is a vicious circle, for had he only made himself emperor, the source of power and command of loyalty would have rested in him. But the gods give the diadem only to those whose vocation is stronger than traditional scruples, and who know how to use the one moment—the katros—when it comes. If it slips by, it will never return. This katros for Wallenstein was immediately after the death of Gustavus Adolphus. With the king of Sweden removed from the field, the greatest danger to the empire had passed and the emperor no longer felt the overpowering need for Wallenstein. And this could mean only one thing: death. To uphold a prince of the empire against the emperor himself may seem inconsistent with the view on German constitutional needs already expressed. But Wallenstein, and not Ferdinand, at that moment was the worldhistoric figure whose ambitions best served the general purpose of his age, because he was the national and universal rallying point against particularistic dissolution. Wallenstein, potentially verus imperdtor, might have accomplished what the dynast Ferdinand never could: he might have asserted himself against the territorial powers and established a new and uncontested central authority. This chance, together with the chance of an early peace, ended with his assassination in 1632, a murder committed if not at the express command, then with the tacit connivance, of Ferdinand. Faith played a minor part in the Thirty Years War, at least among its leaders. Among the people, it was still strong, on both sides of the struggle • The history of the downfall of many a state in most recent times has proved this to be true. Almost invariably the holders of actual power (parliaments, cabinets, chancellors, or ministers of state) were legally or illegally overruled by chief executives whose power, according to the usage or even the letter of the constitution, was purely nominal. See Hubertus zu Loewenstein, 'The Challenge of Dictatorship and the Reintegration of Democracy," Social Science, XV (October, 1940), 369sqq. The perhaps most striking example was the overthrow of Benito Mussolini by King Victor Emmanuel III on July 25, 1943.

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and regardless of theological definitions. But since faith was divided, intolerance of a ferocity unknown to the ages of the one Christian faith could raise its ugly head. It is an amazing fact that just at the time when humanists and Renaissance thinkers hailed the liberation of man from old bondage a new era of horrible persecution and of disdain for human values was just beginning. Two men stand out in the torn and bleeding Germany of that day. They represent the incorruptible spirit of man. One was a Protestant, Johannes Kepler; the other was a Jesuit, Friedrich von Spee. Kepler, a son of Swabia, a land rich in creative visionaries and geniuses, was conscious of the concordantia Catholica of the universe. That is the starting point and the source of his science. He knew that the attacks upon the heliocentric system were without foundation from the religious viewpoint. For, whatever size or position the earth might have among the other stars, spiritually it is always the center of the universe, because man, Cod's greatest creation, dwells there, and on it Christ was bom. Significantly enough, Kepler had to endure greater opposition from his coreligionists than from the Catholics. Anything that seemed contradictory to the plain word of the Bible was anathema to the Protestants; they disdained the progressive revelation of the meaning of the Book through the labor of the Holy Spirit within the living church. Among the Jesuits, Kepler found much understanding and friendship. Kepler's views on the harmony of science and faith can be compared to St. Albertus Magnus' and St. Thomas Aquinas' reconciliation of faith and philosophy. In the Summa contra gentiles (i. vii), St. Thomas had shown that reason, a principle created by God, and Faith, based on His revelation, could not possibly contradict each other. To the tradition of such doctrine Kepler is a rightful heir. He is also truly modern; for his universal mind, drawing on the two sources of knowledge, reason and faith, anticipated a time that is only now rising above the horizon. What has been demonstrated about the nature of things with truthful testimony and good reasons, St. Augustine said, cannot be contradictory to Holy Scripture.10 A modern Augustine, Kepler translated what is basic to human thought —the principle of conscious reason, which aims at harmony in the apparent chaos of phenomena—to the skies. The Ghibelline statesmen had found the universal principle in the Sacred Roman Empire, the minister and mirror of the Kingdom; the mystics had discovered it in their own souls. Kepler proved its presence in astronomy, the stars; he saw the "government of the worlds" written across the firmament. That faith was to be shielded by the armorplate of science against the onslaught of agnostic scientists in a later age is Kepler's work. Once science began to mature (as it has in our 10 Cf. De doctrina Christiana, in Migne, Patrologiae 15-122.

cursus completus,

Latin, XXXIV,

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century), it grew more humble, more Socratic in the knowledge of knowing so little, and hence, more filled with wisdom. 11 One may wonder now when we shall find that third great span, one which is already in existence, the arch that binds faith with the science of the pr. gress of history. Friedrich von Spee of the Society of Jesus is the man who set out singlehanded to fight against a form of death that was claiming victims hardly less in numbers than the casualties of the war: the madness of the witch trials. A feverish fear of the emissaries of the Evil One lurked among the ruins of human habitations and in the darkened souls of men. Surely, the superstitious thought, hidden forces of devilish witchcraft must have a hand in bringing on the devastations wrought by war, hunger, and pestilence! Thousands of stakes flared beneath the sky, which was reddened already by the fire of burning villages. No age or sex or profession was safe; anyone might be seized to expiate the guilt of frenzied mankind. This horrible mental epidemic had reached Germany comparatively late. In the early sixteenth century, France excelled in the fury of persecution. In the Geneva of Calvin, in Lorraine, in Scotland, matters were little different. Protestants and Catholics seemed to vie with each other in cruelty. But in both camps also were men who raised their voices in protest. Nicholas of Cusa had spoken out against the disgraceful slaughter as early as 1452, 12 followed by Ulrich Molitor, protonotary to the bishop of Constance, in 1489. 13 In the sixteenth century, men like Erasmus, the jurists Alciatus and Ponginibus, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, and others attempted to counteract the growing wave of superstitious persecution by a more sober and educated evaluation of unusual physical and mental phenomena. 14 In a remarkable treatise, De praestigiis daemonum, et incantattonibus, ac veneficits, the Protestant Johannes Weyer, physician of Duke William of JülichCleve-Berg, courageously adopted the same line in 1563. The bishop of Basel at once ordered a German translation to b e made, and a French one soon followed. T h e work caused a sensation and seems to have prompted the Emperors Ferdinand I and Maximilian I I to stop all burning of winches in the Austrian domains. But this was only a local and a temporary relief. Friedrich von Spee was destined to stem this tide of madness and to lay the foundations for modern criminology. He was born in 1591 of a noble family. Later members of the family were to be the counts of Spee and some 11 Kepler died in 1Θ30, at Regensburg, while the electoral assembly that deposed Wallenstein was proceeding. His grave was destroyed in the course of the war. 12 Hartzheim, Vita Nicolai de Cusa π. viii; English translation by Rev. Henry Ignatius Dudley Ryder, in Essays, p. 7. 13 De hmiis et pythonicis mulieribus, in Malleus maleficarum, ex variis auctoribus compilatus (Lyon, Claudius Bourgeat, 1669), II, 17-45. 14 An English translation of Agrippa's De occulta philosophic ( 1531 ) was published by L. W. de Laurence, The Philosophy of Natural Magic ( Chicago, de Laurence, Scott, 1913 ).

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descendants of the counts are still living. While still young, Friedrich joined the Jesuits. 15 In 1626 he was called to Würzburg to teach moral theology at the university there and was assigned as a confessor for the condemned "witches." Next he was sent to Paderborn, where his experiences increased in number and frightfulness. A single judge in that city sent five hundred innocent people to their death. An endless parade of men, women, boys, and girls passed before Spee's eyes—tortured, agonized humanity, many with curses on their lips and in their hearts despair of the justice and mercy of God. Not one, Spee affirmed, of all the many whom he comforted on their last way to the stake had he found "guilty." 18 T h e result of his anguish of soul was a book, the Cautio criminalis of 1631 —or to give its full title in English: On Caution in Criminal Matters, in prosecuting the denounced sorcerers, witches, and monsters; addressed to the authorities of the German nation, its chancellors, councilors, commissaries, inquisitors, judges, lawyers, priests, and ministers; submitted to the public by an unnamed Roman Catholic. Within a few years the book had been translated into many languages. 17 In Würzburg, the executions ceased at once and the dukes of Brunswick followed this example. Before a year had passed the imperial chancellery ordered a new edition. 18 Though sporadic burnings were still to occur for some generations, the tide had definitely turned. Spee's work trembles in every word with indignation over the shame visited upon the church and the nation: Almost everywhere in Germany the stakes are burning, a disgrace to the German nation. In spite of the teaching of natural scientists and physicians that extraordinary phenomena and sickness may arise from natural causes, in Germany, and particularly in the rural districts, everything is attributed to witches. How does it come that German princes have ministers who will proceed against their own consciences solely to please their masters? W o e unto you, Germany, mother of so many witches, you have wept so much that you can see no more! " In the present era of secret police and of synthetic mass mania, whipped 15 September 22, 1610. For these dates of Spee's life I follow Duhr, "Neue Daten und Briefe zum Leben des P. Friedrich Spe," in Historisches Jahrbuch der Cörresgesettschaft, XXI ( 1900), 328-52. His study is based on the archives of the order. 19 This fact is mentioned by Leibniz, to whom it was told by Johann Philipp von Schönbom, prince elector of Mainz, who in his younger years had known Spee well. "Although he had examined all circumstances with the greatest diligence," Spee had said, "taking into account also what had been confided to him in confession, he had never discovered anything to convince him that a single one of the unfortunates whom he had accompanied to the stake was accused of the crime of witchcraft rightly." Letter to Vincent Placcius, Hanover, April 26, 1697, in Placcius, Theatrum anonymorum et pseudonymorum HI. 980b (Hamburg, G. Liebemickel, 1708), p. 234. 17 Balke, Introduction to Trutz-Nachtigal von Friedrich Spe, p. xvii. 18 Ryder, "A Jesuit Reformer and Poet," in Essays, p. 13. 1 ® The passages in this paragraph are paraphrased from the Cautio criminalis ( Rinteln, Petrus Lucius, 1631 ), pp. 3-7, 75-76, 145.

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up under the guise of political and racial "ideologies," some of Friedrich von Spee's analyses have taken on renewed and gruesome actuality. "There they sit, close to the stove," he says of the jurists, "and hatch commentaries. They know nothing of pain, and yet discourse largely on the tortures to be inflicted on poor wretches, just as one born blind might compose learned dissertations on colours. . . . But put them for half or quarter of an hour on the fire; how will all their mighty wisdom and philosophy collapse!" 10 Spee outlines the perennial formulae used to assure conviction whatever the trial might bring forth. The accused has either a bad or a good reputation. If her reputation is bad, it is taken as an indication of guilt, for vice goes in company. If it is good, it creates in equal measure a presumption of guilt, for this is how witches are wont to cloak themselves in an appearance of virtue. Fear or lack of fear, keeping the eyes fixed or rolling them, confusion, denials of guilt—everything is "circumstantial evidence" against the accused. She is racked until she becomes her own accuser. She is allowed neither lawyer nor the liberty of self-defense, and, were advocates present, none would be found bold enough to face the suspicion of sorcery. When the accused is permitted to explain, no one takes the slightest notice of her explanations. If she insists on her innocence, she is remanded to prison, where she may bethink herself seriously whether she will still be obdurate.21 Spee, who fought many battles to bring comfort to Catholics and Protestants alike, was at the same time one of seventeenth-century Germany's greatest poets. Among his famous works of poetry are Trutz-Nachtigal, a collection of fifty or sixty sacred songs, and The Golden Book of Virtues written partly in verse, partly in a lyric prose of great religious fervor and depth of thought. In 1806, Friedrich von Schlegel reëdited and published many of Spee's poems in the Musen-Almanach. The Protestant philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz has paid the highest tribute to Spee's work and personality. He praises "the wonderful thoughts of Father Spee, S.J., a most excellent man," " and in his Théodicée ( § 96) refers to him as "one of the most outstanding men of his Order, whose faith in the power of God's love was similar to my own," namely, that it can take away all sin. The Cautio criminalis Leibniz calls ( § 97) a book "most famous for its merits," and by the Golden Book of Virtues he was deeply impressed and influenced. "It is fair to suppose," Frederick W. C. Lieder has suggested, "that the Güldenes Tugendbuch was, to a Ibid., pp. 135-36; English translation by Rev. Henry Ignatius Dudley Ryder, "A Jesuit Reformer and Poet," in Essays, pp. 10-11. 21 The passages in this paragraph are paraphrased from the 1631 edition, pp. 380 sqq. 72 Grundriss eines Bedenkens von Aufrichtung einer Sozietät ( 1671?), 516, in Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, published by the Prévissische Akademie der Wissenschaften, IV. Reihe, I, 534.

THE FIRST THIRTY YEARS WAR 187 large extent, a stepping stone between the Summa Theologica and the Théodicée."25 I quote from the celebrated discourse between penitent and comforter in the Golden Book of Virtues: "But if Christ appeared to thee, and declared that His precious blood would no more avail for thee with His heavenly Father, and thou must therefore be damned, wouldst thou have any power then of hoping?"—"As long as I lived I would hope. . . . His fatherly and motherly heart is so endlessly tender that it would, as it were, break and fly asunder, whenever a sinner with a really true and pure contrition and sorrow should come in contact with it; wherefore I would never give myself up lost: I would hope, yea, I would hope."—"But how! Would you not believe Christ? Could He by any possibility tell you a lie? You must now infallibly despair."—"No, no, of a surety no! So long as I should have breath I would not despair of His mercy. For even if Cod Himself should say that He would damn me, that I should never be admitted to pardon, that would all be on the understanding that as long as I lived I did not convert myself to Him. . . . Out of the Abyss of His mercy would He then receive me back, as He did the Ninevites and others upon whom He had already spoken the sentence of death . . . O God, my God! . . . Thou canst not contradict Thyself; Thou hast long ago declared that Thou wouldst show mercy to all who should be converted to Thee. Now it is impossible that Thou shouldst gainsay Thyself, and so I cannot despair. Accursed be the man who hopeth not in Thee. In Thee, o Lord, have I hoped, let me not be confounded forever!" 24 Friedrich von Spee died in 1635—according to one version, of a wound received in the capture of Trier by imperial troops when he was ministering to the wounded and dying; according to other sources, of a deadly fever contracted in the fulfillment of his Samaritan ministry.25 For thirteen years after his death, seas of fire still washed Europe. Children were bom and grew up never knowing peace, familiar only with the stench of burning houses and the cries of murderers and their victims. Moral depravity, famine, and the plague came as the horsemen of the Apocalypse. Packs of wolves descended on the deserted German towns, and long after * s "Friedrich S pe and the Théodicée of Leibniz," The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XI (1912), 340. 14 Chapter *, questions 8-9, in Güldenes Tugend-Buch and Trutz-Nachtigal by Friedrich Spee, copied from the original manuscript by F. Leonardus Gulichius (Brauweuer, 1Θ40), in Modem Language Association of America, Collection of Photographic Facsimiles CLXXXVI ( 1931 ), 47-48; English translation by Rev. Henry Ignatius Dudley Ryder, "A Jesuit Reformer and Poet," in Essays, p. 31. 25 "His coffin with the simple inscription Hie jacet Fridericus Spe is now in the crypt of the former Jesuit Church at Trier, while the Library of the German Gymnasium at Cologne preserves his portrait." Ebner, Friedrich von Spee und die Hexenprozesse seiner Zeit, pp. 6-7, in Sammlung gemeinverständlicher wissenschaftlicher Vorträge, Neue Folge, XIII. Serie, Heft 291.

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the original cause of the great war had been forgotten, soldiers of all nations still flocked to the ever-changing colors. Nicholas of Cusa's somber prophecy had come true to its fullest extent. For five whole years peace delegations deliberated in the Westphalian cities of Münster and Osnabrück, weighing questions of precedence and disputing about division of the spoils. All the powers except England, Poland, Moscow, and Turkey were represented. Upon the insistence of France, the conferences were not those of the empire of the German kingdom but negotiations among individual German states. Mazarin proved as zealous a protector of the deutsche Lihertät as Richelieu had once been. Peace came only when complete exhaustion was reached. On Sunday, October 24, 1648, while the church bells rang solemnly, the Peace of Westphalia was signed. It was the last diplomatic instrument in the Latin language, for afterward French replaced the mother tongue of the Occident. The treaty meant territorial losses to Germany amounting roughly to forty thousand square miles. France gained in Alsace-Lorraine a dominant position which was not long afterwards to enable Louis XIV to annex these provinces altogether. The borders of western Germany became militarily untenable. Sweden received the major part of Pomerania and became an "estate of the empire." Once the glory of the empire had extended its law and protection over many nations and princes. Now, instead, it sheltered foreign potentates, who could destroy from within what had survived conquest from without. More important than the actual losses was the atomization of the country. German rulers were granted "sovereign" status and now had the legal right to conclude treaties with foreign powers, as they had already been doing in actual practice. Historical maps of Germany after 1648 show countless patches of different colors which seem like the symptoms of an incurable disease. Yet the imperial crown remained, sacred even in the midst of abomination. In the symbolism and ritual woven around it the idea of the Occident survived. It survived, too, in the hearts of men, suffering and yearning, and in the world of the spirit, which kept its unity when the physical body of Germany was split into political fragments. The Passions and the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach and the oratorios of Händel were still able to voice man's longing, his thirst after union with the Absolute. And still the cathedrals stood, holding in their hearts the ever-renewed mystery of the Divine Presence, looking down upon their glory mirrored in the river waters, lifting their spires above the suffering cities. Hope will live on so long as men remain who are conscious of their Christian-Occidental heritage. The Roman Empire of the Spirit could survive the scourge of Westphalia, and it will never die even though its sign and symbol is found only among the stars.

16 THE CATEGORIC IMPERATIVE His glory, as of one whom God has smitten and yet chosen, grew tall as a tree, overshadowing his century. T H O M A S M A N N , Friedrich und die grosse Koalition. nations and other self-conscious territorial units in antithesis to the oneness of Europe has already been identified here as the moving force of Occidental history. T h e parallel between German development and Occidental history has also been drawn. Within the Germanic body it has always been vital to have a just balance between regional and national forces in order to avoid serious disturbances in the dialectical mechanism of historic progress. If the power of the German subnationalities, antithetical to the nation, grows disproportionally strong, there is danger that the entire national fabric may disintegrate. If, on the other hand, regionalistic tendencies are too rigidly suppressed by nationalistic forces, the result may be a petrifying centralism, which in tum will lead to an even stronger antithetical reaction on the part of the German tribes. T H E GROWTH O F

T h e breakdown of the European community after 1648 is paralleled by the atomization of Germany itself. "Sovereignties" here and there took the place of organic commonwealths. T h e empire, reduced mainly to its Germanspeaking parts ( though not all of them since, besides the losses in the west, Prussia was now also lost even to the nominal sovereignty of the emperor), merely lingered on, a "constitutional monstrosity." Thus it was termed by Freiherr Samuel von Pufendorf, the famous teacher of constitutional and international law at the University of Heidelberg, the first to hold that chair. 1 Pufendorf is a fit subject for historic pride. He was a man who in a period of political and moral decline still kept strongly alive the ancient heritage of Occidental Christian thought, and his teachings pointed a way for the future. Though he was a Lutheran active in Protestant lands—the Palatinate, Sweden, and, after he was invited by the Great Elector in 1686, the Berlin court—his writings frequently breathe a Catholic spirit. It is not so much that he refers to St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Thomas More, and the great Jesuit theologian Francisco Suarez; rather he is Catholic in his universal outlook, which takes into account the Holy Scriptures of both Testaments, the Greek philosophers, Josephus, Roman states1 "Nihil ergo aliud restât, quam ut dicamus, Germaniam esse irreguläre aliquod corpus et monstro simile." Severinus de Monzambano [pseudonym of Pufendorf], De statu imperii Germanici in. ix, edited by Fritz Salomon, in Quellen und Studien zur Verfassungsgeschichte des deutschen Reiches in Mittelalter und Neuzeit, Vol. III, Heft 4, p. 126.

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men, writers, and rhetoricians, and Gothic and Frankish thinkers and rulers, as well as more modem scholars. He has also a consciousness of the community of nations, the desirability of international federations, and the strict application of the rules of moral conduct to politics no less than to private life. Vigorously Pufendorf opposed the materialistic statism of Thomas Hobbes, whose theory that the state is the sole creator of law and that there is no law outside the state was certainly a precursor of the ideas of present-day totalitarians. Pufendorf maintains, to the contrary, that justice is not manmade and is antecedent to the state.2 He teaches that the commands of the moral law, always in conformity with human reason and with nature, which was created by the same Supreme Legislator, sets definite limits to state activity and legislation. Laws and ordinances violating the commands of the moral law are not binding upon the citizens.3 Published within a generation of the Treaty of Westphalia, Pufendorfs On the Law of Nature and Nations (De jure naturae et gentium) deals extensively with the problem and the necessity of state federations and with arbitration in international matters. Pufendorf, in disagreement with Hobbes and in agreement with St. Augustine, held that among states, as among individuals, the natural condition is one of peace rather than war. To prevent the outbreak of war by mediation or arbitration and to work for peace at the earliest possible moment are part of the duty of Christian nations in particular. Pufendorf said that often it is much to the interest of neutrals that there should be no war between any two nations, for sparks may only too easily be carried from a fire to neighboring property; the destruction of one of the warring parties might also be prejudicial to the interests of a neutral. States have a natural right to arbitrate an existing conflict and even the right to impose peace by force. "Two or more," he writes, "to whose interest it is for the war to cease, upon weighing the cases of both sides, may agree on what terms they feel peace can be most fairly secured; and then they can offer these to the warring parties with a threat that, against 1 Hobbes, De cive, cap. xii, {1, in Opera philosophica quae Latine scripsit omnia, ed. by Sir William Molesworth; there is an English translation by Molesworth, entitled Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes. For Pufendorfs view, see De jure naturae et gentium, vrn. 5 $1; the edition cited is the photographic reproduction of the edition of 1Θ88, published for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, with an English translation by C. H. and W. A. Oldfather. * "Indeed, it is manifest," Pufendorf writes ( De jure naturae et gentium, vm. 1 §6; English, II, 1142), "that no commands repugnant to divine right can contain a force to obligate, that is, to lay upon the consciences of any men an intrinsic necessity, and that whoever refuses to obey such commands is free from all crimes." Hobbes, on the other hand, declares (De cive, cap. xii §2; English, II, 152) that it is seditious to hold the opinion "that subjects sin when they obey their prince's commands which seem to them unjust." It is interesting to note that Pope Pius XI in his encyclical of March 14, 1937, on the errors of totalitarianism used words very similar to Pufendorfs.

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him who refuses peace on those terms, they are ready to join arms with him who accepts them." 4 Pufendorf, who considered federations of states a sound method for putting international law on a firmer basis, anticipated certain clauses of the League of Nations Covenant. He writes that member states shall not be overruled, and he establishes the need for sanctions in certain cases. "If any one [of the confederates], maintaining a perverse stubbomess which refuses to yield to reason, scoms to join with the salutary counsels of the rest, and sets about to betray in this fashion the common safety or advantage, it will be lawful to employ against him such means as those who live in natural liberty may use against the violators of pacts, unless it please them better entirely to exclude such an unreasonable person from the league." 5 His Latin treatise On the State of the German Empire, written under the pseudonym of Severinus de Monzambano, could not be printed in either Germany or France; it was finally published at The Hague, but with the imprint, "Geneva, 1667." * Tearing aside the veil from the deplorable state of the empire's "good old constitution," the book provoked a sensation and was soon translated into many languages. The psychological shock it caused can be better evaluated if we consider that the Sacred Roman Empire, imperfect and disorganized as its structure had become, was yet the only conceivable world order; faith still prevailed that it constituted the last impediment to the coming of the great apostasy. Pufendorfs frank words touched a deep subconscious fear of the horrors of chaos and anarchy and the powers of darkness lurking beyond the fall of the empire—a fear which, as historic developments have proved, was by no means unfounded. It was during this period that, as a psychological defense mechanism, as it were, the often-mentioned "unpolitical attitude" of the Germans developed. Feeling helpless to prevent the slowly approaching world catastrophe, the individual retreated into the sphere of private interests and private law. There were many small courts, with French as the official language. There were many small armies mainly for the purpose of parades, and each dwarf state developed its own bureaucracy, with a hierarchy of dignities and titles. The nobility, in so far as its members were not "sovereign," entered into the service of the courts or the armies. Even the German language, interlarded with many French à la mode words, degenerated. When, in 1687, the philosopher Christian Thomasius of Leipzig announced a lecture to be held in German, the undertaking shocked his colleagues. It was to be through the * De jure naturae et gentium, v. xiii §7; English, II, 831. 5 Ibid., νπ. ν §20. Compare this with Article XVI §4 of the League of Nations Covenant. ' When De jure naturae et gentium was published five years later, Pufendorf still carefully kept secret the identity of Severinus de Monzambano, and, in giving examples of some irregular forms of commonwealth, wrote (νπ. ν §15; English, II, 1041), "Such an instance we have endeavoured to set forth in the Roman Republic; another Severinus de Monzambano has undertaken in the case of the German Empire."

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efforts of Thomasius and his greater successor, Freiherr Christian von Wolff (1679-1754), professor at the University of Halle, that the German language began to return to world literature and philosophy. It may be considered providential that in this time of decay the Occident was awakened once again to the realization of its oneness when the Turkish flood, bringing recollections of the earlier storms from Asia—Huns, Avars, Magyars, Mongols—swept to the very gates of Vienna. Under the banner of Austria, the weakened empire gained undying glory. The breaking of the siege of Vienna, that bulwark of Christian Europe, in 1683, by a GermanPolish army joined by soldiers, men, and nobles from all nations, was a powerful stimulus rekindling Occidental solidarity. The authority of the emperor, who had once more acted in his traditional role of leader and protector of Christendom, was so strengthened that the empire, despite the Peace of Westphalia, could survive for more than another century. The center of gravity of German history was shifting to the North, to Brandenburg—Prussia, which was formerly only on the periphery. The fact is that now Prussia assumed in Germany a role like that once played by the Saxons who were the most particularistic tribe at the time of Charlemagne and the bearers of the universal empire in the time of Henry I and Otto the Great. When Frederick William, the Great Elector, succeeded his father in 1640, his domains were ravaged by war. They consisted of disjointed provinces: Prussia ( roughly the modern province of East Prussia ) in the northeast, the margraviate of Brandenburg in North Central Germany, with no access to the sea, and some minor counties and dominions on the Weser and in the Rhineland. At his death in 1688, he had added to it Pomerania ( reconquered from Sweden) with its long Baltic coast line and had acquired the ancient city of Magdeburg on the Elbe. The territory of the state was still spread out over the map of Northern Germany, without connecting links between the eastern, central, and western provinces, but its administration and military power had been consolidated. German national interests were as alien to this prince as they were to his western and southern peers. He found it completely compatible with his honor to maintain for many years a secret alliance with France and to receive for it a hundred thousand livres annually. But he was an efficient ruler who realized that the existence of his country, which had no natural borders and was under constant pressure from her neighbors, required a good army with modem discipline. His guiding example was Maurice of Orange (his father-in-law's brother), the first prince to train a reliable officers corps, whose members had to leam Latin, geometry and arithmetic, and the outlines of the science of strategy. Maurice and the Great Elector acted on the

THE CATEGORIC IMPERATIVE 193 principié enunciated by Frederick the Great a hundred years later: "The spirit of an army resides in its officers." When the persecution of the French Huguenots started, and particularly after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the Great Elector opened his lands to the refugees. His statement that he would rather sell his table silver than leave those poor people without succor was immortalized when it was inscribed on the Monument of the Reformation in Geneva. Like other emigres when humanely received and properly treated, these men were to be of rich benefit to the country which gave them shelter. Brilliant civil servants, officers, and poets, industrious and capable craftsmen, manufacturers, and artisans sprang from this French stock, to the lasting benefit of the Hohenzollem monarchy. One third of the population of Berlin (then a city of twenty thousand souls) was French. Throughout Brandenburg perhaps as many as twenty thousand Huguenots found new homes; thousands settled in the Rhenish provinces and others in Hesse and Franconia. Most of these refugees seem to have come from Southern and Southwestern France, and they brought to Germany the greatest influx of Latin blood since Roman times. In 1701 at Königsberg the Great Elector's son Frederick I, with the consent of Emperor Leopold I, crowned himself king, but it was not until the reign of his successor that the name of Prussia became the official designation for the entire state. There was something in this state that excited and disturbed the older powers of Europe. Prussia was a "newcomer," the first German kingdom within Germany and the first Protestant one at that. The consolidation of a strong power in the North was bound to influence the entire balance of states, if you can talk of "balance" in such chaos. Strictly speaking, the new power was not even new. Brandenburg had been opened to the empire by King Henry I, when his men had crossed the frozen Havel river in 928. In 948, the bishopric of Brandenburg was established. Under Empress Theophano's regency and in the first years of the reign of Otto III, Brandenburg was finally reconquered from the Slavs. Centuries before the Hohenzollem, the margraviate (an electorate since the Golden Bull of 1356) had been ruled by Ascanian, Wittelsbach, and Luxemburg princes. Nor was Prussia itself so very new. Its conquest was systematically undertaken at the time of the Greatest Frederick, who granted far-reaching privileges for that purpose to the Teutonic Order and its grandmaster, Hermann von Salza. When the duke of Poland implored the order to assist him in subjecting the pagan "Prussians" (Pruzzi) between the Vistula and Niemen, Frederick's son, King Conrad, with imperial sanction, bestowed on the Teutonic knights further privileges and grants of land. Thus, a "second Sicily" grew up on the shores of the Baltic Sea, with towns and castles very similar

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in style to Frederick's southern creations. Nobles, knights, and colonists from every part of Germany soon flocked to the new province. By the end of the fifteenth century Prussia already had sixty large cities, fifty fortresses, and nineteen thousand villages. The population may have been more than two millions. The "Prussians," from whom the country derived its name, were extinct or completely absorbed, the remnants of the once fierce people having withdrawn to Lithuania. At the time of the Reformation, Albrecht von Hohenzollern was grandmaster of the Teutonic Order. In 1525, after consulting with Martin Luther at Wittenberg, he proclaimed the Ordensland a temporal, hereditary dukedom, nominally under Polish suzerainty. Soon afterwards the new duke and most of his knights, again on Luther's advice, broke the vow of celibacy. Albrecht married a princess of Denmark. And yet despite all this there is some justification for calling the Brandenburg-Prussian state "new." The similarity of its growth to that of the United States of America, which also comprised ancient cultural elements and old settlements but was nevertheless new as a self-conscious historic entity, has been repeatedly observed. Ricarda Huch flatly speaks of the eastern parts of the Prussian kingdom as the Amerika des Reichs—Abenteuerland, a region that lacked the intertwining roots of history.' The absorption of lands separating the various provinces of the North German state roughly parallels the opening of new frontiers in America, the Louisiana Purchase, and the annexation of regions formerly belonging to Mexico.® Under the "soldier king," Frederick William I, son of Frederick I of Prussia, the army increased from 38,000 to 83,000 men. But the king was far too fond of it ever to use it. The state was ruled like a large, well-administered estate, where the word of the squire is law. In contrast to the exhibition of outward splendor in most other European states, based on an irresponsible waste of public funds, Frederick William held a frugal court that naturally evoked scom mingled with envy. He has been much maligned, and his picture is seen altogether too much through the eyes of his daughter, later the margravine of Bayreuth, who for reasons of a personal disappointment gave in her memoirs a lurid description of her father's harshness and despotic nature. Actually the king's frugality was more a matter of necessity than 7

Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation, p. 217. Another interesting parallel between Germany and America is the development of nineteenth-century Germany from the Staatenbund (confederation of states) of 1815 to the Bundesstaat (federal state) of 1871, not unlike the change of the United States of America from the loose federation of the Articles of Confederation to its present stage of ever-increasing Federal power. The German struggle between North and South, first for hegemony, then for unity, has some likeness to the American Civil War, though the Cerman civil war of 1866 fortunately lasted only a few weeks and was not followed by a Reconstruction period but by free alliances between the North and the South, which eventually resulted in their federation. 8

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choice. He once remarked that he, too, looked forward to the time when the finances of the state would permit him to hold a splendid court." Many may be surprised to learn that his secret passion was painting, in which he displayed taste and understanding. He preferred the Dutch masters to the sugary style of his contemporaries, and as a recreation after a workday of sixteen hours he would devote some time to painting himself, by no means without talent. But with him the duties of the state always came first. In his reign Prussia was the first German state to abolish witch trials.10 The exemplary Prussian administration, with its incorruptible civil service and its unified officers corps (the first in Europe), owes much to him. With all his absolutistic stubbornness, he was not insensible to his duties as a prince of the empire.11 By opposing too close family ties with the house of Hanover, he perhaps averted a political development that might have broken Germany into a Northern bloc and a Southern bloc. His personal happiness was sacrificed to the mission laid upon him by history: to prepare the path for his great son, Frederick II, who might never have attained to fame had it not been for the solid foundations laid by his stern father in the state and in Frederick himself. After the famous conflict between the king and the crown prince, when the young Frederick narrowly escaped the death sentence for deserting the army, the prince was forced, for his own good and for the good of Germany, to acquire a thorough knowledge of the duties of a ruler. At the death of Frederick William I in 1740, Prussia, though its army was good and the treasury of the state replenished, was still far from being taken seriously as a great power. The new Russia of Peter the Great, the France of Louis XIV and Louis XV, the England of the first Hanoverians, and the empire of the Habsburgs dominated the concert of Europe. Spain and even Bavaria were of greater importance than la Maison de Brandebourg with its newly forged royal crown. Its crown prince was known only as a flute player, a libertine, and a Voltairian, who had written the Anti-Machiavel, a flaming, though not too profound, philippic against the accepted modes of government. In 1740 Frederick II became king, and like Shakespeare's Henry V, he » In a letter to Geheimer Hofkammerrath Creutz, published in Klepper, In tormentis pinxit; Briefe und Bilder des Soldatenkönigs, p. 9. This book also reproduces some of Frederick William's pictures, including a self-portrait ( pp. 39-62 ). 10 The last witch trial on Prussian soil, at Nauen, in 1721, had a sudden and happy end. The prosecuting magistrates received, in the gruffest tone of Old Prussian officialdom, a thorough lecture on the foolishness of such accusations and were advised that the king had forbidden them once and for all. Baschwitz, Der Massenwahn; Ursache und Heilung des Deutschenhasses (3d ed.), p. 14. 11 "I shall not desert the emperor, and if everything should go to pieces," he wrote to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau, when England and France were making ready for war against Charles VI in 1730, "I have nothing to lose; ought I not risk everything so that our archenemies shall not prevail?" Dated at Wusterhausen, November 1β, 1730. Die Briefe König Friedrich Wilhelms I an den Fürsten Leopold zu Anhalt-Dessau, 1704-1740, p. 460.

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dismissed the Falstaffs at his accession, or took them only for what they were worth. When half a year later the last Habsburg, Charles VI, died and was succeeded in the "hereditary domains" of his house by his daughter Maria Theresa, Frederick announced his claims—not any too sound legally—on Silesia. In alliance with France and the Wittelsbachs, he won that province in the first Silesian War (1740-1742), and defended it in the second (17441745). The pretext for the second war was the support that he, as prince of the empire, owed to Emperor Charles VII ( 1742-1745), elector of Bavaria. This last Wittelsbach to hold the imperial throne, as Veit Valentin rightly says, "represented the ancient Reich Idea as against the de-Germanized . . . house of Habsburg. But unfortunately his unavoidable alliance with France transformed the Reich Idea into a particularistic federalism, and the Sacred Empire into a sort of enlarged Confederation of the Rhine." 12 Imperial loyalty was certainly not Frederick's motive. What mattered to him was the maintenance of his kingdom. If we try to look for "justifications," we shall not find them in legal or German-patriotic reasons. Thomas Mann, in his essay on Friedrich und die g rosse Koalition (written in December, 1914), a brilliant analysis, though one that is startling in its Macchiavellian philosophy, finds the justification in historic necessity. On the dualism of Frederick's character, he quotes Rousseau: II pense en philosophe et se conduit en roi. 'This is a great antithesis which embraces many vivid antinomies; the contrast, for instance, of right and might, of thought and action, freedom and fate, reason and daimon, civic erudition and heroic duty." And he sums up: "He [Frederick] had to do wrong and to lead a life against the Idea. He was not permitted to be philosopher—he had to be king, in order that a great people's task on earth might be fulfilled." 13 Since necessity is the antithesis to freedom, he who consciously wills what is necessary is free. It is a higher freedom, for in the synthesis thesis and antithesis are preserved and overcome. The instrument of history becomes its free partner. Arguments of private morality, valid as they remain in their proper sphere, cannot be advanced against him. One may find it surprising that Frederick apparently never thought of reaching for the imperial purple. To change his Protestant religion would probably have been the least of obstacles for him. Had he not said that in his kingdom everyone should seek salvation in his own way? If he had felt that his happiness depended on it, if he had been urged on by necessity, Frederick would surely have interpreted a change of faith to be his own way. Veit Valentin remarks justly that Frederick was "more Guelf than Hohenzollem." 14 Directly, the reference is to his family descent: Frederick's mother, Sophia Dorothea, was the daughter of King George I of the Welf υ Weltgeschichte, II, 174.

« Weltgeschichte, II, 1β8.

15

Quotations from pp. 116, 118.

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house. But indirectly, there is a greater historic truth involved. Frederick was a Guelf in the political sense: his concept was territorial, not imperialuniversal. It was decidedly not German and national. He was of the "race of great dukes, not of emperors," as Otto of Freising once had said of the Welfs. 15 Frederick, the "Crowned Reality" (as Thomas Carlyle called him), 14 was the categoric imperative on a royal throne. He did not love men; he loved duty. His declaration (in the Anti-Machiavel) that the prince was the first servant of the state, was the keynote of the program of action, followed throughout his long reign. One of his first acts of government was the abolition of torture.17 He created an incorrupt system of professional judges and lawyers and civil servants, whose recompense was greater honor rather than monetary gain. The famous case of the miller of Sans Souci who was wronged by the king but trusted in the king's judges may or may not have happened as the traditional version has it. What matters is that the miller's retort to the king, "There are still judges in Berlin!" carried enough truth to become proverbial. Frederick has been hailed chiefly as a daring strategist ("Attaquez donc toujoursr), a military genius of the first magnitude. This man, who in his youth had hated all things military and had, against the wishes of his soldier father, grown up a convinced civilian, maintained himself against the three great military powers of the Continent, Russia, France, and Austria. But his achievements as legislator are perhaps at least as remarkable. The codification of civil administrative and criminal law, the Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preusstschen Staaten, was begun on his initiative and under his admonition to the jurists that they should order everything "according to reason, justice, and equity." " Carefully worded articles defined and limited the power of the state and the competence of the police—something indeed worthy of note in a time of absolutism. These articles remained law until 1931, when the republic replaced them with more modern formulations. On the foundation laid by Frederick, the Rechtsstaat, the state of law, developed." Though the two Silesian wars and the Seven Years War ( 1756-1763) were really civil wars between the house of Hohenzollem and the house of 15 Gesta Frederici n. 2, in Monumenta Germoniae histórica, Scriptores, XX, 391. i« History of Frederick II of Prussia, called Frederick the Great, i. i, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, XII, 16. " Cabinet order to the Wirklicher Geheimer Etatsminister Samuel von Cocceji, June 3, 1740, the third day of Frederick's reign. Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, "Friedrich der Grosse und sein Grosskanzler Samuel von Cocceji," in Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philologische und historische Abhandlungen, 1863, p. 1. 19 Letter to Cocceji (January 12, 1746), in ibid., p. 4. 10 "The general rights of man," the Allgemeine Landrecht für die Preussischen Staaten says (Einleitung, $83), "derive from his natural liberty to pursue and promote his own happiness, without infringing on the rights of others"—a formulation that seems familiar to Americans because of its likeness to the Declaration of Independence.

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Habsburg-Lorraine, far wider questions and conflicts became involved. As in most factional German struggles, all the main European powers had a stake in the conflict. From 1756 to 1761, England was in alliance with Frederick. While it is true that the English subsidies and the Hanoverian army saved Prussia from defeat, it may be equally well argued that Prussian arms made possible the British conquest of Canada. The battle of Rossbach of 1757, in which Frederick inflicted a stunning defeat on the French army, ranks in British imperial history with Waterloo and the Boer War; it was decidedly less costly. Soon after the accession of George III the Bute cabinet concluded a separate peace with France, and British help to Frederick ceased. It is part of the economy of the spirit of history that with one and the same means it often achieves several different aims. The French-speaking king of Prussia, who from the English point of view was a subsidized instrument to be dropped at will, emerged from the Seven Years War aged, tired, and embittered, but a European figure. He had become what he had never aspired to be, a hero. Without Caesar's pure style, without Roman power and classic harmony—Friedrich Gundolf says—"Frederick nevertheless again brought back a heroic prowess into the enervated, fatigued Later Rococo, as well as the awe of destiny."20 No less a man than Immanuel Kant publicly referred to Frederick in 1784 as "the Great." So well did this express the judgment of the world that the title of honor, fitting Frederick like a golden robe cut to measure, became generally accepted. Frederick knew but little about German literature and intellectual life. His critique, written in French, De la littérature allemande, des défauts qu'on peut lui reprocher, quelles en sont les causes, et par quels moyens on peut les corriger, is a unique document. It was published in 1780, at a time when the name of Johann Wolfgang Goethe had already been shining for five or ten years before the civilized world. For Goethe's achievements the king had no admiration; nor did he take cognizance of Lessing, Winckelmann, Klopstock, or Herder. Of Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen Frederick had heard but vaguely. He characterized it as "a detestable imitation of those bad English plays [by Shakespeare]" and adds, "but our public pays loud tribute to such revolting balderdash, and even demands its repetition." 21 'That the king mentions my work dishonorably," Goethe wrote about this judgment to a friend, "does not surprise me. A mighty man, who leads thou20 Caesar; Geschichte seines Ruhms, p. 227; English translation by Jacob Wittmer Hartmann, The Mantle of Caesar, p. 259. « Oeuvres de Frédéric le Grand, VIII, 109. Frederick wrote also (pp. 108-9): "To convince yourself of the lack of taste in Germany you only have to visit our public spectacles. There you will find those abominable plays by Shakespeare, translated into our language. The public finds its delight in these ridiculous farces that should be good only for performance before the savages of Canada."

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sands with an iron scepter, must needs find the production of a free and inerudite boy intolerable." 22 Frederick was to him the "polar-star, who seemed to turn about himself Germany, Europe—nay the whole world." And his mature judgment in his memoirs is this: "When one considers closely what was wanting in the German poetry, it was a material, and that, too, a national one. . . . The first true and really vital material of the higher order came into German poetry through Frederick the Great and the deeds of the Seven Years' War. . . . Frederick had saved the honor of one part of the Germans against a united world." 2S All other German thinkers of the day, cosmopolitan all of them, felt the same. Lessing, who had never enjoyed Frederick's grace, was prominent among them. And this is all that matters. True historic greatness may well be judged by the spark it kindles in the creative minds of mankind. Just as we see the stars not as they are but in their projection on the firmament, so Frederick's stature stands out brightly against the background of history. The spell that Frederick exercised over the minds of men was not confined to his" friends nor to his lifetime.24 When the great Napoleon, after Jena and Auerstädt, stood at Frederick's grave in the Garnisonskirche at Potsdam, he turned to his entourage and said, "Messieurs, if he were still alive, we should not be here." 2 5 Frederick's greatness transcended the boundaries of his dynastic kingdom. He was sharply aware of the political interdependence of the world, and non-German writers have paid him large tribute. Indeed no German could have esteemed him more highly than did Thomas Carlyle. His glory, Carlyle felt, commenced to make up for a common German government and a common capital. "That higher Question of Teutschland," he wrote, "and of its having in it a Nation, was Friedrichs sore task, and his Prussia's at that time." 29 Lord Byron, in the "List of historic writers whose works I 22 Letter to Frau von Voigts, Weimar, June 21, 1781. Goethes Werke, Vierte Abteilung, V, 145, No. 1254. 23 The quotations are from Dichtung und Wahrheit, m. xi, π. vii, m. xii, in Goethes Werke. Erste Abteilung, XXVIII, 5β, XXVII, 81, 104, XXVIII, 141; English translation by John Oxenford and A. J. W. Morrison, The Autobiography of Goethe, in Goethe's Popular Works, II, 79, I, 219, 232, II, 124. 24 "Those eyes could cast a spell of seduction or of terror, according to the will of his heroic soul," Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, Count de Mirabeau, who had seen him only twice, wrote in a letter of September 24, 1786. Histoire secrète de la cour de Berlin, in Oeuvres (Paris, Lecointe et Pougin, 1834-35), VIII, 324. 25 The admiration which Czar Peter III had for Frederick probably saved him from utter defeat in one of the most dangerous periods of the Seven Years War. Peter, succeeding the Empress Elizabeth in 1762, ordered his troops at once to cease fire and soon afterwards concluded the treaty of friendship of St. Petersburg with Frederick. Though this was later revoked by Catherine II, we may see in the treaty the beginnings of the Russo-PrussianGerman policy of understanding which figured so prominently in nineteenth-century history. 28 History of Frederick II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, XVI, 197.

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have perused in different languages" which he compiled at the age of nineteen, notes: "I have seen, at least, twenty Lives of Frederick II., the only prince worth recording in Prussian annals." 21 Frederick's sympathies were on the side of the American Revolution. George Bancroft, American minister at Berlin till 1874, during the decisive years of Bismarck's career, wrote about the Prussian King: "The successful termination of the [Revolutionary] war aroused in Prussia hope for the new birth of Europe, that, by the teachings of America, despotism might be struck down, and the caste of hereditary nobility give place to republican equality. These aspirations were suffered to be printed at Berlin. The great Frederick had, late in 1782, declared to the British minister at his court, half in earnest and half cajoling, that "he was persuaded the American union could not long subsist under its present form. The great extent of country would alone be a sufficient obstacle, since a republican government had never been known to exist for any length of time where the territory was not limited and concentred. It would not be more absurd to propose the establishment of a democracy to govern the whole country from Brest to Riga. . . .' He did not know the power of the representative system, nor could he foresee that by the wise use of it the fourth of his successors would evoke the German state from the eclipse of centuries, to shine with replenished light as the empire of a people. For the moment he kept close watch of the progress of the convention with Sweden, and, so soon as it was signed, directed his minister in France to make overtures to Franklin, which were most gladly received." 28 The mantle of Frederick the Great has been usurped for many purposes— in recent years particularly by the German nationalist parties. The portrait by Menzel which shows a small man with large, blue eyes, leaning on his cane, the star of the Black Eagle on his uniform, appeared on many revolting election posters. All such appropriations Frederick would have scorned with stern contempt and a disdain voiced, probably, in French. Joseph II, "the high-souled" emperor, as G. P. Gooch so well termed him,20 was among Frederick's greatest admirers. This in spite of the fact that the king had fought relentlessly against Joseph's mother, Maria Theresa and had opposed his own German schemes. Against Joseph's plan to annex Bavaria for Austria and indemnify the Wittelsbachs by giving them the Austrian Netherlands as the "Kingdom of Burgundy," Frederick had founded, a year before his death, in 1785, the League of German Princes, which was pledged to suffer no change of territory or transfer of sovereignty 27 Thomas Moore, "Notices of the Life of Lord ByTon," in The Works of Lord Byron (London, John Murray, 1833), I, 141-12. 29 History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of America ( New York, D. Appleton, 1882), I, 71-72. ?» "The Political Background of Goethe's Life," in Studies in Modern History, p. 155.

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in Germany. This was the first important North German initiative in a question concerning Germany as a whole. It is tragic that the emperor and the great king could not find a common platform for the good of the empire. Together, they might have staved off disaster—had Frederick been younger and had he looked on the empire as a Ghibelline rather than as a Guelf. Joseph, of all the Habsburgs, is the most winning. His reform of the civil law and of civil and criminal procedure in his domains (under Frederician influence) survived the short and unhappy years of his reign. So did the spirit of his Patent of Tolerance of 1781 for the non-Catholic confessions. His Catholicity was beyond doubt, but he felt that faith would fare better with freedom than through suppression of the other creeds. He was an enlightened and humane ruler, whose heart was open to all classes of people. He it was who abolished serfdom in the crown domains. Once more in the graying twilight of the empire there stood an emperor conscious of the tribunician-republican origin of his office. Even though many of his too hasty reforms had to be abandoned Joseph's name persisted as the symbol of the Volkskaiser, the people's emperor. As an historic aperçu it may be of interest to mention that the youngest confederation of peoples, the rising United States of America, received the sanction of the most ancient one, the dying Sacred Roman Empire. Emperor Joseph II informed Benjamin Franklin that he would be welcome in Vienna as the minister of a sovereign power, and the Baron de Beelen Bertholff, dispatched to Philadelphia as a resident imperial agent, made up careful reports, which extend from March, 1785, to September, 1788, and contain much valuable historic material.30 In the last decade of the millennial empire, in 1795, Immanuel Kant's treatise, Perpetual Peace was published. It is the last great document of Occidental universalism, ripened by the traditions of many generations; it was directed, too, toward a new realization of the same idea in the future. Not only from the Occidental traditions, which were alive in him, but also from events in America, Kant drew inspiration. From the beginning he had sympathized with the new federation, its creed of liberty and justice, and its establishment of a workable balance between federal and state powers. Perpetual Peace is a world constitution of reason, conceived as a conscious instrument of the telos of progressing mankind. In elaborating it, Kant was mindful of a truth which, some generations later, seems to have escaped the attention of the statesmen called upon to lead a war-torn world towards peace—namely, that a League of Nations cannot flourish unless sound relations are established between its members. However strong and embrac30 Bancroft, History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of I, 72.

America,

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ing the central authority of such a League may be, direct relations between the states, not necessarily channeled through federal organs, will always continue, and if there are local, regional, or national conflicts, serious dangers for the whole may arise. Therefore Kant tried to lay a stable foundation for the embracing community he had in mind, and the conditions for it are deposited in Six Preliminary Articles. According to the first of these articles, "no treaty of peace shall be esteemed valid, on which is tacitly reserved matter for future war. A treaty of this sort would be only a truce, a suspension, not a complete cessation of hostilities," and therefore a constant menace to the international community.*1 While there exist no "hereditary enmities" between nations (as history proves), and no insurmountable obstacles, be it of hate, prejudice, or supposed conflict of interest, foreign domination of the whole or parts of a people's territory creates and perpetuates all disruptive nationalistic antagonisms. Nations, even if they were at war for long periods, may become reconciled within a higher organism, but one cannot live under another's rule without by necessity forgetting things international and bending its energy first of all to restoring its national integrity. Kant wisely excludes, therefore, the passing of any state, large or small, "under the dominion of another," whether the foreign rule be based on inheritance, on exchange ( a provision quite timely today ), on purchase, on donation, or any other basis. Standing armies form a constant threat to peace and ought to be abolished. They lead to armament races and ever-increasing public expense, until peace comes to be considered more burdensome than war. Article IV, "National debts shall not be contracted with a view of maintaining the interests of the state abroad," is somewhat puzzling, unless it be interpreted as an injunction against overstepping the territorial limits of the state by economic imperialism, or, as in our day particularly, by foreign propaganda. Such an interpretation leads logically to the fifth article, which prohibits states from interfering by force "with either the constitution or government of another state"—again a most timely counsel! Economic imperialism and propaganda would seem to be the forerunner of more direct interference of this sort. Until recently, at least, it was generally agreed that wars are waged with peace as their object. Even in time of wars, bitter as the fighting may be, peace still remains the primary goal, which should not be compromised in advance. Kant thought of this fact when framing the last Preliminary Article, which maintains that nothing must be done in war that would make peace " Zum ewigen Frieden, i. i, in Sämmtliche Werke, edited by Karl Rosenkranz and Friedrich Wilhelm Schubert (Leipzig, L. Voss, 1838-1842), VII, 232; English translation in Perpetual Peace, reprinted from the first English edition published in London, 179Θ (New York, Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 2.

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impossible. In particular, no assassins or poisoners are to be employed, agreements are not to be violated, and no rebellions are to be instigated." Kant, like Hegel, recognized that the state of nature (once more unduly praised in our century) is one of permanent war, and must be overcome by the spirit. In international life, this requires collaboration between states, each republican in its constitution. The postulate of "republican" government forms therefore the first Definitive Article in Kant's treatise, that is to say, a constitution guaranteeing to the people civic rights and a voice in matters of foreign policy. Such a republican (that is, in modem language, constitutional) order is best safeguarded, Kant believed, by a monarchical head of government. By this, he did not mean the princely absolutism of his age; the monarch whom Kant desires bears the traits of Dante's immortal vision. Epithets lavished on a sovereign, Kant says, "ought to render him humble, if he possesses understanding . . . and if he reflects, that he is charged with an employment superior to the powers of man, namely, to protect what is most sacred to God upon earth, the rights of man." Under a despotic rule, Kant felt, it is the easiest thing on earth to plunge a country into war, for the chief is free to "resolve on war as on a party of pleasure, for reasons the most frivolous, and with perfect indifference leave the justification of the same, which decency requires, to the diplomatic corps, who are ever ready to undertake it." " Kant's second Definitive Article demands that "the public right [international law] ought to be founded upon a federation of free states." Just as unrestricted freedom of action among individuals would destroy society and ultimately individual rights themselves, limitless national freedom is the cause of international anarchy. Sovereignty pushed to the extreme destroys itself, along with all other sovereignties. This concept of Kant's is open to criticism, at least on the part of the philosopher of history. Limitation of national sovereignty and the necessity s 2 The Preliminary Articles are in ibid., ι. 1-6; Rosenkranz and Schubert ed., pp. 232-36; English, pp. 2-9. In discussion of acts of war that compromise the peace, it may be noted that today wartime propaganda may do much to poison the peace. If the opponent is pictured as wicked to the core, untrustworthy and aggressive by nature, and altogether subhuman, the unwary may be led to believe that it is not worth-while to conclude peace at all. This leaves only the alternative of total extermination of the opponent. The creed of perpetual peace would thus be changed to a creed of perpetual war—a thought which reason rejects and morality abhors. *» The quotation in the preceding paragraph is in ibid., π. 1; Rosenkranz and Schubert ed., p. 245n.; English, p. 16n. The quotation nere is in π. 1; Rosenkranz and Schubert ed., p. 243; English, p. 14. Among the reasons for undertaking a war that may be accounted "frivolous" should be noted one very popular in our time—to escape from difficulties at home. Kant, of course, envisioned republicanism against the background of the cabinet wars of absolutism. He could not foresee the possibility that republicanism, forma] and devoid of its ethical content, might become a cloak for despotism or that modem technical means of influencing mass opinion might enable a government, strictly republican in form, to manipulate mass response against the truer interests of the people.

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of channeling national, like individual, freedom into the organism of law are high aims with which hardly anyone will disagree. To give at least lip service to them is a postulate even of hypocrisy—that last remaining element of morality. But such stock phrases actually lead nowhere. Upon the oneness of purpose, the reawakening of the consciousness of historic unity, the return of an awareness of the telox of organized society, and the knowledge of mankind as Christ's Mystical Body—on these alone can international organisms be founded. Earthly society represents the 'Temporal City" (and to admit this much implies recognition of another City), and its prudence requires peace and law by which the spiritual, religious, and moral aims of mankind are fostered. It is St. Augustine whom we need as guide in order to interpret Kant, whose purely human ratio is insufficient. Without Kant's subjective nobility of mind this ratio would soon be changed into rationalizing expediency, as in fact did happen with men after him. And expediency as a rule of conduct is the most insufficient of all; in the end it even becomes antirational. War and victory can never determine the question of right. Since "from her highest tribunal of moral legislation, reason without exception condemns war as a mean of right, and makes a state of peace an absolute duty; and since this peace cannot be effected or be guaranteed without a compact among nations, they must form an alliance of a peculiar kind, which might be called a pacific alliance ( f o e d u s pacificum) different from a treaty of peace (pactum pacis) inasmuch as it would for ever terminate all wars." This alliance, for the protection of its members, their liberty and peace as individuals and as a community, must be open to all. A world republic, a society of nations, as the only sensible solution demanded by reason and by peace, is reason's most cherished aim. But as the backwardness of men prevents the easy realization of such plans, there must be added "to the positive idea of a universal republic (if all is not to be lost), the negative supplement of a permanent alliance which prevents war," 34 to stop the torrents of unjust and inhuman passions. This, in the terms of today, would be the postulate of universal collective security.35 The Third Definitive article of peace would establish universal citizenship, universal hospitality. This, too, is a question of right, not of philanthropy. '•This quotation is in ibid., π. 2; Rosenkranz and Schubert ed., p. 251; English, p. 23. The two preceding quotations are also in n. 2; Rosenkranz and Schubert ed., pp. 245, 2 4 9 50; English, pp. 18, 21. 3 5 " I t would not ill become a people that has just terminated a war," Kant suggests in a footnote to this paragraph, "to order, besides their thanksgiving-day, a solemn fast, in order to ask forgiveness of God for the crime the nation has just committed. . . . T h e thanksgivings which are rendered during the war, the hymns that are chanted by us . . . are glaringly inconsistent with the moral idea of the Father of men; they announce a culpable indifference for the principles, which nations ought to observe in the defense of their rights, and express an infernal joy at having slain a multitude of men, or annihilated their happiness." Ibid., π. 3, Rosenkranz and Schubert ed. pp. 2 5 1 - 5 2 n . ; English, pp. 2 3 24n.

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Originally, no one has a greater right to a country than another; in natural law all have a right to the common possession of the surface of the earth. We may conclude that it is Reason, the conscious and personal principle which transcends the world's history, that overwhelms the various nations and instils in them the knowledge of the oneness of the human race. The moral statesman, unlike the Realpolitiker, whom Kant scourges mercilessly and with sarcastic wit, will seek first "the reign of pure practical reason and its justice, and . . . the blessing of perpetual peace will necessarily follow." 3" In this lies the knowledge—which the politicians of the world have not yet acquired—that an honest, moral policy is at the same time the most practical and most successful one, whereas the immoral slyness of the Realpolitiker, running counter to reason and to the telos of history, must defeat the very ends for which it is practiced. The parallels between Saint Augustine, the Florentine Ghibelline, and the philosopher of Königsberg are striking. To all three, it is the world-historic progress that matters. The reign of justice, which can flourish only in a universal order of peace, has as its prerequisite a mankind organized in freedom and ordained toward unity. All three, each in his own tongue, express the basic thought of Christian-Occidental philosophy. It is Providence itself which uses human institutions for the pursuit of its ends. Out of the dialectical conflict between Freedom, Reason, and Morality on the one side and man's corrupt nature on the other a higher human freedom in a universally organized society will eventually be bom. From mankind as a species the way leads through tribal and national communities to universal commonwealths. The many retrograde movements, failures, and defeats cannot and will not impede the final victory of the pure idea of humanity under the guidance of God's grace. Historic optimism has inspired all three, St. Augustine, Dante, and Kant, though they lived in very different periods, under quite diverse circumstances. Yet, in one respect, their ages were similar: while in the time of each an order of centuries was falling to pieces, there was rising above the horizon a new land, still uncharted, but not unknown to the philosopher of the spirit. 30

Ibid., Appendix I; Rosenkranz and Schubert ed., p. 280; English, pp. 53-54.

17 THE SECOND FALL OF THE EMPIRE Wherefore

to rend the empire is not competent

to the DANTE,

emperor. De monarchia.

I N AUGUST, 1 7 9 2 , Wolfgang Goethe arrived at the camp of the duke of Brunswick, commander in chief of the allied armies of intervention against the French Revolution. The émigrés had been positive in their assertion that the people of France would welcome the invaders as liberators from the powers of the Revolution; the march to Paris would be une parade militaire. But soon the situation revealed itself to Goethe as something quite different. Obviously the French people did not look upon the Revolution in the same light as did the émigrés. On September 20, after the cannonade of Valmy, an engagement which was insignificant from a military point of view, the allies retreated. Of all the men there Goethe alone understood the world-historic importance of the day, which was followed within twenty-four hours by the fall of the Bourbons. People avoided looking at each other, he says in his Campaign in France. "Not even the usual fire could be kindled; most were silent. . . . At last I was called upon to say what I thought of the state of affairs; for I had been in the habit of enlivening and amusing the party with brief remarks. This time 1 said: 'From this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world's history, and you can all say that you were present at its birth.' " 1 These words have echoed through world literature; the most famous instance of its use is, perhaps, in the poem on Valmy by Giosuè Carducci, the poet of the Italian Risorgimento. The last lines are these:

E da un gruppo d'oscuri esce Volfgango Goethe dicendo: Al mondo oggi da questo Luogo incomincia la novella storia. Wolfgang von Goethe on the turmoil cast His eye, said, issuing from a group obscure, "To-day from this place starts the world's new story." 2 1 Kampagne in Frankreich, September 19, in Goethes Werke, Erste Abteilung, XXXIII, 75; English translation by L. Dora Schmitz, in Miscellaneous Travels of J. W. Coethe (London, G. Bell, 1882), p. 118. 2 Ça ira ( 1883), χπ. 12-15, in Poesie, 1850-1900, 5th ed. (Bologna, Nicola Zanichelli, 1906), p. 736; English translation by Emily A. Tribe, A Selection from the Poems of Giosuè Carducci (London, Longmans, Green, 1921), p. 56.

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Goethe was no sympathizer with the Revolution, but he understood why it had come. T o his courage and serenity," says G. P. Gooch in his essay on the political background of Goethe's life, "Goethe added a clearness of vision to which few if any of his companions could lay claim. There is not a word of hatred or recrimination in the Campaign or in the letters on which it is based. Aristocrats and democrats, he feels, have sinned alike, and the French people is the victim of its rulers, old and new. He was temperamentally unfitted to scale the heights and plumb the depths of the Revolution; yet he never shared the delusion that it was merely the outpouring of human wickedness or that it could be suppressed by the sword alone. . . . His pages breathe a genuine humanity, and the sufferings of the humble never fail to strike a responsive chord in his heart. He returned home with a shuddering horror of war, more convinced than ever that revolutions were not worth their price, and that the highest duty of rulers was to render them unnecessary." 3 Goethe's marked lack of national feeling—in 1773, he wrote curtly, Ubi bene ibi patria—did not make him a "bad" German, yet it is not an attitude to be adopted by everyone who wants to appear as a "good" German to the outside world. His sentiments arose "from the peculiar situation of his age. The politically formative elements of the empire were exhausted, much as they had been in the fifth century. Only a spiritual residuum, which was Occidental-German culture, remained. From this heritage were derived the great cosmopolitan values of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. It would be erroneous to conclude that, because what may be called the nation-free period of German history coincided with the era of greatest culture, there was a cause-and-effect relationship and that, therefore, nation and artistic culture are antagonistic. Goethe, "the undisputed sovereign of European literature," as Lord Byron called him in a letter of thanks written in 1823,4 was not averse to matters political as such. After the duke of SaxeWeimar appointed him minister of state in 1782 (an office he held for decades), he developed agriculture and industry, reformed finances and improved education, built roads and dams, and aided the poor. A conservative reformer, the author of Faust, that immortal song of the Occidental soul's path to God, could claim that Weimar under his rule became a flourishing country. It was in 1816 the first in Germany to have a representative constitution. With its theater, its brilliant cultural life at the court and among the educated classes, Weimar seemed a nineteenth-century successor to the universal-minded imperial city-republics of the Middle Ages. Goethe was perhaps the only living man whom Napoleon considered an equal. The emperor's famous exclamation after Goethe's first audience with him, in 1808, Voilà un homme! expressed the admiration of one man of 3 4

"The Political Background of Goethe's Life," in Studies in Modern History, p. 163. The Works of Lord Byron ( London, John Mimay, 1833), VI, 70.

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genius for another. Goethe returned this esteem with equal fervor. To him Napoleon was not the ogre, conqueror, and enslaver that nationalistic literature made him out to be, but an embodiment of the universal mind, of world order, and of law. The German poet regarded the emperor as a phenomenon so extraordinary as to be outside any conventional standards of judgment. What Goethe still means to our own generation has hardly been better said than by Friedrich Gundolf: "The centenary of Goethe's death falls at a time when the creed he embodied and exalted is threatened—the allEuropean humanism, that is to say, faith in man as mediator, bearer, and seer of the world. . . . Only through symbols may we creatures enveloped in space and time partake in the mystery. When we return to the origins, home from history, we no longer need the symbols; but reverence for the creative form and the moulder of the form . . . . is the greatest heritage the old Europe handed to ours, menaced and receding, for which we will live and die. . . . We celebrate in Goethe the last universal seer of humanism." 5 The concept of the French Revolution as a world-historic event which carried its own justification was common to all German thinkers of the age. This is readily understandable if we consider that whatever was good and sound in the principles enunciated by the Revolution—and this is a fact overlooked by many of its unhistoric admirers—was neither new nor specifically French; they formed, as we have seen throughout this book, and integral part of Occidental life for more than a thousand years. After having been obscured for some time by European disintegration and absolutism, they were formulated in modern form by Samuel von Pufendorf, that remarkable man who was so far in advance of his age. His works contain those beliefs that later on were hailed as les idées immortelles de 1789. In Pufendorf's On the Law of Nature and Nations we find, for example, a definition of the natural equality of men as a moral category superior to all social ranks, titles, and privileges of birth or office.0 Walter Simons, the late president of the German Reichsgericht, has rightly remarked that, since Pufendorfs age was richer than almost any other in abundance of privilege, his emphasis on natural equality was truly revolutionary.7 The principle of division of power, which has loomed so large in the American and in most other modern constitutions, is also clearly contained in Pufendorf's writings. But he distinguishes among the legislative, the punitive, the judicial power, the power of war and peace, the constituent power (distribution of offices), and the power to levy taxes. He wisely foresaw and attempted to avoid the danger, so evident in certain modem states, that 5 From a paper written a few weeks before his death in 1932 and communicated to the author by Mrs. Elisabeth Gundolf. It has been published, Rede zu Goethe's hundertstem Todestag (Berlin, Georg Bondi, 1932). 6 De jure naturae et gentium ni. ii; English, II, 330 sqq. ι Ibid., Vol. I, Einleitung, p. 32a; English, II, 29a.

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the bearers of authority should discharge their authority in absolute independence of the other branches. They must, he feels, all be coordinated and subject to the supreme will of the historic state community. Democracy Pufendorf considers the oldest form of state; the form nearest to men's natural equality and liberty. But minority rights, in a true democracy, must be as essential as the execution of the will of the majority. In itself, of course, no form of state is to Pufendorf absolutely superior to another—a sound point of view which the Lutheran scholar shares with the teaching of the Catholic Church, upheld through the centuries down to our times, occasionally to the dismay of interested groups of states or politicians. What really matters is not so much the form of state as the subjection of the state under the moral law and the protection of the citizens against unjust infringements of their natural rights, which exist independent of the state or any earthly power. No prince, Pufendorf holds, is really absolute, for he is bound by the rules of natural law; but he is also bound by the constitution upon which he has agreed with his people. 8 The epitome of his On the Law of Nature and Nations Pufendorf s more condensed book De officio hominis et dots juxta legem naturalem, seems to have had direct influence upon French events. Like the rest of his writings, this was translated into many languages, the title of the French edition being Les devoirs de l'homme et du citoyen. As Walter Simons pointed out, the significance of the truly revolutionary ideas of Pufendorf appears in the fact that this title, with one word changed, recurs in the heading of the famous declaration of the French National Assembly in 1789, namely, "Déclaration sur les droits de l'homme et du citoyen." 0 However, the perennial ideas of natural law, of human freedom, equality, and fraternity, were not adopted by the French Revolution without a radical change. For Pufendorf was Christian and his views on the duties of men and the rights of peoples were not unlike those of St. Thomas Aquinas. What he continued and formulated anew were the fundamental doctrines, moral concepts, and relationships valid for all Christian (or all theistic) nations. His "reason" as well as his "nature," the sources from which he derived his political and international values, were neither a purely human ratio nor a mechanistic universe, and society to him was more than a utilarian convention. The spirit of the French Revolution, on the other hand, was distinguished by a regrettable absence of any strong awareness of a divine and personal Absolute as the originator of the dignity of man and the moral law of nature. From this perspective we must admit today that it is necessary to revise many of the conventional and trite opinions and judgments upon the events 8 Specific passages in Pufendorf"s De jure naturae et gentium on the points discussed above are: vn. iv; νπ. ν §§4, 5; English, II, 1010 sqq., 1025 sqq., 1029, 1069. » Ibid., Vol. I, Einleitung, pp. 16a-17a; English, II, 14a.

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of 1789. Rather than contributing towards morality, freedom, and social justice, the Revolution certainly had a large share in propagating the modern heresies of nationalism and legal positivism, which have thrown human society into complete moral anarchy. Once we free ourselves from the cherished but baseless notion that we owe the ideas of democracy to 1789, it becomes quite clear that whatever reforms the Revolution brought about could, perhaps, have been achieved without the hecatombs of blood and all the horrors, which anticipate the doings of the present-day totalitarian heirs of those events. All this, of course, could not have been clear to the enthusiastic contemporaries of the Revolution. German spokesmen, Herder and Fichte, were among the first to refer to it as a major event in the history of mankind.10 Kant, though a man of almost seventy at the time it broke out, did not hesitate to defy the suspicion of the authorities in their hunt for "Jacobins." In 1793, he wrote in his study of religion: "We must be free, in order to use our powers wisely in freedom." The first attempts will naturally be imperfect, even dangerous, but experience will show the way, for God has created mankind for freedom. With this declaration he countered the then popular argument that the French were not ripe for freedom. "It cannot be pretended," he wrote, obviously referring to France, "that a nation should renounce its constitution (were it even despotic, and consequently most formidable to foreign enemies) so long as it is exposed to the danger of being swallowed up by other states. This reform must then be deferred till a more favourable epocha." 11 Not only upon the intellectual leaders, but also upon the broad masses of the German people, particularly the gebildetes Bürgertum, the French Revolution exercised a potent influence. The gebildetes Bürgertum ( a term which almost defies translation into English, for "educated middle classes," by laying too much emphasis on the economic aspect, falls short of justice) traced its historical descent from the learned and cultured citizens of the medieval towns, which had in freedom and tolerance cherished the spirit of Germanuniversal civilization. Although the privileges of the nobility continued, the Bürgertum had, since the days of Frederick the Great, become more and more representative of German cultural life. It was in due time to become 10 J. G. Fichte, for example, said in 1793: "Things have become the subject of conversation which no one had formerly dreamed of. Discussions of the rights of man, of liberty and equality, of the sanctity of oaths and treaties, of the foundations and limits of royal power . . . have taken the place of fashion and adventures. We are beginning to leam." Bettrag zur Berichtigung der Urtheile des Publikums über die französische Revolution, Vorrede, in Sämmtliche Werke, VI, 41. 11 The first quotation is in Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft ( 1793), In Sämmtliche Werke, edited by Karl Rosenkranz and Friedrich Wilhelm Schubert (Leipzig, L. Voss, 1838-1842), X, 227n. The second is in Zum ewigen Frieden, Appendix I; Rosenkranz and Schubert ed., VII, 272-73; English, ρ. 4Θ. Italics mine.

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the bearer of political life. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was the townsmen who understood and appreciated the works of the great sons of Germany—Goethe, Kant, Lessing, Herder, Fichte—and offered them a sympathetic public. By necessity, the ideas advanced by the new France appealed to these circles. But they also appealed to the depressed estates, to the artisans and peasants, still laboring under feudal or city-patrician tutelage. The impact of the ideas of democracy, of civic liberty, and of the abolition of class privileges, can be compared to the world revolutionary appeal of certain international programs today. They aroused political sympathies frequently not compatible with patriotic feelings in the traditional sense. The "fifth column" is not a twentieth-century invention. In so far as its members are at all honest and sincere, they consider the true interests of their country better represented by the foreign power that advances ideas which they regard as progressive. The affinity of ideologies may transcend or overcome national antagonism. The world revolutionary ideas of the French Revolution itself and the many sympathizers outside France contributed to the victories of the French armies, those of the republic as well as those of Napoleon, the man of destiny who was heir to the ideas of 1789. The thought of the great dramatist Friedrich Hebbel (born in the fateful year 1813), that we must see Napoleon in the light of Alexander and Caesar,12 expresses what may have been felt by many who witnessed this most extraordinary historic phenomenon. Not only Goethe, but Hegel (Napoleon, "the world spirit on horseback"), Beethoven (the Eroica), and most leaders in the realm of the spirit who were endowed with an historic sense felt his influence upon them like a stormy wind of destiny. Perhaps the most significant expression of this feeling was that by Friedrich Hölderlin, the Hellenic-German youth, in his poem Buonaparte: Heilige Gefässe sind die Dichter, Worin der Wein des Lebens, der Geist Der Helden sich aufbewahrt. Aber der Geist dieses Jünglings, Der schnelle, müsst er es nicht zersprengen, Wo es ihn fassen wollte, das Gefäss? Der Dichter lass ihn unberührt, wie den Geist die Natur! An solchem Stoffe wird zum Knaben der Meister. Er kann im Gedichte nicht leben und bleiben, Er lebt und bleibt in der Welt! 12 Kritische Arbeiten, in Sämtliche Werke, edited by Richard Maria Wemer ( Berlin, B. Behr, 1901-1907), X, 354.

212

THE SECOND FALL OF THE EMPIRE The poets: sacred vessels are they, Wherein the wine of life, the spirit Of the heroes indwells. But this youth's spirit, The fervid one, would it not shatter The vessel that would contain him? Let not the poet, no more than nature holds The spirit, hold him. In song he can neither live nor sojourn: Here in the wide world he lives and dwells.13

The cosmopolitan spirit prevailed in Germany deep into the Napoleonic epoch, despite events of far-reaching national importance. The Treaty of Lunéville in 1801, between Francis II and the First Consul, led to the loss of the Left Bank of the Rhine. All in all, Germany lost twenty-five thousand square miles and about three and a half million inhabitants. In that same year, Friedrich Schiller wrote his fragment on German Greatness, which is as characteristic of the spirit of the Germany of those days, as it is of the idealistic conception of history, which was later to find its classic perfection in Hegel and Fichte. "May the German at this moment when he emerges without glory from a tearful war, when two arrogant peoples are putting their feet upon his neck and the victor determines his destiny, may he take pride in his name? May he lift up his head and, self-assured, take his place among the other peoples? Yes, he may. He comes out of this struggle in ill fortune, but he has not lost that which makes his real worth. German empire and German nation are two different things. The majesty of the Germans has never rested upon the head of their princes. Apart from the political realm, the German has created for himself his own worth—if the empire should perish, the dignity of the German would still remain undisputed. . . . Let Britons and Frenchmen strive for power and wealth; the German communes with the Spirit of the Worlds. . . . He is chosen by the World Spirit to work, during the struggle of the ages, on the eternal edifice of the erudition of man, to preserve the gains of time. Therefore he has absorbed what was foreign and preserved it in himself. Whatever was precious in other times and peoples . . . he has preserved, and to him the treasures of the centuries have not been lost. Not to excel in the shining moment nor to play a role then, but to be victorious in the great process of time. Each people has a day of its own in history, but the day of the German is the harvest of time." 14 Sämtliche Werke, edited by Franz Zinkemagel and Friedrich Michael (Leipzig, InselVerlag, 1923), p. 204; English translation by Padraic Colum. 11 "Deutsche Grösse," in Sämmtliche Schriften; historisch-kritische Ausgabe, XI, 410-14.

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Coming from the mouth of Schiller, such words are of particular significance. Next to Heinrich von Kleist, he was the most political of the great German dramatists, a man deeply moved by historic forces and by the events of his day. In Don Carlos he raised the cry for the freedom of the spirit, in Wilhelm Tell he wrote the drama of the Swiss people, who, for love of liberty, justice, and the supranational cause of the empire, threw off the yoke of the Habsburg despots. In Cabale und Liebe (written in 1782), he dared to raise the banner of rebellion against princely absolutism and scourged the shameful selling of Germans as soldiers to crush the American people. In 1799, Hölderlin in his Gesang these words:

des Deutschen

rose to the loftiness of

O heilig Herz der Völker, o Vaterland! Allduldend, gleich der schweigenden Mutter Erd, Und allverkannt, wenn schon aus deiner . T i e f e die Fremden ihr Bestes haben! O, sacred heart of peoples: Fatherland! All-suffering like the silent Mother Earth, Unrecognized, although strangers too have drawn Out of thy depths the best they have. 15 O land of love! he exclaims. L a n d of high and austere genius! Hellas-Germany was to him the realm of the spirit, and the soul's longing is to be fulfilled in that union with the ideal of human beauty of which Greece has ever been the timeless symbol. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) is Hölderlin's spiritual brother, though in his yearning for harmony he follows the path of Christian-Occidental history. In the twenty-nine years of his short life, this king of the romantic poets wrote some of the greatest poems of world literature and expressed some of the deepest thoughts of historic philosophy. In his work Christendom or Europe (published in 1 7 9 9 ) , he defined Germanism as cosmopolitanism combined with the strongest individuality. 1 ' "The era was one of beauty and glory when Europe was a Christian land," he writes, "when the dwelling place of Christendom was in this humane Continent. One great common interest united the most distant provinces of this wide spiritual empire." T h e ideal monarchy, which is at the same time a genuine republic, stands before his eyes. E a c h of us sprang from an There is a facsimile edition of the poem, Deutsche Grösse; ein unvollendetes Gedicht Schillers ( 1801 ), ed. with a commentary by Bernhard Suphan (Weimar, 1902). i ' Sämtliche Werke, p. 102. 1β Christenheit oder Europa, in Novalis Schriften, edited by Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel, 4th ed. (Berlin, G. Reimer, 1826), I, 203-4. The quotations in the following paragraph are to be found in this edition of Hardenberg's works at I, 189, II, 172, 175, 177.

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ancient royal tribe; "were it not for reasons of economy, we all would be kings." But how few are still conscious of such an origini A revived commonwealth is needed—Europe, a state of states. The individual states must finally realize once more that they can attain their goal only through universal order. "As the soul needs the body, so the world of the spirit and of human society need a world state." This same note is taken up by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in the lectures on The Characteristics of the Present Age which he delivered in 1804-1805. "Where then is the Fatherland of the truly cultivated Christian European?" He answers, "It is Europe," a "Universal Christian Monarchy" to be organized as a "Republic of Nations" that should be formed by voluntary agreement. To strive for the realization of this unity, he says, is the "sole animating principle of our [European] History." 17 "This," G. P. Gooch remarks, "was the last utterance of the spirit of the eighteenth century. Nationalism is the child of the French Revolution, and Prussia learned at Jena what France had learned at Versailles." 18 One might well speculate on the course world history might have taken in the last hundred and forty years had Napoleon established, not a Frankish, but a truly European, empire. He must have had this wider realm in mind when he called himself L'Empereur de TOccident. During the years of his alliance with Russia, from 1807 to 1812, eternally valid forces reasserted themselves, forces which to most men—but not the man who in stature and in perception towered over the centuries stretching back to the Roman foundations—might have seemed to survive only in ancient chronicles: ecumenical Christendom was again one, represented by the two emperors of the East and the West (the Austrian we may discount), the two heads of the one imperial eagle. The state of the world was not unlike that at the death of Emperor Theodosius (395), with Napoleon, emperor of the West, heir to the Roman-Germanic throne and the czar, heir of Byzantium, ruler over a Slavonic-Orthodox world. Together, they could have renewed the strength and glory of the historic empire. Yet it is an empirical law that states and governments are sustained in their existence by the forces that created them; they cannot later repudiate those forces and try to continue in power with other support. Such a change prepares the road to downfall. Napoleon's empire was born of the forces of French nationalism, which from its union with the ideas of civic progress had gained all-pervading power. In practice the non-French peoples were treated as conquered nations. They were ruled by foreign soldiers, by foreign administrators and tax collectors, and by native hirelings who for their personal advantage became subservient to the foreign rule. As in the earliest IT Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, in Sämmtliche Werke, VII, 202, 212; English translation by William Smith, The Characteristics of the Present Age, pp. 210, 220. ι» "German Theories of the State," in Studies in Modem History, p. 217.

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days of Roman-German relations, the attitude of the Germans was ambivalent. They sympathized with the progressive ideas of the Revolution but opposed French nationalistic oppression. As time wore on, the forces of opposition waxed stronger. The Code Napoléon, which was introduced in Southwestern and Western Germany and remained in force there till 1900, was an excellent and equitable law, superior to the preceding legal system. Moreover, with the French armies had come social emancipation and the hope of further democratic reforms. Freedom of trade and commerce (in so far as they were not restricted by the Continental System directed against England) replaced the outdated guild system where it had still prevailed. There was ample reason for rejoicing over such developments and to wish for their continuation. An added cause of joy was the fact that under the impact of war and Napoleon's state-making the number of German states had been reduced from several hundred to less than forty. On the other hand, French soldiers were quartered all over Germany, and all German states, with the exception of Austria, Prussia, Brunswick, and Hesse-Kassel, were brought into the Confederation of the Rhine under Napoleon's auspices. In practice, France became overlord of the greater part of Germany. Like the British Indian government protecting the status of the princes in relation to their subjects, the French helped to maintain, or even to increase, the power of the German princes in home affairs. In exchange, the princes were expected to see to it that the money and soldiers demanded by France were properly raised among the people. Thirty thousand Bavarians died under the French flag on the icy plains of Russia, and the price paid in blood by the people of the other German states for Napoleon's favors to their rulers was in proportion. Ergo scindere Imperium imperatori non licet (Wherefore to rend the empire is not competent to the emperor), Dante had written. And "It is clear that the emperor, as emperor, cannot change it [the jurisdiction of the empire], since it is the source of his being what he is." " In 1804 Emperor Francis II did rend the empire, detaching his hereditary domains from the universal body. To this act of treason another was added, on August 6, 1806, when the Habsburg emperor laid down the Crown of Charlemagne, that most sublime diadem of Christendom, and declared the empire "dissolved." A millennial epoch of history had come to an unworthy end. Now the German princes were definitely "sovereign," the ambition of centuries was finally fulfilled, though by the grace and under the tutelage of a foreign ruler. Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony had begged, and received, from him royal crowns, and Baden had become a grand duchy. The man 1β De monarchia m. χ; English translation by Philip H. Wicksteed, The Latin Works of Dante, pp. 257-58.

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who at the battle of Austerlitz (December 2, 1805)—another Joshua—had put the sun itself into history could well afford to hand out what the descendants of the oldest houses of Europe petitioned from him, the son of the 18th Brumaire. Prussia under Frederick William II, the weakling who was nephew and successor of Frederick the Great, had been the first state to recognize revolutionary France. By the Treaty of Basel in 1795 Prussia broke with the coalition and withdrew from the war. This signing of a pact with a power on which all "legitimate" governments looked with Burkean horror is an interesting example of how the logic of facts may triumph over ideological considerations. Yet such a policy of realism (or shall we say appeasement?) makes sense only if undertaken to gain time for military preparation, or if motivated by a great statesmanlike conception which looks forward to the opportunity in due time to throw off the unwillingly accepted conditions. Bismarck has maintained that Prussian policy after the death of Frederick the Great either lacked clear aims or selected the wrong ones: ". . . from 1786 to 1806, when our policy began planlessly and ended deplorably. One cannot detect in it, before the French Revolution broke out fully, even a grain of a national German tendency. The first inkling of such a tendency, the League of Princes of 1785, . . . and the acquisition of German territories were results, not of national, but of Prussian-particularistic efforts." 20 Prominent among those who saw with dismay the rottenness of Prussian policies after the death of Frederick the Great, was the Reichsfreiherr Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein, one of the last statesmen conscious of the traditions and duties of the Sacred Roman imperial heritage. He saw that the administration had become overcentralized and petrified, the situation of the peasants intolerable, the towns empty of civic pride, the nobility a clique of robbers, the officers corps arrogant, and the training of the army outdated and inefficient. Ricarda Huch, the most searching of his many biographers, called Stein the "reawakener of the Reich Idea." 21 Stein came from the Rhineland, and like Sickingen he belonged to the estate of sovereign imperial knights. For seven hundred years his family had been proud of its freedom of the empire (Reichsfreiheit). The consciousness of being a living part of the great Respublica Christiana, the universal Roman-German Empire, determined the thought and action of Karl Friedrich, the last male scion of his house. Never a subject, he had no appreciation of the artificial Prussian patriotism or any other such state loyalty. In one of his letters to the English-Hanoverian minister, Count Münster, he wrote: "It pains me that Your Excellency should suspect in me the Prussian, while discovering the Hanoverian in yourself. I have only one fatherland, that is Germany. Since, according to ancient 20 21

Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 183. Stein; der Envecker des Reichsgedankens (Berlin, Atlantis Verlag, 1932).

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constitution I belong only to her, and not to any particular part, I am devoted to Germany alone. . . . All dynasties are completely without interest to me in this moment of great developments. It is my desire that Germany should become great and strong, to regain her sovereignty, independence, and nationality, and preserve them in her position between France and Russia. This is the interest of the nation and of all Europe." 2 2 He entered the Prussian civil service and chose Prussia out of all the German states as the base for his work of reform and liberation because he recognized Prussia's potential value for the future. This state, composed of many different provinces and inhabited by parts of many German tribes, was itself like a miniature Germany. I f the deadly governmental centralism, which Stein hated with all the intensity of his passionate heart, could b e broken, if the people inhabiting the Prussian state could be made selfgoverning, then all Germany would profit. Of the German princes Stein had only the lowest opinion. In a letter to Count Münster, written during his exile in 1811, he called them "cowardly deserters, anxious only to save their own skins," and "titled slaves who with the blood and goods of their subjects barter for their own miserable existence," people dominated by a "weak, abominable, creeping egoism." 2 3 In a memorandum that he wrote at the time of the battle of Leipzig, he spoke about the "fifteen million Germans who are at the mercy of thirtysix petty despots . . . whose mad arrogance, limitless prodigality, and bestial lust have succeeded in destroying any kind of happiness for the miserable people of that once flourishing country." 24 A truly emancipated Germany, Stein felt, would again attract some of the territories that had been alienated from the empire by the dynastic misdeeds of the last centuries. Alsace-Lorraine, Switzerland, and the Netherlands might again adhere in voluntary union. His supranational spirit expressed itself beautifully in his celebrated Nassau Memorandum of June, 1807, in which, on the eve of his appointment as prime minister, he outlined his political ideas and his practical program. In this memorandum he pleaded for one of the most unfortunate of all nations, the Poles. ' T h e Polish nation," he wrote, "is proud of its nationality and mourns to see it destroyed, together with its name and language. It must needs defy a state that inflicts such pain on it. . . . Not to destroy [its national individuality] but to cultivate it will be regarded as a gain by everyone who considers as the goal of society not a mechanical order but the free development and ennobling of the proper character of every tribe of humanity." 25 22 Petersburg, December 1, 1812, in Briefwechsel, Denkschriften und Aufzeichnungen, IV, 166. =3 Prague, October 1811, in ibid., III, 463. 24 Memorandum to Prince Hardenberg, "On a German Constitution" ( Prague, August, 29 Ibid., pp. 230-31. 1813), ibid., IV, 405.

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THE SECOND FALL OF THE EMPIRE The faults of the Polish nation—illiteracy of the common man, lightheartedness of the nobility—he attributed to the great injustice of the partitions, whereby the natural progress of the country had been impeded. On his deathbed, the news of the Polish rebellion still filled him with compassion and sympathy. "My God!" he exclaimed, awakening from a coma, "here I lie prostrate while they are fighting in Poland." It is characteristic of Stein that he should have called the independence of the United States, the formation of the Latin American Republics, the liberation of Greece, and the colonization of Australia the most promising achievements of his age.2" Frequently, when the narrowness of the postNapoleonic era of neoabsolutism seemed about to smother all hope for the freedom of the peoples, he thought that, if he were younger, he would emigrate to the United States. After a long pause, a German statesman had arisen in the midst of suffocating pettiness, whose field of vision was the universal world of humanity. In the Nassau Memorandum, Stein wrote: "If the nation is to be uplifted, the submerged part must be given liberty, independence, property, and the protection of the laws." Liberation of industry, equal taxes, abolition of the patrimonial jurisdiction, and emancipation of the peasants were among the achievements he wished to accomplish first. Yet, he was a pioneer, too, in that he foresaw the dangers involved in the unlimited laissez faire principle. The duty of the state was, he believed, to protect the weaker classes and to promote the moral, spiritual, and physical betterment of the people. Because of these ideas and because of the beginnings he made in their realization, he may well be called the father of German social legislation, that series of measures which was to be copied by many states and nations around the world. "I know very well," Stein once wrote to a friend, "that my views are contrary to those of men who proclaim increased population and production as the principal aim of the state. To me, it is religious, moral, intellectual, and political perfection, and we shall fail to achieve it if the people become hirelings, downtrodden tenants, and industrial workers and Christian-Jewish usurers, entrepreneurs, and state servants." " The "old Pnissia" collapsed completely on October 14, 1806, in the battle of Jena and Auerstedt. The policy of Basel bore terrible fruit, for Austria and Russia, whom Prussia had left unaided, had been crushingly defeated at Austerlitz, and now the Hohenzollem state faced Napoleon's power alone. *· See his letter to Freiherr Hans Christoph Ernst von Gaeem, Cappenberg, February 27, 1825, in Die Briefe dea Freiherrn con Stein an den Freiherrn von Gagem, 1813-1831, p. 164; also his letter to the same, Nassau, April 26, 1825, Briefwechsel, Denkschriften und Aufzeichnungen, VI, 288-θ9. 27 Letter to Count Ferdinand August von Spiegel zum Diesenberg-Hanxleden, Frankfurtam-Main, March 28, 1820, ibid., V, 021.

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219 Russia was in no position to give help. The Prussian army, which had "fallen asleep on the laurels of Frederick the Great," was dissolved, and her fortresses, commanded by arrogant but cowardly nobles, surrendered without a blow. By the end of October, 1806, Napoleon was in Berlin. In May and June of the next year he had reached Danzig, Königsberg, and the Niemen. There Napoleon concluded the treaty with Czar Alexander, whose intervention saved the Prussian state from being wiped completely off the map. The conditions of the Treaty of Tilsit were severe enough: Prussia was reduced from ninety thousand to forty-six thousand square miles, and the rump state was crushed under the burden of reparation payments and the support it had to provide for an army of occupation of 150,000 men. It was from Berlin that Napoleon decreed the Continental System against England. Shortly after Jena, King Frederick William III (who had in 1797 succeeded his father, Frederick William II) dismissed Stein, calling him a "rebellious, arrogant, and disobedient servant, who, swollen with his genius and talent, was far from desiring the good of the state, but, rather, was guided only by caprice and acted only out of passion, personal hatred, and spite."28 The minister had aroused the hatred of the Junkers, ' the landed nobles, who identified their selfish class interest—or what they considered that interest to be—with the sacred good of the state. Frederick William III was one of the most unsympathetic figures that ever sat on a German throne. A dishonest, faithless man, he had a petit bourgeois mentality and shared the dislike that all small despots feel toward true greatness. Even among the petty German courts his was distinguished by the servility of the nobles. Lacking all regard for Germany, for honor, and for duty, he was anxious only to preserve the prerogatives of his absolutist regime. He preferred to ally himself with the foreign conqueror rather than with his own people. Between 1810 and 1820 he made no less than five solemn pledges to grant a representative constitution. He broke all five. Scarcely any of the great reformers and leaders was a native Prussian. They all came from the Reich, that is, from non-Prussian parts of Germany. Scharnhorst, who reorganized the army in Stein's spirit of reform, was the son of a Hanoverian peasant. He opened the officer ranks to commoners, abolished dishonorable punishments, and tried to bridge the gap between an arrogant, privileged army class and the people. In an article on the French army which he published in the Neues Militärisches Journal, in 1797, he made a penetrating analysis of the causes of the Allied defeats and the revolutionary victories. While every Frenchman, he wrote, was fighting for 28 Letter to Stein, Königsberg, January 3, 1807. Stein, Briefwechsel, Aufzeichnungen, II, 163-64.

Denkschriften

und

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the ideal of a more perfect and happier society, feudal Europe lacked an inspiring creed and in consequence fought halfheartedly.-" Count Neidhardt von Gneisenau, the great strategist (who, like Scharnhorst and Blücher, was not a Prussian), expressed much the same judgment. After Jena, he wrote: "One cause above all has raised France to this pinnacle of greatness—the Revolution awakened all her powers and gave to every individual a suitable field for his activity. What infinite aptitudes slumber in the bosom of a nation! . . . Why did they [the courts] not seize this opportunity to multiply their powers a thousandfold, and to open to the simple bourgeois the Arc de Triomphe through which only the noble can now pass?" 30 Gneisenau argued that only by appropriating the nationalrevolutionary results of the French movement could the whole strength of the German nation be mobilized against the conqueror, without a revolution of violence in Germany itself. In 1810, Prince Hardenberg, who had succeeded Stein as state minister, was to say to his king that Prussia must do from above what the French had done from below. But whatever was done had to be wrested from the king and his nobles. The problem of the Junkers finds at least a partial answer in their frontier mentality; originally their rule was set up over colonials, outside the ancient orbit of the empire. Because of the patriarchal system of jurisdiction, the squire was both accuser and judge of his peasants. Since the younger sons of the Junkers furnished the army with officers and the administration with civil servants, their grip on the state was difficult to break, no matter how much the electors and kings of Prussia may have wished to accomplish that end. In a marginal note to a letter from the East Prussian estates, who were protesting a royal tax decree, the soldier-king, Frederick William I, gave a classic answer, in a curious mixture of German, Latin, French, and Polish: "Nihil kredo, aber das kredo, dass der Junker ihr Autorität Niposwollam wird ruinirt werden" (I believe nothing, but that I shall destroy the liberum veto of the Junkers, that I believe). And a few months earlier he had written: "Ich . . . stabilire die Souveränität und setze die Krone fest wie einen rocher von bronze" ( I establish the sovereignty of the crown like a rock of bronze).31 But since the kings depended on the Junkers, the rocher von bronze was subject to an unwritten agreement with them: the king, for services rendered to his absolutist rule over the citizenry, protected the Junkers against the aspirations of the farmers and tenants and protected their large estates with subsidies and other favors of the state. 2 8 "Entwicklung der allgemeinen Ursachen des Glücks der Franzosen in dem Revolutionskriege." Lehmann, Scharnhorst, I, 218-19. 3 0 Quoted in Gooch, "Germany and the French Revolution," in Studies in Modern History, p. 197. 3 1 "Friedrich Wilhelm I, König in Preussen," in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, VII, 641.

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Not only Stein, but also Bismarck after him found among the Junkers the most bitter opposition to all efforts to modernize and unify Germany. It is significant, too, that this antisocial and antinational class was the only large group, which in the period after the First World War objected to the Anschluss with Austria: fear of agricultural competition mattered more to them than the national cause. Bismarck, in his memoirs, has passed very severe judgment upon them. As a whole he considered the landed Prussian nobility inefficient as diplomats and statesmen. They find it difficult to free themselves from their "narrow provincial field of vision," he wrote, "and as diplomats they cannot easily succeed in covering over the specifically Prussian bureaucrat with the veneer of the European." Furthermore, they are unwilling to undertake responsibility, unless they are protected by higher instructions, as happened in the army of 1806. "We were then already producing officer material which, u p to the rank of regimental commanders, was of a quality unequaled by any other state. Yet for the higher ranks the native Prussian stock was no longer rich in producing suitable men, though it had been so in the time of Frederick the Great." 32 After the Peace of Tilsit (July, 1807), Frederick William was forced to recall Stein—interestingly enough, at the request of Napoleon himself. The French emperor considered Stein the only man able to bring to the chaotic Prussian state the order necessary for meeting reparation payments. Only the desperate plight in which h e found himself could have made the king accept this humiliation, and only the categoric imperative of duty could induce Stein to return. Though he was by inclination pro-English, he had in principle no aversion to France. He recognized Napoleon's greatness and praised his genius. But he found him lacking in warmth, friendship, magnanimity, and reverence for the divine. By religion Stein was a Protestant, but he was so close to Catholicism that there was talk of his secret conversion. Whatever the truth may have been, in the Protestant world of his day he is the outstanding representative of historic universalism. Reinstated in the Prussian ministry, he had to see to it that France received all the money she demanded. His policy had to be Erfülltingspolitik, to use a well-known m o d e m expression. But when he recognized that this course would lead nowhere, that France was bent on the gradual strangulation of all autonomous national forces, he began to look for means and to seek alliances that would help in throwing off the foreign yoke. The emancipation of the people, always his cherished aim, now assumed a new aspect, for only a free people would be able to fight bravely. The prize of victory ought to b e not only national liberation, but also liberation from native oppression as well. By the famous edict of Octo33

Gedanken und Erinnerungen, ibid., XV, 8.

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ber 9, 1807, all servitude was abolished: "After St. Martin's day, 1810, there will be only free men [in Prussia]," the edict stated." Legal distinctions between the property of the nobles and that of commoners were erased. Serfs on public and private domains were freed from the last feudal restrictions and were to become free fanners and owners of their land. A few months after this edict of emancipation the first official promise of a representative constitution appeared in the newspapers. Stein still had time to complete the main part of his work, the Städteordnung, the new statute for the towns and cities. Like Sickingen, the Reichsfreiherr vom Stein believed in the community of the towns and the rural people. Like him, he was moved to action by the historic precedent which the imperial cities had set in the Middle Ages. In his own time, he could not hope to create anything so lofty as the medieval institution, for the citizenry had lost much of their ancient pride. But by making the townsmen partake in local government he hoped to reawaken and educate them to civic responsibility. The modern German cities, with their efficient, upright administration, which has won the admiration of foreign statesmen and students of public affairs from all over the world, were the work of Stein. They have survived all storms and changes of the passing generations and in their modern, yet ancient, tradition of liberty lies one of the great hopes for a future German democracy. Stein wanted to blend the kingdom of Prussia into Germany; he desired the restitution of Kaiser und Reich, not by the will of the princes, but by a free people. Nothing could have seemed more subversive to the king and to a large part of the nobility. Even after Tilsit, these circles remained collaborationist, for their privileges seemed to them more secure under French rule than under a free popular government. In the autumn of 1808 a letter in which Stein expressed the hope of overthrowing foreign rule fell into French hands. " Thereupon Stein tendered his resignation to the king. After some hesitation—for the petty despot on the throne feared his minister —it was accepted. The nobility had triumphed. Perhaps now the work of the hated "Jacobin" could be undone! Three months later, Napoleon, by special decree issued from Madrid, outlawed Stein as "an enemy of France and the Confederation of the Rhine." The text of this curious and somewhat vulgar Ordre de ΓArmée reads: 1. Le nommé Stein, cherchant à exciter des troubles en Allemagne, est déclaré ennemi de la France et la confédération du Rhin. 2. Les biens que le dit Stein posséderait, soit en France, soit dans les pays de la confédération du Rhin, seront séquestrés. « Lehmann, Freiherr com Stein, II, 284. »• "Hate and resentment [against the French] are increasing daily in Germany," Stein had written, "and it is advisable to nourish these feelings and to exercise influence on the people." Letter to Fürst Wilhelm Ludwig Georg Sayn-Wittgenstein, Königsberg, August 15, 1808, Briefwechsel, Denkschriften una Aufzeichnungen, II, 486 sqq.

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Le dit Stein sera saisi de sa personne partout où il pourra être atteint par nos troupes ou celles de nos alliés. En notre camp impérial de Madrid, le 16 décembre 1808. SIGNÉ:

NAPOLÉON.

This was a declaration of war against an individual man, such as dictators are wont to make and such as we have seen in plenty in our own day. Stein, the exile, first found a grudgingly accorded asylum in the Austria of Emperor Francis and Metternich. They, too, feared his revolutionary ideas, for what was the use of overthrowing Napoleon if the victory would lead to liberation of the people? For the approaching war against France Stein advanced a number of deep-going suggestions. He pointed to the American example of calling upon all the people to fight the enemy, and he hoped to break the grip which the nobility had on the officer class, a grip which in Austria, as in Prussia, had brought sterility. Stein, after Archduchess Marie Louise's betrothal to the "parvenu" Napoleon, could no longer remain in the Habsburg dominions; he was in danger of being surrendered to a French firing squad. While the FrenchRhenish-Prussian-Austrian coalition against Russia was being formed, an invitation by Czar Alexander reached the exile at Prague. He was asked to Russia as a friend and adviser—a task which Stein accomplished so well that later he could claim with some justice to have been Napoleon's real conqueror. The road to Russia, over which the last statesman of the Sacred Roman Empire traveled in order to advise the ruler of the Third Rome, was for the Frankish Caesar the road to Moscow and to St. Helena.

18 THE SPIRIT OF WORLD HISTORY God governs the world. The actual working of His government—the carrying out of His plan—is the History of the World. HEGEL, Philosophie der Welt-Geschichte. IN AN ADDRESS to the Reichstag on April 30,1930, the only one ever delivered before the German parliament by a foreign guest, Nicholas Murray Butler thus spoke of Fichte, the awakener of Europe to self-conscious freedom: "One hundred and twenty-three years ago, there took place in the city of Berlin a really great happening. Following the calamities of the Napoleonic Wars and the resulting disturbances to the life and thought of the Prussian people, it was imperative that a new note should be sounded, a new blow struck, a new call to achievement heard. The philosopher Fichte seemed divinely appointed for the great task. On successive Sunday evenings from December 1807, to March, 1808, he delivered before crowded audiences his famous Reden an die Deutsche Nation. Surrounded by spies and by enemies, his very life in danger, this great voice was raised in an immortal appeal to the German people to rise to new heights, to seek new means of endeavor, to tread new paths toward national reconstruction, national greatness, national accomplishment. . . . Fichte well understood the fundamental difference between the Nation and the State, and his searching and moving appeal was for the building of a German Nation on spiritual and intellectual foundations so strong that they could not be moved. The effect of those addresses was quick and extraordinary. "They had an immense popularity and exercised a prodigious influence . . . Philosopher and patriot, Fichte insisted that all political differences, geographic divisions and economic antagonisms should yield before the new and unifying spirit of one German nation for the whole German people, able and willing to reflect and to express all that was best in that people's history and ideals. It is to Fichte as prophet and to Bismarck as constructive statesman, that we trace the upbuilding of a truly German nation, and finally of a single federal government for that nation?'1 These Addresses to the German Nation, thus so magnificently praised, have in recent years been only too often misunderstood, whether willfully or through ignorance. Salad-dressing-sponsored historians, who today use the radio to befuddle the public, have accused Fichte of being the inspirer of aggressive nationalism and of German power politics, and so have many 1 "Imponderabilien," in The Path to Peace, pp. 279-80; English translation, ibid., pp. 194-99.

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who either never read the Addresses or else ignore or simply do not know their historic background. There is not one word in them advocating national selfishness at the expense of the national rights of others or praising national aggressiveness. They are inspired by the concept of Humanität, moral mankind capable of education—the correlate of the politically cosmopolitan attitude of the pre-Jena days. Neither the concept nor the attitude was abandoned after Prussia's crushing defeat in 1806; only the approach changed after it became clear that the national bodies were the necessary foundation for any fruitful endeavor toward a more embracing political concept. Fichte in speaking of Germany to the youth of his country held up to them the high ideal of freedom and sacrifice. Only thus could they form themselves and become truly German in the historic sense, men worthy of a new spiritual community of man. Moral regeneration, Fichte felt, was the prerequisite of national and political rebirth. "It is not the might of arms nor the fitness of weapons that wins victories, but the power of the soul," he said.2 "What noble-minded man does not wish and aspire to repeat his own life in better wise in his children and, again, in their children, and still to continue to live upon this earth, ennobled and perfected in their lives, long after he is dead; to wrest from mortality the spirit, the mind, and the character with which in his day hç perchance put perversity and corruption to flight, established uprightness, aroused sluggishness, and uplifted dejection?" 3 Thus, a true people is not a mere agglomeration of individuals, not a society of hedonists, each seeking what pleases him most. It is a moral community, responsible to its history, which extends from a distant past to a theoretically limitless future. It is a moral and spiritual entity within the great plan of the universe. Nor should the state be viewed as a mere mechanism. True German statesmanship, Fichte said, aimed a priori at a stable and positive spirit. "It realizes that such a spirit cannot be produced by haranguing the already tainted adults, but only by educating still uncorrupted youth; and this education will not, as it does abroad, turn in order to realize its aims toward the lonely apex of the pyramid, the prince, but toward the broad foundation, the nation, to which doubtless the prince also belongs. Since the state through its citizens is the agent of the perpetual education of mankind, then the budding citizen must first of all —according to the policy of this statesmanship—be made receptive to this loftier erudition. Thus this German statesmanship is identical in its aims with the most ancient policy, for among the Greeks, too, citizenship had 2 Eighth Address, Reden an die deutsche Nation (1807-1808), in Sämmtliche Werke, VII, 390; English translation by Louis H. Gray, Addresses to the German Nation, in The German Classics; Masterpieces of German Literature translated into English, V, 82. It is regrettable that this translation gives only the Eighth and Fourteenth Addresses. s Ibid., pp. 379-80; English, p. 71.

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been based on education and such citizens had been trained as no later age was to see." 4 Mercilessly, Fichte scourged the centuries-old servility, selfishness, and self-abasement which the disunion and strife in Germany had made evident in only too many Germans. "Foreign powers," he says in his Thirteenth Address, "have used the discord created by religious dissension in order to break up Germany, this prototype of all Christian Europe, into particularistic and artificially independent regions." The same force, the lust of aggressive nationalism, has shattered the unity of Europe and has dismembered the Germanic body. All the German "states," Fichte rightly says, were set against each other by foreign alliances and intervening powers. They were made to believe that all the struggles of non-German power politics were matters of vital interest to Germany. "Each of these wars, from whatever cause it arose, had to be fought out on German soil and with German blood. . . . The German states—whose particularistic existence defied both nature and reason—in order that they might gain some semblance of importance, became mere additional counters added to the main weights on the scale of the European balance of power." So deeply had decay penetrated into Germany—at that time, except for Italy, the only nonnational people in a world of exaggerated nationalism—that the Germans had long since taken up the causes of foreign parties and only rarely was one to be met with who strove to uphold the party of the Germans or believed that the country should make —so to speak—an alliance with itself. "This, then, is the true nature and meaning of the notorious doctrine that a balance of power should be artificially maintained among the European states. These are the consequences for Germany and the world. Had Christian Europe remained united—as it once was and should have continued—no reason would ever have arisen for framing such a doctrine. . . . It could gain its ephemeral importance only in a Europe unrighteous and divided." 5 The duty of the awakening nation is one not toward Germany alone, but toward mankind. Fichte saw clearly that an enslaved, dishonored, and divided Germany would inevitably lead to a Europe in the same predicament. A free, righteous, and self-conscious Germany, on the other hand, would constitute a guaranty of peace and freedom for all Occidental nations. It is on a note of universalism that Fichte's Addresses close. His words, he told his audience at the Royal Academy of Sciences Unter den Linden in Berlin, were intended for German youth whose thoughts could rise above the ordinary and who were sensitive to moral ideas, and also for their * Seventh Address, ibid., pp. 3Θ5-Θβ. "It follows from all this," Fichte states, "that the state . . . is not a primal thine and one existing for itself, but that it is simply the means to the higher end of the eternally uniform development of the purely human in this nation." Eighth Address, ibid., pp. 391-92; English, p. 83. 6 The quotations in this paragraph are from the Thirteenth Address, ibid., pp. 463-64.

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elders, the advisers of the young—thinkers, scholars and writers worthy of their callings—and to the princes of Germany. Added to his own voice, he said, were the voices of ancestors long dead and of generations yet unbom, all blended into a great chorus admonishing the living to take action so that freedom may triumph and the spirit of man may not perish. "Even foreign lands adjure you so far as they still understand themselves in the very least, and still have an eye for their true advantage. Indeed, there are spirits among all peoples who still cannot believe that the great promises made to the human race of a reign of justice, of reason, and of truth can be a vain and an empty phantom, and who assume, therefore, that the present iron age is but a transit to a better state." * In the decisive year of 1813, shortly before his death, Fichte, in his lectures on the Science of the State, formulated once more his wide vision of a free and righteous people, servants and standard bearers for a rejuvenated mankind, Ein wahrhaftes Reich des Rechts, wie es noch nie in der Welt erschienen ist—a true kingdom of righteousness, of which the like has never before descended upon the earth. This is the high aim toward which the Germans should direct their thoughts and sacrifices; it can come only from them, who "for centuries have lived for such a goal and have slowly matured toward its attainment."T Quotations from Hegel's works and references to his ideas have been scattered through many of the preceding chapters. These testify only to the profound reverence which I feel for him, the initiate master of the Spirit, whose words testify for themselves. It is my hope one day to write a monograph to be called "Hegel's Christian Heritage." Scarcely another modem thinker has had his work used so extensively by so many varied thinkers as an arsenal of arguments to support their diverse views. And yet despite the fame which has been visited in reverence or in hatred upon his name for more than a hundred and thirty years and despite the glare of the searching spotlight centered upon him for generations, his true depths of world-embracing genius are still little known. It is precisely the breadth—and the consequent complexity—of Hegelian thought that has enabled so many schools to advance claims as his rightful and legitimate heirs. "Conservative, liberal, and radical, historical and dogmatic, nationalist and cosmopolitan thinkers," as Friedrich Meinecke said "could as pupils draw knowledge from his system, they could exploit it for their particular purposes and, after discarding whatever they chose, still hold in their hands fragments of the original unity." " « Fourteenth Address, ibid., p. 497; English, p. 103. 7 Die Staatslehre, oder über das Verhältnis des Urstaates zum Vernunftreich, ibid., TV, 423-24. * Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat; Studien zur Cenesis des deutschen Nationalstaates, p. 279.

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That original unity is the Idea of Mankind, progressing through immanent and transcending Reason, towards more perfect Freedom and freely willed, conscious Morality. State and society, according to Hegel's view of the philosophy of history, originally meant organized mankind. Hegel cannot, however, be absolved from the accusation that in some of his later writings he has given color to the belief that what he endorsed and even glorified was the individual state, regardless of whether it was made up of a people gifted with an historic spirit, or only an artificially created, absolutist, and particularistic political entity. World History, to Hegel, is the book in which God is constantly writing the life of mankind—of individuals endowed with personality and free will. Each historic period is a chapter in this book, and only after the very last has finished will the process of history and the destiny of the individual be completed. It must strongly be emphasized that the popular opinion that Hegel considered history as "the becoming God" is completely erroneous. Such flat pantheism—like any other brand—may be artificially read into his writings; it is not in them. Nor does he identify the state with God, a belief pseudoscholars have tried to inculcate in unwary readers who know Hegel only at second hand. In his Philosophy of History, a book that should be required reading for every educated man, Hegel has shown some of the phases of the journey which the Spirit has taken through the spheres of human consciousness and their historic realizations. As on a great stage, the drama of mankind unfolds before our eyes, while we are ourselves also active participants. The leitmotif is Freedom. The drama develops from the Oriental overture, with the consciousness of freedom in one man, the ruler; through the GrecoRoman act, in which some, the citizens, are consciously free; and to the Christian-Germanic fulfillment, in which, as the world music swells in proud crescendo, all are free, because they are men who received freedom through Christ and the .Holy Spirit, sent by the Father to reside in the Church of Christ forever. 'The fact that man is in and for himself free, in his essence and as man, free bom, was known neither by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, nor the Roman legislators, even though it is this conception alone which forms the source of law. In Christianity the individual, personal mind for the first time becomes of real, infinite and absolute value; God wills that all men shall be saved." Hegel shares with the Neoplatonists, Duns Scotus, and the entire Franciscan school his Christocentric view of the universe as mirrored in history. Everything is ordained and ordered toward the focal point of the world, the Incarnation of Christ and His work of salvation for man. What Hegel says about the philosophy of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) expresses his own views: that it is his fundamental idea "to comprise everything in an abso-

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lute unity, for he desires to demonstrate the absolute divine unity and the union of all opposites in Cod. Boehme's chief, and one may even say, his only thought—the thought that permeates all his works—is that of perceiving the holy Trinity in everything, and recognizing everything as its revelation and manifestation." 8 In the course of his own development, Hegel came to recognize the fulfillment of history in the advent of Christianity. While prior to that central event there were pain and antinomies, with it has come Atonement and Reconciliation. 'The identity of the [human] Subject and God [in Christ] was introduced into the World when the fulness of Time was come."10 Now we can recognize "the rose in the cross of the present,"11 but, he adds with deep humility and insight, "in order to gather the rose in the cross of the Present, we must take that cross itself upon us." 12 The Philosophy of Religion was written in Hegel's last years of life and contains the ripest of his thought. It is among the least known of his works, partly because his agnostic and radical followers find it embarrassing and work on the policy of the less said the better. It is equally embarrassing to many of his opponents, namely, those who cannot bring themselves to admit that this so-called pantheist (or for that matter anyone else outside the recognized schools of church philosophy—and least of all a German idealistic philosopher) should have written the greatest apologia fidei in centuries. In each epoch the preceding one is aufgehoben, that is to say, overcome as well as preserved. And each epoch, a moment in the process of history, bears within itself its own antithesis. As soon as from thesis and antithesis a synthesis has been achieved, the synthesis becomes itself a new thesis and again subject to the laws of dialectics. The final synthesis will be reached at the end of time. But there is no determinism with regard to the individual, no elimination of man's free will in this system. "The individual subject is the object of divine grace; each subject, or man as man, has on his own account an infinite value." ,a This notion is basic to Hegel's concept of man; it is diametrically opposed to any mechanistic or totalitarian world view. Freedom to him is always positively defined. It is not "freedom from » This and the preceding quotation are from Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, edited Dy Carl Ludwig Michelet, in Werke; Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten, XIII, Θ3, XV, 304-5; English translation by Elizabeth S. Haidane and Frances H. Simson, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, I, 49, III, 19Θ. 10 Philosophie der Welt-Geschichte, in Sämtliche Werke, IX, 733; English translation by J. Sibree, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 335. 11 Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, ibid., VI, 16; English translation by T. M. Knox, Philosophy of Right, p. 12. 12 Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, ibid., XIII, 37n.; English translation by Ε. Β. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, I, 285. 13 Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, in Werke, XV, 107; English, III, 10.

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something," but "freedom for something," as Nietzsche postulated." Positive freedom, however, is the reconciliation of God and man through Christ. "All that we mean by reconciliation, truth, freedom, represents a universal process, and cannot therefore be expressed in a single proposition without becoming one-sided. T h e main idea which in a popular form expresses the truth, is that of the unity of the divine and human natures; God has become Man [in Christ]. . . . T h e final result of the whole of philosophy is that this Idea only is the absolute truth. In its pure form it is the logical result, but it is likewise the result of a study of the concrete world. W h a t constitutes the truth is that Nature, life, Spirit, are thoroughly organic, that each separate thing is merely the mirror of this Idea." 15 History, a spiritual-physical process, is paralleled by the unfolding of the revelation of God in man's faith and knowledge of Him, that is, in religion. Religion is in each man, simply because he is man and because God has revealed Himself to him, the temple of His own triune image. "No man is so utterly ruined, so lost, and so bad, nor can we regard any one as being so wretched that he has no religion whatever in him, even if it were only that he has the fear of it, or some yearning after it, or a feeling of hatred towards it. For even in this last case he is inwardly occupied with it, and cannot free himself from it." " Hegel has spoken of three stages of religion: the religion of nature, the religion of the spirit, and the religion of absolute truth. T h e last is achieved in Christianity, in which nature and the spirit have become reconciled, since in it nature is overcome and yet preserved. It is interesting to note that outside the group of the theologians (and even most of these look upon it only from a historic point of view) Hegel is the only thinker who has grasped the full meaning of Manichaeanism as a perennial danger to human thought. Only if matter is real can it be overcome by the spirit. Only a true human body of Christ—which new Docetic teachings have again denied by attempting to make a "myth" of His historic earthly incarnation—could, united with His Godhead, redeem and sanctify human nature. Only through such a union, and through the conquest and preservation of nature in the Risen Christ, could the Spirit enter into the mystical and yet real body of mankind. That man is not "by nature" what he ought to b e Hegel emphasizes again and again. Only the animal is so constituted. T h e evil that men do results from a "natural" urge. Therefore, to b e truly human, man must conquer his nature through the spirit. Applied to the philosophy of history, this doctrine constitutes a weighty refutation of any blood-and-race teaching. T h e definition of nature as the basis, but not the fulfillment, applies also Also sprach Zarathustra; ein Werk für alle und keinen, in Werke, VI, 92; English, Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common, in The Complete Works, XI, 7. 18 Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, in Sämtliche Werke, XIV, 3β; English, II, 347. « Ibid., XII, 10; English, I, 5-β. 14

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to man's social organization. "The natural state of men, before they entered into society, was a war of all men against all men," Thomas Hobbes asserted.17 The state of lower, primitive nature, of "natural nature," not yet overcome, is antithetical to the spirit of freedom. History achieves this process of overcoming nature through the medium of organized moral society, the state. It is with the history of the state, of organized society in contrast to primitive, unorganized society, that history commences. "The justice of the condition of nature," Hegel explains, "can only emerge as the absolute injustice of the mind." 19 Properly understood, these Platonic ideas, which we discover also in St. Augustine's philosophy, have nothing in common with any deification of the state as such. An empirical analysis of world history leads to them just as surely as does philosophical contemplation of the relationship between nature and spirit. Perhaps graphic illustrations may help to illustrate the working of the dialectical process, according to Hegel (see page 233). The first diagram symbolizes the relationship between the Three Persons of the Most-Blessed Trinity. It is basically Augustinian and scholastic: the Son as the self-consciousness of the Father. God as pure spirit possessed this self-consciousness from eternity; hence Christ is both co-etemal and the Son. Father and Son are united by love, the Holy Spirit, the divine synthesis between God and His self-consciousness. The second diagram symbolizes the path from the Incarnation and the redemption of the nature of man to the ever-present Spirit in the transfigured body of mankind, the church. Here Hegel is very specific: Man reaches truth, "because for him it becomes a sure intuition that in Christ the Logos has become Flesh. We thus first have man through this process attaining to spirituality, and in the second place we have man as Christ, in whom this original identity of both natures is known." 19 Hegel scourges those liberalizing theologians who abandon the firm Christian dogma for the sake of some vague, sentimentalist cult of "goodness." "Christ still indeed continues to be made the central point of faith, as Mediator, Reconciler, and Redeemer; but what was known as the work of redemption has received a very prosaic and merely psychological signification, so that although the edifying words have been retained, the very thing that was essential in the old doctrine of the Church has been expunged. . . . The weighty doctrines of the Trinity, of the resurrection of the body, as also the miracles in the Old and New Testaments, are neglected as matters of 17 De cioè, cap. i, §12, in Opera phüosophica quae Latine scripsit omnia, II, 166, and English, Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, II, I I , both edited by Sir William Molesworth. See also Leviathan, cap. xxxi, §1, ibid., III, 254; English, III, 343. 18 Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, in Werke, XIV, 271; English, II, 92. i» Ibid., XV, 133; English, III, 4-5.

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indifference, and have lost their importance. The divinity of Christ, dogma, what is peculiar to the Christian religion is set aside, or else reduced to something of merely general nature."20 The third diagram demonstrates the working of the human mind embodied in a physical body. Mind and nature are both sanctified by Christ. The ego daily dies and rises again, in spiritual freedom in Christ.21 The fourth diagram may indicate the whole scheme of the philosophy of history, proceeding from the Triune Godhead through the Eternal Logos." The creation of the world is truly creation; there is no pantheistic identity, and there is freedom, not necessity, in God's act. Necessity is in nature, for it obeys the laws infused into it and is not a self-conscious principle. Hegel describes the process thus: "I. The absolute, eternal Idea is, in its essential existence, in and for itself, God in His eternity before the creation of the world, and outside of the world. II. The Creation of the World.— What is thus created, this otherness or other-Being, divides up within itself into two sides, physical Nature and finite Spirit. What is thus created is therefore an Other, and is placed at first outside of God. It belongs to God's essential nature, however, to reconcile to Himself this something which is foreign to Him, this special or particular element which comes into existence as something separated from Him. . . . III. It is the way or process of reconciliation whereby Spirit unites and brings into harmony with itself what is distinguished from itself in the state of diremption and differentiation, and thus Spirit is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit is present in its Church." 23 It has been noted that Hegel's use of the term dialectics signifies something different from the classic meaning of the word. In the Socratic-Platonic system dialectics was simply a way of reaching truth through argument, counterargument, reconciliation (thesis, antithesis, synthesis). Hegel applies these three words not to arguments but to realities. The apparent difficulty is solved in the most literal way: since everything is being created by the Logos, the Eternal Word of Creation, the process of world history becomes a dialogue between God, nature, and man created in freedom. History is the first synthesis in this cosmic dialogue. It is a reasonable principle, contradicted by mankind as a natural unit. This unit is "nature" once more, but on a higher plane than that of the first antithesis, for it has already gone through a reasonable entity. (Mankind is here understood in the collective sense and not as individuals; collective entities act differently from their composing parts.) 20 Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, in Sämtliche Werke, XII, 46; English, 1,38-39. 21 John 17:23, and specifically I Corinthians 15:31—"I protest by that boast in you, brethren, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily. ' 22 John 1:1-4. 2» Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, in Sämtliche Werke, XIV, 30; English, III, 1.

THE LOCOS

THE FATHER

(tii« Father's divine lelf-consciousness )

COD-MAN

THE HOLY SPIRIT (the union of the Father and the Son in love)

(Christ's

Incarnation)

THE HOLY SPIRIT residing in the Church ( mankind transfigured body) into Christ's r-ystical

THE HUMAN EOO

ANIMAL RATIONALE ( man as a spiritualphysical being)

THE TRIUNE CODHEAD creating through the Logos

SELF-CONSCIOUS SPIRIT

RECNUM PATRIS (equality before the law, as children of the same Father)

RECNUM FILII ( fraternity in social and economic matten, as member» of Christ's body)

NATURAL MANKIND

RECNUM SPIRITUS SANCII ( freedom of the spirit, as Christ's coheirs to the Kingdom)

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The second synthesis is achieved by history and natural mankind. This is society, now reasonable and self-conscious. Out of the "dialogue" between man, an individual created by God, and society, the history-conscious community of natural mankind, there is born the state, that is, organized society —a metaphysical, moral being. Since history, natural mankind, society, and man are in principle universal terms, the state, too, should be universal. It should embrace the whole of the human race. The state therefore becomes an instrument of the historical progress, and a means of higher, more selfconscious human freedom, for in the state we will freely what is morally in concordance with the laws of God in history just as in the church we will what is in harmony with the laws of God as revealed in religion. The fifth diagram is a graphic description of the results of my own application of certain principles to the social fabric, especially some constitutional suggestions.21 Since the French Revolution, the watchwords of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" have been proclaimed so loudly that their origin, meaning, and delineation have been obscured. Men hardly know today what the realities behind these words are, since they have been debased to become mere political slogans. The diagram illustrates their correct application. When applied agnostically and indiscriminately they are bound to disrupt the social fabric. Society mirrors the Kingdom; its structure, to be sound and living, must be an image of the Trinity, to which on the human plane liberty, equality, and fraternity pertain. Hence, these absolute values must be applied to their proper categories. The sixth diagram indicates the overcoming of Reason by its synthesis with Faith. It is through Wisdom that we may extend the world of the knowable beyond the Kantian limits of the phenomenal world. Those limits, as Hegel properly recognized, are too narrow; they result in an abstract deism which has contributed to our moral decline. Hegel was well aware of the true problem of his age: the loss of religion and of truly Christian spiritual insight. Tacitus said of the ancient Germans that they were securi adversus deos. This, Hegel exclaims, they have again become in regard to knowledge: securi adversus deum!25 "The more the knowledge of finite things has increased . . . so much the more has the sphere of the knowledge of God become contracted. There was a time when all knowledge was knowledge of God. Our own time, on the contrary, has the distinction of knowing about all and everything, about an infinite number of subjects, but nothing at all of God. Formerly the mind found its supreme interest in knowing God, and searching into His nature. It had and it 24 For details see Prince Hubertus zu Loewenstein, After Hitler's Fail; Germany's Coming Reich and "Germany's Coining Reich," Social Science, XVII (October, 1942), 345-55. 25 Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, in Sämtliche Werke, XII, 5; English, I, 36.

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found no rest unless in thus occupying itself with God. When it could not satisfy this need it felt unhappy. The spiritual conflicts to which the knowledge of God gives rise in the inner life were the highest which the spirit knew and experienced in itself, and all other interests and knowledge were lightly esteemed. . . . It no longer gives our age any concern that it knows nothing of God; on the contrary, it is regarded as a mark of the highest intelligence to hold that such knowledge is not even possible. What is laid down by the Christian religion as the supreme, absolute commandment, T e shall know God," " is regarded as a piece of folly. Christ says, 'Be ye perfect, as My Father in heaven is perfect.' 27 This lofty demand is to the wisdom of our time an empty sound. It has made of God an infinite phantom, which is far from us, and in like manner has made human knowledge a futile phantom of finiteness, or a mirror upon which fall only shadows, only phenomena. . . . "This standpoint must, judged by its content, be considered as the last stage of the degradation of man, in which at the same time he is, it is true, all the more arrogant inasmuch as he thinks he has proved to himself that this degradation is the highest possible state, and is his true destiny. Such a point of view is, indeed, directly opposed to the lofty nature of the Christian religion." It has done away with both divine revelation and reason, and its protagonists, in all their blind conceit, have not hesitated to turn against philosophy, though it is "the liberation of the human spirit from that shameful degradation." 28 Like deism, the transformation of the concept of God into a mere abstraction—this "ultimate point reached by the extreme development of the abstract understanding, as the result of the Critique of Kant," as he said 20— Hegel rejected the pantheistic notion of the universe. It is only after death, he emphasized, that man will really be united to God. His own age with its empty conceit, leading inevitably to degradation and the dissolution of all moral and human relations, was pictured in the parable of the "enlightened Eskimo" which he liked to recite: "On being asked where his people would go when they died, he replied that they would be buried; a long time ago an old man had once said that they would go to the moon, but it was long since any Esquimaux had believed that." 30 In brief, I should say that Hegel is one of the great guides toward a spiritual and religious concept of life and of the state and that democracy might well tum to him for a new integration of its institutions. Certainly educators «· Cf. Hebrews 8:11. " Matthew 5:48. J> Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, in Sämtliche Werke, XII, 4—6; English, I 35—37 ' » Ibà., XIII, 11; English, I, 270. ao Ibid., XIII, 82; English, I, 295. Hegel quoted this anecdote from Sir William Edward Parry, Four Voyages to the North Pole ( London, 1833 ).

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and teachers of religious philosophy, and all others who are looking for a truly modern and stringent apologia fidei equipped with all intellectual weapons of a modem man of genius, could profit greatly from knowing his undiluted doctrines. This can be accomplished, however, only by doing away with second- and thirdhand reports on Hegel and turning instead to the actual sources. True understanding can come only by discarding the prejudiced opinions that ascribe to him pantheism and other errors which are not contained in his writings. I realize that I may earn the reproach of, so to speak, "baptizing" Hegelian philosophy. In this I can see no harm. I am well aware that not everything Hegel said can be squared with the dogma of the church, and far be it from me to endorse or uphold any such part of his ideas. He not always was able to retain the true and right conceptions of the faith which he so valiantly defended. Slips and errors are, in consequence, not infrequent. Yet, especially in his History of Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion, he has come as close to revealed and properly and legitimately interpreted Truth as any nontheologian ever has. And there is so great a treasure in his works, so much of that truth for which he searched, that it seems decidedly worth while and certainly licit to "baptize" them. Though they had far less content of truth, Plato and Aristotle were "baptized" by St. Augustine and St. Thomas, and have been, in this form, utilized as an integral part of orthodox Christian philosophy and armor against the onslaught of error. The revolutionary impact of Hegel upon the minds of men is easily seen, if one contemplates these diagrams thoughtfully, and particularly the fourth. That shows how human institutions, which had early been regarded as stable, are in reality but fleeting moments in a great and continuing process. They are no more than moments, for history and all other phases of the dialogue move on like a motion picture film being rapidly unwound. God remains unchangeable, but our comprehension of Him may develop. The moral law likewise does not change, but man's consciousness of it does alter. It has taken many centuries for the deposit of faith, a stable factor, to become known to us to the present extent, and even yet this process is by no means finished. New dogmas have been extracted from the given sources of faith, Scripture and tradition, and they will continue to be extracted. A dogma is not new in the sense that its enunciation adds something to our faith; rather, it simply defines and establishes something which was, without our full knowledge, already in the faith. Leopold von Ranke was one of the earliest critics of the Hegelian view of history. In his lectures before King Maximilian II of Bavaria, Ueber die Epochen der neueren Geschichte, he expressed fear lest nations and individuals might be deprived of their proper value and reduced to mere instruments of the Spirit of History. Also, he erroneously believed that Hegel con-

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sidered mankind as der werdende Gott, "the becoming God," a teaching which would, indeed, be most heretical and pantheistic.'1 To these reproaches another has been added: that Hegel has dissolved the absolute character of the moral law, making it dependent on historic development and ultimately on its interpretation by the state. Many men have thought they discovered the root and source of such beliefs in his definition of power as the main characteristic of the state. It was in his exceedingly interesting treatise The Constitution of Germany, written in 1802 but not published until long after his death, that Hegel first emphasized power as the essential attribute of any state. Germany, he wrote, had ceased to exist once its central power was destroyed. A stable government, order, and the strength needed to defend the people must be at hand before the German state could be restored. The people must, he stated emphatically, cooperate in making the laws, and popular representation must be acknowledged as essential to the righteous demand for liberty. The power of the princes, usurped from the people and the emperor, must be returned to the people and once more delegated to a central government organized on the principle of the division of power. Thus the original direct relation between people and emperor would be reëstablished and the princes reduced to something like hereditary regional magistrates. All power should be exercised on the basis of a democratic constitution as it corresponds to the historically developed reality of the existing German body politic." For a constitution, Hegel points out, "is not just something manufactured; it is the work of centuries, it is the Idea, the consciousness of rationality so far as that consciousness is developed in a particular nation."' 8 Written constitutions which do not correspond to a political reality are bound to collapse. And it was under such artificial and imposed constitutions that the people of Germany and most other European countries lived after 1815. The result was the sort of tension which precedes revolt. Hegel offers one of the best analyses ever made for the reasons of revolution: The people falls into the category of history, he writes. "But as the individual man is trained in the state, that is, as individuality is raised into universality, and the child grows into a man, so is every nation trained; or barbarism, the condition in which the nation is a child, passes over into a rational condition. Men do not remain at a standstill, they alter, as likewise do their constitutions. And the question here is, What is the true constitution which the nation must advance towards. . . . Every nation in course of time makes such alterations in its existing constitution as will bring it nearer to the true constitution. . . . If a nation can no longer accept as implicitly true what its conFirst Lecture, in Weltgeschichte, VIII, 178. Die Verfassung Deutschlands, in Sämtliche Werke, VII, 3 sqq. « Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Zusatz zu §274, in Sämtliche Werke, VI, 358; English, pp. 286-87. al

52

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stitution expresses to it as the truth, if its consciousness or Notion and its actuality are not at one, then the nations mind is torn asunder. Two things may then occur. First, the nation may either by a supreme internal effort dash into fragments this law which still claims authority, or it may more quietly and slowly effect changes on the yet operative law, which is, however, no longer true morality, but which the mind has already passed beyond. In the second place, a nation's intelligence and strength may not suffice for this, and it may hold to the lower law; or it may happen that another nation has reached its higher constitution, thereby rising in the scale, and the first gives up its nationality and becomes subject to the other. Therefore it is of essential importance to know what the true constitution is. . . . This insight can be reached through Philosophy alone. Revolutions take place in a state without the slightest violence when the insight becomes universal; institutions, somehow or other, crumble and disappear. . . . A government must, however, recognize that the time for this has come; should it, on the contrary, knowing not the truth, cling to temporary institutions, taking what—though recognized—is unessential, to be a bulwark guarding it from the essential (and the essential is what is contained in the Idea), that government will fall along with its institutions, before the force of mind." 34 In his Philosophy of Right (1821), Hegel returned to the power element and to his often quoted definition of the state as the embodiment of the ethical idea. In the whole, he says, power resides. The outward form of government, equality or inequality under the laws, and so on, are less essential questions than that of power. Such power cannot possibly err, because the state as an instrument of history has objective ethics. To submit his subjective will to the will of the state becomes the highest duty of the citizen. The will of the state constitutes the true will of the citizens, even if they are subjectively opposed to it.35 Such praise of the state seemed to provide the philosophical justification for the post-Napoleonic state of reaction and the police state of the Metternich system, which kept Germany and other large sections of Europe in bondage for thirty-three years. Hegel also rejected Kant's notion of a world republic as incompatible with the nature of the state. Hegel failed to see that this rejection was not really valid, that his own system should have led him logically to the world state. Therefore he came to the conclusion that war between states was natural, as the means for the spirit of history to promote and to accelerate development. His justification of war was, how34 Vorlesungen über die Ceschichte der Philosophie, in Werke, XIV, 27Θ-77; English, II, 97-98. 35 Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §257 saq., in Sämtliche Werke, VI, 195 sqq.; English, pp. 155 sqq. See also Zusatz zu §261, ibid., p. 351; English, p. 280. Also, Die Verfassung Deutschlands, ibid., VII, 17 sqq.

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ever, no plea for power-state ideals but came from a suprastatal viewpoint. To him history as such was the motivating force. Since nature must be overcome by the spirit, it would seem just to conclude that the same spirit which admits war also creates peace and that eventually the natural state of war must and will be overcome, to be transformed into peaceful and creative competition between the nations. "The fact that states reciprocally recognize each other as states remains, even in war—the state of affairs when rights disappear and force and chance hold sway—a bond wherein each counts to the rest as something absolute. Hence in war, war itself is characterized as something which ought to pass away."36 Hegel also finds that "the European peoples form a family in accordance with the universal principle underlying their legal codes, their customs, and their civilization." " Yet it is understandable why the reactionary Prussia of the post-1815 period, though peaceful in foreign policy should have looked with favor (erroneously, from its point of view, as we shall see) on the world-famous philosopher, whose words could be understood as an endorsement of centralism and power. Hegel appeared to be offering aid to statism and militarism, and prominent German publicists and writers since that day have hurled accusations against him, just as Ranke attacked him from the historio-philosophical angle. Germany chose the way of uprooting the German spirit, Friedrich Nietzsche claimed in 1873, to make room for the German state. This error, which threatens to turn victory into a signal defeat, is a bending of the back before the power of existing conditions and in the last analysis goes back to Hegelei." The South German federalist Constantin Frantz found in 1871 that Hegel's doctrine of the state was made to order for Prussia, the core being nothing less than deification of the state. Paul de Lagarde, a conservative German critic of parliamentarism, wrote in 1875: "One must mention Hegel, because it is his philosophy of right which we now see translated into practice, and it is he who first made the state palatable." " During the First World War, the English scholar L. T. Hobhouse went so far as to attribute "the most sinister developments in the history of Europe" to Hegel's influence.40 "Bismarck may not have been directly acquainted with Hegelian philosophy," wrote the historian Hermann Oncken in his book on Lassalle in 1904; "but just as Hegel witnessed his views being realized in the living Prussian state [the exemplary state of Stein and Hardenberg], and again deduced his argu3° Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §338, ibid., VI, 270; English, p. 215. " Zusatz zu §339, ibid., p. 371; English, p. 297. 3» Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, in Werke, I, 179-80, 21β; English, Thoughts out of Season, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici, in The Complete Works, Vol. I, Part 1, pp. 4, 46. 39 Deutsche Schriften, p. 159. As to Frantz, see Das neue Deutschland, pp. 334 sq. The Metaphysical Theory of the State, p. 23.

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ments from this state, so likewise the ideas of the Frederician kingship were alive in Bismarck as a creative, practical force." 4 1 Hegel's influence surpassed that of any other philosopher since the Middle Ages. Friedrich Engels spoke about Hegel's "triumphal procession which lasted for decades." To Flaubert and to other French writers Hegel was the German philosopher. His name and thought found admittance to poetry in the works of Lenau, Hebbel, and Heine. "Philosophical contemplation," Hegel had said, "has no purpose other than excluding what is accidental." 43 If understood literally, this might lead one to believe that dialectical speculations could open the whole book of world history as if by magic. Hegel's influence rests largely on this rational interpretation of society, which appealed to the new class, die Gebildeten, the educated academic circles, the literary clubs, esthetic salons. They were willing to overlook the religious, "mystical" elements in Hegel's philosophy and to interpret his Reason not as the Logos incarnate in Christ but as a purely human ratio in line with the agnostic eighteenth-century French heritage. After 1848, an unphilosophical generation (like ourselves) knew Hegel and the other thinkers not from the sources, but from second- and third-hand references only. Whatever formed the true Christian spirit of Hegel was filtered out long before his ideas reached the "educated" readers. The period after 1848 was the era when the wisdom of power politics triumphed all over Europe. It was also the period of developing prosperity, in which new classes, the rising bourgeoisie, the educated middle class, gained greater influence over the state and society than they had ever had before. The state, which protected and admitted them to its honors and offices, became their own affair. Presented by the popularized Hegelianism of men like Constantin Rössler, later Prince Bismarck's chief of the literary bureau of the Reichstag (a sort of minister of the press ), the state, as the embodiment of power and morality did indeed become something extremely "palatable." 4 4 Page 330. Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen Philosophie, p. 22; English, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, in Marx, Selected Works, I, 425. 43 Philosophie der Welt-Geschichte, in Sämtliche Werke, Vili, 5. 4 4 Heller, Hegel und der nationale Machtstaatsgedanke in Deutschland; ein Beitrag zur politischen Geistesgeschichte, pp. 185 sqq. 41 42

19 THE CITY OF THE WORLD The proletariat cannot be overcome without the realization of philosophy. K A R L MAHX, Zur Kritik der Hegeischen Rechtsphilosophie. experience of the Wars of Liberation did this somewhat colonial and aloof Prussianism become really German," writes Veit Valentin in his history of the German revolutions of 1848-1849. "It was the sensation of belonging to the great family of German blood which transformed loyal Prussian subjects into self-sacrificing energetic believers in a State—which, to be sure, existed as yet only in the longing hopes of patriotic hearts." 1 The example of France seemed to show that only a consolidated national state could attain to social and political progress—that, in other words, national unity and constitutional reform were complementary parts of a single and desirable whole. The complete disdain which Napoleon showed for national feelings in other countries could not but strengthen the desire for national democratic self-expression. Clearly the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had become untenable as a practical program. Yet it continued to live as the ethical content of the national movement. After victory had been won, after foreign enemies and native vultures feeding upon the national body had been conquered, the path towards a league of nations would be open, Fichte felt; the victory of the people would lead towards a universal Christian Republic of Nations.2 Such idealistic hopes were cruelly shattered in the aftermath of the struggle. Instead of one united country there were thirty-six "fatherlands," with all the traitors of the Confederation of the Rhine again installed as "sovereigns by the grace of God." Instead of constitutional government there was reaction, and instead of a free Europe, the Holy Alliance of Russia, Austria, and Prussia to preserve the authoritarian status quo. Freiherr vom Stein returned from his Russian exile in 1813. La grande armée was no more. As adviser to the czar, he had unceasingly urged that the eventual destruction of Napoleon (which he never doubted) should be followed by a new constitution for Germany. The princes of the Confederation of the Rhine, if they refused to join hands against the conqueror, should be deposed. Russia and England had the historic right, he felt, to " O N L Y AFTER THE

1 Geschichte der deutschen Revolution von 1848—49, I, 24; English translation by Ethel Talbot Scheffauer, 1848: Chapters of German History, p. 28. - Cf. Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, in Sämmtliche Werke, VII, 163, 198 sqq.; English, The Characteristics of the Present Age, pp. 168, 206 sqq.

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give Germany its constitution; he even seems to have thought of a North German realm under the British-Hanoverian crown. A stable order in Central Europe, he pointed out in a memorandum to the czar, was essential as a guaranty for Russia and for all other nations; Germany must be protected against France and against her own princes.3 A peaceful and strong Germany was Russia's best bulwark against Western aggression. Hence the empire ought to be restored. A Reichstag composed of princes, burghers, and peasants should be formed, with Regensburg as capital. A habeas corpus act should establish civil liberties. I have pointed out repeatedly that partial verdicts of history are influenced by human factors, which only too often triumph temporarily over historic reason. Stein, potentially the verus imperator of the epoch, whose spirit had galvanized the oppressed into action and had helped to move the great Russian Empire to resistance and action, did not receive what was due to him according to historic justice. But from his spirit later generations co«ild still draw strength and inspiration. And after the battle of Leipzig, he was put in charge of the central commission which temporarily administered the German territories reconquered from the French, comprising almost everything outside Prussia and Austria—the territories which the contemporaries simply called das Reich in contradistinction to the two powerful dynastic states. It even happened that a group of young men addressed to a famous teacher of public law, Nicholas Vogt of Frankfurt, the question whether Stein would be eligible for the vacant imperial throne. The answer was affirmative, for though in practice the throne had become hereditary, every free man was eligible to it by right. There seems to have been a willingness at times among some of Stein's friends, men like Blücher, Gneisenau, and other officers, to lend force to the historic right of the uncrowned secret emperor. But the hour passed, and Stein had not stretched his hand to seize the sacred crown. At the Vienna Congress, which established not a German Reich but only a German Confederation of sovereign princes, Stein was the only one who pleaded for the popular cause. His efforts resulted at least in the insertion of Article 13 into the constitution of the Confederation, which said, "In all states of the Confederation there shall be a constitution based on the provincial diets." 4 Every inequality between Catholics and Protestants in the enjoyment of civil and political rights was to be abolished. Jews also were to enjoy civil liberties: Article 16 held out the promise that "civil rights in return for the assumption of civic duties . . . could be granted and secured » Vienna, November 4, 1814. Briefwechsel, Denkschriften und Aufzeichnungen, V, 77 sqq.; see also Stein's memorandum to the Russian cabinet of January 13, 1815, ibid., pp. I l l sqq. * Bundes-Acte, oder Grundvertrag des teutschen Bundes (Vienna, June 8, 1815), in Johann Ludwig Klüber, ed., Acten des Wiener Congresses in den Jahren 1814 und 1815, II, βΟβ.

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to them." Free purchase of land, the right of all citizens to choose a place of residence, and identical rules for the freedom of the press and the like were envisaged.5 The Federal Diet constituted at Frankfurt-am-Main was a congress of diplomats rather than anything approaching a parliament. Austria was the presidiai power, though large sections of its vast domains—Hungary, Galicia, the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom—remained outside the confederation and were not under even its nominal jurisdiction. The Prussian kingdom, as far as its provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, and Posen were concerned, remained outside also. Thus, neither a national nor a universal idea emerged out of the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars. In the first few years liberal men hoped that the charter of the confederation might offer a platform for progressive constitutional reforms, but only too soon did the futility of such hopes become manifest. Austria, the dominant and controlling power, was interested not in reform but only in preserving the existing status. Most of the smaller states were under Austrian influence, while Bavaria, a sort of retarded great power, trotted along its independent way. Prussia, which had undergone the Stein reforms, would have been the logical leader, and, in fact, all the progressives looked hopefully to the North. The University of Berlin, founded in 1810 as a symbol of intellectual revival, had since become a German center of thought. Nowhere were people quicker to adopt new trends and novel ideas than in that city, with its pronounced American touch. A statesman of rank might have used the favorable situation to assume leadership over all forward-looking men in whom the hopes and the longings of the War of Liberation were not yet extinct, but under Frederick William III, a petty despot graced only with long life, there was no such hope. Prussia returned to a regime of crown, aristocracy, and bureaucracy, and it was only underground that the opposition could form. Freiherr vom Stein, disgusted by the deeds of the reaction, in later years refused to take office. He died a disappointed man in 1831, the year of Hegel's death and one year before Goethe's. Whatever small lingering hope there may have been that the charter of the confederation might develop into a true constitution was shattered by the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 and the Wiener Schlussakte of the following year. These measures, on the instigation of Metternich, were whipped through the diet in a manner not even compatible with the charter or the rules of the house. They emasculated Article 13 by stating that its provisions should not be mistaken for democracy; "the whole of state power must remain concentrated in the hands of the monarch, whose sovereignty cannot be infringed upon by a constitution; only the exercise of certain of >lbid., pp. 611 (Article 1Θ), 612-13 (Article 18).

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his rights can be made dependent on the cooperation of the estates." ' Furthermore, strict censorship was established over all publications, schools, and universities. All tendencies towards national unity were outlawed as treason against the member states. The Wiener Schlussakte gave to these and other similar measures the sanction of a constitutional amendment to the charter. "We have been called men of the world, philosophers, cosmopolitans," Ernst Moritz Arndt, a friend and partisan of Stein, said stoutly in his Spirit of the Time, though he had already been warned to "stop his illicit and useless writing" by a Prussian royal warrant in 1819. "We should rather be called," he went on, "the Jews of the newest Europe, for like the Jews we are dispersed, and we are in esteem held almost as low as the Jews. Yet the Jews, in their eternal character, show more strength and character than the modem Germans." And with a tone of prophecy as somber as that of Cusanus he added: "What will happen if hatred is added to the contempt which we now earn from the strangers? If we are driven about as slaves and henchmen, until all nobler peoples will curse and execrate us? Then, indeed, we shall take a sorrowful leave from the world's history."7 Projected against a background like this, Hegel's revolutionary influence is better understood. The views of the Prussian Philosopher Royal could not possibly be suspected of subversiveness; they could be discussed freely in intellectual circles, where discontent with existing affairs and revolutionary feelings were rife. Quite unlike the absolutistic and totalitarian conceptions of the state, Hegel's was in practical realization endowed with civic rights. The state, in idea the powerful instrument of history, in practice must act as guardian of liberty, and the rights of citizens, of faith, of worship, of property and trade, and of the press must be held inviolable. Free access to all public offices was also an integral item among Hegel's postulates, and even the beginning of minority rights can be found in his Philosophy of Right.* Relentlessly he championed the endeavors of the reforming king of β Schluss-Acte der über Ausbildung und Befestigung des deutschen Bundes zu Wien gehaltenen Ministerial-Conferenzen (May 15, 1820), Article 57, in Georg Friedrich von Martens, ed., Nouveau recueil de traités dei puissances et états de l'Europe, V, 504. 7 Geist der Zeit, in Sämtliche Werke X, 247-^48. » Cf. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §§209, 270, in Sämtliche Werke, VI, 169, 212; English translation by T. M. Knox, Philosophy of Right, pp. 134, 169. "Technically," Hegel states in a note to §270, "it may have been right to refuse the grant of even civil rights to the Jews on the ground that they should be regarded as belonging not only to a religious sect but to a foreign race. But the fierce outcry raised against the Jews, under that point of view and others, ignores the fact that they are, above all, men; and manhood, so far from being a mere superficial, abstract quality, is on the contrary itself the basis of the fact that what civil rights rouse in their possessors is the feeling of oneself as counting in civil society as a person with rights. . . . The state refusing them [the Jews] rights would be blamable and reproachable, because by so refusing, it would have misunderstood its own basic principle, its nature as an objective and powerful institution." This, of course, applies to any other minority as well.

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his native Württemberg. "Such a teacher, whatever his faults, is on the side of the angels," Gooch summarizes.* The pre-1848 generation was far too much exposed to state power to misunderstand in a reactionary sense Hegel's emphasis upon power. He never taught, in fact, that power was an end in itself, but he argued, in line with Thomistic and general Christian tradition, that it was the constitutive element of the state. Since the state is willed by nature, power must also be willed by nature, for without power no state exists. His very concept of the state as an historic-dialectical process leads to the belief in a future stage of development when the power of coercion will be no more—a period when mankind, fully educated, will have achieved its true constitution of freely willed morality. Freiherr vom Stein as statesman and Hegel as theoretician were the founders of the modem social state, a state which does not content itself with the laissez faire principle or the outward guardianship of law and order. In Hegel's state—again unlike the totalitarian—the family forms the "natural ethical community." The goal proper to the family, he finds, is the individual personality as such. Even more clearly he expresses this principle when he speaks about "the divine law which holds sway in the family," and states that it is the duty of the commonwealth to protect, develop, and coordinate the family-determined individual forces of the people.10 Since power during the period of reaction was something ugly and oppressive, his definitions of the state and of its role in the progress of freedom were understood, as they should be, in the dialectical sense. If the state is the instrument of history and the true constitution stronger than any imposed one, progress must continue, without regard for the nominal rulers and even against their plans and intent. The greater the oppression by the state, the greater also its work for freedom—dialectically, that is, for greater oppression is bound to strengthen its antithesis, the desire for a thorough change, the revolutionary dynamic. The more Prussia and the other particularistic states accentuated their sovereignty, the stronger became the forces striving for national unity. The dynamic powers slumbering in certain Hegelian thoughts have become apparent, for instance, in their Marxian interpretation, even though that interpretation is discordant with the view of history expressed in this book and with Hegelian idealism itself, which the Marxian creed threw overboard. If it really did throw it overboard! To many Hegelian idealism seems still present, hidden deep under the agnostic-materialistic surface of Marxism—not indeed in its Asiatic-totalitarian version but in its European form of social democracy. » "German Theories of the State," in Studies in Modem History, p. 220. Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Sämtliche Werke, II, 320, 324, 327-28; English translation by J. Β. BaiUie, The Phenomenology of the Mind, pp. 468, 474, 478-80.

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Like Hegel, Marx sees in organized society the chosen leader towards progress. But the state is to him something different. It is "the organised power of one class for oppressing another." 11 Yet the mission of progress is carried out in spite of the opposing will of the rulers, by inner dialectical nece iity. T h e international structure of Marx's definition of the state was modified by Ferdinand Johann Gottlieb Lassalle in a more national sense. Lassalle, a knightly figure of more human warmth than Marx, but like him filled with a Judaeo-German sense of mission, was the founder and organizer of the German trade union movement. Bismarck derived many of his ideas of social legislation from this opponent, for whose personal integrity he had the highest respect. In retrospect, Friedrich Engels wrote this emphatic profession, in 1882, " W e German socialists are proud to descend not only from Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen, but also from Kant, Fichte, and Hegel." 12 " T h e sole source of law," Lassalle wrote, "is the common consciousness of the whole people, the general spirit. Since Hegel, this has been so well established that it requires no additional proof." 13 In his Arbeiter-Programm he said: " I t is the purpose of the state to bring about the unfolding and progressive development of the essence of man, i.e., to awaken the potentialities of culture of mankind to real existence. T h e function of the state is the education and development of humanity towards freedom." 14 This is not a belief peculiar to socialism, for Christianity has always attributed to the temporal power an educational and moral mission, which only extreme liberalism has tried to deny to the state. T h e change which Hegelian idealistic dialectics have undergone when transformed into Marxian concepts is best illustrated by Marx's own words, in the preface to the second edition of Das Kapital: "My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. T o Hegel, the life-process of the human brain [!], i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of 'the Idea,' he even transforms into an independent sub11 Communist Manifesto, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, VI, 546; English, Marx, Selected Works, I, 228. 12 London, September 21. Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft, edited by Karl Kautsky (5th ed., Berlin, Verlag Vorwärts, 1907), p. 5. Lenin wrote that Marx advanced and enriched philosophy "by the achievements of German classical philosophy especially by Hegel's system. . . . The main achievement is dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fuller, deeper form." The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, in Marx, Selected Works, I, 55. 13 Das System der erworbenen Rechte; eine Versöhnung des positiven Rechts und der Rechtsphilosophie, in Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, IX, 305. It is interesting to note that a complete edition of Lassalle's works was published in America, in German, as early as 1883—Sämmtliche Reden und Schriften (New York, E. Wolff), edited by Georg Hotschick. The System der erworbenen Rechte will be found in Vol. III, and the quotation on p. 477. 14 Arbeiter-Programm; über den besonderen Zusammenhang der gegenwärtigen Geschichtsperiode mit der Idee des Arbeiterstandes, in Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, II, 197.

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ject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only -the external, phenomenal form of 'the Idea/ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. ' T h e mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago. . . . The mystification which dialectics suffers in Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell." " To Marx the moving power of the world is not the Spirit of God, the Triune government of the worlds working through Christ, the Incarnate Logos; it is "economic reality," the form of production. And yet, beyond any doubt, he must have believed in reason as a metaphysical principle and in absolute categories of justice and historic righteousness. His whole work is filled with indignation about injustice; sometimes his feelings break forth like surging tongues of flames. But whence does he take his standards of good and evil? Why show moral indignation if everything—at least everything that really decides the fate of man—is determined by economic reality, a law of nature? If this were the true process of the world, the proletariat might well have a right to fight for its domination of the state, which by iron necessity it was bound to achieve, but no one could claim that the struggle and triumph are in a righteous cause any more than a stone could be called morally good because in falling it obeys the law of gravity. Righteousness is not born out of natural or economic necessities. A simplified graphic presentation of the Marxian view of history and society would produce the accompanying diagrams on page 249. The Marxian assumption that in the beginning there was an idyllic primitive communism on the basis of a clan constitution has a strangely Rousseauish touch. In a way it sounds like a translation of the Biblical story of Paradise into earthly social relations. Though there certainly are historic examples of early communities which fit or nearly fit the pattern described by Marx and Engels, it is today very doubtful whether that description represents the type of primitive human existence which prevailed, like a law of nature, admitting of no exception. Yet we might perhaps accept it as a working hypothesis (like the social contract), although without that scientific, historic exactitude which the Marxian school claims for its theories. Little is said, again, of the way in which this primitive communism produced private property, though many individual examples are offered. Friedrich Engels states in his essay on the ancient rural community that the homestead was the first property to pass into private ownership; herediVol. I, pp. xvii-xviii (London, January 24, 1873); English translation by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Capital; a Critique of Political Economy, I, 25.

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tary rights to cattle and fields followed." Many more examples might be added; for instance, that of tribes, who, forced to move on when their land is devastated by drought or floods turn into warrior castes, conquer the lands of other tribes, and establish themselves as the ruling class. But no proof has been offered that primitive communism by necessity produces the institution of private property as its antithesis—necessary for the existence of primitive communism and already contained in its womb, and yet leading to its ultimate downfall. We hardly accept this statement unless, of course, we are ready to accept also Diagram I-A, which the Marxians would never admit. This diagram shows the rise of private property out of the consciousness of man, reversing the Marxian doctrine that consciousness is determined by economic reality. History undoubtedly gives proof of the general development of mankind towards individual, not towards collective, consciousness. Yet the moral advance of man is characterized by a concord between individualism and collectivism. The path, roughly speaking, goes from individually unconscious, collective tribalism towards full individual self-consciousness as its antithesis. The synthesis would then consist of individual consciousness embraced by collective, brotherly responsibility. The first diagram of Marxian dialectics (Primitive Communism—Private Property—Class Distinctions) is not only lacking in historical and logical cogency but also contradicts his predictions for the future. If communism by necessity produces private property, the communistic classless society at the end of the dialectical process will again necessarily produce such antithesis, and thereby, class distinctions and the state. The only difference will be that, whereas primitive private property and classes resulted from the primeval communistic thesis, the necessary result of the classless society, which will stand at the height of the technical conquest of the world, will be more highly developed forms of private property and classes. But essentially the dialectical process will be the same, and so we may look forward to a repetition of the whole cycle, in fact a cyclic repetition of it till the end of time. Or does the Marxian system admit, if only by implication, a moral development through the process of history? Then, indeed, it would appear that the class struggle serves morality, which is freedom, rather than only the necessity of natural laws. Little is said in concreto about the final aim of the dialectical process, the classless society. But we may assume by inference that not history but the material fetters on the spiritual forces of man will then have come to an end. 'The realm of freedom," Marx said, "does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external 16 "Die Mark," in Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft, pp. 57 sqq.; English, 'The Mark," in Socialism, Utopian and. Scientific, pp. 80 sqq.

RULING CLASS

PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM ( classless

(Thesis)

nonsocieíy)

OPPRESSED CLASS

CLASS DISTINCTION

PRIVATE PROPERTY

(ruling and oppressed

(Antithesis)

classes)

(Synthesis)

FREE CITIZENS

(in the ancient

THE STATE

world)

FEUDAL STATE

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS (Communism)

Tlffi CLASSLESS SOCIETY ON ECONOMICALLY DEVELOPED COMMUNISTIC BASIS

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utility is required. In the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of material production."17 This process is illustrated by Diagram IV. Feudalism produces its antithesis, the untitled classes, whose importance grows until feudalism is replaced by liberal capitalism, in which the once revolutionary bourgeoisie shares the power of the state with the once bitterly opposed feudal class. This capitalistic order, in order that it may be able to exist, must produce the army of proletarian wage earners, revolutionary by their very nature. The inevitable outcome is the dictatorship of the proletariat, again a class rule, which retains features of capitalistic production. Thus the general picture of Diagram II still prevails; there still is a state as the instrument of power in the hands of the ruling class, the proletariat. Only the denomination of rulers and oppressed has changed. Democracy in the sense of rule of the people is not yet realized, though society has come one step closer to it, since the class with the historic mandate of progress has seized power. Now there is no longer a lower class. The antithesis which must lead to the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat consists in the change of the conditions of production. By gradually establishing socialistic ways of production, the proletariat disappears as a class. And where there are no classes, there is no state; hence the classless society is at the same time mankind liberated from the state. Lenin, in his polemics against the anarchists who dreamed of abolishing the state, explains with painstaking precision that only Marx's and Engels's views are scientific and the permanent creed of the modem revolutionary party. It is not the bourgeois state which will fall asleep; on the contrary, it must be taken over lock, stock, and barrel by the proletariat to use its power for suppressing the bourgeoisie and abolishing capitalistic production. Only then can the falling-asleep, withering-away, dying-off process of the state begin. True democracy, the realm of freedom, may then set in." It is quite obvious that this process is envisioned, as it must be, on an international scale. The slogan of "World Revolution" means nothing but the activation of the proletarian antithesis the world over. The proletarians of all countries are fellow countrymen, and theirs is the duty of liberating all men by liberating themselves. It would be naive to imagine that the revolutionary parties could ever renounce this doctrine, much as expediency may at times demand that it be kept in the background. They can no more be expected to renounce it and preserve their identity or even existence than the Christian churches can abandon their missionary work and their hope that one day the whole world will be saved by becoming Christian. The astounding parallels between the agnostic dialectician Karl Marx and 11 Das Kapital, Vol. Ill, Part 2, p. 355, Chap. 48; English translation by Ernest Untermann, Capital; a Critique of Political Economy, III, 954. 18 State and Revolution, pp. 15 sqq.

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basic Judaeo-Christian traditions have often been remarked. Hans Kelsen, one of the authors of the Austrian Constitution of 1920 (now at Harvard), wrote on the Marxian ideas of state and society: "The state'—this civitas diaboli—must be overcome, 'wither away,' and make room for a classless, state-free 'society,' a civitas dei. Between the concepts of St. Augustine and Marx there is only this distinction, that the former cautiously places his ideal in the world beyond, whereas the latter, by way of the laws of causality and development, forces it into this world."10 Even this distinction assumed by Kelsen is (as we believe our previous analysis has shown) not entirely correct. St. Augustine also envisaged a state of world-wide freedom and righteousness in this world, as the preparation for and instrument of the Kingdom. Among Marx's most famous statements is the assertion that "the philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it." 20 It is a great and daring cry to the world, reminiscent of the Alleluia in the Mass of Pentecost (Psalm 103:30) : "Thou shalt send forth thy spirit, and they shall be created: and thou shalt renew the face of the earth." The mission of salvation is ascribed to the proletariat, almost as if Marx, the descendant of rabbis and scholars of the law, had wanted to resurrect the messianic prophecies of Isaiah, those great verses from the fortysecond chapter, about the all-patient, all-suffering servant of the Lord, the Messiah to come. Ever since the fanfare of "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, vnitel" 21 was sounded for the first time in 1848, the thoughts of the Judaeo-German prophet, Karl Heinrich Marx, and his fair-haired Westphalian friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, have been an integral part of the political and ethical concerns of modern mankind. Criticism or acceptance, love or hatred —it mattered not with what feelings the new creed was received. It was there to stay because so far the Western world, with all its brilliant criticism of Marxian ideas, has not yet succeeded in conquering this greatest of earthly heresies of our age, which, in an entirely novel form, announced an empire bounded only by the ocean, embracing all men and nations, an empire intended to drown out the stars of Christian history. To Germany, whose "bourgeois" and reactionary, governments they hated and under whose police and censor regimes they suffered, Marx, Engels, and their friends attributed a particular role in the liberation of mankind. They rightly predicted that it stood on the "eve of a bourgeois revolution," but added erroneously that this could not be anything but the immediate prelude to a proletarian one. The German proletariat, they argued, was 10 Sozialismus und Staat; eine Untersuchung der politischen Theorie des Marxismus, pp. 31-33. 20 Theses on Feuerbach ( Brussels, Spring 1845), in Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, V, 535; English, Marx, Selected Works, I, 473. 2' Communist Manifesto, in ibid., VI, 557; English, I, 241.

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more highly developed than the English one in the seventeenth or the French one in the eighteenth century. 22 Actually, the German proletariat of the middle of the nineteenth century was not yet class-conscious, although during the Revolution of 1848 it had an important share in many a struggle, especially in Vienna and Berlin. But the country was still largely agricultural and had a sizable class of independent craftsmen and artisans. " T h e only liberation of Germany which is practically possible," Marx professes in a passage, remarkable in many ways, "is its liberation from the point of view of that theory which declares man as the highest aim of man. . . . In Germany, no kind of servitude can be broken without breaking all kinds of servitude. T h e thorough Germany cannot revolutionize without revolutionizing thoroughly. T h e emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. T h e head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot be realized without overcoming the proletariat. T h e proletariat cannot overcome itself without the realization of philosophy." 23 L e t us remember that this is from an essay on Hegel's philosophy of right. Hegel's philosophy, however, is the philosophy of cosmic reason, of the Logos who rules the world and who became flesh. Without rendering account of it to himself, Marx used in describing the eventual deliverance of man language reminiscent of the words in the Gospel of St. John. There is, indeed, a strong affinity between the Marxian and the Christian philosophies of government. For the latter, government and governmental power have no value in themselves. As St. Augustine has shown in the City of God, these earthly institutions, necessary and justified as they are, must minister to the higher goal, the deliverance of man. In Dante's writings and in the whole philosophy of the Sacred Roman Empire, this fundamental view of the Christian Occidental world has been recognized. F o r the Christian there is the certainty that, in the words of St. Paul, Christ will in the end abolish all sovereignty, authority, and power, and hand over the Kingdom to God and the Father. 2 4 T h e City of Man, though serving dialectically the development of pure reason and faith, will ultimately be dissolved in a new community, "the new heaven and the new earth," 2 5 which is the synthesis of both. Earthly politics, the framing of positive law in accordance with natural law, the state itself—all these have as their final object the betterment of man and his preparation for the community of true freedom. This, obviously, applies to humanity as a whole; no people or state is more than an interdependent part in the great universal drama of development towards God. I n Marxian socialism power is teleologically and ethically determined. 22 23 24

Ibid. Zur Kritik der Hegeischen Rechtsphilosophie, ibid., I. Band, 1. Halbband, pp. 620-21.

I Corinthians 15:24.

25

Apocalypse 21:1.

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Teleologically, because it serves the establishment of a future society in which the domination over men will be no more; ethically, because it tends toward the realization of freedom for all members of the human body in the classless society. In this society, power will vanish, together with the last class to exercise it, the proletariat. It would seem that there must be more than pure accident, explainable by arguments of political pragmatism, in the fact that in our day Christianity and democratic socialism have always had to struggle against the same enemies!

20 THE REVOLUTION OF 1848 I have cast off from me all that was mortal, And am but emperor now, who knows not death. F R A N Z C R I L L P A R Z E R , König Ottokars Glück und Ende, Act III. one of the most tragic developments of modern time that Marx adopted from the hated bourgeois class its most vicious and antispiritual eighteenth century heritage, namely, pragmatism and agnosticism. The deplorable split between working class and religion, which resulted from this, has deeply affected the cause of both. It is only today, in the fire of a common persecution by anti-Christian despotism, that these two natural allies are drawing together and discover anew their common ground. Very different from a certain type of modern labor leaders, Karl Marx lived a life of personal sacrifice. His courageous and loving wife, Jenny ( née von Westphalen, one of the oldest North German noble families), stood loyally at his side throughout all the years of a miserable exile in London. Only three of their six children survived. Marx's pride, their son Edgar, died at the age of nine. Another little boy, Guido, nicknamed Little Fox, died a few months after his birth, of hunger and sleeplessness. "My wife is in a dangerous condition," Marx wrote at that time to Friedrich Engels, "she is so upset and exhausted. She had nursed the boy herself, and fought for his life, and saved it under the most difficult circumstances and with the greatest sacrifices. To think that now the child has become a victim of our bourgeois [i.e. financial] misery."1 When their last child, Franziska, died at the age of one year in March, 1852, her body lay for days in their miserable two-room flat in Chelsea, until a neighboring Frenchman advanced the money for the coffin.2 "She had no cradle when she was bom," Jenny Marx wrote later.3 Only their loyal friend I T W I L L REMAIN

1 London, November 23, 1850, in Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, Dritte Abteilung, 1,114. 1 Letter of Marx to Friedrich Engels, London, April 4, 1852. Ibid., pp. 339-40. •When Lassalle wrote to her, in 1861, that the prospects for their return to Germany were very promising, Jenny Marx replied: "I should not like to show myself to our old friends in my present state. . . . They would all be frightened to see me. I have become so ugly and so disfigured. But my dear, charming girls, growing up to great loveliness, modest and pleasing of character, and their beautiful little sister, the rosy-cheeked Ellinor with her brown curls—the three bright spots in our life—those three I should love to bring over and present to our old friendsl London, April, 18Θ1, in Ferdinand Lassalle, Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, III, 354-55.

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Friedrich Engels and the honorarium paid for writing two articles a week for the New York Tribune enabled Marx to carry on at all. In the midst of hardship and deprivation he formulated one of the most powerful books of modem times, a book profoundly affected by the Christian heritage whether Marx knew it or not.4 It is not the postulate for a fundamental revision of the social order, but exclusively its materialistic philosophy of history which has made socialism anathema as an historic force. And this materialist philosophy is not only superfluous, but is the very contradiction of the ethic of social postulates. Fortunately, the workers' movement in Germany has always been less under the influence of Marx than under that of Ferdinand Lassalle, who allowed room for the national and religious forces. In its moderate wing, social democracy, socialism has thereby played an important part in the development of twentieth-century democracy. Christians have always realized that the Incarnation and the Sacrifice of Christ not only opened heaven but also applied to man's earthly life. Life in this world was to become a worthy preparation for the Kingdom, and the fruits of this earth, distributed in justice, were to be a token of the Kingdom and a means through which life could serve man. It was in this spirit that the church declared, "According to divine law, all things are common to all"; 5 that St. Augustine wrote, "One possesses alien goods if one possesses what is superfluous"; " and St. Thomas Aquinas, "Man ought to possess external things, not as his own, but as common, so that, to wit, he is ready to communicate them to others in their need" 7 —ideas which run like a red thread through patristic writing and the works of the scholastics and return with vigor in the great social encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XI. Hard and ruthless capitalism is far more antagonistic to Christianity than to agnostic socialism, which also admits self-interest, though a collective one, as a licit motive of action. The plunge into materialism, of which Marxian socialism has been guilty, was, however, no isolated phenomenon; it was preceded and prepared by 4

Cf. Shuster, Like a Mighty Army; Hitler versus Established Religion, p. 50. Corpus juris canonici, dist. viii, can. 1. Ennaratio in psalmum CXLVII, xii, in Migne, Patrologiae cursus completas, Latin, XXXVII, 1922. 7 Summa theologica II. • . Qu. lxvi, art. 2; English translation by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, The "Summa Theologica" of Sf. Thomas Aquinas, VIII, 224. Compare also St. Hennas, "Whoever knows of someone who is in misery and does not help him out, commits a grave sin and becomes guilty of his blood." Pastor in. x. 4, in Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Greek, II, 1012. St. Basil the Great says, "If everyone would take only according to his needs and leave the surplus to the needy, nobody would be rich and nobody poor. . . . Are you not a thief if you call your own what was given to you to administer? He who steals a man's clothes will be called a thief; and he who does not clothe the naked man when he could do so, should be called by another name?" Homilía in Lucam 12:18, cap. vii, in ibid., XXXI, 278. And St. Jerome: "All wealth stems from injustice, and had not one man lost another could not gain. Hence that common opinion that the rich man is either unjust himself or an unjust man's heir seems to me perfectly true." Epistola ad Hedibiam, cap. i, in ibid., Latin, XXII, 984. 5 β

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the fall into materialism of the Christian and bourgeois world itself. For this unhappy development, the historic influence of the Reformation is not free from reproach. Martin Luther, though he favored limited usury in certain emergencies, in the main upheld the church's teaching on capital interest— the Fathers, Greek and Latin, had declared any interest, moderate or exorbitant, from rich or from poor, on money or on other replaceable goods, as absolutely illicit. It was Calvin who abolished the traditional laws and established at Geneva the first Christian bank committed to usury. Successively, all Protestant states abolished the antiusury laws, and in 1645 an imperial law provided for a general rate of five percent. France was the last state to remain loyal to the Christian principles; it was not until 1789 that the Constituent Assembly followed the example of the other countries. The church clearly foresaw the disastrous consequences to which the system of limitless free competition was bound to lead. Among the first men to take up the modem social question was the bishop of Mainz, Wilhelm Emmanuel Freiherr von Ketteler, one of the most remarkable figures of German Catholicism. Like Count Galen, the present bishop of Münster, Ketteler came from an ancient Westphalian family and, again like him, fought relentlessly for the rights of the people. Ketteler has been called the first "workers' bishop." His personality and ideas greatly influenced the social program of Pope Leo XIII, and through him the modem social principles of the church, as pronounced in the Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. In May, 1848, Ketteler preached a series of sermons in which he dealt with the plight of the working classes and recognized the urgency of finding a solution for the problem. The echo among Catholics was wide and stirring. In 1864 was published the bishop's famous book, The Labor Question and Christianity, in which he set forth the fundamental bases for the social teaching of modem Catholicism. In tenor and content his ideas were sometimes amazingly close to the postulates of the socialists, except that Ketteler recognized the spiritual forces behind the "economic reality." The bishop said, ' T h e party of which Lassalle himself is the chief representative has the undeniable merit of having shown, with implacable poignancy and truthfulness . . . the plight of the working class, namely, that they are in large part reduced to the bare necessities of life." 8 Ketteler adopted Lassalle's criticism of the treatment of labor in capitalist society and, like him, advocated the organization of the workers in defense of their rights.® 'The false doctrine of the rigid, the absolute right of prop• Die Arbeiterfrage und das Christentum, p. 62. Lassalle's contention that in a system of free economy the workers' wages could not even rise above the bare subsistence level (the so-called ' Iron Law of Wages," going back to Locke, Malthus, and Ricardo), Bishop Ketteler subscribed fully. "The truth of this thesis has been made so evident by the wellknown controversies between Lassalle and his opponents," he wrote, "that only those who intend to deceive the people can deny it." Freiheit, Autorität und Kirche, p. 107. • The influence of Lassalle on Ketteler and the Catholic social movement was great

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erty," he wrote, "is a continuous sin against nature, for it does not recognize the injustice lying in the satisfaction of limitless avarice and extravagant sensual lust by the things which God has created for the food and clothing of man. Such doctrine suppresses the most noble sentiments in the breast of man and creates a harshness and indifference toward the misery of men, such as can hardly be found even among animals. It declares a continued theft to be right, for, as a holy Father of the Church [St. Basil] has said: not only is he a thief who steals alien goods, but also he who retains alien goods for himself. The notorious expression 'property is theft' is not just a falsehood; it contains, together with the falsehood a frightful truth as well. By scorn and irony it will not be eliminated. . . . As long as it contains a particle of truth, it will be capable of overthrowing the whole of our order." 10 Between the two men—different in creed, in standing, and in origin— there was still a bond of mutual esteem. While Ferdinand Lassalle paid homage to Ketteler's book The Labor Question and Christianity, the bishop attested to the respectful recognition of the depth and truth of Christianity in Lassalle's way of thinking.11 The upper classes in the period around 1848 still bore their religion with them like some old talisman or accepted it casually as an accustomed way of life which they were loath to give up entirely. Yet while they accused the lower classes, as they still do, of materialism, they themselves had abandoned the very essence of religion, justice and love. Had Ketteler's voice carried the day, the proletariat might yet have been won for Christ, for in the depth of the hearts of the common people was still the longing for a justice that was not of this world alone. One of the most disastrous rifts in the German people, as in all others, might have been avoided and with it, perhaps, most of the wars and revolutions which have ravaged the world in the last hundred years. Like the Marxians, though without their ethos, the bourgeois of the nineteenth century, lived "in the night which they call enlightenment" and, true heirs of eighteenth century irréligion, cast aside the ethical concepts of society. They, too, indulged their cheerful and irresponsible belief in the physical laws of nature and disdained the moral precepts of natural law. The moral obligations of feudal relationships were forgotten, and no longer was there room for the social functions of private property, which were surrendered for the sake of the shibboleth of "progress." enough to cause Chaplain Schings, editor of the Christlichsoziale Blatter at Aachen ( devoted to the discussion of social problems from the Catholic viewpoint ), to say in February, 1872, "Our Christian-social movement follows in its theories. . . . mostly the ideas of Lassalle." Vigener, Ketteier; ein deutsches Bischofsleben des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, p. 545. 10 Schriften, II, 223. 11 See, for instance, the remarks of the Catholic publicist, Joseph Edmund Jörg, in Geschichte der sozialpolitischen Parteien in Deutschland, p. 28.

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This process of the de-Christianization of public life, with its positivistic dissolution of principles of right, and its reduction of the social fabric (which, as we know, should be a mirror of the Kingdom and a type of Christ's Mystical Body ) to an instrument of power for personal and class gains, prepared the soil where the seeds of modern totalitarianism might sprout. Totalitarianism, the complete subjugation of ethics to political expediency, is only the final consequence of that process. Between the principles of power politics, in which all the major and many of the smaller states have busily engaged since Richelieu and Mazarin and which in the nineteenth century became the accepted basis of international politics, and the principles of totalitarianism there is a logical connection. There is only a difference in degree, not in essence, between European totalitarianism and such systems of government where freedom, though the name of democracy is retained, is no longer rooted in the concept of Christ's human temple but only in positivistic conventions valid today but tomorrow abrogated. Viewed objectively, the disaster that overtook the Western world appears to have been in preparation for centuries beneath the calm surface of outward stability. Our civilization, so great, so free, so human, fell, like the House of Usher in Edgar Allan Poe's story, because corruption had long since undermined its walls. The little pragmatic formulas of the college radicals of all countries will not rebuild them. Perhaps recognition of these facts will prove difficult for a generation that has lost its historic and philosophical consciousness and instead takes as its measure of normality the material standards of a few twentieth-century years of happiness when the antithesis was in abeyance. Nevertheless, we may believe that the anxious cry for democracy rising today just as it rose in the nineteenth century will avail nothing so long as men disdain to see the true sources of democracy. From this viewpoint, the revolutions of the last few generations reveal their hopeless futility. Their failure was a foregone conclusion, and deeper slavery of the spirit has come out of each new disappointment met in the effort to do by barricades, by reforms, and by ballots what can be done only by the re-Christianization of man. And as we look back, we seem to descry men of the nineteenth century who felt more plainly than does our generation the trembling of the earth beneath their feet. This feeling of insecurity can be detected in Bismarck's skepticism regarding the stability of Germany and of Europe and in his deep anxiety lest any shift might topple the whole European edifice. These fears were the motive power behind his cautious foreign policy. The same insecurity can be detected in the anxiety shown by religious, moral, and philosophical thinkers and leaders, and may be seen, too, in the fearsome warnings issued by Pope Leo XIII and in his full-scale attempts to bring mankind back to social justice and the sources of religious truth.

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In 1840 the crown prince, Frederick William, finally succeeded his longlived father. As is the usual case with crown princes, much was expected of the young man, who was known for his liberal and national ideas. His people hoped that he would finally break with the stale absolutism of the old, petty despot, who for so long had been unwanted even by death. Frederick William IV has often been called a romanticist, because he showed some interest in the Middle Ages and some leaning toward Catholicism. He deserves credit for doing much to finish the Cathedral of Cologne, on which construction had halted when the Reformation broke out. Goethe, who did not like fragments, had already urged completion of the cathedral. Now, in September, 1842, when the cornerstone was laid, the building had a new meaning: it was a symbol of that German unity towards which all German tribes, German men, and German women of all walks of life and of all denominations, should contribute. The king, who loved public addresses, pomp, and flags as much as his grandnephew Emperor William II later did, and who, like William, delighted in journeys and unexpected movements across the map, delivered an improvised speech. Gentlemen, he said, great things are happening among you. 'The spirit that is building these towers is the spirit of German unity and strength. . . . The great work may tell to all future generations of a Germany great through the unity of her princes and peoples and enforcing without bloodshed the peace of the world." 12 The fact that the king allowed himself to be carried along with the national current and at times even encouraged it (though never daring to go the whole length in agreement) did much to increase his popularity. The people were tired of the particularistic states and hoped for a united, democratic Germany. As a whole, Frederick William's nature was self-contradictory; he was always at war with himself. An actor, a comedian, he at times could be carried away by his own role; untrustworthy and never brave, he yet was given to great gestures that might seem like manifestations of moral and physical courage. Personally he was amiable, rich in ideas, and sure in his conviction that he was always blessed with the benign approval and sympathy of the Lord. Of true greatness, which might have made him into the tragic figure of a man frustrated in his attempts to fashion a political creation beyond his powers, he had nothing. The end of his career was only pathetic, not tragic: he died in the night of insanity. In 1847 the king consented to a partial fulfillment of his father's five promises to grant a constitution. He summoned not a real Landtag elected by democratic vote, but a combination of the eight provincial diets composed of the Stände, the estates of the realm. The sessions were not to be regular 12

Lewalter, Friedrich Wilhelm TV; das Schicksal eines Geistes, p. 383.

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and periodical, and the competence of the deputies was limited. T h e king opened the diet by making a tactless and ill-advised speech, in which he emphasized his royal magnanimity in permitting the deputies to meet and warned them not to think that a constitution would b e granted. "No printed sheet of paper shall ever interpose itself between the Lord God and this country, as a second Providence, as it were, to rule Us with its paragraphs, replacing by them the ancient sacred loyalty." " T h e nobility was, of course, heavily represented in the five hundred and forty-three deputies, and never before had there been a state-wide or nationwide assembly from which experience in such matters could be gained. For a long time the hand of absolutism had weighed upon the country. All the more surprising, then, was the spirit of independence and of determined progressiveness which flashed out in the united diet. In attitude very few members were conservative in the strictest sense of the word. Nobles (most prominent among them the Westphalian Freiherr Georg von Vincke, a man not unlike the Freiherr vom Stein ) and commoners showed an amazing unruliness in their demands for control of taxation and for periodical sessions of the diet. Though the united diet did not achieve much, it afforded one of these comforting proofs that ideas of political progress can never be suppressed. T h e time was ripe, and the spokesmen of the spirit of the time rose to the occasion. Among the conservative members of that diet was the thirty-two-year-old Junker, Otto von Bismarck. He stood sharply opposed to the entire liberal trend, which was followed by many of his peers. Royalist through and through; Prussian, not German; a keen, incisive speaker of great oratorical power; a born parliamentarian who perceived and used the weak points of his adversaries, yet an avowed enemy of parliamentary institutions—such was the world-historic man who made his entrance into public life. He was to remain active upon the stage of German affairs until his retirement in 1890. He had by then become prince and chancellor and had founded and for eighteen years ruled the German Reich, with a parliament which he himself had created. In the united diet he took the floor to make two major speeches, each arousing the most violent opposition on the part of the majority. In the first he categorically denied the opinion expressed by the liberal East Prussian deputy von Saucken that the liberation of 1813 was the fruit of Stein's reforms of 1807 rather than of national hatred toward the French. He failed completely to see what has in this book been called the ambivalent attitude of the Germans toward French institutions. T o his forceful statements, the assembly, in flaming indignation and great turmoil, countered that the people had been moved not by hatred but by love for the German fatherland 18 Berlin, April 11, 1847. Ranke, Friedrich Wilhelm IV; König von Preussen, in Sämmtliche Werke, LI-LII, 448 sqq.

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and by the idea of freedom and asserted that the expulsion of the enemy had only been a means to achieve this goal. In the uproar, Bismarck pulled a newspaper from his pocket and read quietly until the noise had abated." His second major address was delivered a month later, on the occasion of a government bill intended to grant full emancipation to the Jews. Part of his address is still of a certain timely interest. He said: "I am not an enemy of the Jews. . . . I may even love them. I concede to them all the rights apart from the right of exercising in a Christian State an office involving state authority. [The Christian State is not a vain fiction, nor an invention of modern State philosophers.] I am of the opinion that the concept of the Christian State is as old as the late Sacred Roman Empire, as old as all European States, that it is the very soil in which these States have taken root, and that every State that wants to continue in existence or even claim a right to exist, must be based on a religious foundation. . . . How 'er, as God's will I can only recognize that which is revealed in the Gospeis, and I assume I am right in calling such a state a Christian one which has undertaken the task of realizing the doctrines of Christianity. . . . This realization of the Christian teachings is the goal of the State, and that we can come closer to this goal with the help of the Jews—this I cannot believe." 15 At the end of February, 1848, a students' revolt at the University of Munich (preceding the February Revolution in France) gave the signal to all the revolutionary forces in Europe. On March 13 of that year the Metternich system, which had lasted for thirty-three years, collapsed like a house of cards. This 1848 was the year of the sun: spring came early in March and golden days of summer rolled over the German lands. The weather seemed to herald the coming of a new era, and in the blue air the flags of freedom and historic glory, black, red, and gold, were glowing like flames to announce the dawn of a new age which all had with deep longing been awaiting, though many had almost ceased to believe that it would ever come. Black, red and gold had been the storm banner of the Sacred Empire. In Ottonian days, the imperial eagle had shone golden from a black and red background; then, somewhat later, a black eagle adorned with red, on golden ground, was the symbol of the imperium mundi. The War of Liberation had revived the ancient, lasting colors; Ludwig Jahn, who inspired German youth with enthusiasm for the liberation and unification of their country, had taken the initiative, and they were worn by the Liitzow volunteers. In the years after 1815, the colors became the beloved symbol of national unity and constitutional freedom. In 1832, during the great Hambach Festival in the Rhenish Palatinate, more than thirty thousand Germans had gathered to demonstrate peacefully for the ideals still dear to a nation oppressed by its Berlin, May 17, 1847. Die gesammelten « Berlin, June 15, 1847. Ibid., pp. 8 - 9 .

14

Werke, Χ, 3-4.

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native tyrants. A tidal wave of black, red, and gold roared through the Rhenish valley, and a few but weighty voices were lifted to demand the proclamation of the One German Republic. Many of the Hambach leaders were thrown into prison, where they suffered for years; others were driven into exile. The black, red, and gold colors were upon Metternichs instigation outlawed by decree of the federal diet —one hundred years before the tricolored symbol, after revival and exaltation to the rank of the national republican flag by the Weimar Constitutional Assembly, sank again into a new night of oppression, which is not yet over. On March 15, 1848, the first barricades appeared in Berlin. Three days later the people inflicted on the dynasty the severest defeat ever suffered in its long history. In the fight between the people (led by students and assisted by workers from the Borsig machine shops) and the royal troops of the line the people came off victorious. Lifting of censorship and the arming of the people were among the concessions extracted from the wavering, timid, and heartbroken king. On the following day, the king was humiliated even more: he was forced to stand in the inner courtyard and pay his respects, with bared head, to the bodies of the victims of the revolution. All political prisoners were released, among them, on the express demand of the people of Berlin, the Poles who had two years before led a revolt in the province of Posen. Again the king was forced to salute his enemies, the very men who had been sentenced by his courts to long terms of imprisonment. T h e Polish leader, Mieroslawski, addressed a vast crowd in the main auditorium of the university and proclaimed eternal friendship between Poles and Germans. Symbolically he tore up a Polish flag and distributed the pieces among his hearers. In return, the Poles put on ribbons of the three German colors. On the twenty-first the king himself adopted the revolutionary symbol of national unity. With a large black, red, and gold banner flying before him he rode through Berlin, seeming, to those who did not know his tnie character, like the veritable embodiment of the democratic emperor of the one Germany. But Frederick William IV was not the man of courageous action; while taking upon himself the colors of the national democracy, he emphasized again and again that he did not want "to usurp anything that was not his." 16 When a voice from among the people was raised, "Long live the emperor of Germany!" he frowned his disapproval. 17 W h a t might have been a turning point in German history was transformed into a painted masquerade. While the king made liberal addresses to students and soldiers, he was already toying with the idea of counterrevolution. In the night of March 21-22, the people of Berlin once more built barri19

Hauptstaatsarchiv Munich: Report of Count Lerchenfeld, Bavarian minister to

Berlin, March 21, 1848. Veit Valentin, Geschichte der deutschen Revolution von 1848-49, I, 450-51, 601 (note 309). 17

Rachfahl, Deutschland, König Wilhelm IV und die Berliner Märzrevolution, p. 280.

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cades. On the next day took place the burial of the victims whom the king had been forced to salute. There were one hundred and eighty-three coffins, which were carried in solemn procession through the streets, across the Spree, and to the Schloss. Professors of the university; the whole clergy; officials of the ministry of state; students, workers, and secondary-school boys; Poles with their red and white flags; Italians with their newly adopted green, white, and red banners; and countless masses of burghers—all were on hand to pay their last respects to the dead. The funeral speech, which was pronounced by a young jurist from Cologne, Assessor Jung, who had been coeditor with Karl Marx of the Rheinische Zeitung, characterized the spirit of the March Revolution. "Stand on guard, my brethren," he said, "so that the liberty for which they died may not wither again, so that no one may take it away from us by force or cunning. Stand on guard so that Prussia's star may shine, not upon battlefields or upon the vile breasts of courtiers, but high above in the peaceful firmament, where the stars of all free and enlightened nations are joined in one great constellation." A union of all European nations, he concluded, was the true dream of German democracy, and to reach that goal these dead had sacrificed their lives.1' In May the first national assembly of the Germans met in Frankfurt-amMain, the old imperial republic, the city where many successors of the Caesars were crowned. And in 1848 the delegates of the now sovereign people, so the accounts tell us, were received like the Caesars, as they moved solemnly into the Paulskirche to hold their first meeting. A constitution was to be drawn up to provide federal guarantees of unity and of civil liberties. It is generally agreed that the constitution, completed in March of the following year, represented a most remarkable step in political and democratic development. It arrived at a satisfactory balance of federal and state powers. A Reichstag was to be formed, consisting of a people's house (to be elected by universal, equal, secret, and direct vote) and a house of states (to represent the constituent members of the federal Reich). Legislation in all important matters was to lie in the hands of this parliament, with the Reich ministry responsible to the lower house. A supreme court was created, having appellate jurisdiction over all state courts and jurisdiction over disputes between member states. Out of the struggles between the various political groups of republican and of monarchist hue came the decisions by which the constitution shaped the institution of a democratic people's Kaisertum. The national assembly itself was to elect the emperor of the Germans, who was to have only a suspensive veto on the decisions of Parliament. The constitution embodied, as one of its most important features, a bill 18 Brass,

120.

Berlins Barrikaden,

ihre Entstehung, ihre Verteidigung

und ihre Folgen,

p.

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of the basic rights of citizens, a detailed code of civil liberties—something quite revolutionary in view of the preceding long period of repression." With its clear—indeed classic—language, the Frankfurt constitution awoke enthusiasm in the breasts of all Germans down to the plain man, to whom legal formulas usually have little meaning. The idea of republicanism which is closer to the truly imperial tradition of the Roman-German people's community than the dynastic Habsburg and Hohenzollem monarchies, was first manifested at Frankfurt. Since that time the idea has never died, not even during the decades when the Hohenzollem monarchy was at its zenith. Many passages in Bismarck's writings indicate that he, staunch but skeptical representative of the monarchy that he was, must have had strong forebodings of the inevitable end that would come to the system he had served. On the basis of republicanism and federalism, Germany and the United States of America drew close together. They influenced each other to such an extent that at least a brief mention of the mutual relationship is illuminating. The president of the United States, James K. Polk, was the only head of a foreign nation to send his official greetings to the Frankfurt assembly. So strong was the example of America at the Frankfurt gathering that the "United States of Germany" was repeatedly proposed as the name for the new German Reich. American influence also spread through the writings and personal contacts of German-Americans and others who had studied the situation in the United States at first hand. There was, for instance, Theodor Hilgard, granduncle of Oswald Garrison Villard. He went to America in 1830, lived there for a number of years before returning to Germany, and wrote an excellent book about his experiences, A Voice from North America. In it, he presented to Germany the American Constitution as an example to be followed; he favored a legislature composed of two houses and a responsible president, who, unlike the American executive, would not be eligible for a new term at the expiration of his first.20 This work exercised considerable influence on the Frankfurt assembly. A number of other books written by German students of American affairs followed. Alexis de Tocqueville's work on American democracy was also quoted frequently at Frankfurt, as well as Jefferson's parliamentary rules, and the writings of Hamilton and other Americans. In the United States, sympathy for German democracy ran high at all stages of its development. Veit Valentin speaks of the voyage of the Washi® The Constitution, adopted March 28, 1849, was published April 28 in the Reichsgesetzblatt, 1848-49, No. 16, pp. 101-47. It has been reprinted in various places, for example, Binding, Deutsche Staatsgrundgesetze, Heft II, and Bios, Die Deutsche Revolution, Appendix I, pp. Θ1Θ-59. Full text of the proceedings at Frankfurt appears in Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen, ed. by Franz Wigard ( Leipzig and Frankfurt, 1848-50). 2o Veit Valentin, Geschichte der deutschen Revolution von 1848-49, II, 572.

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ington from the United States in April, 1848. The ship was adorned with the American flag and the German black, red, and gold banner, and it carried

an Address of the German Brethren in the Free Union of America to the

German People, signed by hundreds of prominent German-Americans in Philadelphia. The address was read in the Frankfurt assembly.21 In all the centers of German-Americanism in the Middle West, New York, and Pennsylvania, mass meetings were held to express sympathy for Frankfurt and what it stood for. After the defeat of the revolution, an endless series of meetings took place all over America to protest the victory of reaction and to urge succor for the persecuted German democrats, meetings very similar to those held in the United States after 1933. Since absolutistic Russia under Czar Nicholas I would have commenced military intervention had the revolution gone further, the radicals of the Frankfurt assembly suggested that the "United States of Germany" should form a permanent alliance with England and France as the kernel of a "United States of Europe." Thus the ancient universal idea of the German political mind was given its most modem revival, with national unity as the basis for international solidarity. 21 Ibid.., p. 571. See also Bunsen's Die Deutsche Bundesverfassung und ihr eigentümliches Verhältniss zu den Verfassungen Englands und der Vereinigten Staaten ( 1848), a message addressed to the National Assembly. Bunsen wrote in a copy given to George Bancroft: "To my revered friend, the historian and ambassador of the greatest and freest confederation." Copy in New York Public Library.

21 THE VICTORY OF PARTICULARISM We consider, therefore, that the breaking-up of Germany into small states has been an injustice to the very position to which Germany is entitled among the nations. B I S H O P W I L H E L M E M M A N U E L FREIHERR VON K E I T E L E R ,

Deutschland

nach dem Kriege von 1866.

28, 1849, a constitution was promulgated for the Reich. Almost at once twenty-eight German governments recognized the new central power, and a united German Reich, with all necessary organs, seemed to have come into existence. The national assembly could be proud of the work which it had carried out under most trying circumstances. On March 28, too, the "emperor of the Germans" was elected, with 290 deputies voting for him, 248 abstaining, thus making the election technically unanimous. Never before in the history of the empire had it been the German people who offered the imperial crown to a prince. Previously the election had rested with the nobles, then with the electors. But the man they chose was Frederick William IV of Prussia. The events of March, 1848, had placed Berlin among the great liberal cities of Europe; the people had triumphed over reaction, which had not dared to use its repressive powers. Even more important in guiding the choice of an emperor, the Berlin revolution had represented a victory of the German-democratic idea over Prussian particularism. The king himself had played out his strange role; by embracing the colors of democracy, he had proclaimed himself chief of the national movement. Though the dynastic powers of Germany hated such self-styled national leadership, and though the king himself, wavering, weak, au fond deeply reactionary, false, and untrustworthy, had not abided by his own word, yet the German people and the Frankfurt assembly were still willing to accept his gestures at face value. Had the revolution still been in 1849 what it was in its beginning a year before, perhaps the pressure of the people could have forced the king to choose either acceptance of the imperial office or else his own resignation as well as that of his brother Prince William (the later Emperor William I) in favor of the latter's son Frederick. The fact was, however, that the revolution had already suffered two crushing defeats in two major states— Austria in October, and Prussia in November, 1848. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy had been cut to the bone by the Revolution of 1848. The quest for national unity, which in Germany combined with popular democratic aspirations into one broad political stream, necesO N MARCH

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sarily had disruptive effects in the Habsburg domains. The movement was a signal to the many nationalities under Austrian hegemony to draw away from dynastic rule and to seek autonomy for each group. The Hungarians under Louis Kossuth broke away altogether, proclaiming a republic; they were subdued finally only by a Russian army of intervention of 150,000 men, which Czar Nicholas I dispatched to assist the new emperor, Francis Joseph I (1848-1916), in the struggle against his unwilling subjects. The Croatians, who had been under the Hungarian crown, proclaimed their own independence, and revolutions raged throughout the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom. The Habsburg subjects in Upper Italy were assisted in their revolt by the kingdom of Sardinia but were crushingly defeated by the Austrian general, Radetzki, in the battle of Custozza. The Czechs were also in revolt, undertaking their first major attempt to throw off the Habsburg rule since their defeat at the White Hill in 1620. Again they failed, when General Prince Windischgrätz bombarded Prague into submission. Throughout the German provinces of the Habsburg empire (roughly the same in area as the-republic of Austria of 1918) German national sentiment was running high. In provinces like Styria and the Tirol the constitutional and national movement was led by landed nobles and by burghers; in Vienna students and workers had the upper hand. Ever since that time the black, red, and gold tricolor has been for Austria the symbol of national, democratic unity. The terms and distinctions of grossdeutsch (greater German) and kleindeutsch ( small German ) developed at that time. The "great-Germany" policy signified the union of all Germans; the "small-Germany" policy meant exclusion of the Germans in Austria from the solution of the German question, as was shown quite clearly in the events after 1866 and more particularly after 1871, when the Austrian Germans were left outside though they never renounced their desire for reunion. 1 But properly grossdeutsch signified opposition not only to Habsburg rule but also to the idea of "Greater Prussia," and instead looked to fulfillment of the trend Frederick William IV had insincerely announced during the March Revolution when he said, "Prussia from now on is dissolved in Germany." 2 The "great-Germany" solution would have dissolved the Habsburg monarchy, and plans actually existed to consummate that end. Hungary would have become independent, and so would the Czechs; Galicia would have formed part of a restored Poland; and the 1 After the revolution of 1918 the Austrian National Assembly voted this union with the German Republic unanimously, resolving on November 12, 1918, that "German Austria is a constituent part of the German Republic." The German National Assembly inserted a corresponding provision in the Weimar Constitution of August 11, 1919 (Article 61, 52). Legally, therefore, Austria has been a member state of the federal German Republic ever since 1918-1919. 2 Proclamation of March 21, 1848. Veit Valentin, Die deutsche Revolution von 1848-49, I, 4SI.

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Lombardo-Venetian kingdom would have been given to Italy to help create national Italian unity. There were other plans, too, especially in Austria, for uniting all the Habsburg domains with the future German Reich. In this aim can be seen an interesting revival of age-old forces, a renewal of Hohenstaufen ideas. The empire thus rebuilt would then have numbered seventy million souls and would have reached from the North Sea down to Italy and almost to the threshold of Constantinople—a supranational empire of nations. Each nation would have retained its language and culture, and possibly, as Freiherr vom Stein had hoped, the sections which had gone their separate ways, such as Holland, Alsace, and Switzerland, might have rejoined the empire in voluntary union. These may have been the ideas of General Joseph Maria von Radowitz and his circle of friends, many of them holding important positions at the Prussian court. In 1836 Radowitz had been Prussian delegate for military affairs to the German Confederation, and, as later for Bismarck, Frankfurt had been for him a school of diplomacy where he learned the miseries of the German problem. As a deputy to the National Assembly of 1848 he was greatly disliked by the Prussian ultrareactionaries. In 1850 he was for a short time Prussian foreign minister. A Lutheran by birth, Radowitz had been brought into the church by his father when he was still a boy. He embraced the Catholic faith fervently and enthusiastically, as is the wont of many converts, and he drew from it not only the religious content of his life but his philosophy of history and government as well—at least as he understood it. He was close to Stein in his political and historic outlook, without possessing that genius which had rendered Stein's conception of the medieval empire timeless and modern. Bismarck, who in his memoirs dedicated several pages to scornful detractions of Radowitz, called him the "clever master of costumes for the king's medieval fantasies." * This abuse was unjust, but that it could be coined at all (concerning Stein, such a phrase would have been entirely pointless) shows that the ideas which were to Stein living reality were for Radowitz mere historic knowledge—part of his education or, at best, of his world view. » Oedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 50. The editors of Die gesammelten Werke have restored the title originally envisaged for Bismarck's memoirs, Erinnerung und Gedanke ( For the genesis of the title, see Die gesammelten Werke, XV, xxiv). Since, however, Gedanken und Erinnerungen, the title under which they were finally published, has become traditional, it is retained here throughout. An English translation, not very accurate, is available: Bismarck, the Man and the Statesman; Being the Reflections and Reminiscences of Otto, Prince von Bismarck, Written and Dictated by Himself after His Retirement from Office, which was translated under the supervision of A. J. Butler (New York, Harper, 1899). The third volume was translated by Bernard Miall, The Kaiser vs. Bismarck; Suppressed Letters by the Kaiser and New Chapters from the Autobiography of the Iron Chancellor (New York and London, Harper, 1921); the title of the English edition is New Chapters of Bismarck's Autobiography (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1921).

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T h e amazing breadth of his knowledge and his power of fascination are admitted even by Bismarck, to whom the romantic, greater-German liberal with his strong influence upon the king was an enemy and a symbol of trends of thought to be rejected altogether. Radowitz was a convinced federalist. He envisaged a great European empire of free states and nations, and, after 1848 at least, a federal German empire. Though a brilliant officer and member of the general staff, he was free from any ideas of power politics or Prussian hegemony. In state centralization he, like Stein, saw the death of true German national, cultural, and religious life. Germany, enjoying a free constitutional life, was to b e the model for a wider confederation, a central empire serving as a political and cultural link among various states and nations. But to achieve this, Germany itself had first of all to be lifted from its utter prostration; and thus the unification of Germany would assure strength, freedom, and peace to the non-German peoples as well. After the Revolution of 1848 had failed, the Prussian policy aiming at German unity by calling a parliament of princes to Erfurt was largely the work of Radowitz and was only halfheartedly supported and finally altogether abandoned by the king. In his later years Bismarck to some extent revised his bitter denunciations of the "Catholicizing enemy of Prussia." 4 In March, 1862, he said at a dinner party that had he in 1849 possessed the experiences of thirteen years of an active political life, he would have supported Radowitz. What Radowitz lacked to be successful, he felt, was an army in satisfactory condition, for it would never have been possible to obtain Austria's consent to German unity without a fight, although at the time many parliamentarians and other leading personages were given to such understandable but erroneous opinions. 6 And yet, how one-sided and meager did the "small-Germany" solution appear when compared to the universal ideas of men like Radowitz and his friends! "Many feared," Ricarda Huch remarks, "that 'Small Germany' would not even reach to the Main. But its proponents rejected the Ghibelline dream. It seemed that once again Henry the Lion was rebelling against Barbarossa, whose thought dwelt in the breadth of the South." β If the Ghibelline conception, which was not "great German" but universal and which envisioned the Germans only as being but one contributing factor, seemed impractical (only a truly great statesman could have brought it to fruition ), certainly union among the Germans was still feasible. This would have led not only to a national but also—more important—to a democratic union. The exponent of this idea was Vienna. Youthful enthusiasm and youthful leadership gave to the 1848 struggle its peculiar and attractive • Ibid., pp. 49-50. 5 Keudell, Fürst und Fürstin Bismarck, p. 37.

« Alte und neue Cötter; die Revolution des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in Deutschland,

p. 449.

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aspect, and this fact was particularly true in Vienna. The Aula (students and other young people, many of them in their early twenties ) had control, and in the March days the "Academic Legion" was the first group to fight against and triumph over the Metternich regime. In the beginning of October, 1848, Vienna was in open revolt against the dynasty; troops sent against the revolutionaries had gone over to the people. Even more than in other cities, the workers had joined the movement. Hardly another place in the world has had its name and meaning so badly distorted by sugary legend as Vienna. For the unthinking world outside, the city is the nostalgic capital of music and shimmering waltzes, of ceaseless little frivolities concocted for the benefit of tourists. Dancing and music may truly represent the freedom, imagination, and love of beauty that the Viennese have in abundance. But the people of Vienna are forceful when the need arises—not warlike but heroic. This city of the people themselves is the true Vienna, though it is not familiar to outsiders. The reactionary Vienna of Metternich, of the Habsburgs, of Dollfuss, the falsely romantic Vienna, is but the stuff for operettas, not reality. Strangely enough, this Vienna of reaction and tinsel has an undeserved reputation for culture and humanitarianism, whereas actually Europe has rarely been able to show anything more brutal, more ruthless, more coldly determined to drown all opposition in blood. The harsh truth showed in the massacre of February, 1934, which in ferocity and bloodshed recalled the unhappy days when the revolution was put down in 1848. By the end of October, the imperial general, Windischgrätz, had more than sixty thousand men at his disposal to use against the freedom-loving, black, red, and gold city which fought for united German democracy and was sympathetic toward the desire for national freedom among the Hungarians, the Czechs, and the other peoples under Habsburg rule. The struggle that ensued was the bitterest and most gruesome of the whole revolutionary year; nowhere else in Germany was the contest so hard. On October 31, Windischgrätz began the bombardment. Thousands of shells, bombs, and rockets fell upon the inner city. The revolutionists fought courageously but vainly. Croatian and other Slavonic regiments when they entered the city did a thorough job. The number of those killed is estimated at between two and six thousand, and thousands more may have died later of their wounds. All the inhabitants of entire blocks were butchered. Robbery, plunder, and terror stalked the streets of the heroic city. The revolution for unity and democracy had suffered its first overwhelming defeat, from which it was not to recover. Encouraged by this event, the Prussian reaction struck against the Prussian national assembly in November, 1848. In a bloodless coup detat on November 10, the cabinet of Count Brandenburg (an illegitimate Hohenzollem, uncle of the king) ordered General Wrangel to occupy Berlin. The

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national assembly was exiled to Brandenburg on the Havel, and on December 5 was dissolved. On the same day Frederick William imposed an ambiguous constitution, largely stripped of democratic features. This was the king chosen to head united Germany. His election had been opposed by many on the grounds that German history taught that it was unwise to call upon a territorial prince to head the empire. Had not the princes been the gravediggers of the old Sacred Empire, and had not the rulers of one powerful dynasty, the Habsburg, when they monopolized the imperial throne, been influential in bringing about its final downfall? Would the case be different under the Hohenzollem? In their favor was only the fact that they constituted a more purely German power than the Habsburgs; and there was still some hope of seeing Prussia dissolved in Germany. But what really mattered was the emergency of the situation; acceptance of the offer would have saved the work of Frankfurt, refusal was bound to destroy it. Therefore, all forces sympathetic to the democratic movement favored acceptance. Apart from the Frankfurt leaders, whose very political existence was at stake, many leaders, including die liberal Freiherr von Vincke and his friends and Princess Augusta of Prussia, adhered to the party that was seeking to preserve the national and democratic ideas of the revolution. In retrospect it can be said that it was well that Frankfurt failed because the "noblest crown of Christendom" should not be offered except to a vents imperator, a true emperor. And such an emperor did not exist. Frederick William was a contemptible princeling unworthy of the sacred crown.' It was better for the idea, which never dies, that the crown should remain in abeyance until one day the dawn of a people's republic will shed its light upon a truly free, and hence a truly royal, nation. Since Frederick William was not the emperor of the people by history and by selection, he could not grasp the great hour of destiny. He could not see that, with twenty-eight governments already rallied around the constitution of Frankfurt, a positive decision on his part would have meant the establishment of a great and peaceful Germany. He was not even ambitious, not even bent on Prussia's growth. He had no other ambition than to remain just what he was, the king of a third-rate territorial power. On April 21, he declined the crown. The work of Frankfurt had come to an end. Not long afterward the Frankfurt assembly all but dissolved. In June the rump parliament which assembled in Stuttgart was broken up by govT In a letter to Christian Carl Josias Bunsen, Frederick William IV referred to the crown offered to him by the Frankfurt Parliament as one that would "dishonor him exceedingly by the bestial stench of revolution attached to it. . . . Should a legitimate king by the grace of God put such a phantom crown baked of dirt and mud on his head? Λ kine of Prussia who is blessed, though not by the most ancient, yet certainly the noblest, of all crowns?" Potsdam, December 13, 1848. In Ranke, Aus dem Briefwechsel Friedrich Wilhelms IV mit Bunsen, p. 234. In a similar style the king expressed himself in a memorandum of December 21, in Revolutionsbriefe 1848; Ungedrucktes aus dem Nachlass König Friedrich Wilhelms IV von Preussen, p. 272.

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emment troops. Martial courts began to mete out punishment to all who had risen in civil war to support the Frankfurt constitution. Crowds of émigrés crossed the ocean; among them was a young student, Carl Schurz, who had fought valiantly against the reaction and who was to contribute richly to his adopted land. The black, red, and gold dream seemed to have ended, and the earlier days seemed to have returned. But this was only outward appearance; something had happened in the German mind, and bayonets could not drive out new ideas. Even the enemies of the dream of 1848—Bismarck in particular—were soon to be forced to pay homage to its spirit, which survived even though it would not be reawakened until a much later date. Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck could trace his ancestors back to about 1270, when one Herbord von Bismarck was alderman of the patrician cloth mercers guild at Stendal on the Elbe. In the middle of the fourteenth century, under the Wittelsbach margraves of Brandenburg, the Bismarcks ascended from the untitled urban patrician class into the ranks of the rural nobility, beside the Alvenslebens, the Arnims, the Schulenburgs, and other well-known North German families. Otto von Bismarck was born on April 1, 1815, when Napoleon's struggle for survival was in its last phase." He spent his childhood years on the estates of his parents and most of his boyhood and youth in Berlin. In 1832 he went to Göttingen and registered for two courses in law, one in philosophy, one in mathematics and one in political history. He begins his memoirs by saying: "As a normal product of our public schools I left the Gymnasium at Easter, 1832—as a pantheist [his inner conversion to Christianity came only later] and, if not as a republican, at least with the conviction that the republic was the most reasonable form of government." 0 He also professed German national sympathies, gained through the Jahn tradition which influenced his first school years. But during his university years, he says, he turned away from liberalism and, it would seem, also away from broader German sympathies, which he abandoned in favor of Prussian aims. Bismarck emphasizes strongly that he was not a Junker in the traditional sense, that is, a landowner with arrogant pride in nobility, with vision limited by the confines of his estates and his county and by the views of neighboring "good families," and with an uncritical devotion to the monarchy. His mother had been a commoner, the daughter of Anastasius Mencken, a councilor of high rank and liberal tendencies in the cabinets of Frederick the Great and Frederick William II. The Menckens were a family of professors 8 Bismarck's historic and family background and his youth, have been described best by the historian Erich Mareks in his book Bismarcks Jugend 1815-1848. His own account in Gedanken und Erinnerungen is also valuable and accurate. For an excellent introduction to the literature on Bismarck, Gooch, "The Study of Bismarck," in Studies in Modern History, pp. 233 sqq. » Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 5.

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and scholars, residing in Leipzig since the second half of the seventeenth century. "The Freiherr vom Stein," Bismarck writes, "has called my grandfather Mencken an honest, strongly liberal civil servant. Under such circumstances, the views I drank in with my mother's milk were liberal rather than reactionary, and my mother, had she lived to see my ministerial activity, would hardly have agreed with its course, though she might have rejoiced over the outward successes of my official career." 1 0 Bismarck at all stages of his life was notable for his wide vision, his versatility, his active energy of action, his civil courage ( a thing, he said, which few Germans possessed), and his diplomatic genius. As a man, he must have had great personal charm; he was a perfect gentleman, a perfect host, and a loyal husband and father. His erudition and his general, yet profound, education in history, literature, and world affairs distinguish him sharply from the men who later sought to ape him. His written and spoken German shows complete mastery. His French, too, was excellent; he never balked at learning from his opponents or from foreigners. At Göttingen, an American, John Lothrop Motley, had become his best friend; it was to Motley that Bismarck owed his extraordinary knowledge of the English language and English literature. He himself had a decidedly "American" touch (like Prussia itself), and in later years he intensified the friendly diplomatic relations with the United States. The American minister, George Bancroft, during a banquet at the American Legation in March, 1869, was the first statesman to toast Bismarck as "the chancellor not only of the North German Confederation, but of Germany—for he [Bancroft] could recognize the existence only of a united and indivisible Germany." 1 1 In England, this pro-American policy often aroused great displeasure. The British ambassador in Berlin, Lord Loftus, once reported that Bismarck's flirtation with America seemed to indicate that he was taking the help of the United States seriously into account in case there might be war between Prussia and France. 12 Bismarck, the "militarist" of popular legend, was, despite his sympathies for the military traditions of his family and of the Prussian kings, at heart deeply civilian. As his profession he chose, not the officer's career, but government administration. Throughout his ministerial life he kept the military in strict obedience to the civil authority. Although he held his sovereign in deep respect, Bismarck felt that William I's taste for the military had its humorous side. There is a certain touch of malice as well as insight into the foibles of mankind in the observation he penned after the death of the emperor: "It was natural that throughout his life military influences prevailed more strongly on him than civilian ones. I myself recognized that the im"> Ibid., p. 14. 11 Cf. Veit Valentin, Bismarcks Reichsgriindung im Urteil englischer Diplomaten, 12 Confidential report, March 13. 1869. Public Record Office, London.

p. 396.

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pression made by the military uniform, which I wore to avoid changing several times a day, exerted considerable power in strengthening my influence upon him." " The news of the events of March, 1848, reached Otto von Bismarck, no longer an unknown political figure, after his addresses to the united diet, while he was visiting the estate of a neighbor. His first thought was to mobilize the peasants for a counterrevolution. Then he rushed to Berlin to prevail upon the king to undertake counterrevolutionary measures. This journey was futile, for the king was no longer free. Another idea now occurred to him —he would enlist Prince William of Prussia to head the opposition to the revolution. But the prince was in hiding, and Bismarck was received by the Princess Augusta of Prussia, a woman of more than ordinary capability. She was the granddaughter of the Grand Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar, Goethe's intimate friend. Reared in the spiritual and highly cultured atmosphere of Weimar, she was filled with liberal, progressive, and humanitarian notions, decidedly German-national and decidedly not Old Prussian. In their conversation she told Bismarck that she had to guard the rights of her son Frederick. She obviously felt that the reactionary position of the king and of her husband ( of whose intellectual standing her opinion cannot have been too high) had become untenable. She must have entertained in her mind the possibility that both might renounce the throne and that she might be regent until her son was of age.14 The deadly enmity between Bismarck and the princess which originated in those days was never to die down until the very end of Bismarck's career. Bismarck's memoirs are filled with reproaches directed against Augusta, in whom he recognized one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, of his adversaries. Bismarck's attitude in 1848-49 was also shown in his conversations with Prince William of Prussia after his return from England, whither the prince had fled to escape the unpopularity and hatred he had aroused among the broad masses of the people. Bismarck writes that he was "cruel enough" to read to the prince in its entirety a long poem which the troops had sung after they received orders to evacuate Berlin. "He fell into such a paroxysm of weeping," Bismarck comments, again perhaps with a touch of malice, "as I witnessed on only one other occasion—when at Nikolsburg I resisted his intention of continuing the war." And what did this nerve-wracking poem say? The words that "cut into the loyal hearts" of the troops, when, covered with glory, they were retreating were: 'Ihr sollt nicht Preussen mehr, sollt Deutsche sein" (You shall no " Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 429. i« Ibid., p. 20.

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longer be Prussians, but Germans). The troops could not yet believe this dreadful message and trustingly looked toward the throne. But loi around the king they perceive new men, the "mob's dirty butchers." After another outcry of "Prussians no more" the final verse of the poem utters this message of doom, Schwarz-Rot-und-Gold glüht nun im Sonnenlichte ( Black, red, and gold shine in the sunlight now)." In June of that year, Bismarck concluded his alliance with Frederick William. He became "the king's man," and the destiny of Germany and of European policy were to be shaped by the two. He agreed with his sovereign that the Frankfurt crown should be rejected, and he said so in his address of April 21, 1849, to the united diet, which had moved that the constitution should be recognized and that a no-confidence vote should be registered against the government which had supported the king's refusal of the imperial office. Some of his arguments sound almost childish, particularly in view of later events—for instance, that the Frankfurt constitution was impractical because it would force the emperor to assert his prerogatives against the house of Wittelsbach and the house of Welf. T h e Frankfurt Crown," he exclaimed, "may be very brilliant, but the gold that would lend truth to such radiance is to be won by melting down the Prussian crown first, and I have no confidence that such an experiment would succeed with this constitution!" 14 His own conviction apparently was this: the unification of Germany must result from a concord among the princes, not from an upheaval of the people." Yet the time was to come when Bismarck would no longer be too reluctant to ally himself, if need be, even with the revolution! Out of the frustrated Italian revolutions, the liberal Kingdom of Italy was to rise. Out of the blood shed upon the barricades of Berlin and Vienna rose the liberal epoch of the nineteenth-century Germany—all these were the fruits of the vanquished revolution, and the revolutionary touch itself still persisted. It was characteristic of Frederick William's undecided and tottering policy that, after having missed his great chance, he tried to obtain later what he had first rejected. On January 31,1850, he imposed on Prussia a new constitution, which was to remain in force until 1918. It provided for the famous "three-class vote" and divided legislative power equally among the crown, the house of lords, and the lower house. Yet it also contained the bill of civil ι»Ibid., p. 31.

"Ibid., X, 32.

In his memoirs, written decades later, Bismarck hints that Frederick William IV, in the days intervening between the revolution in Southern Germany and Austria and the uprising in Prussia (that is, from March 13 to 18), should have called a congress of the German princes to Berlin. The princes, he writes, were shattered in their self-confidence and willing to come to Prussia "to seek protection and agree to conditions of German unity that would have surpassed what we have achieved today. . . . A patriotic will to sacrifice among the Cerman dynasts could have been expected comparable to that of the French on August 4, 1789." Ibid., XV, 32. 17

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rights and abundant guarantees of lawful administration such as the right of parliament to regulate the budget. Already the year 1848 had shown clearly that German inner affairs could not be ordered simply to the liking of the German people. Russia's hostility to the revolution might have resulted in open military intervention; England favored a "small Germany" solution; France at least did not discourage the plans of German refugees to invade South Germany and was at any time able to take up once more the old French plans for the Rhineland. There were many foreign factors to be reckoned with by the German people and statesmen. When Frederick William IV halfheartedly took up his own plans for unity by promoting, in 1849-1850 a confederation of Prussia with the other North German states and Saxony, he met with the humiliation of Olmütz. Under Prussian leadership the Erfurt Parliament, with representatives from twentyfour German states, had been intended to work out a constitution of the German Reich, exclusive of Austria. Austria was naturally strong in opposition and anxious to avoid Prussian predominance in Germany. Russia, too, viewed the plans for union with distaste, for they seemed to the czarist government to threaten revival of revolutionary ideas. War between Austria and Prussia appeared a real danger. Under this threat Prussia gave in at the Conference of Olmiitz, on November 29, 1850. She abandoned the Erfurt Parliament, and consented to the reëstablishment of the old German Confederation. Again Bismarck had backed the Old Prussian policy, this time even in opposition to the timid unionist ideas of the king. His address before the Landtag on December 2, 1850, in which he defended the decision of Olmiitz, made him the undisputed leader of the Conservative party. 18 It is possible that the insight he had gained between 1848 and the Olmiitz defeat may have led him to tum towards power politics. His mastery there was to be no more and no less moral than that of any other exponent of power politics in any country. Perhaps in his case the political motives may be justified somewhat by the fact that they aimed not at conquest but at the consolidation of an extant state. Accomplishment of this end forced him to the task he had once rejected—the solution of the German question. It is well known that Bismarck, even in his most triumphant years was haunted always by what he called le cauchemar des coalitions (the nightmare of coalitions ). In the eighties he feared that a combination of France, Russia, and Austria was not impossible. Of British help he never felt secure. Power politics for the German statesman then meant, therefore, to study the parallelogram of European forces and to manipulate those forces in such a way that Germany would never be caught between two major states. This meant carefully cultivated relationships with at least two of the three major Continental powers, while relations with England, though they might never « Ibid., X, 101 sqq.

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be cordial, need not become hostile under any circumstances. His oftenquoted statement that "between a whale and an elephant no casus belli is imaginable" may be apocryphal, but it expressed his attitude correctly. Of course, the matter was not so simple and clear cut, for this whale had always been somewhat amphibious, and certainly the elephant might some fine day put out to sea. The fear of upsetting the equilibrium of forces on the Continent, and perhaps also fear of unchaining revolutionary movements, prevented Bismarck from wishing to destroy the great powers with which he had to reckon. That Russia or France could never be really "annihilated," Bismarck as an educated man and a statesman knew full well. In international policy there is never room for sentimentality (in spite of the personal taste or dislike a statesman may feel toward the national customs of this or that country). Political wisdom is not only more important than sentiment; in the end it is the only thing that counts. Since France could not be destroyed, and since its destruction would in any case have brought no "advantage" to Germany, the wise thing to do was to get along, and, once friendly relations were no longer possible and war had come, to avoid heaping humiliation on France or stressing French weakness, for out of humiliation and feelings of weakness usually grow plans of revenge. Russia appeared to Bismarck the most reliable Continental ally for Germany, though he had no illusions about Russian politics. He did not expect sentimental international friendships any more than he himself was sentimental in his motives. He consistently opposed any policy that might drive Russia into the anti-German camp; thus, for instance, he refused to be goaded by the Western powers into action against Russia on the outbreak of the Crimean War. Though military help accorded England and France might have won their sympathy to Germany for the moment, Bismarck had no reason to believe that this sympathy would last or that gratitude was a factor to be counted upon in international politics. It is always easy to overcome enmities by banding together against someone else. Bismarck knew very well how shaky the Austro-Hungarian empire was and how easily it could have been destroyed. But here, too, he felt that a destructive policy would be unwise. Once Austria was removed from German affairs, it would no longer be a danger, for then it could no longer bring non-German powers into the German fold. It was unlikely—and a strong Germany could render it more unlikely still—that Austria-Hungary would ever undertake an alliance with those other powers to oppose a united Germany. Against this eventuality, the German element in Austria and the German interests of the dynasty afforded a certain guaranty. To help AustriaHungary along was a safer means of protecting the German flank than either to pulverize the Austrian structure or to weaken it to such an extent that the Austrian ruler would be forced to seek aid from France and Russia.

22 BISMARCK AS HEIR OF THE PAULSKIRCHE No head will rule over Germany unless anointed with a full drop of democratic oil. Ludwic Uhland, at the Frankfurt National Assembly, 1849. In 1851 Bismarck became Prussian delegate to the diet of the German Confederation at Frankfurt. He held the office for eight years, and those years were for him a sort of high school of international politics. There and then he became intimately acquainted with Austrian, English, French, and Russian policies no less than with all the intricate problems of the petty rivalries within Germany itself. Frequent diplomatic missions abroad—to Paris, to London, and to Vienna (if that may be called "abroad")—widened his field of vision. They convinced him that the Habsburg monarchy was the most formidable obstacle to the inner consolidation of Germany. Cunning, shrewd, and marked with that dangerous charm which is usually taken as a sign of ancient and peaceloving culture, the Ballhausplatz diplomacy was not unlike the Venetian statecraft of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The days of glory then were past for the Queen of the Adriatic, yet Venice had remained a great power simply by means of an intricate, ruthless, agile, treacherous, but grand-seigneural system of foreign policy. But at the Frankfurt "listening post of Europe" Bismarck learned also to appraise his own Prussia correctly. He quoted with approval the words of Prince Gorchakov: Une grande puissance ne se reconnaît pas, elle se révèle (A great power is not recognized, it reveals itself).1 Bismarck discovered that if Prussia prior to 1862 was a great power at all, it was a fifth-rate onel He was ready to reject not only as unworthy but also as dangerous any policy of boastfulness without material and spiritual force to back it up. And to engage the state in enterprises for which it was not prepared appeared to him as the acme of criminal political stupidity. Toward France Bismarck entertained no particular aversion. The very concept of Erbfeindschaft (hereditary enmity) to him seemed puerile, perhaps at times useful for rhetoric, but never a basis for a nation's policy. He was also convinced that, taken as a whole, the foreign policies of countries do not necessarily change when the regime changes. He was ready to serve the self-interest of Prussia by cordial relations with France, and his friendly intercourse with Napoleon aroused the ire of the Prussian con1

Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 188.

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servatives and legitimists. Their relationship was more than the usual contact between the men who direct the policies of neighboring states which have had their interests, for better or for worse, in friendship or in war, intertwined ever since Charlemagne's successors rent the original unity of the Frankish realm. The emperor "by the grace of God and the will of the nation," and the statesman who came from conservative stock and who had entered public life as the Prussian king's man had stronger ties than mutual respect for each other as shrewd statesmen. Both were civilian by nature; the uniform and all things military were to them means of politics deliberately, and not sentimentally, used. But Napoleon, who had advertised his rule by saying, "L'Empire c'est la paix" ("L'Empire c'est Fépée," retorted his enemies) led his country to many bloody wars, some of them, such as those in Mexico and the Crimea, not even dictated by historic necessity. Bismarck ensured for Europe one of the longest periods of peace it has known in history. Both had deep insight into the nature of men; both had a slightly cynical contempt for mankind. But Napoleon was attached by many sensual ties to women (though, except for the empress, he never allowed women to have influence on him). Bismarck's personal life was unimpeachable, but his beloved, unpolitical wife had no influence upon him, and women in high place (particularly the three queens of Prussia whose husbands he served) disliked him almost fanatically. Napoleon III established in theory and practice a regime which, with all its authoritarianism, was strongly social. He had studied the ideas of St.Simon and Fourier thoroughly, and he wanted to be the workingman's emperor. In spite of much corruption—of the sort which seems to have been endemic to France since the earliest nineteenth century and which was masterfully described in the still-timely novels of Balzac—the country prospered under his reign, and the lot of the lower classes was decidedly superior to that of the English workingmen. In Germany, the democratic movement had been the antithesis to the stratum to which Bismarck belonged—the upper class which held the power. The democratic movement, nurtured in the womb of the pre-March system, could no longer be eliminated from the body of the people, though outwardly it had met defeat. Bismarck's state was to become the synthesis of both orders; through him the Revolution of 1848, as well as the powers that had ruled before that time and conquered in 1848 and 1849, became aufgehoben in the progressive monarchical-bourgeois state of his creation. Primarily and fundamentally, Bismarck always remained Prussian, but the Frankfurt years had taught him that, in order to maintain itself against the Habsburgs, Prussia could not do without the "great Germany" idea. He visualized, however, a modified great Germany which would exclude Austria. From the non-Prussian point of view, the conception was "small German and

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great Prussian"; from Bismarck's point of view, it meant going a very long way towards the national German goal. Here again he met with Napoleon III. For the Bonapartes, nationalism had always been a twin brother of empire, even though both Napoleons also entertained universal schemes—Napoleon III with less bloody designs and perhaps with even more diplomatic skill than Napoleon I. A nationally strong France was to play the role of mediator, if not primus inter pares, in all Continental Europe. The Mexican adventure of the great schemer points toward even wider horizons. Since Napoleon III was not the war lord that his imperial uncle had been, part of his game had to consist in winning the peoples from within. Among the strongest forces of the time was the awakening national sentiment of the divided peoples like Germany and Italy. In his youth, Prince Louis Napoléon had been a member of the nationalistic Italian secret society, the Carbonari. They pledged themselves to oust all foreign rulers and to effect the unification of the kingdom. Willy-nilly, Emperor Napoleon III remained a carbonaro all his life. He could not help sympathizing with Bismarck's national schemes, for they were flesh of his own flesh, although the politician in him must have told him that perhaps a divided Germany was better for French power politics than a united Germany. That one day a final contest between the two men would ensue might seem á foregone conclusion. But it seems so only in retrospect. While Bismarck must have felt for a long time that the civil war between North and South, between Hohenzollern and Habsburg, would have to be fought in order to decide the questions of Germany's unity and of the control over its government, it was only after 1866 that he began to consider a war with Napoleonic France inevitable. It was decidedly a war he did not want. The brilliant Austrian statesman of the counterrevolutionary period, Prince Felix von Schwarzenberg, once said: "Nous étonnerons Γ Europe par notre ingratitude" (We shall astonish Europe by our ingratitude). And, indeed, though gratitude is rarely the most striking feature of policy for any power, Austria-Hungary did excel in avoiding it and lived up to the Schwarzenberg maxim. Time and again Bismarck pointed out this fact, warning his successors against placing too much trust in Viennese policies. It was the policy of ingratitude as a principle of cynical statecraft that caused the first important rift between Austria and Russia and thereby laid the foundation for the German-Russian estrangement. This rift was to deepen to a chasm as soon as Germany was no longer guided by a statesman of Bismarck's European-wide political genius. Russian friendship for Austria had saved the dynasty in 1849 and at Olmütz made the czar side against Prussia. It is not surprising, therefore, that Russia expected the Vienna cabinet to keep faith with her when she was attacked by England and France during the so-called Crimean War of 1854. But Austria leaned towards the

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Western powers and added her diplomatic pressure to Russia's military predicaments. Austria's concentration of large troop contingents at the Russian border immobilized about 200,000 Russian troops, who might have come to the aid of Sevastopol; after a year of heroic defense the city fell into the hands of the French and British as a heap of ruins. Moreover, Austria put forward demands as an ultimatum, and Russia had to comply. Finally Austria occupied the Danube principalities from which Russia had withdrawn. Bismarck violently opposed any participation of Prussia in that war. The neutrality of his state, largely his work, prevented Austria from open military action and kept the war from becoming a full-fledged world war. Austrian pressure on Berlin was great at that time and was supported in Prussian court circles by allies who were pro-Western in their leanings. Princess Augusta in this particular instance played a dangerous role in favor of military action on the side of England, France, and Austria. She seems to have been as anti-Russian as she was pro-British and pro-French. Bismarck remarked sarcastically that "all news from Russia that was likely to create ill-will between us and Russia was used by the anti-Russian policy of the queen to weaken our ties with Russia, be it for reasons of aversion to Russia . . . or of sympathy for England with the assumption that sympathy for England and France showed a higher degree of civilization and erudition than sympathy for Russia." In a conversation with Prince William of Prussia during the Crimean War, Bismarck argued that all interests of the state pleaded for and not against Russia. An anti-Russian policy would mean to attack a friend and perpetual neighbor without provocation, out of fear of France or in the loving service of England and Austria. "We would assume," he said, "the role of an Indian vassal prince who has to conduct war under English patronage." 2 On the other hand, Bismarck rejected the idea of a Russo-Prussian alliance, if it was to be directed offensively against France and Austria. The question arose in 1863, after Prussia, with Bismarck as prime minister, had rendered good services to Russia during the menacing Polish revolution, when Czar Alexander II proposed such an alliance in unmistakably clear terms to King William I. He was tired of Western and Austrian intrigues and expected the king to feel the same way. But such a war would have meant first of all a Prussian-French conflict, in which Russian help could hardly have been a factor. And the interests of Russia and Austria in the Balkans were too divergent to assure Russian moderation towards a defeated Austria, such as Prussia showed to Austria in 1866 with the intention of turning the enemv of yesterday into the friend of tomorrow. Furthermore, to achieve German national unity with the help of a foreign power might have discredited the whole plan in the eyes of the nation. 1 bid., p. 83. The quotation in the preceding paragraph is from p. 89.

2

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Bismarck foresaw (and dreaded) the possibilities of a Russo-French alliance, a deadly embracement of Germany. Napoleon III, here too not unlike Bismarck, seems to have envisaged such an alliance with the beaten enemy of the Crimean War as early as the time of the Congress of Paris in 1856. If, however, a triple alliance of Russia, France, Prussia could have been realized, Bismarck would not have refused. This outcome, of course, would have entailed giving up the possibility of a future alliance with a chastised Austria, for hatred toward that country had been intense in Russia ever since the show of ingratitude in the Crimean struggle. But any exclusive alliance, in the opinion of Bismarck, contained the seeds of war and was, if possible, to be avoided. In 1857, Frederick William suffered a stroke that left him incapable of exercising the royal prerogatives. Prince William became regent and in January, 1861, after his brother's death, king of Prussia. Ten years later he was to be German emperor, the first of three to rule the empire that endured from its foundation by Bismarck to its fall on November 9, 1918. William I was not a great man, but he had the greatness of mind to accept competent counsel. He was a conscientious worker, had a sense of honesty, and was true to his friends. Even after he had received the new German crown he was a Prussian dynast rather than a German emperor, but he grew in stature as the years passed, because he had left behind him the reactionary attitude of 1848-1849 and developed toward a more liberal and moderate view of the office of modem kingship. Bismarck used the English terms of "common sense" and "gentleman" · to describe his monarch, whom he loved despite all the intellectual shortcomings of the emperor. Bismarck did not find things easy in dealing with the new sovereign. William knew him from the days of the antirevolutionary struggle of 1848 and was grateful for his loyalty as king's man. But Bismarck had gained for himself the reputation of being a statesman in the grand style who would negotiate with the Bonaparte and who was, it was said, anti-English and very different from the traditional type of the Prussian diplomat. It is not saying too much to declare that William was almost afraid of the man and his genius—that genius which seemed to him "demonic," as the extraordinary always appears to the average. Had Bismarck not been a "loyal and devoted servant" of William I, as he described himself, 4 he might indeed have had monarchical ambitions of his own, although he denied it categorically when the question was raised. There is a fascinating, Shakespearean scene which he pictures, and the very fact that he does record it is psychologically interesting and significant enough. In 1858, the English Princess Victoria came to Germany to be the wife of Prince Frederick. That was the decisive year of the regency, which initiated the so-called "New Era," moderately liberal in home affairs and • Ibid., pp. 431, 436.

4

Ibid., p. 43θ.

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283 pro-British in its foreign policy. Bismarck felt at once that the Princess did not trust him. "I was prepared for her antipathy," he writes, "because of my alleged anti-British attitude and my immunity to British influences." Nor did this antipathy ever abate; Bismarck had to contend with it till the very end of her political influence, which came with the death of her husband, the Emperor Frederick, on June 15, 1888. Bismarck's account of a conversation with her is striking: "After the war of 1866, when I was her neighbor at table, she said to me in a half-jocular tone that I had the ambition of becoming king or at least president of a republic. I replied in the same half-jocular vein that I had been hopelessly spoiled for being a republican, because I grew up in the royalist traditions of my family and needed for my earthly comfort the institution of the monarchy; I thanked God that I was not called upon to sit, as a king has to, on a golden pedestal, but could remain till the end a loyal subject. However, there could be no guarantee that my conviction would be generally inherited by generations to come—not because the royalists would die out, but because perhaps the kings might. Pour faire un civet ü faut un lièvre, et pour une monarchie il faut un roi (To make a hare pie one must have a hare, and for a monarchy one must have a king). I could not pledge my word but that for lack of kings the next generation might not be republican!" ' Again Bismarck was prophetically right. The monarchies that collapsed did so because there were no longer any kings. It is understandable that William I shuddered at the thought of putting a man of such uncanny vision into power. In 1859 Bismarck was sent into "honorable exile" as Prussian minister to St. Petersburg. For the next three years his influence at the Prussian court, which steered a Western course, prevailed little. For the shaping of Bismarck's future policy, based on his intimate knowledge of Russian affairs, Russian weakness and Russian greatness, these years were decisive. But they might have been still more valuable for Germany and for Europe had he been in control of Prussian policy in Berlin in 1859, one of the most important years of the whole century. The carbonaro-Emperor Napoleon willed and instigated the FrancoItalian war against Austria, as he had the Crimean War. Once more it was shown that "ΓEmpire c'est Tépée" but since the sword was drawn for the cause of Italian national liberation, he could count on the sympathy of liberals in his own and in many other countries. In Germany the sentiments were mixed; there was a contest between anti-French and pro-liberal feelings, for the cause of Italian independence was to a certain extent the cause also of the disunited German nation. England had tried to prevent the war but was not prepared to back up the wish by deeds. Austrian influence at the Prussian court was strong, and the prince regent must have felt perfectly sure that this time, by siding with Austria against France he was working in the true interest of the German 'Ibid., p. 107.

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cause as a whole. Russia was now on excellent terms with Napoleon (differences between inner-political systems never prevent foreign political alliances), and an act of war against France might have led to an attack on Austria and Prussia. It required Bismarck's vision to see that by siding against France the national cause was by no means served. It was part of his strength that, in contrast to all other German politicians of the time, he was capable of thinking dialectically—a fact which greatly disturbed his opponents and earned him the reproach of duplicity. He had already said clearly enough that he had no rancor toward France and also that he could not see in Bonapartism the source of all evil, as did some of his conservative friends. In letters and memoranda to the Prussian government, to his family and to everyone who might possibly wield some influence he warned against participation in the war on the side of Austria. "If we helped Austria to victory," he wrote to his brother, "we would endow her with a position of power such as she has never before had in Italy and has not had in Germany since the Edict of Restitution in the Thirty Years War. We would then need a new Gustavus Adolphus or a new Frederick II to emancipate us again." · Not only was he fearful of Russian intervention, he saw also that the war might at once have become a Franco-Prussian conflict and Austria could have backed quietly out. The German coasts would have been unprotected, for from England only Platonic sympathy, edifying letters, and moralizing newspaper articles could be expected. An epigram he had once heard in Paris seeems to have been ever present in his mind: "L'Anglais est mauvais coucheur, il tire toute la couverture à lui" (The Englishman is a bad bedfellow, for he takes all the covers).7 Bismarck also felt that a league with France would be the means for casting off the fetters of the German Confederation, an institution which had since 1850 more and more served the interests of Austria alone. After his many years at Frankfurt he could no longer doubt that the confederation had outlived whatever usefulness it may once have had. The faster it disappeared, the better for the reorganization of Germany. In the course of Austria's attempt to enlist Prussian help against Napoleon and Piedmont, Emperor Francis Joseph offered Alsace-Lorraine to the prince regent as prize. (During the First World War, his successor, Emperor Charles, was to offer the two provinces to France as reward for a separate peace. ) A generous offer indeed, since the provinces did not belong to him but first had to be conquered by Prussia. Bismarck's influence may have contributed to Prussia's neutrality. But «Petersburg, May 8, 1859. Ibid., Vol. XIV, Part 1, p. 520. 7 Letter to the Prussian minister, Otto von Manteuffel, Frankfurt-am-Main, April 29, 1857. Ibid., II, 210.

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what perspectives of world-historic importance would have opened had he succeeded in forging an alliance with Napoleon! It would have meant the realization of German unity without alienating her French neighbor and would probably have forestalled the war of 1870. The chances for a Continental bloc made up of France, Germany, and Russia would have become reality. The liquidation of the Habsburg monarchy would have taken the Germans out of the Pan-Slavic sphere of Russian interests. Balkan intrigues, which were to precipitate the World War, could have had no effect on a Germany that was serving as a peaceful link between Western and Eastern Europe. The horrors of the battlefields of Magenta and Solferino opened a new chapter in the history of war. New weapons and better transport facilities permitted the concentration and mutual destruction of such masses of men as had seemed impossible previously. The scenes on the fields of battle and in the overcrowded and insufficient hospitals (depicted by Jean Henri Dunant in Un Souvenir de Solferino, which led to the founding of the International Red Cross) shocked mankind. They were a warning of frightful things to come, like a vision out of Dante's Infemo, a lesson before all the nations of the world. The two emperors, Francis Joseph and Napoleon, were prompted by the carnage of Solferino no less than by fear of foreign intervention, to conclude the agreement of Villafranca. Lombardy was ceded to France, which in turn ceded it to Piedmont. In the following year (March, 1860) Napoleon took over the Piedmontese provinces of Savoy and Nice as compensation for his help toward the unification of Italy. Politically, the Franco-Italian victory over Austria constituted a victory for the ideas of 1848. Significantly enough, Napoleon adopted shortly after the war a more liberal policy at home. The period of the "Liberal Empire" had begun, with increased parliamentary influence and a relaxation of censorship. That process cannot have failed to make an impression on Bismarck. During his first visit to Paris, in 1855, Bismarck had had occasion to study the machinery of a state based on executive control of public life—not a very stable foundation. "The illumination [in Paris] is splendid," he had written in September of that year, "but still one sees even more policemen than street lamps. There is no comer of all the streets where one is not sure to encounter from somewhere the searching gaze of a uniformed agent de police, gendarme, municipal, or whatever name may be given them. You cannot stand still without hearing at once, 'Circulez, s'il vous plaîtF As soon as vou enter this treadmill, you cease even sneezing or blowing your nose freely. The Frenchman says, 'C'est précisément ce qu'il nous faut; le despotisme est la seule forme de gouvernment compatible avec Tesprit français' ( It is precisely what we should have; despotism is the only form of govern-

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ment compatible with the French character). This may be true, but it is a very severe self-criticism!" · Already, during the course of the war, the sharp condemnation of Bismarck's policy by the Prussian conservatives grouped around the ultra-Tory paper Kreuzzeitung had shown how far he had moved away from his own Tory origins. A league with the upholders of liberal and national ideas was certainly a stronger fundamentum regnorum, and Bismarck was quick to appreciate the state of affairs. In August, 1859, he visited the British minister to the Frankfurt diet, Sir Alexander Malet, and told him that Prussia was tired of relying on the princes. She would now try to increase her influence by appealing to the liberal forces; that course represented the true way to combat Austria and to make "moral conquests'* in Germany.· It is not, indeed, unlikely that his experiences in Russia had strengthened his feeling for the necessity of constitutional reforms, for the Russian regime he caustically described as gouvernement absolu tempéré par le régicide.1" Yet the weakness of the absolutistic regime by no means caused Bismarck to overlook the inherent strength and power of Russia. This estimation he conveys in the form of a story. It seems that in the first days of spring of the year 1859, the czar noticed a soldier standing on guard in the middle of a huge meadow. When asked for an explanation, the man could answer no more than, "It has been commanded." His superiors knew only that summer and winter a guard was assigned to that same place; the original order could no longer b e found. T h e affair became the talk of the day at the court, and finally reached the ears of the servants. An old man among them then came forward to relate what he knew from his father's tales. Once Empress Catherine I I had seen a snowdrop blooming unusually early in the spring on that meadow. T o protect the blossom, she ordered that a guard should be placed to halt anyone who might try to pick it. Ever since that day a soldier had stood guard at that spot in the middle of an empty meadow. "Such things awake our criticism and hilarity," Bismarck said, "but they are also an expression of an elementary power and perseverance which is the basis of Russia's power in relation to the rest of Europe. One remembers the sentinels who were not relieved from their posts during the flood at St. Petersburg in 1825 and at the Shipka Pass in 1877; the former were drowned, the latter froze to death doing their duty." 1 1 Bismarck's first great memorandum (on the solution of the German question) dates from July, 1 8 6 1 . " It contains the first clear proposals for the creation • Letter to General Leopold von Gerlach, Frankfurt-am-Main, September 15, 1855. Ibid., Vol. XIV, Part 1, p. 415. • Confidential report, November 3, 1859, Public Record Office, London. See Veit Valentin, Bismarcks Reichsgründung im Urteil englischer Diplomaten, p. 146. io Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 333. » Ibid., p. 153. 12 Die gesammelten Werke, III, 266.

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of a national representation of the German people at the seat of the central offices of the German Confederation. A German People's Parliament—this was the Paulskirche assembly of 1848 redivivus, and even the arguments advanced were reminiscent of the arsenal of the revolution: this assemblage would be the only link that could unite the divergent tendencies of dynastic, particularistic policies. This parliament, he suggested, should have legislative power over the military matters of the confederation and over all questions pertaining to trade, commerce, and customs. There was as yet no proposal of universal suffrage; the parliament was to be elected by the state parliaments. Nevertheless, it represented an important step forward. Such an organ, Bismarck felt, would counterbalance the policies of Austria, which were no longer compatible with the interests of the German nation. It would also still forever the suspicion that Prussia considered German development completed and closed with the present charter of the confederation. The memorandum showed that Prussia was still interested in progressive reforms. The historic facts behind Bismarck's proposals are all the more important because of the many popular remarks about the "militaristic Junker caste." In reality, those ultraconservative circles were by nature and by class interest very unaggressive. They did not favor the expansion of Prussia over the other German states or over non-German territories. Nor were they convinced of the necessity for solving the German question; they were simply not interested. Bismarck could conceive the German problem only when he emancipated himself from his conservative, Prussian-particularistic origins. Thereby necessarily he entered into the sphere of the liberal and democratic forces. Had the Junkers had their say, the German Reich might never have been founded at all.

23 PRUSSIA'S GERMAN MANDATE Prussia's administrative system serves as a type of the highest development oj local government in Germany. Prussia has studied to be more perfect than any other European state in her administrative organization. W O O D R O W W I L S O N , The State ( 1 8 9 2 ) . meanwhile? The Bürgertum, the rising new estate, had come forth as the victor of 1848. After 1850 the transformation of the country from an agricultural to an industrial economy had proceeded at a fast pace. The pre-March epoch appeared to the new generation as something baroque, and the year 1848 seemed almost like a childish comedy, sentimental rather than practical. While the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis (Hölderlin was almost unknown), of Kant and Hegel were found in the library of every home of the educated, yet the Bürgertum, expanding and sure of its power, monopolized culture, spirit, and tradition. The stored riches of the centuries, to which their own forefathers had contributed, were now taken over as the undisputed property of the middle class. Marriages into the nobility and the ennobling of successful representatives of the Bürgertum narrowed the gap which had separated it from the historic classes. But characteristically a new class always seeks to level down distinctions of rank only above itself while being anxious to uphold carefully the class lines that shut away the lower strata. The Bürger boasted that he was not inferior to the aristocrat, but considered any claim of the proletarian to be equal to the bourgeois as revolutionary, a subversive attack upon everything that was sacred before God and history. In order to emphasize his claim to superiority the more, the Bürger paid homage to the aristocracy, to its social institutions and to its officers corps, and betrayed the utmost anxiety to be accepted among the nobles. B U T WHERE WAS "GERMANY"

Were the men who had given to world culture Faust, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Philosophy of History, and the Ninth Symphony really the forefathers of the later nineteenth-century Bürgertum? Was it not rather the case that the estate which was claiming the merits of such great achievements, had been much diluted with newcomers, parvenus in the historic sense of the word, men who had usurped the true bürgerliche heritage without possessing the ethos and the traditions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? There can be no doubt that this group—foremen who had grown rich, financiers, entrepreneurs, moneyed patricians of low origin, those whose historic consciousness went back no further than their grandfathers' time—played an increasingly important role.'Once, in 1848, the

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democratic movement had been fed by the idealism of the War of Liberation, and much in it was derived from historic sources. Now it had become the instrument of the new classes for achieving security for their economic and social privileges by rising into the upper strata and amalgamating with it, while at the same time denying the prestige of birth, history, and tradition in the name of progress. It is futile to regret a development that had become inevitable, even though it might have been unnecessary had there been a true king to side with the people. Then the organic structure of society might have been preserved. But "for a monarchy one must have a king," as Bismarck had said, and this was not simply a prediction for the future. The two disruptive forces, the unhistoric (even antihistoric) bourgeoisie and its correlate, proletarian socialism, might then never have become a perpetual menace to a society which has given up its ethical justification and denied its Christian origin and telos. In its practice (though not in its metaphysics) socialism had become no less bourgeois than the bourgeoisie itself with its Godforsaken materialism. What a source of living water was thereby lost to the poor and disinherited! Originally not only Ferdinand Lassalle but also the majority of the Social Democratic party had a desire for an organic social community, in which, as Freiherr vom Stein had put it, the moral betterment of men was to be the main task of the state. This fact is attested by Bismarck, in spite of his later bitter fight agpinst the party of the workers. In his address to the Reichstag of September 17, 1878, which introduced the Sozialisten-Gesetz outlawing Social Democracy, he spoke of the "reasonable aspirations, which then [in Lassalle's time] formed the core of Social Democracy, for the improvement of the plight of the working classes to which I myself always lent a warm heart and an open ear." 1 The bourgeoisie is wrong when it reproaches socialism (as it has done ever since the middle of the last century) with leading to mechanization, despiritualization, and a deadly centralization.2 These vices are exactly those with which the bourgeoisie itself has infected its proletarian opponents. One can understand the fanatic furor of a man like Michael Bakunin, who wanted to put to the torch the edifice of the hated state, whether it be socialist or bourgeois; the distinction did not matter, for both were evil. When Marx and Engels had predicted that all capital would soon be accumulated in the hands of a few, leaving society divided between this Die gesammelten Werke, XI, 607. Stein had complained as early as 1821, long before socialism exerted its influence: "Our economic, technological order, administered by a centralized, ambitious bureaucracy, devours itself as Saturn devoured bis children. We suffer . . . . from overproduction; we have dehumanized our civil servants, despiritualized the administration, and dissolved everything in a deadly mechanism." Letter to Gottlieb Johann Christian Kunth, Nassau, November 8, 1821. Briefwechsel, Denkschriften und Aufzeichnungen, VI, 45. 1

2

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tiny circle of extreme wealth and a huge propertyless class, they overlooked the possibility that the development of productive forces would create a new class of its own. This class, it is true, was fed by the driftwood of the gigantic capitalistic stream and was not a class in the Marxian sense; it was part of the middle class, which was, according to their views, destined for destruction and absorption into the proletariat. Though its aspirations might be socialistic, it was, nevertheless, tied to the existing economic system and was marked by a feeling of social superiority toward the proletarians. In soil like this racial doctrines were bound to flourish, and the lower middle class has indeed proved victim and carrier kat'exochen of such ideas. Neither the upper classes—the nobility and the big bourgeoisie—nor the working class had any psychological need for racism. The upper groups were secure in their historically developed standing, the workers possessed the ethos of class consciousness and grew up with the feeling of solidarity of all men, regardless of race or nationality. The lower middle classes, however, by adopting racialism, could add another element of "superiority" to their feeling of inferiority towards the upper classes. Being racially pure, they felt themselves at least distinguished from, and therefore better than, the Jews (in Europe the main object of racial discrimination), superior even to the very wealthy Jewish bourgeois. The brilliant French diplomat Count Gobineau, whose book L'Inégalité des races humaines started modern racism on its political career, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, author of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, The Aryan Outlook, and similar works, were of course very much upper class. Here was one reason more for the petty middle classes to adopt their utterances and look upon them as infallible oracles. The Dreyfus affair, the pogroms in Russia and Rumania, the increasingly pronounced distinctions between Jews and non-Jews in Germany, Austria-Hungary, England, and the United States of America, were all symptoms of a general sickness which liberalism has been unable to cure. Precisely at the moment when all progressives were hailing the end of what they disparagingly called medieval notions, human society was thrown back to atavistic conceptions which the centuries of Christianity had apparently altogether overcome. This anti-Semitism is not the cause of social disintegration; it is one of the symptoms. It marks the dimming of the historic-Occidental consciousness and the general withdrawal of religious, spiritual forces from mankind which was never so deeply immersed in the world of matter as in the nineteenth century. Only now has the curve of man's development begun to show an upward trend again. The "all-explanatory" laws of the physical world, which were for many during decades past a substitute for God, are being recognized once more as a veil over the mystery of creation. This change is shown most strikingly among the great scientists of our day, while the rank and file of our social scientists and political thinkers, though they may think

PRUSSIA'S GERMAN MANDATE 291 that they are truly modern, are still moving in the obscurity of late nineteenth century agnosticism, that foggy atmosphere which is deadly to the human spirit.* The Germany of the many small courts still enchants the foreigner studying nineteenth-century history. Some even draw the curious conclusion that, in order to produce Goethes, Hebbels, Wagners, Beethovens, all one has to do is reduce Germany once more to thirty-six more or less benevolent princely fatherlands, or at least—with due concession to modernity and to America —to that many republics. The cultural decentralization of Germany is a phenomenon shared only with Italy and a very few other countries. In France, Paris represents the national culture, or is at least accepted as representing it. The same is true with London and English culture. But in Berlin, though since the late eighteenth century more and more talent has been drawn within the walls of the city, German culture is by no means concentrated. The excellent theaters in Munich, Hamburg, and Dresden, in Leipzig, Weimar, Meiningen, and so on are unequalled in any other country. They are not provincial, no mere offshoots of the theater in the capital, but autonomous cultural centers. The same is true in all the other domains of artistic and intellectual life. The fact that there have always been so many fruitful cells of the living spirit in Germany is pei haps the greatest single factor in Germany's contribution to the advancement of the world. But the achievements of the nineteenth century were not the source and the origin of modem German culture; they were instead the product of preceding epochs of history. The German spirit owes the prismatic colors of its manifold expression to the universal idea projected in the German realm. The country, always itself a small Europe, preserved the elements of universality until the nineteenth century. It was not the particularistic dynasties that created the color, nor could they re-create it, because particularism was never its cause. The idea of universal culture survived the universal empire in spite of particularism. None of the manifestations of German culture, in Munich, in Hamburg, or anywhere else, could claim to be more than a part of a whole. The fullness of German culture lay only in the organic combination of all its particular branches. * Cod himself, Ricarda Huch says in her stirring book Michael Bakunin und die Anarchie ( pp. 64-65 ), was changed by men until he resembled a portier in the Hotel Europa, who had to keep order so that the guests who could pay well would find things comfortable. Λ portier of such embonpoint and so majestic an air that no one could approach him without offering a substantial tip. What he had to do was to declare the existing order sacrosanct and holy; there could be no greater crime, no worse stupidity, no more dreadful heresy than wishing to change it. This blasphemous transformation of the image of the Lord of Hosts, Ricarda Huch feels, explains why many an ardent idealist preferred to be called an atheist rather than to worship the majesty at the hotel door. They said godlessness, but they really meant freedom from the man-made idol, the portier.

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In the summer of 1862, after his recall from St. Petersburg, Bismarck spent a few months as Prussian minister to the court of the Emperor Napoleon I I I . At that time in letters to friends he expressed the hope that, since his king obviously did not want to entrust to him the ministry of foreign affairs, he might be permitted to remain in France "at least until 1875." 4 During those months, Napoleon at Fontainebleau, made Bismarck the offer of an alliance. The interests of France and Prussia were identical, he said, and contained the elements of an "entente intime and durable." H e did not accept Bismarck's reply that an alliance presupposed a definite goal. 5 Bismarck knew from his Frankfurt experiences that Austria would not hesitate to enter into any kind of combination and would be willing to sacrifice the L e f t Bank of the Rhine so long as thereby "she could buy on the Right Bank a federal charter which would provide a secure preponderance of Austria over Prussia." He also concluded that it was only due to France, not to Austria, that the French-Austrian coalition did not already exist.· Meanwhile, when Bismarck was on a vacation trip through Southern France and the Pyrenees, destiny—his own and his country's—matured in Berlin. In September, a code telegram from his friend, General Count Albrecht Theodor von Roon, minister of war, called him back to Berlin. On September 23, Bismarck was appointed Prussian Ministerpräsident (minister president or prime minister) and, though the king was reluctant to the last, minister of foreign affairs. At that moment a state crisis threatened, for the crown and the Landtag were locked in bitter combat. T h e Prussian army had been in very bad shape at the accession of William I; their arms were antiquated and general conscription existed only on paper. It is unlikely that the army could have withstood an attack by even a medium-sized power, let alone France. William advanced army reform plans, and these would probably have been approved without much difficulty had they not involved political questions of utmost importance. T h e king, more and inore influenced by the advice of Count von Roon, aimed at getting the army more fully into his own hands. F o r this purpose he needed to strengthen the regiments of the line, which had officers recruited from the noble families. T h e Landwehr (army reserve), which had more liberal commoners in command and was imbued with the traditions of 1848, was to be reduced in size and importance. T h e king and the liberals were naturally at odds. After the dissolution of parliament in 1860, the radical Fortschrittspartei won even more seats. Finally, over a comparatively minor question (whether military service would be for two years or three; even Roon pleaded that two were enough, but the king stubbornly stuck to three) the crisis broke. T h e liberal ministry was dismissed, and the Landtag refused to grant any 4 Letter to Albrecht von Roon, Prussian minister of war, Toulouse, September 12, 1862. Die gesammelten Werke, Vol. XIV, Part 2, p. 619. • Gedanken und Erinnerungen, ibid., XV, 173-74. « Ibid., p. 174.

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money for military expenditures. As neither side would yield, the fight for power between crown and parliament was at hand. When Roon called Bismarck home, the king was considering abdication, but the crown prince refused to assume the royal office. Bismarck, who had come a long way from his 1848 stand on the road toward liberal ideas, fought the struggle out to the end, refusing to yield to the Landtag and refusing to yield to the king, over whom the influence of Queen Augusta and others at times almost prevailed. Then no man in Germany was more hated than Bismarck. In a defiant speech before the uproarious Landtag, on January 27, 1863 ( the fourth birthday of the heir to the crown, Prince William, later Emperor William II, an anniversary Bismarck did not forget to mention), he challenged his adversaries to unseat him and take power themselves. A deadlock had come, he said, for the Landtag was obstructing the working of the state. But he "who holds the power in his hand proceeds according to his intentions, since the life of the state cannot stand still for a single moment."T The stability which Bismarck assured to the state and his amazing successes in foreign policy, which were achieved with a minimum of "blood and iron" (to use his most frequently quoted and most frequently misapplied phrase), finally ended the inner conflict in Prussia. In September, 1866, he rejected the demand made by the Conservative party for changing the constitution. Instead, he asked the Landtag to sanction all expenditures incurred by the state during the conflict. He received it with an overwhelming majority." It is certainly true that the life of the state cannot stand still for a single moment. The question is not only academic: Was there another power that could have taken over the reins of government during the crisis? I do not think that the liberal opposition was in any position to do so. But there was another force which, though not alone, yet at least in conjunction with the crown as the residuary of the historic continuity of the state, might have played an important role. This was the working class. Bismarck considered it; in the midst of the conflict he saw Ferdinand Lassalle, his most brilliant, constructive, and high-souled opponent several times and listened to his views with great attention and respect. It was at this time that Ferdinand Lassalle delivered in Berlin his courageous addresses Ueber Verfassungswesen (On Constitutional Questions). His definition, "Constitutional questions are . . . questions of power," sounded the keynote.' Neither the written nor unwritten basic law of the country is the full constitution; the king and his army, the nobility which has influence upon the king, and the guns in the hands of the king's and the nobles' army, all these are integral parts of the real constitution.10 • Ibid., X. 154. » Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, i» Ibid., pp. 33-34.

II, 60.

« Ibid., XV, 293.

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Lassalle has been bitterly criticized by Marxians for extending his hand to the prime minister of an authoritarian regime.11 But basically there was a sound idea behind his actions, for he and Bismarck were fighting against the same social enemy, the class which stood between the crown and the workers. Bismarck contemplated at that time the introduction of general suffrage in order to tip the balance against the Bürgertum. Many years later, in an address before the Reichstag in 1878, Bismarck paid to Lassalle the highest homage he ever gave to any opponent. Their conversations, he said, had lasted for hours; Lassalle was a man of energy and spirit, a man of noble ambition who attracted him by his importance, erudition, and charm. "He had a clearly defined national and monarchical conviction," Bismarck says of this socialist leader; "the idea towards which he aimed was das deutsche Kaisertum, and in this we had a point of contact. Lassalle was ambitious in a noble way, and whether the Kaisertum should culminate in a Hohenzollera dynasty or a Lassalle dynasty, to his mind may have been a matter of doubt. But monarchical he was, through and through." 12 We may speculate as to what great historic forces an honest league between such a man and the monarchy might have released. Lassalle's political conceptions were in fact truer to the Reich Idea than were Bismarck's. Bismarck was the well-versed statesman who made concessions and concluded alliances, leagues, and agreements with everyone and every force that might help to build and consolidate the Prussian-German state and, after that was established, a peaceful European order. From inner conflicts and European wars Germany had nothing to gain, but everything to lose. In due time Bismarck was to make use of the imperial name and symbol, to which he attributed an integrating power. He took this imperial ideal from the 1848 movement, just as he took the idea of universal suffrage. To him the emperor's power was not what it would have been to Stein: the people's supreme office, hallowed as the fountain of justice and the shield of freedom, the great arch that spans the historic ages and gives dignity and perpetuity to even the humblest and lowliest. Though he became the statesman of Germany, Bismarck's roots and instincts were Guelfish, particularistic. His office was to him that of a proud paladin of a princes' emperor, not that of 11 See, for example, Friedrich Engels's abusive letter about him to Karl Kautsky: "Lassalle's whole greatness rests on this, that for years Marx allowed him to parade the results of Marx's research as his own and, owing to defective education in economics, to distort them into the bargain. . . . Until 1862, a specifically Prussian vulgar democrat in practice, with strong Bonapartist leanings ( I have just looked through his letters to Marx), he suddenly turned round from purely personal causes and began his agitation; and before two years had gone by he was demanding that the workers should take the part of the monarchy against the bourgeoisie, and intriguing with Bismarck, one of his own kin in character, in a way that was bound to lead to the actual betrayal of the movement, if fortunately for him he had not been shot in tune." London, February 23, 1891. Man, Selected Works, II, 598-99. 12 September 17. Die gesammelten Werke, XI, ΘΟβ.

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servant to an emperor of Reich and people. Perhaps it is for this more than any other reason that he and Lassalle could not find a common ground.1' The fact that most of the great statesmen and generals of Prussia were nonPrussians has a meaning beyond the obvious. Stein, for instance, needed Prussia as much as Prussia needed him. Only in Prussia could he find historic forces still young and developing and only through them could he hope to find a solution to the seemingly hopelessly tangled German problem. In the much-praised German petty states, despite their cultural centers, Stein would have remained without the proper political soil and without the proper instruments. The influence of his work could never have transcended that of a gifted court minister. It was not different in Bismarck's age. Neither Bavaria nor any other South German state could have united Germany and raised her to the status of a European power, for the rivalries among the smaller German states were as pronounced as their anti-Prussian jealousy. After the war of 1866, for instance, Bavaria's own South German allies, Baden and Württemberg, were anxious to aggrandize themselves at her expense; Bavaria was too large, they argued as they sought Prussian help for their schemes, which Bismarck, however, refused. Thus one of the main arguments against Prussian hegemony would have applied to Bavaria just as well, perhaps even more forcibly, because Bavaria was weaker, and aversions to hegemonies diminish in proportion to the greater power of the hegemonial state. Yet Munich was a cultural center of the first magnitude. Under King Ludwig I it had earned the title of "Isar Athens," a Greek city under Germanic skies. The Propyläen, the Pinakothek, the Glyptothek, and many other buildings in pleasant classical style were built during his reign. Munich artists, especially painters, brought to the capital of the stolid Bavarian tribe a Parisian breeze of genius and frivolous gaiety. When Ludwig II ascended the throne in 1864, the eighteen-year-old king's personal beauty, his royal demeanor, his love of art, his strange and fascinating romanticism were in the bourgeois century like an isle of golden legend. It is he whom Verlaine called "the only true king of the century," and Germany's greatest modem poet, Stefan George, made him the hero of his Algabal. The end of Ludwig's reign carried out the theme of eery magic. His mysterious death in the waves of the Starnberg Lake, never entirely explained, added to his life the somber greatness of a Shakespearean drama. ι» Lassalle's name as the founder and organizer of the German socialist labor movement is still commemorated in a much sung hymn, the so-called German Workers' Marseillaise: Nicht fürchten wir den Feind, The foe we do not fear, nicht die Gefahren aW Dangers we do not dread. Der Bahn, der Bahn, der kühnen folgen wir, Forward we boldly go our way, die uns geführt Lassalle. And Lassalle is at the head.

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Among the first acts of government of the royal youth had been calling Richard Wagner to his side. The final harvest of Wagner's genius is intimately connected with the communion of his spirit with that of Ludwig II. It is not only that without Ludwig, Bayreuth might never have been built; it was also the faith and friendship of the king—called Parsifal in the inner circle of congenial minds—which strengthened Wagner in the midst of hardship, bitterness, and disappointment. It seems hardly necessary to defend Wagner here against the silly reproaches which writers of political propaganda have leveled against him. He put the great mythological figures of German antiquity on the stage; he never intended to put them on the altars. His Ring der Nibelungen, based on the Edda and the Nibelungenlied, is one of the greatest cosmic dramas ever conceived. Whoever has ears to hear will find in the Siegfried motif the mighty rhythm presaging the emergence of the Saviour out of the world of paganism. In Parsifal, his last and most mature work, which arouses the deepest emotion of the hearer, the greatest mysteries of Christian initiation, above all the mystery of the Holy Grail, were presented again in a form that enabled men to comprehend them anew. The other German states, still smaller and more limited in their outlook than Bavaria, were even less fit to give the necessary impulse toward German unity. There remained only the two major powers which also played conspicuous roles in the European arena, Austria and Prussia. Since their interests of state, so long as the German question remained unsolved, were opposed to each other, some kind of contest was inevitable. Shortly after Bismarck became prime minister, Austria in August, 1863, took the initiative in seeking to win the liberal forces, which were greatly strengthened after the unification of Italy in 1859-1861, by calling a congress of princes to Frankfurt-am-Main. The situation was favorable for Austria. Through General Gustav von Alvensleben, Bismarck had just concluded with Russia what is known as the "Alvensleben Convention," pledging full support in the suppression of the Polish revolt. As is the usual case with allied nations, Russia had received the right to send her troops into Prussian territory to deal with the Polish insurgents. Thereby, Russia was put into a position to resist Austrian, French, and English pressure on behalf of the Poles. This policy had made Prussia, and Bismarck in particular, most unpopular in the West European press. It was no easy undertaking for Bismarck to prevent King William I from participating in the Frankfurt congress, which was presided over by Emperor Francis Joseph. In the interest of the state, the absence of the king of Prussia was necessary to defeat Austrian plans, for Prussia would have been overruled without receiving real compensation. In any event, the congress would not lead to a genuine, national, and liberal reorganization of

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the confederation which would have enabled the German people to play a role worthy of their numerical and moral weight. A month after the failure of Frankfurt, when the medium-sized states had already become distrustful of Austria and were suspecting her of using them for non-German plans, Bismarck made his countermove. He proposed the establishment of a German parliament on the basis of universal suffrage, with identical provisions for all member states and complete equality of the two presidiai powers, Austria and Prussia, particularly with regard to the right of veto in all questions involving war with foreign powers. This most progressively democratic plan was all the more stunning in view of the minister president's very unparliamentary rule at home, based on the three-class electoral law, of which Bismarck himself once said that he knew of "no more nonsensical, more miserable system."14 But Bismarck could rightly point out, as he did to the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Andrew Buchanan, that Prussia's interests were identical with the interests of the whole German nation, and that Prussia would welcome a democratic, all-German parliament.15 It corresponded indeed to the cultural and constitutional development of the German people. Again, as in 1848, every German who desired the unity of his country on the basis of a democratic constitution looked towards Prussia as the power that held the national mandate to realize this goal. Austria, on the other hand, would have nothing of such a democratic German unity. She preferred the Frankfurt diet and princes' congresses, where the representatives were of the governments, not the people, for in them Austria could play the various small states against each other. She stood clearly in the way of the historically necessary development. It was for this reason that the ultimate outcome of the Prussian-Austrian contest should not have been a matter of doubt; it helps also to explain the striking swiftness of Prussia's victory in 1866. 14 Address to the Reichstag of the North German Confederation, March 28, 1867. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstages des Norddeutschen Bundes, 18Θ7, p. 429; Die gesammelten Werke, X, 356. 15 Report of September 19, 1863, Public Record Office, London; see Veit Valentin, Bismarchs Reichsgründung im Urteil englischer Diplomaten, pp. 197 sq.

24 THE SOLUTION OF THE GERMAN QUESTION Patience! What ripens slowly ages late; When others wither, we shall be a state. C O N R A D F E R D I N A N D M E Y E R , "Deutsche

Libertät."

the background of his age that Bismarck's work must be evaluated. In the midst of a generation fast losing the ideals of the past, he found the second-best solution. To find the best one—a European community in modern form based not on well-balanced contrasts or identities of political interests but on a revival of age-old Christian and historic elements—he was not fitted. Nor would the conditions of his time have sanctioned it. Much has been made of the three wars in which Prussia engaged during Bismarck's prime ministership, with the purpose of presenting him as a warmonger. The fact is that Bismarck disliked wars and tried to avoid them when it was at all possible, even though in his day war was still generally regarded as a legal means of settling international controversies. It is illuminating to note that almost all the great powers, including the United States of America, conducted as many (or more) wars in the course of the nineteenth century as Prussia did. The conflict between Denmark and the German Confederation had been brewing since 1848. Before the outward end of the empire in 1806, the German duchies Schleswig and Holstein, like the Danish king himself, had been under the feudal overlordship of the emperor. Later Holstein became a member of the German Confederation as constituted after Napoleon's fall. The two provinces enjoyed many rights of autonomy, and, as the Danish king, Christian I, had sworn upon his election as duke of Schleswig and count of Holstein in 1460, they were to remain forever undivided. That Holstein, the more southerly province, was completely German not even the most nationalistic Danes ever doubted. But Schleswig was also predominantly German. Hardly one third of the people understood Danish, and less than a fourth, all of them in Northern Schleswig, used it as the common language. The language of the educated classes, of literature, and of science was German. The Frisians, on the west coast, were a Germanic tribe different from the Danes. They had their own Frisian language, though High German was spoken at school and in church. Politically, they felt German, not Danish. I T IS AGAINST

Denmark took advantage of the rising idea of the national state in the nineteenth century to tie the two outer duchies more strongly to its po-

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liticai body. While they for their part tended more and more clearly towards the German national state, they nevertheless became incorporated into an all-Danish State, in open violation of their autonomy rights. Feeling had been running high for many years already when, in January, 1848, the king of Denmark, Frederick VII, announced the plan for a pan-Danish constitution and parliament. The events of March in Germany fanned the spark of resistance against threatened "Denization" to full flame. A delegation from the duchies was dispatched to Copenhagen to demand constitutional liberty, arming of the people, and incorporation of Schleswig into the German Confederation. The king declined, and the duchies formed a provisional government at Kiel. A German, Duke Christian August of Augustenburg, claimant to the duchies, addressed himself to the king of Prussia asking his help.1 Soon afterwards, the Danes opened attack on the duchies. The victorious campaign of the German federal troops was cut short by the intervention of France, England, Russia, and Sweden. The SchleswigHolstein question was one of the problems left unsolved on the failure of the 1848 national democratic movement. Because of the obvious weakness of Germany, foreign powers found it an easy sport to interfere in German national affairs. But defeat excited the whole German people and contributed to keep alive the longing for unity and strength. The London Protocol of 1852 was another Olmütz for Prussia and for all Germany as well; it was a capitulation. Yet at least it stated that the duchies were to remain undivided and were not to be formally incorporated into the Danish kingdom. A new crisis appeared in 1863, when the situation was diplomatically more favorable to Prussia. Russia was now on Prussia's side, and Emperor Napoleon III was on friendly terms with Bismarck—or at any rate was not prepared to throw the weight of France against him. Austria-Hungary, lukewarm towards the Schleswig-Holstein question in 1848, now changed its course, guided by Francis Joseph's ambition to gain greater influence in Germany. England, under Palmerston, was decidedly hostile, but Bismarck knew that she would not fight over Denmark, in spite of all her many threats and all her interference. Besides, public opinion in England and the wisdom of Queen Victoria definitely opposed war against the German powers. And furthermore right was on their side, even in the strictly formal sense. King Frederick VII of Denmark had died in November, 1863. His successor, Christian IX (1863-1906), of the collateral branch of the royal house, signed a constitution that violated all the clearly documented rights 1 The Duke of Augustenburg claimed the right of succession to the duchies as head of the eldest branch of the younger line of the royal house of Denmark, since King Frederick VII of the elder line was without male issue. While the Danish crown could rightfully pass to a female branch (as it did with the ascension of Christian IX in 1863), succession in Schleswig-Holstein was to be in the male line, in accordance with ancient rights going back to the elective capitulation sworn to by King Christian I in 14Θ0. The duchies refused to recognize the claims of Christian and supported Augustenburg.

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of the duchies, including those guaranteed by the recent London Protocol.2 Thereupon the German Confederation, under the leadership of the mediumsized and small states, decided on forcible intervention, since Holstein was a member of the Confederation." Saxony and Hanover were instructed to furnish troops. Bismarck's handling of the question was one of his most skillful feats and perhaps his most difficult achievement. He succeeded in keeping the foreign powers out of the game, winning the support of Austria, and he braved German national sentiments, which, had he yielded to them, would have brought about the immediate danger of foreign intervention. Bismarck was at that time openly called by many Germans a Landesverräter, a traitor to the country. Yet his policy by its success in saving the lives of many has fully justified his line of action. In opposition to general public opinion, Bismarck did not believe in the legitimacy of the claims of Frederick of Augustenburg, who had proclaimed himself duke of Schleswig-Holstein. For in 1852, the duke's father had renounced the right of succession to the duchies for himself and his family and accepted an indemnity from the Danish king.4 The Prussian minister was willing to recognize the succession of King Christian IX to the duchies, provided that Denmark would withdraw the so-called November Constitution. He entrenched himself behind the articles of the London Protocol, a European agreement to which Prussia was a signatory, taking an impregnable position. Thus he disavowed the German Confederation, which had claims only with regard to Holstein. Prussia and Austria, however, according to » Russia, England and France, signatories to the London Protocol, urged the Danish government to revoke the November Constitution, which they considered a violation of Denmark's pledge not to incorporate Schleswig into the kingdom. These representations were made on December 23, 18Θ3, by the special envoys congratulating Christian IX upon his accession to the throne, and were addressed to Carl Christian Hall, president of the council and minister of foreign affairs. But "Hall was obdurate. He refused to consider the revocation of the constitution. On the next day, the Danish ministers burned the bridges behind them by dissolvine the Rigsraad, the only body which could legally carry out the repeal." Steefel, The Schleswig-Holstein Question, p. 142. • Article 3 of the Treaty of London of May 8, 1852 (London Protocol) had stated expressly that "the reciprocal Rights and Obligations of His Majesty the King of Denmark, and of the Germanic Confederation, concerning the Duchies of Holstein and Lauenburg, Rights and Obligations established by the Federal Act of 1815, and by the existing Federal Right, shall not be affected by the present Treaty." Peace Handbooks, Issued by the Historic Section of the Foreign Office, Vol. VI, No. 35 (London, H.M. Stationery Office, 1920), "Schleswig-Holstein," p. 101, Appendix I. 4 This view of Bismarck is shared today by most of the Danish historians, most of whom agree that the Augustenburg claim was justified until Duke Christian August renounced his rights in 1852. The question was thoroughly and impartially reexamined in 1915 by Professor Kristian Erslev in his two studies Augustenborgemes Arvekrav and Fortegnelse over Akter am den Sttnderborgske Hertuglinies statsretlige Stilling i Slesvig o g Holsten. Others, as, for example, the English historian Sir Adolphus William Ward, believe that the duke's renunciation was only personal. "His two sons," Ward writes, "who were of age and therefore did not legally belong to his 'family,' his promise was not intended to bind." Germany, 1815-1890, II, 121.

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the London Protocol, were also legitimately interested in Schleswig. Bismarck foresaw that Denmark, fevered with nationalistic agitation and convinced that England would eventually support her by force of arms, would refuse to amend her violations of the London Protocol. Denmark refused even the compromise to which Bismarck and the German Confederation were prepared to agree, namely, division of Schleswig, with Denmark getting the northern part which she finally received in 1920. The reformed Prussian army in this short war received its baptism of fire. For the first time the military genius of Helmuth von Moltke, then already more than sixty-four years old, had a field of action. Moltke not only looked like a scholar, he was a scholar by inclination and by nature and a scholar in his strategic operations. As an author, his style causes his works to rank among the classic documents of the German language. The treaties that terminated the war, the Peace of Vienna of October 30 between Denmark on the one hand and Prussia and Austria on the other, and the Gastein Convention of August 14,1865, between Austria and Prussia, once more ran counter to German public opinion. Bismarck had no intention of creating another "sovereign" state north of Prussia, as popular enthusiasm for the duke of Augustenburg would have demanded. The annexation of the duchies, not for the German Confederation but for Prussia, seemed to him the only solution, unless the duke would agree to put the country won by Prussian and Austrian arms completely under the political direction of Berlin. Bismarck's policy can be reproached as a violation of right only with regard to the ephemeral claims of Duke Frederick and the German Confederation, certainly not with regard to Denmark. That country had by violating the London Protocol in letter and spirit forfeited her rights." The Gastein Convention provided that Austria should administer Holstein, Prussia should administer Schleswig. The small duchy of Lauenburg became Prussian outright; the name was later to receive fame as the ducal title, which Bismarck refused when it was offered upon his dismissal by William II. In 1865, the acquisition of the little duchy, a token of his successful policy, earned him from his king the hereditary title and rank of count. The war of 1866, which had almost broken out in 1850 under conditions far less favorable to Prussia, must appear to the historian as inevitable as any war ever was. For Austria, it was imperative to preserve her prestige in the German Confederation in order to maintain it among her many nonGerman nationalities. The contest of the two powers in Germany was postponed by their alliance of 1864, but it was not removed from the political scene. Weighty dynastic reasons operated against actual civil war. Among 5 Hohenzollem and Augustenburg were subsequently reconciled by the marriage of the duke's daughter with Prince William, later Emperor William II.

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all German ruling houses there existed not only a community of blood relationship but also strong political and social ties. Prussians and Bavarians might call each other names on the street, yet the Hohenzollem and the Wittelsbachs were cousins in more than one sense, and what difference did it make whether the high nobility came from north or south of the Main? Moreover, the Prussian conservatives, the Junkers, were opposed to an armed conflict with Austria and the South. They disliked any policy that would extend the sphere of interest of their state and thereby threaten to break down their own conservative, isolationist walls. This much-discussed class always bitterly opposed anything which might employ the army for other than internal political purposes. Naturally, they also feared Bismarck's possible league with the German national idea, for nationalism was still identical with revolution, and by necessity the league would sooner or later extend to include Hungarian, Italian, Slav, and French revolutionaries. The German liberals were no less opposed to the conflict. For them Bismarck was the man of the conflict between liberals and king, and with the Schleswig-Holstein affair they grew even more distrustful of him. As to the liberals in Prussia itself, they found peace with Bismarck, the man who ruled without parliament, possibly only on the basis of the constitution. For the German nation, a fratricidal war loomed on the horizon. The conflict was as tragic as any civil war. In October, 1865, Count Bismarck negotiated with Napoleon at Paris and Biarritz, for the attitude of France was all-important. Undoubtedly, without friendly French neutrality, at least at the beginning, Bismarck could never have ventured to face the combined power of Austria and most other German states. Napoleon, of course, hoped to receive "compensation," and Bismarck must have dropped some vague hints about certain small German territories, perhaps in the Saar valley or in some other Rhineland region. Napoleon's aid to the unification of Italy under the kingdom of Sardinia had netted him Savoy and Nice; why not try to get paid a similar commission for helping Germany's unification under Prussia? The designs of France upon the Rhineland are centuries old; I have already mentioned the continuous eastward push of French frontiers. A foothold in the Rhineland could have been extended by and by to make a full-fledged Rhenish state under French protection. And from such a protectorate to a new Confederation of the Rhine would have been only a step; the protectorate would guarantee, indeed, French influence in all German affairs. For general reasons also Napoleonic France viewed an internal conflict in Germany with favor. The struggle was bound to lead to a weakening of both parties and would thereby assure to France the role of mediator or arbiter. Napoleon, like most other statesmen of that time, thought that the south, in league with the "eight hundred thousand Austrian bayonets"—an imposing array which prompted the Kingdom of Hanover to throw in her

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lot with the Habsburg monarchy—would win. Austria's military glory had been impaired scarcely at all by the war of 1859, and the Prussian army was still new, in spite of the successes of 1864, which had, be it noted, been won only in conjunction with Austria. When Napoleon III, in his dreamy manner, with the half-closed eyes of a benevolent but detached spectator, listened to Bismarck in Paris and on the promenades of Biarritz, he certainly must have thought that here was a man who overplayed his hand; the shrewd minister president had lost his caution or else was entering on foreign political gambles in order to restore his shaky position at home (a motive only too familiar to Napoleon himself). However, the emperor of the French, with all his imperial, conservative splendor and his clever intrigues, had one comer of his heart given over to idealism; the carbonaro sympathized with peoples who wished to be unified, even though the interests of French power politics might demand their continued disunity. Bismarck represented this revolutionary idea; the victor of Magenta and Solferino could hardly fail to view the deeds of the German Cavour with favor. Negotiations between Italy and Bismarck had been going on for some time. Since Austria still refused recognition, the Italian kingdom was a revolutionary creation opposed to the dogma of legitimacy. Finally, in April, 1866, a treaty was concluded between King Victor Emmanuel II and Prussia; as reward for her friendship Italy was to receive Austrian Venetia. In this proposal, Prussian policy agreed with Napoleon's as well as with the British, who had always favored the aspirations of the Italian nation. Austria also prepared for the conflict and also turned towards Napoleon. The French emperor's duplicity, which was finally to react against him, is well illustrated by the secret agreement he concluded on June 12,1866, which provided that Austria, in the case of victory, was to receive Prussian Silesia and the Rhenish provinces of Prussia were to be transformed into a Rhine state, nominally under a German prince. By this treaty, Austria assured Napoleon's neutrality and removed her fear of another '59 coalition, which would this time include Prussia under Count Bismarck's leadership. Napoleon could now feel that whatever the outcome, he would pocket the Rhineland, while in reality he had just maneuvered himself out of the contest altogether.* In spite of the increasing friction between Austria and Prussia as the administrative powers of Schleswig-Holstein, while both were courting possible • That Napoleon's designs on the Rhineland were of long standing is brought out by confidential instructions he is reported to have given to his minister in Berlin, the Marquis de Moustier, in 1860. After stating that the acquisition of Nice and Savoy and the neutralization of Belgium had made France safe from attack by Italy and from the North, he continued, "It is therefore only from Mainz to Cologne that rectifications [of the French frontiers] are indispensable; in other words, His Majesty has in mind the Palatinate and the Left Bank of the Rhine." Baron Napoléon Beyens, Le Second Empire vu par un diplomate belge (Paris, Plon-Nourrit, 1924-26), I, 312.

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allies in Germany and utside and were placing their armies on a war footing, negotiations between them went on to the last. In Prussia it was mainly Queen Augusta, Crown Prince Frederick William and, within the inner political circle, the conservative army leaders who opposed the war. Roon, Moltke, and Alvensleben were among the few who went along with Bismarck. In this struggle, he, who was the bearer of the historic mandate of the age, was perfectly willing to ally himself with all the oppressed, all the discontent, the entire "underground" of Europe. He himself mentions that, when French intervention threatened during Die war, he submitted to King William an appeal to the Hungarian nation. The plan to raise up an insurgent Hungarian legion against the Habsburg rule took form before his eyes. He also contemplated promoting a Czech revolt, "grasping for every weapon," as he put it, "that the unchained national movement could furnish, not only in Germany, but in Hungary and Bohemia as well." 7 He was also in touch with the South Slav nationalists, and was not unwilling to incite the Transylvanians, through the new prince of Rumania, Charles of Hohenzollern, to revolt against the Habsburg dynasty. To keep a check on Victor Emmanuel, Napoleon's personal friend, Bismarck made contact with Giuseppe Garibaldi and his Italian republicans. There were also wellfounded rumors that representatives of the French republican opposition had been in Berlin. Nor was Russian friendship, despite the friendly relations established during the Crimean War and reaffirmed in the Polish revolt through the Alvensleben Convention, entirely to be trusted. The Russian minister of state, Prince Gorchakov, who during Bismarck's earlier diplomatic career had been pleased to assume a paternal air towards his younger colleague, had later become jealous of his successes. Apparently Gorchakov approached Napoleon in July, 1866, with a view to preparing a joint démarche against Prussia. He met with a refusal, but the sentiments opposing a strong German policy that would block Russian influence continued. The Pan-Slavists, in particular, advocated a French alliance against Germany; thus the cauchemar des coalitions never ceased to haunt Bismarck.8 To parry such a danger, Bismarck might have been willing to light the fuse to set off the Polish powder keg under the Russian Empirei In Germany itself, as we have seen, the revolutionary trump cards which Bismarck put on the table of the Frankfurt diet were a German parliament and universal suffrage. To use his own words: "With a view to the necessity of grasping for revolutionär)' weapons, which might arise in the case Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 271. The expression was coined by Count Piotr Andreyevich Shuvalov, Russian ambassador to London, in 1878, when Bismarck was hesitant to accept a Russian offer for a defensiv e and offensive alliance. "Vous avez le cauchemar des coalitions!" Shuvalov exclaimed in the discussion. Bismarck replied, "Nécessairement." Ibid., p. 394. 7 8

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of an utter emergency in the struggle against superior foreign powers, I did not hesitate to throw in . . . the right of popular suffrage, as I did . . . on June 10, 1866, [also] in order to deter the monarchical powers from all attempts of putting their fingers into our national omelette. . . . The adoption of popular suffrage was a weapon in the fight against Austria and the rest of the foreign powers in the struggle for German unity, and at the same time a threat of ultimate measures in the fight against coalitions. In such a life and death struggle one does not examine too closely the weapons to be used or the values which their use may destroy. The only guide is, first of all, the success of the struggle, the salvation of independence from abroad. The liquidation and restoration of the damage must be left to the time when peace has come." β An amazing spectacle indeed, the "International of Nationalisms," the European revolution against the established order, envisaged and masterfully directed by the one man who felt strong enough to put down at any given moment the forces he had conjured up. The motion of June 10 was intended to push Austria out of the Confederation, for Bismarck foresaw that the Austrian government would never agree to a German parliament elected by universal suffrage, which would have moved swiftly towards German unity. Bavaria, courted by Bismarck because he knew of its rather half-hearted pro-Austrianism, was to receive a special position as the controlling power in the German South. Austria countered Bismarck's proposal on the very next day, June 11, by moving the mobilization of the federal army against Prussia for violating the Gastein Convention. Although the Confederation was not a party to this treaty, the federal diet under Austrian pressure (Austria's mobilization had started in April) accepted the motion three days later with nine votes against six.10 Prussia thereupon declared the federal charter violated and void and offered to conclude a new federation with all the German states. Actual fighting in the German theater during this war, called in English and American terminology the Seven Weeks War (the German terms are Deutscher Bruderkrieg or Deutscher Bürgerkrieg) lasted scarcely four weeks. The battle of Königgrätz (Sadowa) on July 3, though it did not break Austrian power, practically ended the war. Bismarck was now offered the opportunity to use courage and statesmanship in forcing peace on his own sovereign. No one has described more vividly than Bismarck himself the scenes at the Prussian headquarters in Nikolsburg on July 23, when » I bid., p. 287. 10 "Prussia had maintained that the Schleswig-Holstein matter lay outside the jurisdiction of the Confederation, and she therefore could not admit the right of the Diet to interfere in an affair which concerned the two great powers alone. No ground existed, under the Bundesakt, for the mobilization of the federal troops against Prussia," Burt Estes Howard says. "The Prussian government could look upon the motion of Austria, therefore, as nothing less than a declaration of war." The German Empire, p. 2.

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his bitter struggle with the newly awakened military ambitions of the king took place.11 Of course, there were weighty military reasons for not continuing the struggle. A cholera epidemic had broken out in the army, and on July 5, Napoleon III had taken a step which, though it was to cause his own ruin four years later, was at the time extremely menacing: despite all previous understandings, he entered on diplomatic intervention and exercised strong pressure. A prolongation of the war might mean French military action and the defection of Italy. After Königgrätz, Prussia was better prepared to meet the French at the Rhine, but, as Thucydides said, the fortunes of war are inscrutable." With Bismarck, however, diplomatic wisdom was the stronger motive. To take Vienna and parade through the streets, as William I wished, would have been easy to accomplish, for Prussian troops stood almost at the city gates. The headquarters at Nikolsburg near Brünn lay on the border line which, after 1918, separated Czechoslovakia from Austria. But such a military show with no practical political meaning behind it would have done no more than leave a sting of humiliation in the beaten enemy. On the evening after the battle of Königgrätz Bismarck had said, "The contest . . . is decided—now the question is to regain the old friendship with Austria." 13 Therefore he opposed an entry into Vienna à la Napoleon, "for in situations like ours it is a political postulate that after a victory one should not ask what can be pressed out of the enemy, but should aim only at what is politically necessary." 14 Austria's defeat, undoubtedly, would have led to the disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy, had not Bismarck stretched out the victor's hand. The terms of the Preliminary Treaty of Nikolsburg15 and of the Peace of Prague , e are most instructive. Not one Austro-Silesian or Bohemian village was taken by Prussia. Names like Karlsbad, Reichenberg, the Eger valley, which were again to be famous during the September crisis of 1938 and the ensuing Munich Pact, run through Bismarck's pages, but they serve only as comment upon his categoric rejection of any idea of annexing them. Saxony remained undiminished, too, and so did all the South German allies of Austria: Württemberg, Baden, and Bavaria. (From the latter William I would have liked to obtain the old Hohenzollern margraviates of Ansbach and Bayreuth). Only Hanover, Electoral Hesse (a state notorious for its anachronistic government embellished with favoritism and mistresses), Nassau, and the imperial city of Frankfurt were incorporated into Prussia. Schleswig-Holstein 11

« " " »

Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 273 sqq. The Peloponnesian War, n. xi. Sybel, Die Begründung des Deutschen Reiches, V, 203. Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 273. 18 August 23. July 26, 1866.

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became Prussian territory. To King William's arguments that the guilty should be punished, Bismarck retorted, "We do not have to exercise a judge's office, but to make German policy; Austria's struggle to rival us was no more culpable than ours to rival Austria." 17 Austria left the German Confederation and gave her consent to the reorganization of Germany. By August of that year, Bismarck was able to conclude defensive treaties with the South German states. With the Northern states, including Saxony, Prussia formed the North German Confederation, which was in its nature and its constitution the precursor of the German Reich. The king of Prussia exercised presidiai power, Count Bismarck became federal chancellor. To the formation of the North German Confederation, Napoleon gave his consent. In this as well as in the aggrandizement of Prussia in Northern Germany he not only saw no danger for France, but actually envisioned a check on the real unification of Germany. Very erroneously he assumed that the German states outside the Northern Confederation would all become more desirous of a French protectorate. The question might be raised, of course, as to whether, in spite of Napoleon's intervention, the solution of the relations between the Habsburgs and Germany might not have been effected in a very different way. This is a question which concerns the historic attitude of Bismarck rather than what might actually have been achieved. In other words, what would have been done by a statesman who possessed Reich-consciousness rather than Bismarck's particularistic viewpoint, which had gradually and almost reluctantly broadened to a German, but not to a universal, horizon? Again Bismarck could find only the second-best solution; he thought in terms of states determined by national and dynastic forces, and he aimed at amicable relations between them, without conceiving the practicality of entities greater than states in the nineteenth-century definition. For the European world of states, Nikolsburg was no doubt the only possible program. But a spiritual successor of Reinald von Dassel and of Frederick II of Swabia, a Ghibelline statesman might have envisaged another solution altogether—the liquidation of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as a self-determining entity and the establishment of a federal union of free peoples. The pent-up nationalist forces, which had served Bismarck for no more than strategic purposes, could have been set free in Hungary, in Bohemia, and in Germany and could have been bound anew in such a union. Bohemia especially could have been released from her status as a dependent province and restored to the dignity of an autonomous kingdom which she had held before the battle of the White Hill. The German provinces of the Habsburg monarchy might have been joined to the Germanic body, not as provinces of some other German state but as an autonomous part of the Reich. Hungary, if she so chose, might have remained a kingdom under the Habsburg ir

Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 278.

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dynasty. Similar solutions could have been found for Galicia (as part of a restored Poland) and for the southern Slavonic provinces. If we permit our speculation to go even further, there was the possibility of transforming the existing military alliance with Italy into an agreement of union. Italy might then have embraced Trieste and the southernmost Italian-speaking parts of the Tirol, taking a territory from the old frontier at Lake Garda and Belluno to a line running roughly along the latitude of Salum. Of course such a reorganization of Europe would have been possible neither on nationalistic lines (as attempted, with some one-sided leanings toward the nationalistic interests of non-German peoples, in 1919), nor on hegemonial ones. Within the union, embracing the Germanic body, Italy, Bohemia, Hungary, the land of the South Slavs and Poland, all nationalities, completely autonomous in their cultural affairs and self-governing like British Dominions, could have taken part in a central governing council nominated by the national governments. A union parliament, elected by all nationalities without discrimination of race or language, could have constituted the unifying organ. T h e union would have formed an economic unit, and a unit for common defense. Though the time was not graced with a sense of universal principles, dialectically it might have been possible to achieve a universal solution by marshalling the national forces of the day—but this aim would have required, on the part of our fictitious political demiurgos, faith in the integrating power of such a universal idea. W h a t the practical statesman Bismarck saw, on the other hand, was the general historico-political laxity of his age, an era which could think only in terms of power politics and which saw the traditional dynasties as the only remaining stable points around which to build states. Not that Bismarck's estimation of the dynasties was exalted; he coldly disposed of those of Hanover (even expropriating many private holdings of the rulers), of Hesse, and of Nassau. Augustenburg had been only a pawn on his chessboard, and he found "that in England outward respect for the crown belonged among the conventions of good society and the formal preservation of the monarchy was regarded as opportune." 18 Yet, at least in the German sphere, with its divergent particularistic interests, confessional splits, and liberal, socialistic, and borné conservative tendencies, he felt that there was only one institution strong enough to check the centrifugal tendencies. This was the crown of the Prussian state, which was in itself a replica of Germany. It was not that Bismarck was unaware of the wider solution. His knowledge of the alternatives ideologically superior to the way he chose marked him with cynicism and bestowed a tragic touch to his character. Again this recognition distinguished Bismarck sharply from his blatantly ignorant imitators and also from many of his German and non-German critics. In Nikols18

Ibid., p. 201.

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burg, as before, he asked himself quite seriously whether he should consider the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy. But his conclusion was: "I could not imagine a future for the countries composing the Austrian monarchy which would be acceptable to us, should that monarchy be destroyed . . . by Hungarian or Slav revolutions. What should instead be set in that part of Europe now occupied by the Austrian state, from the Tirol to Bukovina? In this geographic space any newly formed creations could be only of a permanently revolutionary nature." In this he was right, and from the point of view of state logic and dynastic logic he acted correctly. "For German Austria we have no use, either wholly or partly," he said in concluding this examination of conscience.1® Here the Prussian Junker of 1848 once more broke through the surface of the developing statesman of 1866. The Ghibelline Reichsfreiherr vom Stein and the black, red, and gold democrats of the Paulskirche and of the Weimar National Assembly would have welcomed Austria with open arms. July 5, 1866, the day of Napoleon's intervention against Prussia, marked the beginning of the fundamental change in the relations between the emperor and Bismarck. Not without reason do historians like to speak about the period between that day and July 19, 1870, when France declared war, as the "duel between Napoleon and Bismarck." Erich Mareks feels that without Napoleon's move Bismarck would have achieved the unification of Germany in 1866. 20 In Bavaria, in Württemberg, in Baden, everywhere, a warm wave of national feeling and sympathy streamed toward Bismarck. Even a man like Bishop Ketteler of Mainz, who viewed Bismarck with misgivings and who, during the Seven Weeks War, had been wholly on the side of Austria and the German South, now regarded the speedy realization of German unity as vital. He rejected the idea of a separate South German confederation, for it was bound to become something like Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine—"a great danger for the integrity of Germany, a playground for the politics of other countries and for the native intrigues of narrow-minded dynasties and particularistic states, and finally a breeding place of pseudo-liberal and radical elements." Only a united German federal state under the king of Prussia, he wrote, could avert "the complete ruin of Germany and shameful subservience to foreign powers." 21 Prince Chlodwig of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, a mediatized South German dynast, a man of statesmanlike wisdom, of liberal convictions, and of international standing, and perhaps the most representative figure in South German politics, speaks in his memoirs with sarcasm and scorn of the "dispossessed" sovereigns, such as the duke of Nassau, who intrigued abroad, trying to enlist French help against the cause of national unification, which was now represented by Count Bismarck. "I think it comprehensible, and 2 0 Otto υοη Bismarck; io Jbid., p. 278. ein Lebensbild, Deutschland nach dem Kriege υοη 1886, pp. 82-83.

p. 89.

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frc\.i the purely human standpoint quite excusable, for these banished, or as they now say 'dispossessed,' monarchs to appeal to foreign Powers for help against Prussia's 'oppression.' From the German point of view, however, there is no justification for it, and in the interests of Germany it is to be hoped that their intrigues will prove unsuccessful." 22 Prince Hohenlohe became Bavarian minister president and foreign minister in December, 18ββ, and held that position until March, 1870. After 1871 he was a member of the Reichstag, then for years German ambassador in Paris. In 1894 he became Reich chancellor and remained in office until October, 1900, a few months before his death. Generally speaking the year 1866 also marked the turning point in the world's evaluation of Bismarck. England began to look upon him with different eyes; his strength, his success, and his moderation could not fail to produce an effect. The great statesman had come like a clean breeze of history, bringing fresh air into the thickly humid atmosphere of Continental affairs. The period of the post-Napoleonic treaties, of the Holy Alliance, of the status quo and reaction had come to a close. For France, German unification in 1866 would have had some advantages. Bismarck, not for sentimental reasons but for reasons of practical gratitude to the emperor, would certainly have endeavored to continue friendly diplomatic relations. It is likely that the war of 1870 could have been avoided altogether, if the French chauvinistic forces (clerical ambitions, favored by the Empress Eugenie, as well as other diverse aims) permitted peace. But it was precisely on account of these forces that the emperor felt a compulsion to increase what he considered his foreign political prestige. The Mexican adventure had greatly undermined his prestige at home and abroad; he had speculated on a victory of the Confederacy, and the victory of the Union in the United States had spelled disaster. In German affairs, he had gambled on Austria's victory, which would have given him the Rhineland; there, too, the North had won. By his intervention on July 5, which accelerated the pace of Bismarck's peace negotiations and made it easier for the minister to exact from King William the mild conditions of Nikolsburg and the treaties with the South German states, Napoleon himself contributed indirectly to German unification by preventing a "reconstruction period," which might have left the South humiliated and embittered against the northern victor. After the signing of the preliminaries of the Nikolsburg peace at the end of July France presented through its ambassador in Berlin, Count Benedetti, exorbitant demands for "compensations," asking for the Saar basin; the Bavarian Palatinate; Rhenish Hesse together with Mainz; the fortresses Landau and Germersheim; and certain parts of Belgium. Why France should have been compensated at all with German territories was, of course, « Denkwürdigkeiten, I, 171; English translation in Memoirs of Prince Chlodwig of Hohenhhe-Schillingsfürst, I, 160.

SOLUTION OF THE GERMAN QUESTION 311 not a question of legal nature, but sheerly a matter of power politics. To accede to the request would have been equivalent to paying blackmail. There are situations in political life when to yield is the only possible wisdom; but such a situation no longer existed. Bismarck refused sharply, and the exaggerated French claims assured for him the help of the Southern states in case war should break out. The treaties of alliance with those states were indeed greatly facilitated by Benedetti's threats. After Bismarck's categoric No, Napoleon recoiled; his demands became more moderate, and in September he dropped them altogether. Italy gave up Nice and Savoy in payment for Napoleon's help to the Italian national cause. Bismarck, by handing over German provinces, could have realized the unification of Germany in July or August, 1866. But the new state would then have been burdened with that shameful price, and his position as well as that of his state would have suffered in the eyes of the nation. German unity would have meant little if gained through the grace and sufferance of Bonaparte, and accompanied by the surrender of some of the most ancient and beautiful German regions. By dismissing the emperor's demands, Bismarck entered into the alliance with the German people; in practice at least he now had crossed the Prussian threshold and entered the German house. Prussia itself had now altered its own structure. The new provinces—and particularly Hanover, which, guided by the liberalism of Rudolf von Benningsen became Bismarck's natural ally—gave old Prussia a different aspect. The constitution of the North German Confederation was Bismarck's own work. Prussia was no longer simply a unified state, it was part of a federal state in which all members shared in the government and the people elected the Reichstag. In the South, Baden tended strongly toward the North German Confederation, while, in Bavaria, Prince Hohenlohe was attempting to create a southern confederation to be joined with the North. This whole Hohenlohe plan was outlined in detail in a memorandum of November, 1867. As a name for the proposed group Prince Hohenlohe suggested "The United South German States." Between them and the North-German Confederation, international ties were to be established. Common weights, measures, and standards were to be agreed upon, as well as a common currency, a common banking system, and unified courts and civil procedure. The existing alliances and customs union were, of course, to be respected and strengthened. But nothing came of these far-reaching plans, mainly because the other German states were unwilling to accept Bavaria's leadership. By July, 1867, Bismarck had already succeeded in establishing an economic union of the North and South with a customs parliament and a government. The Southern staff officers, in view of the increasing French military menace, discussed

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with Moltke in 1868 a common plan of action against the feared attack. Thus, as the result of 1866, the German Reich took shape economically, militarily, and, more and more, politically as well. In an address before the North German Reichstag, when he was being urged on by the impatience of the Progressive deputy Edward Lasker to effectuate a union with the South at once, Bismarck could say on February 24, 1870: "Where, since the time of the first Hohenstaufen, has there ever been undisputed supreme command in war, an undisputed security of commonalty in having the same enemy and the same friends throughout the German lands? Where has there been economic unity, headed by an emperor? It is not the name that counts! . . . The head of the Northern Confederation possesses a position in the South such as no emperor has had since Barbarossa, and even he only when he happened to be victorious by the sword." " These historic parallels are interesting, for the Sacred Roman Empire was then as dead as anything could be in the political consciousness of the ruling classes. That Bismarck should have used such terms shows his own historic awareness of a living past, even though only too often he did not heed its lessons. But it was at this point that Bismarck began negotiations with the political parties and the members of the Confederation for the establishment of a North German Kaisertum; the Imperial title would make the king of Prussia something more than Prussian, for it would make him also the supraparticularistic representative of the member states and of their peoples. 23 Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstages Bundes, 1870, I, 68; Die gesammelten Werke, XI, 103.

des

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25 THE HALL OF MIRRORS He [Frederick the Great] did not know the power of the representative system, nor could he foresee that by the wise use of it the fourth of his successors would evoke the German state from the eclipse of centuries to shine with replenished light as the empire of a people. GEORGE BANCROFT, History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of America. THE WAR OF 1870, Karl Marx wrote in September of that year, "had been carried inevitably in the womb of the war of 1866." And the new war would just as inevitably breed a future war between Germany and Russia; with this "one must even now begin to reckon as with an accomplished fact." He foretold that it would be "not one of those new-fangled localised' wars, but a war of races—a war with the combined Slavonian and Roman races." 1 Bismarck knew, just as all Europe did, that Napoleon, to whom intrigue had now become second nature, and the chauvinistic groups behind the emperor were feverishly preparing for conflict. In spite of Nikolsburg, Austria was unforgiving and remained so until well after the War of 1870. It was natural that Napoleon should look to her for aid in his future plans. Since 1867 the emperor had worked at a system of alliances which was intended to encircle the North German Confederation. An agreement of France, Austria, and Italy had been drafted, providing common action in the case of war. Bismarck's answer to this was the candidacy of the Prince Leopold of Hohenzollem-Sigmaringen for the Spanish throne in 1870. Earlier the Luxemburg affair of 1867 had almost unchained the war between France and Prussia. Luxemburg had been a member of the German Confederation until its dissolution in 1866. Then Napoleon had hoped to win it for France in order to satisfy at least part of his disappointed ambition for "compensation." Luxemburg was under the suzerainty of the king of Holland, who was willing to sell it to France. It is probable that Bismarck would not have objected to the transfer, which would have placed the emperor under obligation to him, except that the move would have again alienated 1 Reichsgründung und Kommune; die Ereignisse von 1870-71 in Schriften von Friedrich Engels und Karl Marx, edited by A. Conrady, pp. 191, 190, 163. The first two quotations are from Marx's letter of instruction to the Committee of the Social Democratic Workers Party at Brunswick, who used it literally in a manifesto of September 5, 1870. The letter itself is lost but is mentioned by Marx in his correspondence with Friedrich Engels (especially September 10, 1870, in Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, Dritte Abteilung, IV, 381 sq.). The third quotation is from the Second Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association on the Franco-Prussian War, London, September 9, 1870, and the English is found in Marx, Selected Works, II, 471.

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the national elements in Germany, with whom the former Prussian particularist was just beginning to be on friendly terms. To keep this friendship the North German Confederation protested, and the king of Holland called the deal off. Napoleon felt consequently that he had been duped. The danger of war became real, although Prussia evacuated the fortress of Luxemburg and did consent to the neutralization of the small country. The French army was at the time in a process of reform. The new chassepot rifle had been introduced, but two hundred thousand more were needed to equip the troops fully, and this process required some time. If a war with France had to come anyway, many Germans therefore felt, let it come now. Excitement ran high on both sides of the Rhine, and conflict seemed at hand. Instead of starting it, Bismarck arranged for King William and himself to visit Paris in an effort to reëstablish friendly relations with Napoleon. Bismarck, the civilian, in seeking to avoid hostilities, had again resisted the military. Moltke, at the head of the army officers, urged that the war should be fought without delay. Later, reviewing his activities in a speech before the Reichstag on January 11, 1887, he said: "The thought of making war because later on it might perhaps become inevitable and might have to be conducted under less favorable conditions has always been far from my mind, and I have always fought against it. I was against taking the Luxemburg question in 1867 as an occasion to make war on France. Luxemburg decidedly was not worth a war with France, and particularly not our questionable right of garrisoning troops there after the German Confederation had become extinct. Thus the only question that could be asked was whether we would not have to fight the war later on anyway. I said: This, perhaps, is possible, but I cannot be so exactly sure of it. I cannot foresee the cards that Providence will deal. . . . My counsel will never be to fight a war because it may later have to be fought anyway. According to God's will, when it is fought later, it may perhaps be under more favorable conditions for us, as happened in the case of France. W e have fought it under more favorable conditions in 1870 than we could have in 1867. But it might equally have been possible that, had the Emperor Napoleon died earlier, we would have been spared the war altogether." 2 Bismarck complained frequently on the reproach that he was hostile to the military, but as a matter of fact, the stanch representatives of army policy did have every reason for being dissatisfied with him, at least from their own necessarily limited viewpoint. With sarcastic eye, Bismarck saw clearly as involuntarily comic those saber-rattling officers for whom the field of world politics was bounded by the limits of the training ground. Even the scholarly Moltke and his old friend Roon did not altogether escape Bismarck's caustic wit. Both of them had opposed the peace of Nikolsburg. Their eagerness for battle, he wrote later, became truly uncomfortable for » Die gesammelten Werke, XIII, 213-14.

HALL OF MIRRORS 315 him in 1867, in the Luxemburg question; during the international crisis of 1875; and again later, "in view of the consideration that it might be advisable to bring about a war anticipando, which perhaps might later on have to be fought with an enemy better armed. I always opposed the affirmative answer, not only at the time of Luxemburg, but also later, for twenty years, convinced that even victorious wars can be justified only if they are forced on one." Bismarck found it natural that not only the younger officers of the general staff but also the experienced strategists should desire to test the efficiency of their troops and to demonstrate that efficiency before history. The task of keeping the martial spirit of the army within the limits set by the just desire of the people for peace "falls to the political, not to the military leaders of the state." ' Here speaks the true Bismarck, cynical certainly, but civilian, a civil statesman through and through, and not the fabulous Bismarck in the boots of a grenadier who lives in the mind of German nationalists, National Socialists, anti-German propagandists, and some German émigrés. On May 8, 1870, the Napoleonic empire liad submitted its program of liberal constitutional reforms to a plebiscite and won a sweeping majority. But in reality, the triumph was bom out of the increasing inner weakness of the regime, upon which the reforms had been forced by popular dissatisfaction—an epidemic of strikes and mass demonstrations. The result was an intensified activity of French foreign policy, because the government was eager to use the respite at home in order to remedy its weakness by successes abroad. The first diplomatic victory was scored when vigorous French protests against the election of Prince Leopold of Hohenzollem-Sigmaringen ( of the Swabian branch of the house ) by the Spanish Cortes resulted in the prince's renunciation of the crown, under the counsel of King William of Prussia. This retreat constituted a grave defeat for the North German Confederation. About this fact there was no doubt in European public opinion, even though Bismarck had tried to present the whole Spanish candidacy as strictly an affair of Spain and the Hohenzollern, not unlike the case of Rumania, where Prince Leopold's brother had ascended the throne, and not unlike the various instances when members of the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha were called to European thrones. Bismarck had not invented the candidacy, but after it had emerged out of the turmoil of Spanish palace revolutions, he had seized on it as a countermove to Napoleon's policy of encircling alliances. A German prince on the Spanish throne would have been a check on Napoleon. Besides Napoleon himself, who was already aging and ill, the most influential circle at the court eagerly welcomed the opportune incident. Leading 3 The quotations in this and the preceding paragraph are from Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 311.

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it was the empress, whose strong anti-Protestant feelings induced her to wish for the defeat of Northern Germany. Until July 6, the day when the new French foreign minister, the duke de Gramont, former ambassador to Vienna and exponent of Franco-Austrian cooperation, delivered before the Paris chamber an address bristling with war threats, Bismarck would have preferred a diplomatic victory to war. King William, who had always viewed Leopold's candidacy with disfavor and who now more than ever was under the influence of Queen Augusta, negotiated with the arrogant French ambassador, Count Benedetti, as late as July 12. The king was then in Ems, in western Germany, while Bismarck was retained by illness at his estate of Varzin in Pomerania. Everyone knew that William had exercised pressure on Leopold and his father to make the prince renounce the candidacy. La Prusse cane ( Prussia cowardly backs down ) became the contemptuous outcry of the French chauvinist press and public opinion. Not content with this triumph, Gramont now requested that King William give a written promise that never again would a Hohenzollem aspire to the throne of Spain. 4 Bismarck's answer to this provocation was to publish the Ems Dispatch of July 13—a telegram he had received from Ems concerning King William's last conversation with Benedetti. By shortening the text of the message, the real meaning of the French ambassador's insinuations was laid bare. The tone of a chamade was now altered to become a fanfare. The dispatch had arrived when Bismarck was back in Berlin, dining with Moltke and Roon. "Count Benedetti," the message said, in the king's words, "accosted me on the promenade in order to demand of me—in the end in a very obtrusive manner—that I should authorize him to telegraph immediately that I pledge myself for all time never again to give my consent should the Hohenzollerns renew their candidature. I repelled him at last, somewhat severely, since one cannot undertake such engagements à tout jamais. Naturally, I told him that I had received no news as yet, and that, as he had been earlier informed than I by way of Paris and Madrid [of Prince Leopold's renunciation], he would see that my Government had again had no hand in it." 5 The dispatch continued by saying that the king had since received confirmation of the news of the renunciation. He had caused his * To Benedetti, who personally seemed to incline rather towards moderation, Gramont wired on July 11: "I must advise you that your language no longer corresponds in firmness to the position which the Emperor's Government has taken (d la position prise par le Gouvernement de TEmpereur). It is necessary today to accentuate it further.' Les Origines diplomatiques de la guerre de 1870-71, XXVIII, 222, No. 8399. 5 Ems, July 13, 3.10 P.M. This telegram was first made public by Chancellor Count Caprivi in an address to the Reichstag on November 23, 1892; see Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstags, VIII Legislaturperiode, 2. Session 1892-93, I, 9-10. Robert Howard Lord ( The Origins of the War of 1870; New Documents from the German Archives, p. 220, No. 163 ) published it from the original in the German Foreign Office archives, indicating changes and corrections made by Heinrich Abeken in drafting the message. The English translation is by William Harbutt Dawson, The German Empire, 1867-1914, and the Unity Movement, I, 334.

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adjutant to inform Benedetti of this, adding that he had no further communication to make to the ambassador. The king authorized the chancellor to use his judgment as to whether the new demands of Benedetti and their rebuff should be communicated to the North German ministers abroad and to the press." The text of the Ems Dispatch after its editing for publication was this: "After the news of the renunciation [of his candidature] by the Prince of Hohenzollem had been officially announced by the Spanish ambassador to the French Government, the French ambassador in Ems demanded of his Majesty the King that he should authorize him to telegraph to Paris that he pledge himself for all future time never again to give his sanction should the Hohenzollems return to their candidature. His Majesty thereupon refused to receive the ambassador again, and caused his adjutant in attendance to inform him that his Majesty had no further communication to make to him." 1 Bismarck himself comments on this version: "The difference in the impression of the shortened text of the Ems telegram as compared to that which the original would have produced, was not the result of stronger words, but of the form which made the pronouncement appear as final, whereas the [original] version would have seemed only like a part of a pending negotiation to be continued in Berlin." 8 o This statement correctly covers the facts. Of "forgery" there can be no question. In summarizing what was essential in the dispatch, Bismarck was, to use a colloquial expression, calling Gramont's bluff. The French government now had to show its hand. Gramont, informed by Benedetti of the king's refusal before Bismarck had made it public, now asked through the Prussian ambassador, Baron von Werther, that "the King should send a letter to the Emperor to the effect that he, when authorizing the prince of Hohenzollem to accept the crown, had had no intention of infringing upon the interests or the dignity of France." 9 This new suggestion, which implied a virtual apology on the part of King William, was an even stronger provocation, indeed an affront of the first magnitude. To submit to a diplomatic offensive of this kind would have been political • Benedetti thus reported King William's refusal: "The King terminated our conversation by advising me that he neither could nor would undertake such an obligation, and that for this as for any other eventuality he must reserve to himself the freedom to consider the circumstances." Ems, July 13, 12.05 P.M. Les Origines diplomatiques de la guerre de 1870-71, XXVIII, 294, No. 8458. 1 Berlin, July 13, 11.15 P.M. Lord, The Origins of the War of 1870, pp. 231-32, No. 187; slightly varying form in Das Staatsarchiv; Sammlung der offiziellen Aktenstücke zur Geschichte der Gegenwart, XIX, 44, No. 4033. English translation by William Harbutt Dawson, The German Empire, 1867-1914, and the Unity Movement, I, 335. 8 Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 310. 9 Baron von Werther to the Foreign Office in Berlin, Paris, July 13, 10 P.M. Lord, The Origins of the War of 1870, pp. 229-30, No. 183.

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suicide. Such submission definitely would have discredited the largest German power in the eyes of the German nation and Europe. When the crisis broke, public opinion and all powerful government circles in England stood at the side of the German states. The United States of America took over the protection of North German subjects resident in France. The insult offered to the old king and played up skilfully by Bismarck relieved Czar Alexander of Russia of any obligation he might have undertaken towards the Bonapartist schemer. Though the hoped-for Russian ally thus defaulted, Napoleon still thought that Austria and Italy would join hands with him: this hope had been the pillar of his system of alliances after 1866. But they, too, as well as Denmark, remained neutral, the latter prompted by a personal letter of the czar addressed to the Danish king. Russia's friendly neutrality must in tum have influenced Austria's decision. National German sentiments also played into Bismarck's hand and put a further check on any possible Habsburg plans of revenge for Königgrätz. Since the French attack on the honor of the king of Prussia was clear, and since the manifest desire of France was to secure influence on internal German affairs or to humiliate Germany, the South at once lived up to its agreements with the North German Confederation. Had the Habsburgs decided upon war, the German provinces of Austria would have caused a serious problem. That Austrian policy hoped for and expected the defeat of the German North is another question; Austrian diplomatic influence was certainly not used to render friendly aid to Prussia. Relying upon an army believed to be superior, upon allies who failed to appear, and hoping for inner-German dissension, the French government, eager for gloire and for successes to strengthen the regime, declared war on the North German Confederation on July 19. But perhaps it will mutatis mutandis be just to paraphrase Bismarck's words at Nikolsburg and say that the French struggle for rivalry against the North German Confederation was no more culpable than the latter's against France. Over the fall of the Second Empire and of Napoleon's dynasty I can never suppress a feeling of deep regret. Those who are not deafened by rolling phrases in the Victor Hugo manner or who knew the emperor personally—I consider myself fortunate that my information on the subject is supplemented by the recollections of my grandmother and my aunt on the maternal side—have always attested to "the unfailing gentleness, the quiet intellectual courage, the profound generosity, of Napoleon III." 10 The final scenes of the drama—the emperor riding undismayed through a rain of bullets in the battle of Sedan, enduring with passive courage, suffering, showing himself with all his un-Napoleonic appearance still truly imperial—have 10 The quotation is from Albert Guérard (Napoleon III, p. 293), whose recent book on the emperor shows him in a truer lieht than that thrown on him earlier by professorial rhetoricians and holier-than-thou republicans.

HALL OF MIRRORS 319 a moving greatness worthy of Arcóle and of the Titan's fall at Waterloo.11 Bismarck's letter to King William from Donchéry, near Sedan, on September 2, 1870, is one of the best samples of his dramatic, yet simple, narrative power. It describes his meeting with the hapless emperor. "Hie story is an example of a chivalry towards the defeated enemy which showed the spirit of a more civilized century. The two men who had been partners and opponents met, the defeated without bitterness, the victor without ignoble triumph. They reviewed the years that were gone and the fatal events that had marked the turning point of a world-historic epoch. The scene is one which only the hand of Clio herself could have recorded adequately. But in both the human actors must have vibrated some realization of their tragic portent, some feeling that they were instruments and agents of a power greater than themselves." "This morning about six o'clock, General Reille was announced to me and informed me that the emperor wished to see me and was already on his way here from Sedan . . ." Bismarck wrote. "His Majestv was in an open carriage with three high officers, and as many more riding alongside. . . . As soon as I reached the carriage, I dismounted, stepped to the emperor's side at the door, and asked for the orders of His Majesty." In a personal conversation with Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe, Bismarck related that the emperor was at first embarrassed on seeing him but was soon reassured when he noticed that Bismarck treated him with the same respect and deference that he had shown in the Tuileries.1' The conversation continued in a small room in the abandoned house of a poor workingman, for there the emperor had desired to rest. Bismarck asked almost at once whether "His Majesty was inclined to consider negotiations of peace." But he received the reply that, as a prisoner of war, the emperor did not feel in a position to proceed with such negotiations. When Bismarck inquired who at the moment represented the public power of France, he was referred to the government in Paris. After an hour's conversation inside the house, the emperor sat down on a small bench before the door and invited Bismarck to share it with him. He deplored the misfortune of this war and emphasized that he had not desired it but had been forced into it by the pressure of French public opinion. "I did not consider it my task," Bismarck writes, "to point out in this moment that what the Emperor called public opinion was only the artificial product of a few ambitious and politically bornés cliques of the French press. I re" Not as pure history but as truthful histoire romancié, Alfred Neumann's two volumes, Another Caesar and Gaudy Empire, are among the few that render justice to the neveu de THomme. 12 The letter is published in Das Staatsarchiv, XIX, 197 sqq.; Die gesammelten Werke, VI Β, 467 sqq. 13 Denkwürdigkeiten, II, 200-201; English, Memoirs of Prince Chlodwig of HohçnloheSchillingsfürst, II, 185.

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plied only that in Germany nobody had wanted the war, particularly not Your Majesty, and the Spanish question had not for the German government constituted any interest worth a war." Later in the day the emperor, with an escort of honor, moved to Gastle Bellevue near Fresnois to meet King William. The high officers, whose courage, soldierly virtues, and dignity Bismarck praises, were all released on their word of honor. It was typical of Bismarck that he brought up the question of peace at once; as in the war of 1866, he was anxious to terminate hostilities as soon as possible. The longer the war lasted, the greater was the danger of seeing the cauchemar des coalitions become reality, the greater was the fear that wounds would be inflicted on the enemy which would make a later peaceful understanding more difficult. The brave struggle of the newborn republic in 1870 and 1871 is a matter of general knowledge. It is less generally realized that a democratic republic is no more and no less the so-called "natural" expression of the people of France than it is of the people of Germany. Nor is it a particular merit for a people if it is republican. Republicanism is natural for countries without historico-monarchical traditions of their own, or for countries whose imperial traditions of freedom, like Switzerland, could not possibly stand for a particularistic monarchy. And it is also natural (that is, historically determined ) that the dynastic idea is no longer an integrating factor, and that any artificial restoration of dynastic-hereditary monarchies would be bound to fail.14 But one should abandon the unthinking notion that a republic per se is something superior to monarchy. The things that count in any state are history and content. From the beginning the Third Republic was torn by dissension and by party strife. The revolt of the Commune against the Bordeaux ( and then the Versailles) government brought events of shocking violence, and was an experience unique in the history of the Continent. The number of dead is estimated at thirty thousand; the number of "missing" was at least fifty thousand; and additional thousands were deported to New Caledonia. While the siege of Paris, which began barely three weeks after Sedan, was still going on, at Versailles on January 18, 1871, King William of Prussia was proclaimed German emperor. The negotiations for the union of the South German states with the North German Confederation had been concluded on November 23, 1870. The German Reich had been brought into being. The formal offer of the imperial crown to William had come from King Ludwig II of Bavaria. If at first that monarch had proposed that the crown i t Albert Guérard sees as one of the reasons for the fall of Napoleon III the fact that he tried to impose dynastic inheritance upon the system of Caesarian democracy which he represented. Napoleon III, p. 292.

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should alternate between his house and the Hohenzollem, it was not from political ambition. It was rather that he was filled with a natural sense of his rank, and he felt that the Wittelsbachs, who had given to the ancient empire more than one ruler, were entitled to the diadem more than was the house of Brandenburg, which had risen to sovereign status comparatively late in German history. Ludwig's personal representative in Versailles was Count Max von Holnstein, a descendant of a legitimized son of the Wittelsbach Charles VII. Artfully Bismarck had employed his own historic connections with the Wittelsbachs to induce Ludwig to make the offer. In a toast to the king of Bavaria, at Versailles, he had said, "His Majesty the King will find in me as long as I live as devoted a servant as if I still were his vassal."15 In a private letter to Ludwig he had reminded him of the five centuries of relationship between the Bismarcks and the Bavarian house, for one of the Bismarck estates had been bestowed on the family by Margrave Ludwig of Brandenburg, son of Ludwig the Bavarian.1· In his official letter of November 27, transmitted by Count Holnstein, Bismarck had written: "In regard to the German imperial question, it is, according to my respectful consideration, of the utmost importance that the initiative be taken by no one other than Your Majesty, and particularly not by the parliament. The office would be impaired if it did not owe its origin to the free and wellconsidered initiative of the mightiest prince joining the confederation. I have taken the liberty of giving to Count Holnstein, upon his request, a draft of a proclamation to be addressed to my most gracious King, and, with the necessary changes, to the other confederates. Underlying it is the idea which fills the minds of all German tribes: the German Emperor is their fellow countryman, the King of Prussia their neighbor. It is the German title which signifies that the rights connected with it emanate from the free transfer of the German princes and tribes." 11 The obstacles to the imperial proclamation remained considerable until the very last. Old King William wanted at first to have nothing of it and called the imperial title scornfully the rank of "Brevet Major." Memories of the older Prussia arose again; Frederick the Great and the Great Elector had fought vigorously against the imperial authority. Crown Prince Frederick William, on the other hand, objected at first because, as Bismarck relates, "His Royal Highness had been persuaded by the ideas of some of the political fantasts to whom he lent his ear, that the heritage of the "Roman Empire resurrected by Charlemagne had been a misfortune for Germany." He would have preferred the title "King of the Germans," at the same time reducing the kings of Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg to their historic ducal rank and title. But he finally yielded to Bismarck's arguments. A last difficulty arose when King William obstinately declared that, if emperor ι» Kobell, König Ludwig II und Fürst Bismarck im Jahre 1870, p. 41. " Mittnacht, Erinnerungen an Bismarck, Neue Folge, pp. 20 sq. " Die gesammelten Werke, Vol. XIV, Part 2, p. 801.

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at all, then "emperor of Germany," not "German emperor." The distinction may sound trivial, but it was of great importance. T h e title "emperor of Germany" would have implied the claim to immediate sovereignty over the non-Prussian parts of Germany and personal sovereignty over the princes, two things they would never have conceded. According to King L u d w i g s offer, the king of Prussia would exercise only "presidiai rights," and would have in connection with those rights the title of "German emperor." " T h e difficulty was finally overcome by the grand duke of Baden; he proclaimed William I neither as "emperor of Germany," nor as "German emperor," but as "Emperor William." T h e title "German emperor" remained in the constitution, and William from then on raised no further objections. H e was, however, so angry with his chancellor that on January 18, the very birthday of the empire, when he stepped down from the platform of the princes, he ostentatiously passed Bismarck without shaking hands with him. T h e French guns of the beleaguered city thundered their "greetings" for the birthday celebration. T h e war was by no means over. And throughout its course, Bismarck complains, the military tried to keep him entirely out of the game. He was excluded from all military councils, a course the generals had agreed upon at the very outbreak of the war. They intended to see to it, Bismarck says, that no new Nikolsburg should come to pass this time. It was their theory that "the minister of foreign affairs should receive word only after the high command considers the time at hand to close the Temple of Janus. But in the double face of Janus there already is found a warning for the government not to look only towards the theater of war." While it is the task of the military to destroy the enemy's army, it remains the duty of the government to look towards peace. And this political consideration must necessarily influence the conduct of the war. T h e government must also see to it that no additional international complications arise, and must decide upon the best moment for the conclusion of peace. This purpose requires political knowledge which is "usually not available to the military." A state, Bismarck concludes in so many polite words, which takes its political directives from the military is bound for destruction. 19 After the capitulation of Paris on January 28, 1871, Bismarck at once made possible free election of a French national assembly. H e considered it to be to the interests of Germany and of Europe that a new, stable, and generally recognized French state should emerge to make peace and to assert itself against the internal subversive forces. T h e national assembly at Bordeaux accepted the peace terms on March 1, by a vote of 546 to 107. These included cession of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which had been taken from the German empire by the Valois 18 The facts and quotations in this paragraph are drawn principally from Gedanken und Erinnerungen. See especially Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 324-25, 327 sqq. »· Ibid., pp. 312-14.

HALL OF MIRRORS 323 and the Bourbons, and an indemnity of six billion francs—a sum which, due to the intervention of the Empress Augusta, was reduced to five billion. The treaty of peace was signed at Frankfurt-am-Main on May 10." Clamor for reannexation of Alsace and at least part of Lorraine had been raised in the German press as early as September, 1870. But there were also many voices among the liberals and especially among labor groups who opposed such plans or felt that, without asking the population itself, no transfer of territory should be effected. Bismarck was only reluctantly won over to the reannexation designs. A second Nikolsburg would have been much more to his liking, although the first had so far failed to reconcile Austria—an argument in the hands of the opponents of a "soft peace." He was, and remained, decidedly opposed to annexation of French-speaking territory and therefore did not want Metz and the surrounding country. It was Moltke who insisted on Metz "for strategic reasons." Such strategic reasons, because they are necessarily based on the war just past, are about the worst possible basis for a peace treaty. In the next war, which may be promoted by the unwise treaty, strategy is likely to be entirely different, so that the reasons of the past are no longer of avail. Bismarck could console himself with thinking that he had at least succeeded in preventing the inclusion of Belfort and its territory in the province of Alsace. Had Alsace and Lorraine been taken back from France in the second Peace of Paris in 1815, the change might have been accepted without much resentment. Since the provinces were the spoils of aggression against the weakened German empire, their return after the second fall of the great conqueror was historically justified. Certainly no voices in non-French Europe would have called it a moral wrong and thereby have fanned the flames of the French policy of revanche. In 1871, on the other hand, it is most likely that a plebiscite would have shown a vast majority, even among German-speaking Alsatians and Lorrainians, for the continued union with France. This probability Bismarck frankly admitted in his address before the German Reichstag on May 2, 1871. But he expressed the hope that the population could be won for Germany by patience and by humane government.21 20 The duke de Gramont had indicated to the Russian chargé d'affaires in Paris that in case of French victory the minimum demands to be made by France would have been : ( 1 ) reduction of Prussia to her pre-1866 borders; ( 2 ) cession of the Saar coal basin to France; ( 3 ) payment of the costs of war to France and restitution to Austria of the costs of war (of 1866); ( 4 ) restoration of the dispossessed princes (the king of Hanover, the prince elector of Hesse, and the duke of Nassau); ( 5 ) enlarging the territories of the medium-sized German states at Prussia's expense; and ( 6 ) setting up state groups in Germany to shatter Prussian hegemony permanently. Letter of Prince Henry VII of Reuss, Prussian ambassador at St. Petersburg, to Bismarck, August 12, 1870 (Hermann Oncken, Die RheinpoUtik Kaiser Napoleons III von 1863 bis 1870, III, 526-27). Besides making these plans, Gramont had (again according to Prince Henry VII of Reuss) offered Danzig to Russia as the price of neutrality; he had also offered all Schleswig to Denmark (Friis, Det Nordstesvigske Sp0rgsmaal, 1864-1879, II, 498). 21 Die gesammelten Werke, XI, 1Θ3 sqq.

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To force France to dismantle any fortification on her soil Bismarck considered intolerable to French honor. Nor were any other limitations of armament imposed on France. A very short time after the war the country was able to build a standing army, which was the most modern in Europe, and in 1914 also was the largest except for Russia's.22 On September 16, 1873, the last German soldier left French territory. The indemnity of war had been paid off. French patriotism and the unhampered economic and political recovery of the country had made possible the rapid payment of the sum, after the terms of payment had been modified in June, 1872. " In 1914, France could boast of an army of 910,000 men with 1,325,000 reservists, while Germany had 870,000 men and 1,180,000 reservists, according to General Edmond Alphonse Buat ( Die deutsche Armee im Weltkriege; ihre Grösse und ihr Verfall, pp. 17, 19). The Russian army was almost twice the size of Germany's.

26 THE STATESMAN OF EUROPE The statesman can never create anything of his own accord; he can only wait and listen until he hears the footstep of God resounding through events; then to leap forward and cling to the hem of His wide garment, that is alll BISMARCK, in the Hamburger Nachrichten, 1886. of the position of the unified Reich, both externally and internally, remained Bismarck's chief problem. Had he met the fate of Count Cavour, who died a few weeks after the proclamation of the kingdom of Italy, it is doubtful whether, in the adverse flood of events, European peace and German unity could have been maintained. A just appraisal of Bismarck must recognize that, with all the unnecessary as well as all the inevitable mistakes of his home policy, the nineteen years of his chancellorship yet laid a solid base for progressive democratic and social institutions, and it must acknowledge that his genius in foreign policy, notable for flexibility, thorough education, and knowledge of men and history, helped ensure for Europe one of the longest periods of peace it has ever enjoyed. At any rate, the heart of Europe enjoyed peace and a cessation of international conflicts for forty years, while, on the borders and outside, the Russians, the English, the Americans, the Spaniards, the Italians, the Turks, and the French, not to mention all the colonial peoples as well, suffered wars and conflicts in plenty. Since the beginning of his official career Bismarck had regarded Russia as the main foreign political problem, and had looked on sound relations with that wide eastern empire as the very pivot of German and Continental peace. Germany's central position rendered her sensitive to all foreign political constellations. A cool, let alone an unfriendly, policy towards Russia would necessarily have driven her into the waiting arms of France. The cauchemar des coalitions had by no means been laid. To the contrary! Yet there were in Russian policy also limits beyond which decrease in the international weight of France could not be tolerated. Those limits had been reached with the Treaty of Frankfurt. Therefore, attention to Russia now required that Germany undertake a gentle policy of gradual reconciliation with France. For this reason, too, Bismarck helped the Third Republic toward self-consolidation—a policy very different from that adopted by France towards the German Republic after 1918. As Georg Rosen has shown, Bismarck's support to the republic was also motivated by the belief that as a liberal-radical state France would not T H E CONSOLIDATION

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appear to Russian eyes as a suitable partner.1 This theory proved entirely wrong, and Bismarck himself might have known better. He himself had never hesitated to accept all kinds of allies regardless of their political tinge. To satisfy French national ambitions while diverting them from AlsaceLorraine, Bismarck encouraged the building of a French African empire. An Italian proposal that the French be opposed in Morocco he in 1884 declined, giving as his reason: 'The observation that Germany not only wants Metz and Strassburg, but also envies the French the chance of gaining success beyond the sea as indemnification for the Rhine frontier, and that France finds Germany standing as an enemy in her path would greatly strengthen the party of revenge, increase the national hatred of the French toward us, sharpen their energy against us, and hasten the outbreak of a new French war. I do not know what could be dangled before our eyes as the prize of a possible victory. Even if victorious, such a war would be a great calamity, and I could not undertake the responsibility of increasing the probabilities of its outbreak." 2 The new German ambassador to France in 1874 was Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe. He and Bismarck were men so different in background, career, and upbringing that they might have become bitter enemies had they not been bound by ties of mutual respect and of loyalty to the cause of the state. While Bismarck had grown up as a Junker, with the traditions of the particularistic Prussian kingdom, Hohenlohe, who was a prince of the Sacred Roman Empire and a descendant of the Saxon emperors, was deeply rooted in the proud and sovereign traditions of the universal idea. He was never a "subject" or, like Bismarck, a paladin of his sovereign. To a man who, like Stein, had the whole of Germany as his home state patriotism could mean nothing; Hohenlohes patriotism was that of the Reich. His Ghibelline conscience implied awareness of the supranational community of Occidental history. French culture and English customs were as close to him as were the German. Queen Victoria's half sister Feodora, nee Princess Leiningen, was his uncle's wife. His brother Gustav, later Cardinal Hohenlohe, was a high dignitary of the church universal. Among the friends of his boyhood and youth were Albert, later the prince consort of Victoria, the heirs to many of the small German thrones, and my granduncle Prince Wilhelm zu Loewenstein. Hohenlohe, himself a profound thinker on religious and philosophical questions and a loyal Catholic, was yet extremely tolerant and disliked what he called "ultramontane clericalism." Prince Hohenlohe had studied the European law of nations, criminal law, psychology, literature, church law, history, and the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel at the Universities of Bonn and Heidelberg. 1 Die Stellungnahme der Politik Bismarcks zur Frage der Staatsform in Frankreich von 1871 bis 1890; auf Grund der Aktenpublikation des Auswärtigen Amts, pp. 23 sqq. 2 Bismarck, Berlin, to Ambassador von Keudell in Rome, June 26, 1884. Die Grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette, 1871-1914, III, 412, No. 679.

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Bismarck felt the distinction between his own origin and that of Hohenlohe deeply. In 1895 when Hohenlohe, then chancellor, came to visit him at Friedrichsruh, Bismarck remarked that Hohenlohe's position was so much more favorable than his own had been, because he had been bom a prince of the empire instead of being made a Prussian prince by patent of the king in March, 1871, to the distaste of the jealous Junkers.3 In his memoirs Bismarck made a similar observation that the title of "Excellency" lay within the customary sphere and seemed to his Junker friends pardonable, whereas "Serene Highness" aroused anger. And he made the comment—only too justified—that one could afford to be a count when only well to do but to be a prince one needed to be wealthy.4 The two men faced each other like symbols of the North and the South, particularism grown into Germany and universalism allied to the cause of the nation. Of the two Bismarck was the man of genius. In his face as in his work appeared the traces of turmoil, of passionate struggle, of originality, and of self-assertion. Hohenlohe, bom to a social plane so high that all the merits of achievement could scarcely take him higher, lacked the force of the fascinating and the unusual, of the extraordinary and the adventurous. In his youth, however, Hohenlohe had manifested a wider range of vision than did Bismarck. On the suggestion of Wilhelm Loewenstein, who himself had entered the Prussian diplomatic service, Hohenlohe came to Berlin in 1841 and, like Bismarck, joined the civil administration. Prussia, the state of promise even when it was under a reactionary regime, naturally drew the South German dynasts. In Berlin and Potsdam Hohenlohe became well acquainted not only with Prince William of Prussia and the whole royal house but also with the political and social structure of the country. An entry in his diary in June, 1844, shows his clear-sighted, analytical understanding. The Stein reforms of 1807-1811 had, he finds, awakened a liberal spirit which from Prussia had taken its course over the whole of Germany; this was the spirit which, after the Congress of Vienna, the other governments considered so dangerous. The frustration of constitutional hopes he regarded as a very serious matter. "To these disturbing elements," he writes in his diary, "were added many economic evils," the pitiful plight of labor in Silesia, for example. "There is a general want of principle and all-pervading lack of vigour, or rather of system, among the supreme administrative authorities. . . . The nobility is brought into contempt by the misdeeds of individuals. . . . We dare not shut our eyes to the fact that on the slightest provocation we may have a rebellion. One movement leads to another; the military are untrustworthy, and there is nothing to check the stream if it bursts its banks and rushes over meadow and field. . . . A time will come when birth will no » January 14. Hohenlohe, Denkwürdigkeiten, II, 519; English, Memoirs of Prince Chlodwig of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, II, 47Θ. 4 Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 340-47.

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longer be of importance, when high and low will be forced to contend in open discussion. It is the duty of the aristocracy to arm themselves, not with sword and shield, but with the word of power drawn from science." No revolutionary but a devout believer in national and liberal progress, he in November, 1848, accepted a mission as ambassador of the Reich central power established in Frankfurt by the March Revolution. He was sent to Rome, Florence, and Athens. "I was warned at the same time, by the older and more experienced diplomats," he writes, "that the new Empire was not likely to last long," but "I did not believe them. I hoped that the PrussoGerman idea would prevail." s The years after the failure of the revolution could be nothing but unfavorable for a man who had been an ambassador of Frankfurt. Bavaria viewed him with suspicion, for he had endorsed a central power which threatened Bavarian particularistic interests. Practically an exile, he spent his time in Paris, Russia, England, and Rome, widening his field of vision on international politics. His acquaintance with Louis Napoléon, and his intimate contacts with the British royal house belong to that period. But the apparent hopelessness of the national cause made him tum instead to the cause of South German federalism, a step that proved of great importance. For it was from this Southern platform that later, after his reconciliation with the Wittelsbachs, he could as Bavarian minister president take a hand in making national policy. Here, too, he and Bismarck went different ways. Bismarck, the Prussian particularist and counterrevolutionary of 1848, developed towards German national liberalism while Hohenlohe, who stood for unity in the revolutionary period and was always Reich-conscious, found the soil for his political growth in South German federalism. The conflict between the Northern and the Southern mentality marked all the stages of the building of the new Germany. But nothing is more asinine than the cry that unification was the Prussianization of Germany by Bismarck and the Junkers. Not until 1876 did the Prussian conservatives accept the new empire at all, and even then only outwardly and grudgingly. They still felt that the united Germany had intruded upon the isolationism of the provincial privileges. Bismarck after the days of the North German Confederation had no more venomous enemies than the Junkers. The Kreuz-Zeitung, organ of the Conservatives, who were his own friends, his neighbors, and the former associates whose party he had helped to found, considered him a sort of traitor who had sold out good old Prussia to atheism, parliamentarianism, and—Germany. « The two quotations are from Denkwürdigkeiten, I, 25-26, 46; English, I, 25-26, 46. It is interesting to note that on the eve of the Revolution of 1848, he had warned in a memoir "On the Political Condition of Germany, its Danger and Means of Defense" that the "real peril lies, not in the parties of the Communists, Socialists, and Radicals, who have existed in every State and in all ages," but rather in the stultification of the people by an arrogant bureaucracy (a complaint familiar from the writings of Baron vom Steinl). November and December, 1847. Ibid., pp. 39, 41; English, pp. 40, 41.

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Perhaps the following entry by Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe in his diary, in December, 1898, when he had been Reich chancellor for four years, will illustrate the true North-South problem: "When I am thus amongst Prussian Excellencies the contrast between North and South Germany becomes very perceptible to me. South German Liberalism is no match for the young aristocrats. They are too numerous, too powerful, and have the kingdom and the Army too much on their side. Moreover the Centre goes with them. Everything which I have seen these four years is made clear by this antithesis. The Germans are right in regarding my presence in Berlin as a guarantee of unity. As I laboured from 1866 to 1870 for the union of South and North, so I must strive now to keep Prussia attached to the Empire. For all these gentlemen don't care a fig for the Empire and would rather give it up to-day than to-morrow." " The service as ambassador at Paris (from 1874 to 1885) of a man with such international views and such a liberal record as Hohenlohe was calculated to promote the necessary French-German reconciliation. His farewell address in Berlin on April 24, 1874, significantly showed his own views on France and his mission. It was his greatest pride, he said, that the representatives of the people had placed him during all sessions of the legislature in the second highest place of honor in the Reichstag (namely, the vice-presidency of parliament). T h i s fact is the best endowment for an Ambassador who is called to represent his Emperor and his country at the capital of a nation to which we, the elected representatives of the German people, must acknowledge our debt, inasmuch as they were the first of all the people on the Continent to express those great ideas of political liberty on which the modern State is founded."7 Hohenlohes memoirs of his Paris years contain much valuable inside information. It is worth-while to read how his endeavors to reach a FrenchGerman rapprochement received the full support of the imperial government as well as that of many leading French statesmen and social leaders. Most prominent among them was old Adolphe Thiers, whom the ambassador met soon after his arrival. When an attempt was made against Bismarck's life at Bad Kissingen, Thiers came to express his sympathy. For a long time, he said, he had had friendly feelings toward Bismarck, whose behavior during the negotiations of peace had only increased that cordiality; Bismarck had made things as easy as possible for the French. Je ne dis pas cela à mes compatriotes qui trouvent qu'on a été beaucoup trop dur. (I would not say this to my compatriots, who consider the treatment much too harsh. ) In the *lbid., II, 534; English, II, 489. 7 Ibid., pp. 117-18; English, p. 108. Hohenlohe was also cordial towards the republic

of the United States, as was shown in his enthusiastic toast given at a dinner of the American colony in Berlin, in 1871 (ibid., p. 77; English, p. 7 2 ) . The American ambassador, George Bancroft, liked it so well that he said he would submit it to President Grant

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opinion of Thiers, Bismarck had done all he could, and for this Thiers was grateful." Shortly before his death in 1877 the old French statesman expressed the opinion that so far France and Germany had been like two greyhounds chained to each other and pulling into opposite directions. But now they were finding a common way and could agree with one another. 9 Once again, the old idea of the united Carolingian empire was echoing dimly in the republican halls of France. The pivot of Bismark's security system turned out to be the German-Austrian alliance of 1879, widened to become the Triple Alliance when Italy joined in 1882. It was Linked to Russia by various open and secret treaties. Keeping France from the opportunity to find a powerful ally, which she needed for any possible revenge plan, while at the same time preserving correct relations with England rounded out and secured the protective wall in the West. Count Julius Andrassy, a "traitor" and exile of 1848, had been in charge of Austrian foreign affairs since December, 1871. With this excellent and liberal Hungarian magnate in the saddle, and with Count Beust, the proponent of Habsburg interference in internal German affairs out of office, there vanished the danger that the coalition of the Seven Years War—Austria, France, and Russia versus Prussia—might be renewed. Now, finally, Nikolsburg could bear fruit. But this system of alliances, like many things undertaken and achieved by Bismarck, was only a second-best solution dictated by embarrassment and by emergency. Originally, the triple league planned by Bismarck immediately after the Frankfurt peace was an alliance of the three emperors, the German, the Austrian, and the Russian. Conversations between the three monarchs for this purpose took place when they met in Berlin in September, 1872. Italy was to join in some fashion. What better means could there be of avoiding the old coalition, Bismarck reasoned, than to bind Austria and Russia like a chemical compound? After the "ingratitude" of Austria towards Russia during the Crimean War, relations between the two empires had been strained. Later they improved and reached a stage of mere coolness. Binding them both to Germany would put Germany into a controlling position. Russia as well as Austria would enjoy guarantees against all Western attacks and—against each other! Germany could take care lest AustroRussian relations should deteriorate. Bismarck hoped that Germany would never be forced by circumstances to choose between Austria and Russia. Success promised at the beginning of this policy. Bismarck possessed in Russia a treasure of confidence, and Czar S July 16, 1874. Ibid., p. 129; English, p. 121. 9 T h e London Times, in a report from its Paris correspondent in July, 1883, summarized Hohenlohe's mission in a few words by calling him "that great and honest friend of peace and mutual toleration, who has for France all the affection consistent with his position and duty." Ibid., p. 337; English, p. 307.

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Alexander II was a nephew of Emperor William I. Austria had felt isolated since the defeat of Napoleon III and was now glad that Germany bore her no grudge. In 1873, defensive military alliances were concluded between Germany and Russia and between Russia and Austria, while King Victor Emmanuel of Italy during a visit to Berlin sought backing against possible French aspirations. Till the death of Pope Pius IX, Bismarck seems to have been just as fearful as was Hohenlohe that clerical international combinations of Catholic powers might be formed against a Germany headed by a Protestant dynasty. In such a combination, the Habsburg might perhaps have used religious pretexts for political aims, a course which would have been no innovation in history. To bind Austria firmly would also eliminate this possible danger. Russia was Orthodox, and thus in her policy "ultramontane" motives did not prevail. However, an ultramontane France, once Austrian support was secured, could not fail to exert a political attraction on Russia too. Pan-Slavism, which was rising among the intelligentsia, clearly headed in the French direction; here was one reason more for keeping Austria and France apart. The first disturbing ripple in German-Russian relations appeared in the "war scare" of 1875, which was provoked on the one side by an increase of 144,000 men in the French army, and on the other by an article in a Berlin newspaper entitled "Is War in Sight?" When the czar and Minister of State Prince Gorchakov were visiting Berlin, the minister issued a communiqué saying, "Now peace is safe." The obvious implication was that Russia had prevented a war—an implication that was wholly unwarranted and was no more than an expression of Gorchakov's vanity. In this connection, Bismarck also asserted that a "preventive" war against France was entirely alien to his intentions. A war against France would inevitably forge a most dangerous coalition against the young German empire, which "thereby would tread the path on which the First and Second French Empires, following a continuous policy of war and prestige, had marched to their ruin." 10 This was warmly upheld by the old emperor, who wrote: "In order to wage war successfully you must have all noble-minded men and countries give sympathy to your side while casting stones of disapproval at the one who has unjustly caused the conflict. This was the secret of the enthusiasm in Germany in 1870. He who takes up arms unjustly will have public opinion against him, he will find no allies, no friendly neutrals—in fact, no neutrals at all, but only enemies!" 11 To steer a course of peace, after 1871, in the midst of aggressive power politics was for the statesman of the empire of mid-Europe a truly gigantic task. To show preference for one of the camps would end by aligning either Russia and France or England and Russia against Germany. If the latter, 10

Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 364. 11 May 16, 1875. Die Grosse Volitile der europäischen Kabinette, 1871-1914, I, 282, No. 181.

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then France would almost certainly also have joined the anti-German coalition. All these dangers could be neutralized only by attempting to create more "chemical compounds." Late in his career (in 1887), Bismarck succeeded in binding England and Italy in the Mediterranean Entente, which was pledged to maintain the status quo in that area. Austria became a partner to it a few months later. Before the Berlin Congress of 1878, a Russo-British war had seemed imminent. During Russia's war with Turkey, British pressure on Russia had increased, the British navy had been dispatched to Constantinople, and general war hysteria, symbolized by the original Jingo song, had swept the British Isles. It was Bismarck who did all in his power to prevent the conflict. For this peace effort, and a new one at the time of British-Russian conflict in Afghanistan in 1885, Bismarck was severely criticized, especially by Baron von Holstein, the "Gray Eminence" of the German foreign office, who later was to play so unfortunate a role in the conduct of German affairs. He and others felt that Bismarck should have allowed the British-Russian conflicts to take their course. Bismarck felt, however, that any major war would ultimately work to the disadvantage of Germany. As the "honest broker" of the Berlin Congress he had stilled the danger, and in so doing had even alienated Russia to a certain extent; the czar's government felt badly treated, although Bismarck had secured for Russia important and permanent advantages. The price of peace for Germany was a severely felt drop in Russian friendship and charges of "ingratitude"; in view of the friendly Russian attitude in the wars of 1866 and 1870, the eastern empire had expected favorable conditions from the hands of Bismarck. Consequently the choice which Bismarck had dreaded had to be made in the following year. Germany entered an alliance with Austria. Austrian interests in the Balkans had also been made secure at the Berlin Congress, a fact which paved the way for closer German-Austrian rapprochement. But it was still not to the interest of Germany to form an exclusive Austro-German alliance any more than it had been in 1876, when Russia had asked bluntly if Germany would remain neutral in case of a Russo-Austrian war. The question implied the problem of partitioning the Habsburg monarchy, a matter which Bismarck had refused to consider in 1866 and which he was even less willing to entertain ten years later. His program was, in a word, Nikolsburg. At the same time he could not afford to break with Russia. Nor could he stand idly by if either or both of the two powers should be seriously weakened. In the Crimean War he had considered it disastrous that Russia was brought into mortal danger. A Russo-Austrian or Russo-British war might easily produce even worse results. Yet the impasse seemed almost hopeless. Germany, he later wrote to Lord Salisbury, must refuse to become England's Continental sword but must also refuse to tí lerate the destruction of Austria. A Russia defeated with the acquiescence

STATESMAN OF EUROPE 333 of Germany would make treaties of friendship and revenge with the victors. A defeated Austria would leave Germany at the mercy of a Russia torn by inner crises and therefore unpredictable also in its foreign policy." Bismarck's reply, given after unsuccessful attempts to shelve the whole problem, was therefore evasive. Germany wished for peace and neutrality, but could not remain passive if one of her Eastern neighbors should be completely defeated. This decision was thus made, in courteous terms, for Austria. It deflected the Russian thunderstorm from Austria to Turkey and prevented a major war. But another result was that Russia took up secret negotiations with that very Austria she had wanted to destroy, and secured her neutrality in the war against Turkey; these dealings laid the groundwork for Austria's acquisition of Bosnia and Herzegovina, begun in 1878, and rendered definitive in 1908. This territorial gain, in turn, fostered Serbian and Pan-Slavic feelings and plots and thus acted as one of the main causes contributing to the outbreak of the World War. In August, 1879, after the Berlin Congress, Czar Alexander II sent to his imperial uncle, William I, a letter couched in strong words and containing veiled threats of war. Thereupon the king—whether with or without Bismarck's consent is not quite clear—left for Russia to conciliate his nephew in personal conversations. But the specter of isolation rose again, as in 1875. Russia alienated, leaning towards France, and unwilling to deal with England, was the opponent after the Berlin Congress, and Austria seemed perhaps to be drifting away. Count Julius Andrassy's resignation from office was imminent. His successor would be a conservative; a clerical, Slavic government in Vienna was in the offing, a government which might draw definitely close to Russia, might reconstitute the old anti-German coalition, or might create a new and worse one. Thus the only logical, indeed the only possible, move for Bismarck in his anxious efforts to maintain the peace of Europe was to undertake an alliance with Austria. Emperor William I seems to have objected heartily and expressed himself forcefully before going to Russia. It was only by using all means of pressure—threat of resignation, intercession of the crown prince, of Hohenlohe, Moltke, and the whole ministry of state—that Bismarck received permission to negotiate with Count Andrassy and to conclude an agreement. He found Andrassy willing to accept the alliance when they met in Gastein at the end of August of that year. But neither Francis Joseph nor Andrassy wanted a mere general defensive alliance—the only sort that Emperor William was willing to approve, because he feared alienating Russia. William, indeed, as he later told Hohenlohe, thought that Bismarck wanted to avenge himself for the personal attack on him in a letter of Alexander II 12

November 22, 1887. Ibid., IV, 376 sqq. Already in 1879 Bismarck had expressed these ideas in a very similar manner to King Ludwig II of Bavaria. See his letter from Gastein, September 10. Die gesammelten Werke, Vol. XIV, Part 2, pp. 905-7.

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by forging an anti-Russian alliance of Germany, England, France, and Austria. Hohenlohe, too, had at first been apprehensive of the Austrian alliance, but came to favor it. Once Andrassy was out of office, Russia and Austria, he argued as he tried to win over the emperor, might make an agreement at Germany's expense. In France, the pro-British ministry of William Henry Waddington might soon be overturned with Gambetta's seekers after revenge taking power, attempting to make contact with the Russian insurrectionists, and plunging Europe into the sea of revolution. Thus, the alliance with Austria was in reality a boon to Russia, for it helped her to keep the revolution in check, while Germany could prevent Austria from joining an anti-Russian coalition." And all these contradictory dangers and possibilities existed in decades that wore an outward semblance of peaceful "normalcy." The treaty of alliance, that document which was momentous in the history of the world, was signed in October, 1879. In its original form, it was directed against the Russian menace; Germany and Austria agreed to lend each other military aid in case of a Russian attack on either. In case of attack by a third power upon one of them, the ally would maintain friendly neutrality, unless Russia was brought into the game—then again armed support would be called for. Thus, against an attack by the French ( Germany's main concern) the treaty contained weaker safeguards than against one by Russia ( Austria's chicf problem ). In November, upon the insistence of William I, the treaty was communicatcd to Czar Alexander. It should be added at once, however, that Bismarck was not overfearful of really losing Russian friendship through the treaty, for already the master weaver had spun new threads. Baron Nicolai Karlovich de Giers, soon to be Russian foreign minister (he was appointed in April, 1882), was pro-German in his policy and was looking for peace. He was already in touch with Bismarck, and there was some hope that tension would abate—a hope that was soon justified by fulfillment. In Austria, the treaty of alliance was acclaimed with outbursts of popular rejoicing. When Bismarck went to Vienna to meet Emperor Francis Joseph, huge crowds in Salzburg, Linz, and Vienna itself demonstrated jubilantly. Bismarck almost feared that their enthusiasm might anger the Austrian government. Conservatives and liberals alike hailed the sealing of the newold friendship: the traditions of a thousand years of common history, the grossdeutschen longings of 1848, and the sense of popular and historic destiny united to form one gigantic stream. For perhaps the first time in his official career, Bismarck was "popular." For Austria, the treaty, apart from the guarantees it gave in the case of a Russian attack, meant assurance of her territorial status quo. Thereby it affirmed in practice the "small-Germany" solution and renewed Germany's >3 September 22, 1879. Denkwürdigkeiten,

II, 276-77; English, II, 254-55.

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renunciations regarding the Austrian Germans. For the latter, the alliance had therefore no advantage. The Slav influences in Vienna were now no longer checked by consideration for the wishes of the German element. Naturally this effect in tum acted as cause and produced the earliest pre-war movements of extreme German nationalism among the people in German-Austria and the Sudeten territory of the kingdom of Bohemia. This nationalism, violently anticlerical, was also tinged by racist notions, developed as a reaction against the overwhelming influence of other peoples. The process offers an interesting illustration of the working of historic dialectic, since the German racist concept was brought to birth within the multinational Habsburg monarchy. Bismarck, who had the rare gift of remaining cool and detached in the midst of popular hatred or enthusiasm, had no illusions about the ultimate value of the German-Austrian alliance. "In the last century," he wrote, "it had already grown dangerous to rely on the coercive power of the texts of alliances as soon as the circumstances under which they had been written had changed. But today it is hardly possible for a great government to put the power of its country at the full disposal of another friendly state if the conviction of the people is opposed. Hence the text of an agreement, if it includes the obligation to go to war, no longer provides the guaranty it gave at the time of the cabinet wars,' which were fought with armies of 30 to 60,000 men." The only firm foundation of treaties is in common interest and in mutual confidence that neither party will become more dependent on the other than is compatible with his own interest. "No great nation can ever be induced to sacrifice its existence upon the altar of loyalty to an agreement once a choice between the two has become compulsory. The principle ultra posse nemo obligator cannot be voided by any treaty clause." 14 There can be no doubt that in 1914 Bismarck would have dropped Austria, which was much shaken by the many centrifugal nationalistic forces, rather than be dragged by her into a world war through which Germany had nothing to gain and which was fought for interests that were not her own. Never would his policy have permitted Austria, for reasons of suicidal Nibelungentreue "to rattle the saber of the German empire"—to use a phrase which Emperor William II coined but did not heed as a guide in directing his own course of action. Italy's adherence to the German-Austrian system could be hailed as a further step in overcoming dangerous rivalries. Both Germany and Italy had been compelled to fight Austria in order to gain national unity. In Italy grievances against Austria still existed. There was much agitation in favor of wresting from Austria the Irredenta, the "unredeemed" Italian territory. A nationalist Italian "fifth column" in the Tirol and in the maritime provinces 14

Gedanken

und Erinnerungen,

in Die gesammelten

Werke,

XV, 408-9.

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promised danger. But Italy and France were rivals for African possessions, and here Bismarck favored France. The Triple Alliance provided him with the means of exercising a calming influence on Italy, outraged after the French occupation of Tunis in 1881. Combining the chemical elements properly before they might bring about an explosion again seemed the wisest policy. But Bismarck had no misconceptions about the ultimate value of the Triple Alliance either. "It was a matter of strategy and was advisable at the time of its conclusion . . ." he explained. "It has been continued from time to time and may be continued still further. No treaty between great powers is safe eternally, and it would be unwise to regard it as a sound basis for meeting all future possibilities. . . . It is no more a perpetual foundation immune to all change than were the many triple and quadruple alliances of the centuries just past, particularly the Holy Alliance and the Charter of the Cerman Confederation. It does not dispense with the watchword: Toujours en vedettel" 15 Czar Alexander II, "the Liberator," who had freed the serfs and had introduced many political, social, and economic reforms, was assassinated by terrorists on March 13, 1881. Negotiations for a revival of the Three Emperors' League were therefore not concluded before June of that year. His successor, Alexander III, was a conservative man who was not friendly to Germany but was averse to international complications. The new treaty was secret. It guaranteed the friendly neutrality of the other two if one of the three contracting powers should get involved in war through the attack by an outside power (exccpt Turkey). It arranged the settlement of pending Balkan questions and of the closing of the Straits, and it defined the Austrian and Russian spheres of interest. The agreement was in April, 1884, renewed for three more years. "Since the Emperor Alexander is regarded as a monarch whose word can be wholly trusted," Bismarck explained, "we mav look upon peace between our two neighbors as secure for years. The danger of a Franco-Russian coalition is also totally eliminated, a circumstance which practically guarantees the pacific attitude of France towards us." 10 Alwavs considering Bismarck's own words on the value of treaties and the manv dangers and frictions in the age of power politics, it can be said indeed that the combination of the Triple Alliance and the Russian treaty was the strongest bulwark of peace Europe had known in a long time. But in 1887 Russia refused to renew the treaty, and the first serious breach had appeared in Bismarck's system of alliances. Troubles over the Bulgarian succession (into the details of which we need not go), had widened the "Ibid., p. 416. 1 6 Memorandum to Emperor William I, Berlin, June 15, 1881. Die Grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette, 1871-1914, III, 175, No. 531.

STATESMAN OF EUROPE 337 Austrian-Russian rift. Once more arose the danger of an alliance which might flank Germany. France had by then completely recovered from the War of 1870. Chauvinism and revenge were rife; General Boulanger, the strongest promoter of the war of revenge, was made minister of war and Georges Clemenceau was leader of the extreme republicans. Obviously, the country was unreconciled and waiting for the proper moment to strike a blow of retaliation. The French military budget had been increased by three billion gold francs within a few years. Tension grew, and in January, 1887, Bismarck expressed fear that at any moment France might attack, relying on her impressive army and on Russian help. Frontier incidents, some of them almost ridiculous in nature ( such as the arrest of a French customs official with the good Alsatian name of Schnaebele), and inflammatory speeches by Boulanger increased the tension. Bismarck demanded an army increase of 40,000 men and received the approval of the Reichstag. Fortunately the danger was once more warded off. Boulanger was expelled from the ministry; the will to war had backfired and had destroyed its chief promoter. Berlin's will to peace, which contrasted sharply with the hysteria along the Seine, finally induced Czar Alexander III again to make an approach to Germany. The result was the secret Reinsurance Treaty, concluded for three years. Next to Bismarck, Baron de Giers could claim most credit for its conclusion. This treaty was perhaps the most famous of Bismarck's career, and it was certainly the most astounding. Though not a full substitute for the then defunct Three Emperors' League, it was, in view of the circumstances, probably the best that could be obtained. Russia and Germany promised friendly neutrality in case of attack upon either by a third power. This agreement, for Germany, meant that she was secure from attack from the rear; for Russia, that Germany would not intervene should Austria attack. The Straits were to remain closed and Turkey was to be urged to make no exception to the advantage of any power. Russia was given a free hand in Bulgaria; an especially secret protocol attached to the secret treaty stated that Germany would help Russia in establishing a "lawful Bulgarian government," that is, a pro-Russian one. Further, should the czaV deem it necessary to undertake the defense of the Straits himself, Germany would lend all moral aid to the project. Thus Russia was covered against Germany's closest ally, Austria-Hungary, bv Germany herself! In 1914, such a clause might have prevented the World War. Austria was also covered against Russia by the Triple Alliance. Thus Bismarck had ensured for Germany's will to peace the opportunity to exercise a moderating influence upon all sides. Treaties are valuable in preventing wars; once war starts, their chief value usually disappears. But Russia was also protected against England, while Bismarck's Mediterranean Entente protected England's Egyptian

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claims against Russia. Most important, the Reinsurance Treaty did away with Russian feelings of isolation. The Reinsurance Treaty even indirectly provided guaranty for France, for in the case of a German attack against her, Bismarck had agreed that Russia should have a free hand. "A man like you," Chancellor von Caprivi later said to Bismarck, "can play with five balls simultaneously, while other people are well advised to limit themselves to one or two." 1T In an address before the Reichstag on January 11,1887, when war seemed imminent and negotiations for the Reinsurance Treaty were still far from concluded, the chancellor could say with obvious justification: "We belong to what old Prince Metternich called the 'satiated states'; we have no desires that could be realized with the sword. . . . Look at the pacific work— this I say to the foreign powers as much as to the Reichstag—of the imperial policy of the last sixteen years. After the Peace of Frankfurt, it was our first desire to preserve general peace as long as possible and to make use of it to consolidate the German Reich. This has not been easy. In the Reichstag itself it was then contended . . . that a situation had been created which probably brought us close to the next war. There was talk of four, five, perhaps even only three years . . . We have made it our primary task to conciliate the states against which we had fought. In the case of Austria, we have succeeded completely. This goal and the desire to achieve it were already dominant in the peace negotiations at Nikolsburg. . . . Neither in the German Confederation nor in the Sacred Roman Empire were relations ever so smooth and so cordial." " Whether peace could be preserved for another period of thirty years, Bismarck continued, no one could foretell. But the best guaranty would lie in a league of Germany, Austria, and Russia. For what interests could Germany possibly have in seeking quarrels with Russia? Certainly, mere Rauflust (pugnacious propensity) could not possibly induce one to look for such difficulties. In this address, as upon many other occasions, his cauchemar des coalitions bred fearful visions of a war more cruel than any before, ending with Germany's defeat. Before his eyes rose the specter of a peace which was like a premonitibn of Versailles or a reappearance of the Treaty of Westphalia. Nikolsburg would be an ideal entirely alien to the victors; their peace would be designed to bleed Germany white. Such a war and such a peace he tried to forestall; his whole alliance system was defensive. A German attack on France would not have set the machinery of alliances into motion; a German attack on Russia (which would to Bismarck have been unthinkable in its criminal stupidity) would at once have brought France IT Eclcardt, Aus den Tagen con Bismarcks Kampf gegen Caprivi, Erinnerungen, p. 53. ι» Die gesammelten Werke, XIII, 209.

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into the fight, and would have made real the danger against which he incessantly struggled. Bismarck's account of the old emperor's death in 1888 has a dramatic impact, which strengthened the sense of foreboding that forever haunted the minds of these two men, the dying sovereign and his loyal chancellor. It was March 8, the day before the emperor's passing. "His Majesty said that he expected me to remain at my post," Bismarck writes, "and assist his successors. . . . I spoke reassuringly, as far as it seemed at all fitting to talk to a dying man about what his successor and I myself would do after his death. Then, thinking of the illness of his son, he exacted the promise from me that I would put my experience at the disposal of the grandson and would remain at his side. . . . I voiced my preparedness to serve his successors with the same zeal as himself. But then delirium set in, bringing fantasies in which his preoccupation with his grandson stood in the foreground. He seemed to think that the prince, who in September, 1886, had visited the czar at Brest-Litovsk, was sitting in my place at his bedside. Suddenly calling me Du he said: "With the Russian emperor you must always keep contact; there no dispute is necessary.' After a long pause the hallucinations vanished, and he dismissed me with the words: Ί shall see you later.' " 19 Behind the specter of the world war, which only a most delicate policy could stave off in the midst of such rivalries in Europe, Asia, and Africa, loomed something else—the socialistic revolution. This Bismarck predicted very clearly. The world war would, he said, push the peoples down to the level of the socialistic republic until the situation would finally force the people to return by violence to monarchical institutions in Caesarian (that is, despotic, "totalitarian") forms. He felt that the monarchies should try to prevent entrance upon this vicious circle. But had he not said himself that for monarchies one needed kings? Bismarck's tragic guilt is the guilt of the age, which was blinded by states and state politics, because the universal idea was in abeyance. Bismarck was not the man to call it back to life. The full meaning of his era was misunderstood until it became obvious that the trembling edifices of the states were commencing to fall, the hollow foundations of "enlightened" society were crumbling. If it were a permissible analogy one might almost say it was just as impossible to keep a genuine, harmonious balance in such a world as it would be to maintain order in the univerce should God withdraw from it; unsupported by the will of the legislator the celestial bodies might stay in their orbits for some time but would finally crash down into the abyss of chaos and nothingness. 18

Gedanken und Erinnerungen,

ibid., XV, 42S-29.

27 THE BLACK AND THE RED To find the right ways and means for fulfilling the social duties [of the state] is a difficult task, but at the same time one of the highest of any commonwealth based on the moral foundation of a Christian people's life. W I L L I A M I, Imperial message of November 17,1881. to the constitution adopted by the Reichstag on April 16,1871, the new empire was "a perpetual union" [ein ewiger Bund] established between His Majesty the King of Prussia, in the name of the North German Confederation, His Majesty the King of Bavaria, His Majesty the King of Württemberg, and the others, "for the protection of the territory of the Confederation, and of the laws of the same as well as for the promotion of the welfare of the German people. This Confederation shall bear the name of the German Empire [Das Deutsche Reich]." And Article 11 provided, "To the King of Prussia shall belong the Presidency of the Confederation, and he shall have the title of German Emperor [Deutscher Kaiser]."1 In essence, the new constitution was the same as that of the North German Confederation, which Bismarck had developed on the basis of the Charter of 1815 and the Frankfurt Constitution of 1849. Thus Germany did not become a centralized state like Italy, but a Bundesstaat, a federal union in which the autonomy of all members was far-reaching and the main South German states enjoyed additional special privileges. In order to understand this constitutional development fully one should remember that it was created out of individual German states, independent personalities of international law, which had since 1806 been sovereign even in name. Of course, their population was in language, race, culture, and historic destiny very much the same everywhere, and originally all state powers had been derived from the same Roman-German source. In the strictest legal and constitutional sense, the new German Empire, like the North German Confederation before it, was not a monarchy, for sovereignty was not vested in the imperial crown. It was a princes' republic, the sovereignty being deposited in the Bundesrat, a federal council made up of representatives of the confederated governments. Twenty-two of the

ACCORDING TO THE P R E A M B L E

1 "Gesetz, betreffend die Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs, vom 16. April 1871." Bundes-Gesetzblatt des Deutschen Bundes, No. 16 (Berlin, April 20, 1871), pp. 64, 69; English translation by Edmund J. James, The Federal Constitution of Germany ( Publications of the University of Pennsylvania, Series in Economy and Public Law, 7 ) , pp. 18, 23. Later, beginning with issue No. 19 of 1871, the Bundes-Gesetzblatt was called Reichsgesetzblatt.

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governments were monarchical: four kingdoms (Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg); six grand duchies (Baden, Saxe-Weimar, Hesse, Oldenburg, and the two Mecklenburgs ) ; seven duchies ( the five Thuringian ones, Brunswick, and Anhalt); and five principalities (the two Reusses, Waldeck, Schaumburg-Lippe, and L i p p e ) . Three of them were city republics (Hamburg, Bremen, and L ü b e c k ) . T h e Bundesrat had fifty-eight members appointed by these state governments. Prussia had seventeen votes, Bavaria six, Saxony four, Württemberg four, Baden three, Hesse two, MecklenburgSchwerin two, and the smaller states had one representative each. T h e Reich chancellor presided over the federal council, but without having the right of vote. Only in so far as he was also Prussian prime minister ( this office was usually, though not always, united with the chancellorship, whether the chancellor was a Prussian or not) did he have any immediate influence in that body. T h e chancellor was appointed by the emperor and was responsible only to him. This was the main imperial prerogative. T h e emperor did not have the right o f veto over the legislative acts of the Reichstag and the Bundesrat, nor was he a factor in imperial legislation; his duty was merely to prepare and promulgate the laws. He could dissolve parliament (the Reichstag) only with the consent of the Bundesrat. Because of the South German special rights, it was only in times of war that he became the commander in chief of the whole German armed forces. Thus his entire constitutional position was far weaker than that of the president of the German republic, not to speak of the constitutional powers of the American presidents, who are in comparison veritable autocrats. 2 After the passage of a special law of 1878, the chancellor was assisted by secretaries of state, who acted under his authority and direction. 3 T h e entire body was called the Reichsleitung, and from it emerged the Reich administration with its central offices such as the foreign office and the offices of home affairs, of the treasury, of justice, of the post, of the navy, of trade and commerce, and of war. This strange governmental dualism of Reichsleitung and Bundesrat has been severely criticized by German constitutional experts. So have the extensive powers of the state governments and the duplication of governmental authority arising from the fact that a single state embraced two thirds of Germany and had its own detailed government and administration. This last danger was, however, overcome by the coordination of the will of the Prussian state and the German Reich and became apparent again only 2 The specific provisions referred to in this and the preceding paragraph are in Articles 5, 6, 15, 17, and 24; Bundes-Gesetzblatt, No. 16, pp. 66, 67, 69, 70, 71. Because of the special exemptions, the provision (Article 63 §1) that the emperor would be commander in chief in peacetime was true only on paper. 3 "Gesetz, betreffend die Stellvertretung des Reichskanzlers," March 17, 1878. Reichsge-

setzbhtt, 1878, No. 4, pp. 7-8.

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under the Weimar Constitution, when Prussia and the Reich were no longer united by a common chief of government. The Reichstag represented the German people in its entirety, regardless of subdivisions. Baden, Alsace-Lorraine, and Oldenburg had universal suffrage for their diets; Saxony and Hesse had direct elections, modified according to income and vocation; Prussia retained her impossible three-class system, but here too the Landtag, as it had begun to do in 1847 and in 18591862, took an increasingly forceful place in all legislative matters. And above these state diets stood the Reichstag, elected, as it had been in the North German Confederation, by universal suffrage. Its influence grew steadily, for it represented the German people as such. The members were elected every three years, after 1888 every five years. All legislative acts required the consent of the Reichstag, which exercised stringent control over the budget.* The great codifications of law it worked out, which were later adopted in principle or even bodily by other nations, gave the Reichstag considerable prestige as one of the foremost parliaments of Europe. Among these codifications were the German civil code (passed in 1896, in force after January 1, 1900), the most important work of its kind since the Code Napoléon, and the codes of civil and criminal procedure, of 1876. The criminal code, the commercial code, the code of maritime law, and the unified laws on checks and notes were taken over from the German and the North German Confederation. The building-up of a Reich court system was also the work of Bismarck. It culminated in the Reichsgericht (supreme court) in Leipzig, which was established in 1879 on the basis of the law on the constitution and administration of the courts of law.· From all this it is apparent that it is completely erroneous to refer to the Reichstag as a mere "hall of echoes." The new Germany proudly called itself with the millennial name Das Reich, although, strictly speaking, it was only a state. The great successor to the Welfish historic position had deliberately planned a state. Its national colors were new: black, white, and red, derived from combining the Prussian black and white with the red from the flags of the Hanse city republics. The colors black, red, and gold were naturally unacceptable. Yet this new national German state still contained in its inner structure much which mirrored the ancient and greater universal community. This was not the merit of the composing states, for each of them had grown up dynastically and artificially; rather universality in regional and tribal color was preserved in spite of the dynastic states. Bismarck, though he used the dynasties as instruments for his work of unification, was well aware of their questionable standing. Should dynastic interests menace Germany again, he * Articles 20 §1 and 5 §1 of the Constitution. Bundes-Gesetzblatt, No. 16, pp. 70, 66. « "Gerichtsverfassungsgesetz," § 125-141. Reichsgesetzblatt, 1877, No. 4, pp. Θ4-Α7.

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openly stated, with new division and new impotence, the dynasties would have to be drastically curtailed. " T h e German people and its national life cannot be divided as if they were private property of the princes. . . . [It was fortunate that] my talents as a courtier were sufficient to win the king and finally his army for the German cause. But I had to fight against Prussian particularism battles which were perhaps even more difficult than those against the particularism of the other German States." · In this stand there is apparent still another trait of Bismarck's political character. He looked upon all internal political German groups and entities, whether states or political parties, with the eye of the nineteenth-century diplomat trained in foreign political matters. Home policy to him was largely another branch of foreign policy, and hence he employed the strategic methods to which he was accustomed. At home, just as in the wider fields of European politics, he formed coalitions, in which the enemies of yesterday, if they wished, could become allies of today. H e successively fought and attracted the Conservatives, the Liberals, the Center party, and the German princes as occasion dictated, in the same fashion that he had dealt with Austria and France and Russia. Bismarck's political pragmatism enabled him always to recognize in practice what progressive liberals and their kindred like to profess in words, namely, that democracy is essential to the life of modern society and that it is a dialectical principle. It must move forward through conflicts, or it will die. Bismarck saw that our age demanded that the people take more and more part in the realms of social and economic matters. Without radical phrases, without the soapbox democracy which he detested, he still was the initiator of social democracy. In this was his strongest practical affinity to the ideas of the Reichsfreiherr vom Stein. But Stein was moved by compassion for the people; his imperial heart overflowed with love, mercy, and justice. Bismarck was moved by raison d'état and by his Kantian sense of duty. It was this categoric imperative which helped him to overcome class prejudices and to attain to the most realistic virtues of the statesman, who is responsible for all strata of society and is able to integrate them into the state. In the Reichstag session of April 2, 1881, when introducing a law on general accident insurance, he used these significant words: "When I was much younger . . . and there was perhaps more ambition in my heart, I felt much better and more content, even though I was without prestige and, on the contrary, had been for years an object of aversion if not hatred to the majority of my fellow countrymen, than I felt at the times when I was most popular. All this has no meaning for me. I do my duty and await what will come of it." T • Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 202. ' Ibid., XII, 236.

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Nicholas Murray Butler, in an address delivered at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, Long Island, in September, 1931, commented on this speech and on the whole work of Bismarck: "Despite its present urgency, this [the social question] is no new problem. Wise economists and students of human affairs have for years past seen it coming upon us. . . . Fifty years ago the keen eye of Prince Bismarck perceived the relation of this problem to the German State and presented it to the Reichstag in an impressive speech marked as much by vision as by wisdom. Germany, which has always been in the forefront of those nations with a firm grasp on social problems, moved forward to deal with this question under Bismarck's leadership. Smaller nations followed, and then Great Britain, whose government has for a century been quickly and increasingly responsive to public opinion and anxious to satisfy public needs, made its contribution." 8 "For fifty years," Bismarck had said in his address, "we have been talking about the social question. Ever since the introduction of the SozialistenGesetz (Antisocialist L a w ) I have been reminded time and again by the people and by officials in high places: it has been promised that something positive will be done to eliminate the causes of socialism!" Free enterprise, he continued, is no magic formula; the state can become responsible also for the things it fails to do! "I am not of the opinion that the principles of laissez faire, laissez aller, pure Manchesterism in politics, 'let each man himself see to it that he gets along,' "he who is not strong enough to stand will be run over and trodden down,' "he that hath, to him shall be given, and he that hath not, from him shall be taken,' can be applied in the paternalistic, monarchical state. On the contrary, I hold that those who oppose state intervention for the protection of the weak lay themselves open to the suspicion that they wish to use their strength, be it of a capitalistic, a rhetorical, or any other kind whatever, to gain support and to suppress others in order to establish a party rule. . . . Call this socialism, if you please, I do not care!" And he closed on a note reminiscent of his earliest addresses in the united diet, "I desire to see our state, in which the vast majority consists of Christians—much as you may reject the term 'Christian state'—permeated with the doctrines of the religion we profess, especially with those regarding charity toward one's neighbor and compassion for the old and the suffering." 0 T h e imperial message of November 17, 1881, Bismarck's work, is a landmark of international social democracy. The ideas it expresses were carried out with the help of the Conservatives against the opposition of the Progressives and the Social Democratic party. T h e message recommended legislation for social insurance, sickness insurance, and insurance against invalidity, old age, and accident. Cooperative associations under the protection of the law, ample funds out of the public income, and cooperation 8 "Unemployment," in Looking Forward; What Will the American People Do about It? p. 11Θ. » Die gesammelten Werke, XII, 237-38.

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between the state and the organizations of the working people would be required to discharge all duties of a community "resting upon the moral foundations of Christian popular life." 1 0 T h e accident insurance law was adopted in 1881 for all wage earners; it was supported by provisions for sickness insurance and was based on selfadministration by local insurance funds. T h e draft of the gigantic plan for old age and invalidity insurance followed, to become law in 1889. The economic existence of the depressed classes was infinitely improved. On this basis, Emperor William I I and the Weimar Republic were finally able to complete the work of overcoming the proletariat without violence. It is this system of security, combined with excellent education by the state and the voluntary associations of workers in their trade unions, sport clubs, evening courses, youth groups, and so on, which has given the German proletariat an almost unique status of culture and self-respect. This imperial social legislation is really the work of Bismarck, the Junker, the bogeyman of blood and iron of hypocritical liberal legends. It has, in conjunction with the freedom of the press and all the civic liberties guaranteed and developed by the state, made German democracy a force in the progress of the world which has been quite different from the imaginary picture of an "authoritarian-militaristic state" built up by self-righteous, ignorant rhetoricians. Bismarck was never reluctant to learn from his opponents. Bishop von Ketteler and Ferdinand Lassalle both had great influence on the chancellor's social work. T h e pressure of revolutionary socialism had a part in inducing him to adopt reforms which by improving conditions deprived the adversaries of his state of the breeding ground of subversion—thereby offering an example of the "cunning of the idea" of reason and progress. Yet not even Bismarck's greatest admirers claim that his repressive measures in the notorious Antisocialist L a w were well advised. This and the Kulturkampf show the fallacy inherent in his translation of foreign political maxims to internal political affairs. Ferdinand Lassalle was killed in a duel in 1864. In that same year, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had formed in London the International Workingmen's Association, the First International. In Germany, the cause of the workers was meeting with much sympathy among the intellectual Bürgertum. T h e leadership of the workers' movement passed into the hands of the highly able Wilhelm Liebknecht, a descendant of Martin Luther. He had once been a leader of the radical democratic students and for participation in the Baden revolution he had been driven into exile. From 1849 to 1862 he lived in Switzerland and England. Under his influence, a workers' Party Day at Nürnberg in 1868 aligned their movement with the International. In the io Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstags, V. Legislaturperiode, 1. Session 1881-82, p. 2.

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following year, at Eisenach, the Social Democratic party of Germany was formed, and a radical political and economic program was adopted. Soon equalling Liebknecht in importance was the Catholic-bom master turner Ferdinand August Bebel of Cologne, who was in his earlier years a sharp opponent of socialism. The full driving power of the new party was not reached until 1875, when a number of separate parties united with the main body. Together they adopted the so-called Gotha Program of May, 1875. As foundations of the (future) state it enumerated the following six points: ( 1 ) universal suffrage, with the voting age lowered to twenty years; ( 2 ) direct legislation by the people; ( 3 ) general arming of the people (read proletariat), to produce a people's army instead of a standing army; (4) abolition of all legal restraints on the press, the right of assembly, free thinking, etc.; ( 5 ) people's courts, and free administration of justice; ( 6 ) general, equal, and free education by the state; liberty of conscience, with religion a private and not a state affair. To these, the program added further aims. "Within existing society, the Socialist Workers party of Germany demands: ( 1 ) all possible extension of political rights and liberties in accordance with the above-mentioned demands; ( 2 ) one progressive income tax instead of indirect taxes . . . ; ( 3 ) unrestricted right of coalition; ( 4 ) a standard working day . . . with free Sundays; ( 5 ) prohibition of child labor and of woman labor in so far as it endangers health or morality; ( 6 ) laws to protect the life and safety of the workers; . . . control of mines, plants, shops, and home industries by workers' representatives; liability of the employers for accidents; ( 8 ) strict rules governing the work of prisoners; ( 9 ) administration by the workers of all workers' and relief funds." 11 One can readily see that much of this program had either been already realized or was about to be realized by imperial and state legislation. Prussia had passed laws for the protection of children as early as 1839 and 1853, the latter act prohibiting altogether the employment of youths under fourteen. On June 21, 1869, the North German Confederation adopted a code of industry, which was at first intended particularly for the smaller enterprises; this code was, after the foundation of the German Empire, extended to the whole country. Elaborate safety devices, provisions for the education and protection of apprentices, women, and youth, and state control of working conditions were abundant and efficient. The industrial code of 1891 contained further laws to protect youthful persons, prohibiting night labor for those under sixteen and extending compulsory use of safety devices to the whole of industry, from the smallest to the largest plants. Civil liberties and the liberal practice of the courts were other factors that worked incessantly in favor of further progress. It is obvious, on the other hand, that some points of the program were so 11

Salomon, ed., Die deutschen Parteiprogramme, Heft II ( 1907), pp. 23-25.

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thoroughly revolutionary that they could not be realized without a complete overturn of the existing order. To arm the proletariat, to introduce direct legislation by the proletariat, and to establish proletarian courts would have meant overthrowing the existing constitutional order and replacing it by the dictatorship of the proletariat. A party advocating such aims was by necessity an enemy of the state. The Reichstag elections of March, 1871, typical "khaki elections," had not been favorable to the Social Democrats, who polled only about 125,000 votes, because the attitude of Liebknecht and Bebel at the outbreak of the Franco-German war was still remembered and was still resented. They had abstained from voting for the war credits, "because the war was a dynastic one." However, in 1874 the party polled over 350,000 votes and gained nine of the three hundred and ninety-seven seats in the Reichstag. Three years later the party jumped to 500,000 and twelve seats. In May and June of that year, attempts were made against the life of the emperor. After the second one, by a certain Dr. Nobiling, in which the emperor was severely wounded, Bismarck dissolved the Reichstag. When it reassembled—the socialists having dropped to nine seats—Bismarck introduced the Antisocialist Law. It was adopted with the votes of the Conservatives and the National Liberals, voting against the Center, the Progressives, and the Socialists. This law was renewed in 1880, and again in 1884 and 1886, with the Center voting with the Conservatives in the last two of these renewals. Clubs and organizations which avowedly aimed at the overthrow of the existing order through socialistic or communistic activities, or which by word and deed manifested such plans for disturbing the public peace, were dissolved by this law against the Socialists. Meetings, assemblies, and demonstrations of such character could be dissolved, and subversive publications were prohibited. Appeal against any of these measures was provided for. Regions and towns which seemed particularly menaced could be placed under a state of limited emergency (not to last more than a year) by order of the central state authorities, if the Bundesrat consented. In such regions, public meetings required police permission; socialistic publications were not to be distributed on public highways or in the squares; persons endangering public order and safety could be prohibited from taking residence in these regions. The possession, importation, sale, and carrying of arms could be prohibited or restricted by police measures.12 Yet the Reichstag refused at all times to permit curtailment of its debates or interference with Socialist election meetings, with election propaganda, or with the right of Socialist members to sit and vote in parliament. These guarantees kept political suppression in Bismarck's Germany from being at all like those of the time since 12 "Gesetz gegen die gemeingefährlichen Bestrebungen der Sozialdemokratie," October 21, 1878. Reichsgesetzblatt, 1878, No. 34, pp. 351-58.

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January 30, 1933, when the dictatorial government simply expelled by force from the Reichstag, first, all deputies of the Left and, later, those of all other parties except the National Socialist.13 After the Antisocialist Law had been mitigated in the last years of its existence, Conservatives, the Center, Progressives, and Social Democrats voted against its renewal in 1890. It lapsed on October 1, 1890. The arguments against the advisability of the whole law turned out to be only too well taken. G. P. Gooch, in his essay "The Study of Bismarck," remarks: "The battle with the Socialists was equally unsuccessful [that is, as unsuccessful as the Kulturkampf], though in this case Bismarck is not open to the charge of provoking an unnecessary conflict. Socialism was a world-wide problem, the child of modern industrialism, and he can hardly be blamed for not knowing how to deal with such a novel phenomenon. But his repressive legislation was a failure, and the working-class movement developed in bitter hostility to the State." 14 In the 1884 elections the Socialist vote rose to 549,000; in 1887, to 763,000; and in February, 1890 (Bismarck's last Reichstag), to 1,427,000 with a representation of thirty-five deputies. At the same time, the Social Democratic party matured in statesmanship and parliamentarianism, under a completely incorrupt and efficient leadership. Finally, with 110 seats out of 397, the party emerged as the strongest single political group of imperial Germany. August Bebel, in an address which he delivered at Kottbus, near Berlin, betrayed a noteworthy insight into the true problem against which repressive measures could, of course, never prevail. "Protestantism," he said, "met with the approval of the ruling groups at the very moment when Luther put himself on the side of the princes. How different with the Church! The latter recognized a long time ago that no church can set itself against the will of the people. Thus Pope Leo XIII said the Church must work towards the goal of securing for the worker his just wage. Outstanding teachers of the Jesuit order long ago proclaimed that neither Nature nor religion demanded a particular form of state. The appropriate form must result from practice. . . . In consequence of the better position of the Catholic clergy, who are in permanent touch with the working classes—far more so than the Protestant—Social Democracy has so far not succeeded in expanding as much among Catholics as among Protestants." 15 1 3 An impression of conditions during the time of antisocialist legislation, conditions which, when compared to events of recent decades, must be termed idyllic, may be gained from August Bebel's autobiography, Aus meinem Leben. "During the twelve years of the Antisocialist Law," he states in the chapter headed "Fights with the Police" ( III, 108), "I was—this I may say without exaggeration—-the man most persecuted by the police in Germany." Inquiring into the nature of these "fights," the reader finds that they consisted mainly in playing hide-and-seek to fool clumsy police agents charged with super1 4 Studies in Modern History, p. 261. vising the author's movements. 1 5 Quoted in Masaryk, Die philosophischen und sociologischen Grundlagen des Marxismus, ρ. 474η.

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It was not only in the question of the proletariat created by nineteenthcentury capitalism that the church assumed the guiding position which the German socialist leader ascribed to it, but also in other secular problems. While the world of states, even in its most farsighted representatives, had gone more and more the way of nationalism antithetical to the thesis of the One Occident, the papacy upheld with increasing determination the idea of universalism in its temporal-political, as well as in its spiritual, aspect. After the accession of Pope Leo XIII in 1878 this became clearly noticeable. Just as the church, after the Sacred Roman Empire had come to an outward end in 1806, remained the sole visible representative of the universal idea, so Pope Leo and his successors have been in our day the only rulers with supranational policy and universal vision. It is for this reason that the voice of the Vatican possesses today among the peoples a political weight unparalleled since the Hohenstaufen age. The bitter hatred of the scribes and modem power politicians for this one beacon of reason and morality, a hatred expressing itself in the daily press of many countries, serves only to confirm the revived leadership of Rome. It was during the reign of Pope Pius IX, Leo's predecessor, that the church began taking up strategic positions for the world struggle to come. One of the most important was defined at the Vatican Council of 1869-1870: the infallibility of the pope as successor of St. Peter and head of the church universal, when making pronouncements ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals. It seems strange today to read how even loyal Catholics were much upset by this event. Ripples of feeling ran out to all European countries, affecting and even intensifying church struggles in many of them. This Vatican Council, the first ecumenical council since that held at Trent in the sixteenth century, was in its very convocation an act of outstanding moral and spiritual courage. Then materialism and agnostic rationalism seemed on the very point of final triumph. All universal, religious, spiritualhistoric forces seemed vanquished for good. At that moment, the Church Universal rose in all her spiritual might and glory, undismayed by "the spirit of the times," because eternity is her home and her destination. The Vatican Council ended the centuries-old struggle between the papal and the council parties within the church ( concerning the supremacy of the pope or of the ecumenical council). The definitive statement of the dogma of papal infallibility did not, of course, add anything to the deposit of the faith that was "new"; it merely gave definition to a truth that had been present but undefined and not yet fully known to the consciousness of men. This problem is usually misunderstood in the non-Catholic world, and is by no means fully understood by all Catholics. In the immense treasure of the revelation that Christ deigned to bestow upon mankind, there is more than the whole of the world's history could possibly grasp or exhaust. What we need for attaining eternal and temporal happiness and for fulfilling our

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duty within the working of God's government of the world through history we have received by grace and through the merits of the Saviour. But in order to be strengthened in our struggle and to be helped in coping with the ever-ready snares of evil, new aspects and more precise formulations of the dogma are given us from time to time. They are made possible by greater insight, so to speak, into the gigantic treasure of the faith, an insight gained as human nature, by means of continued instruction in the Christian faith and the progress of human knowledge through the phases of history, steadily matures. This is accomplished by the perpetual labors of the Holy Spirit in His Church, Christ's Mystical Body, the synthesis of His Spirit and the community of men. Since it is through this same Spirit that the supreme pontiff is raised to the temporal vicarship of Christ, his pronouncements, when made in matters of faith and morals ex cathedra and for the church universal must necessarily be infallible, because error cannot be found in the mouth of the Spirit of Truth. Had the great heritage of the idealistic philosophy, of Hegel—himself an heir of Christian Neoplatonism—still been alive among the educated classes at the time of the Vatican Council, the pronouncement of the infallibility of the church, vessel of the Holy Spirit, would have been recognized by nonCatholics also as the logical, familiar consequence of basic truths on which rests the unfolding of God's Spirit in the realm of man. Every schoolboy today should know that the infallibility of the church universal is confined to matters of faith and morals and has nothing to do with any claims of temporal dominion. Nor is there any political significance to be attached to it. Yet this erroneous interpretation has been voiced. Some states thought that the papacy was reasserting Guelfish claims of superiority over temporal authority and that they must defend themselves by political means. Fear was expressed everywhere that the definition of "faith and morals" could be stretched so vastly as to infringe upon the purely temporal realm of state and politics, as had happened in the Middle Ages, especially with the bull Unam Sanctam of 1302. The government of the emperor of Austria, who was also Apostolic King of Hungary, at once annulled the concordat which had been concluded with the church in 1855, and a severe conflict followed. In France, Spain, and Bavaria, all overwhelmingly Catholic countries, the reaction was equally strong, and soon also in Prussia and the young German Empire the flames were kindled for the struggle which has become known as the Kulturkampf. The word Kulturkampf, now a proverbial expression, was coined in 1873 in the Prussian diet by the Progressive deputy Rudolf Virchow, an excellent scholar in his field and a university professor of pathological anatomy. It literally means a "struggle for civilization." Fundamentally, this conflict between state and church in Europe was an outgrowth of the laicizing tendencies of the nineteenth-century national

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state, of the opposition of liberalism to religious influence on state and education, and of the general agnosticism of an age hostile to religion. In Germany, it has first flared up in 1859, in the grand duchy of Baden; under the pressure of the liberal party the grand duke denounced a concordat concluded with the Holy See, and a struggle lasting for many years ensued, during which church property was placed under strict control and the archbishop of Freising was subjected to state supervision. Bavaria and other South German states had followed, while in Prussia the pro-Catholic attitude of King Frederick William I V and his wife Elisabeth of Bavaria ensured the maintenance of peaceful relations. In 1864, after the publication of Pope Pius IX's Encyclical Letter Quanta cura and the sorely needed Syllabus of Errors, which threw down a challenge to the destructive heresies of modernistic enlightenment, there was another outbreak of antireligious agitation, but at the same time, the morale of the Catholics in their defensive struggle was greatly strengthened. During the Vatican Council, Bismarck had declined to listen to suggestions that he" bring pressure to bear on its deliberations. He felt that the North German Confederation was by its democratic parliament well defended against possible "clerical" aspirations. He also, and not without reason, looked on Pope Pius I X as an obstacle to a French-Italian alliance. T h e capture of Rome by Italian troops on September 20, 1870, had made the pope the "prisoner of the Vatican." Throughout that winter, Bismarck kept in touch with him in order to influence French Catholics to favor an early peace and to prevent Victor Emmanuel from joining France. But he also turned a deaf ear to suggestions, advanced in the Prussian Landtag by the Catholic Center party, that he help restore the temporal dominions of the pope, and this policy of nonintervention was reaffirmed by Emperor William in his speech from the throne at the opening of the first German Reichstag on March 21,1871. 1 · Bismarck's attitude toward Catholicism was determined by purely political, not by any denominational Protestant, motives. Before the Kulturkampf he had even been decidedly pro-Catholic. 17 At one time he planned that Bishop Ketteler of Mainz, who was well known for his keen interest in social problems, should become archbishop of Cologne and later prince primate of Germany. Thereby, so Bismarck hoped, Catholic life and influence would be activated, and he envisioned a conservative policy of social reforms carried out in alliance with the Catholic movement. 18 For unlike the liberals, Bismarck did not look upon religion as something that had been 10

Stenographische

Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstags, I. Legislatur-

periode, 1. Session 1871, p. 2. 17

See Kissling, Geschichte des Kulturkampfes im Deutschen Reiche, I, 345. The writ-

ing of this thorough history of the struggle was commissioned by the Central Committee for the General Assemblies of the Catholics of Germany and was completed in 191Θ. 18

Ibid.

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left far behind by modern enlightenment and should soon fade out of human life altogether. What caused the turn in his policy, after the founding of the German Empire in 1871, was rather the nightmare of coalitions. He feared that in a possible war with major Catholic powers like Austria and France, political Catholicism as represented by the Center party might be an enemy within the gates. This Center party, which derived its colorless name from its seats in the center of parliament, had first been formed in Prussia in 1859. After the elections to the Reichstag of the new Germany in March, 1871, it became an important faction which united a number of Catholic groups and soon attempted to monopolize all German Catholicism for its party purposes, although it never represented more than thirty or forty percent of the Catholic voters. Its following was recruited from the most divergent social groups. It is a phenomenon of considerable interest that at a time of rising agnosticism a "vertical" party could be formed which, held together by the bond of a common religion, did not represent any particular class interest and thus defied the Marxian definition of economics as the prime motor of politics. The basis of the Center was formed by organized Catholic labor, the increasingly powerful Christian trade unions. Peasants, the middle and upper middle classes, and the high nobility all found their places in it. Among the founders of the party was the former Hanoverian minister of justice, Ludwig Windthorst, a parliamentarian of great ability and a tactician of almost Bismarckian stature, and Prince Karl zu Loewenstein-WertheimRosenberg, head of the younger branch of the family. Whereas the former was a political man through and through, Karl zu Loewenstein's motives and interests were predominantly religious; he became a Benedictine monk in his old age. As hereditary member of the upper houses of Bavaria and Baden, he took up the cause of religion from the very first, pleading also for the Protestants. His formula was simple. T h e ideas of the modem state," he said, "are engaged in a bitter struggle with Catholicism and the church. Yet both could live together peacefully, if the modern state would only remain in its own sphere and leave the religious domain to the church." 1β In 18Θ6, he convoked in Münster the first meeting of the Central Committee of the Catholic Associations of Germany, which became the nucleus for the German Center party in the Reichstag, Prince Karl zu Loewenstein being one of the elected deputies. He also exercised great influence as president of the German Katholikentag, the annual meeting of the representatives of German Catholicism. The program of the Center party was largely his work. Bismarck's aversion to the Center party was increased by the fact that Ludwig Windthorst, as an experienced parliamentarian, soon put himself 18

Siebertz, Karl Fürst zu Löwenstein; ein Bild seines Lebens und Wirkens, p. 153.

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at its helm. A traditional foe of Bismarck's work of unification, it was Windthorst who had administered to him a notable defeat in the German Tariff Parliament of 1868. His tactics had prevented that body from dealing with the question of German unity, which Bismarck had hoped it would take up —in other words, it was largely due to Windthorst that Bismarck had "failed then to secure the peaceful union of the South German States with the North German Confederation." 20 At one time, in February, 1872, Bismarck even went so far as to hold out to the Center the prospect of reconciliation if they would only abandon Windthorst's leadership. The fact that particularist forces like the Polish minority and the Protestant Welfish party in Hanover, all opposed to the German empire, found in the Center their foremost representative only served to nourish Bismarck's suspicions. Significantly enough, the reproach of supporting the Catholic Poles was the excuse given for what may be regarded as the opening act of the Kulturkampf. On July 8, 1871, Bismarck abolished the Catholic section of the Prussian ministry of culture and education, charging that its members used their influence to strengthen the position of the Polish minority groups in Posen and West Prussia. The administration of government matters pertaining to the Catholic churches and schools was henceforth entrusted to officials who were in the great majority Protestants. Other measures followed to deprive the Catholic clergy of its influence on instruction and education. The members of the Jesuit order, according to a law passed by the Reichstag July 4,1872, were to be excluded from all ministry either in church or school; as they were also placed under police supervision and could at any moment be expelled, the order left Germany. A year later, four other orders followed. 21 Throughout the years of the Kulturkampf, Bismarck would have much preferred direct negotiations with the Holy See to dealing with the Center party. "I considered it from the beginning as something fantastic on the political plane," he said in the Prussian diet on January 30, 1872, "that a religious faction was formed within a political body, a faction which, if all other confessions adopted the same principle, could be opposed only by the totality of an 'Evangelical faction.'" From most authoritative statements "by His Holiness the Pope and statements by the [German] bishops," he thought he had reason to assume that the religious forces were well pleased with the founding and the policies of the new Germany. But now, he added, it seemed that clerical politicians, aided by anti-imperial forces of all colors, among them many Protestants, felt differently! The conflict was accentuated when the Vatican refused its usual recognition to Cardinal Hohenlohe, who had been appointed imperial envoy to 20

Martin Spahn, "Kulturkampf," in Catholic Encyclopedia, VIII, 705. Reichsgesetzblatt, 1872, No. 854, p. 253; 1873, No. 12, p. 109.

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the Holy See. It was then that Bismarck coined his now familiar phrase, "Have no fear; to Canossa we will not go, neither in body nor in spirit." " In May, 1873, he introduced in Prussia through the minister of culture and education, Adalbert Falk, the so-called May Laws.23 They stipulated that the church could not impose penalties in matters temporal and that ecclesiastical discipline and the education of the clergy were subject to state control; the laws also facilitated secession from the church. In 1875, civil marriage was made obligatory, and later this provision was incorporated into the Civil Code of 1900. A law, dubbed the Breadbasket Law, canceled state grants to members of the clergy who refused obedience to Prussian laws.24 Religious orders and congregations, in so far as they were not engaged in the care of the sick, were dissolved. Soon an exodus of German monks and friars commenced, and many of the American Franciscan monasteries owe their foundation to the Kulturkampf. Many German episcopal sees became vacant, and ministerial activities stopped; gruesome specters that had been cheerfully relegated to ages past were again conjured up. The lesions that had brought suffering to Germany ever since the contests of Guelf and Ghibelline were broken open anew. Bismarck's reference to Canossa, typical of his ability to think in historic terms, showed his awareness of the struggle which had shaken the foundations of the Occident for almost a thousand years. The gigantic contest between the Imperium mundi of the great emperors and the temporal claims of the sacerdotium center in the name of Canossa, and Bismarck's speech illustrated anew that nothing historic is really past; at any moment it may awaken to new reality. The Kulturkampf was to Bismarck, as he said before the Prussian Herrenhaus in 1873, "not a fight between faith and unbelievers, but rather the ageold contest of power . . . between the kingship and the priesthood—the contest . . . of Agamemnon with his seers in which he lost his daughter . . . ; the contest that filled the German Middle Ages down to the disintegration of the empire; the contest which under the name of a struggle between popes and emperors found its medieval conclusion when the last scion of the illustrious imperial Swabian house died under the axe of the French conqueror, who was in league with the pope." 25 Bismarck's liberal allies, with their narrow and unhistoric worship of progress, must have been as amazed as were his conservative Protestant and Centrist opponents to hear the founder of the empire use such language. Even the Theory of the Two Swords is brought to mind, and in a bet22 This quotation, from the address to the Reichstag on May 14, 1872, is in Die gesammelten Werke, XI, 270. The two previous quotations, ibid., pp. 226, 228. 23 The texts are to be found in Gesetz-Sammlung für die Königlichen Preussischen Staaten, 1873, No. 14, pp. 191-208. « Law dated April 22, 1875. Text, ibid., 1875, No. 11, pp. 194-96. 25 March 10. Die gesammelten Werke, XIII, 289.

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ter explanation than most of those offered by later interpreters. One may rejoice that through the struggle of ideas and of worthy men the spirit of Occidental history, transcending the disputes, the political intrigues, and the rivalries of the passing day, has been kept alive. "I marvel," Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe wrote at that time to a relative, "that historians have not seen the obvious analogy between the present contest . . . . and the contests of the Middle Ages. For myself, I am a Ghibelline, and shall be till the end of the chapter." 2 9 Bismarck, who well understood the importance of imponderables in foreign policy, had completely miscalculated them in home affairs. The new Germany, which he was trying to consolidate, now enclosed powerful factions hostile to the government. For although the Kulturkampf was backed also by prominent and indisputably loyal Catholics and Catholic states, it met on the other hand with the opposition of the Protestant conservatives, of Crown Prince Frederick and his wife, and the liberal Protestant, pro-Catholic Empress Augusta. Emperor William was only half-hearted in his support of his government. Socialists, French Lorrainians, Poles, Protestant Hanoverians, all these were united in their stand against the Bismarck government. The mistakes made had to be remedied, the steps taken had to be retracted, lest catastrophic damage should ensue. This fact Bismarck recognized in 1878. Falk was sacrificed, and negotiations with the church were sought. The next year the accession of Pope Leo XIII, the greatest pope in centuries, facilitated the work of reconciliation. This pope is all the more remarkable because he lived in a period when the church had begun to lose the confidence of the masses, and when liberal, atheistic thinking was drifting into a realm of illusions credulously called "scientific truth." Of all the great, he was the only truly anointed and initiate, and more than any other clear-sighted observer he must have felt "the trembling of the earth." It is said that the vernacular invocation of St. Michael the Archangel, composed by him and now said after Mass in every church of Catholic Christianity, owes its origin to a frightful vision of the end of the world, with Antichrist going forth and seeking the ruin of souls. His Magna Carta of social justice, the Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum of 1891, had aimed at winning the disinherited back to Christ, not by charity alone but also by justice, and he was also anxious to strengthen legitimate authority and peace in the world of the European states. On his initiative the French clergy were reconciled with the republic. Over the heads of the quarrelsome Center leaders he concluded peace with the German imperial government, and Bismarck did not hesitate to pay him public tribute. The ™ Letter to Prince Friedrich Karl zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg, Aussee, August 9, 1872. Denkwürdigkeiten, II, 91; English, II, 84.

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pope, he said, not without a touch of malice towards his German political enemies, "is more pro-German than the Center party," and "more interested in the consolidation of the Reich and the well-being of the Prussian state than the majority of the German Reichstag has been at times." Wittily he added: "The pope is not Welf or Polish, and not deutsch-freisinnig (German radical liberal), and he has no leaning towards the Social Democrats. . . . He is simply Catholic . . . free, and represents the free Catholic Church. The Center represents the church in the service of parliamentarianism and vote-getting intrigues. Hence I have chosen to address myself to the absolutely free pope . . . because from the wisdom of Leo XIII and from his love of peace I expected more success for the internal peace of Germany than I did from the Reichstag and the Center." 27 The liberals, who had cheered every act of oppression against the church as freedom, and those Protestants who had hailed Bismarck, much against his will, as a second Luther were deeply annoyed when he liquidated the Kulturkampf and made peace with the church. That he did so has earned him the bad reputation which to this day he enjoys among certain liberals and radicals. "Among the Catholic circles, however," writes Johannes Baptist Kissling, "the energy which the Reich chancellor displayed, under great selfdenial, in working in the parliaments for the conclusion of peace exacted respect and admiration." 28 Even Ludwig Windthorst said frequently that he wished a long life to Bismarck because he alone was able to bury the Kulturkampf. Two comprehensive laws, of May 21,1886, and April 29,1887, modified the May Laws in a way acceptable to the church, and thereby the conflict was ended. 2 ' Bismarck often expressed his readiness for further revisions and held out the hope for calling back the Jesuit order—a hope that was, however, realized only in 1904, and, in full, on April 19, 1917. 30 Since the end of the Kulturkampf relations between state and church in Germany remained harmonious and peaceful, not to be disturbed again until the advent of National Socialism. 27 Address to the Prussian Herrenhaus, April 12, 1886. Die gesammelten Werke, XIII, 189. m Geschichte des Kulturkampfes im Deutschen Reiche, III, 369. 29 Texts in Gesetz-Sammlung für die Königlichen Preussischen Staaten, 1886, No. 17, pp. 147-50; 1887, No. 15, pp. 127-30. »» Reichsgesetzblatt, 1904, No. 12, p. 139; 1917, No. 79, p. 3Θ2.

28 DROPPING THE PILOT Tandem sceptra gerii, qui stemmatis ultimus erit. Vaticinium Lehninense. O N F E B R U A R Y 6, 1888, Bismarck delivered before the Reichstag his most comprehensive address on the European situation. Of all his addresses on foreign political matters and contemporary history it was perhaps the most important, and it should today be required reading for any student of history, diplomacy, or international affairs. In a way this address was a proud and self-assured review of fifty years, of which at least twenty-six were profoundly, if not decisively, influenced by Bismarck. The tenor of it was that although exceedingly great menaces had risen against the peace of Europe, yet the dangers had been overcome time and again. As he spoke, the Reichstag did not know of the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, but Bismarck realized that in spite of it the magnetic attraction between France and Russia continued. Only the most careful handling of Russia and of the entire European world of states could stave off the conflagration. He sounded again his Toujours en vedette! but he also used all the talent of a great orator, to utter, almost with anguish, his warning against preventive wars. No provocation by the Russian chauvinistic press, he said, should induce German statesmen to lose their coolness of judgment. For a war resulting from a break with Russia—over Bulgaria or some other Balkan question, for instance—"would plunge Europe, from the Pyrenees to Moscow, from the North Sea to Palermo," into a life-and-death struggle that would end only in futility, with each participant scarcely knowing the causes for which he had been fighting.

In this address Bismarck spoke of "the whole weight of imponderables, which are so much weightier than the material factors." A state must always take care lest these imponderables shift and tip the scale to the advantage of its opponents.' These were the words which Nicholas Murray Butler took as his text for the address before the Reichstag on April 30, 1930, to which I have previously referred. Bismarck's theory, Erich Mareks wrote with acute though narrow vision, was formulated practice.2 In this sense, his review and preview of the world given on February 6, 1888, is reminiscent of George Washington's words in the Farewell Address of September 17, 1796, "Why, by interweaving our 1 Die gesammelten Werke, XIII, 326 sqq. The quotations are to be found on pp. 34Θ, 344. 2 Otto von Bismarck; ein Lebensbild, p. 192.

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destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European Ambition, Rivalship, Interest, Humour or Caprice?" J Bismarck regarded even the permanent alliance with the Austrian portion of the foreign world as an emergency solution, by no means as an indissoluble union. In another, a literal, sense too, this was to be his farewell address. With the Emperor Frederick III, who ascended the throne on March 9,1888, as a man already doomed, Bismarck had lived in steady dissension, interrupted only occasionally by moments of respectful collaboration (as at Nikolsburg), for over a quarter of a century. With the Empress Frederick, who had British sentiments in Germany, German sentiments in Britain, his relations had never been pleasant. Personal and political reasons coincided in the antipathy between empress and chancellor. The tendency among writers on contemporary history to idealize the empress as a protagonist of liberal thought, who, had her husband lived, would have brought to Germany the blessings of British parliamentarianism (without, of course, infringing upon Britain's monopoly on sea power, colonies, and world trade), has now been largely abandoned; it was part of the pre-war and war propaganda, which singled out for commendation everyone and everything ever opposed to Bismarck or to the young Emperor William II. Emperor Frederick III ruled for ninety-nine days only. The question whether the treatment of his cancer of the throat was ill-handled by incompetence or negligence on the part of Sir Morell Mackenzie, the doctor callcd in by the empress, will probably never be completely solved. On June 15, the second emperor of the new Germany was relieved of his suffering. The reins of government had passed, within three months, from the hands of a monarch ninety-two years of age to his twenty-nine-year-old grandson, William, prince of Prussia, now William II, German emperor and king of Prussia. With the untimely death of Frederick I I I , his liberal contemporaries missed their chance of gaining political influence. This gap in modern German history has often been lamented, but with more sentimental than political justification. Of the new period, the stage for which had been set with the accession of Emperor William II, Nicholas Murray Butler remarked: "As fortune would have it, we have a symbol. . . . About March, 1890, Sir John Tenniel, the accomplished artist of Punch, drew a famous cartoon . . . entitled Dropping the Pilot from the Ship of State. Over the side was going the old, experienced pilot of a generation, Prince Bismarck; and coming onto the quarter-deck to take command of the ship was the figure of the then young German Emperor. This cartoon represented the change of commanders in but one nation; but it has always seemed to me typical and symbolic of the s Washington, The Writings of George Washington, from Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799, prepared under the direction of the United States George Washington Bicentennial Commission and published by authority of Congress, edited by John C. Fitzpatrick (Washington, United States Government Printing Office, 1931-1941), XXXV, 234.

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fact that at about the close of what we call the Victorian Era, about 1890, there began to come into play in this world and to take control of it a series of novel, progressive, even revolutionary intellectual, economic, political movements and forces." 4 Mpre particularly Germany itself underwent sharp change. To understand clearly just what the situation was, it is necessary to see with unbiased eye the relationship of the young emperor to the old chancellor. Many forces and many partial observers have contributed to obscuring and distorting the complex design of the problem. According to the Bismarck legend fostered by the German nationalists, he was an infallible, superhuman genius whose mind, words, and actions were all-embracing; one need only study them in order to arrive at a valid formula for all political eventualities. Nothing could be more mistaken, for Bismarck's greatness lay precisely in the fact that he never acted according to formulas. It is obvious that this view places the whole guilt on the young emperor. Bismarck's own fascinating but polemical, and therefore one-sided, presentation of his case and his caustically drawn portrait of William II have nourished this legend. It was also taken up, with some modifications, by the Radical Progressives and by the Social Democrats who, though they had little or no sympathy for the chancellor, used it for their own ends in the struggle against the empire and against William. Finally, when the World War came, any argument against Der Kaiser was eagerly taken up abroad regardless of whether or not it had been derived, directly or in distorted form, from that wicked bogeyman Bismarck, whose very name was used to frighten children. The opposite, or pure Wilhelminian, version was, on the other hand, vigorously propounded by the imperial courtiers and by all who had been waiting for Bismarck's downfall in order to further their own ambitions. With these timeservers, special sympathy for the monarch was not always the chief motive. The warmed-up Vansittart version of Second World War propaganda which presents Bismarck and the emperor as simply different aspects of the same "Prussian-German spirit of aggressiveness," both préfigurations of Hitler, can be ignored. Though it is at present included in the usual repertoire of propaganda and the prattling of some German émigrés who are trying to cater to the market, the historian and objective student of world affairs need not concern himself with it. As soon as hysteria once more abates, it will leave only a feeling of embarrassment. As time has passed, the objective picture of the struggle between chancellor and emperor has grown clearer. William, prince of Prussia, had stood in constant opposition to his parents—especially to his mother, who loved him as little as he loved her—and had shown a marked, even exaggerated, ad4 "The Present Economic Situation," Address to the American Iron and Steel Institute, New York, October 24, 1930, in Looking Forward; Whet Will the American People Do about It? pp. 301-2.

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miration for Bismarck. T h e first ill feeling between the two had come in 1887. T h e prince had then been drawn into the circle of the court preacher Adolf Stöcker, an ambitious, anti-Semitic politician of considerable talent and some brilliance. H e was the leading spirit of the so-called Stadtmission which had been founded with the support of courtiers and society figures to bring the Gospel and social comfort to the working classes. Stöcker persuaded the prince that aid to these endeavors was part of his royal duty and would help to win the proletariat away from Social Democracy. Bismarck strongly disapproved of the whole enterprise, seeing in it the danger of compromising the heir to the throne for the sake of political climbers. He remarked sarcastically that Stocker had only one defect as a politician, namely, that he was a minister, and only one defect as a minister, namely, that he was a politician. 5 This incident had no deep significance, but it did have an unfortunate effect, for it alienated prince and chancellor. After the prince had become emperor, his first open conflict with Bismarck resulted from a really serious difference in views. T h e question was how to handle a strike of more than a hundred thousand miners in the Ruhr district, which occurred in May, 1889. T h e strikers issued an ultimatum demanding wage increases. Riots, acts of violence, and indecision on the part of the authorities sharpened the struggle and conjured up the specter of social revolution. T h e emperor who had informed himself thoroughly concerning the justified demands of the strikers, invited a delegation of workers to Berlin. There, at a session of the ministry of state, the emperor declared: " T h e industrialists and stockholders must yield. T h e workers are my subjects who are entrusted to me. . . . If industry will not accede to my wishes [that is, raise wages at once], I shall withdraw my troops [from the strike area]. Then, when the villas of the rich mineowners and directors go up in flames and their gardens are trampled down they will surely give in!" " Bismarck remarked that "the propertied classes are also Your Majesty's subjects," and viewed such a policy as dangerous encouragement to more demands and as a capitulation to the socialists. "His Majesty's ideal," he wrote later, "seems then to have been a popular absolutism. His ancestors had emancipated the peasants and burghers; but would an analogous emancipation of the workers at the expense of the employers result today in an analogous development as did the legislative work of half a century, from which grew the Regulation of the peasants' affairs and the city Statute?" 7 Bismarck's own greatest work, provision of old age and sickness insurance, was nearing completion. Difficulties to the passage of the bill had multiplied, and it was only by personal persuasion and pressure that he prevented the « Bismarck to Crown Prince William, Friedrichsruh, January Θ, 1888. Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 467-68. 7 Ibid. »Ibid., p. 495.

DROPPING THE PILOT 361 Conservatives from deserting him at the last moment. Any concession, as he called it, to labor might endanger the whole work which, as he knew, was history-making; the proposed laws defined the utmost limits to which Bismarck was prepared to go in favor of labor, until time and practice would have permitted them to bear fruit. On May 24, with the narrow margin of 185 to 165 votes (four deputies abstaining), the Reichstag passed the bill. The majority of the Center party had voted with the Socialists, the Radical Progressives, and some Conservatives against it! It is to the everlasting credit of the young emperor that he pushed this labor legislation forward even against the will of its originator.8 The new conflict between the two men, which marked the beginning of the end in their relations, arose over two imperial messages nominally addressed to the chancellor and to the minister of commerce. These messages, of February 4, 1890, proclaimed that it was "the concern of the state authorities to regulate the time, duration, and conditions of work in a way that would safeguard the health, moral requirements and economic needs of the workers, as well as their right to equality before the law." * This, as subsequent legislation confirmed, included the regulation of Sunday rest, stringent state control of the safety and health conditions in the whole of industry, detailed protection for youth and women, and abolition of child labor. The state-owned mines were to become institutions exemplary for their protection of the workers, and all other mines were placed under public supervision. The messages promised specifically that the workers must receive the right of collective bargaining between their own representatives and the employers. Bismarck had considered the tone of the messages too declamatory and the time—immediately preceding a Reichstag election—inopportune. But he had yielded and undertaken to rewrite the text, moderating its expressions. To the message addressed to the chancellor he added an instruction to invite foreign powers to send delegates to Berlin for an international conference on labor and social questions. This conference, which met on March 15, 18U0, was the first of its kind and was attended by representatives from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, England, France, Holland, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland. As to the messages, they were published in the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger, the official gazette, without Bismarck's countersignature. But these divergences of opinion might have been overcome had there not been a much more profound gap between the men due to age and char8 There can be no question that with the matter of social improvement for the working classes William was deeply and sincerely concerned. "It was the earnest desire of the emperor when he ascended the throne," Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg writes, "to go forward with the legislation for the protection of the workers and to show to the people that his intention was to help them. This the emperor explained frequently in his emphatic manner: Ί want to help the workers who stand by me as much as possible." " Aus fünfzig Jahren; Erinnerungen, Tagebücher und Briefe, p. 225. 8 Deutscher Reichsanzeiger und Königlich Preussischer Staatsanzeiger, Berlin, February 5, 1890, No. 34.

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acter. 10 Bismarck's prestige was all-pervasive in Germany and abroad, and wherever the young emperor went he still walked its shadow. The chancellor had only to defend his established prestige; the ambitious emperor had to establish his and felt that he might achieve it as "the workers' emperor." Bismarck had but one desire, to preserve and to conserve what existed; he was convinced that any hasty move might rend the whole tissued fabric of the Western world. The emperor, though just as anxious as Bismarck to preserve internal and external peace, thought, on the contrary, that new and more dynamic ways should be opened. He was the favorite grandson of Queen Victoria, and he was greatly, almost childishly, impressed by everything British. His shifting of the foreign policy to the course that was most undependable and unsafe for Germany, namely, placing her future "on the water"; his colonial enterprises (undertaken by Bismarck with utmost reluctance); his emphasis on trade and commerce; and his deep respect for maritime entrepreneurs and big business—all these betrayed great admiration for Anglo-Saxonism. But like any national "philia," Anglophilia is an ambivalent complex that also has a negative side—as was later illustrated by Hitler, one of the most determined Anglophiles and admirers of things British that ever existed. Nor is the sea or land trader particularly impressed if others, out of admiration for his way of life, wish to engage in the same enterprise. The road from Anglophilia to a conflict with England is usually short. The unstable policy of those years with its tinge of nouveau riche mentality fell into the worst of all liberal and Marxist heresies, namely, that economics are stronger than state authority. The giddy succession of events must have been entirely incomprehensible to a man like Bismarck. A land-rooted nobleman, he knew and valued the importance of solid wealth. But wealth in itself never impressed him. It was the state and the land that counted. The catastrophic climax was reached when the emperor, after much interference with the government and conferences with its cabinet members over the head of the responsible chief of government, demanded the rescinding of a cabinet order of 1852, which had defined the position of the minister president. The order provided that before a member of the cabinet could report to the sovereign, the prime minister must be informed on the question; should the sovereign ask for a report from a cabinet member, the prime minister also had to be informed so that he could be present. Only on this basis was any responsible conduct of affairs by the prime minister possible. Bismarck had invoked this order to reassert his authority over the cabinet, 1 0 Prince Eulenburg attributes the deterioration of relations between William II and Bismarck in large part to the influence of the Empress Augusta Victoria, who had conceived a real hatred for Herbert Bismarck because of his often frivolous language (Aus fünfzig Jahren; Erinnerungen, Tagebücher und Briefe, p. 247). The aversion dates back to the time when Augusta Victoria was still crown princess, according to Prince Bismarck, who remarks on it in his memoirs ( Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 460 ).

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which had been weakened by royal interference. It is surprising that the emperor did not realize, even in later years, that the repeal of the order would have made coordinated administration under the prime minister's responsibility impossible; it would have encouraged uncontrolled intrigues and independent policy making on the part of subordinate secretaries and ministers, for they could have shielded themselves behind the chief executive against the power of the constitutional prime minister and foreign minister of the state. In one of the last political interviews granted by the emperor at Doom, on November 15, 1935 (to Joachim von Kürenberg), he referred to this matter and said, "I think the digging up of that old order was only a chicane of the chancellor; I was astonished that Bismarck invoked such an obsolete document against me." 11 As a matter of fact, the order was never repealed, even after Bismarck's resignation. Yet during an audience with the emperor on March 15 ( a date soon referred to as the "Ides of March"), Bismarck was told categorically to prepare the cancellation of the royal order of 1852, and Bismarck's efforts to prove the command unreasonable were of no avail. The air of hostility between sovereign and chancellor was aggravated by the famous Windthorst incident. The shrewd Centrist parliamentarian had, as Bismarck expressed it, "come out of his foxhole" and visited the chancellor in his private apartment at the Reichskanzler Palais. 12 It was most important for the chancellor to talk to him. The plans fashioned by the leader of so important a party as the Center were of particular significance just then because the Reichstag elections had been very bad for the government. Yet this interview outraged the emperor, who felt that Bismarck should not have received Windthorst without consulting him first. Bismarck replied that he would receive any deputy of good manners, and that he would not submit to control over his own home. "Not even if your sovereign commands it?" "The power of my sovereign ends at the threshold of my wife's drawing 1»

room. After this conversation there was little doubt that Bismarck's fall was imminent, though he did not intend to give way voluntarily. Two days later, probably through the intrigues of Baron von Holstein, reports made by a subordinate consul in Kiev on certain Russian troop movements were placed in the emperor's hands. They contained data long known to the general staff, but the emperor gained the impression that he had been kept in the dark about quite threatening developments. In an unfriendly note, he reproached the chancellor, almost accusing him of treason, and advised him to warn Austria at once of the "terrible danger." He said also that he would, of course, Ii Kürenberg, War alles falsch? Das Leben Kaiser Wilhelms II, p. 502. 14 Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 512. 1 5 Kürenberg, War alles falsch? Das Leben Kaiser Wilhelms II, ρ. 12Θ.

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cancel a projected visit to the czar under the circumstances. It was a confused document, dictated by the idée fixe that he was being excluded from governmental affairs and by the desire to find further reasons for dismissing Bismarck. Talking bravely was for William II a device for easing his fear about his own courage, for on the same day he dispatched his military aide. General von Hahnke, to the chancellor with the request that he immediately hand in his resignation and appear before the emperor to receive the dismissal. Bismarck replied that he was not well enough to go to the Schloss and would write. In the afternoon, the imperial demand was repeated. On March 18, Bismarck's resignation was forthcoming. In a document filling six printed pages, he summarized all the events that led to the governmental crisis, and, of course, laid all responsibility for it at the door of the emperor. In this last official document of the great statesman of European affairs, he once more issued a warning against breaking the connection with St. Petersburg. An unfriendly policy towards Russia would, he said, "endanger all the important successes gained by the German Empire in the last decades under the rule of Your Majesty's two predecessors." The resignation reached the emperor while he was nervously listening to his friend Count ( later Prince ) Philipp zu Eulenburg and Hertefeld sing and play the piano. On March 20, the emperor accepted it, at the same time bestowing on Bismarck the rank and title of duke of Lauenburg. This gesture is psychologically most interesting. The chancellor possessed world fame as Prince Bismarck, and the changing of his name to duke of Lauenburg would obscure and hide it. Bismarck at once saw through this subconscious (or conscious?) attempt against his identity, which would have deprived him of his name of glory. Without hesitation he declined the proffered grace, and never used either the ducal name or the title. He would call himself duke of Lauenburg, he remarked in bitter jest later, only when he wished to travel incognito. On March 26, the emperor received him in farewell audience. His health had not been better in years, he retorted scornfully when the emperor remarked that only "consideration for his health" had moved him to accept the resignation. As fate would have it, only one German dynast was present at Bismarck's departure from Berlin. That one was Prince Max of Baden, heir to the grand duchy, the man who was destined twenty-eight years later to be the last imperial chancellor, to announce the resignation of the emperor-king, and to hand over the reins of government to the socialistic leaders of the rising republic. Turning to Prince Max (first cousin to the emperor), Bismarck closed an epoch of history with his defiant words, "Le roi me reverraF (The king will see me again!) He was wrong if this exclamation implied the belief that William II would be compelled by circumstances or by better counsel to re-

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instate him in his office. Yet in a wider sense he was proved right; the emperor was never able quite to succeed in banishing Bismarck's name and Bismarck's warnings from his mind. The gigantic specter of the chancellor must have loomed before him when Russia mobilized in July, 1914, and again in November, 1918, when the gloom of the long winter descended on the German Reich. "I regarded it as a whim of destiny," wrote Bismarck, "and history will perhaps consider it fateful, that on the morning of that same day [March 17] Ambassador Count Paul Shuvalov . . . presented himself to me as being empowered to enter into certain negotiations, which came to naught because I did not remain Reich chancellor." 14 These negotiations, of course, concerned the renewal of the Reinsurance Treaty. With Bismarck his son Herbert, secretary of foreign affairs, also left office. Count Friedrich Johann von Alvensleben, minister in Brussels, whom Bismarck had suggested for the foreign office, declined the honor, which finally fell to Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, an excellent lawyer, Baden's representative in Berlin, but not an expert in international affairs. So little so that Bismarck dubbed him ministre étranger aux affaires (minister to whom affairs are foreign ). T h e true successor in the Wilhelmstrasse was Baron von Holstein, who was to play a decisive and unfortunate role for sixteen years. 1 ' T h e emperor and high officials called him "the Monster," his office the "poison shop." Holstein made and unmade chancellors and foreign secretaries, ambassadors, and ministers at will. T h e emperor met him only once, for Holstein never joined the court circles. Holstein was Russophobe, shrewd, ruthless, borné. The huge private correspondence which he carried on with German diplomats and his careful collection of all things compromising to the private life of public figures gave him an uncanny influence, although in the official hierarchy he was never more than Vortragender Rat (assistant undersecretary). Originally a protégé, friend, and intimate of the Bismarcks, he later turned into their most fanatical foe. This hatred the lonely bachelor-monster later transferred to the emperor. Unlike Bismarck, who considered politics the art of the possible, demanding experience and a flair for realities, with imponderables being the most real forces of all, Holstein looked on politics as a mathematical problem to be solved by established dogmatic rules. Friendship with Austria-Hungary and friendly neutrality with England (even when, as he thought, England had to be "bossed" into friendliness, as in the case of the unfortunate Krüger Telegram of 1896) were his basic tenets; to Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 518—19. For material on Holstein, see Trotha, Friedrich von Holstein als Mensch und Politiker ( 1931); Kürenberg, Die Graue Eminenz ( 1932); Sethe, Im Banne der Grauen Eminenz ( 1936); and the brilliant essay by G. P. Gooch, "Baron von Holstein," in Studies in Modern History (1931), pp. 1-116. 11

15

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them he held without flexibility and without practical knowledge of the world. In collaboration with the brilliant but vicious-minded Maximilian Harden, Holstein did much to undermine the prestige of the crown at home and abroad. The unpleasant "Eulenburg affair," which compromised the emperor by destroying his friend on trumped-up moral charges, was engineered by Holstein and Harden. 1 " To the British ambassador, Holstein remarked in 1897, "His Majesty must be treated as the child or fool he is." Many of the blunders and the lapses in fact charged to the imperial statesman had their true origin in Holsteins intrigues. The fantastic planlessness of German foreign policy—for the Boers, against the Boers; for Russia, against Russia; for England, against England; always on the wrong side at the right time— the lack of coordination, the intrigues and internal rivalries in the foreign office, all these came largely from Holsteins policy and influence. Yet one man is never solely responsible, and it is mere oversimplification to single out one cause as explaining all or one scapegoat to be blamed for all. Those who permitted a comparatively subaltern official to retain his rule over the foreign office of a great power are before history just as guilty as he. Holstein was only a symbol for something more general. Bismarck's realism was a blend of the heritage of the land-rooted nobleman and traditional culture and it rested upon world-wide education and experience. After his day the technical age also invaded politics, that most important and most difficult of all the arts. After a long epoch when Germany was feeble and powerless, she had once more attained political and economic weight. The Germans had not yet learned how to fit their new empire into the conditions of a new era, for the continuity had been interrupted. The old empire had belonged to an entirely different age, with different ideas, means, and relationships. And between the old empire and the new lay a vacuum of centuries. The interim had belonged to the powerful Western nations who had used it at will. Now the Bürgertum, boisterous, enriched, and unhistoric, ruled the hour. Industry, trade, and technics were enthroned as the new trinity. Noblemen had either made common cause with the middle class or had withdrawn into a secluded world of stale class privilege no longer based on class achieve1 6 Prince Eulenburg had for many years been a friend and adviser to the emperor as well as the Bismarcks. He regretted the break between the sovereign and the chancellor but felt that his loyalty belonged to the emperor. To him he was a sincere friend who yet had the moral courage to express criticism and warnings. From 1894 to 1902 Eulenburg was ambassador in Vienna. I n e "affair," which started in 1908, cut short his career; thereafter until his death in 1921 he lived in complete seclusion on his estate. It can unfortunately not be said that William II showed as much loyalty as Eulenbure showed towards him. "There is a silence for the fatherland," Eulenburg remarked in a letter to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, "which is much harder than to die for it" ( March 18, 1919, Erlebnisse an deutschen und fremden Höfen, p. 353). His memoirs and other works published posthumously by his widow ( his only son was killed during the First World War ) show him as a brilliant writer and a keen political observer of wit and sound judgment, and they have done much to rehabilitate his reputation.

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ment. The man of the new decades had discovered what they called "reality," little knowing that there is no reality which is greater than the spirit of history. Art mirrors well the soul of an epoch. And "Wilhelminian" style in architecture was tantalizing and shallow in its pompous bigness. Colossal, vulgar, and covered with senseless ornaments, the new buildings thrust their bulk in to shatter the beauty of German towns. In literature, the general style was not very different, for writing was given to flat realism, to naturalism garbed in swollen phrases, or to an equally swollen functionalism, inflated with clichés and platitudes. Reverence for the exact scientist, for the laboratory expert who reduces life to a chemical formula, explains the real secret of how such men as Baron von Holstein came to power. For imponderables there was no room in such an atmosphere. And it was the tragedy of Emperor William II that, with all his undeniably great gifts, he too was a child of his age. And at a time when material things count, when success is measured in bigger chimneys and larger factories, these will be the forces which in the end triumph—as they did in the World War, which had been creeping on since 1875, and was after 1890 no longer held in check by the magic of the true realist. Holsteins influence prevailed against the renewal of the Reinsurance Pact, although the Russian government under the influence of Baron de Giers showed its willingness for many months. Bismarck, in involuntary retirement at Friedrichsruh, was at once obsessed by dark forebodings. That moment he considered the worst possible time to allow the treaty to lapse, for France and Russia had already drawn very close to each other. Bismarck proved right. Within three years, Franco-Russian relations were to develop into a military convention, then an alliance. For this the temporary improvement in English-German relations, the acquisition of Helgoland at the high price of Zanzibar, and the continuance of the Triple Alliance were no compensations. With the loss of her Eastern ally, Germany became exposed on both flanks and lost her position as mediator between the czarist and the Habsburg empires. Austria was quick to realize Germany's isolation. In 1896, when the Triple Alliance was up for renewal, she demanded amendments that would guarantee Germany's support for Austrian expansion in the Balkans. This Chlodwig von Hohenlohe, then Reich chancellor, refused. The German government would be loyal to the Triple Alliance, he wrote, but it did not want to be used as a means for indefinite Austrian plans in the Orient. Austria must content herself with the defensive character of the Alliance if she did not want to go under." 17 Hohenlohe was the only statesman who ever consulted Bismarck and asked 17 Hohenlohe to Emperor William II, Berlin, February 2, 189Θ. Die Grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette, 1871-1914, XI, 112 sqq., No. 2671.

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his advice. Furthermore, he was not afraid to pay the old chancellor public homage when, very much against his will, he himself became chancellor and Prussian prime minister in 1894. In home policy, Hohenlohe must be given the credit for having put through parliament the important law of 1899 which extended the right of assembly, permitting all kinds of societies. If this was a concession to the socialists, the heart of the old, broad-minded, and liberal nobleman was certainly in it. Bismarck's remaining in office would, undoubtedly, not have influenced home policies favorably. The conflict between labor and the state would have been accentuated, as Bismarck already anticipated. He seems to have believed strongly in the danger of social revolution, and to forestall or put down that he went so far as to consider measures that would have amounted to a coup d'état—dissolution of the empire founded, according to the constitution, by sovereign princes, and a new union of Germany without the right of universal suffrage. How concrete such plans were, and how much they were only speculation about ultimate means, it is impossible to decide. But even if the coup d'état were avoided, the struggle would have involved great dangers which might have become a threat to national unity.1* Bismarck died in 1898, Hohenlohe in 1901, a few months after resigning his office. With these two men passed the last exponents of the founding period of the empire, in which much of an earlier historic heritage had still been alive. Yet the century did not end without seeing reborn, in the midst of the world of states, a feeling that a new international or supranational legality was necessary. Naturally no voice was raised for the all-embracing thesis of the unity of the Occidental world, to which the nationalist antithesis must always return; but at least some attempt was made to transplant the idea of law, as it ruled the modern constitutional states, into the realm of relations between the states. Some shiver of premonition may have shaken the world of prosperity and progress, causing men to see that, unless some radical remedy were applied 1 8 For a study of this question, see Zechlin, StaatsstreichpUine Bismarcks und Wilhelms II, 1890-1894, particularly the most interesting protocols of the conference of ministers of March 2, 1890, which is only sketchily mentioned in Bismarck's memoirs ( Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 509). Bismarck maintained—contrary to the almost unanimous opinion of German jurists, chief among them Paul Laband ( Das Staatsrecht des Deutschen Retches, I, 94 sqq.)—that the members of the German empire were the princes and the senates of the free cities rather than the German states ruled by them. The princes, he argued, could at any time withdraw from the federal pact, the basis for the German constitution, and the king of Prussia could resign the imperial dignity. But even short of such ultimate steps, the opposition of the Reichstag could, if necessary, be broken by a refusal of the emperor to delegate Prussian ministers or Reich civil servants to the federal council, on whose collaboratiop the Reichstag depended for its functioning.

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to the decaying fundamentals of the order of outward civilization, the civilized world itself might soon be swallowed by anarchy and neobarbarism. But behind the deeds of individuals, we may recognize the working of the spirit of history in these efforts towards establishing new forms of interstate life, efforts which spanned the Atlantic Ocean. Without the Occidental examples of federalism, from the Achaean League to the Sacred Roman Empire, the framing of the Constitution of the United States of America might never have been possible. It was repayment of an historic debt that America, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, should contribute to the planning of still wider communities. It was in the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century that peace societies were first formed. The ideas were taken up by the London Peace Society of 1816, and in 1830 by the first Continental peace society at Geneva. The young democratic and socialist movements with their humanitarian ideologies were decidedly pacific in principle. Here too, the year 1848 with its revival of universal ideas was a landmark. The still living heritage of idealism and cosmopolitanism combined with the postulates of modernity to make an impressive movement. The first international peace congress at Brussels in 1848 demanded international arbitration, a congress of the peoples, and general disarmament. A further step was taken towards limiting the abuses of sovereignty by a protocol to the Declaration of Paris in 1856, after the Crimean War. The rules of sea warfare were humanized, and provisions were drafted for securing the good offices of friendly states before resorting to war. The Geneva Convention of 1864, attended by fifteen states, "for the amelioration of the conditions of soldiers wounded in the field" ( Red Cross Convention) and the subsequent conventions have yielded lasting results and created genuine international law. Throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century, in antithesis to power politics and unfettered sovereignty, the efforts of high-minded individuals and groups were directed unceasingly to setting up rules of lawful behavior. Peace conferences called by large private organizations met at Geneva, at Paris, and at Bern. In the German, French, British, and other parliaments demands for disarmament, for arbitration, even for a United States of Europe were raised time and again. Their importance must not be judged by the apparent failure of internationalism in 1914. Despite this failure and the present feeling of hopelessness, these nineteenth-century endeavors prepared the mind of men for a return to the basic tenets of Occidental history. They were surely signs and portents of the reawakening of forces that had long seemed buried beneath the stones of statism and nationalism. It was fitting that at the close of the century should come the historic manifesto which the czar sent forth on August 24, 1898. This invited the powers to assemble at The Hague for the purpose of discussing inter-

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DROPPING THE PILOT national understanding and peace. This First Hague Conference met in 1899, the Second, which was called by the czar on American initiative, in 1907. Among the points to be discussed at these conferences were: limitation of manufacture of firearms and explosives; restriction of use of existing explosives and prohibition of the discharge of projectiles from aircraft; prohibition of the use of submarines and of poisonous gas in warfare; application of the rules of the Geneva Convention to naval warfare; neutralizing of ships and boats employed in saving drowning men during and after naval engagements; good offices, mediation and arbitration in international disputes. As everyone knows, the Hague Conferences failed to achieve most of these ends. Yet they set moral forces in motion, and they appealed to reason as a means against mutual destruction. Many of the international agreements which we value today, such as the prohibition of poisonous gas and the shaping of the modern idea of arbitration, owe their origin or impulse to these conventions. From the vision of the secretary of the American delegation at the First Hague Conference, George Frederick W. Holls, sprang the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which later received an endowment from Andrew Carnegie. The inscription upon the Peace Palace in The Hague, of which I first heard in the darkest and most hopeless days of the First World War, has always seemed to me a modern paraphrase of those principles on which the Roman world empire was based and which through all the centuries since have found their prophets and protagonists: Si vis pacem colle fustitiam.

29 NATIONAL REALM OF SUPRANATIONALEM Dominion in the end must fall to him by whom the spirit is molded and mastered, for if a plan be inherent in the world and any meaning in man's life, eventually, when the goal of the ages is reached, morality and reason must triumph. S C H I L L E R , Deutsche Grösse. of the new Germany were its universities and its scientific and artistic life, in which ancient tradition blended with modern achievement. It is to the life of the spirit, mirrored in youth and its protagonists, that we must look in order to discover the universal idea overcoming the confining national trends. 'To come under the influence of a European university, particularly of a German university, was then the height of academic ambition," Nicholas Murray Butler remarks in his autobiography, a documentary record of personal experience in history which is indispensable for a proper understanding of our epoch. His first visit to Germany which, with reference to Hegel's introductory words to his Phenomenology of the Spirit, he has called "A Voyage of Discovery," took place in 1884-1885. "In Berlin," he writes, "every hour of the day and of the evening was an educational influence. Not only lecture-rooms, but personal visits, the theatre, concerts, the opera, the many delightful opportunities for social intercourse, all combined to give an atmosphere and to provide a stimulus. This was really education. This was really contact with great personalities and with sources and standards of power —intellectual, moral, aesthetic. Where else in the world could the narrow means of a student have admitted him for a mark to hear rendered one of the great operas—German, Italian or French—or on any Wednesday evening for half a mark to the Bilse Koncert-Halle on Leipzigerstrasse, to listen to a complete symphony by Beethoven, by Mozart, by Brahms, or by Raff, superbly rendered by one of the best orchestras in the world? Where eke could one have had opportunity for a mere trifle to hear Shakespeare superbly acted or to see the classic German drama put upon the stage with every possible aid to its complete understanding and appreciation?" A M O N G T H E M A I N ATTRACTIONS

Indeed, it was an epoch when Europe, the old and ever youthful mother of the nations, showed herself once more in all her beauty—perhaps for the last time in this historic cycle. But, as Nicholas Murray Butler rightly states, only contact reveals the "real Europe, whose heart is beating underneath the surface with the blood-flow of centuries in a way that cannot be recorded and described on the printed page. Then, as now, too many Americans went

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abroad without ever getting to Europe at all. They got to hotels where only Americans went; they got to banking houses where only American newspapers were on file; they got to summer resorts where Americans predominated." "Imagine what it meant to an American youth who was planning to devote his life to scholarship and to university service," he says, "to come face to face with Mommsen, the historian of Rome, with Ernst Curtius, master of Greek archaeology, with Wundt of Leipzig, who was revolutionizing psychology, with Klein of the same university, who had a notable group of young American mathematicians in his seminar, and to hear Vahlen at Berlin conduct his seminar in Latin!" Almost forty years after that time, when I came to Berlin myself, a Bavarian brought up with all the Southern traditions, I had precisely the same feeling: that I was embarked upon a voyage of discovery. The simple beauty of the classic university building and the spirit that dwelt within its walls struck me as powerfully as they had the American visitor in Bismarck's time. "On either side of the court sat in marble state the two Humboldts, Alexander and Wilhelm. . . . In and out of its doors and across the court had walked for seventy-five years some of the great men of the world. What would one not have given to see Hegel cross the garden behind the university building, making his way toward the Platz which now bears his name and which contains his effigy. . . . Imagination could even see the magnetic personality of Fichte himself moving about in these halls and streets." 1 Political life in its creative fluctuations represented by true statesmen was hardly less instructive than the university itself for the student of German and European affairs. Bismarck's addresses, each couched in masterful prose ("I read his speeches as one drinks strong wine," Nietzsche said of them 2 ), full of wit, sarcasm, and a ready wealth of erudition, must have been a unique experience. He was then at the height of success, fencing in the parliamentary arena to the marvel and delight of the young, defending his social reforms and his foreign political actions—always courteous, even when he was putting an opponent hors de combat, always charming by the sheer weight of his personality, and sometimes impressively solemn like a man soliloquizing, examining his conscience in the midst of turmoil. "There were vigorous debates in the Reichstag just then," Butler recalls, "and a kindly word from a university professor gained for the young American opportunity to hear, under the best auspices, a stirring debate between Bismarck and Liebknecht, the forceful leader of the Social Democrats. A fascinating figure in the Reichstag was Doctor Windthorst, known fa1 Across the Busy Years; Recollections and Reflections, I, 117-18. The earlier quotations are from pp. 113, 128, 114, 105. 2 Quoted in Eduard Engel, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis in die Gegenwart (Leipzig and Vienna, G. Freytag and F. Tempsky, 1907), II, 561.

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miliarly as die kleine Excellenz, who was exerting enormous influence as parliamentary leader of the Center, or Catholic, party. His fellow Hanoverian, Benningsen, was the spokesman of the National Liberals. In addition to this striking group of parliamentary leaders, there was the spare and grim form of Moltke himself, who occasionally had a very brief word to say on matters of military organization and policy." s Student life, more than in most countries with the exception of czarist Russia, had in Germany been intertwined for generations with political problems. The blessings of education always extended to a very large proportion of the people. The comparative figures of American and of German university attendance are for more than one reason misleading, particularly since the average German secondary school graduate has received training which corresponds roughly to that of the first two years of American college study. The exact number of students, their social provenience, and their division among the various "Faculties" (disciplines of learning) have, of course, greatly changed during the last hundred years.4 In 1817 there were just under eight thousand German students, the University of Berlin leading with over one thousand. In 1830, the number had increased to sixteen thousand, but it fell off at the time of the Revolution of 1848. In 1872, there were sixteen thousand again, in 1890 almost thirty thousand, in 1904 seventy thousand. In 1933, the figure had reached two hundred thousand, with sixteen thousand of them at the University of Berlin. Students of proletarian origin amounted in the second half of the nineteenth century to about two percent, a figure that changed completely after the First World War. The sons of civil servants and professional men accounted for about one third. The lower middle classes were more strongly represented at the Technische Hochschulen, the technical universities. In 1835 the students of theology had still accounted for thirty-four percent, the jurists for twenty-eight, medical students for twenty percent, philosophical students for eighteen (including those devoted to philology). By 1869 the students of the technical and natural sciences numbered seventeen percent, and after 1900 they constituted twenty-three to thirty percent of the entire student body. The number of foreigners studying at German universities increased steadily. Between 1835 and 1910 they averaged between four and nine percent. At the Leipzig University of Commerce, the enrollment of foreign students mounted as high as fifty percent during the first decade of our century! Moreover, German students have not only kept up the ancient tradition of academic migration within the country, but large numbers of them A cross the Busy Years; Recollections and Reflections, I, 128-29. The statistics which follow are taken from Schulze and Ssymank, Das Studententum uon den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart, pp. 235, 423-24. 3 4

deutsche

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have also spent one or two semesters abroad. The universities of Geneva, Grenoble, Zürich, Bern, Lausanne, and Paris always had a large and increasing number of German students. There were thirty-two Germans in attendance at Harvard at the beginning of the century. As in the Middle Ages, a young German frequently goes to a specific university in order to hear a certain teacher whose personality or work has for him some special fascination. The student wants to hear the views of men, not merely views about men. Most students who could at all afford to do so changed their universities several times in the course of their work Sometimes they followed a teacher when he was called to a new piaci of academic activity. In 1910 only forty percent of the students stayed ai the same university during the entire period of their study; for 1933 the figure would be still lower. As is well known, German universities did not have the system of compulsory class attendance. Learning was as free as the teaching—a condition which, of course, placed great responsibility upon the shoulders of the young students and forced them to self-discipline. Thus, the number of semesters spent at the university above the required minimum depended largely on the judgment, the maturity, and the diligence of the student himself. On the other hand, the establishment of a permissible maximum for time spent at the university did away with the "perennial student" familiar to earlier times. Freedom of learning enabled the student to acquire knowledge, experience, and general education in his leisure time. This is a basic principle for the whole of German education. The average age of the German student was around twenty-two or twentythree years. According to Friedrich Paulsen's calculations, the average allowance of a student was between one and two thousand marks for the academic year. Nicholas Murray Butler mentions that he paid 140 marks (about $35) a month for room and board; as a result he was looked upon as "unduly extravagant" by the other American students, but he adds -that "full return was given for the money paid." 5 There were, however, many students who had to do on less, some on as little as fifty or sixty marks a month. Tuition fees, in later years, were comparatively low and included full accident, sickness, and hospital insurance. They depended on the number of weekly hours of lectures attended and also differed slightly at the various universities. According to my own records, I paid 135 marks each semester in 1924 at Munich, with thirty-one weekly lecture hours; at Berlin, in 1927 I paid 152 marks, with twenty-eight lecture hours. Furthermore, dispensation could be obtained from the university fees. In the twentieth century, particularly under the Weimar Republic, the number of full scholars increased steadily. In earlier chapters I have referred to the democratic role played by students and teachers at the universities before and during the Revolution of « Across the Busy Years; Recollections and Reflections, I, 110.

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1848. It is interesting to note that the same spirit was preserved through the ensuing generations. In the spring and summer of 1943, students of the universities of Munich, Innsbruck, and Berlin once more testified in blood to their belief in the idea of freedom as against despotism—in the best academic tradition. And more worthy names may soon be added to those of the past and the present pioneers of liberty and national honor. The pronounced, active political interest of German students during so long a period sometimes amazes the foreign observer who is not accustomed to the phenomenon in his own country and may have read that the German people as a whole is unpolitical. After 1848 Catholic students associations developed at many universities, Breslau, Bonn, and Munich being first among them with Berlin following in 1852. The reawakening of Catholic spirituality among the young is largely due to the students' leadership. Catholicism in general owes a debt of gratitude to these young men who, in the midst of increasingly aggressive agnosticism, fearlessly held to the ideals and the ideas of the faith. In 1866-1867 cartels of Catholic students were formed; they concentrated on fighting against the shameful duels and for increased religious life among their fellow students. They stood openly and loyally on the side of the Vatican Council. In the reawakening and strengthening of the Catholic spirit at the universities the Kulturkampf did its full share. Without any noteworthy exception, the Catholic students stood up for the persecuted bishops and priests, often with great sacrifice to themselves. The fact that they refrained from violence against state authorities made their stand even more effective. When the question of anti-Semitism was first raised in 1880 and the movement was condemned by the well-known Address of the Notables (written by Mommsen, Hofmann, rector of Berlin University, and other equally prominent leaders and supported warmly by Crown Prince Frederick); the Catholic students quite naturally joined hands with the other defenders of Christian traditions. The Catholic students also repeatedly won public praise from Pope Leo XIII. Socialist ideas had been alive in the heart of many a student even before the Revolution of 1848 and the rise of Marx and Engels. The struggle against Metternich was flavored with socialistic ideals, although the economic implications were still vague and were defined sentimentally rather than programmatically. To some extent socialistic trends (though not their modern materialistic perversion, of course ) belong to the oldest heritage of German thought. They are rooted in the Christian concepts o'f responsible rulership and of the public functions of property, as they flourished in the Sacred Roman Empire. In the motives that produced the Peasants War and in the ideals of Ulrich von Hutten they took on their earliest modem form. And later Fichte was one of the strongest forces moving German youth towards idealistic-socialist ideas.

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The struggle of the day and the rise of the new class whose will to power was kindled by the mighty personalities of Marx and Engels, stirred German youth to the depths. The halo of martyrdom shining about the heads of the persecuted leaders of Social Democracy appealed deeply to youthful imagination and aroused youthful sympathy. The increase of proletarian students, a consequence of expanding industrialism, created a fertile soil for socialism at the universities, especially at Berlin and Leipzig. This group of ill-fed and badly clothed boys who lived in the quarters of the poor became the natural allies of the industrial proletariat. They were soon joined by members of the bourgeois and the upper classes. Actually, only a few of the socialist leaders have been proletarian in origin. The lower classes have traditionally been led by members of the upper classes (from the Gracchi to Lenin) whose ambition or ethical feelings have made them protagonists of a social cause. The student socialists, with their higher degree of knowledge and education, have exerted deep influence upon the masses of proletarian wage earners. The high educational level which has distinguished the German proletariat from that of many other countries is due in some measure at least to the comradely collaboration of the universities. The Social Democratic and the Center parties were the first to start student groups. In later years all political parties followed. The students' council of a large university, prior to 1933, usually seemed a replica of the Reichstag with its many—all too many—parties. It is characteristic of German political life that every party endeavored to appeal to youth, even to youngsters under voting age. The repercussions of the Antisocialist Law were strong in student circles. Socialist partisans were threatened with expulsion from the universities, withdrawal of scholarships, and actual prosecution under the general provisions of the law. Some did receive heavy sentences for lèse-majesté. But, as elsewhere, the repressive measures failed utterly to achieve any lasting results." Impressive as the outward appearances of academic and student life were, here, too, the ills and evils of the age were sapping the sources of spiritual strength and destroying the idealistic traditions of youth. To combat this process, the best among the young men started a countermovement, intended to lead them back to a life of nature and of the spirit antithetical to the artificial civilization of the city and the unimaginative materialism of the nineteenth century. With the wisdom of idealism, which is the birthright of youth, this younger generation beheld the progressive decay at the heart of the world in which their elders had found pride and satisfaction. The emergence of β In showing the general attitude of the students, regardless of social provenience or political adherence, their response to the imperial message of November 17, 1881, is significant. From every German university expressions of spontaneous enthusiasm and welcome for the soziale Kaisertum poured in to the Palace and the Chancellery. In the initiation of social legislation the students saw a fulfillment of their own political desires.

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modem technics, the mechanical conquest of the world, the fantastic growth of wealth which beggared the proverbial riches of Croesus, the urge for every man to push ahead by work, by ruthlessness, or by clever schemes (What did the means matter?) and thus to hurdle all the social obstacles that once could be overcome by the slow process of tradition, culture, and history—all these things had affected the relationship between man and man, between man and his world, between man and the Unknown and Infinite. And the effects were fundamental. How few men still felt that only the Absolute could give value and consistency to the finite! Superstitious belief in the supremacy of science and in the sanctity of economic "laws," however cruel, has slain more men, body and soul, than the mania of witchcraft ever did. A theology hardly deserving of the name has tried eagerly to keep pace with modern developments by throwing overboard the essentials of metaphysical philosophy and sometimes even the revealed truths of the Christian faith. Who could possibly find himself uplifted and filled with religious reverence and devotion when listening to certain ministers of today who are comedians and business executivés rather than men of God? An age of material standards, given to monetary gains and to the worship of success (with success itself an exclusive privilege of the adults), obviously could regard youth only as a transitory stage leading forward to a happier status in life. Youth was an imperfection, almost a disease of which the sufferers must seek to rid themselves as fast as possible. Until such time as the illness was entirely cured, a close imitation of grownups might somewhat ameliorate the evil. This was the attitude which Jugendbewegung, the Youth Movement, rose to protest. The movement never had a centralized organization, but did have a spontaneous world view, a philosophy of life, as it spread among university students as well as the youth of the secondary schools, and the movement was molded by living traditions and led by men to whom youth meant more than a simple biological designation of age level. The Jugendbewegung became a peaceful but thorough spiritual revolution, and some knowledge of it is essential to a right understanding of the spiritual Germany. It has had a profound influence on German education, on art, on the German way of life, and it must not be dismissed as mere romanticism (even though romanticism is among the strongest creative, and hence revolutionary, forces of the human mind). To the question of what youth means the transcending genius of Hegel gave the right answer, just as it did to so many other questions. Describing the position of Greece in history, he compares it to the period of adolescence, adding a definition of youth which is universally valid. Youth is exalted, "not, indeed, in that sense," Hegel writes, "that youth bears within it a serious, anticipative destiny, and consequently by the very conditions of its culture

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urges towards an ulterior aim,—presenting thus an inherently incomplete and immature form, and being then most defective when it would deem itself perfect,—but in that sense, that youth does not yet present the activity of work,—does not yet exert itself for a definite intellectual aim,—but rather exhibits a concrete freshness of the soul's life. It appears in the sensuous, actual world, as Incarnate Spirit and Spiritualized Sense,—in a Unity which owed its origin to Spirit. Greece presents to us the cheerful aspect of youthful freshness, of Spiritual vitality."T Fichte must also be numbered among the fathers of the modern youth movement. At the centenary commemoration of the death of the author of the Addresses to the German Nation, in January, 1914, Gustav Wyneken, the founder of the Freie Schulgemeinden (free school communities) and one of the leading spirits in the establishment of a free and youthful culture, rightly hailed him as the "molder and educator of youth," whose "last refuge [in the midst of general decay] was his faith in the younger generation." "Fichte," Wyneken said, "demanded a national education, education for the whole people, not just for the learned and erudite. Only such education as could dare to claim universality has a right to prevail. National education must be the same for all, as surely as the World Plan is the same for each and every being placed in the same stream of divine life. There is only one Truth, which is the same for all, and therefore, in principle, there can also be only one education. Such a radically idealistic education cannot be achieved in a society which is disintegrating and wretched in its selfishness." * Such a national education, of course, has nothing in common with nationalistic education or uniformity; what is meant is an education which does more than perpetuate the old spirit of the state, an education of youth not for some further goal but for youth itself. Only the young who conquer the past can attain to a new spirit in which the past is aufgehoben.* Youth in this classic-idealistic sense, because it is defined not biologically but spiritually as a closeness to Spirit and Nature can be found among men of all ages; it is the eternal Greek ideal of kciokagathia, the harmony of spiritual and physical beauty and virtue. Youth thereby overcomes the diT Philosophie der Welt-Geschichte, in Sämtliche Werke, IX, 528-29; English translation by J. Sibree, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, pp. 232-33. • "Fichte als Erzieher; Festrede bei der gemeinsamen Fichte-Feier des Freideutschen Verbandes und der Berliner Freien Studentenschaft in der Berliner Universität," January 29, 1914, in Der Kampf für die Jugend. The quotations are to be found on pp. 235, 234, 238. • "What good would a Youth Movement do," Wyneken said during the World War, "if its whole harvest consisted only in copying the old forms of social life? Whither, indeed, does such a youth 'move? Towards old age? But for that one does not need a 'movement,' nature takes care of it, just as there is no need for founding a society to promote the rotation of the earth! An analytical Youth Movement (in the sense of Kant's analytical evaluations) whose only wisdom consisted in maintaining that being young means not yet being old (but being old soon), would be a ridiculous farce. A synthesis is needed, a Youth Movement that knows that being young means having faith and the desire of serving only the highest aims." "Der Sozialismus der Jugend," ibid., pp. 146-47.

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vision of society; it is the synthesis of freedom and discipline, it is sovereign and chaste, set apart from the grownups and yet an arena that mirrors the great contest of time. It ever creates anew the new society, which becomes universal by overcoming the bounds which set youth apart as a distinct spiritual and natural class of society. By emancipating itself, youth eventually emancipates all society. Here once more appears the faith in absolute values which is perennial within the German mind. The dialectical concept of youth and society, as it prevailed in the Jugendbewegung is, of course, not borrowed from Marxism, much as it may resemble the Marxist view of proletariat and society; instead it goes back to a common source, idealistic philosophy, which in tum was allied with the universal concept of Germanic-Occidental history. As a historic phenomenon, the Youth Movement sprang up in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Among the universities, the Freie Sfudentenschaft at Leipzig took the lead. Its line of attack against the established attitudes of collegiate life was in two directions: it opposed the traditional student corporations (Corps, Burschenschaften) which monopolized the universities and imposed their formalistic code of honor, degrading drinking and duelling customs, and social prejudices; and it was directed as well against the increasingly large numbers of students who had no true organic connection with their universities, who were no longer members of an academic community but merely private individuals devoted to studying. Through the political and social affiliations of their alumni (called Alte Herren in Germany) the student corporations wielded great influence. The private students, on the other hand, threatened to undermine the very concept of the university as a Civitas Académica. To revive this concept became the main program of the Freie Studentenschaft. The practical work of the organization was both social and pedagogical. Students, the leaders believed, must not allow themselves to be petrified by one-sided training for their particular future "jobs," nor should they abuse the great privilege of acquiring higher learning by wasting time in drinking, laziness, and excess. They should be interested not just in examinations, but also in the full rights and duties of academic citizenship. Understanding of art, general culture, and literature was as important as classroom knowledge. Among the citizens of the academic world, social prejudices and excessive individualism should give way to Kameradschaft (comradeship)—the magic word of the Youth Movement. The rediscovery of the body paralleled the revival of a universalist spirit. Sports, gymnastics, and games took on new prominence, and technical facilities were obtained for them. The "free students" also succeeded in persuading their fellows that to work one's way through the university was not contrary to academic prestige. They established employment agencies, hostels,

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and homes, and they organized courses for workers and other non-academic men and women, who flocked in attendance. Thus, the students themselves laid the foundations for the German Volkshochschulen, which later became known the world over. These "people's universities" afforded thousands and tens of thousands the opportunity to acquire academic knowledge in their adult years. From Leipzig the movement spread to Königsberg, Halle, Charlottenburg (with its famous Technische Hochschule) and Berlin, then to all other universities. Largely due to the initiative of the "free students," the accepted picture of the tippling and roistering German student became obsolete. In the years of the Weimar Republic, the universities no longer harbored "beer romanticism," and students with duelling scars from ear to ear (crossword puzzles, I called them in those days) became an object of ridicule rather than admiration. The Youth Movement also set itself against the rigid separation of the various age groups. The leaders believed in one youth and therefore in comradeship between secondary school and university students, with the elders assuming some pedagogical authority over the younger. Among the youth of the schools the movement began to unfold in the nineties. Its birthplace was a Gymnasium in Berlin-Steglitz, the organizers a handful of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys, among whom one, Karl Fischer, deserves to be remembered. It cannot be said that they had a program. At first they acted rather out of an instinctive aversion to urban civilization and a deep-going desire to rediscover nature, folklore, the simple life, and simple people. These boys said only that they wanted "to live their own life on their own responsibility." The Wandervogel, as they originally called their movement, shunned the institutionalization which marked the Boy Scouts in America and Britain. In the last instance, the Youth Movement was a sort of revolt against home and family, but its purpose was not to destroy the natural bonds of filial love; it was, rather, a recognition of the fact that the family could no longer fulfill the spiritual needs of the younger generation. It was a revolt against the success-worship of middle-class homes and a longing for the ideal of comradeship free from class and income prejudices. In all these endeavors and ideals, the Youth Movement was the exact opposite of the later Hitler Youth, which, significantly enough, remained small and unimportant until the young were pressed into it by force. All youth groups proud of their freedom and conscious of their ethical obligations scorned it as a mere subdivision of the National Socialist party. Mass organization under imposed leaders, regimentation, and subservience to the aims and interests of grown-up politicians was precisely what the Youth Movement rejected most strongly. In an age of collectivism and soulless mass action they had rediscovered the value of the personality, of true lead-

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ership. "A leader," said Wyneken, "is a gift of destiny; one cannot make of him an item of a program, or create him by appointment. He is not determined by human selection but by his charism. He is a spiritual reality." 10 Accordingly, the movement never consisted of organized institutions. After encountering much opposition—the sort that present-day American boys would meet if they denounced swing and juke-boxes as expressions of utter barbarism—the new idealism spread out all over Germany, with small groups springing up spontaneously as living entities in constant change and unceasing competition. The inner breadth and richness, the profound democracy and hatred to regimentation shown by the more valuable section of German youth is due to the Youth Movement. No other younger generation has been so consciously aware of its moral duties, its liberty, and its personality, or so averse to intellectual and political mass instincts. Of course, these youngsters felt very German and were proud to know again of the true Germany that had been hidden by the smoke of chimneys and the glitter of world trade. They rejected militarism, the most concrete expression of modern mass instincts. In this connection, it is interesting to note the experiences of Oswald Garrison Villard, that unrelenting foe of militarism everywhere. He spent two years at a Berlin Gymnasium, commencing when he was twelve. These years were from 1884 to 1886, before the Youth Movement had crystallized. "In the German schools at that time there was no sign of militarism or even marching," he writes. "When the pupils went out with their teachers it was for all day hikes which were correlated usually to their instructions in botany and natural history. Not until the middle of the World War did Germany begin to drill her schoolboys. Until then her military men had believed that drilling boys before they obtained their full growth was hurtful and not helpful—an opinion shared by some of the best instructors in physical training in this country. Few of the boys in my class sought the military career." 11 The youth hostels, open to all groups regardless of political creed or nationality, were started around 1900. The Freie Schulgemeinden like Wyneken's Wickersdorf, the Odenwaldschule (especially well known in America), the Schule am Meer, and many others became democratic republics of youthful, cosmopolitan culture. Other schools, like Salem, founded by Prince Max of Baden, grew out of the same spirit, which steadily infiltrated also the secondary schools controlled by state and city. The scholastic achievements of those schools had always been exemplary, and so they remained; but it was probably the attitude of freedom created by youth which preserved in many of these German schools a spark of their original spirit in spite of the outward Gleichschaltung forced upon them. It is a io "Der weltgeschichtliche Sinn der Jugendbewegung," ibid., ρ. 167. H Fighting Years; Memoirs of a Liberal Editor, pp. 74-75.

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fact to be recorded with pride that more than a decade of unscrupulous despotic endeavor did not succeed in destroying utterly the heritage of liberty. The school, Wyneken said, where youth spends half of its time must be their own property, not an inimical institution. Instead of advancing vague plans of world betterment, youth must work on itself; as a result the world would become better too. Wynecken demanded that the school should not simply prepare the young for future professions or jobs, but should create a youthful life of its own, noble and independent, immediate to the spirit. It should be a liberator of youth, dominated by youth's desire for truth and beauty. Creative thinking and individualism within comradeship should waken the young to the interdependence of all human culture. The new society, potentially alive in youth, should be formed through its own instruments, the schools. Thus the school was to become a synthesis of the two antithetical forces: home and Youth Movement, and was to be a vessel of the spirit of reason and history. One of the strongest influences molding the modern German and the universal Occidental culture was Stefan George, to whom I have often referred. George can be understood only against this background of youth as a spiritual-historic reality. Only recently has he become well known in Englishspeaking countries, though on the Continent his name has held high rank for many years.12 Not without reason George has been called a ruler of the Geheime Deutschland, the secret or hidden Germany. He disliked publicity, but his influence on German youth and on German literature and thought has been enormous. How lasting it has been will become apparent only when, with the restoration of national sovereignty, the true Germany will rise again.13 National Socialism, intent on capturing German youth by draping its aggressive ambitions with pseudouniversal trappings, tried in vain to enlist Òeorge's work and name for its purposes. In 1933 he was offered the presidency of the German academy of literature, which he at once declined; indeed, he did not even answer the invitation himself. Then as an unambiguous, public move of protest, he left his country to spend the balance of his life as an exile in Switzerland. There he died at Locamo-Minusio, on December 4, 1933. There is his grave, where nothing but the name and laurels I I In 1943 a hundred selected poems were published in an English translation by Carol North Valhope and Ernst Morwitz, printed side by side with the German original: Stefan George, Poems (New York, Pantheon Books, 1943). The volume is prefaced by a biographical sketch written by Morwitz, who knew George well for many years. I I I must limit myself here to a bare outline of the significance of George's work. Biographies exist by two of his intimate friends and companions: Friedrich Cundolf, George (Berlin, Georg Bondi, 1920), and Friedrich Wolters, Stefan George und die Blätter für die Kunst; Deutsche Geistesgeschichte seit 1890 (Berlin, Georg Bondi, 1930).

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betray the presence of the mortal remnants of one who continues to be the uncrowned ruler of a sacred realm. None ever scourged more mercilessly than George the belief that bigness is equivalent to greatness. None ever exposed more mercilessly the inner decay of an age at a time when only a few were able to see the rot beneath the surface. Stefan George's work is contained in seven volumes of poetry, besides a collection of early poems, two volumes of prose, and five of translations. His last work, Das Neue Reich, was published in 1928. Together with new verses, it contained a number of his greatest poems written between 1914 and 1919, some of which—the most daring words spoken concerning the war—had been published in 1917 in the journal Blätter für die Kunst. George had with the publication of Der Siebente Ring in 1907 reached the summit of his creation. It centers around the figure of Maximin, his true companion, in whom he found the personification of the idea of youth. Their meeting and spiritual communion forms the core of Der Siebente Ring and it remainedlater the force that radiated its light forth into the future. Of the following lines taken from Maximin • Ein Gedenkbuch, Gundolf once said that "today they sound more understandable than before the war, indeed, perhaps too understandable": 14 "We were moving towards a mankind cold and disfigured, yet boastful about its manifold achievements and arabesque sentiments when all the while the great deed and the great love were waning in our midst. The masses set up their law and rule, and with the falseness of shallow interpretation stifled the voices that still called. . . . Impure hands dug down where in the heaps of tinsel precious stones were buried indiscriminately. . . . Analytic conceit covered despairing impotence, and contemptuous laughter announced the fall of the sanctuary." 18 In Maximin, whom he met, as Dante had met Beatrice, nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita, George recognized "the representative of sovereign youth, such as we had dreamed of, youth in that unbroken fulness and purity that can still move mountains and walk on dry land through the midst of the sea, youth fitted to receive our heritage and to conquer new domains." " "We know," he added, "that only sapless eras see in youth a preliminar)' stage and a promise, never the peak and perfection, that more in their contours than in their words and deeds, lies the lasting power of all the heroes and the mighty and those who in the grace of their spring walk the fields of summer for but a brief space, who bleed to death at the forest's verge or sink into dark waters, to be transported to heaven and to rule with deathless names over all the generations of men. We know that the great exGeorge, p. 214. '»"Vorrede zu Maximin," in Gesamt-Ausgabe der Werlte; Endgültige Fassung, XVII, 74. 18 Ibid., p. 75; English translation by Carol North Valhope and Ernst Morwitz, in Stefan George, Poems, p. 26. 14

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peditíons that changed the face of our world, were planned by the schoolboy Alexander, that the twelve-year-old son of Galilee instructed the scribes in the capital, that the Lord of the longest world rule we know of, did not die in his thirties, but as a youth found the eternal symbols on his bloomy path, and that he died as a youth." 17 Of the influence of this "most un-Protestant German who has spoken out since Luther" 1 8 Ernst Morwitz says: "It is not surprising that great poems always originate at turns of the tide in the affairs of men, when an old era is dying out and a new era is tuning its first song. That is the moment for the poet to 'charm the air to give a sound.' Homer and the Greek tragedians lived in periods when the fate of the Greeks trembled in the balance. Dante wrote at the turn of Italian, Shakespeare at that of English history. Goethe's work marks the beginning of national unity for which he created the necessary unified and unifying language. When Germany had reached the peak of external power and her inner strength began to lessen, another true poet at the turn of her destiny, comprised the present and the future: Stefan George. In an age when everything was flattened to the same level, when rattling of sabers and playing with sugary words, were both manifestations of the same impulse to hide inner emptiness under the guise of being 'interesting,' this man was the only one whose life and work were governed by the same stem law. He was the last of a series of relentless thinkers and of those great poets who blended profundity with enchantment. He not only produced poems of enduring beauty and altered the tone and the structure of his language, he became the judge and the prophet of his people. And so he rings in a new era. "That poets direct the trends of their day, is frequently not apparent during their life-time, but Stefan George's power was felt even thirty years before he died. When the First World War was still in the offing, the best of Germany's younger generation tried to shape the pattern of their Uves to the ideas they had derived from his poems. When the war had come, soldiers carried his books in their packs along with Goethe's Faust, and after it was over, his influence grew from year to year. His younger friends, schooled in his thought, held important positions in almost all of the leading German universities, and members of the youth movements that were gaining in scope and importance, declaimed his poems at their reunions." " These words everyone who was young in Germany or who has more than superficial book knowledge of that country will readily confirm. In George, the perennial spirit of the classic-Christian-Roman-Germanic world found its resurrection. Of Frankish origin ( Upper Lorrainian peasant stock on his father's side, Rhenish on his mother's), he blended French blood, German blood, and Roman tradition. He was Reich-conscious, never particularistic 17 18

Ibid., p. 78; English, p. 27. Gundolf, George, p. 48. Introduction to Stefan George, Poems, pp. 9-10.

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and never nationalistic. In his Germano-Hellenic philosophy of life and youth he is most closely related to Hölderlin; but whereas Hölderlin consummated his work as one of the eternal heroes of youth, George was destined to be youth's master and communicant. In this sense his words Hellas ewig unsre Liebe! ( Hellas our love forever ) 2 0 assume an ever more extensive meaning, for they express a philosophy of life which, as we have noted, has been perennially linked within the Germanic character. History, which in his time had become a lifeless school of knowledge, was alive in him as an ever-present spiritual reality. In his poem "The Graves of Speyer," from Der Siebente Ring, the spirits of the illustrious and anointed from Conrad to the Greatest Frederick emerge from their sublime rest.21 In his poem Torta Nigra," the specter of the Roman youth Manlius, the lowest of the low in the train of the Caesars, rises to denounce the modern world, over which he would not care to wield a scepter.22 In "Leo XIII," transfigured age, true priesthood, consecration, and dominion are glorified. Heut da sich schranzen auf den thronen brüsten Mit wechslermienen und unedlem klirren: Dreht unser geist begierig nach Verehrung Und schauernd vor der wahren majestät Zum ernsten väterlichen angesicht Des Dreigekrönten wirklichen Gesalbten. Now that the thrones are held by brazen idlers, With mien of brokers and with boastful rattle: Our spirit avid to revere and trembling Before the only actual majesty, Turns to the grave paternal face of him, The three-fold Crowned, the verily Anointed.2' One line in this poem, "New love alone begets a new salvation," perhaps symbolizes the fullness of George's creed. But his eyes, in terror, are also turned toward the coming doom. "The Anti-Christ," from Der Siebente Ring, could be truly understood only many years after it was written. The coming of malign deceit is predicted and is in the vision embodied in a sinister prophet of revolt against the Holy—an evil figure who does all the works of heaven with only a hairbreadth of difference, and the blinded eyes of the people cannot detect the sacrilege, while the treasures of the ages are spoilt and wasted. 20 Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder υοη Traum und Tod mit einem Vorspiel, in Gesamt-Ausgabe der Werke; Endgültige Fassung, V, 18. « Ibid., VI-VII, pp. 22-23. 22 Ibid., pp. 16-17. « Ibid., p. 20; English, p. 125.

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NATIONAL REALM OF SUPRANATIONALEM Ihr jauchzet, entzückt von dem teuflischen schein, Verprasset was blieb von dem früheren seim Und fühlt erst die not vor dem ende. Dann hängt ihr die zunge am trocknenden trog, Irrt ratlos wie vieh durch den brennenden hof. . Und schrecklich erschallt die posaune. Jubilant, entranced by the devilish glamour, You waste the last morsel of substance, Unknowing until the final course the woe. Tongue laid to the drying manger, Senselessly and aimlessly you hurry around Like cattle in the blazing farm yard And the trumpet makes terrible sound.21

George would not be the poet of the Abendländisches Reich, had he not eyes and ears to perceive the greatness of the non-German geniuses. The masters to whom he feels indebted are "Attica's purest servants of the gods"; Shakespeare, "the foggy islands' somber prince of spirits"; Petrarch; and "the Florentine." 25 Among his works, translations hold an important place. Selected songs from Dante's Divina Comedia;26 Shakespeare's Sonnets; 27 verses by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, D'Annunzio, Kloos, Rossetti, and many others betray his mastery in understanding the non-German creative spirit.28 George's faith, which based on living history, youth, and the undying idea of the Occident, centered around Das Neue Reich—the Kingdom to Come. He felt, however, that he had a mission not as a politician, but as the guardian of the sacred flame until such time as the spirit will shape bodies to be its vessels. Clearly he foresaw in his poem "The War" ( 1917), "the many downfalls without dignity," the triumph of the trader-kings, and the despair at the end.29 As early as 1921 he spoke of the "First World War" 30 and foretold the even greater darkness at its end, a darkness against which old Marshal von Hindenburg, who had saved the Reich from outward enemies, would not prevail. But he also knew that, "steeled in the fire of the accursed years," a new 24

"Der Widerchrist," ibid., p. 57; English translation by Padraic Colum. " Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder von Traum und Tod mit einem ibid., V, 29. 2 27 « Ibid., Vols. X-XI. Ibid., Vol. XII. 2 » Ibid., Vols. XIII-XVI. 29 "Der Krieg," in Das Neue Reich, ibid., IX, 27 sqa. »o "Einem jungen Führer im Ersten Weltkrieg," ibid., pp. 41 sqq.

Vorspiel,

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generation would rise just when all hope had seemed to fade and would follow "the true symbol on the people's banner"—a generation that would not indulge in lies but would judge man and things with truthful measure, would stand pure, uncorrupted by the unchaste marketplace, proud and humble through sacred dreams, through work, and through overwhelming suffering." That generation, in the dawn of an awakened day, will plant Das Neue Reich. 31

"Der Dichter in Zeiten der Wirren," ibid., pp. 35 sqq.

30 THE SECOND THIRTY YEARS WAR Sed vieta Catoni . . . L U C A N , Pharsalia. To DEAL OBJECTIVELY with a man so much disputed as Emperor William II is particularly fitting for believers in republican government. "For the sake of justice," I wrote in The Tragedy of a Nation: Germany, 1918-1934, "it must be acknowledged that there were moments in the life of the Emperor William II when undoubtedly he understood the significance of his office; but he was the bearer of a rank that went beyond his measurement, and many times his own voice must have frightened him, when it made him utter things which as a human being he did not himself understand." 1 An impartial picture of the late emperor has been drawn by Nicholas Murray Butler in his autobiography, Across the Busy Years. He knew William intimately for eight years. Describing their first meeting, at Schloss Wilhelmshöhe in 1905, he pays tribute to the alertness, the well-informed, quick, and thoroughly educated mind, of his host. "Had the Kaiser not been a reigning monarch," he remarks, "he might readily have made his mark as a man of letters. The striking character of much that he said in ordinary conversation would have made an enviable reputation for the ordinary man. He was greatly concerned to be well informed in regard to everything that was going on in the intellectual and scientific life of the German people and he took all possible pains in respect to these matters." ! His full breadth appeared in the discussions that centered around the establishment of a Theodore Roosevelt Professorship at the University of Berlin, proposed by Dr. Butler and at once warmly espoused by the emperor, for the conversations dealt with the most diverse subjects: religion, literature, social legislation, freedom of the press, etc. And in everything Dr. Butler received the same impression of the deeply humane and honest character of his host. The emperor's political aims and ideas were certainly sincere and highminded. If he had his shortcomings, they were not in his will or intentions. But he was apt to be impulsive, and the bad effect of his rashness was often magnified by the fact that the emperor's judgment of human nature was very poor. "His always noble intentions," said Prince Eulenburg, a truly loyal friend, "were frustrated by the lack of a clear grasp of the 'realities'; his undeniable genius was marred by his thorough inability to judge the character ι Page 70.

a Across the Busy Years; Recollections and Reflections, II, β1-β2.

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and motives of men correctly. For he was more or less wrecked by those with whom he surrounded himself, who cleverly dominated him by never contradicting and who also got everyone out of the way who had the courage to oppose him openly when duty demanded it." s His pompous manner of speech and often ill-placed rhetoric did more harm to the emperor than the attacks of his enemies in Germany. Each of his unfortunate words or gestures was quickly worked into the caricature by which William II soon came to be known by the world. That the "wild beast of Berlin" version of World War days no longer had the faintest resemblance to the real man hardly requires mention. "It will never be possible to persuade me," Dr. Butler concludes his observations on the emperor, "that William I I was the war lord that the newspapers persistently represented. He never mentioned war in any of his talks with me except to decry it, and the whole of his interest was in matters of social progress and educational advantage. That the Kaiser was absolutely absorbed in the happiness, prosperity and prestige of the German people is quite certain." 4 I cannot here undertake to paraphrase the many searching works on the question of the so-called "war guilt" and on the history of the war itself. After having dealt with this extensive literature since my student days, I share the opinion that it is impossible to speak of a particularly German war guilt. Nor would the matter be one in question today, had not the fogs of propaganda of the Second World War again cast a veil over the facts that had become entirely clear to sober thinkers in the years of peace. The misdeeds of the National Socialist regime have retroactively colored the problem, even in the eyes of many who for years before the new hostilities began had recognized the error of charging Germany with full responsibility in 1914. It is sufficiently well established, too, that from the point of view of objective historic accuracy one cannot call the First World War a true war of principles. It was not a case of "democracy versus autocracy." On the side of the democracies was Russia with the most autocratic of all governments, while the constitution of Germany was, on the other hand, one of developing parliamentarianism and of liberal, socially progressive democracy. The two main Central Powers had nothing to gain from war, and everything to lose. It is true, however, that the Habsburg monarchy was menaced by internal dissension, which was accentuated by Russian imperialistic pressure in the guise of Pan-Slavism. Justified as the national aspirations of the Slavic peoples may have been, from the viewpoint of the existing AustroHungarian state they were a grave threat against which the government was s Letter to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, March 18, 1919. Erlebnisse an deutschen und fremden Höfen, p. 353. 1 Across the Busy Years; Recollections and Reflections, II, ββ-β7.

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compelled to defend itself. The Pan-Slavist Russian policy could be regarded only as a continued hostile act. That the policy of divide et impera chosen by the Habsburg monarchy to handle its many nationalities was wrong and inefficient, that the show of force, which dragged Germany to war when the crisis came in the summer of 1914, was criminal stupidity—these are different matters. Russia's ambitions in the West could be satisfied only by dissolution of Austria-Hungary and of Turkey, and these aims were urgent because in the Far East the Russian path had been blocked by the Japanese victory of 1905. On the other side of Germany was France, who could regain AlsaceLorraine only by a war. Veit Valentin has formulated a number of "empirical laws" derived from his historical studies. The one that applies to the crisis of 1914, which demonstrated its truth, is that "in foreign political alliances the weaker partner tries to lead the stronger, and usually with success. T h e robust, saturated and consolidated state," Valentin explains, "is sought by the less robust, but ambitious and endangered one. . . . Bismarck had tried hard to keep the alliance of the German Reich and Austria-Hungary in hand— yet, the Danubian monarchy, the weaker partner, succeeded in becoming the real dirigent." 5 In spite of the reluctance of the imperial German government, Austria, after the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, dictated the course of action. Vienna's ultimatum to Serbia of July 23, insulting in tone and in content, became known in Berlin only twenty-four hours before it was dispatched." Serbia's conciliatory reply was held back for three days by the Austrian foreign minister, Count Leopold von Berchtold, and it was not published until the evening of July 28, the day on which war was declared on Serbia. 7 When it was received in Berlin, the emperor at once expressed the opinion that it constituted a sufficient moral victory." He realized that a war between Austria and Serbia would bring Russia into the game, because Russia would not and could not tolerate a diminution of her Balkan influence or a loss of prestige among the Slavic peoples. Nor did Bismarcks Reichsgründung im Urteil englischer Diplomaten, p. 484. • The text of the ultimatum had been voted upon by the Austro-Hungarian government on July 19 without German collaboration. The Austrian ambassador, Count Szogyény, on handing it to the German government in the evening hours of July 22 added, whether by an error or upon instruction is not clear, that it had already been dispatched to Belgrade. When Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow protested the sharp tone, Count Szogyény replied that nothing could be done, for it was to be presented in Belgrade the next morning and also was to be published by the official Vienna telegraph news agency. Jagow, Ursachen und Ausbruch des Weltkrieges, pp. 109-10. 7 "Count Berchtold and his associates," Theodor Wolff writes about this act of diplomatic trickery, "would deserve for this deliberate concealment alone a place of honour in the dock." Der Krieg des Pontius Pilatus, p. 328; English translation by E. W. Dickes, The Eve of 1914, pp. 455-56. 8 Kautsky et al., eds., Die Deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch, 1914, No. 271. 5

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he doubt that a conflict between Russia and Austria would set the military machine of the Russian-French agreements in motion. If any further evidence were needed, it had been furnished by the visit of Raymond Poincaré, then president of the French Republic, to St. Petersburg on July 20. Maurice Paleologue, French ambassador to the Russian court, has described the intense war excitement among the grand ducal court circles who finally got the better of the pacific, noble-minded, but weak Czar Nicholas II.· At the end of the three-day visit, the obligations imposed upon both countries by their treaties of mutual military aid were solemnly reaffirmed. Emperor William, setting hope against hope, must then have realized that even his attempts to influence the czar personally had become futile. His last telegram was dated August 1; he implored Nicholas II in almost pathetic tone to stop the march of Russian troops towards the German and Austrian frontiers. Meanwhile, on July 28, Austria had declared war on Serbia. The German government at once urged Vienna to make it known that no annexation of Serbian territory was contemplated and that the campaign, a punitive expedition rather Than a war, would be halted at Belgrade.10 This course of action was favored also by the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey. On July 29, Czar Nicholas ordered the mobilization of the Russian army. In the evening, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg advised Sir Edward Grey that, should war break out, Germany would respect Belgian integrity after the war and aim at no territorial acquisition at the expense of France, provided that Great Britain remained neutral. On July 31, the French cabinet met in council, and the result of their deliberations was summarized by the minister of war who declared to the Russian military attaché, "with hearty high spirits," that the French government was firmly resolved to go to war.11 On August 1, at 3.40 P.M., France ordered general mobilization; Germany followed a few hours later. In the evening of the same day, Germany declared war on Russia, while to a German enquiry regarding her attitude France replied that she would be guided by her cwn interests alone. On August 3, Germany declared war on France, motivated by the knowledge that the French would certainly go to the assistance of Russia. Upon the invasion of Belgium, begun during the night of August 4, England declared war on Germany.12 La Russie des Tsars pendant la Grande Guerre, I, 15. Kautsky et al., eds., Die Deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch, 1914, No. 323. S j E. Goschen, British ambassador in Berlin, to Sir Edward Grey, July 29, 1914, in Cooch and Temperley, eds., British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914, XI, 185-86, No. 293. 11 Romberg, Die Fälschungen des russischen Orangebuches, p. 41; English, Falsifications & the Russian Orange Book, p. 61. 12 For the official documents supplying the information here cited, see: Gooch and Temperley, eds., British Documents on the Origins of the World War, 1898-1914, XI, 252, 264, 330, Nos. 425, 457, 643; Kautsky et al, eds., Die Deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch, 1914, Nos. 624, 571; France, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Documents diplomatiques français, XI, 509-10, No. 678. 8

10

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G. P. Gooch, in his recent book Studies in Diplomacy and Statecraft, reports a conversation he had in 1929 with Gottlieb Günther von Jagow, German foreign secretary from 1913 to 1916. The dialogue of these two men, both eminently qualified to pass judgment on the question, throws a dispassionate light on the diplomatic responsibility for the catastrophe. Gooch: Grey believes that you, Bethmann and the Kaiser desired peace, but he thinks the military element wanted war and pushed you on. Jagow: Nothing of the sort. Tirpitz was on holiday and was not consulted. Nor was Moltke consulted till the end. The control of our policy was entirely in civilian hands. Gooch: I regret you only put pressure on Austria so late. Jagow: That would have been time enough if Russia had not made war inevitable. We had warned Russia of the effects of such a step. We did put pressure on Austria, but Grey never tried to hold Russia back. Gooch: Grey says he had no locus standi. We were not allies, and he could do nothing more after the rejection of his plan for a conference. He says you were the people to hold Austria back, as you were allies. He thinks there was no danger of you losing Austria if you had taken a strong line, for she could not do without you. Jagow: That is not the case. She could make friends with France, and then reach some agreement with Russia about the Near East. Gooch: Any such arrangement would have been a triumph for Russia. We think you could and should have pressed Austria more strongly, just as you think we could and should have pressed Russia. Each of us feared the loss of our friend or ally. The European system was the main cause of the war. Germany was dragged in by Austria, England and France by Russia. It was an East European quarrel. Jagow: That is so.1* The blood that began to flow in those fateful days has not ceased to flow yet; even the blood of generations then unborn was already destined as sacrifice on the same altars. In analyzing the reasons for Austria's leadership during the critical days one should bear in mind that the Danubian monarchy was Germany's last reliable ally. The terrible option Bismarck had been forced to take in 1876 and 1879 reëmerged with all its consequences in July, 1914. In the years after his fall, despite temporary improvements such as during the Haldane mission to Germany in 1912, the German foreign political position had steadily deteriorated. But public opinion, as Bismarck said, "becomes clearly aware of foreign political mistakes as a rule only after it can look back on the history of a whole generation, and the Achivi qui plectuntur are not always the contemporaries of the erroneous actions. The task of statesman« Page 85.

THE SECOND THIRTY YEARS WAR 393 ship lies in the most accurate anticipation possible of what other people are going to do under given circumstances."14 This is a frightening statement, proved true again today, one generation after Versailles, when the men responsible for that peace have faded out of the picture. The long view again places a grave responsibility on the statesmen, leaders, and politicians of all nations. Their actions will still weigh on mankind when their entire generation has sunk into the grave. In 1914, a statesman of Bismarck's rank would have tried to turn the Russian thunderstorm towards the Balkans, as in 1876. If need be, he might even have abandoned Austria to her fate. And most important, such a statesman would have known that "the imponderables . . . are much weightier than the material factors." He would never have declared war on Russia and France first but would have left the initiative to them in spite of the military risks involved; nor would he have handled the Belgian problem as did the Epigoni of 1914. This neglect of the imponderables threw their whole weight to the side of the Entente. The fantastic propaganda stories of alleged German atrocities ( which, as one knows, greatly influenced American public opinion), might less readily have found credence had not Germany, by declaring the war, incurred the reproach of having started it. It was part of the dramatic greatness of the summer days of 1914 that all peoples rushed to the colors convinced that theirs was the just cause. Charles Péguy's poem written shortly before he fell in battle speaks for many in all the armies: Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour la terre charnelle, Mais pourvuque ce fût dans une juste guerre. Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour quatre coins de terre. Heureux ceux qui sont morts d'une mort solennelle.1· The same spirit lived in the young German regiments, the tens of thousands of volunteers coming from the Youth Movement. They fought and died as men die who are moved not by love of conquest, but only by the high desire to sacrifice themselves for the sake of something great. The nations of Europe were certainly not filled with mutual hatred so much that each should have desired to cool it in the blood of the adversary. Those who knew Europe before the war can testify to the fact that despite frictions among the governments and press feuds, the peoples themselves 14 Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 568. The quotation is from Horace, Epistolae i. ii. 14. ls F r o m "Ève," in Œuvres complètes de Charles Péguy, 1873-1914 (Paris, Nouvelle Revue Française, 1914-1936), VII, 1Θ2. An English translation is to be found in Péguy, Basic Verities; Prose and Poetry, translated by Ann and Julian Green (New York, Pantheon Books, 1943), p. 275.

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seemed nowhere waiting for an opportunity of releasing pent-up lust for killing, conquest, or destruction. Perhaps the general enthusiasm which, once the war had been declared, swept over the nations of Europe—in 1939 it was completely absent in Germany as well as in the Allied camp—had deeper psychological reasons than merely stirred-up nationalism. A saturated world was falling to pieces, and in all countries the best and noblest wanted to fight and die for a new order to come; and though they would do so on opposing sides, it was still a common sacrifice for a Cause common to friend and enemy alike. Later in the war these feelings yielded to the desire for a peace by which the sacrifice would be transformed for the realization of immediate aims: rest, security, or simply liberation from the continuous menace of death. This happened when the enthusiasm of the beginning had spent itself and a return to "normalcy" became the general object of yearning. Whatever doubtful progress mankind has made since 1914 could, of course, also have been brought about by evolutionary means, and probably in a more thorough way. But to argue thus is not licit. No sacrifice is ever in vain, even if he who brings it may be mistaken or deceived as to the purpose for which it is asked, and although the outcome may not seem to justify the price. The world-historic reasons for events of such magnitude, demanding the blood of so many who give it, obedient to their nations' call, are beyond questioning. The Second International, on which many had pinned their hopes, collapsed as completely in the face of nationalism as did the bonds of common culture, history, and religion. Under the circumstances, the attitude of the German Social Democratic party, much criticized later, was the only one possible. At the session of the Reichstag on August 4 the party, which represented the vast majority of the German working class, voted unanimously in favor of the war credits. In a preceding party conference, fourteen voices out of a hundred and ten had dissented, but in parliament they submitted to party discipline. In December, 1914, however, the dissenting voices had increased to seventeen, and in the plenary session of the Reichstag Karl Liebknecht voted against the new credits. In March, 1915, the opposition numbered thirty-two, almost a third of the party votes; the names of the dissenters were published in the Vorwärts, the official party organ. In August of that year, when the fifth war credits were up for discussion, forty-four dissented. Karl Liebknecht and others left the party, and constituted a group which was to become the kernel of the German Communist party (the K.P.D., Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands).1' The attitude of the Social Democrats, in the beginning as well as later, reflected the general sentiment. It had become clear that no international action could be expected. The declaration of the Social Democratic party 18

Lensch, Die Sozialdemokratie; ihr Ende und ihr Glück, pp. 51-52.

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read by its chairman in the Reichstag on August 4 mirrored the fear that the German workers, should they sabotage their country's war effort, could not count on a sufficiently strong response across the frontiers. They would not bring about a peace according to the ideas of the International but merely the immediate defeat of Germany. The statement pointed to the social achievements at home which were well worth defending. But it also stressed the necessity of a purely defensive war, without annexations or aggrandizement." Though the later split in the Social Democratic party was brought on partly by the desire of the minority group to use the war for personal and political aims, it was also caused by an honest rejection of imperialism which developed after the German victories in the East and the West. At a still later date the socialist opposition in the country, resulting in strikes, found its arguments in the increasing economic distress and the feeling that the hour for wresting power from the old regime was approaching. For the progress of history it may not have been an unmitigated evil that the belief in the redeeming power of international socialism was revealed as an illusion. Its objective content of morality had faded; hedonistic ideas burgeoned in socialism as they did everywhere else in those comfortable years. Socialism had become "capitalism from below" and many of the proletarians "have-not capitalists," with exactly the same longings and materialistic aims of life as the owners of the world's goods. It has been said that world Christianity must also own up to a definite failure. The churches had blessed the arms everywhere, had prayed for the victory of the most diverse countries, and had invoked the grace of Heaven for the respective "just" causes. The Entente did not shun alliance with pagan, emperor-worshipping Japan. Moslems, fetishists, and head-hunters were hurled against the Central Powers, while they, in turn, did not disdain to ally themselves with the sultan-caliph, who proclaimed an Islamic "Holy War." In all these accusations there is some truth. Yet, be it noted, they are usually raised by agnostics or atheists who have a very low opinion of religion as an "ideological superstructure" and still ask it to achieve results that have been far beyond the capacity of the temporal powers. Viewed from within, these problems are far more serious and painful. The World War only revealed the tragedy that had been preparing itself through centuries when national and private morality were secularized, and the universal Occidental authority was weakened and finally destroyed. This process had begun in the days of Gregory VII and had become manifest after the fall of the Hohenstaufen; it had been objectivized in the Reformation and the first Thirty Years War. It was upon these steppingstones in the river of statism and nationalism that mankind has moved to apparent ruin. 17 Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen laturperiode, 2. Session, CCCVI, 8-9.

des Reichstags,

XIII. Legis-

396

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But experience and observation also prove that the reawakening of a living faith in the basic tenets of the Creed and in the reality of the spiritual world has been fostered by bankruptcy of the world of modem man. Out of the death of millions there rose the new certainty that death is not the end. In the very concrete forms of this world, no authority did more to restore peace than the Holy See. But since dominion over this world is not, and cannot be, of the church, she could not take an active part as if she were a supergovemment. All she can do, as residuary of the faith, is to keep alive in the consciousness of man the idea of mankind and of the Mystical Body. A clear-sighted German diplomacy and a strong civil government not under the thumb of a politically incompetent high command might have brought the war to an early and honorable close. For this it would have been necessary to pay careful attention to the sentiments of the United States. Indeed, no other single event affected the family of European nations (a family, despite war) more deeply than did the appearance of American divisions on the Occidental stage. 1 ' Had America remained neutral, a negotiated peace, which should always be the aim of statesmanship, might have been concluded with its cooperation, provided, of course, that the Entente did not have reason to expect eventual American intervention. But it was not only America that deserved the statesmanlike attention of the German leaders; Russia was at least as important. In 1916 a chance for a separate peace still existed; informal negotiations started at Stockholm were already far advanced. The pacific, pro-German attitude of the czarina and the prime minister, Baron Stürmer, opened hopeful prospects. Had this psace come, the inner situation of Russia would have been stabilized while the Central Powers would have gained a free hand in the West, in Italy, and in the Near East. The only reasonable agreement would have been a "Peace of Nikolsburg," namely, a peace without annexations. But the military, Erich Ludendorff, the all-powerful quartermaster general and right-hand man of Paul von Hindenburg, insisted upon detaching Poland from Russia in the hope that one million Polish soldiers might, under German and Austrian officers, join the armies of the Central Powers. Poland was to be a constitutional kingdom under some German prince. The whole plan was so childish that it is difficult to comprehend how any serious strategist could have preferred an ephemeral Polish army to the elimination of the Russian front. Reich " How disruptive it was has been recognized clearly by non-Germans. Oswald Garrison Villard, writing about his impressions in England shortly after the armistice, tells of a meeting with Robert Dell, the famous Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. "Robert Dell," he says, "was one of a number of dissenting Englishmen who asked me, the instant we met: "Why, why did you Americans have to come in and spoil the whole business?"—meaning a sane and negotiated peace." In the light of the history of the nonnegotiated peace of 1919, one may perhaps be permitted to applaud such wisdom and foresight. Fighting Years; Memoirs of a Liberal Ëditor, p. 380.

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Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg did not possess Bismarck's strength of character and will and could not defy the generals. The proclamation of the "Kingdom of Poland" on November 5, 1916, destroyed the hopes for peace. Even after the complete defeat of Russia, German policy blundered criminally during the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. The unduly harsh treaty imposed on the defeated enemy (though hardly worse than conditions forced on Russia by the Allies later) compelled the high command to keep about one million troops in the Ukraine and the other vast areas detached from Russia. Men like Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, an able military leader, humane and democratic in his views, warned in vain against setting such a dangerous precedent. Here, too, is an example of the truth that living only for the present and neglecting the great perspectives of history cannot but end in failure. Meanwhile the German home front, to which an early and secure peace in Russia would have meant everything, grew steadily worse. My own memories tell me that as early as 1916 we began to experience the distinction between good appetite and hunger. The first mutiny in any German regiment of which I know took place in the winter of 1916-1917, in the Bavarian Fifth Infantry Regiment at Bamberg.1· The news was, of course, strictly suppressed. By late autumn, 1917, privation in many German and Austrian provinces was approaching the limits of the endurable. During the dismal winter that followed things became still worse. The Allied blockade did its job thoroughly. It not only achieved a decisive weakening of the German people during the war, but its physical and psychological repercussions were felt by the whole generation bom during and after the war. It certainly helped to poison the atmosphere of the peace before peace had even come. Through soldiers returning to the front from furloughs at home the gloomy picture spread to the trenches and could not but affect the morale of the fighting forces. On July 19, 1917, the German Reichstag passed its famous peace resolution with the large majority of 212 votes (the Center, the Socialists, and the National Liberals) against 126 (the Conservatives). It stated that the German people were not animated by a desire for conquest. "The Reichstag is striving for a peace of mutual understanding leading to a permanent reconciliation of the peoples. Enforced cessions of territory as well as political, economic, and financial oppression are incompatible with a peace of this kind. The Reichstag equally rejects all plans aiming at economic isolation and hostility between the peoples after the war. The freedom of the seas must be safeguarded. Only an economic peace will provide a basis for the 19 I have given an account of this incident in Conquest of the Post; an pp. 81 sq.

Autobiography,

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peoples to live together in friendship." And the declaration added: "The Reichstag will actively promote the creation of an international Organization." 20 The resolution, for which the Centrist deputy Matthias Erzberger was largely responsible, derives its full meaning from the fact that negotiations between the then papal nuncio, Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli, and the German government were under way. Erzberger acted as one of the intermediaries.21 On August 1, the Vatican published its peace note, which was, however, rejected by the British government three weeks later. The German reply, coming in the middle of September, was in no way more encouraging.22 It is obvious that the success of the Russian November Revolution of 1917 and the creation of the soviet regime (helped into existence, as is well known, by the German general staff, who sent Lenin from Switzerland to Russia) had a strong influence on the German political front. It meant encouragement to the radical wing of the workers' party almost beyond the dreams of that group, and it seemed to make possible a "people's peace," for which the soviet government at once appealed. In the spring of 1918, after a frightful winter, the German armies staged the last offensive on the Western front, which brought them within sight of victory. At the end of March, the British Fifth Army, its left wing anchored at the Channel, was almost severed from the French and was in danger of being pushed into the sea. However, the terrain reached by the German armies was so utterly devastated that communications and supply became difficult, if not impossible. Moreover, the German losses had been very heavy. But the main thing that prevented Germany from consummating her victory lay in the false policy adopted towards Russia. According to Allied opinion, even a few of the cavalry divisions used by Germany in the Ukraine to support the unpopular regime of the Hetmán Pavel Skoropadski might have been sufficient to break the British-French lines completely and to turn the tide in favor of the Central Powers. The Allied and American armies, having gained a respite, could counterattack, and on August 8 broke through the German lines east of Amiens. This was for the German army the famous Dies ater, from which it was not to recover. Even Erich Ludendorff, until then given to unrestricted optimism, realized for a brief moment that the war was lost militarily. This should have led to immediate armistice negotiations, but unfortunately Ludendorff recovered from his shock only too quickly. Hardly two weeks had passed 20 Verhandlungen des Reichstags, XIII. Legislaturperiode, 2. Session, Anlagen zu den Stenographischen Berichten, CCCXXI, 1747, No. 933. In principle, this peace resolution of the Reichstag expresses the ideas that were later elaborated by President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. 21 See his Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg, pp. 269 sqq. 22 The French text of the British note of August 21 and the German reply of September 19 (here misdated September 13) are given in the memoirs of Chancellor Georg Michaelis, Für Staat und Volk; eine Lebensgeschichte, pp. 343-44, 338-41.

T H E SECOND THIRTY YEARS WAR

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before the senile Reich chancellor, Count von Hertling (he had replaced the inefficient Georg Michaelis, who came to office after Bethmann-Hollweg's opposition to unrestricted submarine warfare had incurred the displeasure of the high command), informed the Bundesrat that there was no ground for doubting a German victory. He had received his information from Ludendorff. As September ended and October began, Bulgaria and Turkey collapsed, thereby bringing the possibility of a second Allied front in the southeast. In Austria-Hungary the last remnants of state and dynastic unity had been undermined by Allied recognition of the various national interests of the Czechs, Slovaks, and South Slavs. In June, 1918, Italy and France officially recognized the independence of Czechoslovakia, though that country could then be found on the map only as the Austrian provinces of Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, and parts of Hungary and Galicia. It is surprising enough (and worthy of the historians commendation) that the Austro-Hungarian army with its sixteen different language groups had been able to fight so bravely and for so many years. Till the very last, some loyal Czech regiments fought shoulder to shoulder with Austrian soldiers from the German and other provinces of the dying dual monarchy. With the deterioration of the military and political situation, clamor for constitutional reforms and even open defiance of the wartime censorship and restraint of public discussions increased. By the end of September, Ludendorff"s optimism vanished, once more to give way to unrestricted pessimism. On his initiative, the leaders of the various political parties (among them Gustav Stresemann of the National Liberals and Friedrich Ebert of the Social Democrats) were informed that the war was lost and that it was their duty to save what could be saved. On September 29, the emperor, at his headquarters at Château-de-laFreineuse, rose to the dignity of his office as he quietly listened to Hindenburg's and Ludendorff s report of doom. The immediate termination of the war as well as the very existence of the monarchy had been thrown open to public debate. On that day the emperor consented to an important change in the German constitution. Since as emperor he had no legislative power, he agreed that as king of Prussia he would see to it that the Bundesrat would at once transform Germany into a parliamentary, democratic monarchy. The chancellor, as head of the government, and all the cabinet ministers would become responsible to the Reichstag, which would thereby assume the first and most important role in the state. The power of declaring war and of concluding peace, thus far vested in the emperor, was transferred to the Reichstag and the Bundesrat. These constitutional amendments, which anticipated much that was later embodied in the Weimar Constitution, became law on October 2 8 . " They " Reichseesetzhiatt, 1918, No. 144, pp. 1273-76. These three laws were the last to be promulgated for Germany over the emperor's signature.

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were,however, in practice treated as in force from the beginning of the montfi. On October 3, the first parliamentary Reich chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, took office, assuming also the portfolio of foreign minister. His cabinet was the first to include leading Socialists, Philipp Scheidemann and Gustav Bauer. From the outlawry of the time of the Antisocialist Law to positions in the imperial cabinet had been a long way, and only a complete change of time and of circumstances could have achieved such unheard-of things. On the same day, the new cabinet appealed to President Wilson for an armistice. "The German Government accepts, as a basis for the peace negotiations," the note stated, "the program laid down by the President of the United States in his message to Congress of January 8, 1918, and in his subsequent pronouncements, particularly in his address of September 27, 1918." 24 The president's name and the principles he announced were acclaimed by all classes and social strata of the Central Powers. It was honestly believed that the new order of freedom and peace, for which they all longed, was now at hand. I myself (in 1918 I was twelve) remember vividly the wave of hope that broke through the darkness of that terrible year, and there can be no doubt that those ideas shortened the war by many months, if not by a whole year. Far more effectively than Communistic propaganda the Wilsonian ideas destroyed the will of the German people to continue the war. Why should hundreds of thousands die if a decent and equitable peace could now be reached? We know that the Fourteen Points must have been honestly meant by their author. Had they not been, their pronouncement would have constituted a most ingenious piece of propaganda and also a most despicable misuse of noble words and ideas. "The most significant thing about Allied acceptance of the President's program," Paul Birdsall writes in his excellent analysis, Versailles Twenty Years After, "was the reluctance with which it was accorded. The Allies were in no position to refuse, since from the time of America's entrance into the war they had tacitly acquiesced in the President's leadership. The propaganda value of his ringing appeals for a new and democratic world order was immense. If they now openly repudiated these principles just when Imperial Germany had accepted them, the President would certainly notify Congress that the Allied Powers were evidently fighting a war for conquest, and America would withdraw, leaving them to face Germany alone. Colonel House had to make precisely that threat before the Allied premiers finally agreed to the President's proposal." " After Colonel House had repeated and amplified this threat, the Allied governments finally, in their joint note to President Wilson, declared "their « Amtliche Urkunden zur Vorgeschichte des Waffenstillstandes, 1918, No. 34; English translation by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, Preliminary History of the Armistice, p. 48. « Page 23.

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willingness to make peace with the government of Germany on the terms of peace laid down in the President's address to Congress of Janunary 8,1918, and the principles of settlement enunciated in his subsequent addresses," with two reservations, one relating to the freedom of the seas, the other to the question of reparations.2' In the Lansing note of November 5, the United States government informed the German government of the acceptance of the Fourteen Points by the Allies and of the two reservations.27 The German government at once agreed also to these, and thereby the note became an international contract known as the Pre-Armistice Agreement. Chancellor Prince Max had the receipt and acceptance of the note published in the official gazette of November 7, and an armistice commission left Berlin immediately.28 In view of these facts, it cannot be doubted that the Fourteen Points constituted an obligation binding upon the Allied and Associated Governments. The later abandonment of that obligation, after Germany was disarmed, disrupted the very foundations of the peace and shook all faith in democratic decency. The violation was just as powerful in destroying the structure of confidence as the original announcement had been in building it. " House, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, IV, 170. 57 Amtliche Urkunden zur Vorgeschichte des Waffenstillstandes, 1918, No. 101; English, Preliminary History of the Armistice, pp. 143—44. s» Deutscher Reichsanzeiger und Königlich Preussischer Staatsanzeiger, November 7, 1918, evening, No. 265.

31 THE LAST OF THE PALADINS While some, in wrath, cast their own guilt upon Their neighbors · others, weary of privation Scrabble for crumbs which the unworthy victor Casts at their feet and howl And dance to stupefaction, lick the heel That treads them down: He, far o f f , feels alone The full of desolation and of boundless shame. STEFAN GEORCE, "Der Dichter in Zeiten der Wirren." THE MAN WHO, in the twilight of Hohenzollern Germany, undertook the difficult task of leading the country towards peace, Prince Max of Baden, was a loyal paladin of Reich and people. Though Germany owes to him a great debt of gratitude for having saved the continuity of its history, his work and personality have not yet found the recognition to which he is entitled. Nor have his memoirs, "a public account of my stewardship," as he calls them,1 received the attention which they deserve as an accurate and honest source of our knowledge of the events that led to Germany's breakdown. Emperor William II has very unjustly called Prince Max "the destroyer of the Empire." With a sneer one would not expect from the holder of an imperial crown he refers to him as "the weak princely 'statesman,' " and, at least by innuendo, accuses him of "working to eliminate me [the emperor] in order to become himself President of the German Republic, after being, in the interim, the administrator of the Empire." In view of the plain historic facts to the contrary, which must have been well known to the emperor, his weak démenti, when he says that "to believe this is undoubtedly to do the Prince an injustice; such a train of thought is impossible in a man belonging to an old German princely family," does but little to mitigate the accusation.1 But republican historians and political writers have also not treated the last imperial chancellor as he deserves. While his integrity, his earnest liberal and democratic convictions, and his sincere efforts to secure peace are readily admitted, his alleged weakness and hesitant policy are strongly emphasized. Usually he is presented as a man full of good intentions and very useful in 1 Erinnerungen und Dokumente, p. S; English translation by W. M. Calder and C. W. H. Sutton, The Memoirs of Prince Max of Baden, I, xi. 1 Ereignisse und Gestalten, aus den Jahren 1878-1918, pp. 244, 241; English translation by Thomas R. Ybarra, The Kaise/s Memoirs, pp. 288, 283.

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bringing about the change to republican government, but, all in all, a rather pathetic figure of hardly more than transitory merit.* Prince Max's own memoirs, written in a simple and forthright manner, show him in a quite different light. His policy, conforming to the innermost desire of all peoples at war, is well summarized in a special preface he wrote for the English edition. It was governed by the hope of seizing one of the many "golden opportunities of bringing about a peace of general contentment," opportunities which both sides had allowed to slip in 1915, in 1916, in 1917, and in 1918. A just peace negotiated early, Prince Max feels, would have earned "the protests of the Jingoes in all the countries concerned, and the gratitude of their peoples for centuries to come." It would have led to "a real League of Nations, not merely the name and the outward show, and America would be with us." A genuine, general disarmament and true freedom of the seas would have been further consequences, and "Continental frontiers would have been drawn in accordance with ethnographic fact, and not with a view to satisfying the strategic aspirations of certain favoured nations. Aggressive Imperialism would in fact be dead and buried." 4 Towards such a peace Prince Max of Baden himself had been working incessantly ever since the outbreak of the war. Active at first in the problem of caring for the prisoners of war, he worked with energy and deep humanitarianism, convinced that by international improvement of the lot of all prisoners new ties could be woven between the nations. It was due to his initiative and preparatory work that the Stockholm Conference on the problem of prisoners of war convened at the Swedish capital in November, 1915. The results of that conference in bettering the care of prisoners and in relieving the anxieties of the prisoners' families have been great and are much to the credit of Prince Max. His close relations to the Russian imperial family, several of whose members were also active in the work for prisoners, permitted him to maintain a lively correspondence with Russia; he used it to keep a sharp watch for any sign of war weariness. "I was unwilling," he explains, "to forego the hope that Imperial Russia, under the stress of war, would hark back to the powerful tradition of Russo-German friendship."5 At the same time, as president of the upper house of the grand duchy of Baden, he endorsed every move taken towards an understanding with the West. The constant endeavors of Count Johann-Heinrich von Bernstorff, German ambassador in Washington, to prevent the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare and to ensure a positive response to President Wilson's attempts at ' See, for example, Scheidemann, Memoiren eines Sozialdemokraten, English, The Making of New Germanu, II, 147 sqq. * The Memoirs of Prince Max of Baden, I, v-vi. 5 Erinnerungen und Dokumente, p. 19; English, I, 15.

II, 175 sqq.;

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LAST O F T H E PALADINS

mediation, also found his full support." But against the blindness of the high command, who forced their will on the leadership of the state, the counsels of Prince Max prevailed as little as those of all the other statesmen and political experts. One might well argue that in this instance, as in so many others, it was Germany's undoing that she disregarded the warnings of Karl von Clausewitz, a man so highly respected elsewhere. "That the political point of view should end completely when war begins," he wrote, "would only be conceivable if wars were struggles of life or death, from pure hatred. As wars are in reality, they are . . . only the manifestations of policy itself. The subordination of the political point of view to the military would be unreasonable." 7 This dangerous yielding to the purely military viewpoint affected not only matters of strategy such as the treatment of Poland and the conduct of submarine warfare; it was also responsible for the way in which hostilities were ended, and thereby it threw its ominous shadow over the ensuing peace. On September 30,1918, Count Georg von Hertling, the aged Bavarian statesman, had resigned his office as imperial chancellor. Prince Max reached Berlin the following day. Though not yet appointed to the chancellorship, he had been asked to attempt the forming of the first parliamentary government. But before these negotiations could get under way, before the prospective new government had a chance to present itself to the country. Prince Max found himself confronted with an ultimatum of the high command: the government must sue for an immediate armistice. The military situation suffered no delay, the Army General Headquarters insisted; in forty-eight hours it might change for the worse. Iii vain Prince Max objected to such haste, which could only have disastrous consequences. Erich Ludendorff, later one of those who most loudly denounced the "November surrender and betrayal," as the nationalistic slogan ran after the war, seemed to have lost his nerve completely. He dispatched an officer to instruct the parliamentary leaders, among them Gustav Stresemann and Friedrich Ebert, to break the news to them that, "The Supreme Command had seen fit to propose to His Majesty that an attempt be made to break off the battle, and the decision had had to be made to give up the war as hopeless. Every twenty-four hours might make matters worse and lead the enemy to discover our real weakness." Nevertheless Prince Max insisted on a breathing spell—ten, eight, even four days—in order that his government might frame a home policy and declare its war aims. But finally in a meeting of the crown council on October 2, he was overruled by the emperor, and the next day Field Marshal Paul 8 Bernstorff, Deutschland und Amerika; Erinnerungen aus dem fünfjährigen especially pp. 371 sqq. * Vom Kriege, in Hinteriassene Werke, III, 123; English, On War, p. 598.

Kriege,

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von Hindenburg repeated the demand that a German peace offer should be made at once. In the evening, Prince Max signed the armistice request; a few hours later he was appointed chancellor. "The German Government," said the note, which went out on the night of October 4, "requests the President of the United States of America to take steps for the restoration of peace, to notify all belligerents of this request, and to invite them to delegate plenipotentiaries for the purpose of taking up negotiations."8 Appointed by the emperor with the special mandate of liquidating the war and bringing about the transition to parliamentarism, Reich Chancellor Prince Max of Baden saw his position suffer from the decline of power to which the imperial office itself had been increasingly subjected.® His standing as leader of the majority of the Reichstag, on the other hand, was too new to yield much authority from parliamentary forces. Of this weakness the chancellor was certainly aware. After the armistice note of October 3-4 had been dispatched, Prince Max was haunted by the fear that President Woodrow Wilson would demand the emperor's abdication. If such a step were to be taken, it must come without pressure from the outside; only then could the dynasty be saved and grave dangers averted for the German state. It is interesting to note that while the cabinet of Prince Max, including the Socialist, Philipp Scheidemann, were trying hard to save the monarchy, the extreme nationalist Right chose to adopt a very critical tone towards the emperor and the imperial office. Thus the Deutsche Zeitung, organ of these circles, wrote on October 12: 'To-day . . . the other elements of our present age are coming to take from the Kaiser sceptre and crown. It would be mistaken to-day to regret this. One who lets the sceptre be snatched from, his hand is not worthy to bear it." 10 Soon there would scarcely be any doubt that the course was indeed set for abdication and probably also the fall of all monarchical institutions in Germany. 8 The sources for the quotations used in this record of events leading to the note of October 3 - 4 follow. Amtliche Urkunden zur Vorgeschichte des Waffenstillstandes 1918, Nos. 22, 24; English translation in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, Preliminary History of the Armistice, pp. 40, 48. Ludendorff, Entgegnung auf das amtliche Weissbuch: Vorgeschichte des Waffenstillstandes, pp. 535 sqq. Prince Max, Erinnerungen und Dokumente, pp. 346, 353n; English, II, 16, 24n. 9 This is another aspect of the relation between original and delegated powers; the latter, unless its bearer changes its character by revolutionary means, is never stronger than its source. Prince Max, therefore, wanted the emperor to make it clear to the people that his authority was "behind the Cabinet's will for reforms, and would overcome all the obstacles which the soldiers and/or the bureaucracy would place in our way" (Erinnerungen und Dokumente, p. 346; English, II, 52). As Prince Max did not intend to assume supreme authority himself, his insight into the nature of his own delegated power disproves, even if nothing else would, the allegation of William II that the chancellor's policy was directed against the emperor's constitutional position. 10 Evening edition, quoted ibid., p. 377n.; English, II, 51n. See also Prince Max's letter to his cousin, the grand duke of Baden, "The Conservatives speak quite openly of his [the emperor's] abdication. Thank God, I have in the Social Democrats allies on whose loyalty towards me at least I can entirely rely. With their help I hope to save the Kaiser. Such is the irony of fate." Berlin, October 15, 1918. Ibid., p. 405; English, II, 86.

406

LAST OF THE PALADINS In the American note of acknowledgment, dated October 8 and signed on behalf of President Wilson by Assistant Secretary of State Robert Lansing, this question was included: 'The President also feels that he is justified in asking whether the Imperial Chancelor is speaking merely for the constituted authorities of the Empire who have so far conducted the war. He deems the answers to these questions vital from every point of view." Thereupon the following paragraph was worked into the second German note, of October 12: "The present German Government which has undertaken the responsibility for this step towards peace has been formed by conferences and in agreement with the great majority of the Reichstag. The Chancelor, supported in all of his actions by the will of this majority, speaks in the name of the German Government and of the German people." No mention was made of the imperial head—this, in later years, was held against the chancellor by monarchist circles. Under the given circumstances it was a wise move, and one justified also by the state of the parliamentary reorganization of Germany's government system. The tone of Wilson's reply, October 14, was one of unmitigated harshness. It invoked as an indispensable condition for further peace negotiations a passage from the president's address delivered at Mount Vernon on July 4: "The destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately, secretly, and of its single choice disturb the peace of the world; or, if it can not be presently destroyed, at least its reduction to virtual impotency." The note added that, "The power which has hitherto controlled the German nation is of the sort here described. It is within the choice of the German nation to alter it. The President's words just quoted naturally constitute a condition precedent to peace, if peace is to come by the action of the German people themselves."11 TTie chancellor believed at first that the words "destruction of every arbitrary power" had been carefully chosen and were merely intended to "urge Germany forward on the path of constitutional reform."12 Also other members of his cabinet, Philipp Scheidemann in particular, were under the impression that they implied only the emperor's personal abdication. But soon it became clear that the formulation was to be a step toward a more far-reaching demand raised in Wilson's third note, of October 23, namely, "not peace negotiations, but surrender" of the "military masters and the monarchical autocrats of Germany." " The note of October 14 had the effect of a bombshell. It changed the internal German situation overnight. The longing for peace was intense, 11 For text of the notes of October 8, October 12, and October 14, see Amtliche Urkunden zur Vorgeschichte des Waffenstillstandes 1918, Nos. 37, 47, 48; English, pp. 52,

ββ,1268.

Erinnerungen und Dokumente, p. 415; English, II, 97. Amtliche Urkunden zur Vorgeschichte des Waffenstillstandes 1918, No. 7Θ; English, p. 115. 18

LAST OF THE PALADINS 407 and the demand for an armistice with consequent hope for a cessation of hostilities in the near future had fanned it even more. But this very prospect of peace had also enabled the masses of the people to control their impatience and to wait for the great moment with restraint and discipline. Now, however, when this veiled but sufficiently clear appeal was addressed to the German people, urging that as a preliminary for peace they take their fate into their own hands, strong revolutionary sentiments were necessarily unleashed. If peace was to come only after governmental changes, those changes must be effected, even if by violence. By the middle of October the misery in the country had risen to new heights. The weather was çold; there was not enough clothing and no fuel. And there was the ghastly epidemic of grippe. In Berlin alone almost two thousand people came down with it on one day (October 15). Philipp Scheidemann had to report to the cabinet that there was no meat available for the population, and simply to supply the capital with potatoes would require four thousand more cars than were at the disposal of the authorities. Not only was the question of abdication now openly discussed, but in the factories of Berlin there was talk of a government led by the Independent Socialists, Hugo Haase and Georg Ledebour. The Social Democrats supporting the government, whose press organ Vorwärts warned the workers against violence, were rapidly losing ground, while the radical wing with its revolutionary program was in the ascendant. The fear of losing the masses entirely forced the Social Democrats both inside and outside the cabinet to move further to the Left. On May 1, 1917, Karl Liebknecht had been arrested after an inflammatory speech. Upon the insistence of Philipp Scheidemann, who argued that the Independent Socialists really profited by the propagandisdc effect of Liebknechts imprisonment, he was released on October 21, 1918. Within a few days he became the undisputed leader of the social revolutionary movement and of the militant Spartacus League, founded in 1917 and named for the leader of the insurrectionary slaves in the Rome of Pompey's day.14 On October 29, the emperor, disregarding the express advice of his chancellor, left Berlin for army headquarters at Spa. Before his departure, he indicated that it would be advisable to make a change of front in foreign policy; henceforth the government should look towards England rather than towards the United States in the pursuit of peace plans. His last conversation with the chancellor in Berlin was held over the telephone, for the emperor refused to receive Prince Max in personal audience." 14 "As early as October," Friedrich Stampfer writes, "a secret conference of the Spartacus League in Berlin had adopted a proclamation to the workers and soldiers requesting them not to be content with parliamentary government but to carry out the socialist revolution." Die vierzehn Jahre der ersten Deutschen Republik, p. 52. 15 Erinnerungen und Dokumente, p. 528; English, II, 230. ' How did the Kaiser hit upon his remarkable idea [namely, letting Wilson go and making friends with England]?

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Naturally, the emperor's absence from the capital could not but have an unfortunate effect on all the negotiations which the chancellor was to conduct in an effort to save the monarchy during the decisive days that followed. In the evening of the very same day, Philipp Scheidemann addressed a letter to Prince Max to suggest the emperor's speedy abdication. "There can be no doubt," he wrote, "that the great majority of the inhabitants of the German Empire are convinced that the prospects of getting tolerable terms for the armistice and peace are being missed by the emperor's remaining in his exalted office." From then on there could be little doubt that abdication was becoming unavoidable. As long as it still appeared voluntary, it might be a great gesture of self-sacrifice on the part of the emperor; an abdication under duress would lose its political value at home and abroad. 10 On November 3, revolt broke out among the sailors of the German fleet at Kiel. On the fourth, the town and port were in the hands of the mutineers, and the workers made common cause with the sailors. On the fifth, Lübeck was in revolutionary hands, and Hamburg, Bremen, Cuxhaven, and other North Sea ports followed the next day. The local and central authorities no longer felt strong enough to cope with the situation. Only at Kiel did the Social Democratic leader Gustav Noske succeed in reëstablishing a certain degree of order. And yet, the way still seemed open for rolling back the revolution—a way that led over the abdication of emperor and crown prince towards a regency and a German national assembly. With the breakdown of the AustroHungarian Monarchy and the establishment in German Austria of a national government pledged to the Anschluss, a national assembly seemed not only a logical procedure but also a renewal of the democratic tradition of the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. The Social Democrats agreed in principle to this idea. Although nothing came of it at the time, it may perhaps be said that Prince Max of Baden, by evoking the idea on the eve of the revolution secured the eventual victory of constitutional government over the Soviet menace. On November 7 the revolution spread to Mecklenburg, Brunswick, and Cologne, and, most fatefully, to Bavaria. There the Social Democratic leader Kurt Eisner proclaimed the Bavarian Republic. After seven hundred and thirty-eight years the house of Wittelsbach ceased to rule. The Welfish house of Brunswick followed the next day, and Leipzig, Frankfurt-am-Main, Philipp Scheidemann asks in his memoirs. "It was perhaps due to notable efforts by the English King, which the public only got to know something of at the beginning of 1928." Memoiren eines Sozialdemokraten, II, 259-57; English translation by J. E. Micheli, The Making of New Germany, II, 216-17. >· Scheidemann, Memoiren eines Sozialdemokraten, II, 254; Prince Max, Erinnerungen und Dokumente, p. 532.

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Stuttgart, Magdeburg, and many other cities and provinces of Germany went over to the revolution. On the day the Wittelsbachs fell from power, Prince Max had a conversation with Friedrich Ebert, a leading member of the Social Democratic Party. Though it has often been quoted, it deserves to be repeated again. "If I succeed in convincing the Kaiser," Prince Max asked Ebert, "can I count on your support in fighting the Social Revolution?" Ebert's answer was unhesitating and unequivocal: "Unless the Kaiser abdicates, the Social Revolution is inevitable. But I will have none of it; I hate it like sin." 17 On November 9, a cold and foggy day, only Königsberg and Breslau were among the major cities still unaffected by the rising tide. And Berlin still looked calm, though it was almost a besieged city. By ten o'clock thousands of unarmed workers began marching towards the center of the town. Women and children led the procession. Soon afterwards the news came that one of the battalions of the Jäger stationed in the city had gone over to the revolution. Other groups—artillery, infantry, armored cars—followed in rapid succession. The chancellor had received word from Spa that the emperor had finally resolved on abdication; but nothing was as yet definite. To reach headquarters was impossible—one of the receivers at Villa Fraineuse, where the emperor was staying had been disconnected; the other was engaged.18 Thus the chancellor, as a last possible move to save the monarchy before it could be overturned by a revolutionary mob, finally issued on his own initiative the following communiqué. "The Kaiser and King has resolved to renounce the throne. The Chancellor remains in office until the questions connected with the abdication of the Kaiser, the renunciation of the Crown Prince of the German Empire and of Prussia, and the setting-up of the Regency have been regulated. He intends to propose to the Regent the appointment of Herr Ebert to the Chancellorship and the bringing in of a Bill to enact that election writs be immediately issued for a German Constituent National Assembly. This would have to settle finally the future constitution of the German people, including any sections of it that might wish to be included within the Empire." " At noon this proclamation became known in the streets of the capital. At the same time, a deputation of the Social Democratic party, including 17 Prince Max, Erinnerungen und Dokumente, g. 599; English, II, 312. What Ebert had in mind when speaking of the "Social Revolution ' here was, of course, the Bolshevik revolution after the Soviet Russian example. 1 8 The only man whom the chancellor felt he could consult on this question was Dr. Walter Simons, an excellent scholar and jurist, later foreign minister and president of the German Supreme Court. After Friedrich Ebert's death in 1925 he was Reich president ad interim until the election of Paul von Hindenburg. 19 Erinnerungen und Dokumente, p. 634; English, II, 353.

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Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann, called on the chancellor. All troops had gone over to their party, they said, and an immediate reorganization of the government would be necessary. When further reports had come in which confirmed the seriousness of the situation, Prince Max asked Ebert whether he was prepared to accept the office of imperial chancellor. "It is a hard task," he answered, "but I am ready to take it on." He was then asked whether he was prepared to carry on with the Constitution. He answered that he was. "Even with the Monarchical Constitution?" To this, Ebert replied: "Yesterday I could have given an unconditional affirmative to this question; to-day I must first consult my friends." 20 Meanwhile, at Villa Fraineuse, the emperor still hesitated, playing with the thought of placing himself at the head of his loyal troops to restore law and order. Finally, in the early morning hours, after a dramatic conversation with Field Marshal von Hindenburg and General Wilhelm Groener, who had replaced Erich Ludendorff as quartermaster general, he began to yield. Groener told the emperor in unmistakably clear words that one could no longer speak of loyal troops; the oath of loyalty had lost all meaning in the circumstances. Hindenburg and other field commanders whose reports had been requested agreed with Groener's conclusions. Freiherr Werner von Grünau, who represented the German Foreign Office at the emperor's headquarters, reports that from then on it became clear that the emperor, whose utterances betrayed a melancholy mood, would finally bring himself to make the painful decision. "I remained for some time alone with His Majesty," Grünau writes, "and was now able to carry out the instructions which I had received on the previous evening and which had as their object the saving of the Dynasty—in fact, of the Monarchy itself— through a timely and voluntary renunciation on the part of the Kaiser. I represented to the Kaiser once again that in view of the highest military experts no other possible course remained to him." 21 The emperor spoke with bitterness of the government whom he accused of neglecting to counter the attacks against himself and the monarchy. Finally, in the early afternoon of November 9, 1918 ( the news of Prince Max's action had not yet reached Villa Fraineuse), the emperor authorized the secretary of state, Admiral Paul von Hintze, to transmit the following by telephone to the chancellor: T o avoid bloodshed His Majesty is ready to abdicate as German Kaiser, but not as King of Prussia. His Majesty also desires to remain King of Prussia in order to prevent the army becoming leaderless and breaking up, in consequence of the resignation of the majority « Ibid., p. 638; English, II, 357. « To a large extent the negotiations of those days went through the hands of Freiherr von Grünau, a son of Fürst Wilhelm zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg by his second ( morganatic ) marriage. In the time of the Weimar Republic, Grünau was to serve as Reich commissar for Upper Silesia, consul general at Kattowitz, and then as chief of the personnel division of the Foreign Office. See Prince Max, Erinnerungen und Dokumente, p. 644; English, II, 364.

LAST OF THE PALADINS 411 of officers which would be simultaneous with such abdication." The statement said further that Hindenburg would be appointed to the supreme command of the German army, and that the emperor would remain with the Prussian troops.22 This formulation was a strange reëmergence of Prussian particularism, incompatible with the unity of the German Reich.3* It may be understood, though not excused, as a last move of despair tempered by the vague hope that the Reich government would not overrule the Prussian state, which was still in conservative hands. But, of course, the proposal was quite nonsensical —the rising tide of revolution would certainly not stop at an imaginary boundary line between Prussian and Reich administration. The emperor's plan, had it been practical, would indeed have been nothing less than the undoing of Bismarck's work; it would have shattered the constitution and the very fabric of the united German empire. The emperor's message reached Prince Max of Baden shortly after two o'clock. By that time, he was chancellor no more and after a continuous reign of five hundred years, the Hohenzollem no longer had a throne. After the cabinet meeting, Philipp Scheidemann returned to the Reichstag. There, while he was sitting in the canteen swarming with soldiers, many of them armed, a crowd rushed in and asked him to address the people who were gathering by the thousands on the vast open space before the building. More were coming every minute, and the whole wide avenue between the Reichstag at one end and the Schloss on the other side of the Spree River —the famous Unter den Linden—was packed with a quiet, solemn crowd of soldiers, workers, and burghers, as yet undecided about their ultimate political decision. At first Scheidemann refused. But then he was told that Karl Liebknecht, standing on the doorsteps of the Schloss, was about to proclaim the German Soviet Republic. "Now I clearly saw what was afoot," Scheidemann wrote. "I knew his slogan—supreme authority for the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils. Germany to be therefore a Russian province, a branch of the Soviet? No, no, a thousand times no! There was no doubt at all. The man who could bring along the "Bolshies' from the Schloss to the Reichstag or the Social Democrats from the Reichstag to the Schloss had won the day. I saw the Russian folly staring me in the face—the Bolshevist tyranny, the substitute for the tyranny of the Czars! No, no, Germany should not have that on top of all her other miseries!" " Ibid., p. 641; English, II, 360. 23 Freiherr Werner von Grünau states that this compromise, namely, that William II should abdicate as emperor but remain as king of Prussia, was suggested by the emperor's adjutant, General von Plessen, and by Count Wemer Friedrich von der Schulenburg, chief of staff to Crown Prince Frederick William. It is reminiscent of certain ideas Bismark once expressed in a cabinet meeting of March 2, 1890, outlining ultimate steps to be taken if the internal political crisis of those years should become catastrophic. Zechlin, Staatsstreichpläne Bismarcks und. Wilhelms II, 1890-1894, Anhang 4, pp. 178 sqq.

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Stepping to an open window at the Reichstag building, Philipp Scheidemann announced to the waiting masses who by then had become restive: "The Emperor has abdicated. He and his friends have decamped. The people have triumphed over them all along the line. Prince Max of Baden has handed over his office as Chancellor to Ebert. Our friend will form a Labour Government to which all Socialist Parties will belong. . . . Workmen and soldiers realize the historic importance of to-day. . . . The old and rotten —the monarchy—has broken down. Long live the new! Long live the German Republic!" 24 The cry was taken up by tens of thousands, it flooded down Unter den Linden, awakening in the hearts of a despairing, starving people a new hope—perhaps with a memory of the republican days which the burghers of Berlin had experienced on this same broad street seventy years ago, upon the barricades, in triumph and in honorable defeat. At four o'clock Karl Liebknecht proclaimed from the Schloss the Socialist Soviet Republic and was himself hailed as its president. But it remained an episode—the day had been won by the Democratic Republic. In the afternoon of the same day, November 9, between five and six, when Prince Max bade farewell to Friedrich Ebert, the new chancellor suggested that Prince Max should remain as Reichsverweser (regent). In this we may see another resurgence of historic forces. In 1848, it had been the Archduke John of Austria, a man known for his democratic convictions, who as regent presided over the work of the Frankfurt Assembly. In 1918, Prince Max might have been the man who, bearer of the same traditions, could have served as administrator of the empire until a new national assembly had worked out the future constitution. But Prince Max declined. He gave as his reason that he could not work with the Independent Socialists, with whom the Social Democrats were about to seek an agreement. In the years that followed, when he searched his conscience, the true motives for his refusal became clearer to him. To accept the office of Reichsverweser without being appointed by the emperor he would have considered a coup détat, and a coup détat was contrary to his conscience. A final scene is worth recording. "At the door I turned back," Prince Max of Baden writes. " 'Herr Ebert, ich lege Ihnen das Deutsche Reich ans Herz.' (Herr Ebert, I commit the German Empire to your keeping)." He answered, "I have lost two sons for this Empire."" On the following day William II, formerly ruling German emperor and king of Prussia, took leave forever of the stage of history to spend the remaining twenty-three years of his life as an exile on Dutch soil. There were many « This quotation and that in the preceding paragraph may be found in Memoiren eines Sozialdemokraten, II, 310-12; EngÜsh, II, 262-63. 25 Erinnerungen und Dokumente, p. 643; English, II, 363.

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weighty reasons that prompted him to cross the border. All his generals, Paul von Hindenburg prominent among them, urged him to take the momentous step in order that the majesty of the crown might not, in the person of its former bearer, be desecrated by the revolutionary mob. The sacrifice was deemed imperative also for the sake of securing a decent peace. Philipp Scheidemann suggests that in the early days of November the king of England may have known that the surrender of the emperor was one of the provisions of peace. As he wanted to rescue his cousin from this indignity, he requested the queen of Holland to give refuge to him in case of need.2* Directly, the responsibility for the emperor's decision, which was the deathblow to the very idea of dynastic monarchy in Germany, rests with Hindenburg. But no monarch, in matters touching on the fundamentals of his office, may shield himself behind the advice of a counsellor, high-ranking as he may be. An emperor's duty is toward God, history, and the welfare of his people; it is for this reason that he is honored and exalted during his reign. He cannot, in the hour of danger, claim to be simply a functionary of the state, for whoever receives higher honors bears greater duties and must be judged according to his own standards. Bismarck's prophetic statement that he feared the monarchies might die out for lack of kings returns to our mind. That he did not act as king and emperor is the guilt of William II. This is entirely apart from any consideration of expediency, for there are moments when the idea alone should matter, at least for him who is its bearer. After November 10, 1918, it was upon the German republic that the historic mandate of the people had descended. The dynastic-particularistic mandate, widened by Prince Bismarck to a representation of the whole nation, had come to a definite close, and for this the last Hohenzollern monarch himself was mainly responsible. While the emperor went to Holland into exile and oblivion, it was Friedrich Ebert with whom the German Reich remained—and in good keeping. "Ebert was not a hero of world history of the sort historic painters like to present," writes Friedrich Stampfer, in his history of the Weimar Republic, "on horseback, riding over the bodies of fallen enemies, or waving a flag on the top of conquered barricades. But one may visualize him as a guide in the inhospitable regions of high mountains, cautious and with a strong heart, leading the flock entrusted to his care through storm and rain past icy abysses to the safety of the sheltering hut." 27 Memoiren eines Sozialdemokraten, II, 256-57. Die vierzehn Jahre der ersten Deutschen Republik, p. 404. Stampfer, a member of the Reichstag from 1919 to 1933, had known Ebert for many years. Editor in chief of the Vorwärts, official organ of the Social Democratic party, after 1910, he was a brilliant observer and journalist, filled with the living ideals of the Revolution of 1848, in which his parents and grandparents had taken part in Vienna. Prince Max of Baden pays high 2e

27

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The republic, proclaimed at two o'clock in the afternoon, was in its first crisis by the evening of the same day. In the main hall of the Reichstag a meeting was held under the auspices of the radical Workers and Soldiers Soviets. They resolved that on the next day, a Sunday, all workers should meet in the factories and elect one representative for every thousand men; the soldiers should elect one for each battalion. Together these elected workers and soldiers should form the "Workers and Soldiers Councils of Greater Berlin," and this council was to be the supreme executive organ of the country. Had this plan been carried out, a countergovemment would have been created, and the result would certainly have been civil war and the breakdown of national unity. Fortunately for Germany, the Social Democrats succeeded in getting control in the meeting of the council which assembled November 10. A compromise was reached to the effect that the Provisional Reich Government, now called Council of People's Commissars and composed of six men, three of them Social Democrats and three Independent Socialists, would cooperate with the Executive Council of the Workers and Soldiers Soviets elected on November 10. The first major legislative act of the republican government, the historic Proclamation of the Council of People's Commissars of November 12, was the first victory of the democratic idea over class dictatorship, and in its essential points it has remained the basis of later legislation. The proclamation stated that all elections would henceforth be based on universal suffrage of all men and women twenty years of age; this provision would also apply for the elections to the coming Constituent National Assembly.28 Thus, within three days after the fall of the monarchy, a way seemed open, leading through all the wilderness and darkness of civil unrest and factional strife towards a democratic goal. In the National Assembly the people itself would be able to take the making of its Reich and state into its own hands. tribute to his courageous and upright stand during the war and the revolution. He is now in the United States, again in the forefront of the struggle for democratic government and international understanding based upon justice for all peoples. " "Aufruf des Rates der Volksbeauftragten an das deutsche Volk," Reichsgesetzblatt, 1918, No. 153, pp. 1303-5.

32 THE CANNAE OF EUROPE Blessed be he who will first raise the olive-branch, and hold out his right hand to the enemy with an offer of reasonable terms of peace. P O P E B E N E D I C T X V , July 28,1915. has been accused of having been "too mild." What kind of revolution is this, it has been asked, in which not one drop of royal or aristocratic blood has been shed? Such a question betrays opéra bouffe views, all the more amusing because they are usually advanced by men who ordinarily do not attribute any special value or magic to noble blood. Social conditions in Germany (steadily improved through progressive legislation) were not such as to necessitate any excessive violence. Even without the revolution, they would still have been far more democratic than in most of the countries democratic according to profession. The German Republic was born out of the blood and the tears of the World War, a child of pain and suffering, and yet a great hope for the German as well as for many other peoples. The former harness maker, Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann, and the other Social Democratic leaders took up the reins of government that were trailing on the ground when the emperor, the kings, the grand dukes, the dukes, the princes, and all their paladins vanished from the field. The vast majority of the people, officers, soldiers, civil servants, at once accepted the fall of the monarchy.1 Immediately after it was an accomplished fact, the high command under Hindenburg and Groener put themselves at the disposal of the new provisional government, the Council of People's Commissars. The agreement reached between them has frequently been made the object of severe criticism directed against the republic. Didn't a "military plot" start as soon as the war was over, with the old officer caste trying to regain power through subterfuge and by arrangement with the republican authorities, who thus became puppets of the military? Such reproaches against the republic are quite baseless, for they ignore the actual situation. The provisional government was from the beginning menaced by extreme radicalism; anarchy and a complete breakdown of ecoT H E G E R M A N REVOLUTION

1 Had the civil service refused obedience to the new government, the state would have dissolved in anarchy. It is to the credit of Prince Max of Baden that, by formally handing over the chancellorship to Friedrich Ebert, he averted this danger. For, as Walter Simons stated later, "It is quite unthinkable that the old officers and officials would have offered their services to the new Government had the Prince not given it some shred of legitimacy." Erinnerungen und Dokumente, p. 642n.; English translation by W. M. Calder and C. W. H. Sutton, The Memoirs of Prince Max of Baden, II, 3β2η.

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nomic, moral, and political life threatened to destroy the very foundations of the state. If the new government did not want to be swept away in a cataclysm of revolt and lawlessness, it had to accept the assistance of the high command, the only instrument of power which then existed. According to Allied armistice conditions effective November 11, millions of German troops, weary, haggard, their ranks infiltrated with radical agitators, had to be brought back to Germany within only a few weeks. By November 18, the last German soldier left France; by November 26, Belgium was evacuated; by the end of the month, there was no longer a German uniform to be seen within thirty miles east of the Rhine. This withdrawal in perfect order and the ensuing demobilization must be classed as one of the remarkable achievements of military history. During the same time, five thousand locomotives, five thousand motor trucks, and a hundred and fifty thousand freight cars had to be handed over to the former enemy, to say nothing of the enormous war material that was delivered in good order. All this could not have been accomplished without the technical and organizational help of the general staff, and certainly not in the short time conceded by the Western powers. Those who reproach the republic for its agreement with the army ignore the necessity imposed by the Allies in the Armistice. If withdrawal and demobilization had not been completed in the time set, there would have been an outcry in the Allied camp that the agreement had been broken. There were many who were suspicious of Germany's every move, and the hampering weight of war feeling, held over into peace, had ill effect. The cordial and sympathetic treatment that seemed promised by the Pre-Armistice Agreement and the stated Allied war aims did not materialize. Instead, even the food blockade was maintained until July 12, 1919. The little German fishing fleet was not permitted to put to sea until March, and it could not have gone then except for Herbert Hoover's insistence. Starvation and chaos threatened constantly, and to disillusioned German eyes it seemed apparent that what Clemenceau, Tardieu, and Foch, in their fear of a strong neighbor, wanted was not a republican Germany, not a weakened Germany, but no Germany at all. The first American journalist who came to Germany was Oswald Garrison Villard. To this intrepid man history owes one of the most valuable accounts on that entire epoch. His eyewitness report of Germany in February and March, 1919, confirmed fully what Count Ulrich Karl Christian von Brockdorff-Rantzau, the German peace delegate, had said before the Versailles assembly on May 7,1919, "The hundreds of thousands of non-combatants who have perished since the 11th of November by reason of the blockade, were killed with cold deliberation after our adversaries had conquered and victory had been assured them." 2 The number of these victims, according to Vil* Dokumente und Gedanken um Versailles, p. 71; English translation by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, Cernían White Book Concerning the Responsibility of the Authors of the War, p. 4.

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lard's estimates, were three hundred thousand men, women and children, who "died before the Christian Allies allowed food to enter." * In my autobiography, Conquest of the Past, I have recorded what my friends and I experienced at that time.4 After the conclusion of the Armistice came months and even years more dreary and miserable than the war itself. Millions could not realize that peace had come, because they saw starvation increasing and the outside world rallied against the helpless, suffering people inside the German and German-Austrian frontiers. No, not a suffering people—what the world was rallied against was the imaginary Germany of war propaganda, a bestial people who had just tried to vent blood lust upon the world. The floodgates of hate had been open too long to be closed as soon as fighting ceased. And this is the tragic pity of it: that Americans, British, and Frenchmen imagined that they had to maintain pressure upon a warlike people to prevent the next war, and by maintaining pressure helped to create the hatred that in tum helped bring on the next war. I have witnessed how the seeds of national hatred, of which there was none in Germany at the end of the last war, began to sprout again. Where there had been a great belief in a new brotherhood of man and a genuine desire for the end of an outlived epoch, antirepublican, antipacifist trends sprang up in the misery of the ensuing years. "One thing the defeat had done for the German masses," Villard observed, "as by a miracle; it had purged them of hatred and bitterness. No one could mingle with them in the beginning of 1919 and hear any hymns of hate, any talk of revenge, any boasts that thirty years thereafter they would once more tum the tables. Englishmen were not disliked, nor Frenchmen, nor Italians; Americans were welcomed as the best of friends. The stranger from the other side of the battle-lines was treated with complete courtesy and made to feel at home. With hope and confidence and complete trust in Woodrow Wilson's words, in the promises of good-will and aid that were dropped down upon the trenches by Allied and American flyers, the faces of the distraught and tortured German people turned to Paris, seeking there helping hands, expecting the fulfillment of the promises. They had surrendered in good faith; they had accepted the Armistice terms because the United States had pledged its honor that peace would be based on the Fourteen Peace Points. They were ready to do their share. Had they not paid the price? And were they not human beings after all? Quickly this glorious opportunity to rebuild Europe on ideal lines, on permanent foundations, was utterly thrown away. The least skilled observer could see this post-war German mood change, melt, pass away, perhaps never to return."5 I lived through that epoch as a boy, a student, and a young man, and I watched the changes in attitude towards the Western world and democracy a The German Phoenix; the Story of the Republic, p. 17. * Chapter vi. » The German Phoenix; the Story of the Republic, pp. 16-17.

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at home. It required a great deal of strength of character—at least for all who were not born proletarians—to resist the temptation of the early National Socialism bom of disillusionment and defiance. With the twenty-two German monarchs there necessarily disappeared also the conception of Germany as a "perpetual union of the princes." ' The upper houses, the three-class electoral system, the privileges of high nobility, and a little later the famous old Bundesrat all vanished. But Germany did not disappear, and now it became manifest that it had always been more than a union of princes. It was an institution of the people greater than Prussia, Bavaria, and Württemberg, greater than the Hohenzollern, the Wittelsbachs, the Urachs, and the Zaeringen. Bismarck again was proved right, for he had seen in the dynasties only means to be used, not ends in themselves. "Whenever German national sentiment conflicts with particularism, I see the greater power in the national feeling," he had written, "because particularism, including that of Prussia, was born only from rebellion against the all-German community, against Kaiser und Reich and in secession from both. . . . Dynastic interests in Germany have a justification only in so far as they conform with general Reich interests." 7 Though the German Republic was something novel, it could yet claim for itself the historic traditions not only of 1848 and of the liberal, social legislation of the Bismarck epoch, but also of much earlier ages when the people's community was organized in territorial entities without being broken up by particularistic interests. That the republic remained a Bundestaat, a federal state, which did not become overcentralized was as much in line with those ancient traditions as was the reduction of the powers of the states. The working class had matured to political leadership. Steeled by the hard school of the Antisocialist Law and educated in the spirit of Ferdinand Lassalle by universal suffrage, freedom of opinion and of the press, and participation in political life, the working class, together with the conservative strength of the states, enabled the German leaders to stave off disaster. But for many months the fate of the government was in the balance. The provisional government, with its three Social Democratic and three Independent Socialist commissars, was divided. In its Proclamation of November 12 it had announced that "the government which has come forth from the revolution is socialistic and aims at realizing the socialist program," but actually the spirit was democratic: private property had been guaranteed, the laws of the land confirmed, universal suffrage of men and women over twenty years of age introduced. I have referred previously to the decisive pasβ These were the words used by Bismarck's constitution of April 16, 1871, to describe the German Empire. Bundes-Gesetzblatt des Deutschen Bundes, 1871, No. 16, p. 64. 7 Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 262.

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sage: "This universal suffrage applies also for the election of a Constituent National Assembly, about which more detailed rules will be published in due time." · This was a profession and a creation of broad popular democracy; it was a rejection of the idea of proletarian democracy as represented by the soviet principle. Over this passage, in Berlin and elsewhere, veiled and open civil war was to ensue. Only one week later, on November 19, a plenary meeting of the Arbeiterund Soldatenräte von Gross-Berlin (Workers and Soldiers Councils, i.e. Soviets, of Greater Berlin), a body entirely under Spartacist control, passed this resolution: "The endeavors of the bourgeoisie to convoke as fast as possible a National Assembly aim at depriving the workers of the fruits of the revolution. The executive committee of the Workers and Soldiers Councils of Greater Berlin demands therefore the convocation of delegates of the Workers and Soldiers Councils of Germany. These delegates . . . . will elect a Central Council of the German Workers and Soldiers Councils, which in turn will draft a new constitution in accordance with the principles of proletarian democracy." 9 The meaning of this resolution was, obviously, not a democratic but a soviet republic, not a freely elected national assembly of the whole people, following the Frankfurt example, to be sovereign legislator but instead, as in Russia, the program of "All power to the soviets!" This Greater Berlin Council arrogated to itself the right to control the provisional government. That the council and its armed partisans, the Spartacists, receiveà large sums of money through the Russian embassy is a matter of general knowledge.10 Subservience to a foreign power and its revolutionary organs, which often were in no position to judge the German situation correctly, was maintained until the very end of the German Communist party and that of the republic itself. Here was one reason for the almost unbelievable errors of strategy and policy committed by the German Communists. Fortunately, both the federal traditions of the country and the democratic heritage of the trade unions (the main bulk of organized, political-minded labor) came to the aid of the hard-struggling Majority Socialists. A conference of the state governments, all under Social Democratic control, con» "Aufruf dei Rates der Volksbeauftragten an das deutsche Volk," Reichsgesetzblatt, 1918, No. 153, pp. 1303-5. • Vorwärts; Zentralorgan der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, Berlin, November 20, 1918, Vol. XXXV, No. 320, 1. Beilage. 10 Cf. Schulthess' Europäischer Geschichtskalender, 1918, pp. 545 sqq. The money, several million rubles, was distributed by the diplomatic representative of the Soviet government, Adolph Joffe, who also had large quantities of revolutionary pamphlets, printed in Russia, imported to Germany through the diplomatic mail. When on November 4, 1918, one of those chests broke open on Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, scattering the subversive material all over the place, the Imperial government expelled Joffe and broke off relations with Soviet Russia. 7bid., p. 414.

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vened in Berlin and on November 25 declared itself in favor of a national assembly.11 Of even greater importance was the stand taken by the General Congress of Workers and Soldiers Councils of Germany which met in Berlin from December 16 to 19. This was the very congress which the extremists had postulated on November 19 and on which they had placed their hope for a German soviet constitution. Yet this Congress declared itself by overwhelming majority in favor of a national assemblyl "Thus, the soviet system had been rejected by the [German] soviets themselves," Gerhard Anschütz, the eminent jurist and commentator on the Weimar Constitution stated; "the Bolshevistic episode of German constitutional law was ended and the way was cleared for the national assembly." 12 The congress decided also that elections were to be held on January 19, 1919, on the basis of the broadest universal suffrage. In consequence of their defeat, the Independent Socialists withdrew from the provisional government and were replaced by Majority Socialists. But at the beginning of January civil war broke out. The radicals took up arms, discarding the resolution passed by the very Congress of Workers and Soldiers Councils they had been so eager to convene. Through this situation, aggravated by unbelievable misery, the provisional government was once more forced into a working agreement with the leaders of the old army. It must be noted, however, that General Groener, a thoroughly loyal, democratic-minded Swabian, did not exploit his power, as he probably could have, for a coup against the republic. The fact remains that Left radicalism strengthened the forces of the Right and helped them to regain some part of the political position which they had altogether lost in November, 1918. Friedrich Meinecke has summarized the result of those hectic months in these words: "It was the historic merit of the Majority Socialists to have led the revolution, which had become inevitable, into their channels and to soften the clash between the proletarian and the bourgeois worlds by a program of pure democracy." He finds that the January struggles in Germany saved both democracy and the unity of the Reich.1* Only after that time did a strong central government exist—strong enough, at least, to protect the sovereign national assembly which met in Weimar on February 6. The Bavarian soviet government, lasting from April 4 to May 1, was overthrown with comparative ease but great severity. In these restless months it became apparent that the German situation differed from the Russian in another most important point, namely, the attitude of the people towards religion, and that of organized religion towards 1 1 For this and the following material, see the short but juridically precise treatise on the German Revolution of 1918 by Walter Jellinek, in Handbuch des Deutschen Staatsrechts, I, § 11-12, pp. 119-38. 11 Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs vom 11. August 1919; ein Kommentar für Wissenschaft und Praxis, p. 14. 1 1 "Die Revolution, Ursachen und Tatsachen," in Handbuch des Deutschen Staatsrechts,

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421 the people. The great social heritage of a Bishop von Ketteler; the progressive work performed by the Christian trade unions; the closeness of the clergy to the people; the profound religious spirit of the peasants, burghers, and many intellectuals; and, one may add, the heritage of religious, Neoplatonic mysticism and the idealistic philosophy of history—all these elements combined to withstand the antíreligious onslaught of the Spartacists and other radicals. Again in contrast to Russia, whose bourgeoisie had been strongly revolutionary, the Cerman Bürgertum could look back on liberal achievements worth defending. The memory of 1848 and the Paulskirche at Frankfurt was still alive. Representative of these traditions was Dr. Hugo Preuss, who was preeminent among the Fathers of the German republican constitution of Weimar. Born in 1860 (he died in 1925), he had taught constitutional law at the University of Commerce in Berlin, and his reputation as an expert on constitutional, administrative, political, and historic questions was high in all scientific circles. After the revolution he became secretary, then Reich minister, of the interior and was entrusted with drafting the new constitution. In the election for the Constituent Assembly on January 19,1919, the two socialist parties won 185 seats (163 for the Majority Socialists, 22 for the Independents), the nonsocialists 236 (Center, 91; Democrats, the successors to the Progressives, 79; German People's Party, successor to the National Liberals, headed by Gustav Stresemann, 19; German Nationals, the conservative, nationalistic monarchists, 44; and other minor parties, 7 ) . " The majority, though not socialistic, was clearly republican and in this completely differed from the French National Assembly of 1871, which had a monarchist majority. Counting the Independent Socialists among the antirepublicans, 333 Republicans ( Social Democrats, Centrists, Democrats ) stood against 95 nonrepublicans. And among the nonrepublicans one group, the German People's Party, was prepared to enter into constitutional cooperation. The first legislative act of the assembly was a law on the Provisional Power of the Reich. This legalized the parliamentarian form of government." On February 11, Friedrich Ebert was elected to the Reich presidency, the highest office in the land, which he held until his untimely death on February 28, 1925. The work of framing the definitive constitution proceeded with speed in spite of mounting foreign political pressure. The crux and the heart of the whole matter of foreign politics was the treaty of peace which was imposed on Germany by the Allies. The Treaty of Versailles was certainly not an easy peace for Germany. It not only failed to live up to the expectations 14 Anschütz, Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs vom 11. August 1919; ein Kommentar für Wissenschaft und Praxis, p. 16. 15 "Gesetz über die vorläufige Reichsgewalt," February 10, 1919. Reichsgesetzblatt, 1919, No. 33, pp. 1βθ-71.

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German republicans had held since the voice of the American president had proclaimed the principles for the new peace but also made the path of any government in Germany almost impossible. It was fatally important that in the minds of a large section of the German public "Weimar" and "Versailles" were associated. The most intransigent opponent of the republic could well rejoice at that. There had been foreshadowings of the nature of the peace to come. As early as January, 1918, the New York Evening Post had published the famous secret treaties between the Allies, which Britain and France seemingly had been anxious to keep from American eyes. 1 · These revealed French imperialistic designs against Germany. In September, 1916, with the approval of President Raymond Poincaré, the French government decided upon taking away from Germany the industrially valuable, but purely German, Saar Territory and the entire Left Bank of the Rhine. These territories were to be called "autonomous republics" under French military occupation, but the virtual result intended was French annexation, a dream that had recurred ever and again in French policy since the days of Maurice de Saxe down through the time of the princes of the Confederation of the Rhine to the twentieth century. Russia's approval of this scheme was to be won by giving her a free hand with regard to eastern Germany. Marshal Foch laid down in a memorandum of November 27, 1918, a plan for extinguishing German sovereignty west of the Rhine.17 One or more autonomous Rhine republics were to be organized, and the male population of this area conscripted into military units to fight against Germany in case of war. The permanent occupation of bridgeheads on the Right Bank was advocated. On March 7, 1918, Premier Clemenceau declared that the more separate independent republics to be established in Germany, the happier he would be.18 Under the shadow of French bayonets, a "Rhenish Republic" was proclaimed on June 1 at Wiesbaden, Speyer, Mainz, and Aachen. It collapsed, because the separatist "Quislings" met with the reception that must normally be expected for a government that comes not at all from the people themselves but from without. The French in the circumstances could not brave American opposition and go to the full assistance of the "republic." Nevertheless, French efforts to realize these aims continued to appear. 19 Clemenceau made every effort to have the credentials of Count Brockdorff-Rantzau and the other German delegates discredited because they 1β For the story of how these secret treaties came to be published in the Evening Post of January 25, 26, and 28, 1918, see the account of Oswald Garrison Villard, then the owner and editor, Fighting Y ears; Memoirs of a Liberal Editor, pp. 3À0 sqq. 17 Mermeix (pseudonym of Gabriel TerTail), Le Combat des trois; notes et documents sur la Conférence de la paix, pp. 205 sqq. Clemenceau, who feared the impression this memorandum would create if made public, forbade the French press to publish it. See Berger and Allard, Les Dessous du traité de Versailles; d'après les documents inédits de la censure française, p. 57. 18 Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, I, 189. " Baker, Woodrow Wilson; Life and Letters, I, 86-94; and Tardieu, La Paix, p. 417-18; English, The Truth about the Treaty, p. 372.

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represented the German Reich and not separate German states. This move recalled the Peace of Westphalia, for at those deliberations, which resulted in the breakdown of the federative unity that was the Sacred Roman Empire, the French had also insisted upon having the German states individually represented. In 1919 two American representatives, Robert Lansing and Henry White, sturdily opposed the scheme to invalidate the credentials of the German delegates, and they were recognized.20 The total exclusion of one of the main contracting parties from the negotiations that led to the written peace conditions could not reflect propitiously upon the proceedings and outcome of the Versailles conference. The terms remained unknown to the German delegates until they were handed to them complete on May 7. Germany, besides losing all her colonies—they were taken over by Great Britain, other parts of the British Empire, Japan, France, and Belgium as League of Nations "mandates," which in the years that followed seemed to grow indistinguishable from regular colonial possessions of those powers—lost thirteen percent of her national territory. The "Polish* Corridor" isolated from the main body of the country the province of East Prussia, which was Christianized by Germans in the days of the Greatest Frederick. The arrangement was not efficient and contained in it inevitable seeds of trouble. The treatment of the Germans who came under Polish rule was such as to make the difficulties grow and to create a feeling among all Germans that the situation was unwholesome for international peace. The rigid impossibility of adjustments under Versailles in later years prevented any true improvement.21 Germany also had to hand over to the Allies all merchant ships of more than 1,600 tons burden and some of the smaller vessels as well as most of the navy. The armed forces were limited to 100,000 officers and men. This provision, intended to destroy the importance and influence of the army, unfortunately had an effect that was, to some extent, the opposite. It necessarily encouraged the formation of an exclusive officer corps. No heavy armaments, aviation, tanks and so on, were permitted, but this first step toward disarming the world was not to lead to any further measures in the general situation.22 Losses in most essential commodities were considerable, ranging up to fifty percent in iron and coal production. German sovereignty was reduced and German economy naturally hampered by the occupation of western 20 Mermeix, Le Combat des trois; notes et documents sur la Conférence de la paix, pp. 154 sqq. Birdsall, Versailles Twenty Years After, pp. 218 sqq. 21 Article XIX of the League of Nations Covenant, which was made a part of the Versailles Treaty, seemed to hold out hope for a peaceful revision of grievances by legal means, but in practice it remained one of the most ineffective clauses ofthe Covenant. 22 The introduction to Part V of the Versailles Treaty stated that the purpose of German disarmament was "to render possible the initiation of a general limitation of the armaments of all nations." The Allied note accompanying the treaty and Article VIII of the League Covenant were even more explicit. To fulfill this obligation undertaken by the signatory powers disarmament conferences were held after the war. Their singular lack of results is sufficiently well known.

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Germany and the internationalization of all rivers and the Kiel Canal. The imposition of reparations payments threw the whole economy out of gear and ultimately had a serious damaging effect on world economy. In April, 1921, the Reparations Commission, meeting at London, fixed the German debt at the tragicomic figure of a hundred and thirty-two billion gold Marks. The fact that this enormous sum was called reparations instead of indemnity did not have much effect in helping to meet the payments. More important than all these, at least psychologically, was the famous Article 231, the so-called "war guilt" clause. This article, generally interpreted by public opinion at the time as contending that Germany and her allies were alone responsible for the war, came as a shock to the Germans that should be comprehensible in the light of later research by scholars of all nations on the origins of the war. It was felt as humiliating to Germany and could not but discredit in the eyes of the Germans the government signing the peace. The reaction against these terms was immediate and general. The cabinet of Philipp Scheidemann resigned on June 20 rather than sign the Versailles Treaty. 2 ' President Friedrich Ebert supported the opposition, but gradually resistance was whittled away. Separatism was rife in the country, starvation threatened to overwhelm all, and the constitution was not yet adopted to set the new state in process. Hindenburg and the army high command declared that resistance to invasion would be hopeless. The Weimar National Assembly, therefore, yielded to the threats of an Allied ultimatum with a time limit of twenty-four hours. The reasons for that surrender are obvious. Perhaps the German officials of that time may be reproached with acting out of fear and weakness. Perhaps Germany's future moral standing in the world might have been improved by a determined denial of the warguilt charge and a protest against the conditions as unjust and unworkable.24 Yet in the circumstances of that time yielding seemed inevitable. The treaty had followed the policy which Thomas Mann, writing to the editors of the Svenshi Dagbladet in April, 1915, feared: "Germany after all 2 5 Cf. Scheidemann's bitter address to the National Assembly, Berlin University, May 12, 1919. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen der verfassunggebenden Nationalversammlung (1919), CCCXXVII, 1083. 1 4 Teil years later Theodor Wolff, editor in chief of the Berliner Tageblatt, asked Lloyd George: ''What would have happened if we had not signed?" And, with a knowing smile, Lloya George answered, "Germany should not have accepted the armistice conditions." Then moving his hand to and fro over the table, the British statesman "developed the strategic plan of retreat which the Germans should have carried out, until they halted beyond the Rhine. He assured me that if this had happened he would have returned to England and told the nation that the war had lasted long enough, the victory had been won, and he was unable to see the necessity or the use of continuing this sanguinary and exhausting struggle on German soil. This would undoubtedly have been the general opinion; he would have carried the nation with him, and France would have had either to go on fighting alone or to content herself with a more reasonable peace." Der Marsch durch zwei Jahrzehnte, pp. 314-15; English translation by E. W. Dickes, Through Two Decades, p. 248.

THE CANNAE OF EUROPE 425 is not just a physical power; it is, above all else, a great spiritual force, an integral part of the European spirit, without which Europe would be different—possibly inferior, but in any case different. . . . Germany must not be humiliated, her soul must not be broken, she must not be uprooted and shaken in her faith in herself. . . . For the sake not only of the German but also of the European future that must not happen."" The psychological shocks that accompanied the treaty were possibly more devastating for republican morale than the specific provisions. For one thing there was the question of Austria, where the settlement seemed clearly to violate the principle of self-determination of peoples. With the revolution, the colors of black, red, and gold flew from all the standards across Austria. The Austrian National Assembly declared on November 12, 1918, in Article I of the Provisional Constitution, "German Austria is a constituent part of the German Republic." Plebiscites held in various provinces such as the Tirol and Salzburg showed overwhelming majorities for the Anschluss, but they were halted by Allied ultimatum. Even the freely chosen name of Deutsch-Oesterreich (German Austria) had to be changed, by virtue of the Treaty of Saint-Germain on September 10,1919, to Oesterreich.1* Austria is no nation but merely a part of a nation—like Bavaria, Württemberg, and the rest—which happened through dynastic reasons to get separated from the rest. Now the peoples supposedly were supreme, but they were, nevertheless, prevented from making their own decision. Austria was left truncated, unable to live independently either economically or spiritually, and therefore in her weakness dangerous to all Europe. I have always doubted whether National Socialism could have enlisted so many followers had an all-German democracy been strengthened in the first place by German Austrian religious and labor forces. The second dangerous element was the disastrous relationship between France and Germany. German support to the French republic after 1871 had not ended with true reconciliation. How much worse was the situation after 1919! France was not only unwilling to lend any support to the German Republic but was unremittingly hostile. Yet it was clear then, as it is clear now, that only through friendly relationships between the two sister nations could an end be brought to the fratricidal wars that have bled Europe white. Versailles and its aftermath also had a profoundly disturbing effect through the encouragement of cynicism. German idealists quite naturally lost some faith in the trustworthiness of the Western powers. This condition naturally strengthened the hands of the chauvinists greatly as time went on. This feeling of distrust and disillusion deepened, as it became apparent 25

In Friedrich und die Prosse Koalition, p. 130. "Austria is recognized under the name of the 'Republic of Austria.' " United States, Congress, 66th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Document No. 92 (Vol. IX), Preamble, p. 8. 2β

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that the "sacrosanct" character of the Treaty of Versailles applied only to one side. While the efforts of Germany to secure revision in even the most pacific fashion were thwarted, French invasions of German territory, culminating in the occupation of the Ruhr, were made with flimsy pretexts and complete impunity. The treaty did not even give Germany the minimum protection accorded to the losing party after an adverse court decision. Staggering beneath the burden of this treaty, then, the new German Republic sought to commence its career. The wonder is that it could begin at all. Its successes—gained completely without the aid that might have been expected from nations promoting democracy—and its failures can be understood only in the light of its beginning. After working out four different drafts on the basis of Hugo Preuss's original proposals (the main problem being the relationship of the states and the central government), the National Assembly adopted the constitution on July 31, 1919, by a vote of 262 to 75.-7 The opponents were the Independent Socialists, the German Nationals, the German People's Party, and minor groups. The constitution was signed and promulgated by Reich President Friedrich Ebert on August II, 2 " the day which from then on was celebrated as Constitution Day by all the republicans. This document, sometimes called the Weimar Constitution after the town in which the National Assembly met, opened a new phase of German history.2' 27 Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen der verfassunggebenden Nationalversammlung (1919), CCCXXIX, 2138sqq. 2 8 "Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reicns," August II, 1919. Reichsgesetzblatt, 1919, No. 152, pD. 1383-1418. 2 8 English translations of the Constitution will be found in Blachly and Oatman, The Government and Administration of Germany, pp. 642-79; Brunet, The New German Constitution, pp. 297-339; Oppenheimer, The Constitution of the German Republic, pp. 21960.

33 REPUBLIC OF THE GERMANS The republic was bom out of the spirit of humanism, which had taken hold of the German people in the course of their history in threefold form: Christianity, liberalism, and socialism. FRIEDRICH S T A M P F E R , Die vierzehn Jahre der ersten Deutschen Republik. F O R PROCRAMMATIC REASONS as well as for the sake of historic continuity, it was fortunate that the national assembly defended the name Dos Reich against the attacks of the extreme Left. As Hugo Preuss pointed out, "the traditions of centuries, the whole yearning of the long-divided German people for national unity, live in this word."1 "The word Reich contains nothing that would indicate a monarchical form of government," Gerhard Anschütz correctly states; it is "the millennial name of the national community."2 The moral telos of governmental power was expressed in the preamble of the constitution in almost Dantean words, "The German people, united in its tribes and animated by the desire of strengthening and renewing its Reich in freedom and justice, to serve inner and outer peace and to promote the progress of society, has adopted this Constitution." The disciples of both Saint Augustine and Immanuel Kant would have rejoiced over such a formulation; for what could be closer to their hearts than to have the state devote itself to serving peace, ministering justice, guaranteeing freedom and progress, and in these elements seeking the justification of power? "The German Reich is a republic," the first article stated; "the power of the State emanates from the people." No monarchical rule, no Führertum or class dictatorship could be compatible with this. Under Bismarck's constitution, the source and foundation of federal power had been in the union of princes; now it was the people itself from whom all authority derived. The territory of the republic consisted of the territories of the German Länder (Lands), the new name for the former states. Other territories could be received into the republic should their populations, on the basis of the right of national self-determination, so desire. This excluded conquests or annexations of any kind. According to Article 4, "the generally recognized rules of the law of 1 February 24, 1919. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen der verfassunggebenden Nationalversammlung (1919), CCCXVI, 285. 2 Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs vom 11. August 1919; ein Kommentar für Wissenschaft und Praxis, p. 33. For reference regarding the translation of the term "Reich" in non-German languages see ibid., note 1.

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the peoples [international law] are integral parts of German law." Thereby, international laws became binding upon the individual citizens and the civil courts, whereas most other states in the world admit of no such direct responsibility of their subjects, since international law in itself binds only the states. It may indeed be asked if such a provision was not a sign of the reawakening of ancient Occidental traditions. Before the universal European community was broken by its nationalistic antithesis, no international law in the modern sense ( that is, law governing the relations of sovereign states ) had existed, because within this commonwealth there were no sovereign entities usurping the right to enact law at will. All international rules of right and morality were necessarily part of the legal system embracing all members of the Respublica Christiana. That the Weimar Republic for its national banner adopted the ancient colors of the standard of the Sacred Roman Empire, black, red, and gold, which before and during the Revolution of 1848 had become the symbol of "great German" democracy, was a matter of course. And yet this act divided Germany into two camps. The Right stubbornly upheld the black, white, and red, an indication of their unhistoric way of thinking. The historic traditions they so loudly claimed to preserve reached back no further than the Bismarckian "small German" empire. Further, they willfully ignored later that in 1918-1919 the nineteenth-century "small German" black, white, and red was completely out of the question. The choice was either black, red, and gold or—red. Though the Weimar Constitution continued earlier legal developments, the principle of popular sovereignty necessarily shifted the power to the Reichstag, the supreme legislative body elected by universal suffrage. Not only the Reich chancellor but every other member of the government individually was responsible to it and had to resign upon an express vote of nonconfidence.* As in France, the system of proportional representation became in Germany a source of weakness and dissension, for it encouraged the formation of many small parties. But it was considered more just and democratic than the Anglo-Saxon system, since it also gave the minority groups a voice in parliament. The federal structure of Germany was preserved and found expression in the Reichsrat, the second of the main central bodies. It participated in the legislation and administration of the Reich. In nature akin to the old Bundesrat and, like it, composed of appointees of the state governments, it no longer possessed governmental authority; its vetoes of Reichstag votes could be overruled. The structure of the Reichsrat, like other provisions of the constitution, showed the desire to reduce the influence of Prussia, the largest German » Article 54; according to Article 33, § 1, the Reichstag or any of its committees could request the presence of the chancellor or any minister at their meetings.

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Land. No individual state was permitted to have more than two fifths of the seats in the Reichsrat (Prussia, according to her population, would have had almost two thirds). Thus, of sixty-six seats only twenty-six were Prussian, only thirteen of which could be filled by the government; the other thirteen were distributed among the strongly autonomous governments of the Prussian provinces.4 In practice this did not prove a blessing to democracy; for while the Prussian government remained solidly republican till its treasonable destruction by Herr von Papen's coup in July, 1932, some of the provinces fell under strongly reactionary nationalistic influences. Austria, according to the constitution, was to be represented in the Reichsrat by the number of delegates corresponding to the size of her population.3 Until the administrative realization of the Anschluss, they were to have a consultative voice. In shaping the constitutional form of the highest office, the Reich presidency, the national assembly chose a middle course between the American and French constitutions. As in America, the Reich president was elected by the people, not by parliament as in France. But whereas the American president is his own prime minister, the Reich president could rule only through the medium of a responsible government. The term of office was seven years; reelection was permitted. In contrast to the old constitution, the chief executive of the Reich was not at the same time head of the Prussian state, which now consisted of a union of three men: the Prussian prime minister; the president of the Prussian diet; and the president of the Prussian state council, representing the Prussian provinces in the legislation and the administration of the state. Yet in certain ways the presidential powers were greater than had been those of the emperor. The Reich president could dissolve the Reichstag, an act which previously had required the consent of both Bundesrat and emperor; ' he participated in Reich legislation by right of invoking a plebiscite 4 Article Θ3, § 1. The constitutional relationship between federal and state powers was not entirely satisfactory. There was much duplication of effort and expenditure. In Bavaria, Brunswick, Thuringia, Saxony, and other states radical elements seized upon opportunities afforded by local politics to gain influence even over the Reich administration. Therefore, all republican parties with the exception of the Center desire a gradual diminution of state rights, the goal being a dezentralisierter Einheitsstaat, that is, a stronger central authority combined with extensive regional self-administration. The federated German states were to be transformed into self-governing provinces. The minister president of Prussia, Otto Braun, declared that "Prussia had always made it clear that she was willing to give up her statehood, provided the other German lands would do the same." Deutscher Einheitsstaat oder Föderativsystem, p. 33. 5 Article 61, §2. Although the Anschluss was forcibly prevented by an Allied ultimatum of September 2, 1919 (in violation of the Pre-Armistice Agreement and the principle of national self-determination covered by it), Article 61, §2 was never formally invalidated. Legally, therefore, it remained in the Constitution, at least as a rightful claim for the future. See Anschütz, Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs vom 11. August 1919; ein Kommentar für Wissenschaft und Praxis, pp. 340-41. « Article 25, §1; cf. Constitution of April 1β, 1871, Article 24.

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against Reichstag decisions; he was commander in chief of all armed forces, which the emperor had been only in times of war. The greatest potential power—a fatal one, as events proved—was contained in the notorious Article 48. It permitted the president to take, through his government, all necessary measures in case "public security and order were seriously disturbed"; if need be, he could invoke the help of the armed forces. He could even suspend, during such an emergency situation, seven well-defined civil rights and, as was generally agreed, issue decree-laws. Of all such measures taken under authority of Article 48 the president had to inform the Reichstag, and upon its demand he had to void such actions. The article of the constitution promised a Reich law to define all details and rules for the exercise of so great a power. It is one of the most disastrous examples of neglect to be found in the constitutional history of any country that this law was never passed. Yet, contrary to a widespread opinion, Article 48 by no means entitled the president to dispense with the constitution altogether; he could suspend only seven civic rights.7 This is quite logically so, for an article cannot be stronger than the constitution, from which the article itself derives its validity. In view of a possible restoration of the Weimar Constitution, this problem, in due time, may again assume a more than academic importance. In accordance with the traditions of Frankfurt, the Weimar Constitution embodied a minute code of civil Uberties. These were supplemented in an entirely novel spirit by social rights and liberties. The right of coalition and assembly was guaranteed to labor and to all residents, citizens or noncitizens. National minorities were protected against denationalization; their mother tongue was upheld in the schools, the government administration, and the courts. The same guarantees existed in German Austria, with the result that during the plebiscite of October, 1920, in Carinthia the majority of the Slovenian communities voted for Austria. In such exemplary minority legislation, too, I see a return to the supranational principles of Occidental history in which its antithesis of nationalism, the scourge of Europe since the days of the Reformation, is once more overcome by the spirit of universalism. The freedom and independence of judges was fully guaranteed, and so was the cleanness of the administration and the high standing of the civil servants. It was due to the reservoir of moral strength embodied in the professional honor and incorruptibility of these servants of the state that during the German revolution anarchy could be fought off, and this tradition, alive 7 Those seven civic rights were: habeas corpus (Article 114); inviolability of the home (Article 115); secrecy of the mail (Article 117); freedom of expression (Article 118); freedom of assembly (Article 123); right of coalition, except for the protection of economic and working conditions, which could not be suspended ( Articles 124 and 159 ) ; and inviolability of private property (Article 153). It should be noted that no other rights could be suspended by the president, especially not—one later canceled by the National Socialist government in violation of the constitution—nulla poena sine lege (Article 116), and the right to form trade unions (Article 159).

REPUBLIC OF THE GERMANS 431 despite the years of despotism, war, and occupation, may make the reconstruction of lawful government more easily possible in the future. Guarantees of democratic education, freedom of worship, and equal standing of all religions came as a matter of course. Catholicism now was finally able to occupy its rightful place in the northern Diaspora. Berlin became the city with the largest Catholic population in Germany. After centuries, it once more received its bishop, and once more public religious processions were held. The constitution took great pains to define and to safeguard the rights of youth, to protect them against exploitation and to provide for proper training. Education was to be guided by the spirit of Völkerversöhnung (international reconciliation), a spirit of friendship among all peoples. For this, the Jugendbewegung (Youth Movement) which with its spirit of comradeship hurdled all barriers of national or class distinctions, had done valuable preparatory work. Full equality of all Germans before the law was established, and all privileges or disadvantages of public law attached to the state of birth abolished. Illegitimate children were legally placed on the same level with legitimate. Titles of nobility could no longer be bestowed, and the existing ones were "frozen" by being declared part of the family name. Nearly one tenth of the Weimar Constitution was devoted to the new spirit in matters social and economic. Though interspersed with socialistic ideas (whatever that term may mean), its tone was thoroughly democratic and averse to class rule. It is self-evident that this new soil could not have been tilled except for the heritage of the social thought of centuries. We can hear again the great voice of the Reichsfreiherr vom Stein saying, "Property imposes obligations; its use must be service towards the common good." ' In these few words, the concept of rigid Roman private property is overcome and modern German law linked to the traditions of community property of Christian ages. The soil of the country, in those times, was the property of the people, administered by the people s elect, the sacred emperor, whose heart belonged to all, an overflowing and abounding source of justice and mercy. The distribution of the soil, the Weimar Constitution ordered, would be controlled by the state in order to avoid its misuse and to provide a homestead for every German. Ground needed for the social and economic purposes of the community could be expropriated. The tilling and proper use of the soil, the constitution declared, was the duty of the owner towards the community. Entailed estates ( Fideikommisse) were to be dissolved. It is unfortunate that the Weimar Republic did not have time enough to carry out this whole, large-scale program. Yet in 19311 could already write in a Berlin newspaper that the impoverished Free State of Prussia had done more for inner colonization and the improvement of social and economic con» Article 153, §3.

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ditions of the peasants and small tenants in ten years than the prosperous kingdom of Prussia had done in half a century. It is on the basis of the social ideas of the Weimar Constitution that I envisage the future legislation on agricultural and real-estate reform, and the transformation of rigid property into social property. To achieve this, individual initiative need by no means be sacrificed. The Reich had the right to nationalize important economic enterprises with due compensation and could take the other steps necessary for developing a planned economy. Labor unions were recognized as juridical personalities. It should be explained that these unions, politically inert as their leadership may often have been, were organizations having great self-respect and pride in clean democratic and responsible administration. In the course of the years, there developed a comprehensive code composed of interdependent labor laws and regulations, summarily called the Arbeitsrecht (Labor Code). For millions and millions this code became in practice far more important than the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (Civil Code). Labor was the only property many people still possessed after the savings and real estate they might have handed down to their children had been destroyed by the war, the inflation, and the economic crisis. The right of collective bargaining, the freedom of election of the union functionaries, and public control of their administration were recognized by the constitution and by ensuing legislation. The competence of labor courts, with jurisdiction over all matters resulting from labor conflicts, contracts, and agreements were defined by a Law of December 23, 1926.® A well-balanced system of arbitration in labor questions was established and was one of the main pillars of social peace. The famous system of social insurance was, in fulfillment of a promise in the constitution,10 steadily enlarged and completed with the cooperation of the insured. Unemployment insurance was regulated by a Law of July 16,1927. 11 Perhaps the most striking illustration of the awareness in the constitution that democracy is a dialectical principle which, if it does not steadily march forward must lapse into reaction is the daring provision of Article 165. It may be quoted in extenso: The workers and employees are called upon to collaborate with the employers, on a basis of equality, in regulating wages and working conditions as well as the whole economic development of all forces of production. The respective organizations and their mutual agreements are recognized. The workers and employees, for the safeguarding of their social and economic interests, receive legal representations in the form of District Workers "Arbeitsgerichtsgesetz," Reichsgesetzblatt, 1926, No. 68, pp. 507 sqq. Article 161. 1 1 "Gesetz über Arbeitsvermittlung und Arbeitslosenversicherung," Reichsgesetzblatt, 1927, No. 32, pp. 187 sqq. β

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Councils, as well as Regional Workers Councils for the economic provinces, and a Reich Workers Council. The Regional Workers Councils and the Reich Workers Council, in order to fulfill comprehensive economic tasks and cooperate in the execution of the socialization laws, shall combine with the representatives of the employers and other groups of the people concerned to form Regional Economic Councils and a Reich Council of Economy. Bills on social and economic policy of fundamental importance should be submitted to the review of the Reich Council of Economy by the Reich Government before being presented to the Reichstag. The Reich Council of Economy has the right to propose such bills itself. In case of disagreement with the Reich Government, the latter must nevertheless submit such bills to the Reichstag with an exposition of its own views. The Reich Council of Economy may have one of its members argue the bill before the Reichstag. Functions of control and administration may be entrusted to the Workers and Economic Councils within the field of their competences. To determine structure and tasks of the Workers and Economic Councils is exclusively a prerogative of the Reich. These councils, in contrast to the Russian system, were organs of the state, not organs of a class identified with the state, and their political power was an indirect one, through the means of economic influence. The framework of Article 165 was not yet fully realized when the republic went into abeyance, but the basis and the head of the new system had been established, the first by a Law on Factory Councils of February 4,1920, 1 2 the second by the Decree on the Provisional Reich Council of Economy, of May 4,1920. 13 According to the former, all enterprises or workshops with more than twenty employees elected their representative council; in smaller units a chairman was elected. The function of these representatives consisted in taking care of the workers' interests in relations with the employers and in administering certain social institutions of the enterprise. The council also had to furnish advice to the management with a view to providing for "maximum standards and efficiency of production." The leadership and initiative of management was not curtailed. According to the law on the Reichswirtschaftsrat, this body consisted of 326 members. There were 68 representatives of agriculture and forestry, 6 of horticulture and fishery, 68 of industry, 44 of trade and commerce, financial and insurance institutions, 34 of communication and public enterprises, 36 of crafts and artisans, 30 of the consumers, 16 of the civil servants and liberal professions. Added to these were 12 regional experts on economic questions and 12 appointees of the Reich government. This Reichswirtschaftsrat can, in all the fields of its competence, justly be compared to a third house of parliament. Its position was even stronger 12 13

"Betriebsrätegesetz," Reichsgesetzhlatt, 1920, No. 26, pp. 147 sqq.

"Verordnung über den vorläufigen Reicbswirtschaftsrat," ibid., No. 99, pp. 858 sqq.

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REPUBLIC OF THE GERMANS than that of the Reichsrat, which could not dispatch its own members to the Reichstag in order to propose and defend bills. Bismarck had earlier tried to acquire the railroads for the Reich, and when this plan failed through the shortsightedness of the individual governments, he at least acquired, after 1879, the Prussian railroads for the state. In line with these traditions, the fathers of the Weimar Constitution felt that, to use the words of Pope Pius IX in his Encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno, "it is rightly contended that certain forms of property must be reserved to the State, since they carry with them an opportunity of domination too great to be left to private individuals without injury to the community at large." 14 In summary, it can be said that no other modern social order has come so close to the ideals of Rerum Nomrum and Quadragesimo Anno as did the Weimar Republic. It followed the maxim later formulated by Pope Pius that, "when civil authority adjusts ownership to meet the needs of the public good it acts not as an enemy, but as the friend of private owners." It is, therefore, hardly surprising that certain industrial powers in Germany looked with hatred on the social functions of private property and on the rights of the people as proclaimed by the constitution. A system that aimed at the protection of the weak and, in the final analysis, at more private property— that is, property for those now dispossessed—must necessarily be distasteful to all who believe in ruthless, so-called "free competition," which in reality, as the late pontiff rightly said, has been replaced by economic dictatorship. Any party, such as the German Nationals and the National Socialists, promising to do away with the right of coalition, collective bargaining, the postulate of minimum wages, of coöwnership, and of a share in the management for the workers received the full financial support of these truly un-Christian economic despots. It is understandable that, at the same time, the main attack of the two radical groups, the National Socialists and the Communists, was also directed against organized labor, the Free (Social Democratic) and the Christian trade unions, as pillars of the democratic republic. By setting up cells of their own, the National Socialist and the Red trade union oppositions, they endeavored to decry the agreements of the democratic unions with employers and state and to undermine the standing of their leadership. Most important in these tactics was the organization of "wild strikes," that is, strikes not authorized by the trade union leaders because of existing and valid wage or labor contracts or a verdict of arbitration. The radical opposition tried to persuade the workers that their elected leaders did not take proper care of labor interests and that to submit to labor contracts or arbitration meant "selling out" the working class. Through unemployment the membership of the trade unions decreased 14 May 15, 1931. English translation by National Catholic Welfare Conference, in Sixteen Encyclicals of His Holiness Pope Pius XI, No. Θ, pp. 35-36. Quotations in next paragraph are to be found on pp. 17, 33.

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in later years, and, since many young men after leaving school never found work at all, little fresh blood entered into the administration or leadership, while the young workers, never organized in responsible unions and therefore without their political and moral education, were easier prey for radical propaganda. Against the expectations of many foreign observers and native skeptics who found the Weimar Constitution "too" democratic, the republic not only survived the crises of the post-war years but won many important victories at home and in the field of foreign policy. The monarchist Putsch led by Wolfgang Kapp in March, 1920, was beaten down with ease, although it had succeeded in seizing Berlin. The Reich Government appealed to the people from Stuttgart for a general strike (a request that was, so far as I know, quite unique), and the specter vanished. A new Spartacist rising shortly after the Kapp Putsch could also be subdued with the help of troops, dispatched by the government to the centers of revolt in the Ruhr district. To this "violation of the Versailles Treaty," France retorted by occupying Frankfurt-am-Main. Germany had always been able to boast that her history had not been written with the blood of political assassination. Besides Wallenstein, the uncrowned, only two of her rulers, Philip of Swabia and Albert of Austria, were murdered, and these for reasons of private revenge. This changed after the war. The stain of blood guilt was brought on the German name by the Right radicals, who introduced murder as a means of politics. It started in January, 1919, with the cowardly assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg—a remarkable woman, whatever one may think of her political opinions 15—and that of Kurt Eisner in February. The next prominent blood victim was Matthias Erzberger in August, 1921, followed by Waither Rathenau, the able foreign minister, in June, 1922—the most tragic loss for the republic. After 1933, the political murders were, of course, legion. The partial revelation of the Fehmemorde shocked German and world conscience. All these murders of compatriots were perpetrated by Right radicals, on the flimsiest motives or pretexts, which were often personal though draped as political ones. Bands of former officers and soldiers, brutalized by the war, unaccustomed to civil life and law, and forming so-called "Free Corps" reawakened some of the violence of the days after the Thirty Years War. From these corps, the nuclei of the antirepublican private armies developed; the Stahlhelm, the SA, the SS. Their cynicism and lack of pa10 Rosa Luxemburg, despite her radical leanings (together with Karl Liebknecht, she was the founder of tne Spartacus League), pleaded for a National Assembly elected by the people. It made a deep impression when she got up at the Communist Parteitag, Christmas, 1918, and said simply: "Comrades, machine guns against universal suffrage? That is a bad program indeed. ' Friedrich Stampfer, who described this incident to the author some time ago in New York (October 5, 1944), expressed the opinion that Rosa Luxemburg, had she lived, would eventually have come back to the Majority Socialists.

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triotism were complete. Those brought to trial for assassinating Rathenau, for instance, admitted frankly that the foreign minister had been killed for the very reason that his foreign policy had benefited Germany. 1 " Personally, Walter Rathenau, president of the AEG ( Allgemeine Elektrizitätsgesellschaft) and son of its founder, Emil Rathenau, was a cool rationalist. He believed in "unpolitical politics," with economic forces possessing primacy over the political. But he had a brilliant mind, was an honest patriot, and believed in international understanding and peace.17 During the dreary Genoa Conference of April-May, 1922, he stood out as the only man and statesman of true caliber. He stunned the world when in the middle of the conference he concluded with the Russian foreign commissar, Chicherin, the famous Rapallo Treat)', which liquidated the war spirit between the two countries together with all problems of "reparations" and debts. The two pariah nations of Europe had found the way to each other, and in spite of Allied anger the treaty was there to stay. Economic cooperation between a starving Russia and a starving Germany led to great mutual benefits. Bismarck's wise statesmanship had triumphed over the insane anti-Russian course of Baron von Holstein. Rathenau had predicted violence, and violence was to come both from the Right and from the Left. Yet the republic survived all this and the French invasion of the Ruhr in the frightful year 1923, too. Poincaré, eager to carry out his Rhineland plans which in 1919 had been foiled by America, led his country and Belgium to invade the Ruhr District on January 11, 1923, a dark and memorable day in post-war history. The pretext, if it may be dignified by that name, for this gross violation of the peace treaty was a minor default in German coal and timber deliveries. The British crown jurists almost immediately declared the step unjustified and illegal, and their opinion was embodied in a sharp note to the French government, dated August 11. A territory of over eight million souls (Rhine, Ruhr, and western Westphalia), the heart of German industrial production, was directly or indirectly affected. Most of the great steel mills, coal mines, and centers of iron production are located there. These industries France was now to run and exploit directly. The German people replied spontaneously with passive resistance, a system of nonviolence and noncoöperation. High French officials, to whom Villard talked at that time, confirmed that this policy, for which the India of Ghandi had shown the way, almost led to success: the French were 1 0 Salomon, Die Geächteten, pp. 301 sq.; English translation by Ian F. D. Morrow, The Outlaws, pp. 270 sq. 17 "Years later," Prince Max of Baden writes about him, "I heard from friends how on 2nd October [the day when the fatal Armistice request was forced upon the German government by the supreme command] Rathenau had cried like a child, and lashed his inventive mind with the question whether he could not do anything to hold up the armistice offer. Had he but come to me then! This was an ally whom I could have used." Erinnerungen und Dokumente, p. 382; English translation by W. M. Calder and C. W. H. Sutton, The Memoirs of Prince Max of Baden, II, 57.

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on the verge of giving in when German resistance broke down suddenly with the general collapse of the country.18 The Ruhr war, which cost France more in reputation, sécurité, and money than she could possibly gain, was disastrous for Germany and the whole of Europe too. To support the host of wage earners without pay, to keep going an economy without production, the German government had to have recourse to the printing presses, but their day and night work could not catch up with the devaluation of the paper money they were producing. It is wholly incorrect to pretend that Germany deliberately depreciated her currency to cheat foreign and internal creditors. The fall of the Mark started during the war and continued after it, speeding up as Germany found herself thwarted in every effort to regain true economic stability, burdened with reparations, deprived of her resources, hedged about by enemies still hostile in tone and action. Finally with one United States dollar one could buy four trillion two hundred billion paper Marks. Since the decrease of the purchasing power of the Mark at home did not keep pace with its dwindling value abroad, new fortunes could be built up by people with some foreign currency by buying up valuables, commodities, factories, real estate, and so on. Whole blocks of city real estate could be had for a trifle. Naturally xenophobia and antiSemitism expanded among the impoverished, and Right radicalism could cash in on this spreading hate. That no state or family budget was feasible under such conditions is obvious. The taxes were no longer worth the collection. Deaths from undernourishment, from light illnesses which would have been harmless under normal circumstances but were fatal because of the weakened resistance of the people, and from sheer despair or mental collapse soared sky-high. As the last savings of the middle and upper middle classes melted away, faith in all stable values, material or moral, fell. It is not surprising that counsels of despair were rife and that radicalism, especially National Socialism, increased by leaps and bounds. The Ruhr war naturally fostered extreme nationalism combined with extreme socialism, as a reaction to the militaristic foreign exploitation of the country. That Hitler's "socialism" was looked upon as an unobnoxious dead-end street by the financiers of the movement is beside the point; the little fellow supported the party not to please Krupp and Thyssen but in the belief it would be a shortcut to socialism. And because the alleged weakness of Social Democracy and the bankruptcy of reconciliation between the peoples had brought internationalism in disrepute, it was to be a national socialism. It is surprising only that many more Germans did not in those years become National Socialists, when law and order, moral values, and the very foundations of life's continuity had fallen away, and there was every temptaFighting Years; Memoirs of a Liberal Editor, p. 496.

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tíon to grasp in despair upon doctrines of violence and centralized leadership. Though the crisis was passed, ever after the days of the Ruhr war the reserves of good will were dangerously drained. So long as prosperity lasted after the conclusion of this epoch, the deep wound inflicted in 1923 could seem healed; when economic crisis reappeared, the old psychological problems necessarily accompanied it. Only today when time permits me to see these years in a wider perspective can I reach such conclusions; as a young man, I must confess, I thought until midsummer of 1930 that the democratic order had been saved—as indeed it might have been had the Western powers shown greater wisdom and had Germany still possessed in the thirties a statesman of the rank of Gustav Stresemann. The rise of Gustav Stresemann after Rathenau's death gave Germany her only statesman of enough stature, strength and wisdom to halt the disintegration of Europe for the time being." If it is possible that leaders may be determining forces even in the very midst of a fateful historic process, he, had he lived longer, might have staved off the Occidental breakdown—at least in its present shattering form. Born in 1878 of a middle class family, he went in his development the full tum from old-line nationalism to the threshold of the European and German universal idea. He was permitted a glimpse of the land of the future when history once again will have gathered the nations into an embracing synthesis; as yet neither he nor anyone else has been permitted to enter it. Stresemann had the beautiful hands and sensitive mind of an artist. His love for music and his deep knowledge of Goethe, that world genius of classic cosmopolitanism, surpassed by far the usual standards of the amateur. His tact, his diplomatic talent, and his vision of the European aspects of German policy present him to history as a giant among dwarfs and mediocrities.20 He took the office of the Reich chancellorship on August 12, 1923, facing an almost hopeless situation. Civil war was brewing, and the last respect for state authority was vanishing. "No banker would have risked one hundred thousand dollars on Germany's surviving," Rudolf Olden writes. "But the Chancellor defended his country tooth and nail." He worked breathlessly, yet without losing his poise, and did what ten other men could not have done. "Revolution and counter-revolution, separatism, every sort of hostility to the State was experienced every day. . . . He looked the danger in the Stresemann's diaries, letters, and papers were published after his death as Gustav Stresemann s Vermächtnis (Berlin, Ullstein, 1932), edited by his private secretary, Henry Bernhard. The English edition, Gustav Stresemann, His Diaries, Letters, and Papers ( London, Macmillan, 1940), was translated and edited by Eric Sutton. 20 "When he spoke," Rudolf Olden writes, "men trusted him. This 'spirit of Locamo,' so much mentioned since the conference, too often with malicious irony, does not consist in a spirit of unlimited concession, in complacencies, but in that frankness with which anxieties and complaints were communicated to each other by the statesmen." Stresemann, p. 219; English translation by R. T. Clark, Stresemann, p. 172.

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face, met it, averted it. While Germany seemed nearer death than life, the laws were passed which should restore the dying State to health." 1 1 Stresemann felt that passive resistance must be terminated, for in his judgment the weakness of the country had brought matters to a point where she was only playing the game of the radicals, to whom chaos was the most welcome state of affairs. On September 26, 1923, he made his momentous decision to call off resistance and initiate negotiations with France. One moral and political victory came from the misery of the period: public opinion the world over was swinging in favor of the German republic, and England and America had all but terminated their wartime backing of France. In June, 1924, in France itself the reasonable elements gained the upper hand. The ministry of Poincaré (" Poincaré—la Ruhr, Poincaré—Ια guerre") had to make room for the first cabinet of Edouard Herriot. Alexandre Millerand, who as president of the Republic had supported Poincaré, was forced out of office at the same time. In October-November, 1923, the Stresemann cabinet succeeded in stabilizing the German currency. No one who lived through those days will ever forget the awakening from the nightmare of inflation. True, no stabilization could restore the values destroyed or redeem the moral shock of those years. Nevertheless, it could have been one of the great psychological moments for a wise and generous reorientation of international policy. When the desperado-leader Adolf Hitler and the defeated World War general Erich Ludendorff staged their "Beer Cellar Putsch" on November 9, 1923, they had already missed their moment of opportunity. As a slight ray of hope emanated from the new and stable government, many who might otherwise have joined the Munich plotters had recovered sounder political judgment. At the first shots of the Bavarian police, the whole trumped-up "rising nation" was blown to the four winds, with Hitler, the barbershop beau running wild, the man who had dramatically sworn that in twentyfour hours he would be master of Germany or dead, now the first to discover the wisdom of hasty flight. During the same autumn, the republic also mastered the last Left-wing attempt to seize power. It dealt effectively with the radical government in Saxony, and thus, five years after Scheidemann s proclamation, it looked as if finally the work of democratic and international reconstruction could begin. 21

Ibid., p. 193; English, p. 152.

34 SPRINGTIME OF EUROPE It cannot be the purpose of the Divine world-order that men should direct their supreme national energies against one another, thus ever thrusting back their general progress of civilisation. G U S T A V S T R E S E M A N N , Address to the Assembly of the League of Nations, September 9, 1929. 1925 and 1926 marked a springtime for the nations of Europe. The "spirit of Locarno" was in modern form a realization of the age-old heritage of continental unity. Men walked in brotherly fashion, in the conviction that conflicts between European nations are fratricidal civil wars. The revival of such feelings only two years after the Ruhr war bears witness to the strength of the undying European idea—the source to which the Continent will ever again return. To us who still breathed the air of that spring it has remained a hope and promise that history never ages and will always find the minds and bodies it needs for the realization of its great designs. To the British ambassador in Berlin, Edgar, Lord D'Abemon, goes the credit for giving all help in his power toward putting Stresemann's plans into practice. Following a discussion of present and future European questions, Wolfgang Stresemann, eldest son of the late statesman, now in the United States, wrote me about this collaboration and about other problems which are today of greater actual importance than ever before. With his kind permission I should like to quote his letter in full. 1 T H E YEARS

New York, September M Y DEAR P R I N C E L O E W E N S T E I N ,

6,1943

Your call has given me particular pleasure, and I hope that we may soon have an opportunity to meet again and talk about these and other matters. I feel that events may be precipitated within the next few months. The time is certainly ripe. Unfortunately, many of the decisive personalities are not alert. It is amazing that events are also ill-judged in England. Yet there have been enough farsighted Englishmen. I am thinking especially of Lord D'Abemon, about whom we recently talked. He was one of the few who in his time recognized clearly the problems of the decade, both in the political and the economic sense. Had his counsel been accepted in time, an agreement between the former World War enemies could have been reached already in 1921 or 1922. His suggestions regarding the questions of currency and reparations were far ahead of his time and—the only ones feasible. His initiative that finally led to Locarno has become part of history. The astounding thing was that at first he did not speak for the British Govem1

Original in Cernían.

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ment, which, as is well known, almost declined the German offer in the beginning, but instead first talked about a Locarno policy to the German Government as his own private idea. He felt that something had to be done and soon got into a strange position because Sir Austen Chamberlain did not see the importance of the German step. Between Lord D'Abemon and my father a particular relationship of confidence developed. Neither was a diplomat in the old-school sense, and both preferred to express their thoughts with great frankness. Lord D'Abernon never hesitated to be very frank, and his frequently used expression makt siechten Eindruck in London still echoes in my memory. On the other hand, he was also frank in his criticism of British governmental policy. I remember also that he and my father often discussed what he, the ambassador, should report back so that things might be understood in their true meaning. To act and to work in such a way one had to be a man of great stature, and this Lord D'Abernon certainly was. He was not only colossal in the physical sense, but also a giant mentally. He did everything he could to help the Republic, and he disapproved of everything that could injure it. This he did, not perhaps because he loved Germany, but purely for reasons of realistic policy. He recognized that Germany could not be kept in chains for any length of time and that therefore it was imperative to solve the question of European peace with Germany, and not against Germany. When the British Government intended to recall him, my father implored Chamberlain to let him remain in Berlin. Thus he stayed over a year longer than had originally been intended. If men of his caliber and farsightedness were in power today, I should not worry about the future of the world. Yours, etc., WOLFCANC STRESEMANN

One cannot today read without the deepest emotion of the unfolding of the Locarno idea and the League of Nations policy as recorded in Stresemann's letters, memoranda, and addresses collected in Volumes II and III of that indispensable work, Gustav Stresemann's Vermächtnis. A photograph taken in London on December 1, 1925, immediately after the signing of the Locamo Pact at the Foreign Office shows Aristide Briand, Sir Austen Chamberlain and Lady Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill, Eduard Benes, the Italian and Polish delegates, Reich Chancellor Dr. Hans Luther, and Gustav Stresemann.2 It is difficult to realize that the picture of these men of many different nations rejoicing over the new era of peace is a scene from a past that, measured in years, has not been long gone. The Locarno Pact of October 16, 1925, it may be recalled, was a freely accepted agreement which placed the borders between France and Germany, and Germany and Belgium as drawn by the Treaty of Versailles under the collective guarantee of Great Britain, Italy, Belgium, France, and Germany. The 2

Reproduced in Vermächtnis, Vol. II, opposite p. 249.

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demilitarized zone imposed on Germany by the peace treaty ' was also included in the guarantee. France, Belgium, and Germany undertook not to resort to war against each other, except in self-defense or by collective League action; instead they pledged themselves to submit all matters of dispute to arbitration or to the Council of the League.4 The pact was to take effect as soon as Germany became a member of the League of Nations—an event that finally took place a year later. The path that led to the pact had not been easy. When the first news of Stresemann's and D'Abemon's ideas became known, the German foreign minister was at once made the target of the most vicious and violent nationalistic attacks, because his offer of a pact among Germany, France, and Belgium, to be guaranteed by England and Italy, entailed a definite recognition of the existing borders. In other words, Germany voluntarily renounced Alsace-Lorraine. As to Eupen and Malmédy, which had been annexed by Belgium, violence was excluded as a means of settlement, but the way of peaceful negotiations left open. On February 28, 1925, in the midst of heated debates, Reich President Friedrich Ebert, who had loyally stood by his foreign minister, died. On April 28, the aged Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was elected by the votes of the Right and the conservatives, defeating the republican candidate, Wilhelm Marx of the Center Party. Together, Marx and Thälmann (the Communist candidate) gathered over a million votes more than Hindenburg. Stresemann had looked with great apprehension on Hindenburg's taking over the highest office; he feared that as president he might follow the Rightist course of his electors and oppose the Locarno policy. But nothing of the kind happened, and as long as Stresemann was alive Hindenburg proved as loyal to the constitution as his predecessor had been. Locamo, when the battle was finally won, marked a turning point in European history, although for psychological reasons rather than because of the practical results achieved.· For the first time since the Armistice of November 11, 1918, Germany had again met the other powers on an equal footing, and the way had been prepared for her entry into the League of Nations. But many questions that should have been settled then remained unsolved. There still were foreign troops on German soil, a fact that con• Articles 42-44. The zone extended from Germany's western frontiers to a line fifty kilometers east of the Rhine paralleling the river. •Besides this principal treaty, there were two treaties of guarantee concluded by France with Poland and Czechoslovakia as well as four arbitration conventions between Cermany and (respectively) France, Belgium, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. « T h e Treaties of Locamo," Rudolf Olden writes, "are characteristic results of the 'as i f policy. That France and Germany renounced ambitions, the recovery of Alsace on the one side and the annexation of the Rhineland on the other, was only a practical admission of reality. But that eternal peace had been declared on the Rhine while actually a state of war existed between the two States, that was for Germany a bold and brilliant negotiation." Stresemann, p. 221; English translation by R. T. Clark, Stresemann, p. 174.

SPRINGTIME O F EUROPE 443 stantly weakened Stresemann's position at home because it furnished his enemies with easy arguments. The weight of the reparations payments was still crushing, and Germany's unilateral disarmament could certainly not be reconciled with the provisions of the Versailles Treaty. In spite of strong French suggestions and diplomatic pressure, Stresemann wisely refused to conclude an "Eastern Locarno." There was, of course, no thought of war, but the frontiers were drawn in so impossible a fashion that no honest German government felt able to recognize them voluntarily. The way of peaceful adjustments must remain open. On September 8, 1926, the general secretary of the League of Nations, Sir Eric Drummond, sent the following telegram to the Reich minister of foreign affairs, Dr. Gustav Stresemann: "On the instructions of the President of the Assembly of the League of Nations, I have the honour to inform you that the League Assembly, at their meeting on September 8th, declared Germany as admitted a member of the League, and approved the decision of the Council of September 4th granting to Germany a permanent representation in the League Council." " It may be added that when the roll call was taken in the Assembly, the delegations of the forty-eight states represented welcomed Germany unanimously.7 On September 10 Stresemann, after being greeted by the cheers of thousands lining the Quai Wilson and by the Assembly of the League, delivered his inaugural address. This address, from the viewpoint of our historic thesis, is remarkable because in it for the first time a German statesman before a world-wide forum found the path back to universal principles, guided by the duty of the hour and of his office rather than by his personal traditions, upbringing, or creed. 'There is something which far transcends in importance all material considerations," Stresemann said, "namely, the souls of the nations themselves. There is just now a mighty stirring of ideas among the nations of the world. We see some nations that adhere to the principle of self-contained national unity and reject international understanding, because they do not wish to see all that has been developed on the basis of nationality superseded by a more general conception of humanity. Now I hold that no country which belongs to the League of Nations thereby surrenders any of its national individuality. The Divine Architect of the world has not created mankind as a homogeneous whole. He has made the nations of different races; He has given them their mother-tongue as the sanctuary of their soul; He has given them countries with different characteristics as their homes. But it cannot 6 Vermächtnis, II, 590; English translation by Eric Sutton, Custav Stresemann, His Diaries, Letters, and Papers, II, 531. A facsimile of the French original of the telegram is found in the German edition opposite p. 577. 7 Fourth Plenary Meeting ( Wednesday, September 8, 1926 ) ; see League of Nations, Assembly, Official Journal, Special Supplement No. 44: Records of the Seventh Ordinary Session of the Assembly (Geneva, 1926), p. 36.

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be the purpose of the Divine world-order that men should direct their supreme national energies against one another, thus ever thrusting back the general progress of civilisation. He will serve humanity best who, firmly rooted in the faith of his own people, develops his moral and intellectual gifts to the utmost, thus overstepping his own national boundaries, and serving the whole world, as has been done by those great men of all nations whose names are writ large in the history of mankind. Thus the ideals of nationality and of humanity may unite on the intellectual plane, and they may similarly unite in pursuit of political ideals, provided that there is the will to make common progress." 8 Among the younger generation, particularly among those who had been privileged to spend some time in the supranational atmosphere of Geneva, the eagerness to embrace values wider than the nations was great. I remem ber from my own experiences that the policy of the three leading statesmen, Stresemann, Briand, and Chamberlain, did not remain in the tight, formal world of diplomacy but was echoed in the hearts of very many in Germany, France, and all other countries. "How firmly established in Germany is the republican form of government?" Nicholas Murray Butler asked Stresemann in July, 1926. Stresemann, Butler writes, looked off into the distance, reflected for a moment, and then said: "I think it is pretty firmly established; but, of course, it is weakened by the policy of the Allies in keeping their troops on the east bank of the Rhine. That leads our reactionaries to say: 'What is the use of the Pact of Locarno? W h a t is the use of the League of Nations? Look at these foreign troops still in our country!' It is the constant repetition of that sort of thing which makes the continued operation of our democratic form of government difficult." 9 T h e most hopeful forward step was taken in the conversations at Thoiry, on Lake Geneva. There, on September 17, 1926, Briand and Stresemann discussed the relations between their countries with complete frankness, as the detailed notes taken by the German foreign minister himself reveal. 1 0 It remains a lasting tragedy that, mainly due to Poincaré's counterefforts, more did not result from this meeting, around which so many hopes were centered. Had the complete evacuation of the Rhineland, proposed by Stresemann and accepted in principle by Briand taken place then, the course of the next decades might have been altered. As Stresemann said in a letter to Lord D'Abernon: "Those who backed the Locarno policy, see only the ruin of their hopes. T h e crazy policy of continuing the occupation of the Rhineland is driving everybody back to the German-Nationals. Those who were 'Seventh Plenary Meeting (Friday, September 10, 1926), ibid., pp. 51-52. Official League translation. 9 Across the Busy Y ears; Recollections and Reflections, II, 148-49. ™ Vermächtnis, III, 15-23; English, III, 17-26.

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the strongest supporters of this idea [of Locarno] now feel themselves to an equal degree set back." 11 For years it had been the fear of Stresemann and all other clear thinkers that the anti-European forces of reaction might triumph unless the gTeat opportunities of Geneva and Locarno were used and the noble document of the anti-war Pact of Paris (of August 27, 1928) followed by appropriate action. Such action should have consisted in a concrete approach toward the realization of the plan of a United States of Europe, starting perhaps with an economic union as first proposed by Aristide Briand. But since economic reasons, important as they may be, are not the ultimately decisive force in the life of nations ( the wellspring is not found in social and economic conditions, but in historic and moral consciousness), a United States of Europe might create economic advantages; it would not exhaust itself in them. Of this fact both Briand and Stresemann were fully aware, as were the peoples of Europe, who by no means thought primarily in terms of the removal of customs barriers or easier movement for trade and commerce. The failure of the promising endeavors of the springtime of post-war Europe is explained by metaphysical reasons rather than by the role of this or that parliament, party, or cabinet minister. The pioneers who were trying to thrust forward into a future world of peace were not halted by the barriers erected by any individual political event or reason. Rather, they found themselves lost in the wastelands of the past. They could not escape from an era in decline. And today, after another world war, mankind has sunk even deeper into the darkness of futility and desolation. Yet the fact remains that even within the limits of conventional political reason infinitely more could have been done to strengthen whatever good will and peaceful order existed in post-war Europe. The unsolved problem of general disarmament weighed upon all the cabinets of the major powers and did much to weaken the standing of the German republican statesmen. That Germany had fulfilled all her obligations of disarmament was certified by the Allied Disarmament Commission in 1927. Accordingly, there no longer existed any valid excuse for the other Continental powers such as France, Poland, and Italy not to reduce their own huge armies on land and sea and in the air. As spokesmen for American and world conscience, men like Nicholas Murray Butler, who knew Stresemann and his endeavors well, pointed out that the pledge made by the Allies on June 16,1919, to the German delegation still held good.12 It had been accepted also by the United States and was, ι» On the journey from San Remo to Heidelberg, March 30, 1929. Ibid., p. 394; English, p. 423. 12 Reply of the Allied and Associated Powers to the Observations of the German Delegation on the Conditions of Peace (Paris, June 16, 1917), Part V, Section I, § 1: "The Allied and Associated Powers wish to make it clear that their requirements in regard to

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by inference, incorporated in the Treaty of Berlin of August 25, 1921, which terminated the state of war between the United States and Germany." "With what grace can one party to the Treaty of Versailles insist," Dr. Butler said in 1931, "that the terms of that treaty be rigidly fulfilled by the defeated German nation if the terms of that treaty are not abo rigidly fulfilled by the victorious allied powers? There is no answer; surely faith with the German people and with the world, including their own vast victorious populations, has not yet been kept by the governments signatory to that treaty." " All those who observed the internal affairs of the German Republic till 1930 would have agreed with Stresemann that the form of government was firmly established. They would also have rejected the suggestion that there was any thought of war in the air. There was not. But deep in the soul of all peoples it lay waiting, great though their terror of its reawakening might be. In this, too, our epoch deserves to be called a second Thirty Years War. After 1918 there was hardly a year without war or some warlike conflict somewhere in the world, even though certain regions enjoyed an interval of peace—"periods of happiness are blank pages," as Hegel said.15 It was the same in the seventeenth century, although the theater of war was smaller. Regionally, there had also been long periods of peace within that war, and only later, when historic perspective blended its various phases together did mankind realize that it had been a war of thirty years. It is perhaps all the more remarkable that, despite such uncertainty and forebodings, the German Republic succeeded in planting the seeds of universalisai once more in the devastated soil of Europe. Its social, technical, economic, and—last, but not least—spiritual achievements are generally considered astounding. World confidence, shattered by the hysteria after 1914, returned; ambassadors of good will went back and forth across the Atlantic. The deeds of the German democratic genius itself.sent forth the messages of an amazing rebirth in spite of reparations, occupation, misery scarcely conquered among the people, and inequality in the international sphere. In February, 1929, the New York monthly Survey Graphic published a German armaments . . . . are also the first steps towards that general reduction and limitation of armaments which they seek to bring about." Great Britain, Foreign Office, The Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany (with Amendments) and other Treaty Engagements Signed at Versailles, June 28, 1919, (London, H.M. Stationery Office, 1925), p. 308. To this must be added the introduction to Part V of the Versailles Treaty itself, as well as Article VIII of the League of Nations Covenant outlining the same general obligation. ι» United States, Congress, 67th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Document No. 70 ( Vol. VI), Article I ( 1 ) , § 2 . ι» Looking Forward; What Wiü the American People Do about It? p. Θ. Philosophie der Welt-Geschichte, in Sämtliche Werke, VIII, 71; English translation by J. Sibree, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 28.

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special issue on "The New Germany, 1919-1929." Its cover bore the colors of black, red, and gold. A collector's item now, this issue contains one of the best surveys of Weimar Germany. The list of contributors is a long roll call of distinguished names, American, English, Swiss, German. Among them were Reich Chancellor Hermann Müller, Dr. Gustav Stresemann, John Palmer Gavit, Moritz J. Bonn, Paul M. Kellogg, the Prussian minister of education, C. H. Becker, Paul Scott and Edgar Ansel Mowrer, William E. Rappard, George P. Gooch, Oswald Garrison Villard, and many others. The illustrations of the issue are reproductions of the works of modem German artists such as Ernst Barlach, Renée Sintenis, Lovis Corinth, Heinrich Zille, and Käthe Kollwitz and photographs of German cities, youth hostels, industrial plants, and workers' settlements. The essays and analyses deal with almost every aspect of political, international, cultural, and economic life under the Weimar Republic. The articles in this issue, which one cannot read without nostalgia, showed how the world looked upon the republic ten years after the adoption of its constitution." "A Republic with universal national suffrage at the age of twenty, a chancellor responsible to the Reichstag, and an elected president, provided a more consistently democratic constitution than is possessed by any other great power in Europe"—this was the verdict of G. P. Gooch. "Indeed, the ringing in of a republic in Germany registers the greatest accession to the forces of self-government in the Western world in the present century. . . . To an Englishman who owes an immense debt to German scholarship and who regarded the War as the greatest tragedy of our age, no scene in the European drama of today arouses more interest and sympathy than the attempt of Germany to rebuild her shattered life on deeper and more enduring foundations." 16 Moritz J. Bonn, an outstanding economic expert, warned of dangers ahead: "The loss, by the 'peace,' of flourishing provinces as well as of her [Germany's] commercial marine and her investments in foreign countries, was meant to retard her industrial recovery, which in an industrial age might hasten her political resurrection. At the same time she was saddled with a heavy indemnity, going far beyond the reparation of the damages she had bound herself to pay in the Armistice negotiations with President Wilson. She was made to pay five billion dollars within a very short period—five times the amount which, a half century earlier, she had extracted from France. But these five billions were but a first instalment, after the paying of which the total was to be fixed, not later than May, 1921. . . . Any effort to stabilize the German currency was doomed to failure under such circumstances. . . . The middle class from which the brains of Germany had always been drawn, was ruined. None of their bonds, mortgages, debentures was worth a 18 Survey Craphic, XIV (February, 1929), 605. The quotations from Bonn's article are to be found on pp. 560-62, that from Mowrer's occurs on pp. 606-7, those from Rappard's appear on p. 6Ó4.

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farthing . . . [and] the groups which were supposed to have profited by the wholesale spoliation of their creditors turned out to be losers too." Though their land and factories were intact, there was no working capital left. Germany was so devoid of liquid capital that for quite a time loans to first-class concerns cost about 25 percent; gilt-edged mortgage bonds yielding 10 percent were issued at 85 percent. In a short time, Moritz Bonn found, the debt weighing on German industry and agriculture, which inflation was supposed to have lifted, was quite as heavy as before, though capital sums might be smaller. The annual charges owing to the increased rate of interest were just as burdensome. To this were added payments for the liquidation of the reparations charges. Since 1924, these had been regulated by the Dawes Plan, a payment schedule worked out by a committee under the chairmanship of the American Charles Gates Dawes (vice president under President Calvin Coolidge and winner of the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize) and adopted by an international conference in London in August of that year. According to this plan, Germany had to pay 250 million dollars annually—gold value—for forty years, secured by German railroads and industrial concerns, by bond issues totaling four billion dollars. A second annuity, not capitalized, of 400 million dollars was added, making a total of over 600 million dollars, the full annuity falling due fòr the first time in 1929. In the transitional years from 1925 to 1928, 1,350 million dollars were transferred, of which 200 million, in accordance with the plan, had been borrowed abroad. Only because German private concerns, states, and municipalities took large loans abroad could the German Reich government transfer that billion. Interest on the borrowed money amounted to about 100 million dollars, to be added to the 600-million annuity. In other words, payments abroad would amount to 700 million dollars or 2.95 billion gold Marks. (These figures compare with a total Reich budget of 12 billion Marks in 1930, and 9 billion 400 million in 1931; in 1932, it was cut to 8 billion. ) Bonn said, in summary, that economic survival depended not on Germany alone but "to a considerable degree on the world's general economic policy, on the opening or the closing of markets and on the general political situation in Europe and oversea." "The War is really over," Paul Scott Mowrer wrote from Paris. "Despite certain superficial signs to the contrary, the peace, spirit runs deep in Europe's veins; and France and Germany, those "hereditary enemies' of modern times, are today more closely linked together, diplomatically, culturally, and especially economically, than at any previous period of history. . . . A phase of interior politics should be mentioned here parenthetically. French conservative groups, while admitting the necessity of rapprochement, are still very suspicious of Germany. They prefer Fascist Italy, and would like

SPRINGTIME OF EUROPE 449 to see a Franco-Italian alliance. Liberal groups, on the contrary, are chary of Italy, but feel very confident toward republican Germany . . . Diplomatically, the basis of the rapprochement was the Locarno Treaties. Equally important, however, is the economic alliance which followed . . . The recent meeting in Berlin of the international confederation of associations of war veterans and maimed soldiers was attended by an unusually imposing French delegation. A colony of German youths has been camping this summer near the old battlefields of the Chemin des Dames." William E. Rappard, famous Swiss scholar of constitutional and international law and protagonist of international arbitration, wrote from Geneva on the foreign policy of the German republic: "There is no better test of the foreign policy of a country than its attitude toward the League of Nations. . . . When Germany was about to enter the league in 1926, speculation was rife in Geneva as to the line she would take. That she would not imitate American aloofness was obvious. Her geographical situation in the heart of Europe forbade it and the general tendency of her successive governments since 1919 proved them fully conscious of that fact. But would she play the part of a great power by seeking above all to promote her political ends mainly by political bargaining with slight consideration for legal rights and duties? Or would she place herself morally at the head of the small powers in thwarting the manoeuvres of her great associates by insisting constantly on the full and complete application of her rights under international law? . . . The reply, after the experience of the last two years, is clear, although not simple." Rappard found that Germany has consistently attached very great importance to the League and the care and foresight shown at Geneva had greatly enhanced her prestige. "A second characteristic of German policy at Geneva," he wrote, "has been the devotion shown by the Wilhelmstrasse to the ideals of international justice and arbitration." Though Germany was the only great power not represented on the bench of the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague, she was the first, and then the only one, to have signed and ratified unconditionally the optional clause of the statute of the court. "It is therefore generally recognized that Germany is today, through her example, the greatest exponent of international arbitration and judicial settlement in the world." Also in regard to the peace treaties, Rappard found, Germany has refrained from trying to paralyze the League's machinery, as her permanent seat in the Council would under the rule of unanimity have allowed her to do in many cases. In August of that year—1929—Stresemann, his health shattered, arrived at The Hague for exhausting negotiations. The Dawes Plan had proved unworkable and had to be replaced by some new and better formula. The result of long wrangling was the New Plan of January 30, 1930, also called the Young Plan after the American expert, Owen D. Young. This, too, involved heavy burdens for two generations yet unborn. But within the next

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ten years it was to save Germany 10 billion Marks. Even more important, it offered a vision of national liberty without which universal duties cannot be properly fulfilled; according to a protocol signed on August 30, the Rhineland was to be freed of foreign troops not later than June 30, 1930. Over the New Plan bedlam broke loose in Germany. The nationalists were fearful that the improvements brought about by the Young Plan, and the very fact that so shortly after the Dawes Plan another revision had been possible, might soon deprive them also of their main object of propaganda, the Versailles Treaty. Though National Socialism, often and with good reason called a child of the Versailles Treaty—an illegitimate one, to be sure —inherited all the vices of its father, it grew up to strength by clamorous protest or moral indignation against the treaty. At the same time the National Socialists secretly opposed and countered all republican attempts at revision; they wanted to preserve the Versailles Treaty until they themselves would be strong enough to kill it: In this policy they were joined by the German Nationals, who did not even have the excuse that when the peace treaty was accepted they were nonexistent as a party and therefore had no responsibility for it. The German Nationals voted against it, it is true, but it is well to remember that in a certain way they shared the responsibility nevertheless. Upon the request of the other parties they had made a declaration attributing to those who, though under protest, yet felt compelled to vote for the acceptance of the Versailles Treaty the motive of equal patriotism.17 "I can therefore state with satisfaction," the president of the National Assembly said in his summary before the vote was taken on June 22, 1919, "that it has been acknowledged by the various parties of this House that all members of this House, whether voting Yea or No, are guided solely by patriotic motives." " Though the incessant efforts of the republic, against obstacles within and without, succeeded finally in throwing off many of the most oppressive fetters of the Versailles Treaty, the fact remains that national pride, so deeply offended for years, drove many into the arms of the extreme Right because the Rightists promised remedies in defiant language but in vague practical ideas. It was not surprising that a democratic, republican government which by peaceful negotiation, world confidence, and statesmanship had succeeded in bringing Germany back into the society of nations and in freeing the Rhineland should arouse the whole-hearted hatred of those circles who lived only for personal and party ambitions. Naturally also, the fight against Stresemann was couched in "ideological" language as a fight "against the enslavement policy of the republic." For the first time the coalition bétween German Nationals and National Socialists was taking shape, the latter still as the junior partners, dependent on the 17

Scheidemann, Memoiren eines Sozialdemokraten, II, 375-76. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen der verfassunggebenden Nationalversammlung (1919), CCCXXVII, 1140-11. 18

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huge financial and newspaper power of Dr. Alfred Hilgenberg, the leader of the German Nationals, who had been enriched through the inflation. A committee was organized to ask for a referendum "Against the War Guilt Lie and the Young Plan"; they asked that all executives, cabinet ministers, and other officials participating in the adoption of the Young Plan should be punished as traitors to the country! Stresemann, like all other cabinet ministers before him, had time and again rejected the preposterous assertion of Germany's exclusive guilt. But, as he pointed out to the Reich committee of his party meeting in late September, 1929, the "wirepullers" working for the proposed "law" by referendum were trying to deceive the people and make them believe that by a referendum against the war guilt clause international obligations would cease." Only ten percent of the voters participated in the German NationalNational Socialist referendum of November 3. The Reichstag, to which the proposed "law" was next referred, rejected it with an overwhelming majority. On December 22 it came up for the plebiscite, which ended with a crushing defeat of the instigators. They themselves can hardly have hoped to succeed. But the campaign afforded them an opportunity to unloose a torrent of venom, dirt, and calumnies. No one who lived through those months will be able to forget the appalling vulgarity and ferocity of their demeanor. It conjured up once more the terror of 1918-1923 and foreshadowed the things to come. Stresemann was then no longer among the living. On September 9 he had mounted the rostrum of the League of Nations for the last time. The photograph taken on that occasion shows him quiet, yet impassioned, his delicate hands opening as if in a gesture of supplication—for reason and political insight, to give the republic what it needed to weather the stortn.20 Remove the causes of war, he said, through general disarmament. Allow the idea of international solidarity to inspire every negotiation, lest the nations should return to the dangerous practice of dealing with each other separately. The protection of minorities, he pointed out, is also one of the most important means for removing the causes of war. It was the League of Nations to which the minorities looked for the safeguarding of their rights: "In the minorities question I make no distinction between interested and non-interested States. ι» Vermächtnis, III, 581; English, III, 621 sq. 20 "When Stresemann mounted the tribune in the Hall of the Reformation," Antonina Vallentin says in describing this scene, "a faint thrill of horror swept over his audience. There stood a man marked by fate—a man in the shadow of death. . . . His breathing was so laboured that his hurried gasps often drowned his words. The sweat poured in streams from his forehead. . . . From time to time he grasped the balustrade of the tribune—to keep himself from falling. The frantic hammering of his heart was almost audible." Stresemann; vom Werden einer Staatsidee, p. 306; English translation by Eric Sutton, Stresemann, p. 322.

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This is one of those problems which, in accordance with the principle of the new regime instituted after the war, affect the League as a whole. . . . The greater the respect and protection accorded to men and women in the exercise of their inalienable right to preserve and use their mothertongue, develop their civilisation and practise their religion irrespective of political frontiers, the less likely is it that international peace will be disturbed." The day before, Briand had spoken in favor of a United States of Europe. Now Stresemann took it up; he wished to see Briand's address, with its appeal to youth, included in schoolbooks the world over. There were many, he said, who condemned a priori as fruitless all ideas that do not fit into the "normal" way of thinking; these pessimists talk about "romanticism" when they mention any idea of reforming the relations between European states. But, he exclaimed, a great idea at first often appears foolish. Why should it be impossible to unite the European states? This task must be approached not with the intention of directing it against any other continent, but with a view to the benefit of Europe. Modem technics and modern economy make the internal European frontiers grotesque, antiquated obstacles between the peoples, shutting off their happiness and prosperity. Almost at the end of this address, Stresemann spoke to the youth of Europe in the spirit of cosmopolitan culture, which, in the midst of materialism, had been renewed by the Youth Movement and its spiritual leaders, and he pleaded for the heroism of peace.21 It might seem today as if that spirit, which for the last time soared high in the days of September, 1929, was but a star falling swiftly into a sea of darkness. But this I do not believe. The bright hope must and will remain, that the idea of universal history, of an Occidental commonwealth, of youth dedicated to peaceful labor and united by bonds of friendship will be manifest once more before our world is thrown back into the night of atavistic nationalism. In times of suffering it is the knowledge of the unconquerable idea that keeps the forces of life and reason from utter disintegration. In the morning hours of October 3, 1929, Stresemann passed away. Once he had said that when the last foreign soldier would have left German soil, in July, 1930, "we shall have a black, red, and gold celebration." He did not live to see what he so ardently had longed and worked for; but over his coffin and all through Germany there waved, in mourning for him who had consumed himself in the service of his country, the black, red, and gold flag. "The world honoured the dead," Rudolf Olden concludes Stresemann's biography, "as it had honoured no other German of the new epoch. A great statesman, a great European, a great patriot, they said, was dead. . . . It may be 11 League of Nations, Assembly, Official Journal, Special Supplement No. 75: Records of the Tenth Ordinary Session of the Assembly (Geneva, 1929), pp. 69-71. Official League translation.

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as you will, but in these years, at a turning-point in history, he was Germany." 22 It is probably not permissible to attribute great events of history solely to individual reasons and personal events, but it seems that time and again throughout the centuries the fate of Germany ( more perhaps than that of any other country) has been tragically affected by the untimely death of her great. This much can be said—that had Stresemann lived, he would no doubt have been elected to the Reich presidency, after Hindenburg's first term expired in 1932. Had this happened, Germany would have been spared the tragedy of seeing her name humiliated among the peoples. And the peoples would have been spared surrendering to Hitler in full measure all that they had grudged giving to Stresemann and to Weimar, when even a fraction of it in time would have saved the German republic. Neither the reactionary military cliques which created and destroyed the Brüning cabinet nor National Socialism could then have achieved power. A few years more, and the economic crisis would have ebbed, and the republic of the black, red, and gold, firmly established at home, would under such leadership have won full equality and through its spiritual example would have guided the Occidental community to a lasting peace. 22

Olden, Stresemann, pp. 270, 273; English, Stresemann, pp. 214, 217.

35 THE SECRET GERMANY To the Living Spirit.

Inscription over the portals of Heidelberg University. FRIEDRICH GUNDOLF,

greatest assets are her spiritual achievements, once more manifested and renewed in the days of the Weimar Republic. The works of Thomas Mann and Gerhard Hauptmann, the stage productions of Max Reinhardt and of Erwin Piscator; the plays of Ernst Toller; the great opera houses of Vienna, Berlin, Bayreuth, Dresden, and Munich; and the state theaters, which presented classic and modern plays of all countries in masterful performances—all these won world fame. So did the orchestras under Richard Strauss, Furtwängler, Bruno Walther, and Hans Knappertsbusch. In the scientific sphere, the universities, research institutes, laboratories, and the progress in education and inventions of all kinds enhanced the reputation of Germany. T h e colorful and hospitable life of German youth attracted many guests from abroad, and not a few who came as mere visitors left as friends.

AMONG GERMANY'S

Recently, the name of one of Germany's greatest lyric poets, Rainer Maria Rilke ( h e died in 1926), has been made known abroad by a number of fair English translations. 1 His profound and beautiful verses have made this singer of transfigured death, and of redemption through the acceptance of the verdicts of Providence, representative of a trend in the Faustian soul of the Occident. Of course, in Germany as elsewhere, much that represented itself after the war as of spiritual value, many who for their innovations claimed the touch of genius, were but empty shells, sterile in their intellectual conceit, uprooted, unhistoric, and uh-Christian in their artistic pretensions. They would have gone down to quiet oblivion, had not a brutal and equally un-Christian persecution lent them the appearance of masters and martyrs of the spirit. It seems to me, therefore, that some space should be devoted to the true idea of historic Germany, the creations that appeared outside the little world 1 In this country particularly by M. D. Herter Norton, The Tale of the Love and Death of Comet Christopher Rilke (1932), Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke ( 1938), and Sonnets to Orpheus ( 1942); in England by J. B. Leishman, Poems ( 1934), Requiem and Other Poems ( 1935), Sonnets to Orpheus ( 193Θ), and Later Poems ( 1938). There are two excellent translations of the Duineser Elegien, one by V. Sackville-West and Edward Sackville West, Duineser Elegien: Elegies from the Castle of Duino ( 1931 ), the other by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender, Duino Elegies ( 1939). Further translations are by Babette Deutsch, Jessie Lemont, C. F. Maclntyre, and others. Some of Rilke's prose and letters have also been translated into English.

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of conventionally known authors and artists, in a place quite apart from the boulevards and the cafés of the literati, whose productions are so frequently associated with Weimar. There is an intimate relationship that binds the spirit of the constitution and the reawakening of the universal idea in Stresemann's plans with the spiritual deeds of Germany's great representatives such as Ricarda Huch and Stefan George, though from the political arena proper they remained aloof. To the works of Ricarda Huch I have turned many times while reviewing the centuries of Occidental-German history. It is my hope that thereby I may have contributed towards a better knowledge of this great woman, whose books are, in Germany itself, perhaps more widely known and owned than those of any other present-day author who has a talent not exclusively literary. The title which Ricarda Huch bestowed on the Freiherr vom Stein, Erwecket des Reichsgedankens (reawakener of the Reich idea),2 she has won for herself in-a world of sham greatness, self-contained nationalism, and scom for the perennial values of the Christian ages. Among her main historical works (most of which I have used in writing this book) are Der grosse Krieg in Deutschland (The Great War in Germany); s Wallenstein; eine Charakterstudie (Wallenstein; a Study of Character); Michael Bakunin und die Anarchie (Michael Bakunin and Anarchy); Alte und neue Götter; die Revolution des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Old and New Gods; the Revolution of the Nineteenth Century in Germany); Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation (The Roman Empire of the German Nation); Das Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung (The Age of the Division of Faith). Two volumes on romantic poetry, philosophy, and politics, Die Romantik; works on Garibaldi, the Risorgimento, and Federigo Confalonieri, the Milan patriot and martyr; and books on the old towns of the empire—these show her great scope. Her novel called Von den Königen und der Krone ( Of Kings and the Crown) is considered one of the masterpieces of German literature. A Ghibelline Christian ( though by birth a Protestant), she has also contributed towards a human and mystic understanding of the Holy Scriptures, although, of course, from the point of view of orthodoxy one cannot subscribe to all she said in her work Der Sinn der Heiligen Schrift (On the Meaning of Holy Scripture ). A sense of humor enlivens many of her books and gives a human touch to her characters without vulgarizing them. She has even written some of the naughtiest, wittiest stories of the day, with scorn for sham religiosity but always with reverence for the truly sacred, as in Lebenslauf des heiligen Wonnebald Pück (Life of the Saintly Wonnebald Piick) or in Fra Celeste. In the subtitle of her book on Stein, first published in 1925. • For further data on these books, see the Bibliography. None of them, to my knowledge, has yet been translated into English. s

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A classic detective novel, Der Fall Deruga (The Deruga Case) shows her as a scholar of intricate human psychology. What makes Ricarda Huch unique is her mastery in many diverse fields; her prose is classic and probably the best written today; as a writer of fiction and of histoire romanciée she is considered by many (including myself) as Germany's greatest genius; her poems are among the most beautiful of world lyrics. But transcending all these partial manifestations of an overflowing rich soul she stands out as the spiritual representative of the Sacred Roman Empire and of Germany in her undefiled Christian Occidental mission. Ricarda Huch, the great Ghibelline, was bom in the Guelf city of Brunswick under the shadow of the gigantic bronze lion which Henry the Lion erected as a monument to his own glory.4 Of ancient peasant and artisan stock, she has remained rooted in the soil of her Saxon country. Into the later generations of the Huch family, there flowed the cultural heritage of the deutsche Bürgertum in the best sense of the word, of Goethe, Lessing, Herder and ( in her great-grandfather's time ) the romantic school which she has so masterfully described. Tradition, history, and her philosophy of life, as well as her close bonds with Switzerland, which she greatly loves, and with Italy of the past and the present, have given her a fatherland greater than Saxony, greater than Germany—Das Reich. Ricarda Huch married an Italian, Dr. Ermano Ceconi from Trieste, and she has spent much of her life on Italian soil, devoted to the imperial and national history of her husband's country. For years a librarian at the City Library at Zürich, she has interpreted Switzerland as the last cell of Occidental freedom, as a particle, and a perennial token, of the supranational community. She has defined Switzerland as ein Reich, because within itself it has remained supranational, whereas the Bismarckian empire she saw only as a state." The Reich, as Ricarda Huch has shown throughout her works, is consummated through the ideas of justice, mercy, peace, and freedom. But justice, in the Augustinian sense of righteousness, is no opportunistic or pragmatic 4 There is a biography by Else Hoppe, Ricarda Huch ( Hamburg, Marion von Schröder, 193β), which has great merit as a first attempt. On the occasion ofFrau Huch's seventieth birthday, July 18, 1934, a number of her friends collected essays on several aspects of her life and work. The volume, Ricarda Huch; Persönlichkeit und Werk in Darstellungen ihrer freunde was published by the Atlantis Verlag, Berlin. See there, particularly, Martin Hiirlimann, "Ricaraa Huch und der Reichsgedanke," pp. 163-12. • Ricarda Huch's views on the historic mission of Switzerland agree with those recently presented in America by the Swiss historian Denis de Rougemont. Switzerland has always remained faithful to the idea of the Sacred Roman Empire. If she formally separated herself from it in 1648, Rougemont writes, it was because "Germany was definitely orienting itself towards a policy of dynastic power, whereas Switzerland was keeping to the old ideal of its imperial liberties. Rather u>an a break with the empire, it was, as historians have pointed out, 'a refusal to incorporate itself in a denatured Empire'—an act of fidelity to its eternal mission as guardian of the heart of Europe." Rougemont and Muret, The Heart of Europe, p. 53.

THE SECRET GERMANY 457 concept, nor is it an outgrowth of some man-made social contract. It streams from the heart of the Triune Godhead, to Whose image (the imago Trinitatis being in all things) a true commonwealth of freedom and peace must correspond. It is this concept, expressed by the often misused and desecrated word Reich, which fills the whole of her historic philosophy. It is by no means an unrealistic concept, as we ourselves have tried to show. It is proved by history; time and again nations have risen against the universal concept without destroying it. The history of Germany, at least since the fifteenth century, is one of continuous defeats—and even many betrayals— of the universal idea, yet the idea has remained unconquerable. Ideas pertaining to humanity are true only if they tend to become flesh. Therefore Huch has spoken with a love almost obliterating time and space of the men in whom the idea, or part of it, had become embodied: Charlemagne; the Saxon, the Salian, and the Hohenstaufen rulers; Albertus Magnus; Emperor Sigismund, Prince Eugene of Savoy; and the Reichsfreiherr vom Stein. The last two were to her uncrowned emperors of the Sacred Empire. No German outside the circle of Stefan George, to whom she bears a strong affinity of spirit, has had deeper patriotism than Ricarda Huch; but in neither of the two writers does patriotism trespass and cross the border into nationalism. This fact partly explains her aversion to Bismarck, though she recognized his greatness and knew full well that for him nationalism was but a means of political construction. She rejects him as a representative of the statist idea with its centralization, its power politics, and its submersion of freedom under the raison détat. For the same reason she has never found an approach to the understanding of France, a country which she sees as the archtype of the centralization and statism which has developed through the centuries and has infected the whole of Europe. Bismarck's Hohenzollern Kaisertum, in her judgment, was not genuine. It was propped upon the Prussian kingship, a particularistic power bearing only a universal name. Deeply devoted to the historic, ever-present idea of imperial greatness, Ricarda Huch has frequently expressed republican notions. "German history teaches," she wrote, "that the Kaisertum decayed when the emperors became hereditary princes. If a hereditary prince were now made emperor, could one succumb to the illusion that he would renew the age-old idea through which the emperor was the source of righteousness and freedom? . . . Much more of the old Kaisertum was, despite the modern name, contained in the president elected by the whole people." " Her position is clearly antidvnastic, just as her concept of the Reich is diametrically opposed to German or any other national or state hegemony over other peoples. From her knowledge of the historic process and her conviction that the "past" is 9

Alte und neue Götter; die Revolution des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in Deutschland,

p. 452.

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but a category of the phenomenal world, she derives hope for the future: 'The idea of the united Occident will ever anew strive for realization, be it from Rome or some other country or through the League of Nations. Whether a sacred empire can ever again take form in Europe—who has the courage to hope for it? Who, on the other hand, would dare to deny it on the basis of laws or theories! No eye penetrates to the bottom of the deep valley where peoples rise and descend." T In the Weimar Republic, Ricarda Huch saw no fulfillment of what she, and many, had been longing for. She must have been aware of many forces to which she was alien in spirit and which she dreaded among the conservatives as much as among the socialists and republicans; she was not friendly toward any rule of bureaucracy in alliance with industry, whether it be through the entrepreneurs or through the workers. Yet in all the errors, the suffering and hope, the whole danse macabre of the post-war years she did not fail to discern an honest will to spiritual and historic renewal. The young republic, a people s realm, could well have become the foundation of greater things. In the midst of the most violent abuses of the republican colors she has missed no opportunity to defend and exalt them. In these later years, Ricarda Huch's writings have become an integral part of the thinking and feeling of millions, of those who never surrendered after 1933. And this is highly characteristic. For once more, as so often before in the course of history, it is on the spiritual plane that we find Germany undefiled and undiluted. There the perennial idea, which has not yet incarnated itself again on the physical plane, is reality. The longing of so many Germans, to which she has given expression, endows her, because she has revived the sense for history, with a history-making power. This power she possesses more than any other living German however famous in the world of literature. Not for one moment was she, the uncrowned empress of the spiritual realm of the Germans, deceived by the national and imperial pretensions of the so-called 'Third Reich," which could properly be called neither a "Reich" nor "of the German nation." With contempt she saw through the falsity of National Socialist claims, and she knew where they would lead Germany and Europe, with their brutal power, worship of success, slavery of the mind, and apostasy from the faith. Everything a Christian German Ghibelline hates most was embodied in the civitas diaboli. Like Stefan George, she could have received all possible "honors." But, like him, she declined any collaboration with the political or cultural institutions of the new regime. At once she resigned her membership in the Academy and left Berlin. In the seclusion of Heidelberg she began, at the age of sixty-nine, her most ambitious work, a German history, of the nation as well as the idea. These works are written with the most sovereign dis7

Stein, der Erioecker

des Reichsgedankens,

p. 192.

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dain for the very existence of the dictatorship and its "views" on historic, religious, and national matters. It may suffice to mention, by way of example, that she goes out of her way to exalt the Jewish people and to praise their fortitude in braving persecution. It has proved equally impossible for National Socialism to eliminate the works of Friedrich Gundolf, although, for the reason of his "non-Aryan" descent, his books could no longer be sold or printed officially. He continued to exercise a power far greater than simple scholarly or literary influence. Until his death in 1932, Gundolf taught at the University of Heidelberg. He is unforgotten by all who ever listened to him, in the classroom, in his seminars, or on nonacademic ground. His heritage is in the loyal care of his beloved wife, Elisabeth Gundolf, now at Oxford, England, who is editing his posthumous works. In Germany, Gundolfs works saw editions reaching the hundreds of thousands, although they were written in a difficult (yet exemplary) style and certainly not in the popular vein. Naturally, Gundolf upholds the universal idea in history. He believes in the formative power of the historic forces and attributes no small role to world-historic individuals such as Caesar, the Greatest Frederick, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Napoleon, Goethe, and Shakespeare. The opening lines of his Caesar (published in 1924) may now again be in the minds of the countless Germans whose library shelves hold the works of Gundolf. "Today when the desire for the strong man has become loud, when, tired of brokers and talkers, one is content with sergeants instead of leaders, when people, particularly in Germany, show willingness to entrust the governance of the state to any self-publicized, talented specialists, be they military, economic or bureaucratic, accepting as 'statesmen' now socially-minded parsons, now anti-social generals, now giants of economics and industry, now rabid petits bourgeois, let us remind the all too rash of the great man to whom supreme power owes its name and centuries their idea— Caesar. Not that such conjuring up of the past could create another Caesar. Never does history repeat the manifestations of its eternally valid ideas, and no knowledge of what once was can create what the new necessity demands. Imitations bom of political scholarship are always false and fruitless. . . . But for the sake, not of politics but of erudition—that is to say, of human dignity and awe of the great—the eternal heroes must remain alive and protected against the dull and greedy day. The historian as the guardian of education (for this is his foremost calling) cannot make good politics nor reach the fruitful decisions as destiny unfolds hour by hour. But he can help to move the spirit whereof initiate deeds are born and gather disciples for coming heroes. In this sense, he calls up the forces of history and the living, the peoples and the leaders." 8 » Caesar; Geschichte seines Ruhms, p. 7.

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Gundolfs work on Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist ( Shakespeare and the German Spirit) has helped Germans in understanding the spirit of England. His translations of Shakespeare's works have put "the foggy islands' somber prince of spirits," as Stefan George called him," again before the German eye. His works on Goethe, George, Heinrich von Kleist, and Paracelsus are numbered among the important biographies of German literature. 10 Among his still unpublished works there is a book on Martin Luther that promises to throw new light on that disputed figure. Another work that showed significantly the reawakening of the forces of history beneath the surface of utilitarianism and party strife after the war also came from the spiritual circle of Stefan George. This was the biography of the Greatest Frederick by the historian Ernst Kantorowicz, now teaching at the University of California. 11 1 remember vividly the stir it caused in the German Youth Movement and in all the academic circles I knew when it was published in 1927. It was greeted at once as a book of timely importance. The biography presupposes knowledge of the times and the circumstances, of Emperor Frederick II himself, and of the Ghibelline philosophy of history. Kantorowicz rejected with equal force the doctrines of racism and nationalism and the Leftist intellectual hedonism of our days. In the hands of a few millions of young people, it promised to become an effective ideological bulwark against the dangers of misinterpreted and falsified history. It is unfortunate that the cool, rational Weimar Republic showed such an astounding lack of understanding of the historic ideas which, especially for youth, are the factors that integrate political life. Life does not exhaust itself in the problems of the living; it reaches beyond them into the past as much as into the future. A state that wants to be no greater than the sum total of the living is bound to fall; a generation told to hold fast only to what it has, denied the feeling of forward movement, and thwarted in its longings for reverence and sacrifice, becomes petrified. This truth the radicals of both Right and Left understood and used, hence their appeal to the young. The very concrete political and economic accomplishments of both groups (whether good or bad is not the question here) should prove that there are nonmaterial forces at work which cannot be dismissed as "vague dreams" (or whatever the current expression may be). If the non-German nations should insist upon believing that in this respect they are different, let them at least accept these as real factors to be reckoned with in Germany. • Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder von Traum und Tod mit einem Vorspiel, in Gesamt-Ausgabe der Werke; Endgültige Fassung, V, 29. 10 See Bibliography. 11 Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite ( Berlin, Georg Bondi, 1927 ) and Ergänzungsband: Quellennachweise und Exkurse (1931).

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It is obvious that minds like those of Ricarda Huch, Stefan George, and the other Christian Ghibellines of today represent important historicopolitical forces. The fact that for the time being what they stand for is in abeyance, or, rather, hidden under the surface, does not invalidate the meaning or the aim. In a country torn to its very foundations as Germany is today, there can be no greater, no more constructive and fruitful idea than the one to which the nation owes its origin, to which it gave allegiance through many centuries. That idea is still alive in the minds of countless men and in the deeds of martyrs. If so realistic a statesman as Stresemann—who was no Bible-quoting politician—could speak from the rostrum at Geneva of the "Divine Architect of the world" and the "Divine world-order," the fact merits the attention of the political historian. The picture of modern Germany would be incomplete without a mention of the reawakening of the religious forces among youth and the people as a whole. That reawakening was given providentially as a shield and a sword against the onslaught of the agnostic or pagan atavistic forces of the period in which we live. Science itself, in our century, has largely found the way back from the conceit of the time when, undeveloped and therefore arrogant, it presumed to dub the concepts of God and Creation, of Redemption and Sanctification, superfluous. Within the framework of Providential design, the reawakening of religion has also come from the impact upon the living of the deaths of so many in two wars. The walls that separate these two aspects of human existence are steadily growing thinner. Dialectically, the obvious breakdown of the world of rationalism has led many back to the foundations of the Spirit, in which alone there is life, freedom, and morality. No longer, as I found in years of intimate affiliation with German youth, is the mocking of religious truth considered a sign of enlightenment. The attacks on religion by certain Leftist elements, semieducated freethinkers, and driftwood intellectuals anxious to prove their superiority of mind and insight during the days of the republic, and the culmination of this opposition to religion in the Third Reich are producing another important result. It must be recognized that it is a misuse of the words and concepts of freedom and democratic civil liberties to put freedom of religion and of antireligious action on the same level. As far as one may try to fathom the designs of Providence working through the historic process, this much can perhaps be said: The freedom of the liberal, secularized state has destroyed itself by "freeing" itself of the only basis of freedom, namely, the concept of the inherent, absolute dignity of men who as personalities, individually redeemed, form a community of liberty, the vessel and instrument of the Holy Spirit. In other words, the sacrifices of our age, the hecatombs of hu-

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man blood will be consummated only if, by overcoming itself, the secular order gives birth in human consciousness to the Triune Image, the foundation, essence, and telos of society moving toward the individual and historic goal of mankind. Thus at the end of the third decade of our century, Germany presented a model of all the problems confronting Occidental civilization, but sharpened to the extreme. The struggle of the spirit then fought on German soil was the battle of our cycle, suffered for the whole of representative history of the world. All the things of which Germany was to become guilty were the guilt of a whole world, its expiation, now consummated, the beginning of universal expiation. Under the surface of a dull political and philosophical pragmatism, the way was being prepared for a new coming of universalism and truer democracy. Against it were unloosed all forces of evil stored up for centuries. That it supplied a needed pause in which the forces of the future could gather strength was the lasting historic meaning of the Weimar Republic, more important by far than temporary political and intellectual achievements.

36 TEN YEARS AFTER It is singularly indicative of the dissolution of a state when all things go their own way without regard for the laws. H E G E L , Die Verfassung Deutschlands. marked a turning point in contemporary history. Germany was deprived of her only statesman of vision, and at the same time occurred the economic crash in the United States, which was followed by a world crisis. The second phase of the conflict was about to begin. In the winter and spring of 1929-1930, German unemployment figures began to rise again and with them rose the specter of anarchic disintegration of society. With this the well-meaning functionaries of the republican parties proved wholly incapable of coping. In March, 1930, the last Social Democratic coalition cabinet, headed by Chancellor Hermann Müller, allowed itself to be maneuvered out of office. The resignation came out of a dispute concerning an increase in unemployment insurance which amounted to only a fraction of one percent. The reactionary and Rightist groups, after Stresemann's death were gathering around the Reich president, looking eagerly toward a time when republican government might be replaced by a system more to their liking. Carl Schmitt, later state counselor under the National Socialist government, yet undeniably a man of sharp and brilliant mind, described in theory what from that time forward was the regular practice of the declining republic, the état de siège—emergency government as the normal procedure. "The state, shaken by continuous class and group struggle, is, with regard to its constitution, in a permanent emergency, and its law is down to the last detail emergency law. He who decides on the state of emergency is lord over the state."1 This theory Carl Schmitt also expounded in his book Politische Theologie. In that work on the first page he declared, "He who has the legal power to command the emergency is the sovereign of the state." This is a piercing observation, at least if we take sovereignty as the exercise of real power without regard to its ethical determination and its origin as defined in the constitution, where sovereignty is said to reside with the people. Yet it is hard for a thing so formless as "the people"—which under the legal positivism of modern democracy is likely to be no more than unorganic masses without historic function or consciousness—to be vessel and exerciser of sovereignty. T H E MONTH OF OCTOBER, 1 9 2 9 ,

ι Diktatur; von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankeru tarischen Klassenkampf, p. 18.

bis zum prole-

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Rulership must not only be learned; it requires in the first place an inner certainty, a consciousness of one's right to direct the nation. Among the Left everywhere a disquieting lack of this stability was noticeable. The Social Democratic functionary seemed invariably to feel that something must be wrong with a state that recognized him as representative of public authority. When such men go abroad they are likely to judge foreign institutions too leniently in comparison with the German ones either because they do not understand the background of their own people or because they are not equipped to discover weakness or worth in things clothed in an outlandish guise. No wonder that the German Left, which honestly and laboriously shove for the country's good, was nevertheless open to the reproach of being "unnational." The Right was, of course, not in the least qualified to raise the reproach, because it simply identified its own class interests ( and even those misunderstood) with the "national interest." But the Right knew what it wanted, the state as instrument of its own power. If a state society, emptied of ideas, begins to disintegrate and move towards anarchy, the horror vacui of history swings the commonwealth towards order, even if this has to be paid for with the loss of freedom. Many works have been written on the role of the German army, and a sinister, determined plan for the conquest of the state is attributed to it. It has been said that the Weimar Republic never asserted its authority over the army. And it is true that the ideal of pacifism induced the Social Democrats, the largest republican party, to discourage their followers from enlisting in the Reichswehr. This initial mistake from the best of motives was later hard to redress since the Treaty of Versailles imposed a minimum period of twelve years for military service. And yet the army never had a clear political program of its own. The Revolution of 1918 was decided on the home front. The army had made no determined effort either to save the monarchy or to overthrow the new government, and the Reichswehr, with the exception of a few minor and purely local cases of disloyalty, remained a reliable instrument of the state throughout the years of the republic. Although most of its officers, particularly in the higher ranks, had grown up under the Hohenzollern empire and were inclined rather to be conservative, no serious attempt was made by them to restore the dynasty. Armies and navies, like other public institutions, will of course always try to obtain from the state as much as possible for their purpose in man power and money, but they are by nature inferior to the civil power as long as there is such a power. Even in a state of emergency accompanied by martial law, that is, the transfer of civil authority to the military, the state must remain in control. Wherever army rule becomes supreme, the indication is that the state has voluntarily abdicated; only then can a particular power such as an army or a party usurp the representation of the

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whole. Army rule as a permanent institution will inevitably lead to the destruction of the state, and thereby also the army, for the latter alone is in no way an instrument of history. The most handsome and self-assured general obeys orders when they are issued as commands by his civilian superior. It is only when a superior forgets that the uniform is the garb of a servant, not the master, or, lacking trust in the basis of his own authority, feels inferior in civilian clothes that he perversely becomes a puppet of the military, and this brings disaster to the state. As long as Stresemann was alive, the army kept its place (as it had under Bismarck's firm hand), and Hindenburg the field marshal was effaced by the president of the German republic. Without Stresemann, under the cabinets of good Hermann Müller and later of Brüning, who stood in awe of all things military and made up for it by styling himself and his supporters, such as Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, the "government of the front-line soldiers," things were different. It was then that sovereignty in the pragmatic sense, the presidential power with the whip of Article 48 and the état de siège, asserted itself, and the army, its necessary implement, gained in importance. On Dr. Heinrich Brüning, Reich Chancellor during the fateful twenty six months from March 27, 1930, to May 30, 1932, the judgment of history is not yet rendered. His failure must be attributed more to the absence of vision than to an abundance or strength of negative qualities. He was a political creation of the army—of General von Schleicher, then chief of the ministerial office in the Reichswehr ministry—and he fell when in the eyes of his discoverers he had outlived his usefulness. In Stresemann's Vermächtnis the name of the later chairman of the parliamentary group of the Center Party occurs only twice, but both times with significant connotations. Early in January, 1927, Stresemann noted in his diary that "the GermanNationals had been informed by the Centre that the Centre was in favour of an extension to the Right, if the Foreign Minister stated that he could only pursue his foreign policy in co-operation with the German-Nationals. Learned later that this suggestion came from Herr Brüning." It is important here to recall that the German Nationals had done everything they could to torpedo the Locarno Pact and League of Nations policy. The second occurrence of Briining's name is under date of January 20-21, 1937. "On January 19th, Brüning, member of the Centre Party in the Reichstag, told my colleague in the Group, Dr [Fritz] Mittelmann, that a cabinet including the Right would have been completed long ago, if Stresemann had not persistently put forward his objections in regard to foreign policy." 2 2 III, 101. The German has "dass das Kabinett mit der Rechten längst fertig wäre." Eric Sutton, in Gustav Stresemann, His Diaries, Letters, and Papers, III, 109, translates this erroneously, "that the Cabinet would have long since broken off relations with the Right," thus reversing the meaning of the passage. The earlier quotation is to be found on p. 92; English, p. 98.

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The most valuable information on Brünings personality, character, motives, and secret policy, apart from the public records, we owe to John W. Wheeler-Bennett's book Wooden Titan; Hindenburg in Twenty Years of German History, 1914-1934.3 The author, for many years an intimate friend of Brüning, tells the story of the next to the last act of the republican drama entirely from the latter's point of view. Brüning must be given credit for having helped effectively in organizing the passive resistance in the Ruhr war. In 1924 he was elected to the Reichstag and, in the words of Wheeler-Bennett, "soon came under Schleicher's notice, and his relations with the Reichswehr . . . grew rapidly cordial. His personal efforts, both with the Reichstag and the army, facilitated the passage of the military budget of 1928-29, and when in December 1929 he became leader of the parliamentary group of the Centre Party, Schleicher hesitated no longer." 4 Hindenburg was not enthusiastic about the soft-spoken candidate for the chancellor's office, but the combined efforts of Schleicher, Oskar von Hindenburg, the president's son, General Groener, and the perennial secretary of state, Otto Meissner, who was servant of all regimes, succeeded in overcoming his initial aversion. Among the first measures of the Brüning cabinet were the putting in force of the budget by decree-law on the basis of Article 48 and the dissolution of the Reichstag on July 16.' The new government apparently did not consider the fact that the existing Reichstag had a perfectly workable republican majority to support a republican and social course. The parties of the "great coalition" from the Social Democrats to Stresemann's German People's Party controlled 283 seats, or a hundred more than the entire opposition of Communists, German Nationals, National Socialists, and some split groups. From this foolish, politically fatal dissolution at a time when the economic world crisis was still at its height dates the decline of parliamentarianism and the rule by decree-law that undermined the republic. Finally Hitler could tread the path hewn by his predecessors. Four days before that dissolution of parliament, on July 12, when the threat of that act and its inevitable consequences were already before my mind, I wrote in the Vossische Zeitung that a grave disturbance of the European community of peoples was sure to follow should the National Socialists rise to power, if nothing else, their utter lack of understanding of others' psychology, their political clumsiness, and their insolent disdain for the lessons of history would make them blunder into every pitfall of a grown-up world. It can soberly be argued that, had not the National Socialists received the « New York, William Morrow & Company, 1935. * Page 339. «"A conflict with the Social Democrats irresponsibly driven to a head," Friedrich Stampfer writes, "the exclusion of the Reichstag, and quite superfluous elections in a time of trying economic and political turmoil—this was the balance sheet of the first months of the Brüning government." Die vierzehn Jahre der ersten Deutschen Republik, p. 527.

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tremendous encouragement of their election victory on September 14, 1930, which they owed to the conditions of economic crisis, the danger might have been over by 1932. Instead they were able to cash in on the misery and despair and to whip resentments and passions to such a pitch that National Socialist representation jumped from 12 to 107 deputies. For the shifting masses of unemployed, the proletarianized middle classes, the financial backers of the movement, and all the heterogeneous elements affiliated with it, this event became the signal for making a serious bid for power. Nor did the leadership of the German Communist Party show distinction or talent or independent judgment. The party followed blindly the rules laid down by the Third International as revealed to that institution by the spirit of "dialectical reasoning." According to it, the main enemy was not National Socialism—for it would prepare the ground for Soviet Germany—but the Weimar Republic and Social Democracy, the "social traitors" who kept the working class from being united. To understand the party terminology correctly it is important to remember that it assumes a triple identity: the people is identical with the class possessing the historic mandate to represent the whole, the working class; this class (at least in its interests) is, in turn, identified with its representative section, the Communist party; thus, through a simple syllogism, the Communist party becomes identical with the people. Despite much bloody street fighting between their adherents, the Communist and National Socialist parties worked closely together toward their common aim of destroying the Weimar Republic. This became manifest to the world at large when, on August 9, 1931, both parties, together with the German Nationals, joined in a plebiscite aimed at overthrowing the Prussian Social Democratic-Centrist-Democratic coalition government. The plebiscite failed because actually a large section of the Communists themselves could not agree to the argument that National Socialism must come to power so that a Soviet Germany might rise. For it was entirely obvious that the democratic Prussian government would be succeeded not by a Communistic, but a National Socialistic, one. And with Prussia, the bulwark of the republic, and its excellent police force of a hundred thousand men at the disposal of the Rightist radicals, the conquest of the rest of Germany could easily be undertaken. In December, 1931, at a meeting of the Third International in Moscow, Dimitri Manuilski, referee for German affairs, laid down the line for the German Communist party: it was, according to the reports, to work together with all enemies of the Weimar Republic.· In all strikes and movements aiming at undermining the trade unions and the Republican parties, in all parliamentary debates and decisions, this line was from then on faithfully followed. I remember discussions with intellectual Communists in 1930, in which they argued that between Weimar, "capitalistic democracy," and National β Villard, The German Phoenix; the Story of the Republic, pp. 155 sq.

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Socialism, "capitalistic dictatorship," the difference was only in degree, not in essence. Both were class dictatorships. Hence, of the two, National Socialism was to be preferred because as the last line of capitalism's defense it would mean the end of all the deceiving sham liberties of democracy; beyond this line no further retreat was possible. Moreover, National Socialism would necessarily lead to the complete destruction of the trade unions and all workers' organizations pledged to democracy, and it would accelerate the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few. The expropriation of the expropriators could thereafter take place all the more easily. From the strictest Marxian viewpoint, there is, of course, logic in these arguments; for a creed of earthly salvation, the number of victims, curiously enough, is unimportant. All that matters is the ultimate deliverance from subjection under the power of men, long, hard, and bloody as the road may be. To humanitarian objections to helping fascist terror into the saddle, only to overthrow it later and replace it by a merciless concentration of power in the hands of the proletariat the answer was, Is it not hypocritical to play up humanitarian arguments when the whole liberal-capitalistic order is built on blood and exploitation, on colonial wars and the slave service of the vast masses of the peoples, civilized and primitive alike? 7 The dialectical reasoning that the capitalistic state prepares the way for the proletarian one and ultimately for the classless society is, indeed, the very basis of Marxian philosophy of society. What the functions are which (according to such social dialectics ) the capitalistic state fulfills, has been summarized in Friedrich Engels's dramatic language: "Go on struggling, my gracious lords of capital! For the time being, we still have need of you; here and there, we even need your domination. It is your task to clear away for us the remnants of the Middle Ages and of absolute monarchy. You have to destroy paternalism, you have to centralize, you must transform for us the more or less propertyless classes into genuine proletarians and recruits for us [the revolution]. It is you, with your factories and your trade relations, who must provide the foundations, the material means, which the proletariat needs for liberation. As reward for all this you may still rule for a little while. Go on dictating laws and sun yourself in the glory of your self-created majesty, banquet in the royal hall and wed the king's daughter. But do not forget—'The executioner is standing at the door.' " 8 7 "The Rights of Man," Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote with bitter contempt, "did not give to men freedom from religion but merely religious freedom; they did not make men free from property but gave them freedom of property; they did not deliver men from the filth of enterprise but rather gave them freedom of enterprise. The recognition of the Rights of Man by the modern state has, therefore, no meaning other than the recognition of slavery by the state of antiquity." Die heilige Familie; oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik, gegen Bruno Bauer und Konsorten (1845), in Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, III, 287-88. 8 "Die Bewegung von 1847," in Deutsch-Brüsseler Zeitung, January 23, 1848, Vol. II, No. 7, pp. 1-2; Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, VI, 397-98.

TEN YEARS AFTER

469 Today it is established that the definition of Fascism and National Socialism as the last bulwark of capitalism is entirely too narrow. But it is true that a blind, profiteering, unhistoric ruling caste of industrialists and moneychangers backed these movements, from which they expected the elimination of the "red menace," thereby evoking the very thing they were fighting against. And this, as the years of appeasement proved, was true not only in Germany but the world over. Thus the modern ruling class (an amorphic class without tradition, without historic or religious foundations, a class both deeply antinational and antiuniversal) has helped to unchain the most irresponsible, unfettered, and destructive nationalism, which has to a great extent broken down the solidarity of capitalism; but it has also helped to call forth a strong reaction of internationalism. In fact the Communist bogey, against which fascism was called into existence, has today become a powerful reality, much more powerful and menacing than in 1918. And it is the greatest irony of fate—more than Marx and Engels could have imagined in their most daring dreams—that democratic society, so deathly afraid of Communism when Π was weak, is today, when it is strong, its ally. Once more a policy of appeasement is being tried, like that towards fascism—with the difference that this time there will be no one but themselves to stand up against the consequences of appeasement. Again they wed the king's daughter and forget what Marx and Engels were shouting to them from the housetops: that the executioner is standing at the door. The unimaginative Brüning government did little to meet the growing crisis of the state. The twenty-six months during which my own political activity as a republican and youth leader took place were marked by ever darker shadows, and by an ever deepening hopelessness among millions. The republic seemed a gray administrative affair, without initiative, enthusiasm, or aim, a machine manufacturing decree-laws in an empty space while taxes rose and hope sank. And the government became so timid that it was almost afraid to show its own colors or to mention its own name or existence! Of Ghibelline spirit that government possessed nothing. Otherwise, it would have been strong in its foreign policy without being warlike, rather than submitting more and more to Reichswehr influences and thus losing the respect of the military altogether. It would have disbanded all the private armies, whose very existence was incompatible with the dignity of the state. It would have exercised stringent control over industry and finance and put through a large-scale land reform. It would have negotiated a concordat with the Holv See and through this medium established intimate contact with the Latin world. In Geneva, it would have driven forward the Stresemann-Briand plan for a European commonwealth. It would have radically purged the administration and judiciary of all antirepublican elements. It will not do to answer that the president would not have stood for some of these measures. In 1930 and 1931 the president did not have the power

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to prevent them. It was only later that his power, played up by the government against the people, became so great that he could oust or appoint any government with no regard for the wishes of the people. It is not true that the political forces in Germany had become too sterile and party lines too rigid to permit a creative policy. Party lines become rigid when there are no statesmanlike ideas left to break them; to any genuine program men flock from all camps regardless of party. Bismarck, the "iron chancellor," was ingenious and flexible in seeking and finding support from all parties; he never kept his eyes fixed on just one group. Brüning, the "castiron chancellor," as he was sarcastically called, could only look up—to the president—or sidewise, to the Right. Paradoxically enough, it was rather the Left that made his government possible because he was considered at least a republican and the "lesser evil." A strong and truly determined republican government would have enjoyed not just the toleration but the enthusiastic support of millions. This I know because at the time I was in close touch with the people in almost every province of Germany. And despite their political apathy, the Social Democrats too could have formed an important force of state integration had not the Brüning government ground them down by the antisocial measures which they accepted meekly out of fear lest Hitlerism (Brünings constant whip) should come to power. There also was the state of Prussia with its thoroughly republican government and its excellent republican police force, the sharpest sword of democracy; there was the Prussian state spirit, clean, sober, and conscious of the need for lawful administration, pervaded by a Frederician, a Kantian, sense of duty. Through an interesting process of dialectics, the ancient Hohenzollern kingdom had indeed developed into a people's state. Il y a des juges à Berlin. In sacrifice and service, Prussia stood as the pillar of German democracy. By calling Prussian administration clean I do not suggest that the republican administration was riddled with corruption. It was not, despite the Osthäfeskanclal (Eastern Aid scandal), whereby millions of Marks destined for farm relief were misappropriated by Right wing provincial politicians and certain sections of the Junker class. I still think that a clear demonstration of the absence of corruption in the much-abused Weimar Republic was offered when the mere fact that the wife of the mayor of Berlin had bought a fur coat at a wholesale price sufficed to arouse a nation-wide scandal. Prussia was clean in another metaphorical sense too. The foggy outpourings of the National Socialist propaganda left the fclear-headed Northerners unmoved at a time when (I, as a Bavarian, must regretfully admit) it had already affected many in German Austria and the German South. Berlin was never won over by the Hitler creed; it had to be beaten into submission

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after 1933. It is well known, too, that the ancient Hanse cities, particularly Hamburg, never turned National Socialist. In Prussia, the genius rei publicae also influenced the Center party. Its coalition with the Social Democrats was firm and loyal. This coalition government was in itself a proof of the excellent structure and the Steinean heritage of a state that could be taken over and administered flawlessly by the two parties that had formerly been its principal enemies. The attitude of the Prussian section of the Center party was all the more remarkable since in the Reich the party under Brüning shifted more and more towards authoritarianism and after 1931 was engaged in secret negotiations with the National Socialists. In overcoming all its particularistic dynasties, the new Germany had come close to the democratic ideal of 1848, Greater Germany, an embracing state variegated in culture yet united in historic purpose, a mirror of the wider European community. Without German Austria, however, the gap between idea and performance was too great. Both German republics suffered from the unnatural separation. It is quite understandable, therefore, that National Socialism, pseudo nationalism, and pseudo universalism increased so strongly in Austria. The Anschluss (reunion) of Austria and Germany would have deprived the Austrian National Socialists of their principal argument, and, at the same time, would have made the Catholic and social forces of the country fruitful not only for Germany but through it also for Europe. Stresemann had been well aware of the importance of this problem, which has nothing to do with so-called Pan-Germanism.» On August 27, 1928, the day when the Pact of Paris was signed at the Quai d'Orsay, he had a long and frank discussion of the matter with Poincaré. There was no immediate urgency about the problem of the Anschluss then, he stated, but he left no doubt that it would have to be solved eventually. "We are more Americanized than any other nation in Europe," he told Poincaré. "We work too hard. As a nation we have become infected by the speed and unrest of the great cities. Our Press reproduces sensations that crowd the most multifarious impressions on the reader's mind, and show him the picture that is first and foremost presented to the nations of the world by America. But within us lives the unconscious thought that in this modern life we have lost something of our soul. Vienna and Austria stand before our eyes as a country • The term, "Pan-Germanism," is used today with the same reckless lack of discrimination that the fascist propagandists are wont to display in using "Communism" for everything not of their color ana that the Communists show in employing the term "Fascism" in order to denounce every non-Communist as an enemy of liberty. The All-Deutschen (PanGermans) of the time before the First World War were a small group of jingoes and expansionists, very vociferous but wholly unrepresentative. To call "Pan-Germans" all those who today uphold the right of the self-determination of peoples or oppose the dismemberment of Germany in violation of this right is a clear misuse of words which gambles on general ignorance about historic facts in order to deceive the public.

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where another life than ours is lived, one that was, in past days at least, quieter and more contemplative. From that city and that land we hear echoes of the names of Mozart and Schubert. Life was there lighter and more gracious. Literature and the theatre there stood for more than a boxing contest." In the people of Austria, he explained, who consist of men and women of our blood, we seek our own lost soul; we are looking for the complement to our own sentiments. "That was so in former days, even after Bismarck's settlement on particularist lines. After all, we have lived under one Empire for centuries, and our sense of this will remain for the future." 10 In March, 1931, the Brüning government, represented by its foreign minister, Dr. Ernst Curtius, negotiated with the Austrian vice-chancellor, Johann Schober, a customs union. This was to lead to a full economic union and eventually, by peaceful and voluntary agreement, to Anschluss on the basis of national self-determination. The initiative had been Austrian, Schobcr having invited Curtius to come to Vienna for discussion of the project. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler later learned the inside story of this ill-fated undertaking directly from Vice-Chancellor Schober. It seems that in Vienna it was agreed that the project should remain secret until the German and Austrian statesmen met the representatives of the great powers at Geneva in May. With this understanding Curtius returned to Berlin. But "no sooner had he communicated to his staff what arrangements he had made with Vice-Chancellor Schober than the staff flew into a rage and insisted that Germany was an independent nation and would not keep silent about anything which it had done or intended to do. Therefore, a few days later, and despite the arrangement which Doctor Curtius and the Vice-Chancellor had together made, the general fact of the Anschluss and its underlying principles were given to the public from Berlin. At once Arthur Henderson in London, Briand in Paris and Grandi in Rome served notice that the Anschluss would not b e permitted. Sixty days later when Curtius and Schober met these same gentlemen at Geneva, and Schober explained to them what he had intended to do by way of getting their approval of the Anschluss before it was publicly announced, they all three told him that had this course been followed the Anschluss would have been approved by them. . . . Once again, human vanity and human stubbornness were insisting upon preventing human prosperity and human happiness." 1 1 In September of that year the World Court, in an eight-to-seven decision declared that a customs union with Germany would be contrary to Austria's engagements under the Geneva Protocol of October, 1922 (signed on the occasion of granting the country a League of Nations loan ). In Germany, this debacle did much to undermine republican prestige still further, and that io Vermächtniss, III, 3Θ0; English, III, 386, 387. »ι Across the Busy Years; Recollections and Reflections, II, 192-93.

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in a year when economic and social conditions were at a particularly low level. It is strange that all the failures of the republic (or rather of those who passed for republicans ) should have weighed so heavily in the scales of politics, while its great and obvious achievements went without credit as though they were simply to be taken for granted. For this the republic itself, in Prussia as much as elsewhere, bears a good deal of the tragic guilt. Not only was it sadly lacking in the art of propaganda; it did not even try to emphasize or to celebrate its own successes. In a way one may say that the Weimar Republic suffered from too much Kantianism. Its soberness and self-criticism and a Kantian sense of duty—the categoric imperative applied to political and social undertakings—were developed to the extreme, while matter of factness and a certain lack of warmth almost discouraged popular enthusiasm for the state. The republic had raised Germany from chaos and had saved national unity; it had rehabilitated the standing of the country abroad; and under its progressive legislation came forth social, democratic, and intellectual achievements of international importance. Meritorious or remarkable? No, just the fulfillment of duty, and therefore nothing that deserved particular praise or commendation. One did not even mention the matter; deeds and facts were supposed to speak for themselves. Unfortunately, in political life they are not always heard when they do speak unless it is with a loud voice and a fanfare of trumpets. The Weimar Republic was of all states the least publicized, its government, I should say, was the least well known, even among its own people. It failed to dramatize its great historic symbols and its Constitution Day, August 11; it failed to develop a republican ritual such as France and the United States possess. "Republican" was just a label for the administration, while to the people who were, I repeat, eager to fight (and, if need be, to die) for the republic it might have been much more—the expression of the essence and creed of that historic epoch of Germany, once more a European nation. More Hegelian state and history consciousness might have saved the republic from petrification. For the deepest, most deadly blow striking at the nature of the state itself was its deterioration into a bureaucratic concern— whether of the workers or of the upper class matters little—and the failure of the republicans to awaken understanding of the historic process of which Weimar formed an interdependent link. But what understanding of the republican phase of the German spirit within a European republic of nations could one expect of the minor servants of the state when its highest official, the Reich chancellor, could conceive of only one salvation, restoration of the Hohenzollem monarchy? These plans, promoted in utter secrecy, did not become public knowledge until after the fall of the republic, when Dr. Brüning himself revealed them in his lectures at Oxford and through his biographer, Wheeler-Bennett. Since Reich

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President von Hindenburg, General Kurt von Schleicher, the Right-wing parliamentarians, and also Hitler, Captain Röhm, and other National Socialist leaders were taken into the plan, it is hardly surprising that their belief in the chancellor's republican determination was not unshakable. From the constitutional and moral point of view it is difficult to find the right expression to describe this undertaking. From a practical standpoint, it must be called a fool's comedy. The German observer cannot but register his dismay that the government of the German state was placed in such hands. According to the Wheeler-Bennett account (and there seems no reason to doubt it), some time in 1931 the chancellor became convinced that only a restoration of the monarchy could prevent Hitler from ultimately attaining power. 1 ' He gained the support of influential members of parliament and, according to the same source, of some of the leaders of the Left, who were "reluctantly agreeable." Personally, I can think of no one among the labor leaders who would have acquiesced in such a scheme. The first step was to assure Hindenburg's reelection by a constitutional amendment to the effect that the Reichstag, instead of the people, should elect the president. With the republican parties Brüning did not need to negotiate because they were already in favor of reëlecting Hindenburg, whose loyalty to the constitution they trusted; he had kept them in complete darkness as to his ulterior motives. However, in order to assure a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag, the support of the German Nationals and the National Socialists was needed. Therefore, although the move was to inflict "an initial defeat on the Nazi Party," Brüning in January, 1932, met with Schleicher, Hitler, and Emst Röhm in secret conference, and "in this unsavoury company Brüning appealed for the support of the Nazi Party." The lack of logic or plausibility is disarming. Since it cannot be imagined that the National Socialists would agree to this plan for their own defeat, one may assume that the chancellor held out promises to them that would make this strange crowning of a king palatable. The second step would have consisted in proclaiming the reëlected Hindenburg "Regent" for his lifetime, "at the end of which one of the sons of the Crown Prince should succeed to the throne"—again, of course, by way of a "constitutional amendment," requiring a two-thirds majority. But the Social Democrats would absolutely have refused to vote for it. So would the Communists, the Democrats, and the left wing of the Center connected with the Christian trade unions. Therefore, even if the deal had come off satisfactorily, there would have remained only the National Socialists, together with the German Nationals and some minor Rightist groups, to vote for the monarchical coup. But would they have voted for it, if it was to keep them out " T h e story and the phrases quoted are from Wooden Titan; Hindenburg in Twenty Years of German History, 1914-1934, pp. 352-67.

TEN YEARS AFTER 475 of power? And since in any case the Right was far from a two-thirds majority, how much trust can we put into assurances that the change was to be effected by "legal means"? Let us assume that the National Socialists had found the quid pro quo satisfactory. What then would have been the results? A puppet emperor imposed by the army and the Rightists, a German monarchy against the people, a shameful travesty of the historic Kaisertum. And this emperor, of course, would have been dependent on the Nazis from the beginning and would soon have had but one chancellor and one governmental party—Hitler and the National Socialists. It would seem that Dr. Brüning had never given thought to the example of the Italian monarchy, which, even though inherited and established, did not prevent Mussolini from seizing power or restrain the use of it once it was in Fascist hands. Brüning still seems to assume that the ingenious plan failed merely because Hindenburg refused his consent to the intended parliamentary form of monarchy after the English pattern. Hindenburg, Wheeler-Bennett writes, "would be no party to such an emasculation of the royal prerogative. . . . The monarchy which he would wish to see re-established in Germany was not indeed that of 1870, but a complete reversion to the warrior state of Prussia as it existed before 1848." There is a certain piquancy in the thought that the president of the republic would either betray three constitutions (those of 1919, 1871, and 1850) or none at all, and that for this reason the republic was for the time being saved. But much as it may appeal to our sense of historic scurrility, this version does not sound too convincing. Hindenburg was bora in 1847 and therefore was three years old when the liberalizing Prussian Constitution of 1850 was inaugurated. His entire military career came within the lifetime of the Bismarckian Constitution of 1871. As a young lieutenant, he had been present in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles when the constitutional empire was proclaimed. What probability is there that he would demand the return of the so-called "warrior state" of the time before 1848, when he had seen Germany under three emperors, all ruling through the Constitution of 1871, achieve world prominence and he himself had risen to the rank of field marshal and had all other possible honors bestowed upon him? It would seem more probable that the whole plan was contrary to his common sense and his good taste. The reelection of Hindenburg with the votes of his opponents of 1925 entailed the popular mandate to remain loyal to the constitution and keep Hitler out of power. He received nineteen million votes, compared to Hitler s thirteen million; Thälmann scored three million, seven hundred thousand. Seven weeks later, the Brüning cabinet was dismissed from office. It had given itself so completely into the hands of the president and had so thor-

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oughly disdained the support of the people that its only popular plan, namely, to deal with the Osthilfeskandal and break up some of the bankrupt Junker estates could not be carried out against presidential disfavor. There was a spark of Stein's ideas in Brünings agrarian policy. Those who set out to persuade the president to dismiss the chancellor for what they called his "agrarian bolshevism" were the descendants of the same group that had brought about the fall of the "Jacobin" Stein. But as the Brüning government itself had treated the Reichstag en canaille and had made presidential decrees the main fountainhead of legislation, the reactionaries could well assume that no attention whatever need be given to parliament. A purely presidential cabinet would do. The power of Article 48 was now fully tested, and against a lame Reichstag and a divided people the army became the best instrument for exercising practical sovereignty in the sense meant by Carl Schmitt. The new chancellor, Franz von Papen, had scarcely ten percent of the Reichstag to support his cabinet. A state crisis was approaching, for according to the constitution no government could rule without a parliamentary majority.13 On June 4 the Reichstag was dissolved, with new elections to be held on July 31, the very last Sunday within the sixty-day limit set by the constitution.14 On June 16, the Nazi organizations, the Sturmabteilungen (SA) and the Schutzstaffeln (SS) and their subdivisions were again legalized. Their reinstatement, however, did not make very much difference, because the Brüning ban on these organizations, imposed on April 13, had never been very seriously enforced. The National Socialists, to "comply" with the order, simply made minor alterations in their attire, dropping some of the party badges and emblems. Their press had even gone on, without let or hindrance, publishing organizational news; the one concession was a single word in reference to "The Former SS Man" or "The Former SA Man." 1» Article 54.

14

Article 25, § 2.

37 NOR BY THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE The National Socialists imagine that they are able to get along without and against the world and that they can build their air castles without a counteraction from without—a silent one, perhaps, but very effective. OSWALD SPENGLER, Jahre der Entscheidung. ON JULY 20,1932, Chancellor Franz von Papen ousted the legitimate Prussian government from office by presidential decree and had himself appointed Reich commissar for Prussia.1 The action was illegal, in fact treasonable, for even the far-reaching powers entrusted to the Reich president by Article 48 of the constitution in cases of emergency did not include the right to depose state ministers; he could only take over certain of their functions and administer them either directly or by a representative. So the German Supreme Court for Constitutional Conflicts expressly ruled in its decision of October 25, 1932, after suit had been brought by the State of Prussia, the Prussian prime minister and state ministers, and the Center and the Social Democratic party in the Prussian Diet, as well as the states of Bavaria and Baden. However, by the time the Supreme Court had rendered its decision the coup of July 20 had already affected the whole administration of the largest federal state; down to the regional and local communities republican officials were replaced by reactionary antirepublicans, and the police force of the state, the best executive force of the republic, fell under the command of its enemies. The change also upset completely the balance of power in the Reich administration. The Papen commissariai government of Prussia replaced the Prussian delegates at the Reichsrat by its own appointees. Thereby one of the main guarantees against centralized and arbitrary government was overthrown. The Supreme Court singled out these measures as violating Articles 17 and 63 of the Weimar Constitution, which provided that every German Land must have a representative, responsible, republican government, and that their influence on the legislation and administration of the Reich was to be safeguarded through the Reichsrat.2 Americans may best visualize the importance of July 20 if they imagine a comparative act in this country, with a treacherous federal government taking over direct power in two thirds of the territory of the United States, ι Reichsgesetzblatt, 1932, Part I, No. 48, p. 377. 2 Staatsgerichtshof für das Deutsche Reich, Reichsgericht, Entscheidungen in Zivilsachen, CXXXVIII, I e sqq., 39* sqq. The most comprehensive and thorough presentation of the court action is contained in Preussen contra Reich vor dem Staatsgerichtshof; Stenogrammbericht der Verhandlungen (Berlin, J. H. W. Dietz, 1933), with an introduction by Amold Brecht.

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replacing state legislatures and officials by its own appointees, and nominating two fifths of the members of the Senate. I was convinced at the time and still maintain that the only possible course on the part of the Prussian ministers would have been determined resistance.' There was an excellent chance that they would have been successful in saving the republic, for they would have had the support of the trade unions, the workers, the Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold (a semimilitary defense league of republicans of all parties), the Prussian police force, and, last but not least, the governments of the other German states such as Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, and Hesse. These state governments, with whom I negotiated as delegate of the legitimate Prussian government, were all the more willing to cooperate because they knew perfectly well that should Franz von Papen's coup succeed in Prussia they would be next on the list.4 The minister of state of Hesse, Wilhelm Leuschner, went so far as to invite the Prussian ministers to his own capital, Darmstadt, should they find it necessary to move there from Berlin as a government in exile.* They would have been under the protection of the loyally republican Hesse state police, and as Darmstadt was within the demilitarized zone, which Hindenburg at that time could not dare to violate, they would have been outside the reach of his only executive force, the Reichswehr. But the Prussian government, instead of taking bold action, preferred rather to rely on the elections of the Reichstag to be held on July 31. On that day, they argued, the republican parties would win a victory over the Papen cabinet, and a bloodless one at tìiat. There was something touching, a reassuring trace of humanitarianism in the midst of evil politics, shown by so ' T h e case of the constitutional conflict between Prussia and Chancellor Franz von Papen has been restated recently by Arnold Brecht in his excellent book, Prelude to Silence; the End of the German Republic, written from the viewpoint of a high civil servant in the Prussian administration. Yet Brecht's arguments to prove that the Prussian government could take no action in defense of its rights other than to wait for the decision of the Supreme Court and the Reichstag elections are those advanced by the members of the government at the time of the event. I did not find them convincing then, and I must consider them less convincing today when the outcome has proved what at that time could only be asserted: that inaction would simply result in the defeat of the Prussian government without even an attempt at resistance. Such an attempt might, indeed, have caused bloodshed, but it might also have saved the republic—an end worth the price. 4 For a detailed account of these events, see Loewenstein, The Tragedy of a Nation; Germany, 1918-1934, Chapter VII: "The Battle of the Mame of the Weimar Republic: the 20th of July, 1932," np. 167 saq. •The name of Wilhelm Leuschner, who, as may be revealed today, was one of the most prominent leaders of the German underground movement against National Socialism for more than eleven years, has once more become famous—now to be remembered forever. He was the Social Democratic member in the anti-National Socialist government which on July 20, 1944 ( as chance would have it, exactly twelve years after the Papen Putsch), struck against Hitler. For reasons which necessarily are still in large part obscure the long and carefully planned attempt failed, and Wilhelm Leuschner, together with many other leaders of the democratic German opposition, died a hero's death at the hands of National Socialist executioners.

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great a faith in legal paragraphs and in fair play on the part of an opponent. Though the republic had received a blow from which, as time proved, it was not to recover, I still would not call January 30,1933, an historic necessity. In the preceding months there still were opportunities that might have been used to remedy the situation and avert the worst. But it seems that, once a state or a system is so severely battered, history finds it difficult or inopportune to draw men back from the path on which they have entered. The summer of 1932 was marked by National Socialist banditry in the country, "punitive actions" against labor unions and meetings, against youth groups and individual opponents. Unemployment was still at a peak. The number of those officially registered as wholly unemployed was 6,750,000, which means 34 percent of the nonagricultural population. (The corresponding figure in Great Britain was 16.8 percent.) In reality, the figures were even higher. "The world-wide depression," H. N. Brailsford summarizes in his excellent book Our Settlement with Germany, the best work on the subject that has come out of England recently, "hit Germany, a country with no reserves of economic strength, with a fury that had no parallel elsewhere. Industrial production, measured against the level of 1929 (100 per cent.), fell in Britain to 83.5 per cent., in Germany to 53.3 per cent. . . . But such figures fail to measure the catastrophe. Most of those who remained in work were on part-time, and their wages were also cut, as were salaries and benefits. During the winter of 1932 less than a quarter of the membership of the labor unions was fully employed, while wages had been cut by two-fifths, measured against the level of 1929. The fall of agricultural prices struck down the peasants, while the plight of the shopkeeper reflected the general ruin." · And because many of the unemployed had been without work ever since they left school, there were millions who never went through the political training of the trade unions or other republican organizations. Things ahead of them looked gray—a future without a chance to work, a life dependent on unemployment insurance and charity. No wonder that a mass psychosis swept over them, for it seemed as if the ghastly years of post-war misery and inflation were to repeat the old pattern. It is in times like these that shady prophets and propagandists of all sorts find the soil most fertile for their gospels.' National Socialism combined many features which made it acceptable as a doctrine of salvation to those in distress—the unemployed, the struggling middle classes ruined by the inflation, the sttidentes rerum novarum who for whatever reason coveted everything new: it was soothsaying, fortune-telling, political spiritualism, « Page 25. ι "There were clairvoyants, graphologists, mediums, spiritualists, fortune-tellers, parapsychologists and horoscope experts in masses," Rudolf Olden writes. "No fewer than three thousand men and women were counted in Berlin who earned their livelihood by these arts. How many must there have been who were not counted!" Hitler, p. 238; English translation by Walter Ettinghausen, Hitler, p. 245.

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which evoked the ghosts of "blood and race," a doctrine of social revolution, and nationalistic resentment. If the Germans as a nation, as the National Socialists preached, were an oppressed class—the Marxian idea translated into terms of foreign politics—what did it matter that the financiers of the party possessed millions while the little men voting for it starved! Such inequalities were then of no greater importance than the difference between the wage of the youngest laborer and that of a skilled foreman or highly paid party boss within the proletarian class struggle, for they are "proletarians all." National Socialism, in the final analysis, lacked originality. It was a product of decay, the ultimate outcome of the moral pragmatism and social decomposition of our time, with no genuine philosophy of its own except categoriccynicism. It threw overboard all tradition, without putting anything new in its place. Since, therefore, the movement was entirely without creative content, much that was written about National Socialism in recent years seems completely beside the point. Many of the details given by these analyses of the social, economic, and international aspects and of the psychology of the leaders are true. Yet the fundamental meaning is not to be found in them. One of the favorite trite interpretations of National Socialism, for example, is at the same time the most superficial, in fact inane, of all, namely, that National Socialism is the final expression of "Prusso-German statism." Let it be repeated, therefore, that National Socialism, like most of its high-ranking leaders, was fundamentally un-Prussian; it was indeed the very negation of the categoric imperative and was astatal in the extreme. Its principle was the subjection of the existing state under a particularistic force not bound by history and impartial duty. It was, therefore, anarchy—the state's and history's worst enemy—in the guise of a state, which survived not through but in spite of National Socialism. Bismarck would have called it mob rule, and he would not have hesitated for a moment to dispel this public menace ruthlessly, if need be with the help of the proverbial ultima ratio of the Prussian state. In the elections to the Reichstag of July 31,1932, the Social Democrats saw their hopes dashed; they lost seats, while the National Socialists increased theirs to 230 and the Communists theirs to 89. The Papen coalition held 42 seats out of 5121 No workable parliamentary coalition could be formed because the Communists had long been working hand in glove with the National Socialists to obstruct any democratic government; together they had a negative majority in the Reichstag. The result was that the Papen cabinet, supported only by the authority of the president, could remain in office and rule by presidential decree. Still it seemed in the autumn of that year that things were beginning to change. The Reichstag had been dissolved as soon as it had assembled, and in the new elections of November 6 the National Socialists lost 2,300,000 votes and 35 seats. In important state and municipal elections, there was a

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further, steady decline of their votes to about twenty percent under the level of November 6. The party, which had never had an absolute majority anywhere, was clearly receding.· A party aiming at the whole, unrestricted fullness of power can not afford defeats; in this it is like the totalitarian state itself. As soon as success is lacking, the fantastic diversity of political and social interests agglomerated in such a party becomes the source of disintegration. A common National Socialist program had never existed; the intentional vagueness of purpose allowed each group to think that all its own aims would be fullfilled, though they might be directly opposed to the aspirations of other groups within the party. Within this agglomeration the same process of rationalization, individual interpretation, and willful or unconscious self-delusion took place on a gigantic scale as among its German and non-German critics. Each of them advanced an all-explanatory formula of his own. From the completely unscrupulous industrialists, the Junkers, and the cynical conservatives of the type of Hermann Rauschning who did not subscribe in the least to the Nazi "world view" but hoped to use it for political and economic reactions, down to the honest, misled young idealists and certain middle class and proletarian elements, there were innumerable shades, tones, and tints of belief and motive. The idealistic type, by no means rare or insignificant, is perhaps the most interesting and the most tragic victim. It was precisely because of these idealists, particularly among the youngest voters and youngsters in their teens, who were beginning to awake to the terrific fraud of the Nazi leaders, that the situation in the winter of 1932 looked more favorable.9 At the same time, huge masses of uprooted, hopeless people, desperadoes because of misery, without religious, historic, national, or social ties became hesitant. If they could have been weaned altogether from the Nazi counsels of despair and reintegrated into society, the danger might have been averted. This end could have been gained only through large-scale social legislation and land reform, a work program that would have providéd employment and some modest property for the many. To win the middle classes back to support of the state the state itself had to be reintegrated, it had to be re8 "Every new report [on election results] announces a new defeat," Joseph Coebbels wrote in his diary on November β, 1932. And on November 7, "The Berlin office [of the National Socialist Party] is in a very depressed mood—many of our voters are desperate." November 10: "The originally high spirits within the party have given way to discouragement. Everywhere there are only fights, trouble, and irritation." Vom Kakerhof zur Reichskanzlei; eine historische Darstellung in Tagebuchblättern, pp. 197 sqq. 0 To quote the diary of Joseph Goebbels again. The entry for December β, 1932: "The situation [of the National Socialist party] in Germany is catastrophic. In Thuringia we have lost forty percent since July 31." And on December 8: "People in our organization are deeply depressed. Financial worries make any determined work impossible. . . . The danger now exists that the whole party may go to pieces and all our work be in vain." Ibid., pp. 218 sqq.

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established to be, in the words of Pope Pius XI, "ruling in kingly fashion far above all party contention, intent only upon justice and the common good." 10 To undertake this gigantic program at a time when the foundations of society had become shaky was the task of General Kurt von Schleicher, the last Republican chancellor. He took office on December 2, 1932, after Papen had been ousted on November 17. Schleicher, who when he was in the ministerial office in the Reichswehr ministry had been responsible for many political intrigues, who had created and overthrown Brüning, Papen, and not too few cabinet ministers, lacked political subtlety when he himself took over the office of Reich chancellor. Generals are rarely good statesmen, unless they are above all else statesmen, like Caesar, Frederick the Great, or Napoleon. But he had the right ideas and deserved the support of the republicans. This was clear to me at the time; it is not an insight post eventum. I came out for Schleicher publicly as soon as he was appointed; he was the man who stood between Germany and chaos. General von Schleicher had said firmly that the Reichswehr was not there "to protect outmoded forms of private property." His intention was to lift the Reichswehr from its exclusive, particularistic standing into being a people's army, with the backing of the trade unions and a broad front of all positive forces of the country cutting across all party lines. The unions, with their practical common sense, were willing to cooperate, but the Social Democratic party, because Schleicher was a general, was reluctant.11 So was the Center, because he had ousted Brüning, and also because among the leaders speculation on a "brown-black" coalition was already rife. A social republic, national in spirit, democratic in texture, peaceful and strong in foreign relations, was Schleicher's aim—a worthy aim, one should add, which was to be achieved after cleaning up the Osthilfeskandal and smashing, if need be by force, Adolf Hitler's party. Given more time, it is probable that he would have succeeded. By convincing the people of his sincerity, he would have become independent of the presidential power which, as by a thin thread, held control of his cabinet. This confidence had begun to grow after he had been in office only one month. In January, 1933, even the socialistic and Left-wing press began to speak of the storm that had been weathered. 10 Encyclical Letter Quadragesimo Anno (May 15, 1931); English translation by National Catholic Welfare Conference, "Forty Years After; Reconstructing the Social Order," in Sixteen Encyclicals of His Holiness Pope Pius XI, p. 33. V1 "I am heretical enough to admit," General von Schleicher said in his address over the radio on December 15, 1932, "that I am an adherent neither of capitalism nor of socialism." Schulthess Europäischer Geschichtskalender, LXXIII (1932), 225. Friedrich Stampfer writes: "Although Social Democrats remained in the opposition, their attitude towards Schleicher was not the same as that towards Papen. They did not refuse to speak to him, and the trade unions negotiated with him seriously and to the point about social-politica] matters." Die vierzehn Jahre der ersten Deutschen Republik, pp. 600-601.

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At that time Schleicher's enemies—those who really counted because they controlled industry, the conservative party, and the president's confidence— were marshalling their forces. Such bitter opponents as Papen and Hitler joined hands, in the notorious meeting in Cologne at the house of the banker Baron von Schröder.12 The German Nationals and others of "social standing" were now willing to forgive the Nazis their rowdy street manners, for only a Hitler cabinet could still prevent the exposure of the Osthilfeskandal and the names of those profiting by it. Schleicher, in that fateful month of January, 1933, must have fought hard to keep Hindenburg from doing the irrevocable; he must have reminded him of his oath of office to protect the republic and of the popular mandate of his reëlection to keep Hitler out of power. He told him that, if the Reichstag were dissolved once more, in the next election the National Socialists might perhaps vanish as completely as they had after Hitler's Putsch in 1923, for once again, economic recovery was setting in. But Hindenburg had already set his mind on Schleicher's dismissal, and Papen had made Hitler palatable to him. Papen whispered assurances to the president that the conservatives would have a controlling majority in the new cabinet and would keep the Nazis well in check. On January 28, Schleicher was definitely refused presidential sanction for the dissolution of the Reichstag and was in curt words informed of his dismissal. There have been rumors that Schleicher intended a coup ¿Tétat of his own. It was said that he intended to mobilize the Potsdam garrison and to place the Reich president under arrest. If there was such a plan, it is regrettable that it never materialized, for it would have been not an act directed against the state, but rather one for preserving the state, and therefore licit from the point of view of Christian political teaching. The treason was the president's and could not be charged against a chancellor intent on protecting the true constitution against lawlessness in the guise of formalistic law. For the constitutional changes which Schleicher knew were to take place soon, although they might be clothed in legal forms, could not override duty. And the duty of Germany's ruler was to see that the country should not be delivered into the hands of its National Socialist enemies; it was to pay heed to the moral law, the unwritten basis of the Weimar Constitution, as of any 1 2 "The interview between the Führer and Herr von Papen has taken place in Cologne," Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary on January 5, 1933. "It was to remain secret, but an indiscretion has made it public, and Schleicher plays it up enormously through the press. . . . But, surely, the government in office also knows that its existence is at stake in good earnest. If we succeed in this coup, we shall not be far from achieving power." And on January β: "Considering the fortunate progress of political developments, one is hardly in the mood any longer to worry about the bad financial situation of our organizations. If we can strike this time, all this will no longer matter." Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei; eine historische Darstellung in Tagebuchbiättem, pp. 235-36. The style of this diary is as noteworthy as its content. The language reminds one, not of a responsible political man aspiring to high public office, but rather of a low-class stock-exchange jobber.

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Christian-Occidental law even though it be written in secularized language." The definite facts concerning this reputed and praiseworthy plan of Chancellor von Schleicher may not become available until there is free access to the state archives in Berlin. That it was dangerous to the Nazis was proved by the assassination of the general and his wife by the revengeful Hitler hordes during the Blood Purge of June 30, 1934. Thus, the last chancellor of the republic, the much maligned General von Schleicher, became the only leading statesman in opposition to the Nazis to lay down his life for his convictions, and all honor is due his name. On January 30, fate was consummated when the leader of the declining National Socialist party was made chancellor of the German republic. After that date I could no longer doubt that disaster was issuing forth from the crevices of the structure which had been undermined by the doings of a guilty generation. The destiny not only of Germany but of the Occidental world had entered the critical stage, toward which our cycle had for so long been tending. While the people in Berlin and in the country preserved a stunned and gloomy silence, a few frantic Nazi crowds, filling the public squares and streets, plus the official press and the official radio, created the impression that Germany had suddenly thrown herself heartily into a movement which only yesterday had been scorned by the overwhelming majority. The artificial frenzy of those days swept hundreds of thousands who had stood aside skeptically into the maelstrom. Something "new" was arising, they thought; the talk of terror, blood, and war had probably been only rabble-rousing election phrases. Since he had now attained power, Hitler would say, "Let us forget all former enmity, from now on we shall all pull together." Years later friends abroad told me that they, too, had expected such a change, and that, had it come, Hitler might have proved a truly great man, with his regime more secure than it has been when supported by terror. Hitler could have done this, and thereby could have obtained a genuine majority. But a regime is supported by the forces that brought it to power, and by these same forces 11 As to the unwritten limits which are set to changes of the constitution in Germany ( in other words, the relation between formal and true constitutional legality), I should like to quote my doctor's thesis of 1931: "Any [constitutional] change that would take Germany out of the European family of nations is illicit, as, for example, a union with the USSR; the establishment of a despotic monarchy; measures of a general nature against the life or freedom of whole groups, such as a law providing for the expropriation of 'all high civil servants,' or 'all capitalists,' or ordering the killing of all incurables and prisoners. The same would apply to any racially or nationally determined expropriation laws against 'Jews,' or 'foreigners.' State sovereignty is not unlimited. It is circumscribed by the postulates springing from the Universal Idea and the sphere of universal duties. That other peoples in Europe do not live up to them does not release Germany from her historic and spiritual mission as the vessel of the Occidental Idea." Umrisse der Idee des faschistischen Staates und ihre Verwirklichung; unter Vergleichung mit den wichtigsten Gebieten des deutschen Staatsrechts, ρ. 59n.

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it must die. Without the brutal hordes of the SS and SA, all of them expecting their share in the spoils of victory, Hitlerism would not have become the factor that made it a strong, and hence desirable, coalition partner for the gentlemen of the dwindling conservative parties. For those who had joined the party because they expected material or social gains, January 30 of course opened the happy gateway to the land of milk and honey. Their frenzy is understandable. More interesting is the intoxication of happiness I watched among those who might be characterized as the idealistic type of National Socialists, now joined by others who suddenly thought that they had "discovered" the greatness of the movement. These groups, especially the young, must indeed have lived through the initial days as if a chiliastic dream almost incapable of fulfillment had suddenly become true. Few persons in the world can ever have felt more exalted moments. The Third Reich had been in their minds something to be longed for, but incomprehensible and beyond realization. Now it was there, and to each it appeared like the image he had in his own soul, for he was projecting that image upon the witches' Sabbath in the streets of Germany and was taking it for reality. Like Fascism, National Socialism has at times claimed to take up an historic heritage; but the differences were profound. Fascism did at least make some attempt to link itself to the true historic traditions of Italy, those of the Roman Empire and its Christian, imperial renewal. The Lateran Treaties signed on February 11, 1929, were a move in this direction. It would never have occurred to Benito Mussolini to take the political creed of his regime from the myths of ancient Latium or the city state of Rome whose virtus would have pleased Cato. Of course he exalted the Romans who had become the vessel of conscious history, the Romans of the Roman Empire. Anything before that time when in the Roman state men and history merged was considered human raw material with only a potential, future history. The marble plates erected in the Via Imperiale at Rome depicted that part of the integrating historic myth, the growth of the city state into a supranational meta-Rome, the transfigured Imperium. The National Socialist myth, on the other hand, reverted to the raw material stage, the ancient Germans for whom history still lay in waiting, who did not become conscious parts of it until their integration into the thesis of the one Occident. To exalt that state of primeval barbarity above the Sacred Roman Empire of the German Nation was a grotesque perversion of historic truth. Even those ancient Germans themselves had striven to outgrow their primitive stage in which they had neither history nor self-consciousness and had sought to be led into the Roman fullness. Of the traditions of the Sacred Roman Empire of the German Nation, National Socialism had no part. The sources of the National Socialist creed—

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made up, like all its theories, for purely pragmatic purposes—are the racialatavistic doctrines of Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau,14 and Houston Stewart Chamberlain's anti-Semitic and anti-Christian ideas.15 And as a matter of course the regime added to these the ideology of the jingoism of the pre-War Pan-Germanists, whose importance has been greatly overrated. Whatever socialism was contained in the movement was either borrowed from popularized Marxism, or was the work of German social legislation transformed by the Nazis into a pork barrel to feed the party adherents according to the measure of their usefulness. The much-advertised Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) movement, which left many foreign visitors greatly impressed, was built up from the already existing workers' and middle class recreational organizations with an ample supply of further public funds. Nor were National Socialism and Fascism, those regimented mass movements of the people, a reintegration of society through the principle of the personality. For despite all their exaltation of the leader idea, the naked fact remains that they categorically denied the dignity of the individual. What, then, were the sources of that "New Creed," or that "abominable perversion of modern enlightenment" (the term depends on the viewpoint of the observer)? They were neither new nor far to seek. Pointing them out can surprise no one except the hypocritical and the ignorant. To the philosopher of history, harsh as it may sound, National Socialism presents itself as the logical conclusion of the development of modern mass democracy in its secularized, finally de-Christianized form. A society of relativistic values resting precariously on a naturalistic view of man may in the infernal mirror of totalitarianism recognize its own ravaged face. There is no true justification for self-righteous lament. Nor is there reason to assume that the defeat which German National Socialism has suffered through superior material forces will automatically eliminate the causes of totalitarianism. As such the downfall of one type of totalitarianism in one specific country may create an order that does not differ in essence, but rather one that varies only in degree of tolerability, from National Socialism's New Order. It will be an "order" lasting only until the spoils of the vanquished are exhausted, and the whole vicious cycle may begin anew, regardless of all the noble phrases of yesterday and the coercive measures of tomorrow. If we penetrate the phenomenal appearance of the defunct Third Reich, we may discover some forces at work that have gone through all ages. Though denuded of the Christian content which in the medieval Respublica Christiana put even its opponents into the same cultural and religious sphere with its protagonists, there exists in the unbridled nationalism of today an Essai sur Îinégalité des races humaines, 4 vols. (Paris, 1853-1855). « Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. ( 1899; English ed., London, 1910).

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NOR BY THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE 487 affinity to what formerly in a wider sense was called Guelfism, nor can the relationship to even earlier forms of that disrupting antithesis, bome in the womb of the Occidental community, be overlooked. What in our time has come to a climax is the long-smoldering revolt of the forces of particularism against the universal, Roman, Christian idea. In the racial doctrines we may recognize the rising of atavistic blood notions against the Spirit of the One Blood shed by the Cod-Man for the redemption of all, that One Blood through which the brotherhood of all men was realized, manifested in the Roman Empire. The New Order, as practice has shown, ruled everywhere with the particularistic forces. In each country suffering under a totalitarian regime, home-grown or imposed from outside, control over state and society was given to those factions who had developed the results of modem naturalism —unbridled ambition, amorality, the principle of power for power's sake— to the extremest and most concentrated form. On such a basis, no dialectical development toward universalism is possible, because here the thesis of Occidental history itself is exposed to destruction, rather than a struggle with forces which, by overcoming it, strive to reestablish it on a higher plane. Blindness, weakness, and pettiness were equally great in Germany and abroad when night fell on Europe. Some thought that Hitlerism would settle down to responsible government. Others, both conservatives and liberals, were already saying in March, 1933, that bloodshed and lawlessness had gone too far for a return to the earlier patterns, since the collapse of the regime might bring about total anarchy. By supporting the National Socialist government they might perhaps exercise some moderating influence. In the international field, the path to doom was little different. There was not one state capable of understanding the historic and moral issue. How could there be? The fact that morality collapsed completely in one place did not improve the moral stature of the rest of the world except by comparison. And it may seriously be doubted whether any revitalizing content of morality and reason has been since infused into our epoch of once-brilliant decay, stretching over generations, which is now nothing but decay without brilliance. It would rather seem that a long way still has to be traveled until the events of the last twelve (or thirty-one) years will be understood, both with regard to their cause and origin, and to the world-historic lessons which they indeed should teach us.

38 THE YEARS OF CAPTIVITY The walls stand Silent and cold, loud The flags shrill in the wind. F R I E D R I C H H Ö L D E R L I N , "Hälfte des Lebens." To LOOK UPON L A W and the administration of justice as mere functions of society rather than as the expression of absolute moral principles was not peculiar to National Socialism. But this regime, with Fascist and Communist party and class dictatorships as its immediate examples, has expressed the concepts of legal positivism bluntly, in a language which sometimes is almost disarming in its lack of hypocrisy. Today's law is no more and no less," Professor Carl Schmitt wrote, "than the plan and the will of the Führer, which constitutes a landmark for all." His will was binding upon the judge. This was not contrary to law, for "Only he can be administrator of justice who has accepted and absorbed Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf."1 The National Socialist minister of justice, Otto Georg Thierack, formerly president of the People's Court, received authority from Hitler to provide the judges with whatever laws expediency might demand.2 The de facto changes in German law brought about by the regime were indeed numerous and farreaching. As early as March 29,1933, the so-called Lex van der Lübbe * abolished nulla poena sine lege, a principle of criminal justice which had been considered fundamental ever since the Roman plebs withdrew in protest to the Sacred Mount in 494 B.C. This principle established that no act could be punished as a crime according to a law which came into being after the act was committed. Contrary to this rule, the Lex van der Lübbe, named after the unfortunate young man who was used as a tool in the Reichstag fire, provided capital punishment retroactively. Certain crimes which previously had been punishable only by imprisonment were made subject to the death penalty by an emergency decree of February 28, 1933, and the new law now extended that penalty backward to cover offenses committed earlier, namely, between January 21 and February 28, 1933. "Nulla poena sine lege in the sense that at the time an offense was committed there must have been a specific legal norm declaring it punishable," declared Hans Frank, who was minister of justice before Otto Thierack, "is excluded as a matter of course Frankfurter Zeitung, October 7, 1935. 2 New York Times, August 30, 1942, Vol. XCI, No. 30899, Section I, p. 14. » "Gesetz über Verhängung und Vollzug der Todesstrafe." Reichsgesetzblatt, Part I, No. 28, p. 151. 1

1933,

YEARS OF CAPTIVITY 489 in our [that is, the National Socialist] epoch, when right is formed by practice and custom. In any case, that maxim is not a postulate of justice. . . . The idea of retaliation does not depend on nulla poena sine lege." * The general principle of National Socialist criminal justice can best be summarized in the following words: "Today [that is, in the Third Reich] it is generally accepted that criminal law, as all law, must serve the community of the people. . . . A system of law which is alien to racial thinking and does not concentrate upon the people is unfit to serve the people's community." 5 And as the "people's community" was completely identified with the interests of the ruling party, a simple syllogism shows that what National Socialist criminal law considered most important was the interest of the party in keeping itself in power. All this could have been explained by the minister of justice in fewer words. It may be seriously questioned whether in such a system the conception of "laws" is required at all. Actually they largely lost their meaning, for the executive power was not bound by any rules, not even its own. Under National Socialist pressure, the Reichsgericht and certain other high courts as well—such as the Prussian supreme court (Kammergericht) and the Bavarian supreme court—abandoned another principle, ne bis in idem, the prohibition of double jeopardy—protection against being prosecuted more than once for the same offense. This was tossed aside, at least in cases of political significance. "In serious cases of high treason," declared the Bavarian supreme court, "an adequate sentence has to be imposed in all circumstances regardless of all legal principles! The protection of state and people is more important than the adherence to formalistic rules of procedure which are senseless if applied without exception." " Many of the lower courts also accepted this procedure. The criminal code, the code of criminal procedure, and also various laws guaranteeing the independence of the courts and of the judges were "amended" so as to afford greater protection to the regime. The judges, according to the German constitution, are appointed for life and cannot be discharged unless convicted of crime or dishonorable conduct; the National Socialist government, on the contrary, as early as April 7, 1933, made all stale officials of heterodox political views subject to summary dismissal.7 * Nationalsozialistisches Handbuch für Recht und Gesetzgebung, p. 1325. 5 Hans Frank, Nationalsozialistische Leitsätze für ein neues deutsches Strafrecht, I, 19. Another "guiding principle" (p. 13) holds that: "In National Socialist criminal law there is no room for right or wrong in the formal sense but only for the idea of material justice." ' Oberlandeseericht München, August 12, 1937. Deutsche Justiz, 1938, p. 724; English translation of the passage by E. A. Shils, in collaboration with Edith Loewenstein and Klaus Knorr, in Fraenkel, The Dual State; a Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, p. 52. 7 It is of interest to note that a full decade later the National Socialist minister of justice, Otto Thierack, considered it necessary to dismiss nine thousand German judges, many of whom were sent to labor and concentration camps. The reason given was that "they had not yet absorbed the spirit of National Socialism."

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Analogous application of criminal laws was strictly prohibited in preNational Socialist Germany, as it is in all countries which possess a codified criminal law. This rule was changed on June 28, 1935, by a law amending the criminal code. Henceforth, an act could be punished as a crime even if there was no specific law to declare it criminal, provided only that the act "deserves punishment according to the basic idea of any penal law and according to sound popular feeling." * Under the Weimar Constitution special courts are prohibited, and nobody must be denied or spared trial by his lawful judge. However, after the Reichsgericht, refusing to yield to National Socialist pressure, had acquitted Dimitroff, Torgler, and Taneff, whose lives had been demanded by the regime in the Reichstag fire trial, the Volksgerichtshof (People's Court) was created. The trial of all major political offenses was taken away from the Reichsgericht and assigned to this new court, which, in the traditional juridical language, could scarcely be called a court at all. The defendant was not even free to choose his own counsel—his choice must be approved by the president of the People's Court, and this approval could be withdrawn at any time during the proceedings. No recourse or appeal was admitted against the verdicts of the People's Court.' The concentration of power in the hands of the ruling party also changed the appearance of the German state in its relations with the component parts, the Länder, as they are called in the Weimar Constitution. These changes, too, were couched in legal language, particularly in the Reichsstatthaltergesetz (Law on Reich Commissars), as it was usually called,10 and the Law on the Reconstruction of Germany.11 The Law on Reich Commissars of April 17, 1933, abolished all the autonomous constitutional life of the German lands, although this autonomy was guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution. Instead, the executive power of the lands was vested in Statthalter (Commissars) appointed by the cabinet of Adolf Hitler. The 8 "Gesetz zur Aendening des Strafgesetzbuchs," Article 1. Reichsgesetzblatt, 1935, Part I, No. 70, p. 839. A law passed the same day amended the rules of criminal procedure and the law on the status of the courts ( "Gesetz zur Aenderung von Vorschriften des Strafverfahrens und des Gerichtsverfassungsgesetzes," ibid., pp. 844-50). It contained the following remarkable provision; "If an action which according to sound popular feeling deserves punishment is not declared punishable by law, the public prosecutor shall examine whether justice can be made to triumph by an analogous application of the law." And also, "If the trial shows that the defendant has committed an act which according to sound popular feeling deserves punishment although it is not declared punishable by law, the court shall examine whether the basic intent of any criminal law applies to the act and justice can therefore be made to triumph by its analogous application. • "Gesetz zur Aenderung von Vorschriften des Strafrechts und des Strafverfahrens," April 24, 1934. Ibid., 1934, Part I, No. 47, pp. 345-^7. 1 0 "Zweites Gesetz zur Gleichschaltung der Länder mit dem Reich," April 7, 1933. Ibid., 1933, Part I, No. 33, p. 173; amended April 25, 1933 {ibid.. No. 43, p. 2 2 5 ) , May 26, 1933 (ibid., No. 55, p. 293) and October 14, 1933 (ibid.. No. 113, p. 736). 1 1 "Gesetz über den Neuaufbau des Reiches, " January 30, 1934. Ibid., 1934, Part I, No. 11, p. 75.

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Law on the Reconstruction of Germany (January 30, 1934) did away with the diets of the lands and transferred all remaining rights of regional autonomy to the central government, while the governments of the lands were directly subordinated to Hitler's cabinet. Thereby the last remnants of state rights disappeared and the former lands became administrative provinces. Shortly afterwards, the Reichsrat was formally abolished.12 As the Reichsrat under the Weimar Constitution was called to represent the rights of the lands and as these rights had been canceled, the step was only logical. In principle, all these and similar measures would also have been debatable from the republican viewpoint. Constitutional reform aimed at greater centralization of federal power had been on the program of all Weimar parties with the exception of the Center. Those who actively opposed it at the time of the republic were the parties of the Right, especially the National Socialists, who in a system of strong state rights saw their chance of widening their own power by getting control of certain state governments, such as Thuringia and Brunswick. Certainly no republican government could have wished to encourage particularism before 1933 or can intend to do so in the coming German republic. A new relation between federal and regional power will certainly have to be worked out. In the process the laws and measures of the National Socialists will be neither very helpful nor particularly harmful. All in all, their legislation on the matter should not be taken too seriously. It is merely another demonstration of what is only too well known already: that totalitarianism strives for the centralization of power and of all expressions of national life under one single control. Whether or not the techniques of legal form and expression were used for this is rather unimportant. What is much more interesting is that the German lands by no means disappeared and that instead they survived because of the ambitions of the various National Socialist leaders themselves. The prime minister of Prussia was still "prime minister," and so were those of Bavaria, Saxony, Thuringia, and the rest. Who of them would have wished to give up title, influence, and income? And the same thing applied in varying degree to the whole of the state administrations so far as they were filled by party men." The influence of National Socialist rule on family life and education received particular attention abroad throughout the years. The Nürnberg n "Gesetz über die Aufhebung des Reichsrats," February 14, 1934. Ibid., 1934, Part I, No. 16, p. 89. 1 3 'The National Socialist coordination of Reich and lands," writes Otto Braun, former Prussian prime minister and a man eminently qualified to pass judgment on this matter, "is merely superficial. It has not created any new, organic solution of the problem, either politically or with regard to the administration. The bureaucracies of the lands continue tenaciously to live on, and they will assert themselves again more strongly as soon as there is relaxation of the police pressure which at present forces them to keep in line." Von Weimar zu Hitler, p. 445.

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Laws applied only to a small circle of families, but the extension of state and party control to all youth groups, schools, and universities of course affected the whole population. The attempts of the regime to indoctrinate youth with National Socialist "ideas" and to break down the most natural bonds of family relations and filial loyalty have often been described. Most stringently they were denounced by Pope Pius XI in his Encyclical Letter Mit brennender Sorge of March 13, 1937. As to the fanaticism created among the young, it may not always be easy to distinguish between genuine Nazi sentiments and the exaggerated feelings of nationalism which are the regrettable result of wars among all peoples. Personally, judging from knowledge of German youth with whose thought I have been able to maintain contact throughout the years, I am inclined to think that Nazi philosophy—whatever that may mean—was taken far less seriously by the younger generation in Germany than it was by writers on German youth abroad. A greater problem, it seems to mc, will be created by the absence of certain categories of knowledge—especially historic knowledge—withheld from the young under the plan of a politically oriented education.15 German youth—like the youth of Italy, as was revealed in Rome and Naples and other cities after Fascism had been overthrown— has shown strong resistance to totalitarian propaganda. In fact, they have become distrustful of all propaganda and all attempts at indoctrination, a fact which the Allied "professional experts" should remember. All this, it appears, is particularly true with regard to the small boys, that is, those who grew up entirely under the regime. For them, National Socialism never had any of the so-called "glory" and "youthfulness" which appealed to the youth of the thirties. 1 ' And, last but not least, it will not do to overlook the fact that the religious forces, just because they suffered persecution, have been a powerful antidote to totalitarian, pagan ideas. With the dissolution of all other youth organizations, the Hitler Youth took over all their property and also the famous youth hostels which had been built by the state, the communes, and the young people themselves and ι* "Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre," September 15, 1935. Reichsgesetzblatt, 1935, Part I, No. 100, pp. 1146-47. 15 Even this statement must have some reservations. While teaching at American colleges, I have had opportunity to watch some students who had spent their secondary school years in Germany after 1933. They by no means lagged behind the average of their new classmates in this country—rather the contrary. This encouraging fact may be due to the natural reaction of youth against propagandistic, forcible éducation, for such methods will tend to sharpen the curiosity and critical spirit of the young as well as whet their eagerness for independent study in order to find out for themselves. 16 The opposition of youth to the regime, unorganized and without a positive program, was well described by the authors of The Silent War; the Underground Movement in Germany, who wrote under the pseudonyms of Jon B. Jansen and Stefan Weyl ( Philadelphia and New York, J. B. Lippincott, 1943 ), especially pp. 254 sqq. Nora Wain's Reaching for the Stars (London, The Cresset Press, 1939; Boston, Little, Brown, 1940) is still one of the finest and most honest pictures of German youth under the National Socialist regime.

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had been open to all regardless of political affiliation. More, the Hitler Youth became all-powerful, and to escape joining it was practically impossible. To have been a member of it is no indication whatever of the ideas or attitudes of the boys and young men of Germany. As always and everywhere among German youth, idealism continued to be an important force even after tl\e youth groups were swallowed by the state organization. Hence it would be both absurd and unwise to approach former Hitler Youth members as if they were young people with strong criminal instincts or at best reformed delinquents. The real tragedy of German youth consists rather in the misuse of their idealism by unscrupulous, cynical leaders and by the "grown-ups" in general, those who have brought them into the present almost hopeless impasse. It would be utterly wrong if, now that National Socialism has fallen, the younger generation were delivered over wholly into the hands of agnostic, utilitarian, rationalistic instructors, who will offer their views as a supposed antidote to National Socialist irrationalism." A high moral level on the part of the prospective educators will be needed, as well as a great deal of tact and genuine understanding of the problems of youth who will be quite right in holding the older generation rather than themselves responsible for the world into which they were born. Where non-German aid is to be enlisted, it must be on the basis of absolutely voluntary cooperation in the spirit of international comradeship, not as "rééducation" by force. Best qualified for the task ahead will be those teachers and friends of youth in Germany itself who have suffered for the sake of their convictions; those educators who believe in instilling in the young love of all things and understanding of a Christian community of nations which knows no racial discrimination; and those leaders of youth who have faith in the immutable principles of the moral law. I know many süch men myself, and their numbers go into the thousands. To them should be given the German schools as soon as those schools are again open to true, responsible pedagogues. In order to enable German youth to fill the gaps left when certain categories of knowledge were suppressed and in order to help them gain an outlook on the world and on life such as only personal experience can give, I have suggested that as part of a future covenant of nations international schools and universities should be established.18 I am convinced that from such an international system of education not alone German youth would profit; the younger generation of all nations would be united here in free 17 An excellent picture of how rééducation should not be approached is to be found in Francis Stuart Campbell, "Re-educating the Axis Youth," The Catholic World, CLVII (July, 1943), 372 sqq. 18 First presented at the eleventh New York Herald Tribune Forum on Current Affairs, November 17, 1942; published in New York Herald Tribune, November 22, 1942, Vol. CII, No. 35071, Section X, p. 27, and Our Right for Survival in a Free World; Report of the New York Herald Tribune Eleventh Forum on Current Problems (New York, New York Herald Tribune, 1942), pp. 150-55.

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competition, in a community of comradeship and friendship. A world-wide exchange of students and teachers would help to overcome the notions of exclusive national culture everywhere. And establishing ties of personal interest and understanding such as only common endeavor can create would mean to strike at the very roots of international dissension and war. Such a plan would revive the best traditions qf those ages when science, studies, schools, and teachers, unhampered by nationalistic fetters, developed freely within the catholic Respublica Christiana. The National Socialist regime, while pushing existing legislation in social and labor matters ahead," reduced German labor, once a proud and powerful factor in matters political, cultural, and educational, to complete impotence. It was the Communist party which under the Weimar Republic launched the slogan that to have a republic was a matter of small importance, for the only worthy goal was socialism. "It was a misfortune of the first magnitude," Friedrich Stampfer rightly remarks, "that a large section of the German working class did not understand what the Weimar Constitution meant to them." Perhaps National Socialism has also awakened those who, as the Communists persistently put it, saw little difference between the "liberal capitalism" of the Weimar Republic and "dictatorial crisis capitalism" under Hitler. If such an awakening has come—and there are many indications that it has—democratic labor is likely to emerge stronger from the ruins of totalitarianism than it was in many years before the downfall of the republic. However, I should attribute even greater importance to the growing power of religion. I believe that the influence of religion will now be felt in the formation of entirely new forms of social and economic life. It is here that the ideals of Bishop Ketteler may find their realization—a reunion of the laboring, proletarian classes with Christ.21 There is reason to assume that this hope may be justified. Not only has the understanding of the social doctrines of Christianity widened among the working classes; Christian leaders, bishops, priests, ministers, and laymen have also offered unflinching opposition to totalitarianism. The pastoral letters issued to the faithful during the years of oppression will certainly remain documents of lasting significance; the names of men like Michael Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich; the bishop of Münster, Count Clemens von Galen; Bishop Count Konrad von Preysing of Berlin; Cardinal Bertram of 10 For a résumé of this legislation before the war, see Franz Seldte, Die Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich, 1933-1938 (Munich and Berlin, C. H. Beck, 1939). The author was the National Socialist minister of labor and shows the expected bias, but the book is, nevertheless, informative. 20 Die vierzehn Jahre der ersten Deutschen Republik, p. 129. 21 For a more extensive analysis of this problem, see my articles "Catholicism at the Crossroads," "Christian World Revolution, ' and "Fascism and Christianity," Atlantic Monthly, CLVI (September, 1938), 325-30, CLXX (January, 1942), 104-11, CLXXI (March, 1943), 115-20.

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Breslau—they all have become beacons of hope and citadels of strength for Catholics and many millions of non-Catholics. These are the names which, together with the Protestant Bishop Wurm of Württemberg and Pastor Martin Niemöller, have received wide attention all over the world; but there are countless others, inconspicuous men, priests and ministers known only by their congregations or their local communities. They too have not hesitated to fight for the ideals of Christian life and for German dignity, and it may be largely due to them that education, morality, and the sense of human freedom have been kept so strongly alive. Quite naturally, since the political leaders of the German opposition have been killed, imprisoned, or driven underground, the pulpits of the churches have become the only place from which the voice of mankind could still be heard. In times like these it is natural—and this fact was emphasized by princes of the Catholic Church and Protestant leaders alike—that Protestants and Catholics, threatened by the same enemy, should draw close together. We might even express the hope that the fateful division of faith, through which Germany has suffered more perhaps than any other country, may give way to a development towards renewed unity. The service which the religious leaders have rendered to the German people as a whole cannot be overestimated. They are the living witnesses of the unbroken power of democratic thought even under totalitarianism, and even the worst advocate of a policy of blind hate and willful destruction will scarcely dare to cast doubt on the character of these men and martyrs. It must be added, of course, that many of these spokesmen of German Christianity would probably have been liquidated long ago had it not been for the silent power of the millions standing behind them. Indeed, it would seem that, if Germany is to be preserved from a new totalitarianism, her salvation must come in large part from the common front of democratic workers, peasants, burghers, and Christians, and this combination will prove of service to the community of all Occidental nations. The world is wondering today how the German crisis can be solved. Upon the proper answer to this question depend the chances for a lasting peace. Military government of Germany, as exercised today by foreign authorities, can be but a temporary measure. On this there is general agreement, widely as opinions may differ with regard to the time limit to be set to such occupation. And yet this period will be of great importance for the future. It should be the aim of wise statesmanship to use it in order to help the rebirth and development of a genuinely German democracy within the shortest possible time, for otherwise the withdrawing occupation authorities will leave a vacuum that would attract all the forces of anarchy. The danger is great indeed that new conflicts would ensue from such chaotic conditions. If the forces of German democracy—in the labor movement and the churches, among the peasants, the intellectuals, among youth and in liberal

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and conservative circles—are not made self-sustaining now while they are protected against inner political violence, they may not be strong enough to hold their own later on. Their plight will be even more precarious than it was in 1918. Then there existed an unbroken democratic tradition that helped to overcome radicalism and led the country to a new constitutional life. Many are still left of this tradition. They have upheld the faith in democratic fair play, and they must not be made to lose face before their own people. T h e y will need, and they deserve, all help and encouragement, and recognition as representatives of the true interests of a democratic German nation. 12 It seems very timely, therefore, to study such recently published documents

as the Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States 1919:

The Paris Peace Conference, particularly the clear-sighted and brilliant analyses of a man like William C. Bullitt, then of the Division of Western European Affairs. In a memorandum of November 25, 1918, to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who transmitted it to the president, he wrote: "As the government of Prince Lvov represented the progressive bourgeoisie of Russia, so the government of Prince Max represented the progressive bourgeoisie of Germany. As Kerensky represented the moderate democratic socialists of Russia, so Ebert represents the moderate democratic socialists of Germany. As Lenine represents the anti-democratic proletarian dictatorship of Russia, so Liebknecht represents anti-democratic proletarian dictatorship in Germany. Kerensky fell and Lenine succeeded him, partly, to be sure, because of Kerensky's own mistakes, but partly because the Allies and the United States did not take his appeals for material and spiritual aid at their face value. And today there is the gravest danger that Ebert will fall because the Allies and the United States will not take his appeals for material and spiritual aid at anything like their face value." And he added this warning: "The gravity of the situation cannot be overemphasized: Unless we support the

Ebert government a little more strongly than the Bolsheviki are supporting the [Communist] Spartactis Group, Germany will become Bolshevist. Austria and Hungary will follow Germany's example. And the remainder of Europe will not long escape infection." 2 3 T h e rebirth of democratic sovereignty will be made easier if it is now recognized that, with the downfall of Hitlerism and all the Hitlerian decrees which were incompatible with moral precepts and accepted Occidental standards, the basic law of the land—that is, the Constitution of W e i m a r — has revived. This is a matter of principle; it is not affected by the clear recog22 For a splendid analysis of the German resistance movement, its leaders and followers, see Max Jordan's timely book, Beyond Afl Fronts. "The forces which were alive in the days of the Weimar republic, but were weakened and rendered impotent because of the blindness of the victors and the obtuseness of communistic as well as jingoistic elements at home," Jordan concludes ( pages 354-55 ), "these forces can be counted upon again when the day comes, provided they are given effective support in their swaddling period, and not pushed around and discredited in the eyes of their own people." « II, 99, 101. Italics mine.

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nition that, under military occupation, in case of conflict between civil and military interests the latter prevail according to international law. The Weimar Constitution, though many of its fundamental provisions were long in abeyance, has never ceased to be the rightful legal basis of Germany. If, in a short retrospect, the now defunct National Socialist regime is evaluated from the constitutional viewpoint it will appear that for the major part of its existence it was a de facto, not a de jure, government. National Socialism imposed itself upon the German people like a veritable army of occupation; it never had a popular majority as long as majorities still counted. But a state controlled by a force of this kind does not thereby lose its constitution or identity. The exercise of the popular will is simply transferred temporarily to the occupation authorities. It was typical of the National Socialist party, with its mixture of hypocrisy and conceit, that its leaders never formally abolished the Weimar Constitution; its continued existence has been persistently recognized by the courts, directly and by inference.24 The National Socialist government, while considering itself free of all legal restraints, yet wanted to be regarded as the legitimate, lawful holder of supreme power. Nor has the constitution been abolished by a revolution, which would have had law-creating power. It is generally recognized that successful revolutions indeed abolish the existing order and supplant it by a new one of their own. The revolutionaries become the new source of law and can then not be held to account for the breach of the order they have overthrown.25 But a revolution in this sense has never been carried out by National Socialism. When on January 30,1933, Adolf Hitler was made chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg, the procedure was in accordance with the letter of the constitution, although it involved a breach of trust on the part of the president who had been elected with the mandate of keeping Hitler out of power. The Hitler cabinet took the required oath of office, swearing loyalty to the constitution. Shortly afterwards, using as pretext a fancied emergency created by the Reichstag fire, the government prevailed upon the president to issue a decree of February 28, 1933, "For the Protection of the People and the State," 20 based upon Article 48 of the constitution. This decree was misused beyond all bounds and limits to cover a great many unconstitutional acts of the National Socialists with sham legality. Elections to the Reichstag were held on March 5. They are usually referred to as the last free elections in Germany, but "free" is here a relative term. The Socialist parties were silenced; their meetings were dissolved, ** For examples see Fraenkel, The Dual State; a Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, pp. 14 sqq. 25 In fact, most modern states are founded on revolution, a war of independence, or some other violent act. The United States, France, and Russia are among the best known examples. =« "Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutze von Volk und Staat." Reichsgesetzblatt, 1933, Part I, No. 17, p. 83.

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usually as soon as they were opened; their newspapers were banned; and they were not permitted to put up posters. The press and the meetings of the Center party and the Liberals were also under strict control, while the radio was already completely in National Socialist hands. And yet the Social Democrats lost only one seat. The Communists returned with eighty-one seats, losing one fifth of their former strength. The Center party even gained, and the German Nationals remained as strong as before. The National Socialists had forty-three percent of the seats in the Reichstag. Together with the German Nationals, they controlled fifty-one percent, that is, just enough to form a coalition government but far short of the two-thirds majority required for changing the constitution. In order to manipulate such a qualified majority, the National Socialist Party prevented the lawfully elected deputies of the extreme Left from taking their seats in the Reichstag, which was thus reduced to a rump parliament. But even then the government would not have commanded enough votes for constitutional amendment had not the Center party voted for the Enabling Act of March 24. This law (faulty in origin, since eighty-one deputies were deprived of their seats illegally) conferred dictatorial powers on the cabinet. Not, it must be noted, upon Hitler or upon the National Socialists, who were then outnumbered in the cabinet by conservatives and career civil servants. It provided that the powers must not be used for changing the institutions of the office of Reich president, the Reichstag, and the Reichsrat. The act was to go out of force if the cabinet changed and was to expire automatically April 1, 1937." On July 14, 1933, all parties except the National Socialist were dissolved, and any attempt to continue or revive the old parties or to create new ones was forbidden, under severe penalties.28 This decree-law was a grave violation of the Enabling Act, for it touched the institution of the Reichstag as such. In October, 1933, the rump Reichstag itself was dissolved and replaced by a body of party appointees. Constitutionally, this new "Reichstag" was a completely irrelevant assembly of private persons. All these measures, though violating the constitution in the grossest way, were taken with a continued pretense of legality. They were treasonable but not revolutionary. We have the testimony of authoritative National Socialist spokesmen themselves on the question as to whether the Weimar Constitution is still valid or not. "The question may be answered in this way," the Reich minister of justice, Dr. Hans Frank, says in his official National Socialist Handbook of Law and Legislation: 'The legal norms of the Weimar Constitution . . . have not yet been invalidated by one single revolutionary 27 "Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich." Ibid., 1933, Part I, No. 25, p. 141. 2 8 "Gesetz gegen die Neubildung von Parteien." Ibid., No. 81, p. 479. For an excellent analysis of this decree-law and its implications, see Brecht, Prelude to Silence; the End of the German Republic, pp. 114 sqq.

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act. . . . The Führer and Chancellor has always, after as well as before taking over power, emphasized that the national revolution has been legal; the constitutional reconstruction of the Third Reich has been carried out on the legal basis of the [Weimar] interim constitution. Not just with regard to the Enabling Act but also with regard to the Law on the Reconstruction of Germany passed as late as January 30, 1934, it has been pointed out in the preamble that these laws were passed in the form of amendments to the constitution."29 Of course, had there been a free Reichstag and an independent Supreme Court, the cabinet would have been impeached immediately for any one of these unconstitutional acts. The step which in constitutional terms came closest to fulfilling the definition of a revolution was Adolf Hitler's assumption of the office of "Führer" after President von Hindenburg's death on August 2, 1934; for "Führer" is an office entirely unknown to the German constitution. Instead of going to the trouble of running for the presidency, which would have been the constitutional· procedure, Hitler in violation of both the constitution and the Enabling Act simply usurped the powers of Reich president, uniting them with those of the chancellor. Henceforth he had himself styled "Führer and Reich chancellor." Had this act been a revolution, the new government would have required recognition abroad. Such recognition, however, was never sought by the government nor declared necessary by the foreign powers. The Hitler administration, on the contrary, was more than ever anxious to emphasize that it was not revolutionary but legitimate, and a hasty plebiscite was arranged for August 19, which, naturally, approved Hitler's promotion by an overwhelming majority. It must be remembered that all this took place only a few weeks after the Blood Purge of June 30, which had aroused the indignation of the world. Hitler had reason to fear, therefore, that should he proclaim himself a revolutionary, international recognition might be refused, and the major powers might break off diplomatic relations. Hitler did not feel strong enough to risk the economic and political isolation which this would have meant for the regime and the unforeseeable repercussions in Germany itself.30 Even this usurpation, therefore, was no outright revolution 29 Nationalsozialistisches Handbuch für Recht und Gesetzgebung, p. 309. Many more examples are given of laws and decrees invoicing certain (grossly misused) articles of the Weimar Constitution. 30 If Hitler thus avoided an outright revolution, he had good reasons, too, for not going through the constitutional procedure of election to the Reich presidency. For according to a constitutional amendment of December 17, 1932 (Reichsgesctzblatt, 1932, Part I, No. SO, p. 547), the president of the German Supreme Court ( Reichsgericht ) was to be acting president of the republic whenever the presidency should become prematurely vacant. Thus, after Hindenburg's death, the president of the supreme court, Dr. Erwin Bumke, would have been chief executive of Germany until the election of a new Reich president, and in this capacity he would have gained supreme control over the armed forces. His chief of staff would have been General Werner von Fritsch, a man well

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but another act of treason against the Weimar Constitution, though one of the gravest. In summary, it may be said that since October, 1933, ( at the latest ) Germany has had no legal parliament, and since August, 1934, no constitutional chief executive. In other words, the constitutional organs who could create valid law have long since ceased to exist. All this is of more than merely academic or legalistic interest; it may indeed prove of the greatest practical importance. For it means that the Weimar Constitution has of right remained the law of the land. It is indeed the basis on which any democratic reconstruction should start to build. known for his anti-National Socialist views and one who later, during the Polish campaign, died under mysterious circumstances. I have it on good authority that Hitler did not dare to let the exercise of supreme power pass into Dr. Bumke's hands for even a limited time; he was afraid that he himself and his party might be pushed from power with the help of the armed forces. It was for this reason that Hitler hurriedly created a fait accompli by proclaiming himself "Führer and Reich chancellor." Constitutionally speaking, this act was, of course, entirely invalid, and Dr. Bumke was and still is acting Reich president.

39 THE OCCIDENT: SYNTHESIS OF WORLD HISTORY The night will last yet for a while. But this time Out of the East comes not the Light. The battle Was in the stars decided: Victor shall be Who guards the sacred shrine within his bounds, Lord of the future who transforms himself. S T E F A N G E O R C E , "Der Krieg." HISTORY of the world, we said with Hegel at the outset of our analysis, is the working of God's government. What it has willed cannot be undone, nor are the forces that have shaped the past ever without avail for the future. With St. Augustine we have therefore maintained that all earthly doings are ordained towards the goal of perfect reason, of justice, and of morality freely willed. These facts taught by faith, proved by philosophy, and verified by empirical knowledge, demonstrate that even the snares and the wickedness of the Earthly City are used by Providence for the pursuit of its designs. That such guidance does not void man's free will, the most priceless gift he has received—this, too, we have not failed to emphasize. Great power is granted to it even within the plan of God's government, and not too few of what we have called the "wrong partial verdicts of history" must be attributed to man's unwise or amoral use of his freedom. The true meaning of the progress of transcendent reason through the world of nature and finite spirits ( that is, history ) comes closer to our comprehension through the Christocentric view of Duns Scotus and his school. This contention we have upheld throughout, and by the rediscovery of it in Hegel's masterful concept a bridge was thrown from the scholastic to the modern philosophy of history. The dialectical movement of history which we have followed thus becomes movement within the all-embracing Word of creation, a dialogue between the eternal Logos and men created through Him in freedom. It is the idea of mankind, which, as Ranke said, "God has expressed in the different nations," 1 which strives, through defeats, failures, and betrayals, through heroism and sacrifice, towards ultimate victory. The first realization of the one body of humanity in visible, legal, and concrete form we have found in the new and perpetual order of the Occidental commonwealth. This, in the language of historic dialectics, we have called the thesis. Men awoke to the consciousness of the freedom of all when it was realized that God, as St. Paul said to the Athenians, has made all naTHE

1

Frankreich

und Deutschland,

in Sämmtliche

Werke,

IL, 72.

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tìons of the same blood.2 In the Occidental commonwealth, which has gone through various stages of incarnating the same idea, the play of universal and national tensions, of alternating tides and cunents, still is the dialectic of forward movement. While the rhythm of this pulse is felt in all nations, the heartland of Europe, Germany, the country whence came the forces that took up the Roman heritage to perpetuate it through millennia, was placed into the foreground of our observations. No Germanocentric view of history was intended, but rather a Continental perspective in contrast to the usual Western-European peripheric viewpoint of the English-speaking countries. The subjection of the German people under a regime of extreme nationalism based on coercion, a regime as unphilosophical and ahistoric in its mentality as it was ruthless in its methods, has symbolized the general downfall of our epoch. It was in itself a warning that "normalcy" cannot be attained by those very means and doctrines which were the cause of decline. It will be only natural that Germany—which, like every nation, must contribute to the whole, the idea of mankind, in its proper way—should return to its own heritage of the Christian, idealistic school of philosophy. At the same time, both state practice and education must remain conscious of the fact that this heritage is not a nationalistic, homespun product but part of a common universal tradition, reaching from the schools of Athens and Alexandria to St. Augustine, the schoolmen, and mystics on both sides of the Alps, the cosmopolitan geniuses of the eighteenth century and the true Hegel who, wherever his teaching is compatible with the faith, has proved an initiate guide towards truth. The state, not merely a utilitarian, cooperative body, should once more be regarded as the self-conscious instrument of history, emanating from the people under responsible leadership, and in its metaphysical nature and its responsibility greater than the sum of the living. It will then overcome anarchy in all its forms, moral or political. Together with the liberal, agnostic view its successor, the perverted concept of a "totalitarian" state must be discarded. For in reality, totalitarianism is merely the total subjection of history's self-conscious instrument, the state, to the dictates of self-seeking, amoral, particularistic interests, which, in a deadly social Darwinism of alleged "survival of the fittest," set themselves above the state, using its instruments of power for the state's own total subjection. Of the loudly proclaimed dignity of the state nothing was left. Rather the state, an institution of natural ( that is, divine ) law was set against itself, misused by individuals to destroy its own real foundation, which is righteousness, and its telos, which is the temporal contribution to the realization of Christianity. The liberal, agnostic state and its ultimate product, the * Acts 17:26.

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totalitarian state, thereby reveal themselves as anarchy, not order, as antihistoric and thereby anti-Christian and antihuman. The future Germany, according to Christian Ghibelline tradition, will consider itself as an integral part of the Respublica Christiana of the Occident, ministering to the ideas of righteousness, freedom, and personal dignity and to a peaceful order based on a concordantia between national and international interests, between material fulfillment and spiritual postulates. Though the Weimar Constitution is the only basis on which the new German government can stand, important amendments will certainly be necessary. The new Reich, to heal the dreadful wounds of the war, to undo sins and errors of the period of despotism, and to become a beacon of peace must aim at realizing its own True Constitution. It has developed so fast that the written one, held in abeyance for so long, could not possibly keep up with it. This future German Constitution as I should envisage it takes account of the fact that any constitutional order of a state cannot be artificially manufactured but requires the recognition and unfolding of what is already present spiritually. In a most condensed form, the following paragraphs would picture the future German Reich as it emerges from an analysis of historic origins, assuming modern form in accordance with the needs of our age.* Territorially, the future Reich should embrace all regions that according to language, culture, and history are German and by their own free volition desire to belong to Germany. This clearly includes German Austria. In certain border provinces, genuine plebiscites should establish the will and national consciousness of the population. The territorial subdivisions of Germany ( Reich Lands, in my terminology ) should possess a well-defined autonomous status. Since the former German states developed according to dynastic interests, the borders of the Reich Lands must be drawn anew in accordance with ethnical and economic factors. The following ones would more or less correspond to the former provinces of Labor Court jurisdiction worked out under the Weimar Republic: Bavaria, Swabia, Franconia, the Rhine, Lower Saxony, the Hansa (the territory from Bremen to Lübeck), Brandenburg, Saxony (embracing parts of Thuringia), and Prussia (the present province of East Prussia). Austria might form one or two Reich Lands, according to the will of the people. It is suggested that the expression of the will of the people, in the Reich as well as in the Reich Lands and all other territorial units, be placed on a novel basis. The party system, so disastrous to democracy as a living force, should be replaced by direct popular selection. All candidates are to be » I have made this future German Constitution the subject of my book After Hitler's F all; Germany's Coming Reich, published in England in 1934 and in the United States in 1935. A summarizing essay, "Germany's Coming Reich," was published in Social Science, XVII (October, 1942), 345-55.

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nominated and chosen by the assemblies of citizens within small territorial commi'nities. This system has been preserved by Switzerland in her Landgemeinden. Universal suffrage, of course, must be restored and guaranteed. The voting age should be lowered to eighteen years. The legislatures of the Reich and the Lands would consist of two bodies for each unit, one resulting from universal suffrage, the other representing the natural associations of men formed on the basis of professions or of a common purpose and outlook on life. Among these natural associations we will find Labor, Management, Youth, and the territorial subentities: the provinces and communes in the Reich Lands, and the Lands themselves in the Reich. Each association must be represented by organs chosen by itself and embodying the forces of the sum total of its members and inner subdivisions. Labor, for instance, will be represented by two bodies, one resulting from general elections, the other embracing the spokesmen of the freely formed trade unions and professional groups. The third organ of any entity, be it territorial or associative, will be Leadership. Thus, a threefold scale of representative governance corresponding to a threefold scale of developing consciousness is realized. The harmonious cooperation of the different parts under the rule of law will assure the realization of the true will of the people. Political consciousness in its most collective, impersonal form is found within the "Sum Forces"; on this plane, the individual thinks and acts only as a part of a whole, whether it be nation, labor, or youth. A clearer, more personal degree of consciousness is attained where the individual thinks and acts as member of a smaller, more specific community possessing a group personality of its own, whether a Reich Land (within the Reich), the provinces (within the Reich Lands), Labor (within any of the political bodies), or You til (within Labor, for instance). These forces are represented by the individualized subdivisions, the unions, professional groups, etc. In legal language, the proposed Constitution calls bodies representing a sum total Tage (Diets, Parliaments)—Reichstag, Reichsarbeitstag (Reich Labor Parliament)—and the bodies representing a specific group Räte (Councils)—Reichsrat, Reichsarbeitsrat (Reich Labor Council). The clearest, most individual level of political consciousness is reached when the individual thinks and acts with a real or potential personal responsibility, as a leader. The principle that in this sense all are potentially leaders results from the fundamental recognition that all are free because they are human. Within organized society, the first level could be called the realm of the Father; men are His children and therefore brothers without further differentiation. The second level is the realm of the Son; men are members of His

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community. Through this we attain to the third realm, of the Holy Spirit; individual consciousness is poured forth upon us within the brotherhood of all brotherhoods. It is evident that the organs of leadership can no longer be found in a renewal of dynastic, hereditary monarchies. Blood is no longer the vessel for the right of rulership. Any leadership must emanate from the individuals within the community and must eventually return to them. Nor should the future constitution revive the forms of the presidential office. Ways to greater responsibility, stability, and a more unbroken line of historic continuity must be sought. The system of adoption, a combination of spiritual sonship and selection from among the people, appears best suited to this. The Head of the Reich, under public control and in accordance with constitutional forms, will nominate the Reichsfolger, the successor to the supreme office. The Head of the Reich, Justitiae Imperii Semper Augustus, is entrusted with the guardianship of Righteousness, that is the right relation of positive law to the moral law. Hence he shall have a veto power over all acts of the legislature, the right of legal initiative, and authority to call on the people for immediate popular legislation. He shall have the right to remove obscurities or contradictions in the law through authentic interpretation, which shall be binding upon himself as well as others. He may participate in the meetings of the High Court with all rights and duties of a judge. Before his own tribunal, all cases of legal or personal wrongs can be pleaded. The supreme right of mercy and clemency, which does not cover up but rather heals wrongs, will be in his hands, correlated with his office of implacable justice. The oath of office shall be administered in the name of the Trinity, from which all earthly power emanates. Whether at some later date it will be desired to restore the supreme office of the republic, the nondynastic Kaisertum in name must be left wholly to the people itself. Equality, as we have seen, is proper to the political, fraternity to the social, freedom to the spiritual sphere—in this triune obligation again the Trinity is mirrored. A social order must be established in which the idea inherent in the community of equals moving towards freedom becomes reality. Therefore, what must prevail is not the concept of an absolute freedom of private property and enterprise, but of their social functions and obligations. Absolute freedom can exist only in the realm of the spirit. Property has no claim to absolute character; it is subordinated to the well-being of the community. It must serve to provide proper sustenance for the lives of all men, so that they can devote themselves to the fulfillment of their spiritual tasks. The rigid Roman notions of private property must then give way to the Christian-

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Germanic idea of a public benefice, a trusteeship given to the individual for the sake of all. Like any trusteeship, it may be withdrawn by due process of law if the trust is betrayed. In principle, wage contracts should be replaced by provisions of coownership, or rather benefits arising from cotrusteeship.4 The soil, according to natural law the God-given foundation for the people's history, is to be regarded as common property. Land reform through legal means will return the large estates to the nation. The ground thus obtained will be handed out to farmers, tenants, the younger sons of the small landowners, and other groups. Thus there will be a process of intensive home colonization. Soil improvement and the opening-up of new farmland will supplement this program. Thereby, the increasing migration of expropriated masses into the cities can perhaps be stopped or substantially reduced, and a peasant class, peaceful in its very nature, developed. Within such a system, which would take the actual changes of the social and economic structure of Germany since the First World War into account, the community can rise superior to classes and thereby eliminate the danger of seeing classes overcome the community. There will be ample room left for private initiative, which is part of the human personality and helpful to the progress of society. "This may be called the cunning of reason," Hegel said, "that it sets the passions to work for itself." 5 The third sphere, that of spiritual freedom within society, is attained through political equality and social brotherhood. It is a synthesis of both, respected and guaranteed by the legislation of the Reich and necessary for the fulfillment of its own teleological nature. In this sphere, man is recognized as an-und-für-sich-fre», absolutely free. The dignity of the Reich, like that of any other state, is linked to the ministry of this freedom, for through the human element it receives its own historic functions. The coming Germany will aim at being more than a state, and as a symbol of this wider purpose it must preserve and renew the historic name Das Reich. While in the stricter sense of the word it is the organized community of the German people, the Reich is conscious of its historic interdependence with the greater Occidental community. It cannot be restricted by any racial or nationalistic concepts, and it does not set itself up as an antithesis to any other people but seeks communion with them. * Such modification was suggested as a principle of Christian social justice by Pope Pius XI, in his Encyclical Letter Quadragesimo Anno of May 15, 1931: "We deem it advisable that the wage-contract should, when possible, be modified somewhat by a contract of partnership, as is already being tried in various ways to the no small gain both of the wage-eamers and of the employers. In this way wage-eamers are made sharers in some sort in the ownership, or the management, or the profits." English translation by National Catholic Welfare Conference, "Forty Years After; Reconstructing the Social Order," in Sixteen Encyclicals of His Holiness Pope Pius XI, pp. 22-23. » Philosophie der Welt-Geschichte, in Sämtliche Werke, Vili, 83; English translation by J. Sibree, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 34.

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The foreign policy of the new Reich must be guided by these principles. Nothing that belongs to the Occident in origin and in spirit is really foreign to Germany. This principle will, in practice, eventuate in a peace policy, which is specifically incorporated into the constitution. One aim of foreign affairs should be the conclusion of interlocking treaties of arbitration between all states. Treaties should also cover the various political, economic, and intellectual fields, such as common citizenship, financial and customs unions, agreements on civil and penal law and the codes and ways of procedure, the establishment of an international school and university system (to be extended to other continents also), and so forth. Resulting from such a policy one may envisage the eventual rise of an Occidental commonwealth of free nations, in the legislative organs of which both the people and the national governments and the social and other subdivisions would be represented. A federal executive power, and an elected or selected Head of the Commonwealth should not be considered too Utopian a hope. Likewise, one could look towards an international court system culminating in a supreme court with jurisdiction over all arguments arising between member nations, or between a member nation and the commonwealth. Supreme economic organs, on a continental scale, would decide on the main large questions pertaining to this field. The basic rights of the individual and the constitutional government in each member nation should be guaranteed by Federal Charter. This commonwealth, which would be in an ever new historic appearance both the foundation and the goal of the Occidental world, would not be directed against any other federation in the East or in the West, for its ethos and position would demand the closest collaboration with the other component realms of the world of man. But, it will be asked, does there exist any chance, however slight, of seeing such an ambitious scheme realized? The answer can only be that to work for its realization will be the moral and historic duty of the reborn Germany as well as of all members of the Occidental community. With the time for reconstruction at hand, it will be wise to recall Bismarck's profound statement that foreign political mistakes become apparent only after the history of a whole generation.* The Achivi qui plectuntur are not always contemporaries of the erroneous action, and thus each generation is at the mercy of the wisdom of its elders. The conspicuous absence of true leadership in international affairs, added to the agitated sentiments of hate and the distorted thinking of the war years must certainly lend a note of pessimism to any discussion of the future. 7 How can anything good come from plans attempting to set up a system • Gedanken und Erinnerungen, in Die gesammelten Werke, XV, 568. A valuable survey of peace plans since 1306, was furnished by Edith Wynner and Georgia Lloyd, Searchlight on Peace Plans (New York, E. P. Dutton, 1944). The peace program of Pope Pius XII is unfortunately missing. 7

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of force first, while all discussion of the rules of law and morality to be enforced is postponed ad calendas Graecas? It can hardly be assumed that keeping watch over a defeated enemy will be enough to cement peace and friendship between the nations of the world, particularly when the former enemy also represents forces of the spirit, of history, of economic and social renewal, which are vitally needed by all. A tragic touch is lent to all this by the burning desire of so many, particularly among the young generation, "to do better than our parents did last time." How can this desire be fulfilled? Certainly not by self-isolation, by washing one's hands after having taken part in the verdict, and even less by heeding the counsels of vengeance and annihilation and thus letting totalitarianism win the day after all. It is patent that the misuse of confidence and faith in 1918 and afterward created a terrific mortgage which the democracies will hardly be able to redeem by coining more pat phrases, especially if even these are to be limited to a geographical line so as not to obstruct certain imperialistic designs. Such a policy, presented without moral conviction, evokes no faith. No self-respecting German democrat can gladly set the fate of his country upon such a course, for he must foresee that the whole vicious circle will start all over —destruction of whatever faith in democratic good will remains, blindness of purpose, misery, then the resurgence of violent nationalism and eventually a "Third World War. Any order created by bayonets must be maintained by bayonets, and through them it will perish. More bayonets, or their more determined application will create a stronger reaction—stronger in number and in violence.8 It is significant that the only sensible peace programs have come forth from the representatives of religion. And it is an even more hopeful sign for the future that around this question a united front of all Christian denominations, joined by non-Christian religions as well, has been developing ever more clearly. The basis for all the important pronouncements and joint resolutions adopted by the churches and religious groups in the United States and throughout the British Empire was provided by the Five Point Peace Program of Pope Pius XII.· It was first enunciated on Christmas Eve, 1939, and has since been repeated and elaborated several times. The kernel of this program is the following: First, assurance to all nations, large or small, victors and vanquished alike, of their right to life and independence, β "The peace-makers might as well not think of peace at all," Max Jordan observes, "if they are unwilling to keep in mind the fluctuations of human destiny. Balance of power is a most insecure foundation of peace, and no settlements are tenable which are imposed by force alone. Hitler has supplied ample proof of that. He was doomed from the outset because the peoples he meant to subdue would throw off his yoke at the first opportunity. It will be the same story, if Hitler's methods are applied to a defeated Germany." Beyond AU Fronts, pp. 348-49. β For an analysis of the peace program, see my article, "Outlines of an Equitable Peace," in Social Science, XVII (April, 1942), 117-23.

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with reparation for any infringement of those rights not by the sword but by the rule of justice and equity. Second, deliverance of all nations from the slavery of armaments. Third, the avoidance of past errors in creating or reconstructing international institutions, and the establishment of some judicial institution to guarantee loyal fulfillment or, in case of recognized need, revision and correction of peace conditions. Fourth, satisfaction of the real needs and just demands of nations and populations, even, where it appears necessary, by means of an equitable and covenanted revision of existing treaties. Fifth, development of a sense of responsibility in the peoples and those who govern them, cultivation of a hunger and thirst for justice, and guidance by universal love which is the essence of the Christian ideal. Between these points, there exists a logical chain of coherence so that none can be fulfilled without the one preceding it. This program would be well suited to provide the basis for a European commonwealth of nations, on lines proved by history and perennially alive, and for establishing a world-wide federation based on continental units. Father Gerald G. Walsh, S.J., of Fordham University has called my attention to the fact that there exists an unwritten Sixth Point that follows cogently from the preceding five: faith in a personal God, the source and yardstick of objective justice and all stable, absolute principles of morality, be it in private, public, or international life. Without such a foundation, all planning is mere fantasy. It will once more fail miserably, high-sounding as the phrases of the positivists may be. Humanitarianism without theism is but a frail and all too soon worthless shell. Unfortunately, it is today more than vain speculation to point out a final danger, a grave one indeed which for generations might undo what centuries of Christian-Roman development have built. It is the prospect of seeing Europe broken up into a western and eastern part, which would necessarily follow a corresponding partition of Central Europe, and particularly of Germany. One might compare this to a recurrence of the time when the Roman Limes and the frontiers along the great rivers divided the Western world into two essentially different halves. Yet a constant exchange ( osmotic, so to speak) of men, goods, ideas never ceased in Roman time, and finally the barriers of walls and rivers broke. The difference lies in this: then, the one side grew into the representative of Occidental world history, the Roman empire, and there Christ was born and the new and eternal creed fanned out beyond all frontiers to draw all men into the imperitim mundi; now, in Christian Europe, the creed would be on both sides, and neither the Western nor the Eastern part has a better historic claim than the other to a mandate as representative of the whole. Relations between the governments or occupying armies on the two sides might for some time be scrupulously correct; but the inevitable frictions are

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already manifest. It was certainly to be expected that each side should scheme to force the other out of the Continent at the earliest opportune moment. On both sides there are many who wish and work for the cause of the other. In the Eastern part, of course, there may soon be some "autonomous national government," already foreshadowed by the various "free national committees" which today exist. The attraction exercised by such a government must not be underrated, for in the Western part the policy still seems to be to permit only local or regional functionaries without even the pretense of national autonomy. They are open to the reproach not only of serving a foreign cause but also of contributing to a continued division of their country. To join hands with the government in the East, so the propaganda will run, would mean a reunion of what was artificially divided—a reunion under the tutelage of a foreign power, to be sure, yet under a political regime which is not based upon the principle of national exclusiveness. In this way national resentment resulting from national dismemberment, will be blended with the forces of revolution—a most potent compound indeed, and certainly one that will be effective among millions who could not be won by either the national or by the revolutionary catchword alone. Unless the victors can agree among themselves to evacuate the Continent and withdraw within their pre-war borders—leaving to Europe the peaceful development of her natural, historic unity—it can hardly be doubted that sooner or later a general conflagration will develop. Though Europe and the Near East might at first be the main battlegrounds, one may wonder whether such a war, with all its additional features of national and social revolution, would again leave the West unscathed and undisturbed in the enjoyment of its accustomed security and comfort. However, if we take the long view, we may be confident that whatever side may win in the conflict between East and West, the Thesis of World History, Europe, will always find herself again and emerge from all trials strong and rejuvenated. Even if for some dark hour of history she should be incorporated in a Eurasian block reaching from Vladivostok to Lisbon, she will soon shed what is alien to her in origin and spirit and return to a free and independent union of Occidental nations, fully conscious of her historic oneness and her Christian-Roman heritage. It has not yet become necessary for Europe to go through the last, dreadful cataclysm in order to regain her unity and strength. Should wisdom prevail (and this hope must never be abandoned, however little cause for it there may seem to be), Germany, recovered from the pangs of National Socialism, will be the most willing and the most supranational-minded of the nations. In this there lies the one hope for an enduring peace and of a general spiritual revival. At that point it may then become apparent that dialectically The City of God makes even the most evil of forces serve its purposes. Witness only the

THE OCCIDENT: SYNTHESIS 511 powerful reawakening of religion and the heroism of Catholics and Protestants whose cause has only been strengthened by martyrdom, death, and persecution. There is a hunger and thirst after freedom in Germany. Its utter loss, as always, is kindling its renewal. The pain of slavery is today infinitely deeper, the longing for freedom infinitely greater than under ancient despotism, for our Christian epoch has gained the inalienable knowledge that all men are free because they are men. Linked to these resurgent forces of millennial Christianity is the emergence of the universal-Ghibelline heritage, a merciless antithesis to nationalistic particularism. Today even those who do not think in historic terms or use historic terminology know that greatness cannot be gained by turning Germany into a rapacious province inimical to the traditions and the freedom of its own and all other nations. To aim at German domination over Europe as did the National Socialists would always result in turning Europe against Germany and inflicting terrible wounds on both. It is the integral union between Europe and Germany, as we have traced it through the centuries, which excludes German domination over Europe. It equally excludes any policy that would leave Europe without a Germany strong in spirit, self-respect, and freedom, a Germany ready and capable of placing herself and all she stood for during Europe's Christian-universal past wholly at the disposal of the Occidental Commonwealth. It may well be that the frightful consequences of aggressive nationalism will bring about a turn towards universal feeling everywhere. Among the peoples a dialectical process of this kind is entirely possible within the realm of group psychology. It would build on the realization that only a commonwealth of free nations bound together by law and righteousness will provide freedom for all and each to live humanly. We may find hope that the path towards this perennial goal of our history may be shortened in the fact that national hatred in Europe is even now far less pronounced than we had been led to believe for years. Though official policy may still be oriented on other lines, in France, too, weighty voices are heard today which advocate a new understanding between the two Carolingian sister-nations within the framework of a Commonwealth of Europe. Should this indicate an awareness of the need for overcoming the fateful Treaty of Verdun of 843, then both France and Germany might soon dedicate all their energy, for so long spent in mutual destruction, towards one great endeavor—the Occidental community of nations, then to be once more the basic thesis of our common heritage. Thus, in spite of all the devastation and blindness around us, we shall not despair. Mirrored in the great rivers that flow from antiquity and impressed indelibly into the consciousness of man will stand the monuments of Europe, in ruins perhaps but ever illustrious. Even if the Occidental nation, a people

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T H E O C C I D E N T : SYNTHESIS

above all nations, were cut into a thousand pieces, even if it fell prey to barbarians, we firmly hold that the idea of human oneness will rise again. In hunger and thirst for righteousness, men of all countries will break forth to reconquer what a dying age has lost. The old, yet ever youthful, soul of Europe, mother of sorrows and of glory, is still alive and we may trust that the promise of a realm of right, peace, and freedom is still true. It cannot fail to reveal itself again in the full light of history. High above the living, but with them in an unbroken communion, there are enthroned beneath the Cross of suffering and of redemption all the great whom we have brought back from the past, the leaders who are also the guardians of our future: anointed rulers, saints, thinkers, martyrs, the exalted or the nameless of generations past, a host ever present and ever more august. To them we tum in our great anguish, praying that bodies and nations may be formed to receive worthily the spirits of heroes, to undertake the contest that still lies ahead. To keep alive the knowledge of these forces which molded, and are still molding, our world is the office entrusted to the philosopher of history. Then, when darkness and tribulation are greatest, reason fortified by faith will tell us that behind Calvary there lies the Day of Resurrection, and a new cycle of Pentecost may begin.

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INDEX Aachen, see founded by Charlemagne : his cultus authorized at, 67; cathedral, 67; Rhenish Republic proclaimed at, 422 Abel, 40 Abelard, Peter, 106 Absolute, quest for union between the subjective and, 146; synthesis accomplished, 147; man's thirst after union with the, 188 Absolutism the antithesis to feudalism, 78 Academic Legion, triumph over the Metternich regime, 270 Accident insurance, 344,345 Across the Busy Years (Butler), 388 Acts of John, 36 Acts of Thomas, 37 Addresses to the German Nation, see Reden an die Deutsche Nation Address of the German Brethren . . . in America to the German People, 265 Address of the Notables, 375 Adelheid, empress, 74 Adoption, proposed system of succession, 505 Adrianople, battle of (378), 43 Aeneid (Virgil), 5 Aetius, Roman general, 47 Africa, rivalry of Italy and France for possessions in, 336 Against the Jews . . . (Luther), 164 Against the Papacy . . . (Luther), 164 Age of the Division of Faith, The, see Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung, Das Agnes, wife of Frederick of Büren, 104 Agricola, Cneius Julius, 15 Agri Decumati, Domitian's conquest of, 13 A grippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius, 184 Alane I, king of the Visigoths (395-410), 38, 43 Alane II, king of the Visigoths (485-507), 45 Alba, Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, duke of, 53 Albert II ( Albrecht), emperor, 157 Albert I (Albrecht), German king, 92, 129, 435 Albert, prince consort of Queen Victoria, 326 Albertus Magnus, St., 37, 143, 149, 183 Alboin, king of the Langobards, 54

Albrecht Alcibiades, margrave of Brandenburg, 168 Albrecnt the Bear, margrave of Brandenburg, 105 Albrecht von Hohenzollern, grandmaster of the Teutonic Order, 194 Alciatus, Andreas, Italian jurist, 184 Alcuin, 64, 66 Alexander II, pope, 102 Alexander III, pope, 110, 112 Alexander I, czar. Napoleon's treaty with, 219; asked Stein to Russia, 223 Alexander II, czar, 281, 331; relieved of obligation towards France, 318; threats of war against Germany, 333; AustroGerman treaty of Alliance communicated to, 334; assassinated, 336 Alexander III, czar, 336, 337 Alexander the Great, 73, 80, 87 Alexandra Fyodorovna, czarina, pro-German attitude, 396 Alfonso X of Castile, elected German king, 129 Alfred the Great, 73 Algabal (George), 295 Al-Kamil, sultan. 123 Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preussischen Staaten, 197 Alliance, pacific: peace treaty different from, 204 Alliances, Bismarck on ultimate value of, 335,336 Alpine provinces added to Frankish realm, 63 Alps, Roman roads traversing, 25 Alsace-Lorraine, 168, 217; French gained dominant position in, 188; offered by Austria to Prussia, 284; ceded to Germany, 322; opposition to reannexation of, 323; voluntarily renounced, 442 Alte und neue Götter . . . (Huch), 455 Alvensleben, Friedrich J., Count von, Prussian minister to Belgium, 365 Alvensleben, Gustav von, Prussian general, 296, 304 Alvensleben Convention ( 1863), 296, 304 Amalas un tha, queen, 53 Ambiorix, Germanic king, 18 America, meaning of word, 93n; effect of breaking away from European foundations, 169; see also United States

546

INDEX

American Rev olution, Frederick the Great's sympathies on side of, 200 Anacletus II, antipope, 97, 105 Anarchy, 28 Anastasius I, Eastern Roman emperor, 56 Andlau, Peter von, 161 Andrassy, Julius, Count, 3-30; negotiations with Bismarck, 333 Anglo-Saxons, eighth-century, 59 Annals (Tacitus), 13 Annals of Marbach, 115 Anno Lied, 8 Anschluss, 471; opposed by Junkers, 221; German Austria pledged to, 408; Tirol and Salzburg for, 425; provided for in Weimar constitution, 429; prevented by Allied ultimatum, 429n Anschiitz, Cerhard, quoted, 420, 427 Anselm of Canterbury, St., 146; quoted, 176 Antichrist, Emperor Fredtrick II called, 116; foretold, 117; reign to begin with end of Sacred Roman Empire, 134, 161 "Anti-Christ" (George), 385 Anti-Machiavel (Frederick the Great), 195 Anti-Semitism, see Jews Antisocialist Law ( Sozialisten-Cesetz, 1878), 289, 344, 345, 418; provisions, 347; lapsed, 348; repercussions in student circles, 376 Antiusury laws abolished, 256 Antonine age, 25 Apostolic See, king of the Romans did not need authority of, to assume title of emperor, 143 Appeasement, Roman Senate's policy of, 7 Aquinas, Thomas, St., see Thomas Aquinas Aquino, Thomas of, relative of St. Thomas, executed by Charles of Anjou, 128 Arabs, descent upon Spain, 57 Arbeiterfrage und das Christentum, Die (The Labor Question and Christianity, Ketteier), 256, 257 Arbeiter-Prosramm ( Lassalle ), 246 Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte, see Workers and Soldiers Councils Arbitration, in international affairs, 163, 190; demands for, 369; in labor questions, 432; Germany greatest exponent of international, 449; interlocking treaties, 507 Arcadius, Eastern Roman emperor, 44 Archipoeta, 110 Architecture, medieval, 94 Arianism, most Germanic tribes fell prey to, 35 Ariovistus, 6 sqq. passim Aristocracy unseated in many towns, 94

Armies, standing, a threat to peace, 202; antirepublican private, 435 Arminius, 12, 13, 55 Armistice, see World War, First Arms, early, 16. Army, all troops went over to Social Democratic party, 410; withdrawal and demobilization, 416; high command, 42-4; plan for conquest of the state attributed to, 464 Prussian, reorganized by Scharnhorst, 219; reform plans, 292 Army rule, an indication that state has abdicated, 464; permanent, leads to destruction of state, 465 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, quoted, 244 Arnold of Brescia, 106, 107, 142 Arnulf, emperor, 72 Artisans tended towards Hussite creed, 155 Aryan Outlook, The (Chamberlain), 290 Aryans, development of Indo-European religions toward monotheism, 23 Ascania, Brandenburg ruled by house of, 193 Ascendit de mare ( 1239), papal bull, 125, Atalaric, king of the Visigoths, 51 Athaulf, king of the Visigoths, 46, 87 Attains, Flavius Priscus, last pagan Roman emperor, 45n Augsburg, Roman foundation, 20; exports, 96 Augsburg, Diets of (1158; 1236), 120, 137n Augusta, wife of Emperor William I, 271, 293, 304, 316, 355; Bismarck's great adversary, 274; dangerous role in Crimean War, 281 Augusta Victoria, wife of Emperor William II, 301n, 362n Augustenburg, Christian August, Duke von, 299, 300 Augustenburg, Frederick, Duke von, 300, 301 Augustenburg ( Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg), family, £98 sqq., 308; see also Augusta Victoria Augustine, St., 35, 37sqq.; 71, 133, 145, 231, 252, 501; in painting by El Creco, 53; spiritual theocracy of, transformed into a political one, 65; illumination theory, 150; parallels between Kant and, 204, 205; distinction between concepts of Marx and, 251; quoted, 255 Augustus, 73, 134; Christ recognized jurisdiction of, 138 Aula, radical group of Viennese students, 270

INDEX Aurelian, Lucius Domitius, Roman emperor, 28 Aurinia, Germanic prophetess, 21 Austerlitz, battle of ( 1805), 216, 218 Austria, historic birth, 108; attempts to transform into imperial territory, 121; Privilegium mains, 157 sqq.; Privilegium minus: exemption claimed from service to empire, 158; conferred as a fief on Duke Rudolf, 159; defeat at Austerlitz, 218; Junkers objected to Anschluss with, 221; presidiai power in German Confederation, 243; Constitution of October 1,1920, 251; defeat of the Revolution of 1848, 266; plans for uniting Habsburg domains with future German Reich, 268; anxious to avoid Prussian predominance in Germany, 276; first important rift with Russia: ingratitude in Crimean War, 280; FrancoItalian war against, 283 sqq.; interests of, alone, served by German Confederation, 284; Prussian-Austrian contest, 296, 301; did not want a democratic German unity, 297; Gastein Convention between Prussia and : imperative to preserve her prestige in German Confederation, 301; increasing friction between Prussia and, as administrative powers of Schleswig-Holstein, 303; motion to push out of Confederation : move to mobilize army against Prussia for violating Gastein Convention, 305; left Confederation, consented to reorganization of Germany, 307; ingratitude towards Russia, 330; pre-war movements of extreme German nationalism, 335; establishment of national government pledged to Anschluss, 408; Tirol and SalzDurg majorities for Anschluss: Provisional National Assembly of 1918 stated that country was an integral part of German Republic: Deutsch-Oesterreich changed to Oesterreich, 425; representation in German Reichsrat, 429; Anschluss of Germany and, 471; World Court decision re customs union between Germany and, 472; included in future Reich, 503 Austria-Hungary, cut to bone by Revolution of 1848, 266; Bismarck's policy towards, 277; most formidable obstacle to inner consolidation of Germany, 278; policy of ingratitude, 280; attitude towards Schleswig-Holstein question (q.v.), 299; agreement with France and Italy providing common action in case of war, 313; neutrality in war of 1870, 318; defensive al-

547

liance with Russia, 331; Mediterranean Entente: alliance with Germany, 332; secret negotiations with Russia, 333; treaty of Oct. 1879, 334; Germany's renunciations re Austrian Germans renewed: Italy's grievance against, 335; Three Emperors' League, 336, 337; Austrian-Russian rift, 337; demanded Germany's support for expansion in Balkans, 367; menaced by internal dissension, 389; ultimatum to Serbia, 390; war declared, 390, 391; effect upon, of Allied recognition of national interests of Czechs, Slovaks, and South Slavs, 399; breakdown, 408 Avars, 48, 54 Averroes (Ibn Roschd), 57 Azzo, papal secretary of state, 74 "Babylonian captivity," 141, 142 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 188 Baden, 295; made a grand duchy, 215; tended towards North German Confederation, 311 Bad Kissingen, 329 Bakunin, Michael, 289 Balance of power, notorious doctrine of, 226 Baldung-Grien, Hans, 156, 160 Baldwin, Stanley, 441 Balkans, Austria s desire to expand in, 367 Ballhausplatz diplomacy, 278 Baltic area brought under Christian influence, 73 Balzac, Honoré de, 279 Bamberg, cathedral: St. Michael's Church, 100 Bancroft, George, quoted, 200, 273, 313 Banner, black, red, and gold, 261, 267, 428; Italian banners, 263; see also Flags Barker, Ernest, quoted, 1 Barlach, Emst, German sculptor, 447 Basel, Council of (1431-1449), 155 Basel, Treatv of (1795), 216; policy bore terrible fruit, 218 Basil, St., the Great, quoted, 255n, 257 Bauer, Gustav Α., German socialist statesman, 400 Bavaria, 243, 491, 503; added to Frankish realm: extent of, in days of Charlemagne, 63; invaded by Magyars, 72; transferred to Leopold of Austria, 105; bestowed upon Henry the Lion, 108; Thirty Years War, 176; becomes kingdom, 215; Allies anxious to aggrandize themselves at her expense, 295; courted by Bismarck, 305; attempt to create a southern confedera-

548

INDEX

Bavaria (Continued) bon in, 311; Hohenlohe as minister president, 328; republic proclaimed, 408; soviet government, overthrown, 420 Bayreuth, 29β Beatrice, daughter of King Manfred of Sicily, 128 Bebel, Ferdinand Α., 34fl, 347, 348 Becker, Carl H., Prussian minister of education, 447 Beelen Bertholff, Baron de, imperial plenipotentiary to Philadelphia, 201 Beer Cellar Putsch (1923), 439 Beethoven, 211 Belgium, domains under Wittelsbach rule, 141; invasion of, 391; invasion of the Ruhr, 43β; E upen and Malmédy annexed by, 442 Benedetti, Vincent, Count, quoted, 311, 316, 317n Benedict XV, pope, quoted, 415 Benedict of St. Andrea, chronicler, 74 Benedict the Christian, 97 Bene*, Eduard, 441 Benevent, duchy of, 61 Benevento, battle of ( 1266), 128 Benninesen, Rudolf von, 311, 373 Berchtold, Leopold, Count von, 390 Berengar II, margrave of Ivrea, 74, 75 Berlin, French population, 193; Napoleon in, 219; first barricades in 1848, 262; among great liberal cities, 266; Wrangel order«! to occupy, 270; educational influence, 371; revolutionists in 1919, 409; Catholic population, 431; never won over bv Hitler creed, 470; people stunned and gloomy in 1933, 484 Congress of 1878, 332 Treaty of 1921, 446 University of, 243; building, 372; number of students, 373; Theodore Roosevelt Professorship, 388 Berlin revolution, see Revolution of 1848 Bernard of Clairvaux, 137 Bemstorff, Johann Η., Count von, endeavors to prevent declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, 403 Bertram, Adolf, cardinal-archbishop of Breslau, 494 Besançon, Diet of ( 1157), 137n Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, 392, 397; opposition to unrestricted submarine warfare, 399 Beust, Friedrich Ferdinand, Count von, 330 Beverage of Germanic tribes, 16 Bible, Ulfilas' Gothic translation, 42

Bieberstein, Marschall, Baron von, 365 Bila Hora, battle of ( 1620), 176 Birdsall, Paul, quoted, 400 Bismarck, Herbert, Fürst von, 362n, 365 Bismarck, Herbord von, 272 Bismarck, Otto E. L., Fürst von, 97, 224, 239, 272 sqq.; quoted, 216, 272 sqq. passim, 293, 294, 304, 307, 312, 314, 319, 321, 325, 343, 344, 354, 365, 418; severe judgment upon Junkers, 221; debt to Lassalle, 246; motive power behind cautious foreign policy, 258; entrance into public life, 260; characteristics, personality, 260, 273; forebodings of end of monarchy, 264; opinion of Radowitz, 268, 269; forced to pay homage to spirit of 1848: his background and youth, 272; effort to brine about counterrevolution, 1848,274; deadly enmity between Princess Augusta of Prussia and, 274; alliance with Frederick William, 275; defeat at Olmütz: leader of Conservative party: power politics, 276; nightmare of coalitions, 276, 304, 325; desire to cultivate relationships with major Continental powers, 276; fear of upsetting equilibrium of forces on Continent, 277; delegate to diet of Confederation at Frankfurt, 278; and the Paulskirche, 278-87; relations with France and with Napoleon III, 278 sqq.; ensured for Europe one of its longest periods of peace: visualized modified great Germany, 279; policy in Crimean War, 281; relations with Emperor William I, 282; anti-British attitude, 282, 283; fear that monarchies might die out for lack of kings, 283, 413; sent as Prussian minister to St. Petersburg, 283; policy in FrancoItalian war, 284; what alliance with Napoleon III would have meant, 285; visit to Malet: first great memorandum, 286; proposals, 287; address outlawing Social Democracy, 289; as minister to court of Napoleon III: appointed Prussian Ministerpräsident and minister of foreign affairs, 292; "blood and iron" policy, 293; roots and instincts were Guelfish, 294; proposed German parliament on basis of universal suffrage, 297, 304; disliked wars, 298; handling of Schleswig-Holstein question, 300; earned hereditary title of count, 301; refused title Duke of Lauenburg, 301, 364; negotiations with Napoleon at Paris and Biarritz, 302, 303; negotiations with Italy, 303; became federal chancellor, 307; saw only one insti-

INDEX tution strong enough to check centrifugal tendencies, 308; ' duel" with Napoleon, 309; turning point in world's evaluation of, 310; refused exaggerated French claims, 311; effort to reestablish friendly relations with Napoleon, 314; publication of Ems Dispatch, 316; meeting with Napoleon after fall of dynasty, 319; support to Third Republic, 325; encouraged building of a French African empire, 326; created prince: jealousy of Junkers, 327; Junkers considered him a sort of traitor, 328; attempt against life, 329; system of alliances, 330; fear of combinations of Catholic powers, 331; efforts to prevent Russo-Austrian or Russo-British war, 332; visit to Francis Joseph, 334; on ultimate value of alliances, 335, 336; most famous treaty, 337; visions of a war ending in Germany's defeat, 338; account of William I's death, 339; court system the work of, 342; sense of duty, 343; imperial social legislation, 345; repressive measures, 345 ( s e e also Antisocialist Law); asked to help restore temporal dominions of pope, 351; attitude towards Catholicism, 351; introduced May Laws in Prussia, 354; 1888 address on European situation, 357; relations with Emperor Frederick III and Empress Frederick, 358; struggle between Emperor William II anaT359 sqq.; greatest work, 360; resignation: warning against breaking connection with Russia, 364; farewell audience with emperor, 364; forebodings re lapse of Reinsurance Pact, 367; belief in danger of social revolution: death, 368; addresses, 372; deterioration of German foreign political position after fall of, 392; wisdom of Russian policy, 436; Huch's aversion to, 457; army kept its place under, 465; found support from all parties, 470 Black, red, and gold, storm banner of Sacred Roman Empire, 261; symbol of German Revolution of 1848, 261, 262; of national unity for Austria, 267; colors of Weimar Republic, 428; over Stresemann's coffin, 452 Blätter für die Kunst, 383 Blockade of Central Powers, 397 Blood-and-race teaching, refutation of, 230 Blood Purge of June 30, 1934, 484, 499 Boccaccio, 143 Boehme, Jacob, 228

549

Bohemia, 63; estates revoked election of Ferdinand of Austria, 176; Thirty Years War, 176; pre-war nationalism, 335; became part of Czechoslovakia, 399 Bohemians, at battle of Lechfeld ( 9 5 5 ) , 72; rule of, overthrown, 83; loyalty to empire, 103; first nationalistic revolt, 155 Böhmer, Heinrich, 146 Boleslaw I, Chrobiy, duke, later king of Poland, 83 Boleslaw IV, duke of Poland, 108 Bonaventure, St., 145 Boniface, St. (Winfrid), 58 sqq. Boniface VIII, pope, 92, 111, 138 Bonn, Moritz J., German economist, quoted, 447, 448 Bora, Catherine von, 172 Bordeaux, revolt of Commune against government, 320; peace terms accepted at national assembly, 322 Borsig machine shops, 262 Bosnia, groundwork laid for Austria's acquisition of, 333 Boulanger, Ceorges Ernest, 337 Bourbons, fall of, 206 Bourgeoisie, growing influence, 240; suppression of, by proletariat, 250; vices with which it has infected proletariat, 289; see also Bürgertum Bourgeois revolution, prelude to a proletarian one, 251 Bouvines, battle of ( 1 2 1 4 ) , 119 Boys, small: National Socialism had no glory for, 492; see also Youth Boy Scouts, 380; see also Youth Movement Brailsford, Henry Noel, quoted, 479 Brandenburg, Friedrich Wilhelm, Count von, 270 Brandenburg, province, 503; cell from which modern Germany grew, 73; rise of Hohenzollem power in, 157; rising power of electorate, 179; center of gravity shifting to, 192; benefit of Huguenot émigrés to, 193; Prussian national assembly exiled to, 271 Brandenburg, city, Wendic stronghold "Branibor," 73; destroyed, 82 Brandenburg-Prussian state, 193, 194 Branibor, see Brandenburg, city Brant, Sebastian, quoted, 161, 163n Braun, Otto, quoted, 429, 491n Breadbasket Law ( 1875), 354 Breakspcare, Nicholas, see Hadrian IV, pope Brecht, Arnold, 478n Bremen, 61; maritime commercial law, 95;

550

INDEX

Byzantium, emperors of, refused to recogBremen (Continued) nize dignity of Charlemagne, 64; chiefopposed neodespotism, 96; in revolutiontains otter to unite domains with Sacred ary hands, 408 Roman Empire, 113 Breslau, 83 Brest-Litovsk, peace negotiations, 397 Briand, Aristide, 441, 444, 472; Europe an Cabale und Liebe (Schiller), 213 economic union as proposed by, 445; in Cabinet order of 1852, rescinding defavor of a United States of Europe, 452 manded by Emperor William II, 362 Britain abandoned by Romans, 44; Saxons Caesar, 18, 44, 73, 76; Germanic auxiliaries among troops of, 6; conquest of secured foothold in, 45 Gaul, 7; symbol of world conqueror: BrockdorfF-Rantzau, Ulrich Κ. C., Count crossings of the Rhine, 8; second expedivon, 416, 422 tion into Germany: description of lands Brüning, Heinrich, cabinet, 453; leader of and customs of Gauls ana Germans, 9; parliamentary group of Center Party, quoted, 10; on oracular gift of German 465 sq.; government of, 469 sqq.; plans women, 21 to restore HohenzoUem monarchy, 473; appeal to National Socialists for support, Caesar, supreme name of earthly power, 8 474; cabinet dismissed from office, 475; Caesar (Gundolf), 459 "Agrarian bolshevism": ban on Nazi or- Cain, 40 ganizations, 476 Calixtus II, pope, bull Sicut Judaeis, 98n Bruno, St., the Great, archbishop of Co- Calvin, established first Christian bank comlogne, 69 mitted to usury, 256 Calvinism, ideas of, foreshadowed, 36 Bruno of Carinthia, see Gregory V, pope Cambrai, vicarship over, sold to French Bruno of Toul, see Leo IX, St., pope Brunswick, Christian, Prince of, 177 king, 168 Brunswick, 491; revolution, 408 Campaign in France (Goethe), 206 Brunswick, house of: ceased to rule, 408 Canada, Prussian arms made possible the Brunswick-Liineburg, 113 British conquest of, 198 Brutus, 30 Canossa (1077), 354 Capet, Hugh, king of France, 85 Bryce, James, Viscount, 153 Capital all in hands of a few, 289 Buat, Edmond Α., French general, 324n Capitalism, antagonistic to Christianity,255; Buchanan, Sir Andrew, 297 Fascism and National Socialism last bulBulgaria, troubles over succession, 336; wark of, 469 Russia given free hand in, 337; collapse, Capitalistic state, 468 399 Capital punishment, Lex van der Lübbe Bullitt, William C., quoted, 496 provided, retroactively, 488 Bumke, Erwin, German jurist, 499n, 500n Bundesrat, 340; power of declaring war Caprivi de Caprare de Montecuculi, Georg L., Count von, quoted, 338 and of concluding peace, 399 Caracalla, Roman emperor, 28 Bunsen, Christian C. J. Β., 271n Carbonari, 280; Napoleon III a carbonaro, Buonaparte (Hölderlin), 211 Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, see Civil Code 280, 303 Bürgertum, 210, 288; Lassalle and Bismarck Carducci, Giosuè, 206 fighting against, 294; ruled the hour, 366; Carlsbad Decrees ( 1819), 243 see also Bourgeoisie; Middle class Carlyle, Thomas, 197; quoted, 119 Burgundians, 19, 44; converted to Chris- Carnegie, Andrew, 370 tianity, 23 Carol I, king of Rumania, 304 Burgundy reunited with empire, 101 Carolingians, German line extinct, 70; Burkhard of Ursberg, quoted, 117n Welfs linked to, 103 Bute Cabinet concluded peace with France, Cassiodorus, 48; quoted, 51n 198 Catalaunian plains, see Châlons, battle of Butler, Nicholas Murray, 344, 357, 444, Catherine II, the Great, empress of Russia, 119n, 286 445, 472; address to Reichstag, 224; quoted, 224, 358, 371, 372, 388, 389, Catholic Associations of Germany, meeting 446 of Central Committee, 352 Catholic Center party, 351, 352 Byron, 207; quoted, 119

INDEX Catholic church, see Roman Catholic church Cautio criminali! (Spee), 185, 186 Ceconi, Ermano, Italian physician, 456 Celtic Europe integrated into Occident, 67 Censorship, lifting of, demanded, 262 Center party, 355, 356; "something fantastic on political plane," 353; student groups, 376; Brüning leader of Parliamentary group, 465 sq.; coalition with Social Democrats, 471; reluctant to cooperate with Schleicher, 482; under strict control: seats in the Reichstag, 498 Central Europe, stable order essential as guaranty for Russia, 242 Châlons, batde of, ( 273 or 274 ), 47 Chamberlain, Sir Austen, 441, 444 Chamberlain, Houston S., 290, 486 Chamberlain, Lady, wife of Sir Austen, 441 Chancellorship, German Empire, 341 Chanson de Roland, 63 Characteristics of the Present Age, The (Fichte), 214 Charlemagne, alliance with Lombards, 54, 60; treaty with Nicephorus, 55; achieved synthesis between forces of Rome and the nations, 60; alliance with daughter of Lombardie king, 60; returned bride: defeated Desideri us and became king of Lombardie Italy, 61; as patrician of Rome, became defender of the church, 61; sees founded by, 61, 67; power extended: help invoked by Pope Leo III, 63; coronation: realm on Continent, 64; ideas of state and government: De ctoitate Dei the guiding philosophy of realm, 65; sense of justice: genius as a lawgiver: revival of learning in reign of, 66; reckoned among the saints, 67; imperial diadem called his crown, 68; Dürer's study for portrait of, 69; division of empire, 69; Otto the Great restored universal realm of, 73; tomb opened, 86 "Charlemagne's Crown," Corona Borealis called, 68 Charles II, emperor of Austria-Hungary, 284 Charles IV, emperor, 157, 158; imperial constitution, 94; Golden Bull, 153; conferred Austria on Rudolf as a fief, 159 Charles V, emperor, territorial power, 167; attitude at Diet of Worms: dynastic policy, 168; Charles VI, emperor, 196 Charles VII, emperor, 196 Charles Martel, see Karl Martell Charles of Anjou, 127

551

Charle« of Hohenzollern, see Carol I, king of Rumania Chaudans, 20 Chicherin, Georgi Vasilyevich, 436 Children, illegitimate, 431 Christ, elements in pagan religions pointing toward, 24; Incarnation, 31, 33, 77; Docetic notion of, 35, 36; second coming, 84; predestination, 151; revelation bestowed upon mankind, 349 Christendom or Europe (Novalis). 213, 214 Christendom saved from onslaught of Islam, 77 Christian I, king of Denmark, 298 Christian IX, king of Denmark, 299, 300 Christian, bishop of Prussia, 90 Christianity, conversion of Germanic tribes to, 23; adapted to every level of culture: knowledge which determined course of Christian thought, 33; victory in the empire, 37; Russian, came from Byzantium, 62; defended justification of temporal order, 79; way paved for synthesis between Hellenic-Arabic thought and, 85; fulfillment of history in advent of, 229; re-Christianization of man the only hope for democracy, 258; charged with failure, 395; reawakening of a living faith, 396 Christian-Occidental realm, idea of an allembracing, 65 Christian Republic of Nations, 214, 241; see also Respublica Christiana Christian unity, 495 Chronica regia Coloniensis, 52 Church, see Roman Catholic church Church and state, Charlemagne's desire to unite, 65 Churches, in war times, 395 Church Fathers, declared usury illicit, 256 Churchill, Winston, 441 Church property, see Ecclesiastical estates Cistercian monastery at Hefta, 146 Cities, Roman foundations, 20; highest ambition of, to receive Reichsfreiheit, 93; governments, 94; denied admittance to Reichstag: leagues of, declared illegal, 94; self-contained communities, 95; work of Stein in, 222 Citizenship, Roman, 26; universal, 204 City of God, see De civitate Dei City of Man, 252 Civil code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch), 342, 354 Civilization, why our, fell, 258; decaying order in need of radical remedy, 369

552

INDEX

Civil power, armies and navies inferior to, 464 Civil procedure, code of ( Strafprozessordnung), 342 Civil servants, high standing guaranteed, 430 Civil war, 420 Civitas Dei, see De Civitate Dei Civitas Terrena, see Earthly City Class distinctions, 248 Class prejudice, 170 Claudian Road, 25 Claudius I, Roman emperor, 9 Claudius II Gothicus, Roman emperor, 28 Claudius Civilis, Germanic prince, 21 Clausewitz, Karl von, 404 Clemenceau, Georges, 337, 416, 422 Clement II, pope, 101 Clement IV, pope, 128 Clergy, measures to deprive of influence on instruction and education, 353 Clerics induced to break vows, 167 Climatic conditions change with physicalcultural factors, 16 Clovis I, king of the Salían Franks, 55 Code Napoléon, 215 Collective bargaining, 432 Collectivism, concord between individualism and, 248 Cologne, made a metropolitan see, 67; school of painting, 96; influence of mystics on school of painting, 153; Cathedral of, symbol of German unity, 259; revolution, 408 Colonization, intensive home, 506 Colonna, Sciarra, 142 Commandment, supreme, regarded as folly, 235 Commentaries (Caesar) 7, 10, 11, 18 Commerce, 96 Commercial law, common code of, adopted, 95 Commoners, legal distinctions between property of nobles and that of, erased, 222 Commonwealth of free nations, 507, 509, 511 Communism, primitive, 247; democracy's policy of appeasement towards, 469 Communists, German, party splitting away from Social Democratic party, 394; attack on organized labor, 434; party leadership lacked distinction or independent judgment: worked to destroy Weimar Republic, 467; working with National Socialists to obstruct democratic govern-

ment, 480; seats in the Reichstag, 498; see also Independent Socialists ( name of German Communists before splitting away from Social Democratic party) Competition, limitless free, 256 Comradeship, 379 Confederation of the Rhine, 215; Stein outlawed as enemy of, 222; princes of, should be deposed, 241 Confessions (St. Augustine), 38 Conquest of the Past ( Loewenstein), 417 Conrad II, the Salian, emperor, 68, 101 Conrad I, German king, 70, 17 In Conrad III, Cerman king, 104, 105; quoted, 106; invited to assume imperial diadem, 106 Conrad IV, German king, 127, 193 Conrad, duke of Masovia, 90 Conradin of Swabia, king of Jerusalem and Sicily, 127; excommunicated: beheaded, 128; statue, 129 Conrad of Swabia, see Conrad III, German king Conrad the Red of Lorraine, 101 Conservative party, Bismarck undisputed leader of, 276 Constance, Council of (1414-1418), 154 Constantia, empress, marriage, 109; brought Henry VI Naples and Sicily, 114, 115, 116, 117; power given to papacy by, 118 Constantia, queen of Aragon, 128 Constantine I, the Great, Roman emperor, 30, 44; Donation of, Dante's views, 138 Constantine VII, Porphyrogenitus, Eastern Roman emperor, 80 Constantinople, politically the center of gravity, 77; center of trade with India, 96 Constituent National Assembly, universal suffrage in elections, 414, 419, 420 Constitutio Antoniniana (212), 26 Constitutio ducatus Austriae ( 1156 ), falsification of, 158 Constitutio in favorem principum (1231), 121 Constitution, Hegel's analysis of a: the work of centuries, not something manufactured, 237; the "true" constitution, dangers if not realized, 238; German, advocated by Stein, 241 sq.; hope for shattered by Carlsbad Decrees, 243; of Frankfurt ( 1849), 263, 266, 271, 272; Prussian (1848), imposed by Frederick William IV, 271; Prussian, revised (1850), 275; of North German Confederation ( 1867), 311, 340; of German Empire (1871), 340; amendment to, introducing parlia-

INDEX mentarianism, 399 sq.; of German Republic ( 1919), 428; violated by National Socialists, 497; continued validity of, 497, 500; of the coming Reich, proposed, 504 Constitutional questions, Lassalle's address on, 293 Constitutional reform, 171, 241, 399, 491 Constitution of Germany, The (Hegel), 237 Contarmi, Aluise, Venetian ambassador, quoted, 180 Coordination the principle of life, 1Θ3 Corinth, Lovis, 447 Corona Borealis called "Charlemagne's Crown," 68 Corpus Juris Civilis, 28 Corvara, Pietro de, see Nicholas V, antipope Costanza, la gran, see Constantia, empress Cotta, Lucius Aurunculeius, Roman general, 18 Council of People's Commissars, Proclamation of the, 414 Courts, laws guaranteeing independence of, amended by National Socialists, 489 Court system, the work of Bismarck, 342 Cracow, 83 Craftsmen, 94; tended towards Hussite creed, 155 Cranach, Lucas, 156 Crassus, Marcus Licinius, triumvir, 13 Creation, 232 Crescenzi, 74 Crimean War (1853-1856), Austria's ingratitude to Russia in, 280; Bismarck's policy, 281 Criminal code, amended, to afford greater protection to Nazi regime, 489, 490 Criminal justice, principle of nulla poena sine lege, abolished by Nazis, 488; general principle of National Socialist: ne bis in idem tossed aside, 489 Criminal procedure, code of ( Strafprozessordnung), 342; amended, to afford greater protection to Nazi regime, 489 Criminology, foundations for modern, 184 Croatians proclaimed their independence, 267 Crusade, First: interrupted friendly relations between Jews and Christians, 97 Third, 107, 113, 122 Culture, declining moral status of Western, 17; decentralization of, in Germany and Italy: idea of universal, 291 Cumans, pagan tribe, 90 Curia, as a political power: alliance with German princes, 111; influence during reign of Frederick III, 159; movement

553

against, identified with "national" cause, 165 Currency stabilization, 439 Curtius, Ernst, negotiated customs union with Schober, 472 Cusanus, Nicholas, cardinal, 152, 156, 161, 165; philosophy of, 162; quoted, 163; protest against slaughter for witchcraft, 184; prophecy fulfilled, 188 Customs union, Curtius's negotiation with Schober for a: World Court decision, 472 Custozza, battle of ( 1848), 267 Cuxhaven in revolutionary hands, 408 Czar of Russia heir of Byzantium, 214 Czechoslovakia, independence recognized by Italy and France, 399 Czechs, in revolt, 267 D'Abernon, Edgar V., Viscount, 440, 442 Dalmatia, under Eastern Rome, 55; Charlemagne's power reached to coast of, 63 Dances, of Germanic youths, 17 Danes, revolt among, 81; invasion of England and German coastal regions, 82 Dante, 29n, 30, 37, 116, 125, 141, 384; quoted, 115, 127, 206, 215 sqq. passim; and the seamless robe, 126-40; prophecy of future Habsburg policies, 129; judgment upon the Florentines, 130; universal peace as prerequisite for universal goal, 132; "Protestant ' tone: universal outlook, 135; moral philosophy of rulership, 139; historic optimism, 205 Danzig, Napoleon in, 219 Dardanelles to remain closed, 337 Darmstadt, Prussian ministers invited to, 478 Dassel, Reinald, Count von, archbishop of Cologne, 109, 119, 138 David of Auesburg, 145 Dawes, Charles Gates, 448 Dawes Plan ( 1924), 448, 449 Debts, national, 202; see abo Reparations Decius, Roman emperor, 28 De civttate Dei (St. Augustine), 37 sqq., 252; guiding philosophy of Charlemagne, 65 Declaration of Paris ( 1856), 369 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), 16 De docta ignorantia (Cusanus), 162 Degradation, of human spirit by agnostic philosophy, 235 De jure naturae et gentium (Pufendorf), 190

554

INDEX

De la littérature allemande (Frederick the Great), 198 Democracy, form of state nearest to men's natural equality and liberty, 209; when true, may set in, 250; re-Christianization of man only hope for, 258; essential to modem society, 343; policy of appeasement towards Communism, 469 Democratic movement, could no longer be eliminated, 279; pacific in principle, 3Θ9 Democratic spirit of students and teachers at universities, 374 De monarchia (Dante), 129, 136, 138, 141, 143 Denmark, conflict over Schleswig-Holstein question, 298 sqq.; neutrality in war of 1870, 318 De officio hominis et civis . . . ( Pufendorf), 209 De praestigiis daemonum . . . (Weyer), 184 Depression, economic, of 1932, 479 De rationali et ratione uti (Gerbert), 85 De recuperatione Terre Sánete (Dubois), 92 Deruga Case, The, see Faü Deruga, Der Descartes, 37 Desiderius, king of the Lombards, defeated by Charlemagne, 61 Dett, Klara, wife of Frederick the Victorious, 160 "Deutsche Grösse" ( German Greatness, Schiller), 212, 371 Deutscher Bruderkrieg or Deutscher Bürgerkrieg (1866), 301 sqq. Deutsches Museum, Berlin, 160 Deutsche Zeitung, excerpt, 405 Deutsch-Oesterreich, see German Austria Deutschtum, 143 Devoirs de Vhomme et du citoyen, Les (Pufendorf), 209 De vulgati eloquentia (Dante), 129 Dialectical process, graphic illustrations, 231 sqq. Dialectics, term, 232 Dialogue, cosmic, 232 Dietrich of Regensburg, 145 Dietrich von Bern, see Theodoric the Great, 52 Dimitroff, Georgi, acquitted in Reichstag fire trial, 490 Diocletian, Roman emperor, 28, 29 Directive power, twofold needed, 139 Disarmament, 423n, 445; demands for, 369; Germany's unilateral, 443 District Workers councf's, 432

Diviciacus, 7 Divide and rule principle, 7, 20 Divine Comedy (Dante), 128, 129 Dnieper, 96 Dobrzyn, Order of, 90 Dominate, 26 Dominicans, 149; administration of indulgences, 166 Domini terrae, 121 Domitian, Roman emperor, 13 Don Carlos (Schiller), 213 Dorpat, 73 Dreyfus affair, 290 Drinking habits, 16 "Dropping the Pilot" (Tenniel), cartoon, 358 Druids, 10, 23; doctrines on migration of soul, 21 Drummond, Sir Eric, quoted, 443 Dubois, Pierre, 92 Duels, Catholic students opposed to, 375; scars an object of ridicule, 380 Dünaburg, 96 Dunant, Jean Henri, 285 Duns Scotus, 33, 37, 145; quoted, 151; point of contact with Thomistic mystics, 151; Christocentric view, 501 Dürer, Albrecht, 68, 156 Earthly City, 38, 39, 40 Eastern Aid scandal, see Osthilfeskandal Eastern March, 63, 108; see also Austria Eastern Roman Empire allowed to fall to Turks, 157 East Francia, see Francia Ebert, Friedrich, 404, 415, 426; quoted, 409, 410, 412; office as chancellor handed over to, 412; character, 413; elected to Reich presidency, 421; opposition to Versailles Treaty, 424; death, 442; Bullitt's plea for support of government of, 496 Ecclesiastical estates, secularization of, demanded, 169, 172; secularized, to be returned to former owners, 179 Eckhard, Master, 119, 144, 145, 148 sqq.; quoted, 149n Economic crisis, 463; National Socialist owed election victory to, 467 Economic problems, 431, 433, 448 Economic reality, moving power of world to Marx, 247 Economy, planned, 432 Eddas, 24 Edecon, father of Odoacer, 48 Edict of October 9, 1807, 221

INDEX Edict of Restitution (1629), 179 Editha, first wife of Otto the Great, 80 Education, youth, 225; nineteenth-century, 371 sqq.; democratic, 431; extension of state and Nazi party control to, 492; international schools and universities, 493 Edward III, king of England, 142 Eisner, Kurt, 408, 435 Elbe, 13 Elections, of emperor by the people, 266; universal suffrage, 414, 418, 420, 428; last free, 497 Elizabeth of Bavaria, wife of Conrad IV, 127, 129 Elizabeth of Bavaria, wife of Frederick William IV, 351 Elizabeth of England, wife of Frederick V, elector palatine, king of Bohemia, 176 Emancipation, edict of (1807), 221 Emergency government, 463 Empereur, title, 68 Emperor, as "supreme peasant," 78; power of, usurped by princes, 94; as protector of republican freedom, 107; temporal swora given to, 138; king of the Romans did not need authority of Apostolic See to assume rights and title of, 143; elector palatine was judge over, in case of dispute: three rival, claiming throne, 154; Wallenstein, the true emperor ( oerus Imperator), 182; authority of, strengthened, 192; Stein seen as vertu Imperator, 242, 457; Prince Eugene of Savoy as oerus imperator, 457; of the Germans ( Kaiser der Deutschen, 1849), election, 263, 26Θ; German (Deutscher Kaiser, 1871), constitutional powers, 341; see also Kaisertum; Monarchy Emperor worship, under Dominate, 30 "Empire," concept of, 87 Employer-employee relationship, 432 Ems Dispatch ( 1870), 316 Enabling Act (1933), 498; violation of, 499 Engels, Friedrich, 240, 255; quoted, 169, 170, 172, 246, 294n, 468; on private ownership, 247; see also Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels England, parallel between German and English imperial development, 122; on her path to world empire, 164; alliance with Frederick the Great, 198; attitude toward Schleswig-Holstein question, 299; Mediterranean Entente, 332; declared war on Germany, 391; tee also Great Britain

555

Enmities, hereditary, 202 Entente, neglect of imponderables threw weight to side of, 393; alliance with Japan, 395 Enzio, son of Emperor Frederick II, captured by Bolognese, 125 Epidemic of grippe, 407 Equality, 431; natural, 208 Erasmus, 156; plan for averting war, 161; protest against slaughter for witchcraft, 184 Erdmann, Johann Eduard, quoted, 71, 89 Erfurt Parliament, 269, 276 Eriugena, John Scotus, 85, 145 Erzberger, Matthias, 398, 435 Estates, large, returned to nation, 506 Ethics subjugated to political expediency, 258 Eucken, Rudolf, 151 Eugene III, pope, 100, 106 Eugenie, empress of France, 310 "Eulenburg affair," 366 Eulenburg und Hertefeld, Philipp F. Α., Fürst zu, 187, 364; quoted, 388 Eupen, annexed by Belgium, 442 Europe, interdependence of affairs, continental and insular, 44; Magyar invasion, 72; Erasmus' conception of, as an harmonious order, 161; anxiety lest whole edifice might topple, 258; union of, the dream of German democracy, 263; Bismarck's fear of upsetting equilibrium of forces on Continent, 277; mother of sorrows and of glory, 512; see also Occident Eusebius Pamphili, 6 Evening Post, New York, 422 Executions, wholesale: during Peasants War, 172; in Bohemia, 176 Expediency as rule of conduct, 204 Expropriations in Bohemia, 176 Exsurge Domine (1520), papal bull, 166 Factory Councils, Law on, 433 Faith, reconciliation of, with science, philosophy, and reason, 183; overcoming of reason by its synthesis with, 234 Falk, Paul Ludwig Adalbert, Prussian state minister, 354, 355 FaU Deruga, Der (Huch), 456 Family, 245; Youth Movement a revolt against, 380; relations, 492 Farmland, opening up of new, 506 Fascism, attempt to link itself to historic traditions, 485; denied dignity of individual, 486; resistance of Italian youth to

556

INDEX

Fascism (Continued) totalitarian propaganda, 492; see also National Socialism; Totalitarianism Fatherlands, quasi-sovereign, 173 Fatimites, 81 Faulhaber, Michael, cardinal-archbishop of Munich, 494 Faustus, Doctor, 85 February Revolution, France ( 1 8 4 8 ) , 261 Federation of free states, public right should be founded upon, 203 Federations, international: desirability of, 190, 191 Felix V, antipope, 160 Ferdinand I, emperor, becomes king of Bohemia and Hungary, 167; stops burning of witches, 184 Ferdinand II, emperor, 178 sqq.; election as king of Bohemia revoked, 176; relieved by assassination of Wallenstcin, 182 Ferdinand V, the Catholic, king of Castile, Leon and Aragon, 167 Feudal system. 57, 78 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 210; quoted, 214, 225, 220, 227; awakener of Europe to self-conscious freedom, 224; hope for a Christian Republic of Nations, 241; faith in youth: demanded national education, 378 Fifth column, 211 First International, 345 Fischer, Karl, founder of German Youth Movement, 380 Five Point Peace Program of Pope Pius XII, 508 Flags, Polish, 262, 263; see also Banners Flaubert, Gustave, 240 Fleet, revolt among sailors at Kiel, 408 Florentines, Dante's judgment upon, 130 Flowing Light, see On the Flowing Light Foch, Ferdinand, 416, 422. Fortschrittspartei, 292 Foundations of the Nineteenth Century . . . The (Chamberlain), 290 Fourteen Points, see Wilson, Woodrow Fra Celeste (Huch), 455 France, Germanic origin of nobility, 57; nation a consequence of Treaty of Verdun of 843: fratricidal wars witri Germans, 69; Franks and Romanized natives blend into a new French nation, 70; how kings dealt with magnates and nobles, 71; Drang nach Osten: attitude toward the empire, 91; aspired to imperial dignity, 92; papacy under influence of monarchy, 141; secret alliance with the Great Elec-

tor, 192; Frederick the Great's victory over, 198; nationalistic oppression: overlord of greater part of Germany, 215; strangulation of autonomous national forces, 221; Stein's hope of throwing off rule of, 221, 222; Stein outlawed as enemy of, 222; Bismarck's desire to establish friendly relations with, 277; strongly social regime of Napoleon III, 279; period of the "Liberal Empire," 285; Bismarck's efforts to secure neutrality of : viewed internal conflict in Germany with favor, 302; designs upon Rhineland, 302, 303; Napoleon's secret agreement with Austria, 303; exorbitant demands for compensations, 310; agreement with Austria and Italy providing common action in case of war, 313; program of liberal constitutional reforms: inner weakness of Napoleonic regime, 315; declared war on North German Confederation, 318; struggle of Third Republic, 320; capitulation of Paris: free election of national assembly, 322; demands to be made by, in case of victory in war of 1870, 323n; German policy of reconciliation with, 325, 326, 329; Hohenlohe as ambassador to, 329; rivalry with Italy for African possessions, 336; waiting to strike blow of retaliation, 337; Franco-Russian relations developed into a military convention, then an alliance, 367; Russian-French agreements reaffirmed: army mobilized: Germany declared war on, 391; relationship between Germany and, after 1919, 425; occupation of Frankfurt-am-Main, 435; invasion of the Ruhr, 436; attitude of conservative groups towards Germany, 448; of liberal groups, 449; archtype of centralization and statism, 457 National Assembly of 1871, 421 Francia, relations between East and West, 69; pacification of West, 75 Francis (Francis of Assisi), St., 125 Francis II, emperor, 223; declared empire dissolved, 215 Francis I, king of France, 167 Franciscans, 149, 151; monasteries, 354 Francis Ferdinand, archduke, 390 Francis Joseph, emperor of Austria, 267, 284, 296; agreement of Villafranca concluded with Napoleon III, 285; ambition to gain influence in Germany, 299; negotiations with Bismarck, 333; Bismarck's visit to, 334 Franco-Italian war, 283 sqq.; victory over

INDEX Austria constituted a victory for ideas of 1848, 285 Franconia, 503; Huguenots in, 193 Frangipani, 74 Frank, Hans, National Socialist minister of justice, quoted, 488, 489, 498 Frankfurt-am-Main, diets of, 143, 243; first national assembly of Germans, 263 sqq. ; failure: assembly dissolved, 271; congress, 1859-61, 296; incorporated into Prussia, 306; Treaty of, 323, 326; revolution, 408; occupation of, by France, 435; see also Constitution of Frankfurt Frankish-Roman Empire, 70, 92 Franklin, Benjamin, 200, 201 Franks, 19, 42; converted to Christianity, 23; kingdom, 55, 56, 63, 69; national sentiments, 55; Pepin the Short in Italy, 60; revolt, 81 Frantz, Constantin, 239 Frederick I, Barbarossa, emperor, 79, 91, 106, 127; Charlemagne's tomb opened by, 86; privilege granted to Worms, 94; privileges granted to Lübeck, 95n; protection of Jews, 98; consented to extradition of Arnold of Brescia: imbued with notion of universal ethos of his office: died as leader of Third Crusade, 107; quoted, 108n; desire to guarantee everyone's freedom, 109; Henry the Lion's refusal to help, 112; statesmanship triumphed over military defeat, 112 Frederick II, emperor, 19, 106, 114-25; called "The Greatest Frederick," 73; Golden Bull of Rimini, 90; only reproach against, 91; laid foundation for free-city development, 94; scourge of the church political, called Antichrist, 115; drove fight between spiritual and temporal power to its climax, 118 sqq.; coronation, 119; quoted, 119, 124; shunned help of heretics, 120; privileges granted German princes, 121; excommunicated: crusade, 122; self-coronation in Jerusalem, 123; reign pointed toward development of a federal community of nations, 124; marriage to Isabella : relations between Louis IX and, 124; the beast from the sea: interest in sciences, 125; impostors claiming to be: legends woven around, 126; in the Divine Comedy, 129 Frederick III, emperor, 157,159 Frederick VII, king of Denmark, 299 Frederick I, king in Prussia, 193, 194 Frederick II, the Great, king of Prussia, 73, 195 sqq.; quoted, 193, 198; alliance with

557

England, 198; spell exercised over minds of men, 199; portrait, 200 Frederick III, German emperor and king of Prussia, 282, 283, 304, 358 Frederick, Empress, see Victoria, wife of Emperor Frederick III Frederick, duke of Swabia, brother of Conrad III, 104, 105 Frederick V, called the Winter King, elector palatine and king of Bohemia, 176 Frederick, Prince, see Frederick III, German emperor and king of Prussia Frederick of Büren and Staufen ( Hohenstaufen), Count, father of Conrad III, 103; married Agnes, daughter of Henry IV : vested with duchy of Swabia, 104 Frederick of Hohenzollem, made margrave of Brandenburg, 155 Frederick of Scharffeneck, son of Frederick the Victorious, 160 Frederick the Handsome of Austria, coregent with Emperor Ludwig IV, 142 Frederick the Victorious, elector palatine, 160 Frederick William I, king in Prussia, 194; quoted, 195n, 200 Frederick William II, king of Prussia, 216 Frederick William III, king of Prussia, 219, 221, 243 Frederick William IV, king of Prussia, 259, 351; chosen emperor of the Germans, 266; constitution imposed by: unworthy of sacred crown, 271; quoted, 271n, 275; alliance with Bismarck: rejected Frankfurt crown: imposed new constitution, 275; plans for unity: humiliation of Olmütz, 276 Frederick William, of Brandenburg, the Great Elector, 192 Frederick William, crown prince, see Frederick III, German emperor and king of Prussia Frederick William, crown prince, son of William II, 41 In "Free Corps," 435 Freedom, of the will, 2, 38, 501; historic process moves towards greater liberty, 1; establishment of principle of inalienable, 35; metaphysics of, 35; private law the great refuge of liberty: soil the foundation, 78; God's greatest gift to man, 132; individual, within church, 149; philosophy of, 152; conflict between reason, morality, and, 205; man in his essence is free born, 228; Hegel's concept, 229; state as guardian of liberty, 244; unwise or

558

INDEX

Freedom ( Continued ) amoral use of, 501; absolute, can exist only in realm of spirit, 505 Free students, 379 Freie Schulgemeinden, 381; founder, 378 Freie Studentenschaft at Leipzig, 379 French African empire, Bismarck encouraged building of a, 326 French Revolution, Goethe with allied armies of intervention against, 206; German concept of, 208; influence, 210 sqq. Friars Minor of Erfurt, chronicle of, quoted, 128 Friedlaender, Ludwig, quoted, 25 Friedrich und die grosse Koalition ( Mann ), 196 Frikka, 22 Frisians, 20, 298 Fritsch, Werner von, German general, 499η Frontiers, antiquated obstacle« between peoples, 452 Fuente, Rodrigo de la, portrait by El Greco, 53 Führer, office unknown to constitution, 499 Funeral of Count Orgaz (El Greco), 53 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 454 Galen, Clemens August, Count von, bishop of Münster, 256, 494 Galicia, plan to restore to Poland, 267; part of, incorporated in Czechoslovakia, 399 Galla Placidia, queen, 46 Gallienus, Roman emperor, 55 Gambling, 17 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 304 Gastein Convention (1865), 301; violated by Prussia, 305 Gavit, John P., 447 Gelasius, St., pope, 50 Generals, most great, of Prussia were nonPrussians, 295; rarely good statesmen, 482 Geneva, first Continental peace society, 369 Geneva Convention (1864), 369 George I, king of England, 196 George III, king of England, 198 George, Stefan, 93, 101, 295, 382 sqq., 455, 458, 460, 501; quoted, 76, 114, 383, 402; poems, 385 George Podiebrad, king of Bohemia, 159, 160 Gepidae, 54 Gerbert of Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II, 84 sqq.; quoted, 67 German, meaning of term: never a bloodrace concept, 89

German-Americans, American influence spread through writings and contacts, 264 German-Austria, see Austria German-Austrian alliance of 1879, linked to Russia by various treaties, 330 German Communist Party, 419 German Confederation, constitution, 242; hope for a true constitution shattered, 243; all tendencies towards national unity outlawed, 244; Prussian consent to reestablishment of, 276; served interests of Austria alone, 284; proposals for creation of a national representation of the Cernían people, 287; conflict over SchleswigHolstein question, 298 sqq. German Empire, a princes republic, 340; Reich administration, 341; national colors, 342; unstable policy of pre-World War years: catastrophic climax, 362 "Cerman Crcatneu" (Schiller), 212, 371 Germania (Tacitus), 11, 14 sqq., 25 Germanic tribes, auxiliaries among Caesar's troops, 6; first historic impulse towards a supranational commonwealth, 8; region inhabited, 9; religion and social customs, 10, 62; characteristics, 11; influx into Roman army: Roman attitude towards: ideal of beauty to Romans, 14; akin to Latin nations, 15; customs, 16 sqq.; warlike character, 17; loose federal structure, 18; many still distinct units: internal discord, 20; prosperity and political order, 25; infiltration into Roman Empire: in revolt: defeat: league dissolved, 27; result of subdivided collective personalities, 71, 72 Cermanicus, 54 German language, 153 German law, 96 Cerman Nationals, 426, 434; attitude towards Versailles Treaty, 450; coalition between National Socialists and, 450; effort to torpedo Locarno Pact and League of Nations policy, 465; worked to destroy Weimar Republic, 467; seats in the Reichstag, 498 German People's Party, 426 German Question, solution, 298-312 German Republic, 374, 380; flag, 262, 428; proclaimed, 412; composition of provisional government, 414, 418; provisional government menaced by extreme radicalism, 415; post-war era, 417; Proclamation of Nov. 12, 1919, 418; way cleared for national assembly, 420; how German situation differed from the Russian, 420,

INDEX 421; National Constituent Assembly: how votes were distributed : law on Provisional Power of Reich, 421; National Assembly yielded to threats of an Allied ultimatum, 424; presidential powers, 429; public opinion swinging in favor of, 439; foreign policy, 449; spiritual achievements, 454; lack of understanding of historic ideas, 460; lasting historic meaning, 462; never asserted its authority over the army, 464; Communist and National Socialist parties worked to destroy, 467; Brüning government, 4Θ9 sqq.; public attitude towards its failures and achievements, 473; borders of Reich Lands, former provinces of Labor Court jurisdiction worked out under, 503 Weimar Constitution, 342, 399, 426, 427-33, 483, 484; work of framing, 421; violated by Papen commissariai government, 477; unwritten limits set to changes of, 484n; changes made by Hitler's cabinet, 490; revived with downfall of Hitlerism, 496; rightful legal basis of Germany: never formally abolished, 497; violation of, 499; basis on which any democratic reconstruction should start, 500; amendments necessary, 503 Germans, ambivalent attitude towards things foreign, 6; towards empire, 8; praised by Herod Agrippa, 12; Tacitus and the, 13-23; points of contact in Germanic and Jewish character and destiny, 21; universal attitude, 71; affinity between Greek and German mind, 87; contradictions in nature of, 87; first appearance of the name, 89; prepared way for Ghibelline philosophy of history, 141; unpolitical attitude developed, 191 German Tariff Parliament of 1868, 353 Germany, Hercynien Forest, 10; described by Caesar, 10; unattractive to Tacitus, 15; climate, 16; unique position, 20; tenth century the turning point from Germanic to German, 70; tribal structure, 70, 71; later results of decentralized form of government, 71; again a unit with Italy and the empire, 75; period of greatest power, 76; the Battleground of Europe, 89; political structure, 92; monarchy subjected to constitutional limitations, 101; drifting away from universal concept, 102; reduced to state of an aristocratic oligarchy, 106; relationship between states and monarchy, 122; parallel between imperial development of England and of, 122; dis-

559

integration into countless territories, 154; growing contempt for nation, 155; a den of robbers: cultural creativeness, 156; shame over state of things in, 160; multistate anarchy, 163; corruption of leaders, 164; "national" reaction, 165; territorial losses by Treaty of Westphalia, 188; balance between regional and national forces needed, 189; parallel between America and, 194; Fichte's appeal for building of nation, 224; disunion and strife scourged by Fichte, 225; German unity, 254 sqq.; demand for unification, 261; demand for proclamation of One German Republic, 262; democratic movement could no longer be eliminated, 279; Büreertum the victor of 1848, 288; cultural decentralization, 291; economic union of North and South, 311; imperial question, 321; consolidation of position of unified Reich (q.v.), 325; North-South problem, 328; a federal union, 340; deterioration of foreign political position after fall of Bismarck, 392; Emperor William II agreed to transform, into a parliamentary, democratic monarchy, 399; dangerous yielding to purely military viewpoint, 404; Wilson's demand for governmental changes, 406; revolutionary sentiments unleashed, 407; how can crisis be solved? 495; the reborn, to be foundation and goal of Occidental world, 50112; of the future, 503; effect of partition of, 509; most supranational-minded of the nations, 510 Gertrude, St., the Great, 146 Gesang des Deutschen (Hölderlin), 213 Cesta Frederici (Otto, bishop of Freising), 104 Ghibellines, 71, 138; doctrine of temporal and spiritual powers, 21; contest between Guelfs and, 104 sqq.; philosophy of government, 118; philosophy of history, 141; Ludwig IV supported by, 142; sonship in church, 149; mentality often triumphed over class interest, 171 Gibbon, Edward, 16; quoted, 58 Giers, Nicolai Karlovich, de, 334, 337, 367 Gilson, Etienne, and Philotheus Böhner, 145; quoted, 41, 65 Gneisenau, August W. Α., Count Neidhardt von, quoted, 220 Gnesen, 83; introduced Magdeburg law, 96 Gnosticism, Docetic views, 35 Gobineau, Joseph Α., Comte de, 486 God, Hebrews nad no images of, 21; hypo-

560

INDEX

God ( Continued ) static union between true, and true man, 34; wills that all shall be'saved, 228; absolute unity: identity of Subject and, 229, 230; knowledge of, 234; history the working of His government, 501; faith in a personal, 509; see also Trinity Kingdom of: relations to world, 39 Godfrey of Bouillon, 97 Godhead, triune, see Trinity Gods, Germans had no images of, 21 Goebbels, Joseph, quoted, 481n, 482n Goethe, 163, 198, 211, 259, 384, 438; quoted, 2, 198, 199, 20Θ; with allied armies of intervention against French Revolution, 206; horror of war: as minister of state, 207; mutual esteem of Napoleon and, 207 sq.; last universal seer of humanism, 208 Goldeη Book of Virtues, The, see Cuídenos Tugendbuch Golden Bull of Charles IV ( 1356), 94, 153 Golden Bull of Rimini ( 1 2 2 6 ) , 90; excerpt, 124 Cooch, George P., 200; quoted, 207, 214, 245, 348, 392, 447 "Good King Wenceslas," 74 Gorchakov, Prince Aleksandr Mikhailovich, 304, 331; quoted, 278 Gotha Program ( 1 8 7 5 ) , 346 Gothic kingdom, 46 Gothic style, Arabic influence, 57 Gothic War ( Procopius ), 55 Gothic wars, 43 Goths, 19, 28, 42 sqq.; converted to Christianity, 23; wiped from stage of history, 53; denude Pannonia and Noricum of troops, 54 Götz von Berlichingen (Goethe), 198 Government, loose federal structure: division between civil and military power, 18; superiority of monarchy over republican magistrates, 28; military superseding civil authority, 29; concentration of power in one hand, 29; republican, 203; affinity between Marxian and Christian philosophies of, 252; sustained by forces that created it, 214 Grabmann, Martin, quoted, 144 "Graeber in Speier, Die" (The Graves of Speyer, George), 114, 385 Gramont, Antoine Α. Α., Duc de, 323η; war threats, 316; affront to King William, 317 Grandi, Dino, 472

Gratian, Roman emperor, 43 "Graves of Speyer, The," see "Die Graeber in Speier" "Gray Eminence," see Holstein, Friedrich Α. Κ. F. von "Great," group of men called, 73 Great Britain, war with Russia prevented by Bismarck, 332; rejection of Vatican peace note, 398; see also England "Greater Prussia," opposition to idea of, 267 Great Migration, 97 Great War in Germani/, The, see Grosse Krieg in Deutschland, Der Greco, El, 53 Greek federations, 87 Creeks, affinity between German mind and Greek, 87 Gregory I, the Great, St., pope, 98n Gregory V, pope, 84, 101 Gregory VI, pope, 9 7

Gregory VII, St., pope, 97, 104, 111, 136, 138; Henry IV's struggle with, 102; originator of papal Two Swords doctrine, 137 Gregory IX, pope, 90; quoted, 122; bull Ascend it de mare, 125 Grey of Fallodon, Edward G., Viscount, 392 Groener, Wilhelm, general, 410, 415, 420, 466 Grossdeutsch, term, 267 Grosse Krieg in Deutschland, Der (Huch), 455 Grünau, Werner, Freiherr von, 41 In; quoted, 410 Grünewald, Matthias, 153, 156 Guelfism, 103 sqq.; affinity of nationalism to, 487 Guelfs, concern about eastern expansion lost sight of Rome, 91; taken from name of Welfs, 103; contest with Hohenstaufen, 104 sqq. ( see also Ghibellines ) ; policy contributed to inner division of Germany, 113; sonship in church, 149; 'nfluence during reign of Frederick III, 159; reaffirmed political tenets of Bull Unam Sanctum, 166; heritage fell mainly to Protestant princes, 168 Güldenes Tugendbuch (Spee), 186, 187 Gundolf, Elisabeth, 459 Gundolf, Friedrich, 86, 454, 459; quoted, 8, 83, 198, 208, 383 Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, Thirty Years War, 177, 179 sqq. Gutenberg, 156

INDEX Haase, Hugo, 407 Habsburg monarchy, see Austria-Hungary Habsburgs, Dante's prophecy of future policies of, 129; rise in power: fraud and usurpation, 157 sqq.; Sacred Roman Empire a dynastic superstructure belonging to, 167; at battle of Bila Hora, 176; civil wars between house of HohenzoIIem and, 197; opposition to rale of, 267; revolt against, 304 Hadrian I, pope, 61, 74 Hadrian IV, pope, 107, 110, 137n Hague Conferences ( 1899 and 1907 ), 369 Hahnke, Wilhelm von, general, later fieldmarshal, 364 Haldane mission to Germany (1912), 392 Hambach Festival (1832), 261; leaders thrown into prison, 262 Hamburg, 61; plundered and burned, 82; maritime commercial law, 95; opposed neodespotism, 96; in revolutionary hands, 408 Hamilton, Alexander, 264 Handel, 188 Hannibal, 13 Hanover, 300, 308; incorporated into Prussia, 306; became Bismarck's natural ally, 311 Hanseatic League, 94, 503; Wallenstein's plan for alliance of, with Spain, 178; rising power, 179; never turned National Socialist, 471 Harden, Maxmilian, 366 Hardenberg, Georg Friedrich von, see Novalis Hardenberg, Karl August, Fürst von, 220 Hartzheim, Joseph von, S.J., quoted, 165n Harun-al-Rashid, 69 Hauptmann, Gerhard, 454 Havelberg destroyed, 82 Heavenly City, see Civitas Dei Hebbel, Friedrich, 211 Hebrews, see Jews Hefta, Cistercian monastery, 146 Hegel, Georg W. F., 15, 19, 29, 33, 37, 69, 133, 174, 211, 501; quoted, 1, 7, 32, 33, 40, 99, 146, 175, 176, 224, 228-40 passim, 244, 377, 446, 463, 506; understood importance of struggle of church for orthodoxy, 35; neglected idea of a world state, 131 ; recognized foundation of Occidental Christian philosophy, 151; world-embracing genius, 227 sqq.; Ranke's criticism of, 236; doctrine of the state, 237 sqq., 244; accusations against, 239; influence, 240;

561

a founder of modem social state, 245; idealistic dialectics transformed into Marxian concepts, 245 sqq. Heidelberg, University of, 160, 189 Heiliges Römisches Reich, see Sacred Roman Empire Heine, Heinrich, quoted, 103 Hêliand, epos on, 62 Hellenic-Arabic thought, way paved for synthesis between Christianity and, 85 Helvetians, 8 Henderson, Arthur, 472 Henry II, St., emperor, 100, 101; as duke of Bavaria, 82, 108 Henry III, emperor, 101 Henry IV, emperor, 94, 101 sqq.; protection of Jews, 97; struggle with Pope Gregory VII, 102 Henry V, emperor, 104 Henry VI, emperor, 73, 91, 104, 106, 114, 116, 117; elevated to rank of coregent with title Caesar: marriage to Constantia, 109 Henry VII, of Luxemburg, emperor, 129, 130, 140 Henry II, Plantagenet, king of England, 109 Henry III, king of England, 110; quoted, 120 Henry VIII, king of England, 167 Henry II, king of France, 168 Henry IV, king of France, 92 Henry I, the Fowler, German king, 72, 193; storming of Branibor, 73; married to Matilda: family, 73 Henry VII, German king, son of Emperor Frederick II, humiliated before German princes, 121 Henry, duke of Bavaria, see Henry II, emperor Henry, duke of Swabia, son of Conrad III, 106 Henry the Lion, duke, 91, 106, 456; Bavaria bestowed upon, 108; refusal to help Frederick Barbarossa, 112; placed under ban of the empire, 113 Henry the Proud, duke of Bavaria, father of Henry the Lion, 105 Hercynian Forest, 10 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 8, 210 Heresy, 119 sqq. Hermann of Aftaich, abbot, quoted, 127n Hermann the Cheruscian, see Arminius Hermanric, king of the Ostrogoths, 43 Hermas, St., quoted, 255n

562

INDEX

Herrn undurians, 20 Herod Agrippa II, Jewish king, 12 Henriot, Edouard, 439 Herding, Georg, Count von, 399, 404 Herzegovina, groundwork laid for Austria's acquisition of, 333 Hesse, 308; Huguenots in, 193; Electoral, incorporated into Prussia, 306 Hidalgos, Spanish: descended from Visigoths, 53 Hildebrand, 102; see also Gregory VII Hildesheim, 67 Hilgard, Theodor, 264 Hindenburg, Oskar von Beneckendorff und, 466 Hindenburg, Paul von Beneckendorff und, 386, 396, 410, 411, 415, 424, 474; demand that peace offer be made at once, 405; responsible for emperor's decision

to a b d i c a t e , 4 1 3 ; elected Reich president,

442; field marshal effaced by president of German republic, 465; aversion to Brüning, 466; refused consent to parliamentary form of monarchy: reelection, 475; could not violate demilitarized zone, 478; Schleicher's effort to keep from doing the irrevocable: Hitler made palatable to: treason, 483; appointing Hitler chancellor, a breach of trust, 497 Hintze, Paul von, 410 Hippo besieged by Germanic Vandals, 41 Historic consciousness, dimmed by Protestantism, 168; effect of America's break from European foundations, 169 History, thesis of world history, 1-12; the carrying out of God's plan, 1; the everpresent memory of mankind, 2; meaning, 3; St. Augustine's theology of, 31-41; philosophy, 33, 232; basis oiphilosophy of, 35; telos of, from the Manichaean viewpoint, 37; cycles, 174; new era in world's, 206; spirit of, 224-40; Hegelian view of, 228 sqq.; fulfillment of, in advent of Christianity, 229; human factors triumph temporarily over historic reason, 242 History of Philosophy (Hegel), 236 History of the Popes (Ranke), 4 Hitler, Adolf, 437, 439, 466, 474, 475; a determined Anglophile, 362; made chancellor, 484, 497; authorized providing expedient laws, 488; assumption of office of 'Führer" after Hindenburg*s death: did not dare run for presidency: hasty "plebiscite," 499; administration anxious to em-

>hasize that it was not revolutionary but

Îegitimate, 499

Iiitlerism, Brüning's constant whip, 470 Hitler Youth, 492; exact opposite of Youth Movement, 380 Hobbes, Thomas, 190; quoted, 231 Hobhouse, Leonard T., 239 Hofmann, August Wilhelm von, 375 Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Feodora, Fürstin zu, half-sister of Queen Victoria, 326 Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Chlodwig K. V., Fürst zu, quoted, 309, 311, 319, 327 saq. passim, 355; background, career, .26 sqq., 355; ambassador of Frankfurt: espoused cause of South German federalism, 328; as ambassador at Paris, 329; fear of combinations of Catholic powers, 331; attitude towards Austrian Alliance, 334; reply to Austria's demand for amendments to Triple Alliance, 367; as chancellor and Prussian prime minister: death, 367, 368 Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Gustav, Prince zu, cardinal, 326; Vatican refused recognition to, 353 Hohenstaufen house, 103 sqq., 114; downfall, 77; inherited Salian lands, 104; contest with Welfs, 104 sqq. ( see also Ghibellines; Guelfs); supremacy over competitors for supreme office, 109; plan to make imperial crown hereditary in, 115; rule reestablished, 119; helped to develop Sacred Roman Empire, 141 HohenzoUerns, rise in territorial power, 157; civil wars between, and house of Habsburg-Lonraine, 198; no longer had a throne, 411 Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Leopold, Erbprinz von, candidacy for the Spanish throne, 313; renunciation of crown under pressure, 315 Holbein, Hans, 156 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 385; quoted, 211, 213, 488 Holland, a part of the empire, though estranged, 161; lost to empire, 176 Holls, George F. W., 370 Holnstein, Max, Count von, 321 Holstein, Friedrich Α. Κ. F. von, 332, 363, 436; character, basic tenets, 365; fantastic planlessness of foreign policy under, 366; influence prevailed against renewal of Reinsurance Pact, 367 Holstein, Austria to administer, 301; see also Schleswig-Holstein

INDEX Holy Alliance of Russia, Austria, and Prussia, 241 Holy Roman Empire, term, 79; see also Sacred Roman Empire Homer, 384 Homo Austríacas, 108 Honorius, Western Roman emperor, 44, 45, 46 Hoover, Herbert, 416 Hospitality, universal, 204 House, Edward M., 400 Huch, Ricarda, 59. 68, 82, 93, 149, 194, 216, 29In, 455 sqq.; quoted, 42, Θ0, 125, 269, 457, 458 Hugenberg, Alfred, 451 Huguenots, French: in Brandenburg, 193 Humboldt, Alexander von, 85 Humiliation, plans of revenge grow out of, 277 Hungarian legion, plan to raise up an insurgent, against HaDsburg rule, 304 Hungary, Charlemagne's power stretched over, 63; founding of kingdom, 83; attacked by Cumans, 90; break with Austria, 267 ; port of, incorporated in Czechoslovakia, 399; see also Austria; AustriaHungary Huns, 43; invasion upset European structure, 27; an anti-Occidental power, 48 Hussite wars, 155, 176 Hutten, Ulrich von, 15β, 160, 165, 375 Ibn Roschd, see Averroes Icelandic literature, 24 Idealism, philosophic, 151 Idea of mankind, 228 Ideologies, mass mania whipped up under guise of political and racial, 186 "Ides of March," 363 "Illuminated Doctor," 152 Illumination theory of St. Augustine, 150 Independent Socialists, 407, 412, 426; in provisional government of the Republic, 414, 418; replaced by Majority Socialists, 420; see also Communists, Cerman India, English set forth to conquer, 164 Individualism, concord between collectivism and, 248 Indo-Europeans, see Aryans Industrial codes, 346 Industrialists, Fascism and National Socialism last bulwark of, 469 Inégalité des races humaines, V (Gobineau), 290 Inflation, 437

563

Innocent II, pope, 97, 105 Innocent III, pope, 99η, 100, 117, 118 Innocent IV, pope, message to Al-Kamil's son, 123 Institutions, human, but fleeting moments in a continuing process, 236 Insurance, social, 344, 345, 432 International arbitration, see Arbitration International court, 163, 507 Internationalism, 369, 469 International law, should be founded upon federation of free states, 203; created in peace conventions, 369; integral part of Cerman law, 428 International peace congress at Brussels (1848), 369 International reconciliation, in education, 431 International relationships, Bismarck's desire to cultivate, 276 International Worldngmen's Association, 345 Intravit Jesus . . . (Eckhard), 150 Invalidity insurance, 344, 345 Isabella of Castile, wife of Ferdinand V, the Catholic, 167 Isaías foretold a Messianic realm, 31 "Isar Athens," 295 Isenheim Altar, 153 Italy, Senators disclaimed necessity of continuing imperial succession, 40; independent peasant clan destroyed, 50; reign of Theodorlc, 51; part of Southern, under Byzantine sovereignty: under Eastern Rome, 55; again a unit with Germany and the empire, 75; birth of nation, 112; revolt of Habsburg subjects in Upper, 267; plan to give Lombardo-Venetian kingdom to, 268; awakening national sentiment of, 280; Franco-Italian war, 283 sqq.; negotiations between Bismarck and, 303; treaty with Prussia, 1866, 303; agreement with France and Austria providing common action in case of war, 313; neutrality in war of 1870, 318; proposal to oppose France in Morocco, 326; Mediterranean Entente, 332; adherence to German-Austrian system, 335; rivalry with France for African possessions, 336 Jagow, Gottlieb von, 390n Jahn, Ludwig, 261 James I, king of England, 177 Japan, alliance with Entente, 395 Jefferson, Thomas, parliamentary rules, 264

564

INDEX

Jerome, St., quoted, 255η Jerome, St., painting, 53 Jerusalem, Frederick II entered, 123 Jewish communities, 97 Jews, 29, 244; had no images of God: points of contact in Germanic and Jewish character and destiny, 21; monotheism: identified salvation of Israel with salvation of world, 31; world-historical importance, 33; status in cities and empire, 96 sqq.; persecuted by crusaders, 97; placed under imperial protection, 98; tolerance towards: acquitted of ritual murder accusation, 120; campaign against Hebrew writings, 165; civil liberties, 242; Bismarck on bill to grant emancipation to, 261; discrimination against, 290, 437; anti-Semitism condemned by Address of the Notables, 375; fortitude, 459 Joachim of Floris, abbot, 117 Joanna, queen of Castile, mother of Emperor Charles V, 167 Joffe, Adolph, Soviet diplomat, 419n John, St., 134, 147; prologue to Gospel, 35 John XII, pope, 74 John XIII, pope, 79, 80, 84 John XXII, pope, 149; declared a heretic and deposed, 142 John, king of England (John Lackland), 122 John II, king of France, 153 John, archduke of Austria, Reich regent and president of Frankfurt national assembly ( 1848-1849), 412 John, cardinal-deacon, 74 John Chrysostom, Saint, 30 John of Salisbury, 137 Jordan, Max, quoted, 496n, 508n Joseph II, emperor, 200 Judaeo-Christian traditions, parallels between Marx and, 250 sq. Judas Iscariot, 30 Judges, Prussian, 197; independence of, 430; laws guaranteeing independence of, amended by National Socialists, 489 Jugendbewegung, see Youth Movement Julian the Apostate, Roman emperor, 55 Julius II, pope, 166 Jung, Assessor, editor of Rheinische Zeitung, quoted, 263 Junkers, 219; grip on state, 220; an antisocial and antinational class: objected to Anschluss with Austria, 221; not interested in German question, 287; opposed employing army for other than internal political purposes, 302; jealous of Bis-

marck's title of "Serene Highness," 327; considered Bismarck a sort of traitor, 328 Justice, 132; prerequisite of reign of, 205; administration of, 488 Justinian I, Eastern Roman emperor, confirmed legitimacy of Frankish possessions beyond Alps, 56 Kaisertum, 76, 107, 263; fell asleep under Frederick III, 157; Protestant, necessarily particularistic, 179; Lassalle aimed towards, 294; negotiations for a North German, 312; idea of, contained in elected president, 457; restoration of, to be left to people, 505; see also Emperor; Monarchy Kant, 37, 146, 198; quoted, 204n, 210; doctrine on limits of the knowable, 151; Perpetual Peace, 201 sqq.; parallels between St. Augustine and, 205; notion of a world republic rejected by Hegel, 238 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 115, 460 Kapital, Das (Marx), 246 Kapp, Wolfgang, 435 Karl August, grand duke of Saxe-Weimar, 274 Karl Martell, 48, 57; defeat of Saracens, 58; policy of Pepin broke with that of, 60 Katholikentag, 352 Keller, Gottfried, 68; quoted, 254 Kellogg, Paul M., 447 Kelsen, Hans, quoted, 251 Kepler, Johannes, 183 Kerensky, Aleksandr Feodorovich, 496 Kettcler, W. E., Freiherr von, bishop of Mainz, 256, 345, 351, 494; quoted, 266, 309; regarded speedy German unity as vital, 309 Kiel, in hands of mutineers, 408 Kiev, 96 "King by the Grace of God," first use of formula, 60 King of the Romans did not need authority of Apostolic See to assume title of emperor, 143 Kings, Germanic, their powers limited, 18 Kissling, Johannes Baptist, quoted, 356 Kleindeutsch, term, 267 Kleist, Heinrich von, 213 Knappertsbusch, Hans, 454 Knights Templars, 123 Kolberg, 83 Kollwitz, Käthe, 447 Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, see Communists, German Königgrätz, battle of ( 1866), 305

INDEX Königsberg, Napoleon in, 219 Kossuth, Louis, 267 Kraft durch Freude movement, 48Θ Kral, Slavonic word for king, 68 Kreuzzeitung, 286 Krüger Telegram of 1896, 365 Kriiswica, Treaty of ( 1230), 90 Kulmer Land turned over to Teutonic Order, 90 Kulturkampf, 350 sqq.; opening act, 353; contest between kingship and priesthood, 354; liquidated, 356; share in reawakening Catholic spirit, 375 Kunigunde, St., empress, 100 Kürenberg, Joachim von, 363 Kyffhäuser mystery, 127 Laband, Paul, 368n Labor, reduced to complete impotence by National Socialist regime: likely to emerge stronger from ruins of totalitarianism, 494 Labor code, 432 Labor legislation, 361 Labor Question and Christianity, The, see Arbeiterfrage und das Christentum, Die Labor unions, 432; attack of radical groups directed against, 434 Lagarde, Paul de, quoted, 239 Land, see Soil Lander, term, 490 Land reform, 506 Landwehr, 292 Langobards, descent on Italy: ferocity, 54; see also Lombards Language, French: became diplomatic language, 188 German, 192; influence of Suso, 153 Latin: last diplomatic instrument in, 188 Lansing, Robert, 423; note of Nov. 5, 1918, 401; note acknowledging German request for an armistice, excerpt, 406 Lasker, Edward, 312 Lassalle, Ferdinand J. G., 256, 257, 259, 345, 418; definition of the state, 246; socialism of, 255; quoted, 293; Bismarck's homage to, 294 Lassalle (Oncken), 239 Lateran Council, Fifth ( 1512-1517), 166 Lateran Treaties (1929), 485 Lauenburg, duchy of, 301 Law, 95 sqq.; world of reason must have its stable laws, 2; private, the great refuge of liberty, 78; state the sole creator of, 190; Joseph l i s reform of civil, and of

565

civil and criminal procedure, 201; Code Napoleon, 215; codifications, 342; of the land confirmed in Republic, 418; administration of, 488; amended, to afford greater protection to Nazi regime, 489, 490 Law on Factory Councils ( 1920), 433 Law on Reich Commissars ( 1933), 490 Law on the Reconstruction of Germany (1934), 490, 491,499 Leaders, corruption of German, 164; great, not Prussian, 219 Leadership, 504, 505; youthful, in Revolution of 1848, 269 League of German Princes ( 1785), 200, 216 League of Nations, unfolding of policy, 441; Germany admitted to membership, 442, 443; German policy, 449; German Nationals' effort to torpedo, 465 Covenant, clauses anticipated by Pufendorf, 191 Learning, revival of, in reign of Charlemagne, 66 Lcbenslauf des heiligen Wonnebald Pück ( Huch ), 455 Lechfeld, battle on the (955), 72 Ledebour, Georg, 407 Legislation, see Antisocialist Law; Law; Social legislation Legislatures, 504 Legnano, battle of (1176), 112 Leit>niz, Gottfried W., FreiheiT von, 185n; quoted, 186 Leipzig, Reichsgericht, 342; revolution in, 408 University of Commerce, foreign students, 373 Lemberg province, towns under Magdeburg law, 96 Lenin, 250, 496; quoted, 246n Leo III, St., pope, 63, 67 Leo IX, St., pope, 101 Leo X, pope, 166 Leo XIII, pope, 255, 256, 258, 348, 355 "Leo XIII" (George), 385 Leo III, the Isaurian, Eastern Roman emperor, 60 Leopold I, emperor, 193 Leopold of Austria, duke of Bavaria, 105 Lepanto, battle of ( 1571 ), 47 Lessing, 199 Leuschner, Wilhelm, Hessian minister, 478 Lex van der Lübbe ( 1933), abolished nulla poena sine lege, 488 Libellus de Caesarea monarchia (Andlau), 161

566

INDEX

Liberals, under strict control, 498 Liberties, code of civil, 430 Liberty, tee Freedom Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 234 Licet {uria ( 1338), decree, 143 Liebknecht, Karl, 372, 407, 411, 496; voted against war credits, 394; proclaimed Socialist Republic: hailed as its president, 412; assassination, 435 Liebknecht, Wilhelm Philipp Martin, 345, 347 Lieder, Frederick W. C., quoted, 186 Life of Dante ( Boccaccio ), 143 Life of the Saintly Wonnebald Pück, see Lebenslauf des heiligen Wonnebald Pück Literature, cosmic scope, 24; tee alto Mythology; Sagas Lloya George, David, quoted, 424 Locarno Pact, 449; spirit of, 440; unfolding of idea: border agreement, 441; German Nationals' effort to torpedo, 465 Loewensteins, 170; see alto Ludwig I, of Bavaria, count of Loewenstein-Scharffeneck; Ludwig II, count of LoewensteinWertheim Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, Hubertus, Prince zu, 182n; negotiation with State governments during constitutional conflict between Prussia and Chancellor von Papen, 478 Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, Maximilian, Prince zu, quoted, lOn Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, Wilhelm, Fürst zu, 326, 327, 410 Loewenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg, Karl, Fürst zu, 352 Loftus, Lord Augustus W. F. S., 273 Logocentric view of mystic philosophy, 151 Logos, 35 Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, revolutions, 267; plan to give to Italy, 268 Lombards, alliances with Pepin and Charlemagne, 54; alliance with papacy, 55; revolt, 112 Lombardy, defeat of Desideri us by Charlemagne, 61; ceded to France, then to Piedmont, 285 London Peace Society, 369 London Protocol of 1852, 299, 300, 301 Lothar II, emperor, 104 Lothar II, king of Provence, 74 Louis I, the Pious, emperor, 103 Louis IV, d'Outremer, king of France, 75 Louis IX, St., king of France, 124 Louis XIV, king of France, 188 Love, 39; faith in omnipotence of, 147; Su-

preme Reason and Supreme Love become one, 151 Lower Saxony, 503 Lübeck, granted its Reichsfreiheit, 94, 95n; law, 95; opposed neodespotism, 96; in revolutionary hands, 408 Lucullus, 26 Ludendorff, Erich, 404, 439; effort to detach Poland from Russia, 396; optimism vanished, 398, 399 Ludwig IV, the Bavarian, emperor, 94, 141 sqq., 171n, 321; refused to abdicate: excommunicated, 142 Ludwig I, the Child, German king, 70 Ludwig II, king of Bavaria, 295, 296, 320 Ludwig I, of Bavaria, count of LoewensteinScharffeneck, 160, 170 Ludwig II, count of Loewenstein-Wertheim, 171n Ludwig, margrave of Brandenburg, 321 Luitizes, 73 Luitpold, count of Bavaria, margrave of Austria, 72 Lunéville, Treaty of ( 1801 ), 212 Luther, Hans, Reich chancellor, 441 Luther, Martin, 135, 149, 164, 194; quoted, 165; excommunicated, 166; attack on universal power of church, 167; put under ban of empire, 168; admonition to show no mercy: marriage with nun, 172; upheld Churcn's teaching on usury, 256 Lützow volunteers, 261 Luxemburg, Rosa; assassination, 435 Luxemburg, Brandenburg ruled by princes of, 193 Luxemburg affair of 1867, 313 Macchiavelli, 163; influence upon birth of nationalistic state, 76 Mackenzie, Sir Morell, 358 Magdeburg, 61, 192; raised to an archdiocese, 80; revolution, 409 Magdeburg law, 95 Magenta, horrors of battlefield, 285 Magistrates, republican: government by, 28 Magyars, invasion of Europe, 72 Maimonides, Moses, 57 Mainz, Jewish community at, 97; Rhenish republic proclaimed at, 422 Majority Socialists, 419, 420; see Social Democrats Malet, Sir Alexander, Baronet, 286 Malmédy, annexed by Belgium, 442 Management-labor relationship, 432

INDEX Manfred of Hohenstaufen, king of Naples and Sicily, 127, 130; quoted, 126 Mani, 36 Mania, synthetic mass, 185 Manichaeism, 35, 36, 230 Mankind, twofold aspect, 3 Mann, Thomas, 196, 454; quoted, 189, 424 Mansfeld, Emst, Count von, Protestant general, 177 Manuùski, Dimitri Ζ., 467 March Revolution (1848), 261 sqq. Mareks, Erich, 309, 357 Marcomanni, 27 Marcus Aureli us Roman emperor, plan for settlement of Germanic tribesmen: death, 27 Maria Theresa, empress, 196, 200 Marie Louise, French empress, 223 Maritain, Jacques, 91 Maritime commercial law, 95 Mark, fall of the, 437 Marriage, 18, 36 Marsiglio of Padua, 143 Marx, Jenny, 254; quoted, 254n Marx, Karl, quoted, 241, 246 sqq. passim, 313; interpretation of Hegelian thought, 245 sqq.; ideas of state and society, 246 sqq.; parallels between the agnostic dialectician and basic Judaeo-Christian traditions, 250 sq.; life of personal sacrifice, 254 and Friedrich Engels, 247, 289, 345, 376; quoted, 248, 468n Marx, Wilhelm, Reich chancellor, 442 Marxians, criticism of Lassalle, 294 Mass mania, synthetic, 185 Mass psychosis of 1932, 479 Materialism, of Marxian socialism, 255; of Christian and bourgeois world, 256 Matilda, St., wife of Henry I, the Fowler, 73 Matilda, grand countess of Tuscany, 104 Matrimony, 18; Manichaean view of, 36 Matthew of Paris, quoted, 123 Maurice, duke of Saxony, 168 Maurice of Nassau, prince of Orange, 192 Max, prince of Baden, 364, 381; parliamentary Reich chancellor and foreign minister, 400; task of leading country towards peace, 402; interest in bettering care of prisoners of war, 403; confronted with ultimatum to sue for immediate armistice, 404; signed armistice request: appointed chancellor, 405; quoted, 405n, 412,436; secured victory of constitutional government over Soviet menace, 408;

567

handed over office as chancellor to Ebext, 412 Maximilian I, emperor, 161,163,164 Maximilian II, emperor, stopped burning of witches, 184 Maximilian II, ldng of Bavaria, 129 Maximilian I, duke and elector of Bavaria, Catholic leader in Thirty Year» War, 176, 177, 179, 181 Maximin, Ein Gedenkbuch (George), 383 May Laws ( 1873), 354, 356 Mazarin, Jules, Cardinal, 188 Mechthilde, St., of Hackeborn, 146 Mechthilde of Magdeburg, 145, 146 sqq.; quoted, 126 Mechthilde of Savoy, 160 Mecklenburg, duchy of, bestowed upon Wallenstein, 178; rising power, 179; revolution in, 408 Mediterranean Entente ( 1887 ), 332,337 Meinecke, Friedrich, quoted, 89, 227, 420 Mein Kampf ( Hitler), 488 Meissner, Otto, 466 Meistergesang, 96 Melfi, Constitutions of (Liber Augustalis, 1231), 119 Mencken, Anastasius, 272 Mencken family, 272 Menzel, Adolf Friedrich Erdmann von, 200 Merovingians, 57 Merseburg, 73; Cathedral Library, 22 Merseburger Xaubersprüche, 22 Merswin, Rulman, quoted, 144n Messianic realm, Virgil's vision, 5 Metternich, Clemens Wenzel Ν. L., Prince von, 223, 375; measures instigated by, shattered hope for a true constitution, 243; collapse of system, 261; triumph of "Academic Legion" over regime, 270 Metz, vicarship over, sold to French king, 168; ceded to Germany, 323 Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand, quoted, 298 Michael, St., the Archangel, 22; invocation of, composed by Pope Leo XIII, 355 Michael I, Rhangabe, Eastern Roman emperor, 64 Michael Bakunin . . . (Huch),455 Michaelis, Georg, Reich chancellor, 399 Michael of Cesena ( Michele Fuschi), 143 Middle Ages, unparalleled respect for human rights, 98 Middle class, see Bourgeoisie; Bürgertum Mieroslawski, Ludwig von, general, Polish revolutionary, 262 Miesko I, of Piast, duke of Poland, 82 Milan, Edict of (312), 37

568

INDEX

Milanese in battle of Legnano, 112 Militarism, rejected by youth, 381 Military cliques, reactionary: created and destroyed Brüning cabinet, 453 Military power an indication that state is falling into anarchy, 29 Millerand, Alexandre, 439 Mind and nature, 232 Minorities, rights of, 209, 430; protection of, as a means for removing causes of war, 451 Mit brennender Sorge ( Pius XI ), encyclical letter, 492 Mithridates VI Eupator, king of Pontus, 13 Mittelmann, Fritz, 465 Mohammedanism, spread, 57 Molitor, Ulrich, 184 Moltke, Helmuth Johannes Ludwig, Count von (1848-1916), 392 Moltke, Helmuth Karl Bernhard, Count von (1800-1891), 301, 304, 312, 316, 373; urged war without delay, 314; insisted on annexation of Metz, 323 Mommsen, Theodor, 372, 375 Monarchical coup, Briining's, 473 Monarchy, roots of Occidental, lie in people's tribunate, 26; beneficial to liberty, 28; medieval argument in favor of, 132n; ideal, a genuine republic, 213; Europe a Universal Christian Monarchy (Fichte), 214; Bismarck's forebodings of end of, 264; nondynastic, supreme office of, 505; see also Emperor; Kaisertum Monasteries founded by St. Boniface, 59 Mongols, 48 Montesquieu, quoted, 2 Monument of the Reformation, Geneva, 193 Morality, in conflict with man's corrupt nature, 205; complete collapse, 487 Moral regeneration, prerequisite of national and political rebirth, 225 Moravia, became part of Czechoslovakia, 399 Morocco, Bismarck encouraged building of a French African empire, 326 Morwitz, Ernst, 384 Moscow a center of gravity outside the Occident, 62 Motley, John Lothrop, 273 Mowrer, Edgar Α., 447 Mowrer, Paul S., 447; quoted, 448 Müller, Hermann, Reich chancellor, 447, 463, 465 Munich, imperial see, 143; taken by Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, 181; cultural center, 295

University of, students' revolt, 261 Münster, 61, 67; peace delegation, 188 Murders, political, 435 Musen-Almanach, 186 Music, 371; see also under names of individual composers Mussolini, Benito, 182n, 485 Mutiny, first in any German regiment, 397 Mysticism, 144 sqq. Mythology, 21 sqq., 24 Naples, under Byzantine sovereignty, 55; brought to Henry VI by Constantia, 114 University of, 115, 127 Napoleon I, 68, 73, 91, 92, 107; mutual esteem of Goethe and, 207 sq.; heir to ideas of 1789, 211; empire born of forces of French nationalism, 214; treaty with Czar Alexander, 219; opinion of Stein, 221; declaration of war against Stein, 222; his real conqueror, 223 Napoleon III, friendly intercourse with Bismarck, 278; women had no influence on: strongly social regime, 279; diplomatic skill: a carbonaro, 280; instigated FrancoItalian war against Austria, 283 sqq.; what alliance with Bismarck would have meant: agreement of Villafranca: more liberal policy adopted, 285; offer of alliance to Prussia, 292; secret agreement with Austria, 303; quoted, 303n; diplomatic intervention, 306; consent to formation of North German Confederation, 307; intervention against Prussia marked change in relations with Bismarck: "duel" with Bismarck, 309; desire to increase foreign political prestige: contributed indirectly to German unification, 310; policy of encircling alliances, 314, 315; fall of dynasty: character, 318; meeting with Bismarck, 319 Narses, 53, 54 Nassau, incorporated into Prussia, 306, 308 "Nassau Memorandum" (Stein), 217, 218 National assembly, first, of Germans, 263 sqq.; as a way for rolling back revolution, 408 National consciousness, true, embraces ideal of supranational humanity, 89 National idea, 76 Nationalism, first "national" reaction in Germany, 165; the Reformation not source of, 169; child of the French Revolution, 214; unity of Europe shattered by lust of aggression, 226; growth in Prussia, 241; awakening of sentiment in Germany

INDEX and Italy, 280; German pre-war movements of extreme, 335; scourge of Europe, 430; doctrines rejected by Kantorowicz, 460; unchained by modem ruling class, 469; affinity to Guelfism, 48Θ sq.; the New Order, 487; exaggerated feelings of, result of wars, 492; frightful consequences may bring about a tum towards universal feeling, 511 National movement, Frederick William IV of Prussia chief of, 2ββ National pride, antidote to, 40 National Socialism, 382, 418, 437; child of Versailles Treaty, 450; would lead to destruction of workers' organizations, 468; last bulwark of capitalism, 469; analysis, 480; intentional vagueness of program, 481; myth, a perversion of historic truth: sources of creed, 485; denied dignity of the individual: a modem product of decaying, de-Christianized mass democracy, 486; concepts of legal positivism, 488; effect of Nazi philosophy on German youth, 492; see also National Socialists National Socialist Handbook of Law and Legislation ( Frank ), 498 National Socialists, 393, 434; attack on organized labor, 434; wanted to preserve Versailles Treaty: coalition between German Nationals and, 450; falsity of claims: George and Huch declined collaboration, 458; gTave disturbance sure to follow rise to power, 466; worked to destroy Weimar Republic, 467; Nazi organizations legalized by Papen, 476; banditry: soil fertile for their gospels, 479; working with Communists to obstruct democratic government: elections of 1932: decline of votes, 480; reaction of idealistic type, 481, 485; effect of artificial frenzy, 484; opposed constitutional reform at time of republic: influence on family life and education, 491; coordination of Reich and lands, 491n; reduced German labor to complete impotence, 494; imposed itself upon the people like an army of occupation: a revolution never carried out by, 497; unconstitutional acts covered, with sham legality, 497; seats in Reichstag, 498; see also National Socialism National state, influence of Macchiavelli, 76; birth of, 112 National unity, as basis for international solidarity, 265 Nations, federal community of, foreshad-

569

owed by ideas of Emperor Frederick II, 124; foreign domination, 202; all made of the same blood, 501 sq. Natural associations, 504 Nature, nothing that results from, can be intrinsically wicked, 40; definition of, as basis, but not fulfillment, 230; process of overcoming, 231, 239; relationship between spirit and, 231; and mind, 232 Naumburg, 73 Nazi Party, see National Socialists Nazi philosophy, see National Socialism Necessity, 232 Neoabsolutism, post-Napoleonic era of, 218 Nerva, Roman emperor, 14, 15 Netherlands, 217; see also Holland Neue Reich, Das (George), 383, 386, 387 Neues Militärisches Journal, 219 New Era, 282 "New Germany, The, 1919-1929," 447 New Order, 487; see also National Socialism New Plan, see Dawes Plan Nibelungenlied, 52, 296 Nice, 285, 311 Nicephorus I, Eastern Roman emperor, treaty with Charlemagne, 55 Nicholas II, pope, 102 Nicholas V, antipope, 142 Nicholas I, czar, 265, 267 Nicholas II, czar, invited powers to assemble at The Hague, 369; ordered mobilization of Russian army, 391 Nicholas of Cusa, see Cusanus, Nicholas Niemen, Napoleon in, 219 Niemöller, Martin, 495 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 29, 123, 239; quoted, 372 Nikolsburg, Preliminary Treaty of (1866), terms, 306 Nobiling, Dr. Karl, 347 Nobility, world-historic, 170; legal distinctions between property of, and that of commoners erased, 222; grip on officer class, 223; see also Junkers; Princes Nordic state, 62 Noricum, 54 Normans, 19; alliance with papacy, 102 Norse literature, 24 Norsemen, Western Europe ravaged by, 72; invasion of England and German coastal regions, 82 North German Confederation, 340; formed: precursor of German Reich, 307; constitution, 311; Napoleon Ill's effort to encircle, 313; grave defeat for, 315; France de-

570

INDEX

North German Confederation (Continued) ciared war on, 318; union of South German states with, 320; code of industry, 346 North German Kaisertum, Bismarck's negotiations for establishment of a, 312 North Sea ports in revolutionary hands, 408 Noske, Gustav, 408 Novalis, quoted, 146, 213 sq. November Constitution, Denmark (1863), 299, 300n Nulla poena sine lege, violated by Lex van der Lübbe, 488 Nuns induced to break vows, 167 Nürnberg, medieval trade, 96; diet at, 160 Nürnberg Laws (1935), 491 sq. Obotrites, Slavonic, 82 Occident, thesis of world history, 1-12; national aspirations of its peoples: dialectical conflict between nations and, 3; early Germanic representative of occidental viewpoint, 45; struggle for existence of, 46, 47, 48; could profit from Arab gifts, 57; conscious of representative character of its supreme officer, 65; Celtic Europe integrated into, 67; foundation, 75; continuity of, rested on interdependence of church and empire, 77; destruction of temporal order of, 102; idea of, again ascended, 106; modem detractors of name, 107; solidarity, 108; opposition to political body, 111; greatest treatise on government of, 129; struggle brought to a decision in favor of Ghibelline view, 143; consciousness for historic continuity dimmed by Protestantism, 168; cycles of history, 174; moving force of history, 189; awakened to realization of its oneness, 192; fundamental view, 252; disaster that overtook, in preparation for centuries, 258; feeling that a new international or supranational legality was necessary, 368; preparation for return to basic tenets of history, 369; idea of the united, 458; synthesis of world history, 501-12; foundation and goal, 507; see also Europe; Reich; Reich idea; Sacred Roman Empire Occidental idea, national unification indispensable, 170; we may be moving toward a new realization of, 174; see also Reich idea; Reich Odenwaldschule, 381 Odin (Wotan), 22, 24

Odo, Master, 67 Odoacer, 48 sqq., 103 Oesterreich, see Austria Of Kings and the Crown (Huch), 455 Old age insurance, 344, 345, 360 Old and New Gods, see Alte und neue Götter Olden, Rudolf, quoted, 438,442η, 452,479η Oldenburg, rising power, 179 Olmütz, conference of ( 1850), 276 On Caution in Criminal Matters (Spee), 185, 186 Oncken, Hermann, 239 On Constitutional Questions ( Lassalle ), 293 On the Flowing Light of the Godhead (Mechthilde of Magdeburg), 146 sqq. On the Law of Nature and Nations ( Pufendorf ), 190, 208 On the Meaning of Holy Scripture ( Huch ), 495 On the State of the German Empire ( Pufendorf), 191 Opera houses, 454 Operas, 371 Oppression strengthens desire for change, 245 Ordensland, 194 Orestes, 48 Organized labor, see Labor unions Orosius, quoted, 46 Orsini, 74 Osnabrück, 61; peace delegation, 188 OsthUfeskandal, 470,476,482, 483 Ostmark, 63; see Eastern March; Austria Ostrogoths, 42; united under Theodoric, 50; rule extended, 51; appearance, 53 Otto I, the Great, emperor, 69, 72, 73; dominion: marriage: aid to papacy, 74; coronation, 75; twofold danger checked by, 77; Sacred Roman Empire Degan with, 79; character: death: equestrian statue, 80; placed Jews under protection of bishops, 97 Otto II, emperor, 85; marriage: death, 80 Otto III, emperor, 69, 81 sqq., 193; dominance of universal over national principle found expression in, 82; crowned, 84; policy of an integral union opposed, 100; his policy of uniting nations reaffirmed, 108 Otto IV, emperor, 117 sqq. Otto, bishop of Freising, 104 Otto I of Wittelsbach, duke of Bavaria, 110; Bavaria given to, 113 Otto of St. Blasien, 112; quoted, 115 Ottoman house, 141

INDEX Our Settlement with Germany ( Brailsford ), 479 Ownership, see Property Pacelli, Msgr. Eugenio, papal nuncio, 389; see also ñ u s XII, pope Pacher, Michael, 156 Pact of Paris ( 1928), 445 Paderborn, 61, 67 Paganism, one stage in development of religious consciousness, 25; extinguished idolatry, 30; on eastern frontier of empire, 91 Paléologue, Maurice, 391 Palmerston, Henry J. T., Viscount, attitude towards Schleswig-Holstein question, 299 Pan-Germanism, 471, 486 Pannonia, 54 Pan-Slavism, 331, 389; advocated French alliance against Germany, 304 Papacy, alliänce with Lombards, 55; saved from grave danger by Otto the Great, 74; cities opposed increase of political power, 94; legislation for protection of Jews, 98n; alliance with Normans, 102; power weakened, 106; reaction against temporal arrogations of, 107 ; curia claimea that all temporal power was derived from: not a universal power, 111; supremacy over temporal power, 118, 166; Frederick II's struggle against temporal aims of, 118 sqq.; doctrine of political overlordship of, 137; under influence of French national monarchy, 141; three rival popes claiming throne, 154; decline in power, 159; removed from actual interests of world, 181; troheld idea of universalism: political influence, 349; part in restoration of peace, 396 Papal States, foundation for, 60 Papen, Franz von, 476; treasonable coup, 429; constitutional conflict with Prussian government, 477 sqq.; made Hitler palatable to Hindenburg, 483 Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States 1919 . . . . 496 Papinian, Aemilius, 28 Paris, Bismarck's first visit, 285; capitulation of, 322 Paris Peace Conference, Papers Relating to . . . , 496 Parliamentarianism, decline of, 466 Parliamentary leaders, 372 Parsifal (Wagner), 296 Particularism, victory of, 266-77; Sacred

571

Roman Empire defeated by particularistic forces, 112 Particularistic tendencies, influence in Germany, 76 Partnership, contract of, to replace wage contract, 506 Party Day, Nürnberg, 345 Party system, shoulabe replaced by direct popular selection, 503 Paschal III, antipope, 67, 110 Pastimes, of ancient Germans, 17 Patent of Tolerance ( 1781 ), 201 Patricius Romanus, title and rights revived,

101

Patrimonium Petri, 60, 102 Paul, St., 134, 501 Paulsen, Friedrich, 374 Paulskirche, Bismarck and the, 278-87 Paulskirche assembly of 1848 redivivas, 287 Paulus, Julius, Roman jurist, 28 Peace, wars waged for sake of, 39; the natural condition among states, as among individuals, 190; Kant's treatise on, 201 sqq.; acts of war that compromise, 202 Peace conferences, called by private organizations, 369 Peace delegations in Münster and Osnabrück, 188 Peace Palace, The Hague, 370 Peace societies, first, 369 Peace treaty different from pacific alliance, 204 Peasants, 94; social oppression, 154; uprisings, 155; understanding of Luther's doctrines, 167; 'Twelve Articles" the charter of the, 171 Peasants War, 169 sqq., 375 Péguy, Charles, 393 People's Court, 490 People's Parliament, 287 People's universities, 380 Pepin the Short, king of the Franks, 60; alliance with Lombards, 54 Permanent Court of Arbitration, 370 Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague, Germany not represented on bench, 449 Perpetual Peace ( Kant ), 201 sqq. Persecution, new era of, 183 sqq.; present era of, 185 Peter II, czar, 73 Peter III, czar, 199n Peter III, king of Aragon, 128 Petrarch, 14; quoted, 157; forgeries unveiled by, 158 Petrus de Vinea, 109, 125

572

INDEX

Peutinger, Konrad, 161 Pfeffert ora, Johannes, 165 Pharsalus ( 4 8 B.C.), 8

Phenomenology of the Spirit (Hegel), 371 Philip of Swabia, German king, 117, 435 Philip IV, the Fair, king of France, 92 Philosophy, debt of Occidental, to St. Augustine, 37; Christian, open to Oriental influences: influence of Hellenistic-Arabic, on Maimonides, 57; influence of Creek, 87; reconciliation of faith and, 183; see also Idealism; Mysticism; Truth Philosophy of History (Hegel), 1, 7, 228 Philosophy of Religion (Hegel), 32, 229, 236 Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 40, 238, 244 Pierleoni family, 97, 105 Pietro de Vinea, see Petrus de Vinea Pilate, 134 Piscator, Erwin, 454 Pius IX, pope, 349, 351; quoted, 434 Pius XI, pope, 190n, 255; quoted, 24, 482, 506; encyclical, 38 Pius XII, pope, 398, 508 Plato, 2, 35 Platonists, 35 Plessen, Cenerai von, 41 In Podiebrad, see George of Podiebrad, king of Bohemia Podolia, 96 Poems, great, originate at turns of tide in affairs of men, 384 Poetry, 454 Poggio Bracciolini, Cian Francesco, quoted, 155 Pogroms, 290 Poïet, Bertrand du, cardinal, 143 Poincaré, Raymond, 391, 422, 436, 439, 444; Anschluss discussed with Stresemann, 471 Poitiers, battle of Tours and ( 732 ), 58 Poland, founding of kingdom, 83; threatened by Pruzzi, 90; introduced Magdeburg law, 96; plan to restore Galicia to, 267; LudendorfFs effort to detach from Russia, 396; Kingdom of Poland proclaimed, 397 Poles, emancipated from German sovereignty, 83; political prisoners released: eternal friendship with Germans proclaimed, 262 Police, secret, 185; Prussian force, 470, 477 Polish nation, Stein's plea for, 217; injustice of partition: rebellion, 218 Polish revolt, 296

Political ideologies, mass mania whipped up under guise of, 186 Political interest of German students, 375 Political life, instructive in its creative fluctuations, 372 Political suppression, in Bismarck's dav, 347; under National Socialists, 348, 498 Politics, power, see Power politics Politische Theologie (Schmitt), 463 Polk, James Κ., 264 PoUentia, battle of (402), 44 Pomerania, 188, 192 Pompey, 6 Ponginibus, 184 Pope, spiritual sword given to, 138; infallibility of, 349; see also Papacy "Porta Nigra" (George), 385 Post-Napoieonic era of neoabsolutism, 218 Power, holder of delegated, 181; principle of division of, 208; essential attribute of state, 237, 245 Power politics, triumph in Europe, 240; connection between totalitarianism and, 258; Bismarck's tum towards, 276 Prague, Wallenstein's conquest of, 181; bombarded, 267 Prague, Peace of ( 1866), 306 Preger, Wilhelm, 148 Preuss, Hugo, 421, 426, 427 Preysing, Konrad, Count von, bishop of Berlin, 494 Priests, jurisdiction vested in, 18, 19; function, 21 Princes, usurpation of power by, 94; rise in power of, 106, 108; alliance of curia with German, 111; power of, a threat to central authority, 121; chaotic interrelationships of territorial powers and, 153; revolt of nobility against, 160; emperor should be independent of, in financial matters, 162; accept bribes for services against Germany, 163; corruption of, an asset for other powers, 164; in Peasants War, 169 sqq.; French helped to maintain power of: became definitely sovereign, 215; Stein's low opinion of, 217; unwise to call upon a territorial prince to head empire, 271 Printing press, 156 Private initiative, 506 Privilegium truths, 157 sqq. Privilegium minus (1156), 108, 158 Probus, Roman emperor, 16, 26 Procopius, 51, 55 Production, moving power of world to Marx,

INDEX 247; by establishing socialistic ways of, Proletariat disappears as a class, 250 Proletarian students, in universities, 373 Proletariat, dictatorship: duty of liberating all men, 250; reduced to bare necessities of life, 256; vices with which bourgeoisie has infected it, 289 Propaganda, wartime, 203n Property, legal distinctions between property of nobles and of commoners erased, 222; homestead first to pass into private ownership, 247; false doctrine or absolute right of, 256; subordinated to wellbeing of community, 505; private, guaranteed by Republic, 418 "Property is theft," 257 Proportional representation, 428 Protestantism, 175; term, 149; treaty for protection of Protestant Libertät: antinational influence in Germany, 168 Protestant landslide staved off, 154 Protestant princes, as self-seeking as Catholic, 177 Provisional Reich Council of Economy, Decree on the ( 1920), 433 Prussia, 503; Teutonic Order called into, 90; lost to sovereignty of emperor, 189; name of, became designation for entire state, 193; abolition of witch trials: exemplary administration, 195; abolition of torture, 197; first state to recognize revolutionary France: rottenness of policies, 216; Stein ( q.v. ) in, 216 sqq.; collapse of "old Prussia," 218; saved from being wiped off map, 219; Junkers' grip on state, 219 sqq.; Stein's desire to overthrow foreign rule, 221, 222; when Prussianism became really German, 241; return to regime of crown, aristocracy, and bureaucracy, 243; Revolution of 1848 (q.v.), 254-65; defeat of the Revolution, 266; aftermath of Revolution of 1848, 266-77; reaction against Prussian national assembly, 270; exiled: dissolved, 271; consent to reëstablishment of German Confederation, 276; could not do without the "great Germany" idea, 279; neutrality in Franco-Italian war, 284; ready to appeal to liberal forces, 286; German mandate, 288-97; dissolution of parliament, 1860: liberal ministry dismissed, 292; fight for power between crown and parliament, 293; Bismarck's main aim to consolidate Prussian-German state, 294; Prussian-Austrian contest, 296, 301; would welcome a democratic, all-

573

German parliament, 297; Gastein Convention between Austria and, 301; treaty with Italy, 1866: increasing friction between Austria and, as administrative powers of Schleswig-Holstein, 303; Hanover, Electoral Hesse, Nassau, and Frankfurt, incorporated into, 306; part of a federal state, 311; Catholic section of ministry of culture and education abolished, 353; reëmergence of Prussian particularism, 411; representation in Reichsrat, 429; improvement of social and economic conditions achieved by impoverished Free State, 431; plebiscite aimed at overthrowing Social Democratic-Centrist-Democratic coalition government, 467; pillar of German democracy, 470; constitutional conflict between von Papen and, 477 sqq.; see also Junkers; Princes Prussians, original, extinct or absorbed, 194 Pruzzi, Polana threatened by, 90 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, 145 Pseudo-Isidorian decretals, 102 Ptolemy, Claudius, mathematician and geographer, 25 Public right founded upon federation of free states, 203 Puer Apuliae, see Frederick II, emperor Pufendorf, Samuel, FreiherT von, 189, 208; quoted, 189η, 190η, 191η; on state federations and international arbitration, 190 Punch, 358 Putsch, monarchist, 435; Beer Cellar, 439 Pythagoras, 162n; metempsychosis, 21 Quadi, 27 Quadragesimo Anno (Pius IX), encyclical, 256, 434, 506n Quanta cura (Pius IX), encyclical letter, 351 Quedlinburg, 73; castle of, 82 Races of men, all made from one common origin, 5; Germanic tribes akin to Latin nations, 15; mixed blood introduced into Germanic national body, 16 Racial doctrines, rising of atavistic blood notions, 487 Racial ideologies, mass mania whipped up under guise of, 186 Racism, 290; German, brought to birth, 335; doctrines rejected by Kantorowicz, 460 Radetzki, Joseph Wenzel, Count, Austrian fieldmarshal, 267 Radio in National Socialist hands, 498

574

INDEX

Radowitz, J. M. von, 268 Railroads, 434 Rainald von Dassel, see Dassel Ranke, Leopold von, 64, 76, 81, 83, 100, 157; quoted, 1, 4, 30, 70, 101η, 114, 181, 501; critic of the Hegelian view of history, 236 Rapallo Treaty (1922), 436 Rappard, William E., 447; quoted, 449 Rathenau, Emil, 436 Rathenau, Walther, 435, 436 Rauschning, Hermann, 481 Ravenna under Byzantine sovereignty, 55; taken by Pepin the Short, 60 Reason, historic process moves towards greater, 1 ; positive and real, 40; Supreme, and Supreme Love become one, 151; and faith, 183, 234; condemns war, 204; perpetual peace will follow reign of: conflict between freedom, morality, and, 205; true meaning of progress of transcendent, 501 Red Cross, International, 285 Red Cross Convention, see Geneva Convention Reden an die Deutsche Nation (Fichte), 224, 378 Reformation, the, 149; not source of German nationalism, 169 Reformers, great, not Prussian, 219 Regency as a way for rolling back revolution, 408 Regensburg, 242; electoral assembly, 179 Regional Economic Councils, 433 Regional Workers Councils, 433 Rcich, never stable, always to be founded anew, 82, 89; meaning of word and concept, 93, 456; original application of term, 121; new German, took shape as result of 1866, 312; brought into being, 320; consolidated position of unified, 325; administration grew out of Reichsleitung, 341; Bismarcks Germany only a state rather than Reich, 342; name defended against attacks of extreme Left, 427; future, as it emerges from an analysis of historic origins, 503 sqq.; Head of the, entrusted with guardianship of Righteousness, 505; name to be preserved and renewed, 506; foreign policy, 507; see also Europe; Germany; Occident; Occidental idea; Reich idea; Sacred Roman Empire Reich Council of Economy, 433 Reich idea, transformed into a particularistic federalism, 196; Stein the reawakener of,

216; Lassalle's political conceptions truer to, than Bismarck's, 294; see also Occidental idea; Reich Reich Lands, autonomous status, 503 Reich president, Ebert elected, 421; constitutional position, 429; emergency powers, 430; Hindenburg elected, 442; reelected, 475; abuse of emergency powers, 477, 497; usurpation of office by Hitler, 499 Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold, 261, 267, 428, 478 Reichsfreiheit, 93 Reichsgericht in Leipzig, 342 Reichskammergesicht, 163 Reichsleitung, 341 Reichsrat, 428; abolished, 491 Reichsstatthaltergesetz (1933), 490 Reichstag, imperial cities admitted as a separate estate, 96; only address ever delivered before, by foreigner, 224; elected by universal suffrage, 342; dissolution of, 347, 466; peace resolutions of July 19, 1917, 397; power of declaring war and of concluding peace, 399; dissolved by Brüning, 1930, 466; outcome of new elections, 467; elections of 1932, 480; last free elections to, 497; reduced to a rump parliament: dissolved and replaced by party appointees, 498 Reichsteg fire, 497; trial, 490 Reichswehr, mistaken attitude of Social Democrats towards, 464; not an instrument of social reaction, 482 Reichswirtschaftsrat, 433 Reich Workers Council, 433 Reille, René-Charles-François, Baron de, 319 Reinhardt, Max, 454 Reinsurance Treaty ( 1887), 337, 365; Holstein's influence prevailed against renewal of, 367 Reiter, Bamberger, equestrian statue, 100 Relatione della corte ai Roma (Contarini),

180

Religion, 10, 21 sqq., 24; imperial office drawn into orbit of: spiritual nature of the peoples' interests: loss of unity, 77; is in each man: three stages, 230; loss of spiritual insight, 234; split between working class and, 254; attitude towards, in German Republic, 420; freedom of, 431; reawakening: opposition to, in Third Reich, 461; growing power, 494 Religious leaders, 495 Reparations payments, 424, 443, 448 Repgow, Eyke von, 138, 153

INDEX Republic (Plato), 2 Republicanism, 320; idea first manifested, 264 Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII), encyclical letter, 355 Respublica Christiana, 143, 21β, 428, 48β, 494; see also Christian Republic of Nations Restitution, Edict of ( 1629), 179 Reuchlin, Johann von, 156, 165 Reval, 73 Revolution of 1848-1849, 254-65; aftermath, 266 sqq.; youthful leadership, 269; enemies of, forced to pay homage to its spirit, 272; foreign factors to be reckoned with, 276; Bürgertum the victor of, 288 Revolution of 1918-1919, 408 saq. Revolutions, first social, of modem times, 1Θ9; Hegel's analysis for reasons of, 237; without violence, 238; failure, 258; successful, abolish existing order, 497; see also American Revolution; French Revolution; Peasants War Rhabanus Maurus, 66 Rhaetia, 20 Rheims, 55n; cathedral school, 85 Rheinische Zeitung, 263 Rhenish League, 94 Rhenish provinces, Huguenots in, 193 "Rhenish Republic," proclaimed, 422 Rhine, 503; Caesar's crossings of, 8; became permanent frontier of empire, 13 Rhine, electorate of the, transferred to Bavarian line, 176 Rhineland, designs of France upon, 302, 303, 422; occupation of, 444; to be freed of foreign troops, 450 Rhine republics, autonomous, 422 Richard Lionheart, English king, 117 Richard of Cornwall, elected German king, 129 Richelieu, A. J. du Plessis, Duc de, cardinal, 168, 177, 180 Riemenschneider, Tilman, 156 Rienzi, Cola di, 142 Riga, 73 Right radicals, political murders, 435 Rights of Man, 468n Rilke, Rainer María, 454 fling der Nibelungen (Wagner), 24, 296 Ripuarian laws, 56 Ritual-murder accusations, Jews acquitted of, 120 Robert II, king of France, 85 Robert Guiscard, duke of Apulia and Calabria, 102

575

Roger II, king of Sicily, 105 Rohm, Emst, 474 Roland, defeat at Roncesvalles, 63 Roman Catholic church, early struggles, 34; relations between empire and, 77; first temporal domain outside Patrimonium Petri, 102; political power, 107; dependent on temporal arm for defense of faith, 120; Rome granted to, 139; Protestantism and, 149; path from the Incarnation to the, 231; struggle between papal and council parties ended, 349; Kulturkampf, 350 sqq.; peace established with, 356 Roman Catholic powers, Cerman fear of combinations of, 331 Roman Catholics, princes as self-seeking as Protestant, 177; inequality between Protestants and, abolished, 242; Social Democracy has not expanded much among, 348 Roman Catholic student associations, 375 Roman Empire, unable to overcome its own natural limitations, 4; effect of subjugation of nations on, 14; power of: cause of its misery, 32; Germanic infiltration: opposition of Cermans outside of empire, 27; legal system formulated, 28; division between Eastern and Western, 29; fall: triumph, 42-53; Charlemagne, 60; a power of governance and peace: relations between church and, 77; for the Roman, was everywhere, 87; legal and historic continuity between Sacred Roman Empire (q.v.) and, 109; embraced both spiritual and secular orders, 137; prior to church, 138 Roman Empire of the German Nation, The, see Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation Roman law reaffirmed as legal foundation of Sacred Empire, 109 Roman republican movement, 106 Roman roads, 20, 25 Romans, Arminius' victory over, 13; attitude towards Germans, 14; cunning and faithlessness, 27; general apathy, 28; a worldhistoric people, 133 Roman Senate, policy of divide and rule, 7 Roman society, moral status, 17; after Marcus Aurelius, 27 Romantik, Die ( Huch ), 455 Romanus II, Eastern Roman emperor, 80 Rome, city: abandoned as capital, 38; pillaged by Alaric, 45; under Byzantine sovereignty, 55; included in domain of Charlemagne, 61; spiritual precedence led to retranslation of empire back to its

576

INDEX

Rome (Continued) Western cradle, 77; granted to church, 139 Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation ( Huch ), 455 Romulus Augustus, Western Roman emperor, 47, 49 Roncaglia, Diet of (1158), 109 Roncesvalles, Roland's defeat at, 63 Roon, Albrecht T. E., Count von, 292, 293, 304, 314, 316 Rosen, Ceorg, 325 Rosenberg, Alfred, quoted, 144n Rosenkranz, Johann Karl F., 145 Rossano, battle of (982), 81 Rossbach, battle of ( 1757), 198 Rössler, Constantin, 240 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 15; quoted, 196 Royal Academy of Sciences, Berlin, 226 Rudolf I. of Habsburg, German king, 129 Rudolf, duke of Austria, forgeries perpetrated by, 157; forced to renounce usurped title, 158; Austria conferred on, as a fief, 159 Ruhr invasion, 436, 437, 466 Rupert of the Palatinate, emperor, 160 Rupprecht, crown prince of Bavaria, 397 Russia, defeat at Austerlitz, 218; Stein asked to, as friend and adviser to czar, 223; stable order in Europe essential as guaranty for, 242; attitude towards German unity, 276; Bismarck refused to be goaded into action against, on outbreak of Crimean war, 277; rift with Austria the foundation of German-Russian estrangement, 280; weakness of absolutistic regime, 286; in position to resist Austria, French, and English pressure on behalf of Poles, 296; attitude toward SchleswigHolstein question, 299; desire for French alliance against Germany, 304; neutrality in war of 1870, 318; pivot of German and Continental peace: policy towards France, 325; Austro-Russian relations, 330; defensive alliances with Germany and Austria: disturbing ripple in relations with Germany, 331; war with Great Britain prevented by Bismarck, 332; war against Turkey: secret negotiations with Austria, 333; Austro-German alliance directed against menace of, 334; Three Emperors' League, 336, 337; Austrian-Russian rift: Reinsurance Treaty, 337; Bismarck's warning against break with, 357, 364; reports on, placed in hands of William II, 363; willingness to renew Rein-

surance Pact: Franco-Russian relations developed into a military convention, then an alliance, 367; Pan-Slavist policy, 389 sqq., passim; ambitions in the West, 389; Russian-French agreements reaffirmed: army mobilized: Germany declared war on, 391; German negotiations for a separate peace with, 396; November Revolution of 1917, 398; German general staff helped creation of Soviet government: appeal for a "people's peace": German victory prevented by false policy towards, 398; money and subversive material distributed by, 419n; economic cooperation between Germany and, 436 S.A. (Sturmabteilungen), 435, 476, 485 Saar Territory, French designs on, 422 Sabinus, Quintus Titurius, Roman general, 18 Sachsenspiegel (Saxon Mirror), 138, 153 Sacred Heart, cult, 147 Sacred Roman Empire, 67-75; insignia, 69; Italy and Germany again a unit with, 75; term "Holy Roman Empire" misleading, 79; estates, 89-99; eastern and western frontiers: attitude of France toward, 91; supranational legal and moral spheres, 96; continuity between Roman Empire ( q.v. ) and, 109; defeated by particularistic forces, 112; Byzantine chiefs offered to unite domains with, 113; transition into a pure idea, 114; struggle between papacy and empire, 118 sqq.; the seamless garment, 133; erroneously looked upon as offspring of Catholic church by some moderns, 138; mystics devoted to, 143; proud edifice of, crumbled, 155; forgery perpetrated by Duke Rudolf of Austria, 157 sqq.; in need of fundamental reforms: historic epoch drawing towards its close, 160; attempted monopoly of, by Habsburg dynasty, 167; imperial authority at unprecedented low: loss of Holland and Switzerland, 176; entire world imperiled by fall of, 181; reduced to its German-speaking parts, 189; impediment to coming of Antichrist: only conceivable world order, 191; transformed into a sort of enlarged Confederation of the Rhine, 196; United States received sanction of, 201; second fall, 206-23; every free man eligible to throne by right, 242; colors of storm banner, 261; see also Europe; Occident; Reich Sadowa, battle of, see Königgrätz, battle of

INDEX Sagas, Icelandic, 24 Saint-Empire, le, see Sacred Roman empire, 91 Saint-Germain, treaty of (1919), 425 St. Michael's Church near Bamberg, 100 Salem, school founded by Prince Max, 381 Salían house, 101, 141; election of Lothar II promoted by enemies of, 104 Salian lands, inherited by Hohenstaufen, 104 Salic laws, 56 Salza, Hermann von, 90, 91, 95, 193 Salzburg, Roman foundation, 20; monastery of, 59; made a metropolitan see, 67; majority for Anschluss, 425 Sanctions, need for seen by Pufendorf, 191 Santa Maria del Carmine, church of, 129 Saracens, 48, 58; driven beyond Pyrenees, 63; tolerance towards, 120 Sardinia, 267, part of, under Byzantine sovereignty, 55 Saucken-Tarputschen, Ernst von, 260 Savoy, taken over by Napoleon III, 285; given to France, 311 Saxe-Weimar, Bernhard, Prince von, Protestant general, 178 Saxon dynasty, founder, 72 Saxons, foothold in Britain, 45; incorporated into Frankish-Roman orbit, 61; Bavaria part of domain of, 63; revolt, 81; laws and customs recognized, 101; revolts, 103,106 Saxony, 300, 491, 503; duchy of, transferred to Albrecht the Bear, 105; dismembered, 113; received royal crown, 215 Schäfer, Dietrich, 89 Scharnhorst, Gerhard Johann David von, 219 Scheidemann, Philipp, 400, 405, 407, 410, 413, 415; suggested emperor's abdication, 408; quoted, 411; proclaimed German Republic, 412; resignation of cabinet of, 424 Schiller, J. C. Friedrich von, 177; quoted, 87, 174, 212, 213, 371 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 136, 186 Schleicher, Kurt von, 465, 466; quoted, 474, 482n; lost Republican chancellor: aims, 482; Papen and Hitler joined hands in opposition to, 483; fought to keep Hindenburg from doing the irrevocable: dismissed: coup d'état intended? 483; and his wife assassinated by Hitler hordes, 484 Schleswig, northern part of, given to Denmark: Prussia to administer, 301 Schleswig-Holstein question, 298 sqq.

577

Schmitt, Carl, German jurist, 476; quoted, 463, 488 Schober, Johann, Curtius negotiated customs union with, 472 Scholarship, revival of, in reign of Charlemagne, 66 Schönbom, Johann Philipp von, archbishop, prince elector of Mainz, 185 Scnönbrunn decree (1805), 116 Schools, origins of Continental, 66; extension of state and Nazi party control to, 492; international, 493 Schröder, Kurt, Baron von, German banker, 483 Schule am Meer, 381 Schulenbure, W. F., Count von der, 411n Schurz, Carl, 272 Schwabenspiegel (Swabian Mirror), 138 Schwarzenberg, Felix L. J. F., Prince von, 280 Science, Kepler's views on harmony of faith and, 183 Science of Colors (Goethe), 2 Science of the State ( Fichte ), 227 Scotus, see Duns Scotus; Eriugena Seamless robe, Dante and the, 126-40 Sea power, importance of, 178 Second International, collapse, 394 "Seconds in command," 110 Secret police, 185 Semnones, 22 Sequani, 7 Serbia, Austria's ultimatum to, 390; war declared, 390, 391 Serfdom, incompatible with Christianity, 33; free peasants reduced to state of, 94; abolished, 201, 222 Seven Weeks War (1866), 301 sqq. Seven Years War (1756-1763), 197 Severin, St., 48 Severus, Septimius, Roman emperor, 28 Shakespeare, 198, 384 Shakespeare und der Deutsche Geist ( Gundolf ), 460 Shuvalov, Paul, Count (1830-1908), Russian ambassador to Germany, 365 Shuvalov, Piotr Α., Count (1827-1889), Russian statesman, 304n Sicily, lost to Arabs, 55; conquered by Fatimites, 81; brought to Henry VI by Constantia, 114; under Frederick II, 116, 118, 119; Otto IV's effort to bring under his rule, 118; decree against heresy in, 120; realm reconquered t y Manfred, 127 Sickingen, Franz von, 156, 160, 169, 170, 216, 222

578

INDEX

Sickness insurance, 344, 345, 360 Siebente Ring, Der (George), 383, 385 Siegfried, 24 Sigeric, 46 Sigismund, emperor, 154, 157; Diirer's study for portrait of, 69 Silesia, Upper, 83 Silesian Wars (1740-1742, and 17441745), 196, 197 Simons, Walter, 208, 209, 409; quoted, 415n Sinn der Heiligen Schrift, Der (Huch), 455 Sintenis, Renée, 447 Sittengeschichte Roms (Friedlaender), 25 Skoropadski, Hetmán Pavel, 398 Slavery, see Serfdom Slavonic lands, new frontier opened to Christendom in, 73 Slavs, revolt among, 81; national aspirations, 389 Slovakia, became part of Czechoslovakia, 399 Social conditions after Peasants War, 172 Social democracy, Bismarck the initiator of, 343; imperial message a landmark of international, 344 Social Democrats, German, Bismarck's address outlawing party, 289; Gotha Program, 346; growth, 347, 348; leadership, 348; student groups, 376; attitude in First World War, 394; move to Left, 407; conflict between democratic majority and radical faction of Independent Socialists ( later Communists ) : triumph of Majority Socialists, 407-26; agreed to idea of a national assembly, 408; all troops went over to, 409 sq.; frustrated attempts of setting up Soviet system: proclaimed German Republic, 411; in provisional government of the Republic, 414, 418; conference of state governments under control of, 419; last coalition cabinet maneuvered out of office,' 463; ideal of pacifism, 464; coalition with Center party, 471; hopes dashed, 480; reluctant to cooperate with Schleicher, 482; seats in Reichstag, 498 Social disintegration, anti-Semitism a symptom of, 290 Socialism, 289, 345 sqq.; Christianity and, struggle against same enemies, 253; materialistic philosophy, 255; pacific in principle, 369; at universities, 375; belief in redeeming power of, an illusion, 395 Socialist Soviet Republic proclaimed, 412 Social legislation, 344 sqq., 376n, 432; father of German, 218; only large-scale

could have weaned people from Nazi counsels, 481 Social order, future, 504 Social reform program, of peasants ( 1525), 171; for future, 504 Social revolution, first of modern times, 169; coup