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Updated: June 3, 2025
And thus both their politics and their religion have made them a prey to visionaries and sentimentalists, to unscrupulous journalists like Harden and Reventlow, to unbalanced poets like Nietzsche, to political professors, and to fanatic doctrinaires. Of those academic politicians and fanatic doctrinaires, Treitschke has probably been the most dangerous and the most illustrious representative.
Even the Gospels are distorted to convey a militarist meaning, for the author quotes them to remind us that it is the warlike and not the meek that shall inherit the earth. But Bernhardi’s chief authorities are the historian of the super-race, the Anglophobe Treitschke, and the philosopher of the superman, Nietzsche.
Prussian publicists again and again tell us that Germany does not want to copy English institutions. The old German monarchic institutions are good enough for Germany. Read the treatise of Treitschke, the great historian and political philosopher of modern Prussia.
A Prussian army saved the Saxon monarchy from revolution and then withdrew. Treitschke has no words strong enough to condemn this solitary instance of a disinterested Prussian policy. The national State is alone invested with the attributes of sovereignty. There is nothing above it. National rights must be final.
Yet we are bound to point out that a very different view of war, and of national aggrandizement based on the threat of war, has been advocated by such influential writers as Nietzsche, von Treitschke, von Bülow, and von Bernhardi, and has received widespread support from the press and from public opinion in Germany.
Those readers who will follow Treitschke’s close reasoning to the end will probably agree with me that the political creed of which he has been the apostle and prophet is substantially the same creed which has plunged Europe into the present world war, and that, more than any one thinker, much more certainly than Nietzsche, Treitschke must be held responsible for the catastrophe.
Treitschke has no sympathy for such quixotism. The national State must be selfish. To be unselfish is the mortal sin of politics. Humanity, sentimentalism, have no place in politics. Frederick William IV., the one sentimental King in the whole history of the Hohenzollern Dynasty, once rendered an unselfish service to his neighbours.
"God will see to it," wrote Treitschke, "that war always recurs as a drastic medicine for the human race."
Now the formula of Treitschke was opposed by that of Bluntschli, Einheit durch Freiheit "Unity through liberty." This doctrine, which counted at that time some eminent advocates, aimed first to safeguard the independence and unity of the German States and then to establish between them on that basis a federated union.
Von Treitschke, writing on the last birthday of Emperor William I, thus spoke of the doctrine: "A generation ago an attempt was made by a theologizing State theory to inculcate the doctrine of a power of the throne, divine, released from all earthly obligations. This mystery of the Jacobins never found entrance into the clear common sense of our people."
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