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Treitschke and Nietzsche may have furnished Prussian ambitions with congenial ammunition; but Bentham with his purely selfish interpretation of human nature and Marx with his doctrine of the class-struggle the high priest of Individualism and the high priest of Socialism cannot be acquitted of a similar charge.
The contempt of German imperialists, from Treitschke onward, for the rights of small States, the racial theories which included in "German" territory Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries, may seem to give colour to this idea. But it would be hazardous to assume that German statesmen were seriously influenced for years by the lucubrations of Mr.
Our main contention is, that as the pacific philosophy of Herder and Kant, of Goethe and Lessing, provides the key to the old Germany described in Madame de Staël’s masterpiece, even so the military philosophy of Mommsen and Treitschke, of Bismarck and Nietzsche, gives us the key of modern Prussianized Germany.
General von Bernhardi's Germany and the Next War is one of the most interesting, as well as most suggestive, of books, intended to illustrate the spirit of German ambition. Bernhardi writes like a soldier. Such philosophy as he possesses he has taken from Nietzsche. His applications of history come from Treitschke.
At the bottom of his heart he was at one with the radical Pan-German writers, like Lagarde, Treitschke, Mommsen, Naumann and others, who openly declared that the Slavs should be subjugated and the Czechs, as the most courageous and therefore the most dangerous of them, crushed. The Slavs always bitterly opposed the encroachments of Germanism, and saw in it their chief enemy.
Treitschke had just finished it, and handed it to him. Beethoven read it over, he continues, "walked up and down the room, humming as usual, instead of singing and opened the piano. My wife had often asked him in vain to play; but now, putting the text before him, he began a wonderful improvisation, which, unfortunately, there were no magic means of recording.
The national historian of Prussia, Treitschke, is a Saxon of Bohemian descent. That colony of many heterogeneous populations is above all a military State, a Kriegstaat. It was created through war and has been organized for war. In the eighteenth century the whole of Prussia was one vast camp and barracks. The King of Prussia is primarily the Kriegsherr, or war-lord.
And at the university itself the lectures of Treitschke, attended by excited crowds, were heated harangues against the French, inciting to hatred and to war. Seeing that nothing was thought of but the preparation for war, I came back at the Easter vacation of 1869 convinced that hostilities would ensue.
The choice for Germany would be either to stand excommunicated from the brotherhood of nations for ever, or to say plainly, "I declare what my professors and schoolmasters have for half a century had to teach to be false; the doctrines of Treitschke and of his disciple von Bernhardi are anathema; it is infamous to adopt the statement of the German writer that 'It is of no importance to me whether an action is just or unjust, or that 'If I am powerful enough to perform any deed, then I am justified in doing it. I renounce such leaders and teachers and all their words and works, so that I will not follow or be led by them."
Amongst the many discoveries brought about by the war of the nations, an educated British public has suddenly discovered the unsuspected existence of Heinrich von Treitschke. And not only have we discovered the national Prussian historian—we have also unwittingly discovered Prussian history. We have certainly had revealed to us for the first time its secret and hidden meaning.
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