The Barbarism of Berlin by G. K. Chesterton
G >>
G. K. Chesterton >> The Barbarism of Berlin
This would seem obviously fantastic were it not supported by solid facts
which cannot be explained otherwise. Indeed it would be inconceivable
if we were thinking of a whole people, consisting of free and varied
individuals. But in Prussia the governing class is really a governing
class: and a very few people are needed to think along these lines to make
all the other people act along them. And the paradox of Prussia is this:
that while its princes and nobles have no other aim on this earth but to
destroy democracy wherever it shows itself, they have contrived to get
themselves trusted, not as wardens of the past but as forerunners of the
future. Even they cannot believe that their theory is popular, but they
do believe that it is progressive. Here again we find the spiritual chasm
between the two monarchies in question. The Russian institutions are, in
many cases, really left in the rear of the Russian people, and many of the
Russian people know it. But the Prussian institutions are supposed to be
in advance of the Prussian people, and most of the Prussian people believe
it. It is thus much easier for the war-lords to go everywhere and impose
a hopeless slavery upon everyone, for they have already imposed a sort of
hopeful slavery on their own simple race.
And when men shall speak to us of the hoary iniquities of Russia and of
how antiquated is the Russian system, we shall answer "Yes; that is the
superiority of Russia." Their institutions are part of their history,
whether as relics or fossils. Their abuses have really been uses: that
is to say, they have been used up. If they have old engines of terror
or torment, they may fall to pieces from mere rust, like an old coat of
armour. But in the case of the Prussian tyranny, if it be tyranny at all,
it is the whole point of its claim that it is not antiquated, but just
going to begin, like the showman. Prussia has a whole thriving factory of
thumbscrews, a whole humming workshop of wheels and racks, of the newest
and neatest pattern, with which to win back Europe to the Reaction ...
_infandum renovare dolorem_ And if we wish to test the truth of this, it
can be done by the same method which showed us that Russia, if her race or
religion could sometimes make her an invader and an oppressor, could also
be made an emancipator and a knight errant. In the same way, if the Russian
institutions are old-fashioned, they honestly exhibit the good as well as
the bad that can be found in old-fashioned things.
In their police system they have an inequality which is against our ideas
of law. But in their commune system they have an equality that is older
than law itself. Even when they flogged each other like barbarians, they
called upon each other by their Christian names like children. At their
worst they retained all the best of a rude society. At their best, they
are simply good, like good children or good nuns. But in Prussia, all that
is best in the civilised machinery is put at the service of all that is
worst in the barbaric mind. Here again the Prussian has no accidental
merits, none of those lucky survivals, none of those late repentances,
which make the patchwork glory of Russia. Here all is sharpened to a point
and pointed to a purpose, and that purpose, if words and acts have any
meaning at all, is the destruction of liberty throughout the world.
IV
THE ESCAPE OF FOLLY
In considering the Prussian point of view, we have been considering what
seems to be mainly a mental limitation: a kind of knot in the brain.
Towards the problem of Slav population, of English colonisation, of French
armies and reinforcements, it shows the same strange philosophic sulks.
So far as I can follow it, it seems to amount to saying "It is very wrong
that you should be superior to me, because I am superior to you." The
spokesmen of this system seem to have a curious capacity for concentrating
this entanglement or contradiction, sometimes into a single paragraph, or
even a single sentence. I have already referred to the German Emperor's
celebrated suggestion that in order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we
should all become Huns. A much stronger instance is his more recent order
to his troops touching the war in Northern France. As most people know,
his words ran "It is my Royal and Imperial command that you concentrate
your energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that
is that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to
exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over General French's
contemptible little army." The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can
afford to pass over; what I am interested in is the mentality, the train
of thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space.
If French's little Army is contemptible, it would seem clear that all the
skill and valour of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it,
but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the skill and valour
of the German Army are concentrated on it, it is not being treated as
contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible sentiments
in his mind; and he insisted on saying them both at once. He wanted to
think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to think of
an English defeat as a big thing. He wanted to exult, at the same moment,
in the utter weakness of the British in their attack; and the supreme
skill and valour of the Germans in repelling such an attack. Somehow
it must be made a common and obvious collapse for England; and yet a
daring and unexpected triumph for Germany. In trying to express these
contradictory conceptions simultaneously, he got rather mixed. Therefore
he bade Germania fill all her vales and mountains with the dying agonies of
this almost invisible earwig; and let the impure blood of this cockroach
redden the Rhine down to the sea.
But it would be unfair to base the criticism on the utterance of any
accidental and hereditary prince: and it is quite equally clear in the
case of the philosophers who have been held up to us, even in England, as
the very prophets of progress. And in nothing is it shown more sharply
than in the curious confused talk about Race and especially about the
Teutonic Race. Professor Harnack and similar people are reproaching us,
I understand, for having broken "the bond of Teutonism": a bond which the
Prussians have strictly observed both in breach and observance. We note
it in their open annexation of lands wholly inhabited by negroes, such as
Denmark. We note it equally in their instant and joyful recognition of
the flaxen hair and light blue eyes of the Turks. But it is still the
abstract principle of Professor Harnack which interests me most; and in
following it I have the same complexity of inquiry, but the same simplicity
of result. Comparing the Professor's concern about "Teutonism" with his
unconcern about Belgium, I can only reach the following result: "A man
need not keep a promise he has made. But a man must keep a promise he has
not made." There certainly was a treaty binding Britain to Belgium; if
it was only a scrap of paper. If there was any treaty binding Britain to
Teutonism it is, to say the least of it, a lost scrap of paper; almost
what one would call a scrap of waste-paper. Here again the pedants under
consideration exhibit the illogical perversity that makes the brain reel.
There is obligation and there is no obligation: sometimes it appears that
Germany and England must keep faith with each other; sometimes that Germany
need not keep faith with anybody and anything; sometimes that we alone
among European peoples are almost entitled to be Germans; sometimes that
besides us, Russians and Frenchmen almost rise to a Germanic loveliness of
character. But through all there is, hazy but not hypocritical, this sense
of some common Teutonism.
Professor Haeckel, another of the witnesses raised up against us, attained
to some celebrity at one time through proving the remarkable resemblance
between two different things by printing duplicate pictures of the same
thing. Professor Haeckel's contribution to biology, in this case, was
exactly like Professor Harnack's contribution to ethnology. Professor
Harnack knows what a German is like. When he wants to imagine what an
Englishman is like, he simply photographs the same German over again. In
both cases there is probably sincerity as well as simplicity. Haeckel
was so certain that the species illustrated in embryo really are closely
related and linked up, that it seemed to him a small thing to simplify it
by mere repetition. Harnack is so certain that the German and Englishman
are almost alike, that he really risks the generalisation that they are
exactly alike. He photographs, so to speak, the same fair and foolish face
twice over; and calls it a remarkable resemblance between cousins. Thus, he
can prove the existence of Teutonism just about as conclusively as Haeckel
has proved the more tenable proposition of the non-existence of God.
Now the German and the Englishman are not in the least alike--except
in the sense that neither of them are negroes. They are, in everything
good and evil, more unlike than any other two men we can take at random
from the great European family. They are opposite from the roots of
their history, nay of their geography. It is an understatement to call
Britain insular. Britain is not only an island, but an island slashed by
the sea till it nearly splits into three islands; and even the Midlands
can almost smell the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful and fertile
inland country, which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and
narrow paths, as people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy
is really national because it is natural; it has cohered out of hundreds
of accidental adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer's time and
after it. But the German Navy is an artificial thing; as artificial as a
constructed Alp would be in England. William II. has simply copied the
British Navy as Frederick II. copied the French Army: and this Japanese
or ant-like assiduity in imitation is one of the hundred qualities which
the Germans have and the English markedly have not. There are other German
superiorities which are very much superior.
The one or two really jolly things that the Germans have got are precisely
the things which the English haven't got: notably a real habit of popular
music and of the ancient songs of the people, not merely spreading from
the towns or caught from the professionals. In this the Germans rather
resemble the Welsh; though heaven knows what becomes of Teutonism if
they do. But the difference between the Germans and the English goes
deeper than all these signs of it; they differ more than any other two
Europeans in the normal posture of the mind. Above all, they differ in
what is the most English of all English traits; that shame which the
French may be right in calling "the bad shame"; for it is certainly mixed
up with pride and suspicion, the upshot of which we called shyness. Even
an Englishman's rudeness is often rooted in his being embarrassed. But
a German's rudeness is rooted in his never being embarrassed. He eats
and makes love noisily. He never feels a speech or a song or a sermon or
a large meal to be what the English call "out of place" in particular
circumstances. When Germans are patriotic and religious, they have no
reaction against patriotism and religion as have the English and the
French.
Nay, the mistake of Germany in the modern disaster largely arose from the
facts that she thought England was simple, when England is very subtle.
She thought that because our politics have become largely financial that
they had become wholly financial; that because our aristocrats had become
pretty cynical that they had become entirely corrupt. They could not seize
the subtlety by which a rather used-up English gentleman might sell a
coronet when he would not sell a fortress; might lower the public standards
and yet refuse to lower the flag.
In short, the Germans are quite sure that they understand us entirely,
because they do not understand us at all. Possibly if they began to
understand us they might hate us even more: but I would rather be hated for
some small but real reason, than pursued with love on account of all kinds
of qualities which I do not possess and which I do not desire. And when the
Germans get their first genuine glimpse of what modern England is like,
they will discover that England has a very broken, belated and inadequate
sense of having an obligation to Europe, but no sort of sense whatever of
having any obligation to Teutonism.
This is the last and strongest of the Prussian qualities we have here
considered. There is in stupidity of this sort a strange slippery
strength: because it can be not only outside rules but outside reason. The
man who really cannot see that he is contradicting himself has a great
advantage in controversy; though the advantage breaks down when he tries
to reduce it to simple addition, to chess, or to the game called war. It
is the same about the stupidity of the one-sided kinship. The drunkard who
is quite certain that a total stranger is his long-lost brother, has a
greater advantage until it comes to matters of detail. "We must have chaos
within," said Nietzsche, "that we may give birth to a dancing star."
In these slight notes I have suggested the principal strong points of
the Prussian character. A failure in honour which almost amounts to a
failure in memory: an egomania that is honestly blind to the fact that
the other party is an ego; and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny
and interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the
proud. To these must be added a certain mental shapelessness which can
expand or contract without reference to reason or record; a potential
infinity of excuses. If the English had been on the German side, the
German professors would have noted what irresistible energies had evolved
the Teutons. As the English are on the other side, the German professors
will say that these Teutons were not sufficiently evolved. Or they will
say that they were just sufficiently evolved to show that they were not
Teutons. Probably they will say both. But the truth is that all that they
call evolution should rather be called evasion. They tell us they are
opening windows of enlightenment and doors of progress. The truth is that
they are breaking up the whole house of the human intellect, that they
may abscond in any direction. There is an ominous and almost monstrous
parallel between the position of their over-rated philosophers and of their
comparatively under-rated soldiers. For what their professors call roads of
progress are really routes of escape.