called “Realpolitik,” the claim that all right is born of might—might, in its turn, being identified with violence. In the name of this doctrine, the German people were declared to be the ruling race. Even since the war, the pan-German identification of might, or power, with violence has been upheld by Professor Schäfer in his “State and Society,” published in 1922. He maintains that right, or law, is solely the expression of might (page 264) and he subtly treats might as equivalent to force. He writes: “The thing cannot be otherwise; force and might can create right.”
Goethe or Bismarck?.
The Germans themselves have sometimes expressed the difference between the new Germany and the old in the catchwords “Weimar or Potsdam? Goethe or Bismarck? Kant or Krupp?”
The Prussianization of Germany was political in the first instance. Taking advantage of the decay of the “Holy Roman Empire of German Allegiance,” that remnant of Roman Catholic theocracy, the Prussian theocracy dominated Germany and Austria by its strong, unitary, military and administrative organization. Little by little Prussianism secured control of all efforts to advance education and culture, and made of Germany outwardly a well-ordered Empire. Not only in politics, philosophy, science and art, but even in theology this Prussianism expressed itself. As soon as the leading men and classes in a nation begin to rely on might and violence, the wells of sympathy dry up. People lose interest in knowing the feelings and thoughts of their neighbours, since the mechanism of the State, the word of command, the fist, suffice for all purposes of intercourse. They cease to think freely and their learning becomes barren of living ideas.
This is the explanation of the great errors and faults of German history and in German thought before and during the war. Bismarck, with his overbearing treatment of those about him, is the type of the domineering Prussian. Were I to make a diagram of the development of German ideas it would be:—
| Goethe—Kant—Frederick the Great |
| Hegel |
Moltke—Bismarck—William II—Lagarde—Marx—Nietzsche |
