I look upon Hegel as a synthesis of Goethe and Kant and an anticipation of Bismarck. He accepted the Prussian idea of the State as the highest expression of nationality and a guide for the whole community. His pantheism and fantastic philosophy are a transition from the idea of the Universe held by Goethe and Kant to the mechanical materialism and violence of Prussianism. By his doctrine of “Absolute Idealism” Hegel supported the claim of the Prussian State to absolute authority, forsook the universal outlook and humaneness of Goethe and Kant, and created the basis for a policy of force in theory and practice. It was not for nothing that Hegel was originally a theologian; and even in theology he propounded the principles of the Prussian theocracy. Bismarck and the Emperor William were always calling on God, the Prussian God; and Bismarck and Bismarckianism swallowed up Goethe. The Prussian State became the infallible director of the nation and of its spiritual life and culture.
Marx, for his part, after running through Feuerbach’s philosophy that “a man is what he eats,” turned Hegel’s pantheism and Absolute Idealism into materialism. He took over the mechanism of the Prussian organization, with its State authority and almighty centralization, even though he conceived the State itself as subject to economic conditions. His relationship to the method and the tactics of Prussianism explains the circumstance that, in the world war, the German Marxists associated themselves for so long with the pan-Germans and gave uncritical support to Prussian policy despite their Socialism and their revolutionary tenets. Indeed, the undemocratic notion that large economic units are indispensable corresponds to Prussian “supermanishness”; and Marx’s own view of the Slav peoples was not different from that of Treitschke or Lagarde. And Nietzsche sought refuge from egomaniac isolation—from “solipsism”—in the Darwinian right of the stronger. The sway (and the Church) of a new aristocracy were to be founded upon the “blonde beast,” Christian theocracy being replaced by a theocracy of the superman.
Yet I do not conceive the antithesis between Goethe and Bismarck, Kant and Krupp in the sense of a Parsee dualism, for a psychologist might find elements of Prussian “Realpolitik” even in Kant and Goethe. The real antithesis would be between Beethoven and Bismarck. In Beethoven I see a German genius unspoiled by Prussia. His art springs from pure, true inspiration. It speaks from heart to heart, as Beethoven sometimes
