tenacity and devotion. It showed what modern men are capable of and what they could do were they to rid themselves of the desire to rule over others, and were they not to suppress in themselves the fellow-feeling that is born in every man. True, they would need also to overcome the whole modern hankering after Titanism, and the selfishness of morbid subjectivism and individualism; for supermanishness necessarily ends in suicide and war.
Inadvertently, my analysis is confirmed by the German historian, Lamprecht, who sought, with so much vigour and enthusiasm, to vindicate the Germans in the war. In his history of Modern Germany, written before the war (“Zur jüngsten deutschen Vergangenheit,” published in 1904), he rightly describes the epoch as one of “irritability,” and adduces both the Emperor William and Bismarck as its characteristic types. In truth, the German superman, the Titan, is a nervous creature who seeks relief from chronic excitement in death or in war, that is to say, in an excitement still more acute.
However true this may be of all nations, it is especially true of the Germans. Their philosophers, artists and other active minds pushed subjectivism and individualism to the point of absurd egomania, with all its moral consequences. Nietzsche’s superman, the Darwinian “beast,” was to prove a remedy for the inhuman folly of “solipsism.” In their spiritual isolation, the German philosophers and men of learning, historians and politicians, proclaimed German civilization and culture as the zenith of human development; and, in the name of this arrogant claim to superiority, Prussian pan-Germanism asserted its right to expansion and to the subjugation of others by sheer force. The Prussian State, its army and its fighting spirit became antidotes to morbid subjectivism. Prussian pan-Germanism is answerable for the world war, morally responsible for it, even if the Austro-Hungarian system shared its guilt and was, in a sense, still guiltier. The people of philosophers and thinkers, the people of Kant and Goethe, which claimed for itself the proud task of enlightening the world, was not entitled to seek in war a way out of the blind alley into which its one-sided, albeit highly refined, culture had led it. Nor could it honestly adopt and support the deceitful and short-sighted policy of the degenerate Hapsburgs. Corruptio optimi pessima.
