Conditions in 1923 Germany - Part 5
But the actual state of well or ill-being, the degree of wealth or poverty in the German Republic, is not to be guessed at by a tourist. I saw only what I saw, and that in South Germany.
They exhibited as much warmth toward the English as you could reasonably expect, since men are not inclined to feel over warmly to a nation which has defeated them in war. Their attitude to America was one of hope for the future; they were extraordinarily solicitous of being understood by us. For the French, as foes in the open field, I heard nothing but plain and high commendation. But the French policy since the war arouses their deep-est indignation. The Treaty of Versallies, the determination — so they put it — of the French government to destroy the German nation, fills them with a passionate hatred of France.
Turning to our own history, we know that the period and process of Reconstruction embittered the South more than the four years of war which preceded it. Must injustice and tyranny follow on every defeat? Is this what is happening in Germany? I am at one with Dean Inge, in the belief that all the nations of Europe must bear, each in its degree, the guilt of the Great Disaster.
The Germans deny that they were the authors of the war; but for them, as once for our Southern brothers, the war is over; they accept their defeat, and they desire, as our Southern brothers once desired, a return to the works and ways of peace; some sort of common understanding; some sort of economic cooperation between nations; they look to time and trade as the great healers; they want peace, but they also want justice; to their minds, the Peace of Versailles is a peace contrived for the ruin of the Teutonic peoples. They may be wrong, but a good deal of the higher English opinion appears to agree with them.
I heard more pacificism talked in Germany than anywhere else in my life. The former Kaiser was spoken of with indignation, his flight with contempt. I met almost no one in any class who wished to restore the Hohenzollerns. Amongst military men the general desire was for a constitutional monarchy, and they looked to England for a model.
Von Kaiserling, the greatest of their present-day thinkers, a man of increasing influence, suggests in his latest book an elected king, with the executive powers of an American president. I have recorded the dissatisfaction with the Republic as constituted, and this is natural enough. For the administration is weak, and the official chiefs do not embody and represent German character to the Germans themselves. Many Frenchmen regard their Republic in the same way. It irritates them that their political leaders should be men so wanting in the more brilliant and engaging French qualities. But the French Republic survives; the German one may possibly continue to function.
But the question of economic condition, the relative wealth or poverty of Germany, will not down. Are the Germans in bad case, or are they seeking to delude the world. The question goes to the root of the matter, but it is one for men of finance to answer. Our American tourists return in shoals to their native country, and report the Germans to be busy, fat, rubicund, and rude; the exterior of things to be unchanged, and all classes equally prosperous. I did not find it so.
There was everywhere the sign of carelessness, dirt, and decay. Civilians of both sexes wore old and rusty garments; or, because of its cheapness, had adopted the Bavarian peasant costume, with its bright contrast of colors. Apart from profiteers, the people on the street looked either anxious, or sour and embittered, or listless, or abstracted, or in a dull despair. There were respectable persons, persons of refinement, who begged of one. One learned from prelates, physicians, and officials certain facts:
Suicide was on the increase, and abortion, hitherto the most infrequent of crimes, had appeared. The children's hospitals were overcrowded. The children in the towns had very largely ceased to play games, or to play at all. The faces, as the human current swept by you, were gray and bloodless, and none more so than those of the University students.
In September, the children and the aged showed signs of feeling the early cold of north Europe. There was, too, more sourness, more cheating, more surly and ugly rudeness from German to German than, with my previous experience in view, I could have dreamed possible. If you moved among the poor of either sex, you were met at once with the assertion of 'equality'; and throughout the continent, equality is asserted threateningly, and with insult.
I saw nothing of North Germany, where the race is possibly more powerful, more willful, and at the same time more highly industrialized. Let me, therefore, leave any summary of conditions to others, and report upon the one sinister phenomenon that impressed me most — the fall of the middle class.
There was painful evidence of the decay of that class, on all sides. Lawyers were leaving the law, ministers the church. In September I accompanied an eminent man of science to the door of a pawn-shop, where he was to sell his most costly and delicate instruments, expecting to receive for them about one twentieth of what they had cost him. He wanted food for his children; he sold his tools, thus ceasing to function in his chosen profession.
Multiply his case by the thousand, and you have a picture of things as they now are.
The professional class, which creates and sustains civilization, is being rapidly abolished. It needs no Trotzky or Radek to destroy it; the tyranny of circumstance suffices. Owing to the fall of the mark, the rise of prices, and the general dislocation of things, the salaries of these men are not sufficient for their support; and if, in addition to their salary, they were recipients of an income, this is now no longer forthcoming. The scholarship, science, medicine, and art of Central Europe are actually disappearing.
The discoverers of the spectroscope, of the antitoxin for diphtheria; the creators of the Ninth Symphony and the inventors of the higher criticism; a race that produced Kant and Goethe in modern times, and to which the whole of Northern Europe is indebted for the Protestant Reformation; the people that produced Luther, must necessarily perish as a creative force. That is, their civilization will cease to exist. But, civilization once rooted out and gone, cannot be wished back into being. There is a dream among men that this is not so. We think of Civilization as of the Earth or Air: — it cannot conceivably suffer diminution, or be absent, but it must be recalled that modern science and its child, modern civilization, or progress, are not like the Roman state and culture, robust and enduring things, iron and granite, which only time and erosion can destroy: they are as frail as any weed, and yet more frail. For they depend on money; on a class of highly bred human animals with well-trained minds; on a degree of leisure in that class; and on a selfless enthusiasm. Let the educated men and women of a community become hewers of wood and drawers of water — all is over; the thing ends; you have a dark age.
The more prosperous nations must then carry the people which is thus depleted of its mind, as the living tissue carries dead matter. That, in as far as it affects us, the loss is potential and in the future, does not make it any the less a loss.
If the forces now active in Germany continue to play on the social system, her hundred millions of people will cease to function in that state of things we call progress; and it needs no prophet to foresee that we and the whole world must suffer a secret, but actual and progressive impoverishment. The gen-eral body of mankind will want what it would have possessed. The mind of man will be so much the less productive of values, and hence there will be that much less of good to share among the peoples of the earth.
They exhibited as much warmth toward the English as you could reasonably expect, since men are not inclined to feel over warmly to a nation which has defeated them in war. Their attitude to America was one of hope for the future; they were extraordinarily solicitous of being understood by us. For the French, as foes in the open field, I heard nothing but plain and high commendation. But the French policy since the war arouses their deep-est indignation. The Treaty of Versallies, the determination — so they put it — of the French government to destroy the German nation, fills them with a passionate hatred of France.
Turning to our own history, we know that the period and process of Reconstruction embittered the South more than the four years of war which preceded it. Must injustice and tyranny follow on every defeat? Is this what is happening in Germany? I am at one with Dean Inge, in the belief that all the nations of Europe must bear, each in its degree, the guilt of the Great Disaster.
The Germans deny that they were the authors of the war; but for them, as once for our Southern brothers, the war is over; they accept their defeat, and they desire, as our Southern brothers once desired, a return to the works and ways of peace; some sort of common understanding; some sort of economic cooperation between nations; they look to time and trade as the great healers; they want peace, but they also want justice; to their minds, the Peace of Versailles is a peace contrived for the ruin of the Teutonic peoples. They may be wrong, but a good deal of the higher English opinion appears to agree with them.
I heard more pacificism talked in Germany than anywhere else in my life. The former Kaiser was spoken of with indignation, his flight with contempt. I met almost no one in any class who wished to restore the Hohenzollerns. Amongst military men the general desire was for a constitutional monarchy, and they looked to England for a model.
Von Kaiserling, the greatest of their present-day thinkers, a man of increasing influence, suggests in his latest book an elected king, with the executive powers of an American president. I have recorded the dissatisfaction with the Republic as constituted, and this is natural enough. For the administration is weak, and the official chiefs do not embody and represent German character to the Germans themselves. Many Frenchmen regard their Republic in the same way. It irritates them that their political leaders should be men so wanting in the more brilliant and engaging French qualities. But the French Republic survives; the German one may possibly continue to function.
But the question of economic condition, the relative wealth or poverty of Germany, will not down. Are the Germans in bad case, or are they seeking to delude the world. The question goes to the root of the matter, but it is one for men of finance to answer. Our American tourists return in shoals to their native country, and report the Germans to be busy, fat, rubicund, and rude; the exterior of things to be unchanged, and all classes equally prosperous. I did not find it so.
There was everywhere the sign of carelessness, dirt, and decay. Civilians of both sexes wore old and rusty garments; or, because of its cheapness, had adopted the Bavarian peasant costume, with its bright contrast of colors. Apart from profiteers, the people on the street looked either anxious, or sour and embittered, or listless, or abstracted, or in a dull despair. There were respectable persons, persons of refinement, who begged of one. One learned from prelates, physicians, and officials certain facts:
Suicide was on the increase, and abortion, hitherto the most infrequent of crimes, had appeared. The children's hospitals were overcrowded. The children in the towns had very largely ceased to play games, or to play at all. The faces, as the human current swept by you, were gray and bloodless, and none more so than those of the University students.
In September, the children and the aged showed signs of feeling the early cold of north Europe. There was, too, more sourness, more cheating, more surly and ugly rudeness from German to German than, with my previous experience in view, I could have dreamed possible. If you moved among the poor of either sex, you were met at once with the assertion of 'equality'; and throughout the continent, equality is asserted threateningly, and with insult.
1923 Germany - Part 6
The general impression received from three months in South Germany was of a people on short ration, mentally distressed, and living from hand to mouth; a people terribly shattered, terribly demoralized. They were industrious without hope; their moral nature was weakened, their courage undermined, or worn to the point of irritation. Had I hated the Germans when I entered their country, I should have left it with my thirst for vengeance satiated.I saw nothing of North Germany, where the race is possibly more powerful, more willful, and at the same time more highly industrialized. Let me, therefore, leave any summary of conditions to others, and report upon the one sinister phenomenon that impressed me most — the fall of the middle class.
There was painful evidence of the decay of that class, on all sides. Lawyers were leaving the law, ministers the church. In September I accompanied an eminent man of science to the door of a pawn-shop, where he was to sell his most costly and delicate instruments, expecting to receive for them about one twentieth of what they had cost him. He wanted food for his children; he sold his tools, thus ceasing to function in his chosen profession.
Multiply his case by the thousand, and you have a picture of things as they now are.
The professional class, which creates and sustains civilization, is being rapidly abolished. It needs no Trotzky or Radek to destroy it; the tyranny of circumstance suffices. Owing to the fall of the mark, the rise of prices, and the general dislocation of things, the salaries of these men are not sufficient for their support; and if, in addition to their salary, they were recipients of an income, this is now no longer forthcoming. The scholarship, science, medicine, and art of Central Europe are actually disappearing.
The discoverers of the spectroscope, of the antitoxin for diphtheria; the creators of the Ninth Symphony and the inventors of the higher criticism; a race that produced Kant and Goethe in modern times, and to which the whole of Northern Europe is indebted for the Protestant Reformation; the people that produced Luther, must necessarily perish as a creative force. That is, their civilization will cease to exist. But, civilization once rooted out and gone, cannot be wished back into being. There is a dream among men that this is not so. We think of Civilization as of the Earth or Air: — it cannot conceivably suffer diminution, or be absent, but it must be recalled that modern science and its child, modern civilization, or progress, are not like the Roman state and culture, robust and enduring things, iron and granite, which only time and erosion can destroy: they are as frail as any weed, and yet more frail. For they depend on money; on a class of highly bred human animals with well-trained minds; on a degree of leisure in that class; and on a selfless enthusiasm. Let the educated men and women of a community become hewers of wood and drawers of water — all is over; the thing ends; you have a dark age.
The more prosperous nations must then carry the people which is thus depleted of its mind, as the living tissue carries dead matter. That, in as far as it affects us, the loss is potential and in the future, does not make it any the less a loss.
If the forces now active in Germany continue to play on the social system, her hundred millions of people will cease to function in that state of things we call progress; and it needs no prophet to foresee that we and the whole world must suffer a secret, but actual and progressive impoverishment. The gen-eral body of mankind will want what it would have possessed. The mind of man will be so much the less productive of values, and hence there will be that much less of good to share among the peoples of the earth.