Germans of Yesterday and Today

Differences Between Goethe and the Boche Intellectuals

FRANK MOORE COLBY

A FORLORN confession, recently published by a university teacher of German, who has found himself with nothing to teach ought, I suppose, to have stirred me more deeply.

It may be that it was overshadowed by the other horrors of the war. Or perhaps it was because the writer said, rather tragically, that there was nothing left for him now but to work his farm, which, assuming the farm to be a reasonably good one, would have seemed to me an agreeable alternative to teaching German, even before the war. At all events, it was not hard to imagine a man in the situation of this real or fictitious teacher of German (the confession was anonymous) who would have faced it with more composure than he did.

HE had made German the strongest of the college courses, he tells us, and even after the war broke out, the enthusiasm of his students was undiminished. Hatred of Hapsburgers and Hohenzollems did not at first lessen their ardor for William Tell or Hermann und Dorothea, and it was not till after a year of war that they began to fall away. As for him, though he had lived long in Germany, he saw nothing amiss in the German character till 1912, when, in the course of a visit there, their self-praise began to annoy him.

He never dreamt of such a thing as actual war.

War-scares, of course, were in the wind, but they were the work of a few alarmists. Mad theorists there were, Treitschke and the rest, and everybody knew of Bernhardi's extreme views and of Prussians like von Bülow,

Rohrbach, and others who outPrussianed Prussianism; but there were extremists in every land under the sun.

Then came the awakening and he lost all heart in his work.

He tried at first to show that all that is best in German literature was in revolt against the very spirit we are now fighting, but the "newspapers made current events too vital." Students did not wish to learn the language of the Kaiser and the Crown Prince—except for practical purposes. German as a literary foster-tongue for us Americans was gone, perhaps for centuries. This was what frightfulness and Kultur had done for the language of Luther, Leibnitz, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Heine, Herder, Grillparzer and Grimm. He felt as if the Germans of today had cheated him of something that was beautiful and good, and he was now engaged in the pursuit of scientific agriculture.

On the practical side, the prospect of the German language seems fairly good. The sentimental campaign for blotting it out altogether is beginning to look foolish, since the government turned all the colleges into military schools, with German as a regular part of the course, and since that report to the British government which urged the creation of fifty-five professorships and a hundred and ten lectureships for a group of foreign languages in which German stood second only to French.

One would have supposed from the letterwriters in the newspapers a while ago, that it was treasonable even to learn enough of the enemy's tongue to catch a German criminal and hang him; and they all had the air of being thereby rather dreadful to Germany. But even they will hardly consider the British government pro-Boche.

It is not likely that the civilized peoples will permit the doings of Germany to be permanently concealed behind the German language. On the contrary, it would seem to be in a fair way to be taught more thoroughly, if not more widely than before, the interest in it being sharpened by anxiety. A good many of the arguments against the learning of German apparently rested on the somewhat rash notion that the best way to deal with a rattlesnake was not to learn what his rattle meant.

BUT there seems to be no doubt about the present unpopularity of German literature, and one can foresee, during an interval, a train of inconvenient and rather absurd results. Classic German figures, whose spirit is as alien as possible to the Germany of today, will be shunned on account of an imaginary kinship. Goethe, whose ideas if set in motion would have blasted the whole squalid modem German Empire in a moment, will be blamed because that Empire existed. We shall present Hindenburg with the poems of Heinrich Heine, who would have hanged him and any six other Prussians on the seven trees of his imaginary garden, and we shall try to believe that the music of Beethoven somehow resembles the language of the General Staff.

We shall no! let the submarines blow up all our shipping, but we shall let them blow straight out of the eighteenth century all the poets who wrote in German, though they do not belong in any sense to modern Germany, but to the world. Good things bestowed upon the world's republic of letters two centuries ago are to be given back to an abortive modern state experiment less than fifty years old; and while we deny the claim to a Middle Europe, we admit the claim of two misbegotten generations to six whole centuries of literature with which, they have less in common than any civilized people in the world. In short, we shall surrender to the Germans of the moment, a fair part of the world's heritage that they have forfeited, and give back to them the very sort of ancestor who did his best to prevent their being born. And we shall do this without any suspicion that we are giving aid and comfort to the enemy; and persons of the type of the tearful professor of German above mentioned will not lift a finger to set us straight for fear that someone will misunderstand them.

BUT one need not suppose that this popular confusion will endure, or that it will do any lasting damage. We shall learn in time that confounding one's enemy does not really mean confounding him with somebody else; and people are not likely to identify permanently the second part of "Faust" with the conversation of Admiral von Tirpitz, or to mistake a symphony for a submarine.

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One may remain reasonably calm about the future of what is of permanent value in the books of any language, and the Kaiser and the Crown Prince and the Pan-Germans and the German mob will not in the long run be permitted to possess the whole of German literature. In fact, should the next generation of Germans, reverting a little further along their path of Kultur, all be born with tails, the fate of the world's poetry and art will not be altered.

And meanwhile, as to one side of the thing, one may be almost cheerful. No one can say, as he looks back on that somewhat monotonous stream of Teutonized American teachers flowing back from Germany during so many years, whether it did more harm than good; but even before the war, it had been suspected in our universities, that the annotating type of man might possibly be breeding too fast. I suppose the majority of American students of language, no matter in what state they started out for Germany, returned from Germany as annotators; and as soon as it was known that they had acquired the habit of annotation, along with a degree from Heidelberg or Gottingen, they were placed in charge of the education of the young. It was the era of the superstition of "original research," when the average college president actually preferred as a teacher any sort of person who could gather information into little heaps to any man who could distribute it. So they threw into contact with the mind of youth great numbers of German-patented automata, trained only to function copiously in loot-notes—creatures who ought never to have been allowed outside their native bibliographies. It was the day of German "thoroughness," when the victims of it never gave an instant's thought to what the thoroughness was for, and any person who could read a paper to a small group of other persons, who, though specially trained to endure, would not for a moment have stood it, had they not all been going to read papers back, was welcomed to the college chairs from which people of more ample lives were excluded.

IT may be that the German-bred annotator was harmless, but he seemed not to have approached a classic from the outside %vorld. He seemed, rather, to have hatched in it, like a worm in an apple, and to be unable to emerge. It is possible that he had a good deal to do with the making of our university humanities so inhumane. At all events, even before the war broke out, a great many people were thinking that while perhaps he himself had made no mistake in passing his youth in Germany, it was rather a serious blunder to permit him to come back. No doubt many of them, being parasitic by nature, might have turned out badly anyhow, even if they had remained at home— perhaps have added to the honors of Shakespeare scholarship,—for there is always some Shakespeare trouble for a marginal mind to add to—but they certainly seemed the worse for having been dried in Germany.

"OUT the more one detects the German things of our own time, the less one likes to see them identified with the decent things of any time. To say the Germans, old and new, are all alike, is to pay the new ones too high a compliment. To mix up Goethe with the Boche intellectuals of our day is objectionable, not because it hurts Goethe, but because it flatters the intellectuals. It must have pleased the German ruling class to have read in Le Bon that the Germans of today and the Germans of their best periods are all of a piece. The Kaiser loves to think he is like Frederick the Great, and everywhere in the Allied press obliging journalists and men of letters have echoed his opinion; only they turn it around and say Frederick the Great was like him.

While we are trying to remove that monstrosity, the German Imperial Government, thousands of pens are busily engaged in trying to prove it a legitimate inheritance and that the modern Germans are what they are, because they had to be. One would suppose they might see that to provide the Germans with an unbroken succession of barbarous ancestors, was to provide them with too good an excuse. It is a brand-new order of barbarity that the Germans of our time have brought into the world, and any man will have more heart in the war if he remembers that they alone are to blame for it. Old books or musical compositions really cannot be made to bear any portion of the burden of the guilt. From the writings of a good many literary people, it would seem that, if they had their way, we should be carrying on the present war against the Germans' of some previous century.