German, Slav and Magyar

Excerpt:

VI.  “Central Europe” and “Berlin-Bagdad”

 

IT has become a commonplace of writers on the war to say that Germany is a danger to Europe. In a sense this is of course true, but it gives a wrong focus to the truth. For no nation, so long as it is content with its national unity and independence and the development of its own resources and culture, can fairly be described as a menace to its neighbours. That stage is only reached when it begins to regard its own civilization as a species of super-culture, and its leaders as supermen who have the mission of imposing their wishes and ideas upon the outside world. It is not, then, Germany, as Germany, that threatens Europe's whole future. There have been cases before in history, when a great nation went mad for a time and yet recovered from its madness. The classic example is that of our nearest and dearest allies, the French, during the orgies of the Reign of Terror. And it may be that in the same way Germany will recover from the madness which has devastated Belgium, Poland, and Serbia, and that some intercourse between her and her neighbours to the West and East will again be possible. At a moment when her submarines and Zeppelins are murdering at random, and her soldiers are drugged with ether for the assault, this may appear little better than a pious hope.

But to-day the essential fact with which we hare to reckon is that Germany is more united than ever before, and that the classes which control her destinies not merely the narrow military clique at the top, but the whole vast organism of the bureaucracy, army, and professional and academic classes are inspired by a programme which may be summed up in three words Deutschland uber Alles. Fortunately this has at last become too obvious to be ignored, and is, indeed, only contested by a few cranks, who have been far too often wrong in their estimates and prophecies to obtain credence now. Strangely enough, however, the real urgent menace from Germany has been, to a large extent, overlooked by our public opinion or merely alluded to in passing. This menace lies in the fact that Germany controls the destinies of the 51,000,000 who inhabit the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy to say nothing of the 20,000,000 of Turkey and the 4,000,000 of Bulgaria and is ruthlessly exploiting them in a cause which the vast majority of them regard with complete indifference, and at least half of them with utter loathing. Just as the harmless Anatolian peasant is fighting the battles of Enver Pasha the murderer of his commander-in-chief, his Grand Vizier, and now his Heir-Apparent so the 35,000,000 Slavs and Latins of the Central Empires are being used as " food for cannon " in a death-struggle against their own kinsmen and their dearest national ideals. Thus the main task before us, if we are really to reconstruct Europe on new and healthy lines, must be to detach these peoples from their present thraldom to Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, to liberate the Slav democracies of Central Europe, and to secure to them the means of progress and organization upon a national and independent basis. This task has the further military advantage that it enables us to attack Germany at her weakest, and no longer at her strongest, spot ; for the events of the war have only served to prove that some of the leading French strategists were right in maintaining that the true field for a successful offensive lies through the great Hungarian plains, not through the brick walls of Belgium. By our planlessness and levity we have abandoned the magnificent natural frontier from the Adriatic to the Danube, which was at our disposal for the first fourteen months of the war, and we did not even take the trouble to defend Mount Lovcen, the key of the Adriatic, from the assaults of Austria. But though our folly has made the task infinitely more difficult, it still lies before us. If to the conquering Germans last autumn Serbia was the route to the East, she is also the route to the West for the Allied armies.

Before the war in Germany, as in all other European countries, our own included, there were two currents of opinion, the one definitely opposed to adventure or expansion, the other as definitely basing itself upon force as the root of all progress. No one who visited Germany frequently, or was in the habit of reading German political literature, could fail to be aware of the existence of an active Pan-German movement and of a propaganda which often assumed an anti-British complexion. Our mistake lay in over-estimating the strength of those saner forces in German public opinion which made for peace. At the end of July 1914 those forces proved themselves to be utterly impotent, and were swept away by the march of events. The inevitable result has been to bring the Pan-German programme within the range of practical politics and to increase immensely its appeal and its popularity. It may be argued that we were always wrong to ignore its significance ; to-day our most vital interests demand that we should study it in all its bearings.

There are three stages in the Pan-German plan : (1) The creation of " Mitteleuropa," a great Central European state-organism of 130 to 150 million inhabitants, as an economic and military unit ; (2) the realization of the dream Berlin-Bagdad, by the inclusion in the political and economic spheres of influence of the new Zollverein of all the territory lying between the Hungarian frontier and the Persian Gulf ; and (3) naval supremacy and Weltmacht. The vital problem of this war, upon which the whole future development of civilization depends, is whether we are to oppose this programme or to submit to it as inevitable. At such a moment there can be no half-measures ; the answer must be yes or no. If no, this war is an act of criminal folly which has no parallel in history. If yes, we must not wait till the enemy's plan has reached maturity, but must overthrow it in its initial stages. It was a German poet who told us that what we have inherited from our ancestors we must earn again in order to possess (Was du crerbt von deinen Vdtern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen). That is a lesson which we have been in danger of forgetting, and which Germany is teaching us. For the future we must throw off the insularity which left us ignorant or oblivious of hostile designs, nor must we ever allow a situation to arise in which we might seem indifferent to events upon land, simply because they take place at the other end of Europe. For such indifference is the surest way to alienate our Allies, who realize to the full the close interconnection of West and East and Southeast, and expect us to realize it equally. If we are right in regarding sea power as the key to victory, it is none the less true that the extension of German land power will be the prelude to a fresh attempt to challenge our security on the sea. That is, of course, the true inward explanation of the presence of British armies upon French soil ; but while every one to-day realizes the need of countering the German land plan on the West, the equally urgent and overwhelming need of countering the Germans in the East of Europe has still not been sufficiently realized. There are still quite serious and well-meaning people who argue that if the Germans could once be ejected from Belgium and Northern France, our aims in the war would be achieved. To them all the vast problems of Central and Eastern Europe are a mere blank. In seeking to differentiate between Germany and her Allies, they fail to realize the fact that it is no mere accident that has brought Prussia, Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria into line. All four stand for the same principle of racial hegemony. The only difference lies in the varying degree of crudeness with which that policy is pursued in Posen, in Transylvania, in the Balkans, and in Armenia.

If the German plan of "Berlin-Bagdad" is to be countered, we must find obstacles to place in its path, and in so doing we can only build with the material which is already to our hand. This consists, above all, of the Slav and Latin peoples of Austria-Hungary and South-eastern Europe generally, who are eager to lead their own national lives, and the fulfilment of whose aspirations coincides absolutely with British interests and the interests of the Entente as a whole. Till the very eve of war, and even later, it was the fashion in certain circles to regret our political ties with Russia on the ground that the Slavs are barbarous. It would be as easy as it is superfluous to prove that the Russians, the greatest of all the Slav nations, are anything but barbarous, and that they have much to teach us all above all, the Kulturvolk pat excellence in every branch of science, art, literature, and music. But my present object is to emphasize that it is an equally gross libel, and in some directions an even grosser libel, upon the other Slav nations also. The next two in importance, the Poles and the Czechs, far from being barbarous, have ancient cultures and literatures of their own, and have played a notable part in European thought and progress. The Slovaks are perhaps the most attractive and naturally gifted of all the Slav nations, and only await the removal of the tyrannous Magyar yoke in order to reveal their latent talents to the world at large. The Serbs and their Croat and Slovene kinsmen, the three branches of the Jugoslav race, are also noticeable, not only for their heroic endurance against fearful odds, but above all for the virile perseverance which has created, without external aid, the most democratic of peasant states in modern times.

One further point deserves special emphasis in this connection, namely, the essential error which underlay our diplomacy in the years preceding the war, in treating the Balkans and AustriaHungary as two watertight compartments. It lies quite outside my present purpose to describe the process by which the Germany of the Burschenschaften and Turnvereine, of the Romantic Era in literature, and of liberalism in the Swabian and South German form, was transformed by the genius of Bismarck and his group into the Prussianized Germany against which we are pitted to-day, and which rests upon the material doctrines of blood and iron, and of brute force as the sure forerunner of national prosperity. During the generation which separated the Congress of Vienna from the Revolution of 1848, the aspirations of the leaders of German thought were directed, at one and the same time, towards national unity and constitutional liberty and reform. But the reform movement was shipwrecked at Frankfurt in 1848. Unity was only possible on a unitary basis. Two masters were impossible ; either Prussia or Austria had to give way. The idealists of Frankfurt dreamed of a " Great Germany," the Germany of 70,000,000, as they reckoned even then. But the inclusion of Austria with her non-German elements would have created a dangerous dualism and prolonged still further the rivalry of Habsburg and Hohenzollern. Bismarck achieved German unity on rather narrower lines by the elimination of Austria. He achieved it in seven years by three successive wars of aggression, in which appearances were carefully preserved till long after the event. But for his remaining twenty years of office, with the notorious exception of 1875, when he was within an ace of attacking France once more, he favoured peaceful development, and posed as the peacemaker and honest broker. Nor was this a mere pose, and there are no grounds for doubting his sincerity when he applied the famous phrase " satiated " (saturierf) to the territorial appetites of Germany, and when he declared that the whole Eastern Question was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. The modern German tendency to repudiate his attitude in this respect has obscured the extremely subtle nature of his policy. The same attitude which, in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, made him lie in despair upon his bed and tear the bedclothes with his teeth when his master wanted to annex Bohemia, was reflected in the memorandum which he addressed to William I in 1871, to the effect that it was far more advantageous for Germany to extend her influence over the Slavs through the medium of Austria than to annex the German subjects of the House of Habsburg. A whole volume could easily be devoted to a discussion of his motives in 1866, in suggesting that Budapest was a better centre than Vienna for the reconstruction of the Dual Monarchy. But it is quite clear that he aimed at the political organization of Austria-Hungary as an instrument of German policy ; and with that aim always in view the Czechs were isolated, the Poles discreetly held in check, and the Magyars flattered and encouraged. So firmly persuaded was Bismarck of Austria's value to Germany, that when the Eastern Question separated Austria from Russia and forced Bismarck to a decision, he chose Austria without hesitation. Thus arose the Dual Alliance, which in 1882 became the Triple Alliance. Throughout these years Bismarck favoured the league of the three Emperors, and sometimes managed to attain it, though never permanently ; and his leanings towards Russia, or the Tsarist system, led him to conclude the famous Reinsurance Treaty (Ruckversicherungsvertrag) . But determined as he was to remain on friendly terms with Russia, he was never prepared to pay the price of deserting Austria.

Bismarck's aim, then, was slow infiltration. He once said to Hermann Bahr, the novelist, who as a young man headed a deputation of Austrian students, "that he was glad to see that the German-Austrians were good Germans ; but that they could not prove this better than by making Austria strong. Germany needed them and reckoned upon them, but inside Austria" To-day we are beginning to see the meaning of this policy. On a similar occasion, in 1895, Bismarck said: "To prove effectually your sentiments towards the German Emperor, fulfil all your duties towards your own dynasty. I advise you to show condescension and indulgence to your Slav neighbours." In the same way he steadily discouraged political demonstrations directed against Austria, and in 1897 induced the Reichstag to reject a motion of sympathy with the German nationalists of Austria. In short, he desired a perpetual political alliance between Germany and Austria, if possible, leading to a Zollverein, but very possibly nothing more.

It is sometimes argued that because Germany's present-day ambitions follow quite naturally out of Bismarck's policy, therefore Bismarck was a Pan-German. That is as true and as false as to describe Drake or Nelson as an Imperialist ; for every man lives in his own age. It may be that his biographer, Erich Marcks, is right in claiming that Bismarck would be heart and soul with his people in their struggle to-day. But it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Marcks and many of his compatriots feel, in their heart of hearts, that Bismarck would never have involved Germany in such a war. For to-day Germany is fighting at one and the same time the three wars which her Jingoes would have liked her to fight in succession the war against Russia and Slavdom, for the domination of Middle Europe and the Near East ; the war against France, to silence the promptings of revanche and to win the mouths of the Scheldt and the Rhine ; and the war against Britain, for sea power and world dominion. Bismarck would certainly have taken them singly. There is another direction, however, in which it is possible to trace the hand of Bismarck on the tragedy of to-day, in his policy of the " strong hand " against the Poles of Posen and Silesia. Despite his platonic advice to Austrian students, he pursued an anti-Slav policy in the most acute and irreconcilable form, and contrived to combine it with a firm league with the Russian Court. Thus under Bismarck we find the curious paradox of Petrograd, inspired by German influence, following an anti-Slav policy in Poland, and thus weakening Russian prestige in the Slavonic world. The Polish partition is the great initial crime which lies at the root of all European troubles for a hundred and fifty years past, and which has committed the three spoilers to the support of an evil situation. Now that Russia has broken with Germany, and is very slowly but noticeably preparing to atone for the crimes of the past, we have the right to expect a complete transformation of Russo-Polish relations, and consequently of the whole situation between the Baltic and the Danube.

The eighties were a period of mild colonial expansion on the part of Germany, but it was not until the accession of William II that the new era can be said to have begun. Pan-Germanism raised its head and kept pace with the tremendous outburst of economic activity and material prosperity. Weltpolitik (world policy) became the new cry, and William himself became its mouthpiece. In 1896, the year of the Kruger telegram, he made one of his most memorable speeches : " Out of the German Empire a world-empire has arisen. Everywhere in all parts of the earth thousands of our countrymen reside. German riches, German knowledge, German activity find their way across the ocean. The duty devolves on you to help me to knit this Greater German Empire close to the home country, by helping me in complete unity to fulfil my duty also to the Germans in foreign parts." Thus was inaugurated the new Imperialism. The motto of the Great Elector " Remember that you are a German " (Gedenke dass du ein Deutscher hist) became the motto of Emperor and people. What more natural and estimable than this encouragement of national sentiment ? How could we, who were at that very moment engaged in knitting our own Empire more closely together, venture to criticize the Emperor's attitude ? What more unexceptionable than William II's words, if they had been pronounced by a man of normal temper and not accompanied by a whole series of reactionary and arrogant utterances ? It is unnecessary to go through the long catalogue. " Sic volo, sic jubeo" " Him who opposes me I will crush." "Our future lies on the water." "The trident must be in our hands." " The Emperor of the Atlantic greets the Emperor of the Pacific." " Peoples of Europe, guard your holiest possessions." " No quarter will be given, no prisoners will be taken. . . . Open up once for all a way for Kultur." The last two sentences, incredible as it may sound even to-day, belong to one and the same speech. In William II's unbalanced imagination a glorious ideal becomes raucous and rings false. The pure enthusiasm of the patriot soldier-poet, Theodor von Korner, who apostrophized the sword upon his thigh on the evening before he gave his life in the War of Liberation of 1813, becomes the nauseous military sentiment which makes the German Crown Prince proclaim his regret that a cavalry charge at manoeuvres is not the "real thing."

The old idea that Germany is " satiated " comes to be more and more keenly repudiated, not only by the Pan-German extremists, but by all the sanest and most influential political writers. We hear more and more of Kulturdunger (" the manure of culture ") ; of the crude gospel of materialism ; of the doctrine of the superman and the " strong hand " ; of the supreme morality of war ; of military strategy as the basis of all political organism and of all international frontiers ; of the theory that small states cannot subsist and must inevitably become the prey of the great. That least aggressive and greatest of all German writers, Goethe, once declared that every man had the choice between becoming hammer or anvil. The Pan-Germans caught up this phrase, and preached the view that after being the anvil for centuries the German must insist upon becoming the hammer. The essence of these modern doctrines may be summed up in the teaching of Treitschke " the State is Power."

One of the main secrets of German success has been those habits of association and co-operation to which their mediaeval cities owed much of their prosperity. Just as the student societies played a predominant part in the War of Liberation, so the eighties and nineties which have led to the War of Hegemony, were a period of the foundation of every kind of patriotic and political society. In 1880 the Deutsche Schulverein was founded in Vienna for the support of German schools, and in the following year its namesake in Berlin was established. The aims of these societies, which are still very active, though perhaps slightly less powerful since the year 1895, were by no means confined to preserving the German position in such mixed districts as Bohemia, Silesia, Posen, Hungary, and Styria, but also to propagating in the intensest manner possible the German idea all along the non-German borderland. An older society, the Gustav-Adolf-Verein, has devoted itself to the support of German Protestant congregations in difficulties, and has done splendid work against Magyar aggression ; but, despite its genuinely Protestant zeal, it must be regarded as an eminently political organ. The three colonial societies the German Colonial League, the German Colonial Society, and the Society for German Colonization have all exercised a very marked influence upon public opinion in Germany. The so-called Schittzvereine (Leagues of Defence), which sprang up in every direction throughout the Polish districts of Germany, the German and mixed districts of Bohemia, and the countries lying between Vienna and the Adriatic, have at one and the same time strengthened the German element wherever it was forced upon the defensive, and intensified the racial struggle by every kind of offensive tactics. Above all, the notorious Deutsche Ostmarkenverein (1894), which has acquired the nickname of the " Hakatist " League from the first letter of the names of its three founders, Hansemann, Kennemann, and Tiedemann, led a fierce and merciless attack upon everything Polish schools, traditions, culture, religion and became the foremost champion of the brutal policy of land expropriation pursued by the Prussian Government.

There is, however, one society which has attained special notoriety and which deserves fuller treatment, because though often poohpoohed even by quite serious Germans before the war, and though always ahead of German public opinion, and in deed, extravagant and fantastic in its aims and utterances, it has, in this present war, come into its own, and proved, not only to Germany but to all Europe, that its vapourings and frenzy are not merely Utopian, but Realpolitik of the grimmest kind. This is the PanGerman League, which, first founded in 1886 by the notorious Dr. Carl Peters as the Allgemeine Deutsche Verband, to encourage colonial expansion, was transformed in 1895 by Dr. Hasse, the deputy for Leipzig, into the Alldeutsche Verband. Its programme was one of expansion and dominion, of the community of all branches of the German race (Gemeinschaft alter deutscher Stdmme). It favoured the restoration of the ancient frontiers of the mediaeval Empire, the redemption of all German outposts at the expense of the enemy at the gates, the consolidation of Central Europe on a Teutonic and at the same time on an economic basis. It worked through perpetual meetings and agitation, and the noisy cries of its platform orators were reflected in its official organ, the Alldeutsche Blatter. It would be very easy even to-day to exaggerate its influence in the years preceding the war. But it certainly acted as a permanent stimulant to the Government, especially in matters of emigration and colonial expansion. Above all, it stirred up public opinion and accustomed it to think of worldproblems which had hitherto lain outside the German ken. It would not be accurate to assert that William II encouraged the League, but he has always worked upon parallel lines. Another famous speech, delivered in 1898, in which he urged "the unity and co-operation of all the German tribes," aroused special enthusiasm in Pan-German circles owing to its use of the central phrase in the League's programme. The agitation of the Pan-German League unquestionably paved the way for the first Navy Bill and popularized the German fleet, especially in Bavaria and the south. Its programme may be summed up under three main heads. No German must be de-Germanized, or lost to his nationality ; the fleet must form the link with all Germans overseas ; and an active Pan-German propaganda must prepare the colonization of Central Europe . . .