Light on German History
The Course of German History By A. J. P. Taylor. (Hamish Hamilton. 12s. 6d.) HITHERTO, as Mr. Taylor implies in his preface, English writing on German history has been unreadable or irrelevant, often both. The serious student, struck by the peculiar inefficacy of Stein's trumpeted reforms or perplexed by the disastrous effects of Bismarck's diplomatic genius, has laboriously pieced the story together for himself ; detailed studies like J. V. Fuller's "Bismarck's Diplomacy at its Zenith" have helped him on his way. But the average teacher or politician has continued to murmur phrases totally inapplicable to the facts. This folly has not been confined to Britain. Mr. Taylor refers to John Russell's tribute to Bismarck as a "fellow soldier of liberty " ; but, as Bainville has insisted, leftist opinion in nineteenth century France mistook Prussian aggressiveness for progressiveness: the same is largely true of the Italian Left in its attitude towards Germany— which, as Mr. Taylor shows, had by then conquered Prussia—in the early twentieth century.
Mr. Taylor's new book destroys the last excuses for such dangerous illusions. One must, in the first place, be particularly grateful to hirn for his clear appreciation of the unpleasant significance of Luther (whose anti-Semitism should also perhaps be noted) and of half- absurd figures like Turnvater Jahn ; one misses the mention of S.S. Obergruppenfiihrer Frederick William I. In the second place, how true is Mr. Taylor's dictum that Palacky's reply to the Frankfurt Liberals in April, 1848, was "the most fateful document in the history of modern Germany." For it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this Slav challenge to the Great German point of view. " No one," Mr. Taylor wrote at the outset, "can understand Germans whO does not appreciate their determination to exterminate the East."
The yearnings of the pre-industrial German soul were not, how- ever, a fearful danger to humanity. German industrialisation (in the case of Germany all but synonymous with unification) made the silliest German dreams of domination become plausible ; power, when it became mechanised, did appear to approach the German conception of it, and efficiency seemed to obliterate principle. The young Hitler observed that the Pan-German followers of Schonexer (much more ferociously anti-Semitic, surely, than Lueger) lacked mass appeal. Butmechanical contrivances then rapidly facilitated the mass production of public opinion, and Bismarckian election slogans about the Fatherland in danger developed, via "encirclement," into the
monstrous propaganda of Goebbels. "Intoxicated by German power, the Germans felt the need of no allies and made concessions to no one," writes Mr. Taylor. "This, and this only, is the meaning of the ' encirclement ' of Germany."
If one year is to be singled out as decisive in this evolution, Mr. Taylor is right to emphasise the importance of the new tariff policy of 1879 when Germany "passed virtually without a break from the age of Colbert to the age of Dr. Schacht." If Bismarck had refused to protect German industry, "Germany would have been so deeply bound to the world market as to be incapable of war." This was unthinkable: "Germany must produce both the raw materials of war and the weapons of war herself." Bismarck thus inevitably abandoned the economic policy of the Liberals, and the Junkers, hitherto hostile to Great German notions, became "the agents of a Greater German programme of unlimited expansion." Under William II this programme rapidly included that naval policy which satisfied the appetites of German heavy industry and which gratuitously provoked the hostility of Britain. It also became in- creasingly identified, despite all official denials, with that Pan- Germanism which was especially offensive towards the Slav world ; what Mr. Taylor calls the Jekyll and Hyde policy of the Wilhelm- strasse is well illustrated by despatches such as that of Count Bernstorff dated London, April 16th, 1904. Thus did Germany come, both in 1914 and in 1939, to hit out at the world in apparent if hysterical unity, in lieu of tackling the problem of her own fundamental disunity.
Mr. Taylor's concise, lucid sentences are undoubtedly severe • his book will not perhaps be easy enough to be popular, and some readers may not enjoy the suspicion that no nation could pass tests of such severity with much success. Let us hope, nevertheless, that his warnings will not go quite unheeded. "To keep Russia and the Western Powers divid.td was the great achievement of German policy between 1934 and 1941, and the key to German success." To divide them again has been Germany's constant and greatest hope since 1941, and it would be rash indeed to suppose that this hope was extinguished by the unconditional surrender of the Reich in 1945.
ELIZABETH WISKEMANN.
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