BOOKS OF THE DAY
The German Mind (A. L. Rowse) ... .
Henry Grattan and His Times (Frank MacDermot) Rothermere and Hitler (E. H. Carr) ... . The Facts about Property (Honor Croome) Christianity and Economics (H. G. Wood) ... A Number of People (Christopher Hobhouse) 599 600 600 6or 6ot 602 Let Dons Delight (Ronald Lewin) ...
Travel Medicine and the Bar (Anthony Powell) ... The Final Wordsworth (Edward Sackville West) Birds as Animals (John Raynor) ... Fiction (Forrest Reid) Current Literature and Magazines
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THE GERMAN MIND
ROWSE By A. L.
THE problem of Germany is the problem of Europe. There needs no apology for returning to it again and again, consider- ing it now from this angle, now from that, since we have it with us always.. If Germany involves Europe in another war, and is defeated, it will still be there. What are we to think of it? There is every reason to inform ourselves of what contemporary Germans are thinking—of what passes with them under the guise of " thought."
This French book is the best survey I know of the thinkers who have made the thought of the Germany we have to deal with : of Rathenau, Keyserling, Thomas Mann ; of Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck and the group of writers in Die Tat ; of Hitler, Rosenberg, Goebbels and all the lesser fry among the Nazis. Professor Vermeil is a distinguished authority at the Sorbonne on contemporary Germany and German thought ; and his book has all the virtues of the French academic mind at its best, precision and lucidity, careful documentation and a sound instinct for what is sense and what is nonsense.
What is remarkable is the continuity of thought, the strongly marked common characteristics among these writers, in spite of their different positions and associations. " Writers or publicists, orators or men of action," M. Vermeil comments, " the thinkers here dealt with all go back to the traditions of the nineteenth century. Since the end of the Holy Roman Empire, the intellectual Elite of Germany has never ceased meditating upon the origins, the nature and destiny of the German Reich." They have a great deal more in common than this ; almost all of them, whether Liberal or Nazi, idealist or realist to the point of cynicism, share a distrust and dislike of the West, of England and France, and what they stand for in European civilisation, amounting in some cases to horror, but always to active hostility. One knew before that the fatal and systematic Spengler, who constructed, as Germans will, a whole sociology out of his own schaden freude, hated England and believed in an inevitable conflict between England and Prussia, of which 1914 was only the beginning.
But it comes with something of a surprise to realise to what an extent a so-called Liberal like Thomas Mann, in his heyday, shared the general German hostility to the West, the "eternal German protest "—as M. Vermeil calls it—against the intel- lect, against the life of reason, his criticism of our over- civilisation, our decadence and hypocrisy. The world could do with a little more of our over-civilisation at present. It is tragic to observe how thoroughly, with what laborious exactitude these idealist writers, Rathenau, Keyserling and Mann, paved the way for the brutality and vulgarisation of the Nazis. Rathenau died, their victim ; Thomas Mann is now in his old age at leisure to repent, an exile in America.
One does not need to go again into the extraordinary system of thought erected by Spengler on the basis of German defeat (ergo, defeat of the West) ; it has been sufficiently criticised before. And yet there is something so representative of Germany in its completeness, its heavy pretentiousness. Its whole conception of a morphology of cultures is, of course, false, but so typically German. Spengler's conception of a culture is altogether too anthropomorphic, much too rigidly defined, something marked off like one living entity from another. On the one hand we have- a " culture " defined as a person, which is born, lives and dies ; on the other we have the person regarded as having no individual existence ; an inversion so characteristic of German mental processes. It is all very like Hegel, fans et origo of these intellectual ills. The West knows that it is only individual human beings who have a real existence and that groups exist to aid them in
lioctrinairea de la Revolution Allemande 1918-1938. By Edmond Vermeil. (Fernand Sorlot : Paris.) attaining a fuller and more satisfactory life. That is the fundamental difference between Europe, particularly Western Europe, where European civilisation originated and in which it is still located, and Germany. It happens that this position is also the true one ; the best elements in Germany recognise it. It is a pity that they have been found so weak and ineffec- tive ; but Germany will come back to it, leaving this self-willed ostracism which M. Vermeil so well diagnoses in nearly all these writers : " cet ostracisme de plus en plus radical qui resume route l'attitude de l'Allemagne contemporaine a regard de Mccident europeen."
There are other characteristics, which Spengler expresses, that recur again and again in the others. For example, the hatred of reason which " kills life." But why? one wonders ; surely intelligence and clarity of mind enable one to live more satisfactorily? To put it at the lowest, it is the intelligent animals that survive. One wonders why these Germans—all these thinkers bear evidence to it—hate reason so much ; is it because they are so bad at it? All this goes along with a pathetic insistence, which " Liberals " like Thomas Mann and Keyserling and Rathenau share with brutes like Spengler and Hitler and Rosenberg, on the superiority of German culture. They must be superior or nothing. It is the same cry in the realm of thought as in politics : " Either a world-Power or nothing." Spengler has a whole theory—he would have—that a " culture " must dominate. No conception of collaborating with others to make a more varied, a richer, more fruitful civilisation. Actually it is enough to discern the difference between cultures ; one does not have to think all the time in terms of superiority and inferiority, but of the particular con- tribution which each has to make to the whole that is Europe. To the really enlightened there is a European culture in which German music, where Germany really has been supreme, takes its place along with Italian and French art, Greek and English poetry. Modern science is essentially European.
The fact that music is the art in which Germany is supreme is one of great significance, if one could elicit it. But there is something in this magnificent structure they have built up out of sound—this inner world of experience, to which some of their best poetry, for example Rilke, conforms—which reveals their weakness in the realm of external form, in imposing rational order and control upon their experience, where the Latins, and of them the French above all, are so strong. There are moments with all these writers, especially with Rathenau, even with Spengler, and still more surprisingly with the not wholly unattractive cynical candour of Goebbels, where one breaks through the crust of neurotic assertiveness, the over- emphasis of people not sure of themselves, and one gets a glimpse of the depths of formlessness, of indecision, of extreme relativism, of a scepticism underneath amounting to real nihilism (pace Spengler), which have their counterpart in the violence and brutality of the Nazis. Rathenau allowed the truth to appear, in spite of all his hopes of a new order led by Germany, in a passage where he said that beyond the Rhine " there was neither form, nor style, nor any real desire for liberty. Everywhere, on the contrary, feebleness of will, per- manent confusion between loyalty and dependence, between autonomy and anarchy, between work and servility. The masses bow before all the forces of the day. Tout le slavisme s'etale ici en face d'une poignie de Germains authentiques." There is an equally remarkable passage (p. 67) from Thomas Mann, which deepens the despairing picture of a people with- out form, open to all the winds that blow, exposed to all the contradictions, " une nation qui ne s'enferme jamais dans un riseau sonde de systemes, de morales ou d'institutions. L'Alle- magne remet tout en question, inlassablement."
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