THE BISMARCK TRADITION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24326, 17 June 1940, Page 6

THE BISMARCK TRADITION

If Bismarck, who created the German empire, was not the founder of the fatal doctrine that the State is an end in itself, he was the most successful modern proponent of it. Having welded a congeries of small States into one nation, with Prussia at its core, the Iron Chancellor declared himself satisfied. “ Germany,” he said in 1870, in words that have for a later generation a grimly familiar ring, “ is now a satiated Power; she has no further territory to gain.” The Reich, he said, did not desire to go the way of Napoleon, it had no ambition to be the arbitrator of Europe: “We do not wish to force our policy on other States by appealing to the strength of our army.” But though Germany settled for a time into peaceful ways, in the development of newly-acquired resources, the cultivation of the arts, and in keen and successful scientific work, the raw mind of Germany remained unchanged. The Bismarckian theory of blood and iron, of despotism, became the credo of a ruling class nurtured in the Prussian tradition. While elsewhere the democratic ideal was shaped into a working policy of government, the German people stayed a thwarted, repressed nation, which was given but one god to worship—the State. The tragedy of this progress is nowhere more clearly shown than in the unhappy ponderings of the German philosophers upon their country’s condition. Goethe was grieved that a nation could be “ so worthy of

respect individually, and so wretched as a whole.” Nietzsche believed resolutely in the destiny of the Fatherland, yet sought the flaw in German evolution and characterised it bluntly: “To be a good German means to disgermanise oneself.” Seemingly content, with their ample share of the world’s goods available to them, the Germans were led into the war of 1914, as true to the cult of the sword as when their great country was a collection of minor States struggling for survival. Defeat merely added to their fixed belief that in war alone can nations be strong and prove their virility. It is this baneful, driving impulse in the German mentality which Mr Nicolson, of the Ministry of Information, discussed a few days ago in an address at Edinburgh, and his argument is that the machine so motivated contains a flaw. In truth, the flaw extends, like a crack in some complicated steel structure, in many directions. Philosophically, the Bismarckian concept is outmoded. Only the cruder peoples of the world still adhere to the creed that nations profit from war and conquest. Politically, it is dangerous, for in a world in which free peoples have proven the success of a free system of government, those who remain subjected to the iron rule of tlje dictator present a menace to the leaders themselves. “In the war. of the future,” said Himmler, head of the Gestapo, in 1937, “there will be a fourth theatre of war inside Germany.” And in the realm of the physical—in the huge theatre of total war itself—there is, as Mr Nicolson averred, a fault in the German machine which the wear and tear of long-drawn conflict must discover. It was when the German armies found, in their successful drives on the Western Front in 1918, that the stories of Allied despair and impoverishment were untrue, whereas they knew their own country was starving and threadbare of resources, that the defeat commenced. Quick to respond to the martial call of the demagogue, blindly sure of the greatness and strength of the State, the Germans have not the tenacious courage of free-men in the hour of adversity. The brief and bloody history of the Reich, if it has shown the world the blind German willingness to be marched into adventures for the glory of the State, has also shown how that spirit may be broken by misfortune which would merely steel less militant, but more self-reliant, peoples to greater effort.