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Collier Price. Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View
Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
GERMANY AND THE GERMANS
FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW
I THE CRADLE OF MODERN GERMANY
II FREDERICK THE GREAT TO BISMARCK
III THE INDISCREET
IV GERMAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE PRESS
V BERLIN
VI “A LAND OF DAMNED PROFESSORS”
VII THE DISTAFF SIDE
VIII “OHNE ARMEE KEIN DEUTSCHLAND”
IX GERMAN PROBLEMS
X “FROM ENVY, HATRED, AND MALICE”
XI CONCLUSION
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Price Collier
Published by Good Press, 2019
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By the year 1411 long strides had been made toward other forms of social, political, religious, and commercial life, due to the German grip upon Europe. Dante, whose grandmother was a Goth, was not only a poet but a fighter for freedom, taking a leading part in the struggle of the Bianchi against the Neri and Pope Boniface, was born in 1265 and died in 1321; Francis of Assisi, born in 1182, not only represented a democratic influence in the church, but led the earliest revolt against the despotism of money; the movement to found cities and to league cities together for the furtherance of trade and industry, and thus to give rights to whole classes of people hitherto browbeaten by church or state or both, began in Italy; and the alliance of the cities of the Rhine, and the Hansa League, date from the beginning of the thirteenth century; the discovery of how to make paper dates from this time, and printing followed; the revolt of the Albigenses against priestly dominance which drenched the south of France in blood began in the twelfth century; slavery disappeared except in Spain; Wycliffe, born in 1324, translated the Gospels, threw off his allegiance to the papacy, and suffered the cheap vengeance of having his body exhumed and its ashes scattered in the river Swift; Aquinas and Duns Scotus delivered philosophy from the tyranny of theology; Roger Bacon (1214) practically introduced the study of natural science; Magna Charta was signed in 1215; Marco Polo, whose statue I have seen among those of the gods, in a certain Chinese temple, began his travels in the thirteenth century; the university of Bologna was founded before 1200 for the untrammelled study of medicine and philosophy; Abelard, who died in 1142, represented, to put it pithily, the spirit of free inquiry in matters theological, and lectured to thousands in Paris. What do these men and movements mean? I am wofully wrong in my ethnographical calculations if these things do not mean, that the people of whom Tacitus wrote, “No man dictates to the assembly; he may persuade but cannot command,” were shaping and moulding the life of Europe, with their passionate love of individual liberty, with their sturdy insistence upon the right of men to think and work without arbitrary interference. Out of this furnace came constitutional government in England, and republican government in America. We owe the origins of our political life to the influence of these German tribes, with their love of individual freedom and their stern hatred of meddlesome rulers, or a meddlesome state or legislature.
Germany had no literature at this time. When Froissart was writing French history, and Joinville his delightful chronicles; when Chaucer and Wycliffe were gayly and gravely making play with the monks and priests, the only names known in Germany were those of the mystics, Eckhart and Tauler. When the time came, however, Germany was defiantly individualist in Luther, and Protestantism was thoroughly German. It was not from tales of the great, not from knighthood, chivalry, or their roving singer champions, that German literature came; but from the fables and satires of the people, from Hans Sachs and from the Luther translation of the Bible. This is roughly the setting of civilization, in which the first Hohenzollerns found themselves when they took over the Mark of Brandenburg, in the early years of the fifteenth century.
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