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3.11.1923

WILL GERMANY break into pieces and become a group of divergent and mutually hostile States?

To some readers this will seem to be an entirely useless question. They will declare that the thing is happening. Germany is breaking up visibly, they will say. Germany has attempted a democratic republic and failed. The daily news is kaleidoscopic. It varies with the day and the political bias of one's paper. Sometimes Germany is breaking in this way and sometimes in that. But few people seem to have much faith in the final emergence of a united Germany from this sea of disaster and misery in Central Europe.

Perhaps I believe too much in the things of the mind and imagination, in language and writing and literature as a link and a sustaining power in human affairs, but I do not share this belief in the break-up of Germany. I believe she will keep together as Russian-speaking Russia has kept together, and become again a great nation and a great people playing a leading part in the world's destinies.

It is true that her new democratic institutions have worked feebly and disastrously. But just at present what we call democratic institutions, our old clumsy system of voting and representative government that is, are not working particularly well in any European country. One cannot congratulate either Great Britain or France or Italy upon its triumphant democracy just at the present time. The duly elected British Government is unable to carry out its obvious foreign policy effectively because it is shouted down by a millionaire newspaper-owner suffering from Napoleonic mania, and in France the expression of public opinion is not so much shouted down as battened down under a centralised and all-powerful Press combine. France behaves with the concentrated vigour of monomania, and Great Britain with the self-regardful evasiveness of the feebleminded, and the common citizen of neither country is really justified in an attitude of superiority towards the distraught and leaderless German.

Distraught and leaderless the Germans are, and—which is perhaps the greatest misfortune that can happen to a people in the face of a steadfast enemy —without a leading idea to hold them together. We have to remember that this great people, the Germans, lost their way in 1848, and have still to recover it. At that tune there was a reasonable prospect of a Republican United States of Germany. It was wrecked by the habitual particularism of Germany, and by the self-seeking treason of the Hohenzollerns. Germany was unified later, but from above and not from below, by a crown and dynasty and not by education and an educated popular will, and Germany is still reaping the consequences of that misfortune.

It is not the least among the endless inconveniences of monarchy that it substitutes an unreal symbol for real ideas of unity. Instead of a cult of brotherhood, instead of a pride in the achievements of one's own people in science and art and social progress and the service of mankind, there is substituted, more or less completely, an idiot adulation of the crowned head and his womankind and their offspring. The school children of a monarchist country are trained up to a worship of these glorified individuals; the flag becomes a carpet beneath the feet of their deities, and their attention is diverted from their own pride and honour as future members of a great community. Many people never grow up out of the obsessions of a royalist training, and so it is that the collapse of the Hohenzollern system has left great masses of the German people imaginatively bankrupt and utterly confused. Any people who had had the same training and the same experience would be equally at a loss and helpless. The idea of a great German republic, one and indivisible, has to be built up now in an atmosphere of unparalleled storm, confusion, and disaster.

It cannot be built up all at once, and meanwhile anything superficial in the way of separations may happen to Germany. I will not attempt to discuss the bubblings of separatism and monarchist extremism that are going on. But one probability is very present in my mind. It is one of the paradoxes of the Russian situation that the Communist Government of Moscow survives there very largely because under the stress of foreign invasions and the foreign- subsidised devastations of White adventurers it became a patriotic Government. In Germany now, neither the big industrials, the old Junkers, nor the ruling classes generally seem to have the wit and generosity to think of their civilisation as a whole. The Communists do—after their fashion. At present the Communists are showing no overwhelming strength in German affairs, but a time may come when great numbers of the German people, trained in hardship, ruined and desperate, may turn to this one party which tells the same story in the Rhineland and Bavaria and Saxony and Prussia.

We have, I think, to count it among the possibilities of the present situation that a Communist Government may presently be fighting for German integrity against foreign domination in Berlin, and that great masses of the German people, like the Russians, may prefer even Communism to the certain shames and indignities of separatism. In which case Monsieur Poincaré will, I suppose, beat up his armies of blacks and whites and march on Berlin. With an "extension" trip to Moscow to follow.

Yet even after that Germany will survive. Twice before in her history Germany has arisen out of desolation and defeat. I believe she will rise again out of her present darkness and end at last the central and leading Power, the very keystone, it may be, of a reconstructed Europe. I believe in the German schoolmaster, the German student, in German persistency, and the patient strength of the German brain. I hated and hate that bastard imitative Byzantine-German Imperialism and German Junkerism, and I believe that our war to shatter these things was a necessary war. But I have never faltered in my belief in the greatness and soundness of the German people, and in my appreciation of all that we owe in intellectual, social, and industrial stimulus to Germany.

Her present situation is unparalleled. Every attempt she makes to get to her feet is thwarted by her pitiless, senseless foe. Our English-speaking peoples, in our slow, oafish way, are looking on, are assisting, at an attempt to waste and torment to death a great community as civilised as our own. We never came into the war for any such objective, and I do not believe that we shall stand by to the end in the face of this iniquity.

But anyhow, I believe that Germany will come back. Her common language and now her common miseries will keep her one. She has many enemies, but on her side now is the long reach and the long memory of the printed word. Bohemia, Czechoslovakia as we call it now, rose again after an almost complete extinction of three hundred years. Dark years are before Germany and a terrible winter, but in two years or ten years Germany will have found her Masaryk and her Benes and be on her way to recovery.

I would not like to be a German separatist in the days to come.