THE CASE FOR GERMANY
Having put in the last chapter some of the points
which seem to throw the immediate blame of the war
on Germany, it would be only fair in the present chapter
to show how in the long run and looking to the general
European situation to-day as well as to the history
of Germany in the past, the war had become inevitable,
and in a sense necessary, as a stage in the evolution
of European politics.
After the frightful devastation of Germany by the
religious dissensions of the early part of the seventeenth
century and the Thirty Years War, it fell to Frederick
the Great, not only to lay a firm foundation for the
Prussian State but to elevate it definitely as a rival
to Austria in the leadership of Germany. Thenceforth
Prussia grew in power and influence, and became the
nucleus of a new Germany. It would almost seem
that things could not well have been otherwise.
Germany was seeking for a new root from which to grow.
Clerical and ultra-Catholic Austria was of no use
for this purpose. Bavaria was under the influence
of France. Lutheran Prussia attracted the best
elements of the Teutonic mind. It seems strange,
perhaps, that the sandy wastes of the North-East, and
its rather arid, dour population, should have
become the centre of growth for the new German nation,
considering the latter’s possession of its own
rich and vital characteristics, and its own fertile
and beautiful lands; but so it was. Perhaps the
general German folk, with their speculative, easygoing,
almost sentimental tendencies, needed this
hard nucleus of Prussianism—and its matter-of-fact,
organizing type of ability—to crystallize
round.
The Napoleonic wars shattered the old order of society,
and spread over Europe the seeds of all sorts of new
ideas, in the direction of nationality, republicanism,
and so forth. Fichte, stirred by Napoleon’s
victory at Jena (Fichte’s birthplace) and the
consequent disaster to his own people, wrote his Addresses
to the German Nation, pleading eloquently for
a “national regeneration.” He, like
Vom Stein, Treitschke, and many others in their time,
came to Berlin and established himself there as in
the centre of a new national activity. Vom Stein,
about the same time, carried out the magnificent and
democratic work by which he established on Napoleonic
lines (and much to Napoleon’s own chagrin) the
outlines of a great and free and federated Germany.
Carl von Clausewitz did in the military world much
what Stein did in the civil world. He formulated
the strategical methods and teachings of Napoleon,
and in his book Vom Krieg (published 1832) not
only outlined a greater military Germany, but laid
the basis, it has been said, of all serious study
in the art of war. Vom Stein and Clausewitz died
in the same year, 1831. In 1834 Heinrich von Treitschke
was born.
