VIII. THE THIRD EMPIRE

1

The Third Party wills the Third Empire.

The Third Empire stands for the continuity of history.

The Third Party is the party of all who wish to see Germany preserved for the German people.

Germans of all parties cry out at this point: "We want it too!" We are very willing to believe you; but we know only too well that you are thinking of the Germany of your party, and that you want to see life in Germany cut according to your party programme.

Some of you come with your red flag, which is only an infuriating rag the colour of blood without brains. The red flag can never be ours, not even if you deck it out with a hammer and sickle and a star for humanity. Others of you have brought out the black-red-gold flag which once the romantics hailed as the flag of our first Empire; but it has long since lost the golden glory with which stormy and enthusiastic youth endowed it. Others of you cling to the black-white-red of our second Empire, which fluttered above a dream of power that dreamt of sailing the seven seas before it had even conquered the continent. We lived to see the day when this, our proudest flag, sank amid the vortices of Scapa Flow.

Over Germany, today only one flag is flying, the token of mourning and the symbol of our life: only one flag which tolerates no colour near it and robs the people who move below its sable folds of all their joy in merry pennons and in gaudy standards: only the black flag of need, humiliation and an utter bitterness—a bitterness which clothes itself in self-control lest it should pass into despair—a black banner of unrestful thoughts that hover day and night over the fate which a conspiring world has designed for our disarmed country: a banner of resistance for men who will not resignedly acquiesce in the work of annihilation that begins with the dismemberment of our country and is intended to end with the obliteration of our nationhood: a banner of revolt for Germans who are resolved to fling back deceit in the teeth of the deceiver, to rescue their nation and to preserve their Empire.

2

Today we call this resolution not conservative but nationalist.

This nationalist will desires to conserve all that in Germany is worth conserving. It wills to preserve Germany for Germany’s sake: and it knows what it wills.

The nationalist does not say, as the patriot does, that Germany is worth preserving because she is German. For him the nation is not an end in itself.

The nationalist’s dreams are of the future. He is a conservative because he knows that there can be no future which has not its roots in the past. He is also a politician because he knows that past and future can only be secure if the nation is secure in the present.

But his thoughts range beyond the present. If we concentrate exclusively on the past, we might easily imagine that German history is closed. It is nowhere written that a people has a right to life eternal. For every people the hour at length strikes when they perish either by murder or by suicide. No more glorious end could be conceived for a great people than to perish in a World War where a world in arms overcame one single country.

German nationalism is in its way an expression of German universalism, and turns its thought to Europe as a whole, not in order—as Goethe in his middle phase expressed it—to "lose itself in generalities" but to maintain the nation as a thing apart. The German instinct of self-preservation is penetrated by the experience which Goethe in his age confessed to: that art and science alone are "poor comfort" and no substitute for the "proud consciousness" of "belonging to a strong people, respected at once and feared." Romance nationalism thinks only of itself. German nationalism thinks of itself in relation to other things. The German nationalist wants to preserve Germany not merely because she is Germany, which might easily mean simply to preserve the past. He wants to preserve Germany as a country arising out of the revolutionary upheavals and changes of a new age. He wants to preserve Germany because she holds a central position from which alone the equilibrium of Europe can be maintained. The centre, not the west, as Pannwitz though, and not the east, as Spengler too rashly anticipated, is the creative focus of our hemisphere. The German nationalist wants to preserve German nationhood; not to exchange it for the "supernational culture" of a Fr. W. Foerster—in whom the bastardization of German idealism reached its zenith,—but to preserve Germany in the consciousness that the Germans have a task in the world which no other people can take from them.

Our old, enduring mission is a continuation of the task of Austria, and Prussia and the Bismarckian Empire. We can only fulfil our task towards the east if we feel our rear protected in the west. Our most immediate and most German task is to make ourselves free. Fr. W. Foerster called Bismarck the greatest blunder in our history. But Bismarck, the founder of our Second Empire survives his work, and lives to be the founder also of Germany’s Third Empire.

The conservatism that corresponded to the state-for-the-sake-of-the-state had treated the problem of nationality too cavalierly. Therefore it foundered.

The patriotism in which we were bred by that state considered nationality to be merely a question of the country in which we were born and the language which we spoke. This was not enough.

A common country and a common speech and the foundations of a nation, but historically the nation receives its own peculiar character from the manner in which the men of its blood value life. Consciousness of nationhood means consciousness of a nation’s living values. Not only those are Germans who speak German, or were born in Germany, or possess her citizen rights.

Conservatism seeks to preserve a nation’s values, both by conserving traditional values, as far as these still possess the power of growth, and by assimilating all new values which increase a nation’s vitality.

A nation is a community of values; and nationalism is a consciousness of values. The peoples in the World War who possessed a national consciousness of values were defending not only their speech and their country but their civilization and their culture. We were defeated by them because, though our state was strong and our military power was great—that is, we were strong in everything that should give protection—we were lamentably weak in everything worth protecting.

We imagined that even if we lost the war it was only the state which would be defeated. We now know that it was the nation which was defeated.

We must make our starting-point a new conservatism, that aims at conserving, not for the sake of the state but for the sake of the nation. We must make good what our patriotism lacked; we must formulate and demonstrate what nationalism means in the present and what it means for us in our future.

Under our First Empire we had a strong consciousness of values. With this we combined profound and powerful mediaeval conceptions of a definite occidental mission which was ours; we believed that the German nation was privileged to represent the Christian and imperial ideals of the west. This lent us a courageous and lofty self-consciousness.

The princes for whom this self-consciousness was reserved early developed a separatist consciousness which benefited only their individual states. The nation was thus deprived of its national consciousness which, being based on values common to all, might have enabled it to maintain itself as a political unity. There were individual Germans, acutely conscious of these values, who deduced from them a passionate belief in our destiny as a nation; and sought to awake a national consciousness among us similar to that which animated Spaniards, Frenchmen and Englishmen. But these Germans who had experienced a consciousness of nationality in foreign parts and amongst the clash of other nations, were never understood at home when they summoned their people to partake their experience.

This is why German nationalists, from the times of Ulrich von Hutten onwards, were always felt as outsiders and were never accepted by the nation. Their influence was lost—until today. No one troubled his head about them; they went on their way, pursuing their business or profession and the state-for-the-sake-of-the-state saw to it that they were able to do so in safety. In return, the state demanded obedience and gratitude. The patriotism which the state taught—as a schoolmaster teaches his pupils—was a duty imposed. Nationalists were somehow rather a stumbling-block to this kind of patriotism. No one remembered them except in times of stress, and they never got the opportunity to become what they ought to have become: the leaders of the nation.

Those who justified this state-for-the-sake-of-the-state were no doubt conscious of a certain emptiness it left in the souls of men. So the state sought to fill the vacuum by cultivating the attitude of the vassal towards the state. Patriotism had become a custom among its citizens; it was necessary to justify this custom to their souls. The justification was sought in loyalty to throne and altar. The state made use of the mystery that underlies the two conceptions: Royalty and Christianity.

The state took over the legal responsibility for the lives of men—which is inherent in royalty; the moral responsibility which is inherent in Christianity. Loyalty to the monarchy and loyalty to God reinforced and complemented each other, forming a unity on which the state was founded.

In the long run, however, these two conceptions fared as patriotism had fared; they became mere customs and lost their consecration; they became formulas which had lost their content. They became conventions which sufficed for times of peace, but when a testing-time arrived, the people failed as a nation to stand the test.

So royalty disappeared from the world. The individuals who sat on thrones had lost their royalty long before the actual loss of their crowns confirmed the fact that they were no longer princes but very human men. Had this not been so, their people would not have let them fall, they would have rallied to the support of the crown and with their wonted loyalty defended its wearer to the last. But this being so, the representatives of royalty were driven out from the holy places into the banality of private life, in a general tragedy that lacks all tragic grandeur.

Similar changes took place in the Christian world, though they were not so catastrophically evident. As the princes had lost touch with the people, the churches lost touch with their flocks. The throne had not availed to save the state; the altar was even less able to do so. The state crumbled; its foundations gave way; its two pillars gave way. It had miscalculated in thinking that "patriotism"—on which it had always laid stress—could permanently form a substitute of "nationalism" which it had always fought shy of.

Time and history have liquidated the state. Only the nation remains: only from the nation can a new mystery spring: the love of country.

The state that has fallen had made patriotism an item in our educational curriculum. In the cultural decay of the nineteenth century, however, more especially of the Wilhelmine period, education was degraded more and more to serve the ends of career, of social position, of economic advantage. Hence the inevitable failure of our patriotic education.

The crumbling state threatened to bury the nation in its ruins. But there has arisen a hope of salvation: a conservative-revolutionary movement of nationalism. It seeks to save the nation’s life; it seeks to make good what had been omitted: to permit the nation to take a share in determining its own destinies.

Nationalism seeks to secure for the nation a democratic participation in which the proletarian shall also have a share.

The ideals of a nationalist movement differ as greatly from the ideals of a merely formal democracy as from the ideals of a class-conscious proletariat—above all in this: that it is a movement from above and not below. Participation implies consciousness of the values which are to be shared. This consciousness can never be imparted unless a movement of ready acceptance comes from below; it must, however, be imparted from above.

The democrat, who always leans toward cosmopolitan points of view, and still more the proletarian who hankers after international trains of thought, both like to toy with the thought that there exists a neutral sphere in which the differences between the values of one people and of another vanish. The nationalist on the other hand holds that its own peculiar values are the most characteristic and precious possession of a nation, the very breath of its being. These give a nation form and personality; they cannot be transferred or interchanged.

In no country are the values so mysterious; so incomprehensible and uncomprehended as in Germany: so imperfectly-developed, fragmentary and yet complete; now the most intimate confessions, now wild stormings of heaven; tender or powerful; earth-born or sublime; utterly realistic or entirely space-defying; to all appearance the expression of irreconcilables and incompatibles. But in no country are they more closely and fatefully bound up with the history of the nation: they are the countenances and the mirror and the tragic confession of the German who has created them amidst the contradictions of his history—not for himself, but for the nation.

In no country have these values tended so definitely towards a unity—a unity which we have never enjoyed since our First Empire, a unity in which our Second Empire we failed to achieve—

A unity which it must be the task of our Third Empire to establish. The antitheses of our history will remain, but it is reserved for our Third Empire to bring our values to their fulfilment.

3

We must have the strength to live in antitheses.

German history is full of fresh starts for new goals.

We never reached any goal. When we did reach one of the goals we had set ourselves, we reached it accidentally and with a bound and for a moment, only to fall back from it the more completely. But we pulled ourselves together and chose another goal—frequently an old one over again—and tried with new strength.

We were barbarians who took over the inheritance of Mediterranean civilization. We were heathen and became protectors of Christendom. We were tribes and created a nationality. We abjured our gods and followed the Saviour. We possessed our dukes and chose ourselves a king. We began our history with particularism and laid claim to universal monarchy. We set up an Emperor and shared with Rome the overlordship of the world. We were a democracy of freemen and an aristocracy of feudal vassals. We recognized, supported and did homage to Rome and yet were forced to defend the secular against the spiritual power. Our bishops struggled against the Pope and our princes set themselves up against their overlord. Our virtues were faithfulness and defiance. We crossed the Alps and we rode to the East. We took the side of the Ghibellines and we took the side of the Guelphs. We were South Germans and North Germans. We were mystics in the west and pioneers in the eastern colonies. We betrayed the Hohenstaufen in the height of their power, quarrelled amongst each other for their crown and finally let it fall to foreigners. We consoled ourselves for the fall of the Empire by the sovereignty of the states, we decentralized on a large scale, we centralized on a small one. We carried on domestic politics and grew into the Habsburg-Spanish Empire on which the sun never set. We created no metropolis for ourselves but a great town civilization. On the ramparts of Vienna we defended the west against the east and we let our western boundary be breached along the Rhine. We opposed the decay of the Church and let the wars of religion rage in our countries for thirty years. Our Protestant Lutherans fought against our Protestant Calvinists and let the Counter-Reformation spread. The Peace of Westphalia interrupted the Emperor’s attempts to establish an absolute monarchy and took France as surety for our German Imperial constitution. The princes divided the government of the country between them and the imperial house exhausted itself in wars of succession. Prussia gained predominance in Germany, but twenty years after Frederick the Great, Napoleon was able again to take up Richelieu’s policy against Germany.

The nation’s consciousness awoke in poetry and philosophy, but the Empire was in disillusion. While German idealism lifted the human spirit on to the loftiest plane, the nation of idealists fell under a foreign yoke. We made ourselves free once more and rested content with ourselves. We were a people of geniuses and we began our new life by degrading Stein, failing to utilize Humboldt and misunderstanding Kleist. We enjoyed intellectual superiority over all other nations in 1800; allowed them to catch us up, and we spent the century in developing internal discords until at last towards the close we founded the Second Empire. The "domination of Prussia" and the "unification of Germany" were two ambitions which coincided: till Bismarck finally used the "domination of Prussia" to subordinate every other thought to that of the "Unification of Germany." Yet anxiety for Germany’s future clouded the last days of the great statesman’s life.

His anxiety was justified. The dynastic foundation of the Empire which Bismarck founded has collapsed. But the work that he accomplished will outlast the Second Empire, which proved to be but a circuitous route to the nation’s unification. It is timely to recall that Bismarck was wrong in the national conclusions which he drew from the dynastic premisses. As a conservative he reflected over the duration of his work. Weighed continually the foreign dangers and the internal possibilities. On one occasion he said "suppose that the German dynasties were suddenly eliminated. It is unlikely that national feeling would hold the German together as one people amid all the frictions of European politics."

Today his hypothesis is fact; but the hypothetical consequences have not followed. If one thing is certain in the Germany of today, it is the feeling of solidarity that unites all Germans. The various races who to Bismarck were an obstacle to unity, exert a centripetal not a centrifugal attraction to each other. They possibly chafe a little over the arbitrary internal boundaries of ancient princedoms which cut across racial boundaries; but far above everything else they feel the common German tie which binds them together whether they are North German or South, East German or West. The problems of unity and federalism will be met from within. The Bavarians, from whose particularism our enemies before the War ingenuously hoped so much, are the race which have seized on the idea of national regeneration with the greatest enthusiasm. The working classes in the border provinces are firm in their loyalty to the Empire, and firmly withstand all the seductions of the French or the Poles. They are discovering in their own persons that there is no such thing as the International they used to be taught about, but only the nation to which they belong. The border provinces feel themselves all of a sudden as marches, and from the frontiers the conviction spreads gradually inward that Germany herself is one great March against which the hereditary hostility of our enemies rages in vain, seeking by the perpetuation of the Un-Peace of Versailles to cripples our German existence for ever. This is what makes our people a nation today.

The antitheses which have marked our history are still perceptible. The oldest of all which we had thought dead, are coming again to life. It is significant, even politically significant, that there are Germans today who consciously turn back to the earliest stage which was the basis of our First Empire: that there are Germans who revert to the idea of mediaeval guilds and mysticism, or even to the still earlier primitive myths as offering a new starting-point: that there are Germans who prefer the cult of the Middle Ages and of prehistoric times to the westernizations, the civilization and the progress of which they have had a taste; that there are worshippers of Thor amongst us here and Primitive Christians there, and nothing awakens greater enthusiasm than the memories of our romantic and barbaric days.

The antitheses of later days are disappearing. Once in our history at the zenith of our First Empire we overcame a mighty feud which had long rent the nation in twain. The time is past when the twin cries "Hie Welf!" "Hie Waibling!" sufficed to kindle fratricidal war, and we have long paid equal homage to the graves of Palermo and the Lion of Brunswick. We must similarly obliterate all the antitheses of our past which are still with us, not by burying them but by lifting them to a higher plane. Immediately after the collapse of our Second Empire, the Prussian-German feud, which still lived on in rancorous feeling, fell into the background before the popular wave of national German consciousness. The races feel more strongly conscious of their racial individuality than ever before, but stronger still they feel themselves the Germans that they are. All Germans today feel themselves "Greater Germans" regardless of frontiers and customs boundaries.

Yet a third antithesis is dying out today: that of religious differences.

Everywhere there are Germans today who do not feel their creed as a confession which severs, but as a religion which unites. Roman Catholics and Protestants are drawing together regardless of their differences. The Protestants are allured by the thought of ONE catholic Church, and Roman Catholics are learning to look on Luther not as the founder of enlightenment, rationalism and liberalism but as the last great German mystic. We must have the strength, not to deny and reject, but to recognize and to reconcile all the antitheses which are historically alive amongst us.

We must have the strength to be "Welfs" again full of a consciousness of race, and at the same time "Waiblings" inspired by imperial thought. We must have the strength to be at once Barbarian and Christian, Catholic and Protestant, South and North German, East and West German. We must have the strength to be Prussians, Austrians, Bavarians, Swabians, Franks, Hessians, Saxons or Frisians: everything—for ourselves and for each other—as GERMANS.

9

Such sentiments and such consciousness must be the basis of the practical philosophy of Germany’s THIRD EMPIRE. There remain antitheses enough: the federalist-unitarian problem, the socialist problem, the pacifist problem.

The Weimar Constitution made a radical failure of the federalist-unitarian problem. It is a monument to the unteachability of the liberal, for it is based on all the principles which had been used to deceive the German people. The Weimar Constitution is in fact far behind the changed times and far outstripped by the country’s feelings. It bears no relation to the changes wrought in the German people by its growing nationhood. Its paragraphs sought to create an artificial unitarian Republic, not heeding the inner natural unity that was developing in the body politic. The Weimar Constitution took the revolutionary interlude as its basis; it was a purely negative document as was tacitly admitted when it laid down:

EMPIRE LAW SHALL OVERRIDE THE LAW OF THE LAND

Not so. Law must not overrride. Law must work. Germany must reach the point where Empire Law and the Law of the Land, the Law of the Land and Empire Law are one and the same. There must be other goal than a state: we must revive a federal state or a confederation of states; we must create an Empire that shall be both. Only in such a state will a real representation of the people—instead of parliamentism—be possible, in which the vital force of the people will be represented as the current of their will. Rodbertus saw "the finger of Providence" in the fact that the German state was called "to take up the social question after having solved the national question." Engels expressed the challenge: "We are not concerned with preserving the revolutions made from above in 1866 and 1870; it is our business to complete and improve them as may be necessary by a movement from below." The Revolution failed in the first instance to introduce socialism. But a movement-from-below has sprung therefrom which we have called the proletariat’s participation in the nation. This must be fulfilled in the Third Empire if it is to have its roots in the people: but it must not merely a material participation such as communism demands, confusing the classes with the nation. Socialism cannot be realized from above as the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine social policies imagined. Socialism can only be realized by the co-operation of Above and Below, not by a socialism of profit, as Marx assumed, but by a socialization of enterprise founded on mutual understanding and co-operation between economic direction and labour effort which shall establish harmony between profits and claims.

This socialization of enterprise, however, cannot extend to the entire world-proletariat, as communism and the International promised. It will only be possible in an economically, spatially, nationally co-ordinated sphere, as the economic system of a people, valid only for its own economics in the first place, however exemplary it may prove for other peoples. Since the German collapse, the German economic system has been involuntarily approaching the standpoint of socialism so interpreted. The distinction between enterprise and business became ever more evident. Being defeated and fettered the nation possessed neither time nor space, nor freedom of movement to realize its own new conception of an economic world. German capitalists had difficulty enough in keeping their enterprises going. But the ground for a transition from a pre-War capitalist system to a post-War capitalist system is being gradually prepared. The first preparation is a change of soul and heart which makes the natural attitude of capitalist and workman no longer a hostile but a friendly one, no longer destructive but constructive.

The problem of pacifism in Germany is closely related to that of our supernational mission. It is the most vital, the oldest and the most difficult in German history. To live not for ourselves only, but for mankind: to erect an immortal memorial of our existence that shall stand to the limits of furthest time for the most distant men: this has been the innermost meaning of all German achievement throughout our history—as it has been the ambition that has fired all great peoples at all times.

The greatness of a man is: to be something more than his mere self.

The greatness of a nation is: to be something greater than itself, to be able to communicate something of itself; to possess something that it can communicate.

In this ambition all great German fulfilled their tasks on earth, and left the issue to eternity. They often did not emphasise their German nationality in their work; yet it was there: enshrined, unintentionally, securely, self-evidently, and they could rest secure that its influence would not belie it. But if they were asked whence their strength came to which their work was owed, they forthwith confessed their German nationality. And when their people were in danger they rallied to them.

Side by side with this, however, there has always existed a fatal German weakness to fall under the spell of foreign modes of thought, to prefer foreign opinions to our own and to run off to salute the flag of every foreign philosophy. German ideologues talk today of a supernational mission by which they mean a renunciation of nationality—and boast of this betrayal as something characteristically German. These are the people who as revolutionaries confused the idea of political peace with the philosophical ideal of world peace. Even today, after the experiences of the Ruhr and the Rhine and the Saar, there are German communists so hardened in their enlightened world-revolutionary doctrines that they will not admit that the class war idea is not only "national in form" (which Marx admitted), but also (which Marx repudiated as bourgeois) "national in content."

Engels spoke of the "spirit of servility" which still clung to us from the days of our many petty states, and he hoped that a revolution would cure us of it. He was thinking of this spirit of servility as something in our domestic politics: a spirit of vassalage which a free people no longer owed to princes who had forfeited their royalty. It would be a most desirable result of the Revolution if it could teach us to think of this spirit of servility in relation to our foreign politics: a false spirit of admiration which we now owe to no other nation—since ten of them stood against us and seven and twenty of them betrayed us. It would be good if this experience made us humbler towards ourselves and haughtier in our bearing to the foe.

We have had our warning—an experience unique in our history. We know that we can only live with our supernational mission if we as a nation are secure. All our values owe their origin to the German nation’s fight for spiritual and intellectual self-preservation. If we had not maintained ourselves politically as a nation we should never have possessed anything to communicate to other nations; we should have been scattered and crushed at other nations’ will. If our credulity is such as to let us still trust the European benevolence of our enemies our fate is sealed.

The thought of enduring peace is in very truth the thought of the Third Empire.

But it must be fought for, and the Empire must be maintained.

5

The Second Empire was a transitional empire. It collapsed because it was not given time to become a tradition.

Yet the German conservative sought to preserve this empire. He sought nothing more. That was his crime. He sought nothing less. That was his virtue. He wanted to preserve for us the form in which Bismarck’s empire had been committed to us; but this form was too raw and young; it was outwardly and inwardly immature.

The Second Empire was an imperfect empire. It did not include Austria which survived on from the First Empire, side by side with our Second Empire. Our Second Empire was a Little-German Empire which we must consider only as a stepping stone on our path to a Greater-German Empire.

Our First Empire lost many lands of foreign speech, Lombardy and Burgundy. We lost also lands which belonged to us by race and speech, Switzerland, and the Netherlands and the Baltic colonies; but during those periods when we grew weaker and weaker we concentrated more strongly on what we retained.

During the whole of our more recent history we have been busy with a tidying-up process, getting rid of the ridiculous little frontiers and obstinate internal barriers with which the fall of the First Empire in the middle ages had cumbered Germany. We got rid of the system of petty states which had been the expression of our powerlessness. In our Second Empire we regained the position of a Great Power, basing it on the great races and the greater internal kingdoms which had succeeded in surviving the downfall, and on the smaller states which during it had become ever smaller and smaller.

The result of the World War was to break the position of the Second Empire as a Great Power. The Revolution brought disintegration. It could not prevent our impoverishment nor the destruction of our four Marches. The Revolution left us to live in a Rump Empire whose mutilated shape we do not recognize as the German Empire of the German nation. The Revolution missed the great opportunity which the collapse of the Central Powers afforded for the union with German Austria, and lacked the courage, the will and the ambition to present the world with this union as a fait accompli. The Revolution was a Little-German insurrection and wrote itself in Weimar a constitution whose federalist-centralist scribblings accorded neither to the Empire nor to the states, neither to the races nor to the districts, what was their due.

Yet the Revolution worked some simplification and cleared up some of the internal barriers which were still encumbering our development into a nation. The Revolution is a German episode whose meaning will be retrospectively seen from its results. A bye-product of the Revolution, which seems to be becoming its main result, was that it provided a forcible solution for many German problems for which we might not readily have otherwise found a motive. It made an end of small states that had outlived their usefulness. It organized the empire on the basis of races, which we are able to adopt now that we are a free people. This would be of little importance if it represented only entries on a map. It is vital since it expresses human feelings. We lost territory; but we drew together as Germans. As Germans we acknowledge the Empire which must be preserved for us.

The Revolution deserves no credit for this. It had no consciousness that it was in fact acting for the nation and not for the party. We are living in uncertainty. We have no guarantee that the Revolution if left to itself—as the insurrection of an unpolitical people—might not prove to be the beginning of the political end of the German people. But we believe that it will prove to have been a German folly which will subsequently gain meaning if it succeeds in making the German nation politically-minded when it finds that it cannot live in the conditions imposed by the issue of the World War.

The Revolution was an episode in our national history. We believe that it will prove to have been a detour necessary in order to snatch us out the rut into which—German-wise—we were getting accustomed to run under the Second Empire. We believe that the Second Empire was only the transition to a Third Empire, a new and final Empire, which is promised us, and for which we must live, if we are to live at all.

There are some German who comfort themselves with the thought that even if the collapse of the state should be followed by the downfall of the nation, the nation’s values will nevertheless prove indestructible. This is the most grievous of all the self-deceptions of which Germans are capable. We were fighting for our civilization and culture: but our enemies were fighting for theirs. Our enemies have no use for our civilization; they do not understand our values. They each think their own civilization perfect. The thought of according equal rank to German civilization and culture is intolerable to them. They do not recognize our values as valid.

We do not recognize our values ourselves. The course of our history has been such that we repeatedly broke off one set of values to start others elsewhere. It is with this which makes German civilization rich and many-sided on one hand, and on the other confused and difficult to summarize. It will be the task of the new nationalism to gather up and to set forth, to display clearly to the nation the inheritance which belongs to her, because it is German and because it is of value: German human history.

The goal is a spiritual one, yet a political task is included. Judging by what we know of other peoples, if we perish as a nation, then Germany will perish also and therewith all that Germans have ever created. There is no other people that could assimilate us. The people of the west deny us. Their values are different from ours; they are incapable of our valuations. Even in Clausewitz the French General Staff were only able to see the "German fog"—though the fog was often lifted with a German clearness that was terrible to our foes. When the Entente advised us to abandon Potsdam and revert to Weimar, they played as their trump card their greatest lie. The peoples of the west ought to hate Weimar far more than Potsdam since their purblind eyes see in Potsdam only the expression of militarism, while, if they admit that Weimar is an expression of civilization this at once raises the question of the relative quality of that civilization. The classic plane is as much loftier than the place of classicism as the plane of Goethe is loftier than the place of Racine. German civilization does not hang on these two towns alone, but on every German town within the range of German values, from Strassburg’s Minster and the town where Grünewald’s Christus hangs on the German cross, to towns far away in the East.

The peoples of the east accept such values as reach them from Germany and as can be of use to them. But the German language is a medium of communication only in Eurasia and central Europe. It is a business medium but does not speak from spirit to spirit. When it was adopted as the language of the Third International, it communicated only internationalism and Marxism, but not the great cosmos of German intellect and spirit, which stands before and beside and against Marx, which refutes him and remains un-understood. Even those Russians who differ from Tolstoi in not repudiating Europe root and branch, are too deep-sunk in their own nationality to take more than partial values from us: matters of system, and of idealist-philosophy, Hegel and possibly Schiller. The German infinity, which cannot be limited by finite terms, is closed to them because they possess an infinity of their own, which is not ours, which turns its face towards Asia, away from the west.

6

German nationalism is the champion of the Final Empire: ever promised, never fulfilled.

It is the peculiar prerogative of the German people for which other peoples vie with us. In the World War the peoples fought against the Empire-for-the-sake-of-the-empire, the Empire-for-the-sake-of-world-hegemony, in which we claimed our very material share. Each of these nations wanted an empire of its own: a sphere and empire of Latin or Anglo-Saxon or Pan-Slav thought. They annihilated our material empire. They still tremble before its political shadow.

But they had to leave our Empire standing. There is only ONE EMPIRE, as there is only ONE CHURCH. Anything else that claims the title may be a state or a community or a sect. There exists only THE EMPIRE.

German nationalism fights for the possible Empire. The German nationalist today as a German remains for ever a mystic, as a politician he has turned sceptic.

He knows that nations can only realize the idea committed to their charge in proportion as they maintain themselves and assert themselves in history.

The German nationalist is in no danger of falling under the spell of ideology for the sake of ideology. He sees through the humbug of the fine words with which the peoples who conquered us ascribed a world mission to themselves. He knows that within the radius of the peoples’ civilization, which they so complacently describe as western, humanity has not risen but has sunk.

In the midst of this sinking world, which is the victorious world of today, the German seeks his salvation. He seeks to preserve those imperishable values, which are imperishable in their own right. He seeks to secure their permanence in the world by recapturing the rank to which their defenders are entitled. At the same time he is fighting for the cause of Europe, for every European influence that radiates from Germany as the centre of Europe.

We are not thinking of the Europe of Today which is too contemptible to have any value. We are thinking of the Europe of Yesterday and whatever thereof may be salvaged for Tomorrow. We are thinking of the Germany of All Time, the Germany of a two-thousand-year past, the Germany of an eternal present which dwells in the spirit, but must be secured in reality and can only so be politically secured.

The ape and tiger in man are threatening. The shadow of Africa falls across Europe. It is our task to be guardians on the threshold of values.