The German Genius

British were guilty of a sense of “innate superiority” that was too much: “For the other nations this [English] feeling [of superiority] is completely intolerable, and I dare say that the world cannot return to peace until this feeling has been replaced…by a more modest appraisal.”
    More impressive were the arguments of the generation of historians who comprised Max Lenz, Erich Marcks, Otto Hintze, and Hans Delbrück among others. 8 Their view—commonplace since the 1890s—was that the system of old European states, which existed in Ranke’s day, would soon be replaced by a small number of world states (empires) in which the Germans would take their place as an equal. For them, the point of the war was to force Britain, the oldest of the established world powers, to surrender its pre-eminence and grant Germany equality.
    The effect was twofold. It meant that Britain had to be seen as the instigator of the war, and it provided yet more justification for militarism. Even a moderate like Hans Delbrück, who later came to oppose government war policy, could write as follows in the early months of hostilities: “This nation is invincible…against that island nation [Britain]…[these] men of commerce, who merely hand out money, who send out mercenaries and mobilise the barbaric masses and think they are able to defeat us—it is these [men] who we need to be fighting against…with the certainty of our eternal inner superiority…”
    Not everyone fell into this category. In 1915, for instance, Otto Hintze, Friedrich Meinecke, Hermann Oncken, and Hermann Schumacher got together to produce Deutschland und der Weltkrieg , aimed at counteracting the effects of English propaganda on neutral countries, in particular the United States. 9 They sought specifically to counter the British propagandists who had resurrected the French argument that there were two Germanies, the Germany of Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven, on the one side, and the Germany of Treitschke, Nietzsche, and General Friedrich von Bernhardi on the other. Hintze, Delbrück, and Meinecke stopped short of advocating the utter destruction of Britain, arguing instead for a “balance-of-power” and they thus seemed reasonable, certainly in comparison with everyone else. 10 In general, however, they were drowned out by more openly annexationist writers and speech makers.
    Oswald Spengler, later well known as the author of Der Untergang des Abendlandes ( The Decline of the West ; see Chapter 30), believed that Germany’s decision “to challenge England for world domination” was a turning point in history. The fight with Britain was for him a crude Darwinian struggle between “English” liberalism, “with its emphasis on individual freedom and self-determination,” and “Prussian” socialism, “with its emphasis on order and authority.” 11 Elsewhere he confessed, “In the Germany which made its world position secure through technical skill, money and an eye for facts, a completely soulless Americanism will rule, and will dissolve art, the nobility, the Church…in a materialism such as only once has been seen before—in Rome at the time of the First Empire.” 12
    As the war continued, and the stalemate grew staler, still the arguments kept coming. Even Max Weber, so sane in so many ways, said this in a speech in Nuremberg in August 1916: “It would be shameful if we lacked the courage to ensure that neither Russian barbarism, English monotony, nor French grandiloquence ruled the world. That is why this war is being fought.” The historian Friedrich Meinecke went much further, claiming that the German nation as a whole “has a mission from God to organise the divine essence of man in a separate, unique [and] irreplaceable form. It is like a great artist, who, by means of his personal genius, creates something above his own personality…Only the Germans had managed to find the combination of Innerlichkeit , individual freedom and willingness to sacrifice selfish interests to the good of the whole that characterised their unique spiritual heritage.” The philosopher Eduard Spranger wrote about the need to keep alive the German tradition of Bildung. 13
    Even as the war started to go against Germany, the cultural arguments remained strong. The philosopher Adolf Lasson insisted: “The whole of European culture, which is surely the only universal form of human culture, has gathered itself together like a focal point on German soil and