Page:EB1922 - Volume 31.djvu/258

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224
GERMAN LITERATURE

continue until, in July 1916, he realized that that place would fall into the hands of the Belgians.

Early in 1914 Lt.-Col. von Lettow Vorbeck arrived at Dar es Salaam and took over the command of the protectorate military forces. He had just completed a tour of the country when the war broke out. Up to March 1916 the civil administration continued with little alteration, and Dr. Schnee was tenacious of his authority up to the time when in Nov. 1917 he was compelled to flee from the protectorate.

Apart from the military operations the last years of German rule in East Africa—1914–7—were remarkable for the manner in which the Germans, cut off by the British blockade from outside supplies, were able to provide for their necessities. They had indeed adventitious aid. An exhibition was to have been opened at Dar es Salaam on Aug. 12 1914 to celebrate the completion of the Tanganyika railway, and for the use of the many visitors expected large quantities of European foods had been imported. In 1914 too the natives had large stocks of corn and cattle, and the country itself furnished milk and eggs. The abundance of wild honey largely made up for the lack of sugar, and rhinoceros fat was much esteemed. But all this apart, the Germans showed much resource. They manufactured whiskey and benzine, soap, tea, chocolate, biscuits, cigars and cigarettes, paper, calico, boots and quinine.

The British and Belgians established their own administrative machinery in the regions they respectively occupied, but by a decision of the Supreme Council in May 1919 the whole of German East Africa was assigned to Great Britain as mandatory. Nevertheless, in virtue of an agreement reached in Sept. 1919 nearly the whole of the provinces of Urundi and Ruanda were added to Belgian Congo. The British-governed area over nine-tenths of the whole protectorate was renamed Tanganyika Territory (see Tanganyika Territory).

See a valuable report by Vice-Consul Norman King, Annual Series, No. 5171, published by the British Foreign Office, 1913; A Handbook of East Africa, prepared for the British Admiralty, 1916; A. F. Calyert, German East Africa (London 1917); Gen. Smuts, “East Africa,” Geog. Jnl. vol. li. (1918) ; and the authorities cited under East Africa: Military Operations.  (F. R. C.) 


GERMAN LITERATURE (see 11.783). Between 1910 and 1921 German literature, as shown in philosophy, poetry, drama and the novel, displayed various interesting reflections of the movements of ideas.

I. Philosophy.—The World War and the Revolution, which alike took the most unpolitical nation of Europe by surprise, were preceded by many premonitory signs, by many preparatory intellectual conflicts, waged in the sphere of ideas, of philosophy, literature and art and not touching in their immediate implications the domain of actual facts. Long before the European catastrophe there began in Germany an intellectual reaction against the materialist view of things with its promise of power and enjoyment. Sciences which had come to be prosecuted solely on technical and specialized lines began to strive for a return to philosophy, the primal mother of them all; for there was a general longing to venerate once more something that was absolute and beyond experimental investigation, and to establish a new value for the life of the soul. The one-sided explanation of the universe given by the natural sciences and by the materialism compendiously and popularly set forth in Ernst Haeckel's Weltraetsel was disposed of from three quarters by the Vitalists or philosophers of the vital principle, whose forerunner was Nietzsche, by the Marburg school of philosophers, which revived Kant's transcendental idealism and by the so-called Baden school, which issued from Windelband's “systematics.” The Vitalists by the mere fact of their descent from Nietzsche were a kind of romantic school. That great rhapsodist, who was far more of a poet and an artist than an abstract thinker, bequeathed to his successors an idea which has often been misrepresented, the idea of the superman, the lofty ethical ideal of the tragicman, who in spite of his sufferings affirms life by virtue of his intellectual power which emanates from the unconscious and ever exhausts itself in the pursuit of the objects of consciousness. Halfway between Nietzsche and the French Vitalist, Bergson, stands the

keen-witted analyst Georg Simmel, although he after all " turns to the idea " and seeks above biological conceptions a meta- physical value higher than life itself (Der Konftikt der modernen Kultur; Lebensanschauung) . Wilhelm Dilthey, one of the most gifted representatives of the historical method, tries to find a bridge between the newer Vitalism and the idealism of classic German philosophy. The living conception of the world of history has for him become the totality in which individual values compensate one another and form a unity of life. Karl Joel seeks this unity beyond the limits of the biological principle in a wider conception of the " organic " (Seele und Welt).

Eduard Spranger lays stress upon the subjective nature of every philosophy (Weltanschauung) as a creative synthesis of the imagination; the philosopher always arrives at a point where he believes in himself and in nothing else. Max Scheler, a pupil of Husserl, is the spirited representative of a new attitude in his Philosophie des Lebens. Philosophy, he argues, must not think in general conceptions; it must avoid relations with natural science or with mathematics, neither of which can supply any direct subjective experiences; it should confine itself to history, regard- ing it as the autobiography of the human soul. With Oswald Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes, a fascinatingly written book, this vitalistic view is further extended. Spengler represents universal history as a morphology which shows the great civilizations arising upon one another to flourish and decay. They have as little comprehension of each other as have the vegetations of different climates and have therefore produced neither a common nor an absolute value. Fritz Mauthner maintains a cooler scepti- cism than the elegiac exponent of our decline. According to his Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache, men cease to understand one another as soon as they begin to speak. In his Atheismus im Abendlande this nihilist nevertheless acknowledges the necessity of " a mysticism without God " in the sense of Buddhism. The marriage of the Oriental with the European soul is celebrated by Count Hermann Keyserlinginhis Reisetagebuch einesPhilosophen, which, like Spengler's book, became the mode. An artist and an enthusiast rather than a philosopher, Keyserling aims at awaken- ing the divinely creative element in the human soul, and attempts the conquest of selfishness, including the self-seeking of races and nations. Encouraged by the example of Rabindranath Tagore, he founded a “School of Wisdom” at Darmstadt (1920).

Leopold Ziegler gives the question of the significance of the future of western man a deeper bearing in his Gestaltwandel der Cotter. Gods are for him not merely Zeus or Jahwe but also the conceptions by which we are swayed, endless space and time, the law of causation or that of the conservation of energy. Ziegler makes a penetrating analysis of the religious spirit of Europe, the forces which sustain our intellectual and social life, and then shows himself to be an equally able master of synthesis in his role as a prophet of the mystery which invokes Buddha and Nietzsche, the mystery by which we make ourselves divine without God, the mystery ever renewed, of guilt incurred and expiated, of sacrifice and regeneration, of creation and redemption.

Compared with these individual confessions the tendencies of Mme. Blavatsky and Mrs. Annie Besant's occultism and theosophy are more superficial; but it may be mentioned that they have been distilled into an esoteric doctrine by Rudolph Steiner in his Anthroposophical Society. Steiner likewise invoked the idea of development as set forth by Goethe, who used to make short work of prophets of the occultist type such as ordinary people, particularly women, have sometimes been very ready to accept. It is noteworthy in this connexion that long before the World War the very popular travelling preacher, Johannes Miiller, started under the motto, " Save thy Soul," a successful campaign against materialism and intellectualism.

As at the time of the tdaircissement in the i8th century, philosophy went down among the people in order to act directly as a guide to the will and to teach men how to live. Abstract philosophy naturally maintains its attitude of reserve; the problems of the theory of knowledge which are its province are not suitable for engaging the public directly in the debate. But the philosophy of the universities against which Schopen-