PANGERMANISM AND THE EASTERN QUESTION
European Economic Union), 1904, and Vorderasien-Komitee (Asia Minor Committee), 1911; the latter was founded by Hugo Grothe, and among its Trustees are to be found such names as Ballin, von der Goltz Pasha, Karl Lamprecht, Hans Meyer, Cornelius Gurlitt, Dr. v. Jacobs (President of the German Levant Line), and R. Willing. The Pangermans expressed explicitly and in plain language what the others expressed implicitly; they have dared a political plan of international bearing. But they spoke in the name of all Germany, and I cannot understand how anybody can speak of men like Lagarde, not to mention Treitschke, Bernhardi, and many others, as political dreamers! And why should a Utopia be only theoretical? Can a war, or practical work not sometimes be Utopian? And is only a victorious war non-Utopian?
After the successes of 1870 Pangerman imperialism grew more and more chauvinistic and aggressive: at the same time a peculiar, wild mysticism gained the ascendant in the ranks of the Pangermans. I refer to the adherents of the theory of "pure Germanism," and of the inequality at the various human races—a theory which by an irony of history was worked out by the French politician and diplomatist Gobineau. The older German anti-Semitism found in Gobineau its philosophical, or quasiphilosophical, basis, and this anti-Semitism was also to a high degree mystical; mystical also was Wagner and his host of followers, who conceived Pangermanism from the standpoint of Art. But so far from Pangermanism being less effective or less political because of its mystical strain, this is, on the contrary, a positive proof of its force. Besides, it is not only mystical, but in a high degree religious. The founder of modern Pangermanism, Paul de Lagarde (of French origin!) is a very strong personality; being a theologian, he endeavoured to construe a purely national German religion. The religious tinge is also strongly noticeable in the writings of Jahn and Constantine Frantz. On the whole, modern German theology is highly national, with its devotion to Luther and its retracing of the Lutheran Reformation to German sources. As against the Poles and other Slavs Protestantism is declared to be the national religion, and in the same way Pangermanism in Austria has been bound up with the "Los von Rom!" movement.
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