Page:The New Europe, volume 1.pdf/68

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

THE NEW EUROPE

that he fails to mention many of the recognised authorities; the historian, Justus Moser, for instance, and the philosophers Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Krause, Schopenhauer, and, more recently, von Hartman and Nietzsche. Richard Wagner and his followers (Herr Houston Chamberlain among them) are also omitted, although their influence in a Pangermanic direction was very strong. It is curious, too, that even in dealing with German philosophy, the author makes no mention of the nationalist school, which represents a considerable body of German philosophic thought. Nor do we find any representatives from the ranks of the more modern nationalists and political economists. The author's range will, no doubt, be extended in the further volumes of this useful series. He will then be able to include such military writers as Klein, Frobenius, and von Bernhardi, and perhaps there will he a chapter devoted to the Pangerman literature of the war.

It must be home in mind that the authors selected by Professor Andler have not all exerted the same degree of influence upon German thought; their reputation as political, philosophic or scientific authorities varies very greatly. The most important among them are Treitschke and Lagarde, and, to my mind, Lagarde is the more extreme of the two, and does not yield to Treitschke in influence. He was a Professor of Theology and had an established reputation as an Armenian scholar. His conception of a complete scheme of national reform, based upon a radical change in the educational system, had for its object the regeneration of the German national church. A ruthless critic of the established church, so dead and so ineffectual, he went on to attack the very idea of Protestantism itself, and especially the Pauline theology, and he showed some sympathy, or at least an understanding of Catholicism. Lagarde's style is full of pathos; but though rugged and even harsh it often reads like a poem in prose. His "Deutsche Schriften," a collection of essays, interpret Pangermanism not only as a political doctrine but as a whole Weltauschauung. It may be mentioned that Lagarde's real name was Paul Anton Bötticher, which he altered into Paul de Lagarde, in view of his descent from a French aristocrat.

Treitschke's views were no less pronounced than those of Lagarde, but his thinking is more suggestive of the German

58