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Prussian and southern German spirit, the problem of the right of Prussia to lead Germany, and actually to Prussianize Germany. The difference is brought out in the motto: “Goethe or Bismarck?” The answer usually given is that there exists a difference, but that it is insignificant, and that as far as any exists, it tends to increase the contents of German culture; but right now during the war some Austrian and Prussian Germans search their conscience, and reach the conclusion that Prussian Germandom has a clear title to stand alongside of Austrian Germandom, and emphasis is laid on the organic synthesis of the two directions of the German national spirit.
One does not like to pass a summary judgment upon such a complicated subject without a lengthy reasoning. While pointing to my former statements I will give here with all proper reserve my opinion, an opinion which, it seems to me, is well founded. I will not go into racial problems, namely, how far the Prussians of to-day possess the qualities of the original Prussians, whom German historians themselves declared to be a brave and cruel race. Neither is it practicable to investigate how much Slav blood there is in the Prussians and Germans. This analysis would make it necessary to go into the question of how far the Southern (and Western) Germans are racially mixed, for these also are not purely German (Celtic, Slav, Mongolian, and other admixtures). Here it must suffice to speak of the Prussian political program. I then reject the Prussian worship of the State, and specifically the Prussian monarchism; I reject the idea of the Prussian kingship, according to which the dynasty is looked upon as a divine revelation. I reject the Prussian denial of parliamentarism, its apotheosis of war, the worship of militarism and militaristic bureaucratism. This Prussianism is deeply rooted; Sombart is the spokesman of thousands of educated Germans, both when he sees the substance of German thought in the faculty of finding union with the divinity even here on earth and when he sees in militarism the most perfect union of Weimar with Potsdam (“he is the Faust, Zarathustra and Beethoven in the trenches”). Sombart’s divinity, of course, is the fetish of his pedantic historical materialism.
Bismarck shows what Prussianism is politically; his life really consisted in safeguarding the Prussian monarchism against revolution, against socialism and democracy, and a part of this Bismarck is in every German, even in Messrs. Scheidemann and David; these very socialists who have become reconciled even to monarchism, indicate the degree to which Germans have become accustomed to Prussian militarism and monarchism; but the tragedy of Bismarck’s life and his policy lies in this, that in the end he rebelled against William in opposition to his own idea; Bismarck knew and saw what weak and vain representatives of his idea he defended; he unveiled the monarchical Isis. . . . In this fatal contradiction (Bismarck played with Lassalle, but Lassalle also played with Bismarck) Bismarck systematized the Prussian political Jesuitism; he, the foe of Austrian Jesuitism and its narrowness. Those who analyse deeper psychologically, cannot be deceived by Bismarck’s tactics, using against the old-style diplomacy the bluff of robust half-truth. Bismarck defended a lost position, and he understood that it was lost, and yet he practised conscientiously the policy of “blood and iron,” from which, as we know from Busch, he never derived any joy or satisfaction; and this Bismarck, and men like Treitschke, carried out the synthesis of Weimar with Potsdam; Treitschke declared morality to be the endowment of small men undertaking small things, whereas the State must carry out great things. This internal contradiction of Bismarck is involved in the very conception and substance of the Prussian State; a State by God’s grace whose dynasts are supposed to be the prophets of God, is in all its substance conservative, legitimist; but imperialistic aggressiveness compelled the Prussian king by irony and trickery to absorb his neighbouring dynasts, who also ruled by God’s grace (Prussia arose by the absorption of more than a hundred dynasties) and drove him to come to terms with socialism and revolution.
