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Right here we put our finger on Prussian materialism; just because a state has at its disposal an effective army, and can mobilize masses that does not make it great, unless all its endeavours are honest, generous. Prussian politics never were honest and generous (see, for example, the dishonourable peace with revolutionary Russia: William makes agreements with Trotzky—the super-legitimate monarch with a revolutionist, and, what is more, a Jew, who in William’s army could not be promoted to be an officer. In Prussia the nationalities are suppressed, but in Belgium the Prussians fostered the Flemings, etc.). The Prussians lack that generosity which the French possess, and the Germans do not have that naïveté and sincerity that characterizes Englishmen and Americans. The Prussian is on guard all the time and against all.
36. The Germans advance the claim to primacy by pointing to their philosophy and science, and emphasize the utilization of science in all administrative and military affairs, in political economy and commerce. German science, it is true, is efficient, but it is not free, it is a part of the official system. German universities are intellectual barracks. German philosophy is deep, but much of its depth forced, artificially produced by the lack of liberty; it is but the modernization of scholastics—the whole political aim set out in advance is proved and applied by all sorts of ex post arguments. German philosophy, as far as it is not based on specialized science, is nothing but Sunday sermons for the academic youth, the future officials of the church and state. Look at the German literature in the field of jurisprudence, especially in the science of state and politics, and see how much brainwork is employed there for the advance of theocratic absolutism, what special legal categories are devised for a peculiar monarchical right, of a special monarchical “office,” etc., while the matter really is very simple—judged from a higher degree of enlightenment and education. Monarchist absolutism is simply immoral. Even during this war German jurists and philosophers argue for the superiority of the Prussian-German state and its administration over the English and Western systems in general. There is nothing so absurd but that the German professors cannot cleverly defend it. I am sorry that even such a man as Toennies stoops to this; according to him the West has gone in theory beyond the mediæval theocratism, and therefore it looks upon the State from a utilitarian point of view, for this is what democracy means to him; evidently the Prussians can stand theocratic tsarism, and so it is no accident that Treitschke gave his recognition to Russian tsarism, and that the Hohenzollerns and Bismarck have been so long and so intimately devoted to old Russia. Now they are in alliance with Turkish theocratism and are its defenders.
37. German scholastics is at its best in theology, namely, in the so-called modern theology; in the Prussian theocratic system the State has the largest share, and therefore its theology is nothing but politics in ecclesiastical and religious guise. Ludwig Feuerbach and his criticism of theology is in substance a criticism of Prussianism.
German scholastics arose in the same way as Jesuitism in the Catholic Church. Besides the Hohenzollerns must have a regard to the Centrum and the Catholics, and in their rivalry with Austria they employed the methods of Viennese Jesuitism. Prussia-Germany absorbed Austria, but incidentally it swallowed a portion of Austrianism and now it absorbs and swallows even Mohammedanism. Prussia betrayed the Reformation: Prussia is secular Jesuitism—in its endeavour to maintain mediæval theocratism at all cost it follows the same methods as the Society of Jesus. In this respect Prussia spiritually leads Austria, and this is its great crime; Pangerman publicists know Austria quite well; men like Treitschke, Lagarde, Lange, and others, know that Austria is a political misfit and a mediæval mummy. The first generation of Pangermans was in favour of the disruption of Austria, but Bismarck and Lagarde with him established the tactics to employ Austria for their own purposes. There are
