the German Empire was, in spite of the
professors, no popular, national fabric, but a dynastic, military and
compulsory association, with a constitutional facade, the interested
nationalist elements took on the repulsive and dishonourable forms
that we all know. The most deeply interested parties, cool and
conscious of their strength, the Prussian representatives of the
military and official nobility, avoided all declamation and only
interfered when their interests were endangered. The greater
industrialists sold themselves. A higher stratum of the middle-classes
composed of certain circles of higher teachers and subaltern officials
took the business seriously, and in order to escape from their drab
existence created that atmosphere of hatred of Socialists, telegrams
of homage, and megalomania, which made us intellectually and morally
impossible before the world. Instead of the Germany of thought and
spirit one saw suddenly a brutal, stupid community of interested
persons, greedy for power, who gave themselves out as that Germany
whose very opposite they were; who, unable to point to any
achievements, any thought of their own, prided themselves on an
imaginary race-unity which their very appearance contradicted; who had
no ideas beyond rancour; the slaverings of league-oratory and
subordination, and who with these properties, which they were pleased
to call _Kultur_, undertook to bring blessing to the world.

It was no wonder; for our slavonicized association of interests, bent
on subordination and on gain, does not produce ideas; its possessions
were power, mechanism and money; whoever was impressed by these things
believed they must impress others too, and so the conclusion was
arrived at that all the great spirits of the past had lived only to
make this triple combination supreme. Wagner had formed the bridge
between the old Germany and the new--armoured cruisers and giant guns
appeared as a free development from Kant and Hegel, and the word
_Kultur_, a word which Germany ought to prohibit by law for thirty
years to come, masked the confusion of thought.

To discover now, after our downfall, that Germany ought never to have
carried on a continental let alone a world policy, would be a pitiful
example of _esprit d'escalier_. It is true that it was our right, and
even our duty, by our intellect, our ethics and our greatness, to
carry it on; but the weakness of our character on the side of Will was
the cause of its f