ardt, during the last winter I was in Berlin,
produced Strindberg's "Ghost Sonata," in quite a wonderful way.
The play was horrible and grewsome enough, but as produced by
him, it gave a strong man nightmare for days afterwards.

The German soul, indeed, seems to turn not towards light and gay
and graceful things, but towards bloodshed and grewsomeness,
ghosts and mystery--effect doubtless of the long, dark, bitter
nights and gray days that overshadow these northern lands.

I think the only time I lost my temper in Germany was when a
seemingly reasonable and polite gentleman from the Foreign Office
sitting by my desk one day, in 1916, remarked how splendid it
was that Germany had nearly two million prisoners of war and that
these would go back to their homes imbued with an intense
admiration of German Kultur.

I said that I believed that the two million prisoners of war who
had been insulted and underfed and beaten and forced to work as
slaves in factories and mines and on farms would go back to their
homes with such a hatred of all things German that it would not
be safe for Germans to travel in countries from which these
prisoners came, that other nations had their own Kultur with
which they were perfectly satisfied and which they did not wish
to change for any made-in-Germany brand!

Certain Germans have prated much of German "Kultur," have boasted
of imposing this "Kultur" on the world by force of arms. What is
this German "Kultur"? A certain efficiency of government obtained
by keeping the majority of the people out of all voice in
governmental affairs, a certain low cost of manufactured products
or of carrying charges in the shipping trades made possible by
enslaving the workmen who toil long hours for small wages--a
certain superiority in chemical production because trained
chemists, willing to work at one semi-mechanical task, can be
hired for less than a Fifth Avenue butler is paid in America, and
a certain pre-eminence in military affairs reached by subjecting
the mass of the people to the brutal, boorish, non-commissioned
officers and the galling yoke of a militaristic system.

Subtract the German Jews and in the lines of real culture there
would be little of the real thing left in Germany. Gutmann,
Bleichroeder, von Swabach, Friedlander-Fuld, Rathenau, Simon,
Warburg in finance; Borchardt and others in surgery, and almost
the whole medical profession; the Meyers, the Ehrlichs,
Bamberger, Hugo Schiff,