ng to be an old man. At
sixty years of age one does not make new friendships. All the more
carefully does one keep those one has. Berlin has seemed to me a
desert--almost unbearable, without you. You do not know how impossible
things have become there. They are misusing, without one pang of
conscience, the most touching and lovable characteristic of our
people--its sense of gratitude, which it exaggerates to the point of
weakness. They are doing all they can to bind Germany hand and foot, to
gag her and drag her back into absolutism before her sentimentality
will allow her to put herself on the defensive. They are pandering to
the lowest instincts of the people, and enervating their manhood by
every artifice in their power. Thus they have successfully achieved the
introduction into Germany of that most degraded form of
self-worship--Chauvinism. They poison her morality by wisely organizing
that every conscience, every conviction, should have its price. They
debase her ideals by decreeing that henceforth the officer is to be the
national patron saint to whom the people are to offer up their devotion
and worship. The press, literature, art, lecturing-room--all preach the
same gospel, that the highest product of humanity is the officer, and
that "soldierly discipline and smartness"--in other words, slavish
submission, self-conceit, arrogance, and the upholding of mere brute
force--are the noblest qualities of a man and a patriot. The army is
taught to forget that it is the armed population of the country, and is
trained to be a band of body servants. And even when the soldiers
return to private life, the idea of servitude is carefully kept up, and
he finds again in the military 'Verein' the beloved barrack life, with
all its servile submissiveness and abnegation of free will. Whichever
way I look, I am filled with horror. Everything is ground down,
everything laid waste, the governing spirit has not left one stone
standing upon another. Even our youth, with whom lies our hope for the
future, is rotten in part. In many student circles I see a want of
principle, a low cringing to success, a cowardly worship of animal
strength, that is without its parallel in our history. Instinctively,
this corrupt youth sides, in every question, with the strong against
the weak, with the pursuer against the pursued, and that at the age
when my generation exerted itself passionately, without a question as
to right or wrong, for everyone oppre