Nationalism and Culture (55 page)

From Chamberlain, no more than from Gobineau, do we discover what, exactly, "race" is. He is the finished mystic of the race idea, which in him condenses into a devoutly believed race mythology. External characteristics, like the shape of the skull, texture and color of the hair, the skin, the eyes, have for him only a qualified meaning j even language is not determinative. Only the instinctive feeling of cohesiveness which reveals itself through the "voice of the blood" is determinative. This "feeling of race in one's own bosom," which is subject to no control and cannot be scientifically apprehended, is all that Chamberlain has to tell us about race.

Like Gobineau, Chamberlain sees in every great culture period the undeniable product of the German intellect and with cool assurance appropriates for his Noble Race the cultural wealth of all peoples and of all the great minds that mankind has ever produced. The Germans are the salt of the earth j they have been endowed by Nature herself with all the mental and spiritual qualities which fit them to be "masters of the world," This alleged historical destiny of the Germans follows so clearly for the author of the Grundlagen from all previous history that any doubt about it is stricken dumb. It is Germans who as leading caste have played an important role even among non-Germanic folk-groups, such as the French, the Italians, the Spaniards, the Russians j it is due only to their influence that a culture was able to develop in these lands at all. Even the great cultures of the Orient arose in this way. Under the influence of German blood they rose to undreamed-of greatness, and then went down as mental elasticity relaxed and the will to power was quenched in the deteriorating master caste by blood mixture with inferior races. Even Chamberlain did not deny that race-crossing can be advantageous to cultural development so long as it involves only the mixture of related races; for a noble race builds itself up only gradually by intermixture with other races of more or less the same worth. It is at this point that Chamberlain's concept parts company with Gobineau's. For Gobineau

race stands at the beginning of all human history. It has its definite physical and mental characteristics which are transmitted by heredity and can be changed only by crossing with other races. And since he was convinced that in the course of thousands of years the blood of the noble race had been constantly debased and its precious qualities lost by mixture with yellow and black races, he looked toward the future with gloomy eyes. Chamberlain, on whom Darwin's theory had not been quite without effect, saw in race not a starting point, but a product of evolution. Accord ing to his view the race arises through natural selection in the struggle for existence, which eliminates the incapable and preserves only the able individual for the propagation of the species. Consequently, the race is the end-product of a continuous process of splitting-off from a related genus.

But if the race is a product of evolution and not its starting-point, then the production of noble races for the future also is guaranteed, provided that the ruling upper stratum of a nation takes to heart the teaching of history and wards off the threatening "race chaos" by a suitable race hygiene. For the strengthening of his position Chamberlain appeals to the experience of breeders and shows us how a noble race of horses, dogs or swine comes into being. It is true, he forgets the essential point, namely, that the crossings of the human races in the course of millennia have been carried on under very different circumstances from those followed in the so-called "ennobling experiments" in the stables of breeders. For Gobineau we should rightly read: In the beginning was the Race. Therefore the nation meant nothing to him, and the idea of the fatherland was just a cunning invention of the Semitic mind. Chamberlain, however, who believed in the breeding of a noble race, wished to train the nation to racial purity. And since the German nation seemed to him best fitted for this purpose, because in its veins, according to his opinion, Germanic blood flowed purest, he saw the Teuton as the Bearer of the Future.

After Chamberlain had fitted out the noble Germans with every conceivable mental and spiritual trait in a really big way, there remained nothing for the peoples of any other descent except to surrender unconditionally to the proud master race and in the shadow of its overtowering greatness to drag out a humble existence. Since these others are merely the culture-dungers of history, it is so much the worse for them if they cannot see it.

According to Chamberlain the opposition between Romanic peoples and Germany constitutes the whole content of modern history. And since" the Romanic world, which had risen out of the great "chaos of peoples," had bound itself for good or ill to the "materialistic aims" of the Catholic churchy had of necessity so to bind itself, since the voice of the blood left it no other choice, therefore Protestantism became for him the great

achievement of Germanic culture. The German is the specially chosen minister of the Protestant mission, through which Christendom is first made aware of its true content. That the Christian had thoughtlessly chosen the Jew, Jesus, for his savior was surely a bitter pillj it was too late to undo that. But was it not written in the Gospel that Christ first saw the light in Galilee? And immediately the "instinct of the race" came to Chamberlain's aid and informed him that in just this part of Palestine extensive crossing of races had occurred and, above all, that in Galilee Germanic stocks had settled. Must one not, then, admit that Christ had been a German? It was, in fact, unthinkable that out of "materialism-drunken Jewry" a doctrine could come to whose spiritual content the Jewish mind is completely opposed.

Chamberlain revealed an utterly morbid hatred of everything Jewish. He even ventured to assure his credulous readers that a Germanic child, the keenness of whose senses had not yet been ruined or blunted by the prejudices of adults, could tell instinctively when a Jew was near him. Yet he found it possible to speak highly of the Spanish Jews, the so-called "Sefhardtniy" while he could never severely enough disparage the "Ashkenaziniy* the Jews of the northern countries. To be sure, he based his preference for the Sefhardim on the assumption that they were in reality Goths who had been converted to Judaism in large numbers—a recognition which came to the great master of unproved assertion rather tardily, as it first appears in the third edition of his book. How the Goths, those genuine branches of the noble tree of Germandom, in spite of their "mystic inclination" and their inborn sense of "religious profundity," which according to Chamberlain are the heritage of their race, could throw themselves into the arms of "materialistic Judaism" with its "dead ritualism," its "slavish obedience," and its "despotic God" remains an unsolved mystery. In this case the "race in their own bosoms" must have failed outright j otherwise the wonder is not to be explained. Chamberlain's work on race swarms with similar assertions. There is hardly another work which reveals such unexampled unreliability in the material used and such reckless juggling with bare assumptions of the most daring type. As to this, not only the opponents, but also many outspoken believers in the race theory, like Albrecht Wirth, Eugen Kretzer and others, are fully agreed. Even so self-satisfied an advocate of the race theory as Otto Hauser speaks of Chamberlain's work as "the Foundations of the Nineteenth Century which so frequently lacks factual basis." *

Like Gobineau, Chamberlain is a fanatical opponent of all liberal and democratic ideas and sees in them a danger to Germanism. For him, freedom and equality are antagonistic concepts; who desires equality must sacrifice to it his personality, which alone can be the basis of freedom. But

* Die Germanen In Euro fa. Dresden, 1916, p. 5.

the freedom of Chamberlain is of a quite peculiar kind. It is the "freedom which the state is able to protect only on the condition that it shall limit it." "Man does not become free by being granted political rightsj rather, the state can grant him political rights only when he has attained inner freedom J otherwise these alleged rights are always misused by others." ^

This utterance proves that Chamberlain had never understood the nature of either freedom or the state. But how could he? Fatalism is the exact opposite of the concept of freedom, and no fatalism bears so plainly the Cain's brand of hostility to freedom as the Kismet of race. Chamberlain's concept of freedom is that of the well fed and satisfied, to whom order is the first duty of the citizen, and who accepts such rights as the state hands out to him. Before such freedom no despot has ever trembled j but any trivial right that man wins by struggle against the tyranny of tradition brings the sweat of anxiety to the despot's brow. Chamberlain's "inner freedom" is just an empty wordj only where the inner sentiment of freedom is transformed into liberating deed has the spirit of freedom a genuine homestead. "He who is occupied with nature and with *force and matter' must, if he is honest, let freedom go," opines Chamberlain. We think, however, that he who does not constantly strive to convert freedom into "force and matter" must always remain a slave. An abstract conception of freedom that cannot inspire its possessor to strive to the limit for the attaining of his rights is like a woman to whom nature has denied the gift of fertility. Chamberlain's concept of freedom is the illusion of impotence, a cunning inversion of the inner feeling of serfdom which is incapable of any action. Ibsen had a very different view of freedom when he wrote:

You can never get me to regard freedom as synonymous with political liberty. What you call freedom, I call freedoms; and what I call the struggle for freedom is nothing but the constant, livihg assimilation of the idea of freedom. Who possesses freedom otherwise than as something to be striven for possesses it only as a thing without life or spirit, for the idea of freedom has always this quality, that it constantly expands as one assimilates it, so that if during the struggle one pauses to say: Now I have it! he merely shows that he has lost it. But to have just this dead kind—a certain static view of freedom—is characteristic of state organizations; and it is just this that I have called worthless.*

Chamberlain never stood still on the road to freedom, because he never found himself on that road. His criticism of democracy has its basis in the past J he is the man who looks backward, the man to whom every product

^ Demokratte und Freiheit. Munich, 1917.

* Letter to George Brandes of February, 1871, in Henrik Ibsens samtliche Wcrke in deutscher Sprache. Zehnter Band, Berlin, 1905.

of revolution was hateful because it carried on its face the mark of its revolutionary origin. That which is today called democracy can be overcome only by forces which look not to the past, but to the future. The remedy lies not in what has been, but in the continual enlargement of the concept of freedom and its social applications. Even democracy did not overcome the will to power, because it was shackled to the state and dared not shake the privileges of the possessing classes. But Chamberlain did not find his base in the future j his gaze was fixed unchangingly on the past. Therefore he condemned even the constitutional monarchy as essentially alien to the Germanic spirit and advanced the idea of an absolute monarchy over a "free people"—whatever he meant by that. He was one of those unswerving ones who opposed to the very last every limitation of the royal power in Prussia and, like all his predecessors and successors in the race theory, stood squarely in the camp of undisguised political and social reaction.

One would think that a work like the Grundlagen, which offers no opening for earnest understanding, which has regard neither for social relationships nor for the slow process of spiritual endeavor, and in which actually only the violent whim of the author is revealed, would be wrecked on its own mad contradictions. But it worked quite otherwise. It became for the ruling castes in Germany a destiny. So profound was the infatuation which this work induced that the former Kaiser could write in his memoirs: "Germanism in all its glory was first revealed and preached to the astounded German people by Chamberlain in his Grundlagen des ig. Jahrhunderts. But, as the collapse ot the German people showed, without effect."

That the dethroned champion of divine right even today holds the German people responsible for the collapse is quite as delightful a revelation of the "lordly German spirit" as is the sorry role of those who with slavish exaltation revered the hopeless fool as "German Emperor" only to turn upon him after his downfall and kick him like maddened asses— even to brand him as an "offspring of the Jews."

What Chamberlain had begun so gloriously was continued in the same spirit by men like Woltmann, Hauser, Giinther, Clauss, Madison Grant, Rosenberg, and many others. Woltmann, the former Marxist and Social Democrat, who one fine day threw over the class struggle and took up the race struggle instead, tried to supply historical proof for what Gobineau and Chamberlain had asserted about the origin and character of foreign cultures. He assembled an enormous mass of material which supposedly went to prove that all distinguished persons in the cultural history of France and Italy had been of German descent. To reach this conclusion he had examined the portraits of several hundred prominent personalities of the Renaissance period and was in a position to announce

to an astonished world that most of them had blond hair and blue eyes. Woltmann was completely obsessed by his blue-eyed-blond theory and went into raptures every time he thought he had discovered a new blondling.'^

One utterly fails to see what such assertions are meant to prove. That there are Germanic elements in the population of France and Italy, no one has ever questioned. Both peoples are racially just as mixed as are the Germans, as are all the peoples of Europe. France and Italy were repeatedly overrun by Germanic tribes, just as the numerous human floods of Slavic, Celtic and Mongolian tribes poured over Germany. But to what extent the culture of a people is determined by race is a question to which science has as yet found no answer, nor is likely to find one. We are here depending merely on conjectures which can never serve as substitutes for actual facts. We do not yet know one thing definitely about the causes behind even purely external characteristics like color of hair and eyes.