OPTIMIST What idea will it help emerge victorious?
GRUMBLER The idea that God created neither man the consumer nor man the producer, but simply human beings. That the means of subsistence are not the purpose of existence. That one’s belly should not outwit one’s brains. That life is not founded exclusively on commercial interests. That time is a gift to be savoured, a goal to be attained not by swiftness of foot but by abundance of heart.
OPTIMIST That is primal Christianity.
GRUMBLER Not Christianity, for Christianity was incapable of resisting the vengeance of Jehovah. Its promise of salvation was too weak to assuage men’s ravenous hunger for things of this world, seeking compensation here and now in place of eternal rewards. For such people do not eat to live, but live to eat, and even die for that cause. They want the brothel and the slaughterhouse, with the chapel in the background where a pope forlornly wrings his hands.
OPTIMIST So, in a word, the idea is the battle against materialism.
GRUMBLER So, in a word, the idea.
OPTIMIST But isn’t German militarism precisely the conservative institution which opposes those trends of the modern world that you despise? I’m surprised a conservative thinker should speak against militarism.
GRUMBLER I’m not at all surprised that someone with progressive views should speak in support of militarism. You are quite right: for militarism is not what I mean, it’s what you mean. It is the instrument which the dominant ideology of the day employs to enforce its power. Today it serves, just as the press serves, the idea of Judeo-capitalist global destruction.
OPTIMIST But in the declarations of the enemy powers, the talk is of nothing but their desire to defend freedom against autocracy.
GRUMBLER It’s the same thing. The instinct of mankind, even of its least free representatives, is an inextinguishable desire to protect freedom of the mind against the dictatorship of money, human dignity against mercantile autocracy. Militarism is the instrument which enforces that dictatorship, instead of being internally employed against it, the role for which nature intended it. Since lethal weapons became industrial products, they have been turned against mankind, and the professional soldier no longer knows what interests he serves. Even Russia is fighting against autocracy. Through a last-ditch civilized instinct it is defending itself against the power most threatening to the mind and human dignity, namely the seductive power to which the Christian idea, with its intrinsic submissiveness, most readily, and in the most disastrous pact, succumbs.
OPTIMIST But can the heterogeneous peoples that have been drummed together for this war really have this single desire in common? Russian autocracy and Western democracy?
GRUMBLER Precisely this antithesis is proof of a deeper convergence, one which reaches out beyond the political goal. And the fact that even these contrasts can unite shows that Germany’s misguided politicking, its incapacity to follow the basic rules of diplomacy, was the catalyst for a progressive convergence.
OPTIMIST But the Allies are such a hotch-potch, what a motley crew they are!
GRUMBLER The heterogeneity proves how authentic the hatred is.
OPTIMIST But hatred employs the most fallacious arguments.
GRUMBLER Hatred always does, but its fallacious arguments are proof of the authenticity of its instincts.
OPTIMIST So you’re saying the Germans could have derived cultural regeneration from the realms of lies.
GRUMBLER Could have, yes, but a victory would make it seem redundant in their eyes. They could no longer be cured of their most dubious truths. For you surely have to ask whether the “lies from abroad”—provided they, too, are not made in Germany—do not contain more lifeblood than a “true” communiqué from the official German news agency. Abroad, you can distinguish between a lie born of national temperament and a truth based on rational insight. Here, even the truth is propaganda, and it is all paper-thin. If lying in the Latin countries is an intoxication, here it’s a science, which endangers the organism accordingly. They’re artists at lying, down there, they don’t believe it themselves, but they want to hear it since the lie tells them more clearly what they feeclass="underline" their truth. Here, when they lie, they don’t use a word more than is absolutely necessary to achieve their purpose; they are the engineers of lying, they build lies which enable them to live and to wage war.
OPTIMIST Accusations of German barbarity in their conduct of the war are really too absurd.
GRUMBLER Let us assume that, God willing, the German conduct of the war is no more barbaric than that of the others — except for some measures taken solely as reprisals and which, by chance, always affect the civilian population, and except for some cases simply, if ingenuously, dubbed “incidents”, such as the sinking of the Lusitania. But when the others say the German conduct of the war is barbaric, they feel, and are surely right to feel, the German conduct of the peace to have been barbaric. It must have been, otherwise it would not have been based for generations on the thought of preparing for the German conduct of the war.
OPTIMIST But when all is said and done, the Germans are also the nation of poets and thinkers, are they not? Does not German culture contradict the materialism you accuse it of?
GRUMBLER German culture is without content, a show house with which the nation of judges and hangmen ornaments the emptiness within.
OPTIMIST A nation of judges and hangmen? You call the Germans that? The nation of Goethe and Schopenhauer?
GRUMBLER It can call itself that, given its level of education, but by rights, according to the most popular article of its penal code, namely public nuisance, it should be condemned in the court of world opinion for doing so.
OPTIMIST Why’s that?
GRUMBLER Because Goethe and Schopenhauer might more justly apply everything they alleged against in their German contemporaries to the current condition of the German people, and with more sting than Le Matin. As undesirable German nationals, they could count themselves lucky today if they managed to escape across the border. During the Wars of Liberation, all Goethe derived from the state of exaltation of his fellow countrymen was a feeling of emptiness, and today’s vernacular German and newspaper language would be blessed if it had retained the level Schopenhauer found despicable in his day. No people lives more remote from its language, which is its life source, than the Germans. A Neapolitan beggar is closer to his language than any German professor to his! Yet this people is better educated than any other, and since its academics without exception — those who don’t end up in a press bureau, that is — are busy perfecting gas bombs, it promptly turns its generals into academics. What would Schopenhauer have said about a faculty of philosophy that bestowed its highest honour on someone who organizes mechanized death? Educated they are, as even British envy is obliged to concede, they are instructed about everything. Their language fulfils the sole function of giving instructions. This is a people that today writes the truncated jargon of global commerce. Goethe’s Iphigenie may not yet have escaped into Esperanto, but the Germans still abandon the language of their classics to the merciless barbarism of unscrupulous pirate printers. In an age when no one any longer senses, or actually experiences, the fate of language, it will make up for that by resorting to luxury editions, rare book collections, and other debauched manifestations of an aestheticism that is just as genuine a stigma of barbarism as the bombardment of a cathedral.