Teuton

“ One can readily imagine the painful kind of questions that will arise in the mind of an intelligent ally who realizes for the first time how great are the inventive and organizing talents of the Teuton, how unswerving his resolve, how tenacious he is of purpose, and how unconscious most of us still are of the need of bestirring ourselves to compete with him on terms of equality. The German’s striving is one, but all-embracing. His means are countless, for they are restricted by no limitations. In his search for tools and agents he enters into human nature, but not in its entire compass ”

“ Every Teuton must fall on his face before an inferior Teuton; until they all find, in the foul marshes towards the Baltic, the very lowest of all possible Teutons, and worship him—and find he is a Slav. ”

“ There is a power of universal mastery about the travelling Teuton which affronts our feebler souls. We cannot cope with him; we stand defeated at every turn by his resistless determination to secure the best. The windows of the railway carriages, the little sunny tables in the hotel dining-rooms, the back seats—commanding the view—of the Swiss funiculaires;—all these strong positions he occupies at once with the strategical genius188 of a great military nation. ”

“ Ardarich raised the Teuton Gepids and Ostrogoths. The Teutons who had obeyed Attila, turned on their Tartar conquerors, the only people who had ever subdued German men, and then only by brute force of overpowering numbers. At Netad, upon the great plain between the Drave and the Danube, they fought the second Hunnenschlacht, and the Germans conquered. Thirty thousand Huns fell on that dreadful day, and the rest streamed away into the heart of Asia, into the infinite unknown deserts from whence the foul miscreants had streamed forth, and left the Teutons masters of the world. ”

“ It is another convulsion equal in its range and perhaps still greater in its effects than that which made Teuton tribes the masters of Gaul and Spain and Britain, of Germany, of Italy, and Illyricum. The peoples of the north had struggled for hundreds of years to break the barriers of the Rhine and the Danube, and in their savage ferocity and tameless independence wrest the South, so long coveted, from the civilised but degenerate Roman. ”

“ Next day we motored down to Strassburg, climbed the towers, and saw the marks of the German shells fired nearly forty years before, and spent a pleasant afternoon in the picturesque streets of that ancient town. As far as man could do it Alsace had been painted black, white and red with Teuton colours. Nowhere in the streets of Strassburg did we observe any sign or notice in any language but German. Everywhere were German soldiers, and in the evening we attended a concert of massed German bands at which the music was purely Teuton, and Teuton of the most patriotic kind. ”

“ The Teuton method is far more effective and brutal. The man is not badgered, coaxed, and threatened in the hope of extorting a signed confession, but he is condemned to loneliness, silence and solitude amid a gloom which can be felt, and which within a short time eats into your very soul. Add to this complete deprivation of exercise and insufficient, un-nourishing, food, and one can gather some faint idea of the effect which is wrought upon the human body. The German idea is to wear down a man physically as well as mentally, until at last he is brought to the verge of insanity and collapse. ”

“ To follow the fortunes of Italy, we must follow those of these East Goths, and especially of one man among them, Theodoric, known in German song as Dietrich of Bern or Verona.
Interesting exceedingly to us should this great hero be. No man’s history better shows the strange relations between the Teutons and the dying Empire: but more; his life is the first instance of a Teuton attempting to found a civilized and ordered state, upon experience drawn from Roman sources; of the young world trying to build itself up some sort of dwelling out of the ruins of the old. ”

“ There is work to be done by the Teuton. As a unit he must in times to come crush successively the rising power of Slav and Mongolian, preserving for Europe and America the glorious culture that he has evolved. ”

“ To hear in hard, to gouge, are toward the foreigner procedures relied on by the Teuton nature as appropriate. In it there is to be found little mutuality or respectfulness of feeling that curbs, not to speak of the social spirit that restrains or breeds a fine dignity of self. A show of weakness in any form, however ideal or beautiful, makes small appeal. So far as any other "tribe" is concerned, life to the German is at base a knock-down argument. ”

“ The apparent ingenuousness of the English-speaking Teuton is calculated to throw the most vigilant Anglo-Saxon intelligence off its guard. We have no psychological X-rays by which to pierce the peculiar racial vesture in which the German soul is shrouded, nor [306] are we endowed with the gift of patient observation which might enable us to extract those rays from facts. And so we stumble along, dealing with an imaginary people whom we ourselves have created after our own image and likeness, falling into fatal blunders and recommencing anew. ”

“ That this is a matter of grief to all true Americans, is well known; and it is always said, whenever a case comes up, the man in question is a ‘German American.’ The tenacity of the Teuton has preserved his individuality under foreign conditions, and he now forms a distinctly powerful element in the country, lives the same way as if he were in Germany, thinks the same thoughts, and clings to his language. ”

“ He is warned to stamp his letters before mailing them, to avoid draughts if he would keep his health; he is verboten to step off a tramcar in motion, lest he break his precious neck, and so on through all the possibilities of earthly existence, until any but a German would feel like the victim of one of those motherly women whose extreme solicitude becomes in practice a constant nagging. The Teuton, however, seems to like it, and he grows so accustomed to receiving or imparting information by means of placards that his very shop-windows are ridiculously littered with them. ”

“ They might have done it before that again, when Hermann slew Varus and his legions in the Teutoburger Wald; or before that again, when the Kempers and Teutons burst over the Alps, to madden themselves with the fatal wines of the rich south. And why did the Teutons not do it? Because they were boys fighting against cunning men. Boiorich, the young Kemper, riding down to Marius’ camp, to bid him fix the place and time of battle—for the Teuton thought it mean to use surprises and stratagems, or to conquer save in fair and open fight—is the type of the Teuton hero ”

“ Starting from the only artistic section of the Empire, namely Bavaria, this cult had knocked even against the gloomy portals of the Pommeranian churches in the north. The Teuton had suddenly discovered that it was right and proper in his godship, as it was in the realm of the Greek deities, to go about naked. It was natural, healthful, and both beautiful and moral.
German men and women, in their divinity, should bathe, drink beer, dance together nude. ”

“ Progress always demands as its price the best the age or generation has to give. The installation of the Goths and Teutons in Europe cost five centuries of woe and strife,—we can now see why; for it was destined to give the world a better civilization and a better leadership. But this leadership could not come from the Teuton alone: he is never prompted to enterprise in the world at large; he is never aggressive, he is strong only at home. Why then those six generations of viking conquest and mingling with the conquered, if not to supply this lack through the evolution of the British nation? ”

“ In Western Europe, though we have had plenty of political conquests, we have had no national migrations since the days of the Teutonic settlements—at least, if we may extend these last so as to take in the Scandinavian settlements in Britain and Gaul. The Teuton has pressed to the East at the expense of the Slave and the Old-Prussian: the borders between the Romance and the Teutonic nations in the West have fluctuated; but no third set of nations has come in, strange alike to the Roman and the Teuton and to the whole Aryan family. ”

“ The Franks in the early days of the Merovingians, by no means an estimable people, were probably purely Teuton; they separated more and more from their less civilized race-kindred, and by the time the Frankish Empire had reached its zenith its people had absorbed a good deal of other blood, which mixture crystallized into the French nation and soon broke away from any racial relations with the Teutons. ”

“ Along the country of the Danube, from the Euxine to the Alps, the Teutons had still the advantage of interior lines, and vast bodies of men—Herules, Gepids, Ostrogoths, Lombards—were coming down in an enormous échellon similar to that which forced the Rhine; to force Italy at the same fatal point—Venetia. The party who could command the last reserve would win, as is the rule. And the last reserves were with our race. They must win. ”

“ No reasonable man can doubt that this conviction is sincere upon the part of a large majority of our enemies. From first-hand evidence it is equally indisputable that the few, the Court Party, for example, and certain writers, have frankly admitted the Teuton aims and ambitions, crystallized into the famous phrase—“Weltmacht oder Niedergang.” The amazing thing—perhaps the most amazing fact of the war—is the moral Atlantic which heaves between the few who know and the many who do not. ”

“ They have assimilated some of the best qualities of the Teuton without sacrificing those which are inherent in men of their own race. A thorough grasp of detail and a gift for organization characterize their conceptions, and precision, thoroughness, and conscientiousness are predicated of their methods. ”

“ But the Imperial power never reached such height as under this imperious, commanding Teuton; who exists now as a half-mythic hero, honored in picture, statue, song, and legend throughout Germany. His reign was a splendid fight against the two antagonists which were finally to be fatal to the Empire—Italian nationality and the Papacy.
The knighthood established by his Saxon predecessor, in 930, had during the Crusades expanded into great orders of chivalry throughout Europe. Frederick Barbarossa fostered and brought the chivalry of Germany to great splendor. ”

“ Greece and Rome were unaware of the existence of the Teuton until about the year 330 B.C., when Pythias, a Greek navigator, came home from a voyage to the Baltic with terrible tales of the Goths whom he had met. Nearly one century before Christ the inhabitants of Italy were enabled to judge for themselves of the accuracy of the description. Driven from their homes by the inroads of the sea, the Goths poured in a hungry torrent down into the tempting vineyards of Northern Italy. ”

“ When we recollect the invasion of the Normans; the wholesale eastward migration of the Crusaders, men, women, and children; and the later colonization by Teutonic peoples, of every quarter of the globe, is there anything wonderful in the belief that similar migratory manias may have seized the old tribes; that the spirit of Woden, ‘the mover,’ may have moved them, and forced them to go ahead, as now? Doubtless the theory is strange. But the Teutons were and are a strange people; so strange, that they have conquered—one may almost say that they are—all nations which are alive upon the globe ”

“ Of course, it might be urged that this merely shows that the Mediterranean race of southern Italy is as much less inclined to the phenomenon than the Alpine race in these respects, as it in turn lags behind the Teuton. For it must be confessed that even in Italy neither divorce nor suicide is so frequent anywhere as in Teutonic northern France. Well, then, turn to Germany. Compare its two halves in these respects again. The northern half of the empire is most purely Teutonic by race; the southern is not distinguishable ethnically, as we have sought to prove, from central France. ”

“ You have never lived with the Germans there—only read the best about the "most advanced" of mankind. They are so different from our American-Germans. You did not know that the educated Teuton at home is apt to be dirty in his person and habits, eats with his knife, walks before women, kicks his children about, has coarse or vulgar ideas on [338] female chastity, enjoys the obscene, has no good words to say of anyone beyond his boundaries. ”

“ Your Britisher never forgets that a man’s home is his castle. One could not but wonder just what the attitude of a German officer would have been under reversed conditions, for the same motto is far less deeply ingrained in the Teuton character. The barge nearest the steamer was occupied by a family with five children, the oldest aged fourteen, all born on board, at as many points of the vessel’s constant going and coming between Rotterdam and Mannheim. ”

“ Man easily makes himself at home under any sky, and the national characteristic, far from being much changed by the place of abode, dominates and changes the latter after its own pattern. Moreover, the variety of natural influences in the region inhabitated by the Teutons is not very great. Just as little importance should be attached to the fact that the Teutonic race has intermingled with the former inhabitants of the countries it conquered ”