Germany and the Germans from an American Point of ViewCollier, Price
History
Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View
Collier, Price
Germany; National characteristics, German
Certainly I am not the man to say he is wrong, when I see how
spiritual things in my own country are cut out of the social body as
though they were annoying and dangerous appendices.
The German of this type looks down upon the spiritual and intellectual
development of other countries as far inferior to his own. Such an one
in talking to an Englishman feels that he is conversing with a
high-spirited, thoroughbred horse; to a Frenchman, as though he were a
cynical monkey; to an American, as though he were a bright youth of
sixteen.
The German considers his dealings with the intangible things of life
to be a higher form, indeed the highest form, of intellectual
employment. He is therefore racially, historically, and by temperament
jealous or contemptuous, according to his station in life, of the
cosmopolitan exchanger of the world, the Jew. He denies to him either
patriotism or originality, and looks upon him as merely a distributer,
whether in art, literature, or commerce, as an exchanger who amasses
wealth by taking toll of other men's labor, industry, and intellect.
It has not escaped the German of this temper, that the whirling gossip
and innuendoes that have lately annoyed the present party in power in
England, have had to do with three names: Isaacs, Samuels, and
Montagu, all Jews and members of the government.
German politics, German social life, and the German press cannot be
understood without this explanation. The German sees a danger to his
hardly won national life in the cosmopolitanism of the Jew; he sees a
danger to his duty-doing, simple-living, and hard-working governing
aristocracy in the tempting luxury of the recently rich Jew; and
besides these objective reasons, he is instinctively antagonistic, as
though he were born of the clouds of heaven and the Jew of the clods
of earth. This does not mean that the German is a believer, in the
orthodox sense of the word, for that he is not. He loves the things of
the mind not because he thinks of them as of divine creation, and as
showing an allegiance to a divine Creator, but because they are the
playthings of his own manufacture that amuse him most. His superiority
to other nations is that he claims to enjoy maturer toys. Not even
France is so entirely unencumbered by orthodox restraints in matters
of belief.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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