The Land of Deepening Shadow: Germany-at-War — John Shaqi
The Land of Deepening Shadow: Germany-at-WarCurtin, D. Thomas (Daniel Thomas)
History
The Land of Deepening Shadow: Germany-at-War
Curtin, D. Thomas (Daniel Thomas)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Germany; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
I went to Germany the first time under the impression that the
Anglo-Saxon had much to learn from German education. I do not
think that any observer in Germany itself to-day would find
anything valuable to learn in the field of education, except when
the German student comes to the time he takes up scientific
research, to which the German mind, with its intense industry and
regard for detail, is so eminently suited. The German Government
gives these young students every advantage. They are not, as with
us, obliged to start money-making as soon as they leave school. As
a rule a German boy's career is marked out for him by his parents
and the schoolmaster at a very early age. If he is to follow out
any one of the thousand branches of chemical research dealing with
coal-tar products, for example, he knows his fate at fourteen or
fifteen, and his eye is rarely averted from his goal until he has
achieved knowledge and experience likely to help him in the great
German trade success which has followed their utilisation of
applied science.
CHAPTER IV
PULPITS OF HATE
The unpleasant part played by the clergy, and especially the
Lutheran pastors, needs to be explained to those who regard clerics
as necessarily men of peace.
The claim that the Almighty is on the side of Germany is not a new
one. It was made as far back as the time of Frederick the Great.
It was advanced in the war of 1870. It found strong voice at the
time of the Boer War, when the pastors issued a united manifesto
virulently attacking Great Britain.
These pastors are in communication with the German-American
Lutherans in the United States, who exerted their influence to the
utmost against the election of President Wilson, taking their
instructions indirectly from the German Foreign Office.
The state of affairs in the German churches is so different from
anything on the other side of the Atlantic, and in Great Britain,
that it is almost as difficult to make people in England understand
war-preaching ministers as it is to make them comprehend
war-teaching schoolmasters.
My description of the poisoning by hate songs of the child mind of
Germany at its most impressionable age came as a shock to many of
my readers. But the hate songs of the children are not as fierce
as the hate hymns and prayers of the pastors. Do the public here
realise that of the original Zeppelin fund hundreds of thousands of
marks were subscribed in churches and chapels, and that models of
Zeppelins have formed portions of church decorations at festivals?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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