The Pan-German Programme: The Petition of the Six Associations and the Manifesto of the Intellectuals
History
The Pan-German Programme: The Petition of the Six Associations and the Manifesto of the Intellectuals
Pangermanism; World War, 1914-1918 -- Peace
If, nevertheless, we are to say a few words on this subject, our
position is briefly this. The German Mind is, in our opinion, beyond
all doubt our one supremely valuable asset. It is the one priceless
possession amongst all our possessions. It alone justifies our people’s
existence and their impulse to maintain and assert themselves in the
world; and to it they owe their superiority over all other peoples.
But, in the first place, we must emphatically insist that, if Germany is
to be free to pursue her spiritual vocation, she must first of all
secure her political and economic independence. And, secondly, to those
who advocate the so-called Policy of Civilisation (_Kulturpolitik_)
alone, to those whose watchword is "The German Mind without the Policy
of Power," we reply: "We have no use for a ’German Mind’ which is in
danger of becoming, as it were, an uprooted national spirit, in danger
of being itself disintegrated and the cause of disintegration in others.
We have no use for a Mind which, having no healthy national body of its
own, is driven to seek vainly in every country for a home and to become
’all things to all men’—a Mind which is forced to be untrue to its own
character and a spurious imitation of the character of the nation that
is its host. If the demands which we have formulated are satisfied, we
shall create the necessary healthy body for the German Mind. The
expansion of the national body which we have demanded will do the German
Mind no injury, provided the precautions upon which we have also
insisted are observed. On the contrary, subject to those precautions,
such an expansion will strengthen the German Mind by providing it with
wider opportunities."
We are well aware that the aims which we have proposed are great, and
that their attainment is impossible without a spirit of resolute
self-sacrifice and the most energetic skill in negotiation. But we
appeal to a sentence of Bismarck’s: "It is palpably true in Politics, if
it is true anywhere, that ’faith removes mountains,’ that Courage and
Victory are not cause and effect, but identical with one another."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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