Heinrich von Treitschke
THE GREATNESS OF WAR
Coupled with the military’s
influence on state decisions was a romantic glorification of the nation and
war, an attitude shared by both the elite and the masses. Although militarism generally
pervaded Europe, it was particularly strong in Germany. In
the following reading from Politics (1899—1900), the influential German
historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834—1896) glorified warfare.
• . . One must say with the greatest determination: War is for an
afflicted people the only remedy. When the State exclaims: My very existence at
stake! then social self-seeking must disappear and all
party hatred be silent. The individual must forget his own ego and feel himself
a member of the whole, he must recognize how negligible is his life compared
with the good of the whole. Therein lies the greatness
of war that the little man completely vanishes before the great thought1 of the
State. The sacrifice of nationalities for one another is nowhere invested with
such beauty as in war. At such a time the corn is separated from the chaff. All
who lived through 1870 will understand the saying of
Niebuhr’ with regard to the year 1813, that he then experienced the “bliss of
sharing with all his fellow citizens, with the scholar and the ignorant, the
one common feeling—no man who enjoyed this experience will to his dying day
forget how loving, friendly and strong he felt.”
It is indeed political idealism which fosters war, whereas
materialism rejects it. What a perversion of morality to want to banish heroism
from human life. The heroes of a people are the personalities who fill the
youthful souls with delight and enthusiasm, and amongst authors we as boys and
youths admire most those whose words sound like a flourish of trumpets. He who cannot take pleasure therein, is too cowardly to take
up arms himself for his fatherland. All appeal to Christianity in this matter
is perverted. The Bible states expressly that the man in authority shall wield
the sword; it states likewise that: “Greater love hath no man than this that he
giveth his life for his friend.” Those who preach the
nonsense about everlasting peace do not understand the life of the Aryan race,
the Aryans are before all brave. They have always been men enough to protect by
the sword what they had won by the intellect….
To the historian who lives in the realms of the Will, it is quite
clear that the furtherance of an everlasting peace is fundamentally
reactionary. He sees that to banish war from history would be to banish all
progress and becoming. It is only the periods of exhaustion, weariness and
mental stagnation that have dallied with the dream of everlasting peace. . . .
The living God will see to it that war returns again and again as a terrible medicine
for humanity.