The Detroit times. [volume] (Detroit, Mich.) 1903-1920, 1917-07-09
German Egotism
BY Or. FRANK CRANE
Copyright. 1915. by Frank Crane)

These are times of big things, unex-
ampled monstrosities crowd the daily
news columns, but probably the most
monumental and amazing production of
this era of prodigies is German egotism.
Nothing quite so thick, so fat, so smooth,
SO preposterous, so horribly sincere, and
so insanely naive has ever been witnessed
in the long history of the worlds manias.
Violating every instinct of common de-
cency, punging its hands elbow-deep in
innocent blood, out-Heroding Herod in
Belgium. and out-pirating the goriest
pirates of the Spanish Main or the Bar
barry Coast, the German government
blandly asserts that it. and it alone, is the
apostle and chief priest of kultur.
The funniest element in the German
attitude, if it were not so blasphemously
CHASTITY, is its appropriation of God. 1t
is common characteristic of megalo-
mania. The inquisitors of the Holy
Church sang praises TO God as they slow
~ pulled the accursed heretic's joints
apart in the torture chamber the blood
thirsty wretches that ravaged the native
Americans with Cortez and Pizarro. the
deSpoilers OF Holland under the dirty
spanish dukes. and the unspeakable
Turks as they rape and raven among the
Armenians, all use the smirk of pious
satisfaction, but it has remained for the
Germans TO combine a high degree of in
tellectual training with moral code that
would Justify crimes as black and damn
able as ever disgraced the records of saw
agery.
William Archer has compiled a num-
Der of excerpts from German writer's in a
book called Gems of German Thought"
and 20 me il is the most astounding. shat
tering thing | have seen in print about
this war. The description of the living
hell of the trenches, of the heinous out
rage Of Belgium, of the heartrendng dew
astation Of Poland of the murierous,
cowardly and inhuman destruction of pas
senger ships and hospital ships by SUBJ
marines, are all bad enough. God knows,
but this twisted logic, this Black Mass
heology. this Snug and fanatic egotism
by which such deeds of Satan are made
white and glorious is more appalling still.
When one reads the utterances of that
precious trio of German prophets,
Nietzsche, Bernhard. and Treitschke, Of
such scholars as Ulrich Won Wilamovitz-
Moellendorf and Haeckel and Harnack
and the renegade II. S. Chamberlain, one
is convinced that never since the world
began has such an epidemic of fatuous
egotism added the brains of any race
of men,
Behind the sneaking submarines, be-
hind the Zeppelins and airplanes that
drop bombs on peaceful non-military
English hamlets, behind the rabid saw
agery that enslaves Belgian workmen,
ravishes Belgian women and spits the
children upon bayonets, we must not for
get, stands a group of intellectual and
religious prostitutes whose propaganda is
even more awful than the deeds Of the
soldiers; such. for instance, as this ex-
tract from Pastor Baumgarten's adj
dress on "The Sermon on the Mount"
%:
I'VE are not only compelled to accept
the war that is forced upon US, but are
even compelled to carry on this war with
a cruelty, n ruthlessness, an employment
IF every imaginable device unknown in
previous war"
If the God that the kaiser invokes so
constantly be God, then give us Allah
" bloody Moloch