New-York tribune., 1918-05-25
The Archaic Race
To the Editor of the Tribune.

To the Editor of the Tribune.
Sir: The war is daily throwing light on
anomalies in the German character and un.
raveling the inner thread of it's parodoxes
and contradictions 1t was quite the fashion
in circles intellectual, some time ago, to re-
gard German theorists with bated awe and
genuhectcd admiration. But as regards the
art of living that was quite another thing
Germans were notoriously SNUG and soggy
in temperament; Chinese and bizarre in
culture And we inferred with a show of an
alytic wisdom that there is a difference be-
tween theory and life.
Since 1914 many of the predictions of the
King of Dyspeptics have been verified 1t
was courageous of Carlyle to argue forty
years ago that essentially theory and life
are one; that what man is in conduct he is.
mutatis mutdndis, in intellect, vision and
personality. The personality is, in essence,
unit. Is not the worlds experience with
Germany since 1914 striking confirmation of
this truth Once Balzac related that Ger
man arch9ologist went digging for knowl-
edge Forty years he dug, in a state of
comatic patience, and finally his toll ended.
He had reached the bottom of his excava-
tions and found-himself!
When lived in Germany, a student by
the behest of Fate at Prussia's Musical
Fortress, often | encountered the phenom-
cnon of suicide among students and the
so-called intellectuals. The "Wcrther" period
of annmic romanticism had been followed
by period of Hinduism and Pcssimism.
fostered by the philosophy of Schopenhauer
and the poetry Of Ienau At the academy
where studied under Professor Willy Hess
four students made away with themselves
within space of six months
The German theorists on crime are one
sided, obsessed by false notion of objec-
tlvlty and utterly lacking in insight The
theories square with the German character:
Carlyle was right. You will find in them a
queer mixture of subjective pathos with an
objective show of figures, data, statistics; n
morbid inner life with pretentous scien-
tihc exterior; primitiveness which has not
yet been transcended in civilization. They
have failed to assimiate the humanities un-
derlylng learning, although their accretions
OIL pedantlc learning are mountainous. And
these characteristics have been dramatized
by the war. They never were civilized in
the true sense of the word From the neu-
rotic Romantcism Of Werther, to Schopen-
hauer's pessimism, to Nietzsche's Philosophy
of the Ego, to Bernhardi's Gospel of Force,
the psychological development of the Ger
man character is consistent and adequate
expression of the true inwardness of the
German nature.
1t is good canon of science that it is
bad to generalize; yet the observation is
inescapablc that the German character COM
pick is pathological, specifically in it's apti-
tude for reversion to primitive forms of
myth-building and fetch worship, as exem-
plfied in their apotheoss of Kaiser and
Kultur. 1t is this complex which gives
Germany the largest number of criminals
in times of peace; it is this complex which
is working out it's maleficcnt aims in the
present war.
One of the suicides referred to in this
note was an interesting boy of eighteen,
febrle chap, who had memorized the whole
of Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra."
He declaimed the "Seven Seals of Eternity"
with the ardor of fanatic. Pretending that
he detested pessimism in all it's forms, he
was pessimistic to the core, and his glor-
fication of Nietzsche was a mask to conceal
his weakness. In the coffee house he held
long disputations on the superman; in his
room was pile Of Hindu sacred books On
the night of his suicide he spoke not a
word-an alarming symptom in one so gar
rulous. He was pale and proud; held aloof
and pathetically gave up his heroic notions
by inhaling gas.
Germany is full of such moral cripples
A keen intellectual power seems to be at
the service of perverted view of life.
There lies the germ of German Kultur.
MAYO WADLER.
New York, May "a, 1918.