CUCKOO TO EAGLE

Evening Star, Issue 23701, 8 October 1940, Page 8

CUCKOO TO EAGLE

EVOLUTION OF PAN-GERMANISM We might sum.up the history of PanGermanism by saying that it began as a cuckoo and finished as a mystic eagle, laying its eggs in other birds’ nests,-and then receiving a heaven-sent mission to spread its Wings across the world. The eggs were at first nothing more than small business houses established' in foreign territory on the Continent (writes Professor A. 11. Chisholm in the Melbourne ‘ Argus ’). Over 700 years ago the movement began not as a national mission but as a homely enterprise on the part of individual Germans who saw an opportunity of thriving on other people’s industry. Merchants from Lubeck and elsewnere began this commercial colonisation in the 12th century, setting up fur-trading houses in what was then Livonia, and followed by German monks. One of these, Canon Meinhard. made himself a bishop in the adopted territory, arid, with the characteristic German habit of combining power politics and religion, built two stronglyfortified castles in his see. CUCKOOS COME TO STAY. The cuckoos had' come to stay; so much so that one of Meinhard’s successors, Albert von Appeldern, set out with an army and a fleet to undertake his ecclesiastical duties, and founded the town of Riga in 1201. Then the Germans founded Reval later the capital of Esthonia, .Appeldern having in the meantime established in the territory taken under German “ protection ’ (as Hitler would put it) an order of chivalry that was subsequently amalgamated with the order of Teutonic knights. This penetration has never ceased in the Baltic regions, and it became so important and attractive that by the 18th century, as _ Andre Fribourg, a French authority on Baltic questions, remarks, the proverb had grown up: “ Livland ist Bliefland ” —Livonia is a place where you stay; that is to say, a place where the cuckoo finds a very comfortable nest. FROM CUCKOO TO EAGLE. And now the transformation of the cuckoo into an eagle begins. In regions which were long a sort of private duelling place for rival interests— Swedish, Danish, Polish, Russian —and despite the ultimate establishment of a Russian political hegemony, the Germans began that new sort of penetration with which we are so dismally, familiar to-day: propaganda. The town of Dorpat, which became Russian in 1721, was chosen as the centre of diffusion for Teutonic ideas, with the University of Dorpat as the citadel of growing Pan-Germanism. Otto Richard Tannenberg, who had one of the loudest Pan-German voices m the period immediately preceding the Great War, tells us proudly in his ‘ Grossdeutschland ’ that this university exchanged professors with the “ other German universities of the Reich,” and that students from the Baltic provinces used to spend a few semesters in southern and eastern (Prussian) German universities, finishing up with a Dorpat degree that enabled them to enter the State service in Baltic countries. Thus from the cuckoo’s eggs grew the sturdy eaglets who later tested their full-grown claws, hardened by Hitler and twisted into a four-square swastika, on the unhappy city of Danzig. MYSTIC PAN-GERMANISM. There is no room to speak here of the dream of the Baltic as a “ German lake ” and the expansion of Germanism in other directions. Let us turn, rather, to the question of the mystic eagle. The concept of Pan-Germanism as a sort of national religion, which was discussed by various German writers in the nineteenth century and reached its paroxysm of inspired frenzy in ‘ Mein Kampf,’ is a very different thing from our concept of Empire. The British are a practical people, and their Empire has grown in a haphazard way out of the enterprise of their most vigorous men. Its contours have been carefully and progressively charted, and have never faded away into the cloudy regions of romance. Pan-Germanism, on the other hand, is a doctrine, both militant and mystic; and it has been given exceptional strength by the evolution of a modern German mythology. You can find the germs of it at least as far back as the time of the Napoleonic wars, in Fichte’s 1 Addresses to the German Nation.’ You can see it grow into a thing, of half-inspired, half-crazy beauty in the works of Kleist, a gifted playwright of the romantic period. It was given a considerable impetus by the writings of a Frenchman, Gobineau, who had the first vision of the glorious Aryan. And then came Nietzsche, with his Superman, who, as he said, belonged to no time and no place. Seized on by people who lacked Nietzsche’s lofty disinterestedness, this idea was twisted into meaning that there are no frontiers where the Aryan is concerned; spiritually the world is his, and the sword is all too > ready to follow the banners of the spirit. MYTH OF TWENTIETH CENTURY. Spongier (who died some four years ago) followed up Nietzsche’s writings with his attack on Grmco-Latin tradition, and Rosenberg followed Spengier; Rosenberg, with bis megalomaniac myth of the twentieth century, which transforms Nietzsche’s Blond Beast of the past into the conquering Nordic of modern times. It is interesting to open a parenthesis here, in order to mention that the ex-Kaiser was accused by some anthropologists of encouraging this growing myth by having the statistics of an ethnological survey of Germany so falsified as to show a preponderance of “ Nordic ” skull-measurements among the German population, multiplying “square-heads” for his anthropological round holes, as it were. I cannot vouch for this, of course. With our Western common sense scepticism we may smile at this queer jumble of force and fairy tales, but we have only too much reason to see its dangers. EAGLES OF DESTRUCTION. The point which 1 wish to stress is this; In the present war we are not .merely fighting Hitler; we are fighting a national aberration which has grown more and more aggressive over a period of more than seven centuries, begining as a more or less harmless commercial enterprise and finishing as a devastating mythology. We arc defending the Christian values and ethics of the West against anti-Christian and anti-Western doctrines that admit no frontiers. We are fighting the battle of man against the most bloody-minded of mystics. And in that very fact lies our real strength. It is the quality of humanity itself that upholds ns in our times of greatest human suffering. And though the mystic eagles of 1940, despising the humble methods of their ancestors and cuckoos, rain down bombs and destruction and five and fury on the homes of Britain, they cannot break tjie spirit

of man that nestles in those homes, older, more steadfast, more patient and resilient than all the forces of Pan-Germanism. The Aryan, even if he were an historical reality, would only be part of an infinitely greater whole—humanity. Particularism _ cannot conquer the universal, and history is indestructible. And, to come down to a less metaphysical level, the homely Cockney, or the British farmer, with his simple courage and his sense of humour, is ever so much more_ real than the Blond Beast or his Nordic descendants, and reality always finishes by destroying the myth in this world of plain, human comings and goings.