Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Into the insanity of monomania created by the shattering of the Germanic tribes came the sudden recognition of a better system, which could be, they thought, equally secure, equally meaningful, because equally total. This was symbolized by the word Rome. It is almost impossible for us, of the West and of today, imbued as we are with historical perspective and individualism, to see what Classical culture was like, and why it appealed to the Germans. Both may be summed up in the word “total.” The Greek polis, like the Roman imperium, was total. We in the West have escaped the fascination of totalitarianism because we have in our tradition other elements—the refusal of the Hebrews to confuse God with the world, or religion with the state, and the realization that God is transcendental, and, accordingly, all other things must be, in some degree, incomplete and thus imperfect. We also have, in our tradition, Christ, who stood apart from the state and told his followers to “Render to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.” And we have in our tradition the church of the catacombs, where clearly human values were neither united nor total, and were opposed to the state. The Germans, as later the Russians, escaped the full influence of these elements in the tradition of the West. The Germans and the Russians knew Rome only in its post-Constantine phase when the Christian emperors were seeking to preserve the totalitarian system of Dioclesian, but in a Christian rather than a pagan totalitarianism. This was the system the detribalized Germans glimpsed just before it also was shattered. They saw it as a greater, larger, more powerful entity than the tribe but with the same elements which they wanted to preserve from their tribal past. They yearned to become part of that imperial totalitarianism. They still yearn for it. Theodoric, the Ostrogoth (Roman Emperor, 489-526), saw himself as a Germanic Constantine. The Germans continued their refusal to accept this second loss, as the Latins and the Celts were prepared to do, and for the next thousand years the Germans made every effort to reconstruct the Christian imperium y under Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor, 1519-1555) as under Theodoric. The German continued to dream of that glimpse he had had of the imperial system before it sank—one, universal, total, holy, eternal, imperial, Roman. He refused to accept that it was gone, hating the small group who opposed its revival and despising the great mass who did not care, while regarding himself as the sole defender of values and righteousness who was prepared to sacrifice anything to restore that dream on earth. Only Charlemagne (died 814) came close to achieving that dream, Barbarossa, Charles V, William II, or even Hitler being but pale imitations. After Charlemagne, the state and public authority vanished in the Dark Ages, while society and the Church survived. When the state began to revive at the end of the tenth century, it was obviously a separate entity from the Church or society. The totalitarian imperium had been permanently broken in the West into two, and later many, allegiances. During the split in the Dark Ages of the single entity which was simultaneously Holy Roman, Catholic, Universal, and Imperial, the adjectives became displaced from the nouns to leave a Universal Catholic Church and a Holy Roman Empire. The former still survives, but the latter was ended by Napoleon in 1806, a thousand years after Charlemagne.

During that thousand years, the West developed a pluralistic system in which the individual was the ultimate good (and the ultimate philosophic reality), faced with the need to choose among many conflicting allegiances. Germany was dragged along in the same process, but unwillingly, and continued to yearn for a single allegiance which would be totally absorbing. This desire appeared in many Germanic traits, of which one was a continued love affair with Greece and Rome. Even today a Classical scholar does more of his reading in German than in any other language, although he rarely recognizes that he does so because the appeal of Classical culture to the Germans rested on its totalitarian nature, recognized by Germans but generally ignored by Westerners.

All the subsequent experiences of the German people, from the failure of Otto the Great in the tenth century to the failure of Hitler in the twentieth century, have served to perpetuate and perhaps to intensify the German thirst for the coziness of a totalitarian way of life. This is the key to German national character: in spite of all their talk of heroic behavior, what they have really wanted has been coziness, freedom from the need to make decisions which require an independent, self-reliant individual constantly exposed to the chilling breeze of numerous alternatives. Franz Grillparzer, the Austrian playwright, spoke like a true German when he said, a century ago, “The most difficult thing in the world is to make up one’s mind.” Decision, which requires the evaluation of alternatives, drives man to individualism, self-reliance, and rationalism, all hateful qualities to Germanism.

In spite of these desires of the Germans for the coziness of totalitarian oneness, they have been forced as part, even if a relatively peripheral part, of the West to live otherwise. Looking back, it seemed to Wagner that Germany came closest to its desires in the guild-dominated life of late medieval Augsburg; this is why his only happy opera was placed in that setting. But if Wagner is correct, the situation was achieved only briefly. The shift of world trade from Mediterranean and Baltic to the Atlantic destroyed the trans-Germanic commercial basis of German municipal guild life—a fact which Thomas Mann still mourned in our own day. Almost immediately the spiritual unity of the Germans was shattered by the Protestant Reformation. When it became clear that no degree of violence could restore the old religious unity, the Germans, in the settlement of Augsburg (1555), came up with a typically German solution: individuals would be saved from the painful need to make a decision in religious belief by leaving the choice to the prince in each principality. This solution and the almost contemporary reception of the Roman Law were significant indications of the process by which the German municipalism of the late medieval period was replaced by the Germany of principalities (Lander) of modern times.

As a result of the loss of religious unity, the Germanies became divided into a Protestant northeast, increasingly dominated by the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg-Prussia, and a Catholic southwest, increasingly dominated by the Habsburgs of Austria. Significantly enough, both of these began their dynastic rise as “marks,” that is, frontier military outposts of Christian Germanism against pagan Slavdom of the East. Even when the Slav East became Christianized and, by copying Byzantium, obtained a society closer to the Germanic heart’s desire than the West, the Germans could neither copy nor join the Slavs, because the Slavs, as outlanders from the tribe, were inferiors and hardly human beings at all. Even the Poles, who were more fully part of the West than the Germans, were regarded by the Germans as part of the outer darkness of Slavdom, and thus a threat to the still nonexistent Germanic tribal empire.

Germany’s misfortunes culminated in the disasters of the seventeenth century when Richelieu, on behalf of France, used the internal problems of Germany in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) to play off one group against another, ensuring that the Habsburgs would never unify Germany, and dooming the Germanies to another two hundred years of disunity. Hitler, Bismarck, and even Kaiser William II could well be regarded as Germany’s revenge on France for Richelieu, Louis XIV, and Napoleon. In an exposed position in central Europe, Germany found herself trapped between France, Russia, and the Habsburg dominions and was unable to deal with her basic problems in her own fashion and on their merits. Accordingly, Germany obtained national unity only late and “by blood and iron,” and never obtained democracy at all. It might be added that she also failed to achieve laissez faire or liberalism for the same reasons. In most countries democracy was achieved by the middle classes, supported by peasants and workers, in an attack on the monarchy supported by the bureaucracy and landed aristocracy. In Germany this combination never quite came off, because these various groups were reluctant to clash with one another in the face of their threatening neighbors. Instead, Germany’s exposed frontiers made it necessary for the various groups to subordinate their mutual antagonisms and obtain unification at the price of a sacrifice of democracy, laissez faire, liberalism, and nonmaterial values. Unification for Germany was achieved in the nineteenth century, not by embracing but by repudiating the typical nineteenth-century values. Starting as a reaction against the assault of Napoleon in 1806, and repudiating the rationalism, cosmopolitanism, and humanitarianism of the Enlightenment, Germany achieved unity only by the following processes: