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

by strengthening the monarchy and its bureaucracy;

by strengthening the permanent, professional army;

by preserving the landlord class (the Junkers) as a source of personnel for both bureaucracy and army;

by strengthening the industrial class through direct and indirect state subsidy, but never giving it a vital voice in state policy;

by appeasing the peasants and workers through paternalistic economic and social grants rather than by the extension of political rights which would allow these groups to assist themselves.

The long series of failures by the Germans to obtain the society they wanted served only to intensify their desire for it. They wanted a cozy society with both security and meaning, a totalitarian structure which would be at the same time universal and ultimate, and which would so absorb the individual in its structure that he would never need to make significant decisions for himself. Held in a framework of known, satisfying, personal relationships, such an individual would be safe because he would be surrounded by fellows equally satisfied with their own positions, each feeling important from his membership in the greater whole.

Although this social structure was never achieved in Germany, and never could be achieved, in view of the dynamic nature of Western Civilization in which the Germans were a part, each German over the centuries has tried to create such a situation for himself in his immediate environment (at the minimum in his family or beer garden) or, failing that, has created German literature, music, drama, and art as vehicles of his protests at this lack. This desire has been evident in the Germans’ thirst for status (which establishes his relationship with the whole) and for the absolute (which gives unchanging meaning to the whole).

The German thirst for status is entirely different from the American desire for status. The American is driven by the desire to get ahead, that is, to change his status; he wants status and status symbols to exist as clear evidence or even measures of the speed with which he is changing his status. The German wants status as a nexus of obvious relationships around himself so there will never be doubt in anyone’s mind where he stands, stationary, in the system. He wants status because he dislikes changes, because he abhors the need to make decisions. The American thrives on change, novelty, and decisions. Strangely enough, both react in this opposite fashion for somewhat similar reasons based on the inadequate maturation and integration of the individual’s personality. The American seeks change, as the German seeks external fixed relationships, as a distraction from the lack of integration, self-sufficiency, and internal resources of the individual himself.

The German wants status reflected in obvious external symbols so that his nexus of personal relationships will be clear to everyone he meets and so that he will be treated accordingly, and almost automatically (without need for painful decisions). He wants titles, uniforms, nameplates, flags, buttons, anything which will make his position clear to all. In every German organization, be it business, school, army, church, social club, or family, there are ranks, gradations, and titles. No German could be satisfied with just his name on a calling card or on the name-plate of his doorway. His calling card must also have his address, his titles, and his educational achievements. The great anthropologist Robert H. Lowie tells of men with two doctorate degrees whose nameplates have “Professor Dr. Dr. So-and-So,” for all the world to see their double academic status. The emphasis on minor gradations of rank and class, with titles, is a reflection of Germanic particularism, just as the verbal insistence on the absolute is a reflection of German universalism which must give meaning to the system as a whole.

In this system the German feels it necessary to proclaim his position by verbal loudness which may seem boastful to outsiders, just as his behavior toward his superiors and inferiors in his personal relationships seems to an Englishman to be either fawning or bullying. All three of these are acceptable to his fellow Germans, who are as eager to see these indications of his status as he is to show them. All these reactions, criticized by German thinkers like Kant as craving for precedence, and satirized in German literature for the last two centuries, have been the essential tissue of the personal relationships which make up German life. The correct superscription on an envelope, we are told, would be “Herrn Hofrat Professor Dr. Siegfried Harnischfeger.” These pomposities are used in speech as well as in writing, and are applied to the individual’s wife as well as to himself.

Such emphasis on position, precedence, titles, gradations, and fixed relationships, especially up and down, are so typically German that the German is most at home in hierarchical situations such as a military, ecclesiastical, or educational organization, and is often ill at ease in business or politics where status is less easy to establish and make obvious.

With this kind of nature and such neurological systems, Germans are ill at ease with equality, democracy, individualism, freedom, and other features of modern life. Their neurological systems were a consequence of the coziness of German childhood, which, contrary to popular impression, was not a condition of misery and personal cruelty (as it often is in England), but a warm, affectionate, and externally disciplined situation of secure relationships. After all, Santa Claus and the child-centered Christmas is Germanic. This is the situation the adult German, face to face with what seems an alien world, is constantly seeking to recapture. To the German it is Gemutlichkeit; but to outsiders it may be suffocating. In any case it gives rise among adult Germans to two additional traits of German character: the need for external discipline and the quality of egocentricity.

The Englishman is disciplined from within so that he takes his self-discipline, embedded in his neurological system, with him wherever he goes, even to situations where all the external forms of discipline are lacking. As a consequence the Englishman is the most completely socialized of Europeans, as the Frenchman is the most completely civilized, the Italian most completely gregarious, or the Spaniard most completely individualistic. But the German by seeking external discipline shows his unconscious desire to recapture the externally disciplined world of his childhood. With such discipline he may be the best behaved of citizens, but without it he may be a beast.

A second notable carryover from childhood to adult German life was egocentricity. The whole world seems to any child to revolve around it, and most societies have provided ways in which the adolescent is disabused of this error. The German leaves childhood so abruptly that he rarely learns this fact of the universe, and spends the rest of his life creating a network of established relationships centering on himself. Since this is his aim in life, he sees no need to make any effort to see anything from any point of view other than his own. The consequence is a most damaging inability to do this. Each class or group is totally unsympathetic to any point of view except the egocentric one of the viewer himself. His union, his company, his composer, his poet, his party, his neighborhood are the best, almost the only acceptable, examples of the class, and all others must be denigrated. As part of this process a German usually chooses for himself his favorite flower, musical composition, beer, club, painting, or opera, and sees little value or merit in any other. Yet at the same time he insists that his myopic or narrow-angled vision of the universe must be universalized, because no people are more insistent on the role of the absolute or the universal as the framework of their own egocentricity. One deplorable consequence of this has been the social animosities rampant in a Germany which has loudly proclaimed its rigid solidarity.