New York Times Current History The European War, Vol 1, No. 1 Part 29

*A Letter to Gerhart Hauptmann*

*By Romain Rolland.*

I am not, Gerhart Hauptmann, of those Frenchmen who call Germany barbarian. I recognize the intellectual and moral grandeur of your mighty race. I realize all that I owe to the thinkers of old Germany; and even at this extreme hour I recall to mind the example and the words of our Goethe--for he belongs to all humanity--repudiating national hatred and preserving his soul serene in those heights "where one feels the joys and sorrows of all peoples as one's own." It has been the labor of my life to bring together the minds of our two nations; and the atrocities of impious war shall never lead me to soil my heart with hatred.

Whatever reason I may have, therefore, to suffer through the deeds of your Germany and to judge as criminal the German policy and the German methods, I do not hold responsible the people who submit thereto and are reduced to mere blind instruments. This does not mean that I regard war as a fatality. A Frenchman knows no such word as fatality. Fatality is the excuse of souls that lack a will.

No. This war is the fruit of the feebleness of peoples and of their stupidity. One can only pity them; one cannot blame them. I do not reproach you for our sorrows. Your mourning will not be less than ours.

If France is ruined, so also will be Germany. I did not even raise my voice when I saw your armies violate the neutrality of n.o.ble Belgium.

This forfeit of honor, which compels the contempt of every right-thinking mind, is too well within the political tradition of Prussian Kings to have surprised me.

But the fury with which you treated that generous land whose one crime was to defend, unto despair, its independence and the idea of justice--that was too much! The world revolts in wrath at this. Reserve for us your violence--for us French, who are your enemies. But to trample upon your victims, upon the little Belgian people, unfortunate and innocent--that is ignominy!

And not content with a.s.saulting the Belgium that lives, you wage war on the dead, on the glory of past centuries. You bombard Malines, you put Rubens to flame, Louvain comes from your hands a heap of ashes--Louvain with its treasures of art and knowledge, the holy city! Who indeed are you and what name do you conjure us to call you, Hauptmann, you who reject the t.i.tle of barbarian?

Are you the children of Goethe or of Attila? Do you wage war against armies or against the human spirit? Kill men if you must, but respect man's work. For this is the heritage of the human race. And you, like us, are its trustees. In making pillage of it as you have done you prove yourselves unworthy of this great inheritance, unworthy of holding rank in the small European army which is the garde d'honneur of civilization.

It is not to the sense of the rest of the world that I appeal against you. It is to yourself, Hauptmann. In the name of our Europe, of which up to the present you have been one of the n.o.blest champions--in the name of that civilization for which the greatest of men have struggled--in the name of the honor even of your German race, Gerhart Hauptmann, I adjure you, I command you, you and the intellectual elite of Germany, where I have so many friends, to protest with utmost vehemence against this crime which leaps back upon yourselves.

If you fail in this, one of two things will be proved--that you acquiesce, (and then the opinion of the world will crush you,) or that you are powerless to raise your voice against the Huns that now command you. And in that case, with what right will you still pretend, as you have written, that your cause is that of liberty and human progress?

You will be giving to the world a proof that, incapable of defending the liberty of the world, you are helpless even to uphold your own; that the elite of Germany lies subservient to the blackest despotism--to a tyranny which mutilates masterpieces and a.s.sa.s.sinates the human spirit.

I await your response, Hauptmann--a response which shall be an act. The opinion of Europe awaits it, as do I. Bear this in mind; in a moment like this, even silence is an act.

*A Reply to Rolland*

*By Gerhart Hauptmann.*

You address me, Herr Rolland, in public words which breathe the pain over this war, (forced by England, Russia and France,) pain over the endangering of European culture and the destruction of hallowed memorials of ancient art. I share in this general sorrow, but that to which I cannot consent is to give an answer whose spirit you have already prescribed and concerning which you wrongly a.s.sert that it is awaited by all Europe. I know that you are of German blood. Your beautiful novel, "Jean-Christophe," will remain immortal among us Germans together with "Wilhelm Meister," and "der grune Heinrich."

But France became your adopted fatherland; therefore your heart must now be torn and your judgment confused. You have labored zealously for the reconciliation of both peoples. In spite of all this when the present b.l.o.o.d.y conflict destroys your fair concept of peace, as it has done for so many others, you see our nation and our people through French eyes, and every attempt to make you see clearly and as a German is absolutely sure to be in vain.

Naturally everything which you say of our Government, of our army and our people, is distorted, everything is false, so false that in this respect your open letter to me appears as an empty black surface.

War is war. You may lament war, but you should not wonder at the things that are inseparable from the elementary fact itself. a.s.suredly it is deplorable that in the conflict an irreplaceable Rubens is destroyed, but--with all honor to Rubens!--I am among those in whom the shattered breast of his fellow-man compels far deeper pain.

And, Herr Rolland, it is not exactly fitting that you should adopt a tone implying that the people of your land, the French, are coming out to meet us with palm branches, when in reality they are plentifully equipped with cannon, with cartridges, yes, even with dumdum bullets. It is apparent that you have grown pretty fearful of our brave troops! That is to the glory of a power which is invincible through the justice of its cause. The German soldier has nothing whatsoever in common with the loathsome and puerile were-wolf tales which your lying French press so zealously publishes abroad, that press which the French and the Belgian people have to thank for their misfortune.

Let the idle Englishmen call us Huns; you may, for all I care, characterize the warriors of our splendid Landwehr as sons of Attila; it is enough for us if this Landwehr can shatter into a thousand pieces the ring of our merciless enemies. Far better that you should call us sons of Attila, cross yourselves in fear and remain outside our borders, than that you should indict tender inscriptions upon the tomb of our German name, calling us the beloved descendants of Goethe. The epithet Huns is coined by people who, themselves Huns, are experiencing disappointment in their criminal attacks on the life of a sound and valorous race, because it knows the trick of parrying a fearful blow with still more fearful force. In their impotence, they take refuge in curses.

I say nothing against the Belgian people. The peaceful pa.s.sage of German troops, a question of life for Germany, was refused by Belgium because the Government had made itself a tool of England and France. This same Government then organized an unparalleled guerrilla warfare in order to support a lost cause, and by that act--Herr Rolland, you are a musician!--struck the horrible keynote of conflict. If you are at all in a position to break your way through the giant's wall of anti-German lies, read the message to America, by our Imperial Chancellor, of Sept.

7; read further the telegram which on Sept. 8 the Kaiser himself addressed to President Wilson. You will then discover things which it is necessary to know in order to understand the calamity of Louvain.

*Another Reply to Rolland*

*By Karl Wolfskehl.*

To you, Rolland, belonging as a chosen one to the more important Frenchmen who can rise above their race, the German nature has often been revealed. To you, now, we shall make answer, offer frank testimony concerning the spirit of the time, concerning that fate, that very fate in which you, the Frenchman, do not believe. You do not believe in it; what to us is fate, mysterious necessity, to you is fatalite, an unavoidable Alp which threatens the individual in his individual freedom. This fatalite, we, too, do not believe in it, but we do believe in the forces which bring forth the eternal in human will, that these both are one, will and forces, one with necessity, with actuality, with creative, moral power, of which all great ideas are the children, the idea of freedom, the idea of the beautiful, the idea of tragic fidelity, and that these, reaching far above being and pa.s.sing away, are nevertheless real, life entire, fact entire. All that which is as dear to you as to us, great works and great feelings, resignation and self-restraint, all that is necessity, is fate, that became will--all that a unity out of choice and compulsion. All that is for us eternal, not according to the measure of time, but according to the beginning and the power of its working forces, in so far as it is necessary.

Thus has it become fate, destiny, not fatalite, rather like that fate which in Beethoven's own words in the first movement of his "Eroica" "is the knocking at the gate."

Such a fate is this war. No one wanted it in our Germany, for it was forced upon us with terrible arbitrariness, contrary to all right. Do you not know of the net that has been spun around us and drawn tight for the last half of a generation, to choke us? Do you not know how often this most peaceful of peoples has drawn back, how often the strange powers in the East and in the West have with contemptuous snarls said, "Wilhelm will not make war"? That you ought to know, Rolland, for it is known to the whole world.

*The War "Came from G.o.d."*

But I will betray something to you that you cannot know, because you are a stranger; and this will probably show you where we see fate. I will betray to you the fact that there is still another Germany behind the exterior in which great politics and great finance meet with the literary champions of Europe. That Germany tells you in this heavy hour of Europe:

This undesired war that has been forced upon us is nevertheless a necessity; it had to come to pa.s.s for the sake of Germany and the world of European humanity, for the sake of the world. We did not want it, but it came from G.o.d. Our poet knew of it. He saw this war and its necessity and its virtues, and heralded it, long before an ugly suspicion of it flew through the year--before the leaves began to turn. The "Stern des Bundes" ["Star of the Federation"] is this book of prophecy, this book of necessity and of triumph.

The present need and the present triumph are quite human and quite inexorable. They have a part in all that has taken place, and they are unprecedented and new. None of us--do you hear, Rolland?--none of us Germans today would hesitate to help destroy every monument of our holy German past, if necessity made it a matter of the last ditch, for that from which alone all monuments of all times draw their right of existence and their worth unless they are empty husks, skeletons, and framework; even so, we alone may ask what shall come to pa.s.s, not what shall cease. Which ruins are ravings, and which are the pains of childbirth, we do not presume to decide; but you, too, who are so pained by ruins, even as we are pained by them, you, too, do not know it.

Today it is a question of the life or death of the European soul. Do you not believe that this soul is more endangered at the hands of the hordes of stub-nosed Slavs than of the phalanx of those whom you, Rolland, call Huns? Your sense must give you the right to answer. Recall the terrible story of Russian incendiarism for the last hundred years, which has torn to pieces in ever-increasing l.u.s.t for murder bodies and souls; recall the eternally perjured and law-defying regiment of grave diggers; and then blush that you have characterized as a heavy crime a manfully confessed act of self-defense on the part of the Germans, the temporary occupation of Belgium! Blush that you have forgotten the Russian Moloch now loosed upon us, drunk with the blood and tears of alien peoples as well as of its own children! That you have forgotten all that, in order to lament over buildings which we have been forced in self-defense--again in self-defense--to sacrifice! And blush for those of your people who have become accomplices of that Moloch! Those who are sinning against the Holy Ghost of Europe, in order to attempt belated vengeance against Germany! Do you know what the ancients, the very Greeks and Romans from whom you have drawn your blood and temperament, called that sin? Blood-guiltiness is the name of that horror. And do you know how it is atoned for? I shrink to ask further, yea, even to think further; for horror falls upon me, and I see the unspeakable.

Today, battling against you allies of the swarms of Muscovites, we Europeans are battling also for that France which you are threatening--you, not we!

*German Intellectuals "All Afire."*

Yes, Romain Rolland, try, Frenchman that you are, to look into the mysteries of the time. Ask yourself, marvel, how it comes to pa.s.s that we, the intellectuals among the Germans, take part without exception in this dreadful war; take part with body and soul. None of us ambitious, none of us a politician, not one of us who, till this war, busied himself about anything except his idea, the Palladium of his life! And now we are all afire, with all our hearts, with our whole people, all full of determination and prepared for the last. All our youth in the field, every man among us thrilled with faith in our G.o.d and this battle of our G.o.d, every man among us conscious of the sacred necessity that has driven us, every man among us consecrated for timely death! Are these incendiaries? Are these slaves, whom a despot points the way to the rolling dead? Every one knows it is our all that is at stake; it is a matter of the divine in humanity, a matter of our preservation and that of Europe.

And so we stand amid death and ruins under the star--one federation, one single union. This I have had to tell you, whether you will listen to it, whether Europe has ears to hear it, or not. From now on, may our deeds be our words!

*Are We Barbarians?*

*By Gerhart Hauptmann.*

The idea of cosmopolitanism has never taken deeper root anywhere than in Germany. Let any person reflect about our literary translations and then name a nation that has tried so honestly as we to do justice to the spirit and the feelings of other races, to understand their inmost soul in all good-will.

I must out with it: We had and have no hatred against France: we have idolized the fine arts, the sculpture and painting and the literature of that country. The worldwide appreciation of Rodin had its origin in Germany--we esteem Anatole France, Maupa.s.sant, Flaubert, Balzac, as if they were German authors. We have a deep affection for the people of South France. We find pa.s.sionate admirers of Mistral in small German towns, in alleys, in attics. It was deeply to be regretted that Germany and France could not be friends politically. They ought to have been, because they were joint trustees of the intellectual treasures of the Continent, because they are two of the great cultivated nations of Europe. But fate has willed it otherwise.

In the year 1870 the German races fought for the union of the Germans and the German Empire. Owing to the success of this struggle Germany has enjoyed an era of peace for more than forty years. A time of budding, growing, becoming strong, flowering, and bearing fruit, without parallel in history. Out of a population, growing more and more numerous, an ever-increasing number of individuals have been formed. Individual energy and a general tendency to expand led to the great achievements of our industry, our commerce, and our trade. I do not think that any American, Englishman, Frenchman, or Italian when in a German family, in German towns, in German hotels, on German s.h.i.+ps, in German concerts, in German theatres, at Baireuth, in German libraries, or in German museums, ever felt as if he were among "barbarians." We visited other countries and kept an open door for every stranger.

*English Relations.*