This explanation is justified.  Consider the German professor in the beer garden, in the relations of everyday life, in his amusements.  With certain notable exceptions he excels only in discovering and collecting materials for study and in drawing from them, by mechanical operations, solutions that rest wholly upon text and argument and make no appeal whatever to ordinary judgment and good sense.  What a disproportion often between his science and his real education.  What vulgarity of tastes and sentiments and language.  What brutality of methods on the part of this man whose authority is indisputable in his specialty.  Take this learned man from his university chair, place him on that scene of war where force can alone reign and where the gross appetites are unchained, it is not surprising that his conduct approaches that of savages.

A Culture of Violence.

That is the current judgment and not without reason.  The savant and the man, among the Germans, are only too often strangers to each other.  The German in war is inhuman not merely because of an explosion of his true nature, gross and violent, but by order.  His brutality is calculated and systematized.  It justifies the words of La Harpe, “There is such a thing as a scientific barbarity.”  In 1900 the German Emperor haranguing his soldiers about to set sail for China, exhorted them to leave nothing living in their path and to bear themselves like Huns.

If, then, in this war, in the manner in which they have prepared and provoked it and now conduct it, they violate without scruple the laws of the civilized world, it is not despite their superior culture, it is in consequence of that very culture.  They are barbarous because they are more civilized.  How can such a combination of contradictory elements, such a synthesis, be possible?

Fichte in the famous discourses to the German Nation which he delivered at the University of Berlin during the Winter of 1807 and 1808, had one object:  to arouse the German Nation by kindling its self-consciousness, that is to say, its pure Germanic essence, Deutschheit, in order to realize that essence when possible beyond its borders and to make it dominate the world.  The general idea which must guide Germany in the accomplishment of this double task is:  Germany is to all the rest of the world as good is to evil.

The appeal of Fichte was heard.  During the century which followed, Germany in the most precise and practical manner, on the one hand built up the theory of Germanism or Deutschtum, on the other hand prepared the domination of Germanism in the world.  This notion of Germanism furnishes, if I am not mistaken, the principle of the inference which I wish to indicate, the explanation of the surprising solidarity which Germans have created between culture and barbarism.

It would be interesting to probe this notion and follow its development.

In the first place how can a people come to claim for its ideas, its virtue, its achievements, not only the right to exist and to be respected by other people, but the privilege of being the sole expression of the true and the good while everything which emanates from other peoples represents nothing but error and evil?