Sir:  Those who trace the German militaristic doctrines to Nietzsche’s influence commit Pastor Mander’s sin when he told Mrs. Alving to bar from her library a book which he had never read.  Nietzsche was an inveterate enemy of efficiency, astigmatic with regard to practical life, and he never worked out a philosophy in the accepted sense of the term.  He was a lyric poet who wrote psychology when he failed to sustain the poetic mood.  In the Engadine and at Sils-Maria, brooding in a rocky void wherein he touched the sharp edge of infinity, he sang a Dionysian hymn to life against the melancholy products of German learning and against those Nihilistic snares which he thought lurked in Christian doctrine.  There he worked out the mystic idea of “Eternal Recurrence” and his song of Zarathustra with the bell strokes of noon.

What he knew of history he used for an analysis of values, and not for State polity.  He shrank from the irritations of reality, and he had little patience with the national mania cultivated after Sedan, warning his country that their victory was not one of a superior culture, that Germany had no style but a barbaric mixture of many styles; and he pointed out the essential difference between culture and erudition.

His unfinished work, “The Will to Power,” was an attempt to house his lyric passions in an architectural frame.  The facade of the structure, as posthumously revealed to us, is an indication that he was really engaged in building a Tower of Babel.  Power, Affirmation, Yea-Saying he considered the attributes of life, and he found in them recompense for his weakness and his lack of capacity for happiness.  He was a master of the exquisite nuances of vision, but since he touched real life at the circumference, and not at the centre, his philosophical valuations are bizarre, and have only a literary value.

It is superficial to make Treitschke and Bernhardi his disciples, as some American writers have made Roosevelt his disciple.  Treitschke is a heavy-footed historian who raised the axiom of self-preservation into a philosophy of force.  Von Bernhardi’s book, though extreme in its expression, is based on the fundamental truth that if Germany desired a just proportion of oversea territories (a proportion denied her by England) she would have to gain it by force of arms.  In the development of this idea he makes many generalizations calculated to dazzle the multitude and to imbue it with the courage to expansion.  Treitschke would have rested in obscurity but for the war; Bernhardi does not pretend to talents as a philosopher.

The real origin of Germany’s policy in the last forty years may be derived from the eminently practical and direct mind of Bismarck.  From reading of history he learned that chicane and force had been utilized as the roads to power, of which fact he found ample demonstration in the histories of England and Russia.  He proved himself a true adept by using chicane and force to achieve German unity, after the theorists had failed.