The German Spirit (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill GERMANY'S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION One of the saddest effects of the present war has been the mania of international aspersion and belittlement engendered by it. Germany, in particular, has been treated by her opponents to vilifications so fanatic and hysterical that they can arouse only astonishment and pity. According to these critics there is hardly a single national achievement of the highest rank to which Germany could justly lay claim. German statesmanship is brutal and insolent, German scholarship is heavy and mechanical, German science is uninventive and unoriginal, German academic freedomis a catch-word without substantial meaning, German literature is mediocre and formless, German sculpture and architecture are crude and barbaric, German painting is a clumsy copy of French models, the greatest German composer, Beethoven, was a Belgian, Nietzsche, the greatest German thinker of the last generation, was a Slav? these are a few strains from the voluminous chorus of detraction and misrepresentation which ignorance or malice or both during the last twelvemonth have hurled against a country which, until the beginning of the war, appeared to most of the world as an embodiment of high intellectual striving, spiritual uprightness, imaginative power, and civic virtue. I shall refrain from answering such attacks either by counter-accusations directed against what other nations have produced or by the glorification of individual German achievements. The former would be incompatible with the German respect fornational contributions to the common stock of the world's possessions from whatever country they may come. The latter would be unprofitable and unconvincing. For however good a case I might be able to make out for Goethe or Beethoven or Hegel or Helmholtz or ...