THE GERMAN AND THE AMERICAN TEMPER1 KUNO FRANCKE PERHAPS the most fundamental, or shall I say elementary, difference between the German temper and the American may be expressed by the word "slowness." Is there any possible point of view from which slowness might appear to an American as something desirable? I think not. Indeed, to call a thing or a person slow seems to spread about them an atmosphere of complete and irredeemable hopelessness. Compare with this the reverently sturdy feelings likely to be aroused in a German breast by the words langsam und feierlich inscribed over a religious or patriotic hymn, and imagine a German Männerchor singing such a hymn, with all the facial and tonal symptoms of joyful and devout slowness of cerebral activity and you have in brief compass a specimen-demonstration of the difference in tempo in which the two national minds habitually move. - It has been said that the langsamer Schritt of the German military drill was in the last resort responsible for the astounding victories which in 1870 shook the foundations of Imperial France. Similarly, it might be said that slowness of movement and careful deliberateness are at the bottom of 1 As a native German and an American citizen and patriot, Professor Francke is peculiarly fitted to recognize the merits and defects of both the German and the American temper. The article from which these extracts are derived — “German Literature and the American Temper," printed in the Atlantic Monthly, November, 1914, and again in The German Spirit, 1916 was written in the spring preceding the outbreak of war. It is here reprinted through the generous permission of Henry Holt & Co. most things in which Germans have excelled. To be sure, the most recent development of Germany, particularly in trade and industry, has been most rapid, and the whole of German life of to-day is thoroughly American in its desire for getting ahead and for working under high pressure. But this is a condition forced upon Germany from without through international competition and the exigencies of the worldmarket rather than springing from the inner tendency of German character itself. And it should not be forgotten that it was the greatest German of modern times, Goethe, who, anticipating the present era of speed, uttered this warning: "Railways, express posts, steamships, and all possible facilities for swift communication, - these are the things in which the civilized world is now chiefly concerned, and by which it will over-civilize itself and arrive at mediocrity." A striking consequence of this difference of tempo in which the American mind and the German naturally move, and perhaps the most conspicuous example of the practical effect of this difference upon National habits, is the German regard for authority and the American dislike of it. For the slower circulation in the brain of the German makes him more passive and more easily inclined to accept the decisions of others for him, while the self-reliant and agile American is instinctively distrustful of any decision which he has not made himself. Here, then, is another sharp distinction between the two National tempers, another serious obstacle to the just appreciation of the German spirit by the American. I verily believe that it is impossible for an American to understand the feelings which a loyal German subject, particularly of the conservative sort, entertains toward the State and its authority. That the State should be anything more than an institution for the protection and safeguarding of the happiness of individuals; that it might be considered as a spiritual, collective personality, leading a life of its own, beyond and above the life of individuals; that service for the State, therefore, or the position of a state official, should be considered as something essentially different from any other kind of useful employment, - these are thoughts utterly foreign to the American mind, and very near and dear to the heart of a German. The American is apt to receive an order or a communication from a public official with feelings of suspicion and with a silent protest; the German is apt to feel honored by such a communication and fancy himself elevated thereby to a position of some public import ance. The American is so used to thinking of the police as the servant, and mostly a very poor servant, of his private affairs, that on placards forbidding trespassing upon his grounds he frequently adds an order, "Police take notice"; the German, especially if he does not look particularly impressive himself, will think long before he makes up his mind to approach one of the impressive-looking Schutzleute to be found at every street corner, and deferentially ask him the time of day. The American dislikes the uniform as an embodiment of irksome discipline and subordination, he values it only as a sort of holiday outfit and for parading purposes; to the German the "King's Coat" is something sacrosanct and inviolable, an embodiment of highest national service and highest national honor. . . Closely allied with this German sense of authority, and again in sharp contrast with American feeling, is the German distrust of the average man. In order to realize the fundamental polarity of the two National tempers in this respect also, one need only think of the two great representatives of American and German political life in the nineteenth century: Lincoln and Bismarck. Lincoln in every fiber of his being a son of the people, an advocate of the com mon man, an ideal type of the best instincts of the masses, a man who could express with the simplicity of a child his ineradicable belief in the essential right-mindedness of the plain folk. Bismarck with every pulse-beat of his heart the chivalric vassal of his imperial master; the invincible champion of the monarchical principle; the caustic scorner of the crowd; the man who, whenever he notices symptoms in the crowd that he is gaining popularity with it, becomes suspicious of himself and feels inclined to distrust the justice of his own cause; the merciless cynic who characterizes the futile oratorical efforts of a silver-tongued political opponent by the crushing words, "He took me for a mass meeting." But not only the political life of the two countries presents this difference of attitude toward the average man. The great German poets and thinkers of the last century were all of them aristocrats by temper. Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, the Romanticists, Heine, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche - is there a man among them who would not have begged off from being classed with the advocates of common sense or being called a spokesman of the masses? What a difference from two of the most characteristically American men of letters, Walt Whitman and Emerson: the one consciously and purposely a man of the street, glorying, one might say boastfully, in his comradeship with the crudest and roughest of tramps and dock-hands; the other a philosopher of the field, a modern St. Francis, a prophet of the homespun, an inspired interpreter of the ordinary, — perhaps the most enlightened apostle of democracy that ever lived. Is it not natural that a people which, although with varying degrees of confidence, acknowledges such men as Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Emerson as the spokesmen of its convictions on the value of the ordinary intellect, should on the whole have no instinctive sympathy with a people whose intellectual leaders are men like Bismarck, Goethe, and Richard Wagner? To be sure, there is another, a democratic side to German life, and this side naturally appeals to Americans. But German democracy is still in the making, it has not yet achieved truly great things, it has not yet found a truly great exponent either in politics or in literature. In literature its influence has exhausted itself largely, on the one hand, in biting satire of the ruling classes, such as is practiced to-day most successfully by the contributors to Simplizissimus and similar papers, sympathizing with Socialism; on the other hand, in idyllic representations of the healthy primitiveness of peasant life and the humble contentedness and respectability of the artisan class, the small tradespeople and subaltern officials - I am thinking, of course, of such sturdy and charming stories of provincial Germany as have been written by Wilhelm Raabe, Fritz Reuter, Peter Rosegger, and Heinrich Seidel. It may be that all these men have been paving the way for that great epoch of German democracy; it may be that some time there will arise truly constructive minds that will unite the whole of the German people in an irresistible movement for popular rights, which would give the average man the same dominating position which he enjoys in this country. But clearly this time has not yet come. In Germany, expert training still overrules common sense and dilettanteism. The German distrust of the average intellect has for its logical counterpart another National trait which it is hard for Americans to appreciate the German bent for vague intuitions of the infinite. It seems strange in this age of cold observation of facts, when the German scientist and the German captain of industry appear as the most striking embodiments of National greatness, to speak of vague intuitions of the infinite as a German characteristic. Yet throughout the |