What We Demand from France 173
weak Wurttemberg would be kept feebly oscillating.
weak Wurttemberg would be kept feebly oscillating.
Treitschke - 1915 - Germany, France, Russia, and Islam
hathitrust.
org/access_use#pd-us
? i62 What We Demand from France
border country would be but a temporary posses-
sion. We know better than our friends in the
North do the strength of the resistance which will
rise up in Strassburg and Miilhausen against their
Germanization. Prussian territory must be
wrapped, like a protecting mantle, round all our
threatened boundaries from Wesel, past Metz
and Saarlouis, down to Strassburg and Belfort.
Prussia may not always be led by strong men. She
will certainly not be led always by men of genius.
The time may come when Prussian particularism,
which is out of heart at present, may again say
to itself, "Is the shirt not nearer the skin than the
coat? Is it absolutely necessary that North
Germany should always defend South Germany? '*
Such questions ought to be impossible in the
Germany of the future. It is in that view that
we wish to bind Prussia to us by the only bond
which is always sure in politics: the bond of its
own vital interests. We have always regarded it
as a misfortune that the State which leads Ger-
many should be, in appearance at least, exclusively
North German, but the priceless opportunity to
leaven it with South German life is given us, so as
to do away with the misleading and arbitrary
distinction between North and South for ever.
Once before, in one of the pettiest periods of its
history, Prussia filled the httle South German
Anspach-Baireuth with Prussian political feeling.
To-day, in the splendour of power and fame,
she could accomplish a similar task with a like
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? What We Demand from France 163
success. It will be the healing of the German
Empire if our leading Power learns to like and to
value South German ways in their home, if the
citizen forces of her western, and the still immature
social conditions of her eastern, provinces find their
counterpoise -- in one word, if Prussia includes
and reconciles within herself all the opposites of
German life.
What have people in the North to oppose to such
solid arguments? Nothing but the self-sufficient
phrase that Prussia is strong enough to care for no
annexation of territory. How magnanimous it
sounds! -- but the indolence and pettiness of
particularism lie behind it. Which of the two
lines of policy would be the loftier or the more
German? Is Prussia to enter into a suitable
engagement, flattering to the vanity of the Court of
Munich, and then to observe, at a comfortable
distance, Bavaria struggling to subdue her mutin-
ous province; or is she herself to undertake that
watch upon the Rhine which she alone can keep,
and decisively to take a province which will bring
nothing at first but trouble and resistance to its
new masters? Nothing but an exaggerated deli-
cacy, a false magnanimity, have hitherto prevented
the North German Press from demanding what is
necessary, and what the South German papers,
for example, the courageous Schwdbische Volkszei-
tung, have long been urging. Every other plan
which has been suggested for the future of these
border countries is foolish -- so foolish that it
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? 164 What We Demand from France
requires some self-command to induce one to refute
it. What is the use of attempting to answer the
suggestion that Alsace and Lorraine should form
a neutral State? Has not Europe had enough of
that already in the disgusting spectacle of the
Nation Luxembourgeoise? Only the brain of an
English Manchester man, surrounded by the mists
he blows from his pipe of peace, could conceive
such extraordinary bubbles. No wonder that
every enemy of Germany should approve of this
suggestion. No better way has yet been thought
of to enable France to recover all that she has lost.
The proposal to entrust this outwork of Ger-
many to a secondary State appears scarcely more
unreasonable. One would think we were hurled
back out of the great year of 1870 into the times
of the Federal Diet. We seem, again, to hear
those wise thinkers of the Eschenheimer Gasse,
who kept warning us so earnestly against the
flames of centralization, while the marsh- water of
petty Statedom was rising above our shoulders --
those gallant riflemen patriots who shouted so
lustily for the unity of Germany -- but with Nurem-
berg as its capital! Prince and people in Baden
have acquitted themselves nobly in trying times;
and we can now fully comprehend, and that per-
haps for the first time, what it cost them to main-
tain an honourable national policy here for four
years in face of the enemy. Are we, in return,
to impose a burden on that State which could
not fail to crush it? The plan of founding an
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? What We Demand from France 165
Upper Rhine kingdom of Baden proceeds from
nothing but a too conscientious study of the map ;
and an old North German mistake has procured for
it a few adherents in the North. As Baden has
reckoned among its sons a long line of distin-
guished politicians, from Rotteck and Liebenstein
down to Mathy and Roggenbach, the men of the
North have accustomed themselves to expectations,
founded on the intellectual power of the country,
which no State of the third rank could possibly
fulfil. In Baden itself people are more modest.
Every reasonable man shudders at the thought
of a Diet of Carlsruhe, half made up of the repre-
sentatives of Alsace. If they allied themselves
with the same party in Alsace, who could control
the strong native Ultramontane and Radical
parties which an intelligent Liberal majority keeps
in order at present? Such a State would delight
the eyes of a map-drawer, as the kingdom of the
Netherlands did, when it was welded out of
Belgium and Holland; but, like that, it would be a
political impossibility.
The Government of Baden no doubt regards the
prospect of an acquisition which would be the ruin
of the country with sufficient wisdom and patriot-
ism. All the more must it be listened to with
respect, as it is most nearly concerned in the matter,
when it protests decisively against any increase of
Bavaria by Alsace. I shall not grope in the filth
of a petty past; but it is impossible for people in
Carlsruhe to forget that the desires of Bavaria for
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? i66 What We Demand from France
the Baden Palatinate disturbed the Grand Duchy
for a whole generation, while Prussia was all
that time its honourable protector. Would our
boundaries be safe in Bavarian hands? Let us
picture to ourselves the Bavarian Government
under a king less honestly German than Ludwig II,
surrounded on all sides, as it would be, by the
insubordinate province, kept in a constant state
of irritation by France, until at last the bad
neighbour returns in a favourable hour with the
proposal: Take all Baden and Wiirttemberg, and
give us back our own. Even a State has need to
pray, " Lead me not into temptation ! " What are
all compacts and federal constitutions against
the plain fact of the possession of the land? God
be praised, a result so unworthy as I am describing
is little to be feared in New Germany! The
noble blood that reddens the plains of Worth
and Weissenburg bound the armies of Prussia
and Bavaria in a close alliance. No new Lord
Castlereagh can step forward, as his prototype
did fifty years ago, to tell us scornfully that the
loosely compacted German Bund is not able to
defend Alsace. Yet the troublesome question
presses on us whether Bavaria possesses the in-
tellectual and the political power which are neces-
sary to fuse Alsace into union with itself. Facts
familiar to everyone supply the answer. What
was it that, in 1849, saved the German-minded
Palatinate on the left bank of the Rhine for the
kingdom of Bavaria? The sword of Prussia.
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? What We Demand from France 167
The results of Bavarian administration in the
Palatinate are, to put it mildly, extremely modest.
Wanting in all creative power, she has indolently
adopted far too many of the Napoleonic institu-
tions of the province. It is precisely this despotic
administration of the French which must be
rooted out of Alsace. The people of the Palatinate
are German, body and soul, and yet they have
remained half strange, half hostile, to the German
State; and their representative almost always sat
in the Diet at Munich as a close party of fellow-
countrymen. The feeble and unnatural body of
the kingdom had not strength sufficient to break
down the separate life of the province. And it is
just that breaking down of a life of unnatural
separation that is our most serious duty in Alsace.
Let no man tell us that it matters very little in
the New Germany to what single State a district
may be assigned, since the Munich Parliament
must henceforth be content to play the part of a
Provincial Diet. To say so is to assume, foolishly,
that a work has already been completed which can
develop only slowly in the course of many years.
The powerful excitement of this war will certainly
find some statesmanlike expression, but we can-
not yet foresee the form which it may take. The
unity of the armies, which has manifested itself so
splendidly in the war, will continue, beyond all
question, in time of peace also. From that follows,
as an immediate corollary, a common diplomacy;
and from that again a collective German Parlia-
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? i68 What We Demand from France
ment. The North German Confederation must
and will remain true to those two fixed principles
which it laid down, not in fear of France, but from
a true sense of the conditions of Germany. It will
declare then, as it has done before, that we demand
the entrance of no South German State; and w^e
shall not loosen the strong and dearly-bought
compactness of our Confederation in the very
smallest degree. It is by no means certain that
the Bavarian Court will at once enter the Con-
federation on these conditions. If it should,
there will still remain very essential differences
between the separate States. The province of in-
ternal administration can hardly be affected in
the slightest degree of federal legislation.
The administration, the whole new hierarchy
of the Government offices' -- the communes, the
schools -- must all of them be organized in the best
possible way in Alsace-Lorraine. The Prussian
administration has shown indisputably, on the
Rhine, that it is superior, with all its defects, to the
French, or to that of the little States. Compare
the later history of the three great Rhenish towns,
which are limited in their natural development
by fortress walls. In what wretchedness and
beggary did Cologne stand in the days of Napoleon
in comparison with the golden Mainz and the
prosperous Strassburg! How far the stately
metropolis of the Lower Rhine surpasses both her
sisters to-day! All of that is due to the blessing
of Prussian laws. Prussia alone can undertake the
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? What We Demand from France 169
remorseless sweeping away of the French officials in
Alsace, which is indispensable, and replace the
foreign powers by vigorous home ones. Prussia
alone can steadfastly maintain the state of siege
which, we may easily imagine, may be necessary
for a time in some of the districts of the forlorn
land. The worst fault of the Prussian adminis-
tration, its perpetual scribbling, will seem innocent
to the people of Alsace after the corruption and
the statistical mania of the prefectures. A power-
ful State, which has impressed its spirit on the
inhabitants of the Rhine country and the people
of Posen, will know how to reconcile the separate
life of the half -French Germans; and just as
Prussian parties have spread themselves immedi-
ately, in three or four years, over every part of
the new provinces, the people of Alsace will one
day be ready to ally themselves with the various
parties of Prussia, and cease to form a separate
faction in the Parliament at Berlin.
The peace must break many a bond which was
dear to those borderers. Can Germany venture
to add the useless cruelty of separating them
from each other, and giving Metz to Prussia,
and Strassburg to Bavaria? The peace will cut
the people of Alsace off from a powerful nation, in
their connection with which they found their
honour and their pride. Can Germany humiHate
them in the hour of their violent liberation, and
raise the modest white and blue or the red and
yellow flag where waved the tricolor e of the Rev-
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? I70 What We Demand from France
olution, which once conquered the world? No!
These Germans have been accustomed to the larger
views of a great State ; they will not endure being
anything but Prussians, if they must cease to
be Frenchmen. Let us give them something in
exchange for what they have lost -- a great and
glorious State, a powerful capital, a free competi-
tion for all the offices and honours of a great
Empire. In the uniformity of a great State they
have lost all taste for those bewildering conditions
of South German political life which we ourselves
often hardly understand. The}^ might learn to be
Prussian citizens, but they would think it as ridicu-
lous if they were handed over to a king in Munich,
and to a supreme king in Berlin. Here, in fact,
there is no place for those half measures and
artificial relations. Nothing but the simple and
intelligible reality of the German State will serve.
Everything like "federal fortresses," or "territory
acknowledging no authority between itself and the
Empire " -- or by whatever name the too-clever-by-
half devices of gambling dilettantes are known -- is
utterly out of the question.
We, who are old champions of German unity,
have for six years been demanding the incorpora-
tion of the Elbe Duchies into the Prussian State,
although the hereditary claim of a German princely
house stood in the way. Is this review to plead to-
day that a little State should insinuate itself into
the far more dangerously threatened Duchies
of the Rhine, where no claim of right bars the claim
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? What We Demand from France 171
of Prussia? Once give up the standpoint of Ger-
man unity, and cease to ask only what is for the
benefit of the great Fatherland; once begin to
reckon, like a shopkeeper, what part of the prizes
of victory should be assigned to each of the con-
federate allies, and one must be driven to the mani-
fest absurdity that the border territories should be
split up into I know not how many fragments. It
would be a worthy repetition of that ludicrous
sub-division of the Department of the Saar which
brought the sarcasms of Europe on us in 181 5. At
that time, when the consciousness of the strength
of Prussia was yet in its infancy, Gneisenau could
still propose that Prussia should hand over Alsace
to Bavaria, and receive the territory of Anspach-
B aireuth in exchange . All such barters of territory
are out of the question to-day. The nation knows
how casually its internal boundary lines have
been drawn. It tolerates those barriers of sepa-
ration ; but it is with a quiet dislike, and without
any serious confidence ; and it looks unfavourably
on any attempt to draw s ' milar lines anew . Prussia
is not in a condition to hand over its own share
of the rewards of victory to each separate country
and people. If it were really so -- if the friendh-
ness of the Court of Munich to the Confederation
were to be bought only by the cession to them of
at least Northern Alsace, including Hagenau
and Weissenburg -- what an ugly escape it would
be out of our difficulties! how repulsive to the
people of Alsace! But what is essential -- the
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? 172 What We Demand from France
uninterrupted boundary-line stretching from Died-
enhofen to Mulhausen -- can never be given up by
Prussia without serious injury to Germany.
We are told in warning tones of the objections
of Europe. If you go to the foreigner for counsel
he will most likely suggest to you that the Grand
Duke of Hesse, with his Herr von Dalwigk, should
be created King of Alsace. It is so, and we are
surrounded by secret enemies. Even the un-
worthy attitude of England has a deeper root than
her mere indolent love of peace -- it springs from
her unspoken mistrust of the incalculable power
of New Germany. In company with the Great
Powers, Switzerland and the Netherlands see
our growing strength with suspicion. Watched
as we are by angry neighbours, we must trust
gallantly in our own right and in our sword. If
Germany is powerful enough to tear the border
country away from France, she can venture,
without troubling herself about the reluctance of
foreign countries, to hand them over to the pro-
tectorate of Prussia.
But the solution of the question of the people of
Alsace involves the nearest future of the German
State. For Bavaria, strengthened by Alsace, and
hemming in all her South German neighbours,
would be the Great Power of the German South.
No man who comprehends this great time would
dream of replacing the unlucky dualism of Austria
and Prussia by a new dualism of Prussia and
Bavaria, between which a powerless Baden and a
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?
What We Demand from France 173
weak Wurttemberg would be kept feebly oscillating.
The day for the secondary States of Germany to rise
into fresh importance is past for ever. The first
Napoleon created the kingdom of the South with
the express intent that that seeming sovereignty
might bar the way against a real and powerful
German kingdom, and that its apparent authority
might undermine the real strength of Germany.
By their German loyalty these sovereigns have
deserved the thanks of the whole nation to-day.
They have obtained our forgiveness for the fault
of their original existence. The blood which had
to flow before North and South could be united
has flowed, thank God, in battle against the
hereditary enemy and not in civil war. Even we
radical partisans of unity are delighted, and have
no intention now of ever diminishing the authority
of the Bavarian Crown in opposition to the wishes
of the Bavarian people themselves. Why should
we be asked to increase the power of the second-
ary States, which is unquestionably too great at
present for any permanent national existence?
Why should we celebrate our victory over the third
Napoleon by strengthening the creation of the
first? We are determined to secure the unity of
Germany, and to leave no treacherous German
balance of power.
Deep-thinking persons advise us to reflect
whether the augmentation of its territory might
not predispose Bavaria to enter the German
Confederation. Those who talk so have little
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? 174 What We Demand from France
notion of the power of the national idea. The
entry of Bavaria is merely a question of time,
and it must come as surely as the blossom passes
into fruit. If Alsace be first made Prussian, and
then admitted, along with Baden, into the Ger-
man Confederation, we may rest secure against the
blindness of the sovereigns of Munich, and wait
in patience till the sense of what will be to her
an advantage constrains Bavaria to come in. If
Alsace fell to Bavaria, our European policy could
not rise out of its everlasting uncertainty, or our
German policy surmount the feeble vacillation
of its past. There is only one way in which the
jealousy of foreign Powers can prevent a just
peace for Germany -- they may try to separate
Bavaria from Prussia. If this be prevented,
pubHc opinion. North and South, will declare
itself unanimously, "It is our will that Alsace
and Lorraine should become Prussian, because
it is only so that they will become German. "
The spirit of the nation has already acquired a
wonderful force in these blessed weeks; and it is
able, when it declares itself unanimously in favour
of this clear and straightforward course, to cure
the Court of Munich of sickly and ambitious
dreams, which an intelligent Bavarian policy
can never encourage.
The people of Alsace have learned to despise
this Germany, broken into fragments. They will
learn to love us when the strong hand of Prussia
has educated them. We are no longer dreaming,
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? What We Demand from France 175
as Amdt did many years ago, of a new German
Order, whose task it was to be to guard the border-
land. The sober and upright principles which we
have applied in all newly taken provinces are
completely applicable here in the West. After a
short period of transition, under a strict dictator-
ship, the new districts may enter without danger
into the full enjoyment of the rights of the Prusso-
German constitution. When the official world has
once been cleared by the moderate use of pensions,
every attempt at treachery will be repressed with
relentless severity; but native officials who know
the country will be employed here, as they have
been everywhere, in the new provinces. Even
the good old Prussian fashion, according to which
the troops that garrisoned the fortresses usually
came from the provinces in which they were
situated, may be applied here cautiously after a
time. We Germans despise the babyish war
against stone and bronze, in which the French
are adepts. We left the monuments of Hoche
and Marceau standing, in honour, in the Depart-
ment of the Lower Rhine, and we have no intention
of transgressing against any of the glorious memo-
ries of the people of Alsace and Lorraine. Still
less shall we meddle with their language. The
German State must, of course, speak German only;
but it will always practise the mild regulations it
has adopted in the mixed districts of Posen and
Schleswig-Holstein. It would contradict all our
Prussian ways of thinking were we to assail with
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? 176 What We Demand from France
violence the customs of domestic life. All our
hope rests on the re-awakening of the free German
spirit. When once the mother- tongue is taught,
purely and honestly -- when the Evangelical
Church can again move about in undisturbed
liberty -- when an intelligent German provincial
Press brings back the country to the knowledge
of German life -- the cure of its sickness will have
begun. Is it idle folly to give expression to the
hope which rises unbidden in a scholar's mind?
Why should the great University of Strassburg,
restored again after its disgraceful mutilation, not
bring as many blessings to the Upper Rhine pro-
vinces as Bonn has done to the Lower? Another
Rhenana in Upper Germany would certainly be
a worthy issue of the German war, which has
been a struggle between ideas and sensuous
self-seeking.
The work of liberation will be hard and toil-
some; and the first German teachers and officials in
the estranged districts are not men to be envied.
The monarchical feeling of the German people
there has been thoroughly broken up by hateful
party fights. The Ultramontanes on the right
bank will soon conclude a close alliance with
those on the left; and there will be found, even
among the German Liberals, many good souls
ready trustfully to re-echo the cry of pain which
the people of Alsace will raise against the fury of
Borussic officialism. But the province cannot,
after all, long continue to be a German Venice.
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? What We Demand from France 177
Single families of the upper classes may migrate
indignantly into foreign countries, as the patricians
of Danzig once fled before the Prussian Eagle.
The rest will soon adapt themselves to the German
life, just as the Polonized German nobility of West
Prussia have resumed their old German names
since they became Prussian subjects. Even the
material advantages which the Prussian State
brings with it are considerable: lighter taxes
better distributed, and finances better arranged;
the opening of the natural channels of commerce
for the country of the Saar and the Moselle; the
razing of those useless fortifications of Vauban,
which, maintained in the interest of the traditional
war policy of the French, have hitherto limited the
progress of so man}^ towns of Alsace. Even the
manufacturing industry of the country will dis-
cover new and broad openings, naturally after
a trying period of transition, in East Germany.
But all this is of secondary importance as compared
with the ideal advantages which they will derive
from their German political life. And are these
German lads to grumble because they are no longer
compelled to learn Gaulish? Will the citizens be
angry with us for ever when they find that they are
permitted freely to elect their own burgomaster?
When they have to deal with well-educated,
honourable German-speaking officials ? When we
offer them, in place of their worthless Conseils
Generaux, a Provincial Diet, with an independent
activity; and in place of their Corps Legislatif a.
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? 178 What We Demand from France
powerful Parliament? When their sons will all
be entitled to pass a brief period of service in the
neighbourhood of their own homes, instead of
wasting long years as homeless soldiers of fortune
in migratory regiments? When they mingle un-
molested in the numerous unions and gatherings
of our free and joyous social life? The deadly
hatred which the Ultramontane clergy show
toward the Prussian State is the happiest omen
for the future. Such an enmity must draw all
the Protestants, and all the Catholics who can
think freely, in this province to the side of
Prussia.
Humbled and torn by contending parties,
France will find it very difficult to think of a war of
vengeance for the next few years. Give us time,
and it is to be hoped that Strassburg may then
have risen out of her ruins, and that the people of
Alsace may already have become reconciled to
their fate. Their grandchildren will look back one
day as coldly and strangely on the two-century-long
French episode in the history of their German
district as the Pomeranians now do on the century
and a half of Swedish government. No German
soil anywhere has ever repented placing itself
under the protection of Prussia when it passed out
of the subjection to the foreigner, which is, taken
at the best of it, but a splendid misery.
Who knows not Uhland's Minster sage, the
beautiful poem which expresses so finely and so
truly the love which the Germans bear to the land
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? What We Demand from France 179
of Goethe's youth? The old dome begins to
shake as the young poet ascends the tower.
A movement through the mighty work,
As though, in wondrous wise,
Its body travailed to give birth
To what unfinished lies.
Oh, Ludwig Uhland, and all of you who dreamt
of a great and free Germany in the desolate days
bygone, how far stronger than your dreams are the
days in which we are living now ! How much else
that was unfinished then has yet to be bom anew
in the restored German land! It is all but three
hundred years since a Hohenzollern, the Margrave
Johann Georg, chosen as coadjutor of Strassburg,
bore the title of Landgrave in Alsace; but his
young State did not dare to defend the claim.
The great stream of German popular power which
burst forth and rolled its mighty waters over the
Slav country of the north-east is flowing back
westward to-day, to fertilize anew its former bed,
now choked up -- the fair native lands of German
civilization. In the same Western Marches, where
our ancient Empire endured its deepest disgrace,
the new Empire is completed by German victories ;
and the Prussia which has so often and so shame-
fully been evil-spoken of by German lips is building
up the State, which is destined to march on, proud,
thoughtful, warlike, from centiiry to century.
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? THE INCORPORATION OF
ALSACE-LORRAINE AS AN IMPERIAL
PROVINCE IN THE GERMAN EMPIRE
{A Speech in the Reichstag)
Gentlemen,
A man from the Upper Rhine province might
be pardoned if the weighty words of the first
paragraph of the motion stimulated him to make a
pompous speech. Everywhere in our beautiful
land we see the bloody traces of the French, from
that hill in Freiburg where Louis XIV built his
three castles, his Defiance of Germany, dow^n
to the ruined towers of the Castle of Heidelberg.
We have looked hundreds of times with silent
sorrow at the summits of the Vosges. It would
be quite pardonable if now a man from the Upper
Rhine proudly expressed his joy at feeling how
everything has quite altered, how confidently we
look into the future, glad at the thought that the
German sword has reconquered the old frontier
territory. But, gentlemen, I regard it as more
worthy of us, even to-day, not to abandon that
simple and modest tone which, thank God, is
customary in this House. Our countrymen the
1 80
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? Alsace an Imperial Province i8i
Alsatians, who now return into our kingdom, have
under their old masters been satiated to disgust
with great pompous phrases. We would like to
accustom them already now to the fact that the
German way of dealing with things is simpler
and more modest.
Allow me, gentlemen, to commence with a
confession, which I make not in my name only,
but in the name of many here in the House. I
could have wished as early as some months ago
that the first paragraph of the motion contained
an additional clause, i. e. , the words, "The two
provinces will be incorporated with the Prussian
State. " I wished that for a very practical reason.
I said to myself. The task of re-incorporating these
alienated races of German stock into our country
is so great and difficult that it can be trusted only
to experienced hands, and where is there a political
power in the German Empire which has so well
proved its talent for Germanization as glorious old
Prussia? I, who am not a born Prussian, can well
say so, without incurring the reproach of boasting.
This State has rescued the Prussians themselves
from Poland, the Pomeranians from Sweden, the
East Frisians from Holland, the inhabitants of the
Rhine provinces from France, and still daily ad-
vances some inches further eastward the toll-gates
of German civiHzation. It was my opinion that to
this well-tested Power we should entrust the task
of being also in the West the champion and aug-
menter of the German Empire. I thought, more-
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? i82 Alsace an Imperial Province
over, the Alsatians have become only too alienated
from us as members of a centralized foreign State ;
with all the greater energy therefore should one
compel them to come into a German unitary State,
into the firmly-compacted strength of Prussian
political life. Finally, it would be a good thing
both for Prussia and for Germany if Germany's
leading State were to comprise numerous South
German elements. Prussia, if it is to understand
and guide Germany, must learn to value within
itself and do justice to the South German character.
These were the reasons which some months ago
made me hope that the incorporation of the two
provinces in Prussia might be proclaimed. This
hope, gentlemen, is completely shattered; it was
shattered already on that day in September when
the Prussian royal power declared in Munich that
it wished for no increase of territory. All this
happened at a time when the German Reichstag
did not yet exist. We have no more to pronounce
judgment on matters which are settled, but accept
circumstances as they are, and now ask: How are
we to set to work to fill this Imperial Province,
this common possession of all Germany, with
German civilization, in order to make it actually a
member of the German Empire ? The task appears
to me, gentlemen, not merely theoretically, but
also practically, very difficult. The only two for-
mer political phenomena which show some simi-
larity to the life of our Empire awaken little
confidence in my mind. The general provinces of
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? Alsace an Imperial Province 183
the United Netherlands succeeded as little as the
common administered districts of the Swiss Con-
federates in maintaining their vigour for any
length of time. The former have become in our
century provinces of a homogeneous State, enjoy-
ing equal rights, and the latter have become
equally privileged cantons of an alliance of States.
But we do not approach this new province with
the covetousness of the old Swiss Confederates,
nor with the lazy pride of the Dutch, but with the
honest wish to bring to our newly-won brothers our
German character, the best of our possessions, our
mother-tongue and its literature, and all the noble
elements of German civilization. The task is
unspeakably difficult, and I wish to ask you not to
make it more difficult by academic disputes regard-
ing the question, What is unitary and what is fed-
eral? These are theoretical questions which in
my opinion have already occupied too much room
in the discussions of the Commission.
We have heard in the Commission the distinct
assertion that the imperial province is the first step
to the unitary State. On the other hand, I have
heard from many of my friends that the imperial
province represents the true triumph of federalism.
I ask. Whither will these academic disputes con-
duct us? We wish here honestly to acknow-
ledge the constitution of the Confederation, as
it has been formed, with all its faults, and we
wish to say without more ado that what has been
done in the West affords no precedent for what
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? i84 Alsace an Imperial Province
might happen in Central Germany. There in the
West we have to regulate provinces hitherto
belonging to a foreign empire, in which at present
there is no legally constituted State authority.
In Germany there are States with constitutional
dynasties, and no less constitutional diets, and
what we do and consider necessary in Alsace does
not impose limits on what we may some day
be able to settle for the separate German States
with their actually existing constitutional order.
Let us then approach the question without fur-
ther ado, and allow me to ask. What should we do
for the Alsatians in order to win them for Ger-
many? I find myself in complete agreement with
what the Commission says; we wish to treat our
new fellow-countrymen from the first moment as
Germans, and therefore we wish to instil into them
from the beginning some of the fundamental
ideas of German political law which form, so to
speak, the political atmosphere which we breathe.
Among these fundamental ideas of German
political law I reckon the monarchy. The Alsa-
tians, like all Frenchmen, have too much grown
out of the habit of relying on the blessing of
monarchy. Bourbons, Princes of Orleans, Napo-
leons, and Republican experiments have pressed
on each others' heels in swift alternation, and
after all the changes nothing remains but the
unalterable despotism of the prefects. Here it is
our part to show that we Germans imderstand
monarchy in a much higher, nobler sense.
? ?
? i62 What We Demand from France
border country would be but a temporary posses-
sion. We know better than our friends in the
North do the strength of the resistance which will
rise up in Strassburg and Miilhausen against their
Germanization. Prussian territory must be
wrapped, like a protecting mantle, round all our
threatened boundaries from Wesel, past Metz
and Saarlouis, down to Strassburg and Belfort.
Prussia may not always be led by strong men. She
will certainly not be led always by men of genius.
The time may come when Prussian particularism,
which is out of heart at present, may again say
to itself, "Is the shirt not nearer the skin than the
coat? Is it absolutely necessary that North
Germany should always defend South Germany? '*
Such questions ought to be impossible in the
Germany of the future. It is in that view that
we wish to bind Prussia to us by the only bond
which is always sure in politics: the bond of its
own vital interests. We have always regarded it
as a misfortune that the State which leads Ger-
many should be, in appearance at least, exclusively
North German, but the priceless opportunity to
leaven it with South German life is given us, so as
to do away with the misleading and arbitrary
distinction between North and South for ever.
Once before, in one of the pettiest periods of its
history, Prussia filled the httle South German
Anspach-Baireuth with Prussian political feeling.
To-day, in the splendour of power and fame,
she could accomplish a similar task with a like
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? What We Demand from France 163
success. It will be the healing of the German
Empire if our leading Power learns to like and to
value South German ways in their home, if the
citizen forces of her western, and the still immature
social conditions of her eastern, provinces find their
counterpoise -- in one word, if Prussia includes
and reconciles within herself all the opposites of
German life.
What have people in the North to oppose to such
solid arguments? Nothing but the self-sufficient
phrase that Prussia is strong enough to care for no
annexation of territory. How magnanimous it
sounds! -- but the indolence and pettiness of
particularism lie behind it. Which of the two
lines of policy would be the loftier or the more
German? Is Prussia to enter into a suitable
engagement, flattering to the vanity of the Court of
Munich, and then to observe, at a comfortable
distance, Bavaria struggling to subdue her mutin-
ous province; or is she herself to undertake that
watch upon the Rhine which she alone can keep,
and decisively to take a province which will bring
nothing at first but trouble and resistance to its
new masters? Nothing but an exaggerated deli-
cacy, a false magnanimity, have hitherto prevented
the North German Press from demanding what is
necessary, and what the South German papers,
for example, the courageous Schwdbische Volkszei-
tung, have long been urging. Every other plan
which has been suggested for the future of these
border countries is foolish -- so foolish that it
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? 164 What We Demand from France
requires some self-command to induce one to refute
it. What is the use of attempting to answer the
suggestion that Alsace and Lorraine should form
a neutral State? Has not Europe had enough of
that already in the disgusting spectacle of the
Nation Luxembourgeoise? Only the brain of an
English Manchester man, surrounded by the mists
he blows from his pipe of peace, could conceive
such extraordinary bubbles. No wonder that
every enemy of Germany should approve of this
suggestion. No better way has yet been thought
of to enable France to recover all that she has lost.
The proposal to entrust this outwork of Ger-
many to a secondary State appears scarcely more
unreasonable. One would think we were hurled
back out of the great year of 1870 into the times
of the Federal Diet. We seem, again, to hear
those wise thinkers of the Eschenheimer Gasse,
who kept warning us so earnestly against the
flames of centralization, while the marsh- water of
petty Statedom was rising above our shoulders --
those gallant riflemen patriots who shouted so
lustily for the unity of Germany -- but with Nurem-
berg as its capital! Prince and people in Baden
have acquitted themselves nobly in trying times;
and we can now fully comprehend, and that per-
haps for the first time, what it cost them to main-
tain an honourable national policy here for four
years in face of the enemy. Are we, in return,
to impose a burden on that State which could
not fail to crush it? The plan of founding an
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? What We Demand from France 165
Upper Rhine kingdom of Baden proceeds from
nothing but a too conscientious study of the map ;
and an old North German mistake has procured for
it a few adherents in the North. As Baden has
reckoned among its sons a long line of distin-
guished politicians, from Rotteck and Liebenstein
down to Mathy and Roggenbach, the men of the
North have accustomed themselves to expectations,
founded on the intellectual power of the country,
which no State of the third rank could possibly
fulfil. In Baden itself people are more modest.
Every reasonable man shudders at the thought
of a Diet of Carlsruhe, half made up of the repre-
sentatives of Alsace. If they allied themselves
with the same party in Alsace, who could control
the strong native Ultramontane and Radical
parties which an intelligent Liberal majority keeps
in order at present? Such a State would delight
the eyes of a map-drawer, as the kingdom of the
Netherlands did, when it was welded out of
Belgium and Holland; but, like that, it would be a
political impossibility.
The Government of Baden no doubt regards the
prospect of an acquisition which would be the ruin
of the country with sufficient wisdom and patriot-
ism. All the more must it be listened to with
respect, as it is most nearly concerned in the matter,
when it protests decisively against any increase of
Bavaria by Alsace. I shall not grope in the filth
of a petty past; but it is impossible for people in
Carlsruhe to forget that the desires of Bavaria for
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? i66 What We Demand from France
the Baden Palatinate disturbed the Grand Duchy
for a whole generation, while Prussia was all
that time its honourable protector. Would our
boundaries be safe in Bavarian hands? Let us
picture to ourselves the Bavarian Government
under a king less honestly German than Ludwig II,
surrounded on all sides, as it would be, by the
insubordinate province, kept in a constant state
of irritation by France, until at last the bad
neighbour returns in a favourable hour with the
proposal: Take all Baden and Wiirttemberg, and
give us back our own. Even a State has need to
pray, " Lead me not into temptation ! " What are
all compacts and federal constitutions against
the plain fact of the possession of the land? God
be praised, a result so unworthy as I am describing
is little to be feared in New Germany! The
noble blood that reddens the plains of Worth
and Weissenburg bound the armies of Prussia
and Bavaria in a close alliance. No new Lord
Castlereagh can step forward, as his prototype
did fifty years ago, to tell us scornfully that the
loosely compacted German Bund is not able to
defend Alsace. Yet the troublesome question
presses on us whether Bavaria possesses the in-
tellectual and the political power which are neces-
sary to fuse Alsace into union with itself. Facts
familiar to everyone supply the answer. What
was it that, in 1849, saved the German-minded
Palatinate on the left bank of the Rhine for the
kingdom of Bavaria? The sword of Prussia.
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? What We Demand from France 167
The results of Bavarian administration in the
Palatinate are, to put it mildly, extremely modest.
Wanting in all creative power, she has indolently
adopted far too many of the Napoleonic institu-
tions of the province. It is precisely this despotic
administration of the French which must be
rooted out of Alsace. The people of the Palatinate
are German, body and soul, and yet they have
remained half strange, half hostile, to the German
State; and their representative almost always sat
in the Diet at Munich as a close party of fellow-
countrymen. The feeble and unnatural body of
the kingdom had not strength sufficient to break
down the separate life of the province. And it is
just that breaking down of a life of unnatural
separation that is our most serious duty in Alsace.
Let no man tell us that it matters very little in
the New Germany to what single State a district
may be assigned, since the Munich Parliament
must henceforth be content to play the part of a
Provincial Diet. To say so is to assume, foolishly,
that a work has already been completed which can
develop only slowly in the course of many years.
The powerful excitement of this war will certainly
find some statesmanlike expression, but we can-
not yet foresee the form which it may take. The
unity of the armies, which has manifested itself so
splendidly in the war, will continue, beyond all
question, in time of peace also. From that follows,
as an immediate corollary, a common diplomacy;
and from that again a collective German Parlia-
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? i68 What We Demand from France
ment. The North German Confederation must
and will remain true to those two fixed principles
which it laid down, not in fear of France, but from
a true sense of the conditions of Germany. It will
declare then, as it has done before, that we demand
the entrance of no South German State; and w^e
shall not loosen the strong and dearly-bought
compactness of our Confederation in the very
smallest degree. It is by no means certain that
the Bavarian Court will at once enter the Con-
federation on these conditions. If it should,
there will still remain very essential differences
between the separate States. The province of in-
ternal administration can hardly be affected in
the slightest degree of federal legislation.
The administration, the whole new hierarchy
of the Government offices' -- the communes, the
schools -- must all of them be organized in the best
possible way in Alsace-Lorraine. The Prussian
administration has shown indisputably, on the
Rhine, that it is superior, with all its defects, to the
French, or to that of the little States. Compare
the later history of the three great Rhenish towns,
which are limited in their natural development
by fortress walls. In what wretchedness and
beggary did Cologne stand in the days of Napoleon
in comparison with the golden Mainz and the
prosperous Strassburg! How far the stately
metropolis of the Lower Rhine surpasses both her
sisters to-day! All of that is due to the blessing
of Prussian laws. Prussia alone can undertake the
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? What We Demand from France 169
remorseless sweeping away of the French officials in
Alsace, which is indispensable, and replace the
foreign powers by vigorous home ones. Prussia
alone can steadfastly maintain the state of siege
which, we may easily imagine, may be necessary
for a time in some of the districts of the forlorn
land. The worst fault of the Prussian adminis-
tration, its perpetual scribbling, will seem innocent
to the people of Alsace after the corruption and
the statistical mania of the prefectures. A power-
ful State, which has impressed its spirit on the
inhabitants of the Rhine country and the people
of Posen, will know how to reconcile the separate
life of the half -French Germans; and just as
Prussian parties have spread themselves immedi-
ately, in three or four years, over every part of
the new provinces, the people of Alsace will one
day be ready to ally themselves with the various
parties of Prussia, and cease to form a separate
faction in the Parliament at Berlin.
The peace must break many a bond which was
dear to those borderers. Can Germany venture
to add the useless cruelty of separating them
from each other, and giving Metz to Prussia,
and Strassburg to Bavaria? The peace will cut
the people of Alsace off from a powerful nation, in
their connection with which they found their
honour and their pride. Can Germany humiHate
them in the hour of their violent liberation, and
raise the modest white and blue or the red and
yellow flag where waved the tricolor e of the Rev-
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? I70 What We Demand from France
olution, which once conquered the world? No!
These Germans have been accustomed to the larger
views of a great State ; they will not endure being
anything but Prussians, if they must cease to
be Frenchmen. Let us give them something in
exchange for what they have lost -- a great and
glorious State, a powerful capital, a free competi-
tion for all the offices and honours of a great
Empire. In the uniformity of a great State they
have lost all taste for those bewildering conditions
of South German political life which we ourselves
often hardly understand. The}^ might learn to be
Prussian citizens, but they would think it as ridicu-
lous if they were handed over to a king in Munich,
and to a supreme king in Berlin. Here, in fact,
there is no place for those half measures and
artificial relations. Nothing but the simple and
intelligible reality of the German State will serve.
Everything like "federal fortresses," or "territory
acknowledging no authority between itself and the
Empire " -- or by whatever name the too-clever-by-
half devices of gambling dilettantes are known -- is
utterly out of the question.
We, who are old champions of German unity,
have for six years been demanding the incorpora-
tion of the Elbe Duchies into the Prussian State,
although the hereditary claim of a German princely
house stood in the way. Is this review to plead to-
day that a little State should insinuate itself into
the far more dangerously threatened Duchies
of the Rhine, where no claim of right bars the claim
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? What We Demand from France 171
of Prussia? Once give up the standpoint of Ger-
man unity, and cease to ask only what is for the
benefit of the great Fatherland; once begin to
reckon, like a shopkeeper, what part of the prizes
of victory should be assigned to each of the con-
federate allies, and one must be driven to the mani-
fest absurdity that the border territories should be
split up into I know not how many fragments. It
would be a worthy repetition of that ludicrous
sub-division of the Department of the Saar which
brought the sarcasms of Europe on us in 181 5. At
that time, when the consciousness of the strength
of Prussia was yet in its infancy, Gneisenau could
still propose that Prussia should hand over Alsace
to Bavaria, and receive the territory of Anspach-
B aireuth in exchange . All such barters of territory
are out of the question to-day. The nation knows
how casually its internal boundary lines have
been drawn. It tolerates those barriers of sepa-
ration ; but it is with a quiet dislike, and without
any serious confidence ; and it looks unfavourably
on any attempt to draw s ' milar lines anew . Prussia
is not in a condition to hand over its own share
of the rewards of victory to each separate country
and people. If it were really so -- if the friendh-
ness of the Court of Munich to the Confederation
were to be bought only by the cession to them of
at least Northern Alsace, including Hagenau
and Weissenburg -- what an ugly escape it would
be out of our difficulties! how repulsive to the
people of Alsace! But what is essential -- the
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? 172 What We Demand from France
uninterrupted boundary-line stretching from Died-
enhofen to Mulhausen -- can never be given up by
Prussia without serious injury to Germany.
We are told in warning tones of the objections
of Europe. If you go to the foreigner for counsel
he will most likely suggest to you that the Grand
Duke of Hesse, with his Herr von Dalwigk, should
be created King of Alsace. It is so, and we are
surrounded by secret enemies. Even the un-
worthy attitude of England has a deeper root than
her mere indolent love of peace -- it springs from
her unspoken mistrust of the incalculable power
of New Germany. In company with the Great
Powers, Switzerland and the Netherlands see
our growing strength with suspicion. Watched
as we are by angry neighbours, we must trust
gallantly in our own right and in our sword. If
Germany is powerful enough to tear the border
country away from France, she can venture,
without troubling herself about the reluctance of
foreign countries, to hand them over to the pro-
tectorate of Prussia.
But the solution of the question of the people of
Alsace involves the nearest future of the German
State. For Bavaria, strengthened by Alsace, and
hemming in all her South German neighbours,
would be the Great Power of the German South.
No man who comprehends this great time would
dream of replacing the unlucky dualism of Austria
and Prussia by a new dualism of Prussia and
Bavaria, between which a powerless Baden and a
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?
What We Demand from France 173
weak Wurttemberg would be kept feebly oscillating.
The day for the secondary States of Germany to rise
into fresh importance is past for ever. The first
Napoleon created the kingdom of the South with
the express intent that that seeming sovereignty
might bar the way against a real and powerful
German kingdom, and that its apparent authority
might undermine the real strength of Germany.
By their German loyalty these sovereigns have
deserved the thanks of the whole nation to-day.
They have obtained our forgiveness for the fault
of their original existence. The blood which had
to flow before North and South could be united
has flowed, thank God, in battle against the
hereditary enemy and not in civil war. Even we
radical partisans of unity are delighted, and have
no intention now of ever diminishing the authority
of the Bavarian Crown in opposition to the wishes
of the Bavarian people themselves. Why should
we be asked to increase the power of the second-
ary States, which is unquestionably too great at
present for any permanent national existence?
Why should we celebrate our victory over the third
Napoleon by strengthening the creation of the
first? We are determined to secure the unity of
Germany, and to leave no treacherous German
balance of power.
Deep-thinking persons advise us to reflect
whether the augmentation of its territory might
not predispose Bavaria to enter the German
Confederation. Those who talk so have little
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? 174 What We Demand from France
notion of the power of the national idea. The
entry of Bavaria is merely a question of time,
and it must come as surely as the blossom passes
into fruit. If Alsace be first made Prussian, and
then admitted, along with Baden, into the Ger-
man Confederation, we may rest secure against the
blindness of the sovereigns of Munich, and wait
in patience till the sense of what will be to her
an advantage constrains Bavaria to come in. If
Alsace fell to Bavaria, our European policy could
not rise out of its everlasting uncertainty, or our
German policy surmount the feeble vacillation
of its past. There is only one way in which the
jealousy of foreign Powers can prevent a just
peace for Germany -- they may try to separate
Bavaria from Prussia. If this be prevented,
pubHc opinion. North and South, will declare
itself unanimously, "It is our will that Alsace
and Lorraine should become Prussian, because
it is only so that they will become German. "
The spirit of the nation has already acquired a
wonderful force in these blessed weeks; and it is
able, when it declares itself unanimously in favour
of this clear and straightforward course, to cure
the Court of Munich of sickly and ambitious
dreams, which an intelligent Bavarian policy
can never encourage.
The people of Alsace have learned to despise
this Germany, broken into fragments. They will
learn to love us when the strong hand of Prussia
has educated them. We are no longer dreaming,
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? What We Demand from France 175
as Amdt did many years ago, of a new German
Order, whose task it was to be to guard the border-
land. The sober and upright principles which we
have applied in all newly taken provinces are
completely applicable here in the West. After a
short period of transition, under a strict dictator-
ship, the new districts may enter without danger
into the full enjoyment of the rights of the Prusso-
German constitution. When the official world has
once been cleared by the moderate use of pensions,
every attempt at treachery will be repressed with
relentless severity; but native officials who know
the country will be employed here, as they have
been everywhere, in the new provinces. Even
the good old Prussian fashion, according to which
the troops that garrisoned the fortresses usually
came from the provinces in which they were
situated, may be applied here cautiously after a
time. We Germans despise the babyish war
against stone and bronze, in which the French
are adepts. We left the monuments of Hoche
and Marceau standing, in honour, in the Depart-
ment of the Lower Rhine, and we have no intention
of transgressing against any of the glorious memo-
ries of the people of Alsace and Lorraine. Still
less shall we meddle with their language. The
German State must, of course, speak German only;
but it will always practise the mild regulations it
has adopted in the mixed districts of Posen and
Schleswig-Holstein. It would contradict all our
Prussian ways of thinking were we to assail with
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? 176 What We Demand from France
violence the customs of domestic life. All our
hope rests on the re-awakening of the free German
spirit. When once the mother- tongue is taught,
purely and honestly -- when the Evangelical
Church can again move about in undisturbed
liberty -- when an intelligent German provincial
Press brings back the country to the knowledge
of German life -- the cure of its sickness will have
begun. Is it idle folly to give expression to the
hope which rises unbidden in a scholar's mind?
Why should the great University of Strassburg,
restored again after its disgraceful mutilation, not
bring as many blessings to the Upper Rhine pro-
vinces as Bonn has done to the Lower? Another
Rhenana in Upper Germany would certainly be
a worthy issue of the German war, which has
been a struggle between ideas and sensuous
self-seeking.
The work of liberation will be hard and toil-
some; and the first German teachers and officials in
the estranged districts are not men to be envied.
The monarchical feeling of the German people
there has been thoroughly broken up by hateful
party fights. The Ultramontanes on the right
bank will soon conclude a close alliance with
those on the left; and there will be found, even
among the German Liberals, many good souls
ready trustfully to re-echo the cry of pain which
the people of Alsace will raise against the fury of
Borussic officialism. But the province cannot,
after all, long continue to be a German Venice.
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? What We Demand from France 177
Single families of the upper classes may migrate
indignantly into foreign countries, as the patricians
of Danzig once fled before the Prussian Eagle.
The rest will soon adapt themselves to the German
life, just as the Polonized German nobility of West
Prussia have resumed their old German names
since they became Prussian subjects. Even the
material advantages which the Prussian State
brings with it are considerable: lighter taxes
better distributed, and finances better arranged;
the opening of the natural channels of commerce
for the country of the Saar and the Moselle; the
razing of those useless fortifications of Vauban,
which, maintained in the interest of the traditional
war policy of the French, have hitherto limited the
progress of so man}^ towns of Alsace. Even the
manufacturing industry of the country will dis-
cover new and broad openings, naturally after
a trying period of transition, in East Germany.
But all this is of secondary importance as compared
with the ideal advantages which they will derive
from their German political life. And are these
German lads to grumble because they are no longer
compelled to learn Gaulish? Will the citizens be
angry with us for ever when they find that they are
permitted freely to elect their own burgomaster?
When they have to deal with well-educated,
honourable German-speaking officials ? When we
offer them, in place of their worthless Conseils
Generaux, a Provincial Diet, with an independent
activity; and in place of their Corps Legislatif a.
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? 178 What We Demand from France
powerful Parliament? When their sons will all
be entitled to pass a brief period of service in the
neighbourhood of their own homes, instead of
wasting long years as homeless soldiers of fortune
in migratory regiments? When they mingle un-
molested in the numerous unions and gatherings
of our free and joyous social life? The deadly
hatred which the Ultramontane clergy show
toward the Prussian State is the happiest omen
for the future. Such an enmity must draw all
the Protestants, and all the Catholics who can
think freely, in this province to the side of
Prussia.
Humbled and torn by contending parties,
France will find it very difficult to think of a war of
vengeance for the next few years. Give us time,
and it is to be hoped that Strassburg may then
have risen out of her ruins, and that the people of
Alsace may already have become reconciled to
their fate. Their grandchildren will look back one
day as coldly and strangely on the two-century-long
French episode in the history of their German
district as the Pomeranians now do on the century
and a half of Swedish government. No German
soil anywhere has ever repented placing itself
under the protection of Prussia when it passed out
of the subjection to the foreigner, which is, taken
at the best of it, but a splendid misery.
Who knows not Uhland's Minster sage, the
beautiful poem which expresses so finely and so
truly the love which the Germans bear to the land
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? What We Demand from France 179
of Goethe's youth? The old dome begins to
shake as the young poet ascends the tower.
A movement through the mighty work,
As though, in wondrous wise,
Its body travailed to give birth
To what unfinished lies.
Oh, Ludwig Uhland, and all of you who dreamt
of a great and free Germany in the desolate days
bygone, how far stronger than your dreams are the
days in which we are living now ! How much else
that was unfinished then has yet to be bom anew
in the restored German land! It is all but three
hundred years since a Hohenzollern, the Margrave
Johann Georg, chosen as coadjutor of Strassburg,
bore the title of Landgrave in Alsace; but his
young State did not dare to defend the claim.
The great stream of German popular power which
burst forth and rolled its mighty waters over the
Slav country of the north-east is flowing back
westward to-day, to fertilize anew its former bed,
now choked up -- the fair native lands of German
civilization. In the same Western Marches, where
our ancient Empire endured its deepest disgrace,
the new Empire is completed by German victories ;
and the Prussia which has so often and so shame-
fully been evil-spoken of by German lips is building
up the State, which is destined to march on, proud,
thoughtful, warlike, from centiiry to century.
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? THE INCORPORATION OF
ALSACE-LORRAINE AS AN IMPERIAL
PROVINCE IN THE GERMAN EMPIRE
{A Speech in the Reichstag)
Gentlemen,
A man from the Upper Rhine province might
be pardoned if the weighty words of the first
paragraph of the motion stimulated him to make a
pompous speech. Everywhere in our beautiful
land we see the bloody traces of the French, from
that hill in Freiburg where Louis XIV built his
three castles, his Defiance of Germany, dow^n
to the ruined towers of the Castle of Heidelberg.
We have looked hundreds of times with silent
sorrow at the summits of the Vosges. It would
be quite pardonable if now a man from the Upper
Rhine proudly expressed his joy at feeling how
everything has quite altered, how confidently we
look into the future, glad at the thought that the
German sword has reconquered the old frontier
territory. But, gentlemen, I regard it as more
worthy of us, even to-day, not to abandon that
simple and modest tone which, thank God, is
customary in this House. Our countrymen the
1 80
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? Alsace an Imperial Province i8i
Alsatians, who now return into our kingdom, have
under their old masters been satiated to disgust
with great pompous phrases. We would like to
accustom them already now to the fact that the
German way of dealing with things is simpler
and more modest.
Allow me, gentlemen, to commence with a
confession, which I make not in my name only,
but in the name of many here in the House. I
could have wished as early as some months ago
that the first paragraph of the motion contained
an additional clause, i. e. , the words, "The two
provinces will be incorporated with the Prussian
State. " I wished that for a very practical reason.
I said to myself. The task of re-incorporating these
alienated races of German stock into our country
is so great and difficult that it can be trusted only
to experienced hands, and where is there a political
power in the German Empire which has so well
proved its talent for Germanization as glorious old
Prussia? I, who am not a born Prussian, can well
say so, without incurring the reproach of boasting.
This State has rescued the Prussians themselves
from Poland, the Pomeranians from Sweden, the
East Frisians from Holland, the inhabitants of the
Rhine provinces from France, and still daily ad-
vances some inches further eastward the toll-gates
of German civiHzation. It was my opinion that to
this well-tested Power we should entrust the task
of being also in the West the champion and aug-
menter of the German Empire. I thought, more-
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? i82 Alsace an Imperial Province
over, the Alsatians have become only too alienated
from us as members of a centralized foreign State ;
with all the greater energy therefore should one
compel them to come into a German unitary State,
into the firmly-compacted strength of Prussian
political life. Finally, it would be a good thing
both for Prussia and for Germany if Germany's
leading State were to comprise numerous South
German elements. Prussia, if it is to understand
and guide Germany, must learn to value within
itself and do justice to the South German character.
These were the reasons which some months ago
made me hope that the incorporation of the two
provinces in Prussia might be proclaimed. This
hope, gentlemen, is completely shattered; it was
shattered already on that day in September when
the Prussian royal power declared in Munich that
it wished for no increase of territory. All this
happened at a time when the German Reichstag
did not yet exist. We have no more to pronounce
judgment on matters which are settled, but accept
circumstances as they are, and now ask: How are
we to set to work to fill this Imperial Province,
this common possession of all Germany, with
German civilization, in order to make it actually a
member of the German Empire ? The task appears
to me, gentlemen, not merely theoretically, but
also practically, very difficult. The only two for-
mer political phenomena which show some simi-
larity to the life of our Empire awaken little
confidence in my mind. The general provinces of
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? Alsace an Imperial Province 183
the United Netherlands succeeded as little as the
common administered districts of the Swiss Con-
federates in maintaining their vigour for any
length of time. The former have become in our
century provinces of a homogeneous State, enjoy-
ing equal rights, and the latter have become
equally privileged cantons of an alliance of States.
But we do not approach this new province with
the covetousness of the old Swiss Confederates,
nor with the lazy pride of the Dutch, but with the
honest wish to bring to our newly-won brothers our
German character, the best of our possessions, our
mother-tongue and its literature, and all the noble
elements of German civilization. The task is
unspeakably difficult, and I wish to ask you not to
make it more difficult by academic disputes regard-
ing the question, What is unitary and what is fed-
eral? These are theoretical questions which in
my opinion have already occupied too much room
in the discussions of the Commission.
We have heard in the Commission the distinct
assertion that the imperial province is the first step
to the unitary State. On the other hand, I have
heard from many of my friends that the imperial
province represents the true triumph of federalism.
I ask. Whither will these academic disputes con-
duct us? We wish here honestly to acknow-
ledge the constitution of the Confederation, as
it has been formed, with all its faults, and we
wish to say without more ado that what has been
done in the West affords no precedent for what
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? i84 Alsace an Imperial Province
might happen in Central Germany. There in the
West we have to regulate provinces hitherto
belonging to a foreign empire, in which at present
there is no legally constituted State authority.
In Germany there are States with constitutional
dynasties, and no less constitutional diets, and
what we do and consider necessary in Alsace does
not impose limits on what we may some day
be able to settle for the separate German States
with their actually existing constitutional order.
Let us then approach the question without fur-
ther ado, and allow me to ask. What should we do
for the Alsatians in order to win them for Ger-
many? I find myself in complete agreement with
what the Commission says; we wish to treat our
new fellow-countrymen from the first moment as
Germans, and therefore we wish to instil into them
from the beginning some of the fundamental
ideas of German political law which form, so to
speak, the political atmosphere which we breathe.
Among these fundamental ideas of German
political law I reckon the monarchy. The Alsa-
tians, like all Frenchmen, have too much grown
out of the habit of relying on the blessing of
monarchy. Bourbons, Princes of Orleans, Napo-
leons, and Republican experiments have pressed
on each others' heels in swift alternation, and
after all the changes nothing remains but the
unalterable despotism of the prefects. Here it is
our part to show that we Germans imderstand
monarchy in a much higher, nobler sense.
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