against France is our alliance
with the Empire of the Czar. I have received many letters reproaching us
with this. In the Munich review, _Das Forum_, I read only yesterday an
article by Wilhelm Herzog challenging me to explain my position with
regard to Russia. Let us consider the question, then. I ask nothing
better. By this means we shall be able to weigh the German danger and
the Russian danger in the balance, and thus show which of the two seems
the more threatening to us. Of the actual events of the present war
between Germany and Russia I will say nothing. All the information we
have comes from Russian or German sources, equally unreliable. To judge
by them it would appear that the same ferocity exists in both camps. The
Germans in Kalish were worthy companions of the Cossacks in Grodtken and
Zorothowo.--It is of the German spirit and of the Russian spirit that I
wish to speak here, for this is the important thing and of this we have
more definite knowledge.

You, my German friends--for those of you who were my friends in the past
remain my friends in spite of fanatical demands from both sides that we
should break off all relations--know how much I love the Germany of the
past, and all that I owe to it. Not less than you, yourselves, I am the
son of Beethoven, of Leibnitz, and of Goethe. But what do I owe to the
Germany of today, or what does Europe owe to it? What art have you
produced since the monumental work of Wagner, which marks the end of an
epoch and belongs to the past? What new and original thought can you
boast of since the death of Nietzsche, whose magnificent madness has
left its traces upon you though we are unscathed by it? Where have we
sought our spiritual food for the last forty years, when our own fertile
soil no longer yielded sufficient for our needs? Who but the Russian
writers have been our guides? What German writer can you set up against
Tolstoi and Dostoievsky, those giants of poetic genius and moral
grandeur? These are the men who have moulded my soul, and in defending
the nation from which they sprang, I am but paying a debt which I owe to
that nation as well as to themselves. Even if the contempt for Prussian
Imperialism were not innate in me as a Latin, I should have learned it
from them. Twenty years ago Tolstoi expressed his contempt for your
Kaiser. In music, Germany, so proud of its ancient glory, has only the
successors of Wagner, neurotic jugglers with orchestral effects, like
R