e we see fate. I will
betray to you the fact that there is still another Germany behind the
exterior in which great politics and great finance meet with the
literary champions of Europe. That Germany tells you in this heavy hour
of Europe:

This undesired war that has been forced upon us is nevertheless a
necessity; it had to come to pass for the sake of Germany and the world
of European humanity, for the sake of the world. We did not want it, but
it came from God. Our poet knew of it. He saw this war and its necessity
and its virtues, and heralded it, long before an ugly suspicion of it
flew through the year--before the leaves began to turn. The "Stern des
Bundes" ["Star of the Federation"] is this book of prophecy, this book
of necessity and of triumph.

The present need and the present triumph are quite human and quite
inexorable. They have a part in all that has taken place, and they are
unprecedented and new. None of us--do you hear, Rolland?--none of us
Germans today would hesitate to help destroy every monument of our holy
German past, if necessity made it a matter of the last ditch, for that
from which alone all monuments of all times draw their right of
existence and their worth unless they are empty husks, skeletons, and
framework; even so, we alone may ask what shall come to pass, not what
shall cease. Which ruins are ravings, and which are the pains of
childbirth, we do not presume to decide; but you, too, who are so pained
by ruins, even as we are pained by them, you, too, do not know it.

Today it is a question of the life or death of the European soul. Do you
not believe that this soul is more endangered at the hands of the hordes
of stub-nosed Slavs than of the phalanx of those whom you, Rolland, call
Huns? Your sense must give you the right to answer. Recall the terrible
story of Russian incendiarism for the last hundred years, which has torn
to pieces in ever-increasing lust for murder bodies and souls; recall
the eternally perjured and law-defying regiment of grave diggers; and
then blush that you have characterized as a heavy crime a manfully
confessed act of self-defense on the part of the Germans, the temporary
occupation of Belgium! Blush that you have forgotten the Russian Moloch
now loosed upon us, drunk with the blood and tears of alien peoples as
well as of its own children! That you have forgotten all that, in order
to lament over buildings which we have been forced in
self-defense--again