Germany Vs Civilization Author:William Roscoe Thayer 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: CHAPTER III ATAVISM "From these old-German gloomy times," said Goethe, "we can obtain as little as from the Servian songs, and similar barbaric popular poe... more »try. We can read it and be interested about it for a while, but merely to cast it aside, and let it lie behind us. Generally speaking, a man is quite sufficiently saddened by his own passions and destiny, and need not make himself more so by the darkness of a barbaric past. He needs enlightening and cheering influences, and should therefore turn to those eras in art and literature during which remarkable men obtained perfect culture, so that they were satisfied with themselves, and able to impart to others the blessings of their culture." Eckermann, Conversations, October 3, 1828, p. 327. WHAT of the German Cain who suddenly arose at the opening of the twentieth century, gigantic, merciless, mad with the purpose of slaying the small and feeble, of subduing the powerful whose spoils he coveted, of shattering the civilization which embodies the cumulative ideals of three thousand years, and of setting up his own civilization in its stead ? The Goths and Vandals and Huns who peopled Germany early in the Christian era, were as unqualified Barbarians as Apache Indians. They had an insatiable appetite for war; and this was whetted when they came into conflict with the Romans, because by war alone could they defend themselves and then make their inroads into the crumbling Roman Empire and secure its wealth. Even after they gained the mastery and had mixed their blood freely with that of the decadent peoples which Rome once swayed, they kept to an extraordinary degree the traits which dominated their ancestors when history first describes them. One of those traits, blood-thirstiness, crops out at intervals during all thei...« less