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... The foremost nationalist representative of the first of these periods was Herr Professor Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-96). “He was active before the unification, but his influence was especially notable during the last decades of the century … Standing before packed audiences, Treitschke eloquently proclaimed his faith in a German morality and his deep feeling for the Volk. A note of militancy... nurse to the warrior, symbol of the gentler sentiments. “Treitschke even criticized Bismarck for not completing the holy task of uniting all Germans in an imperial Weltmacht (world power). A people with the power to conquer and absorb weak states had a divine mandate to do so. ‘Brave peoples expand, cowardly peoples perish.’ Treitschke looked forward to the day when a German fleet would sail up... 8. Long Skulls and Broad Skulls Hitler and his God Treitschke, Fritsch, Haeckel It was to be expected that the self-affirmation of the Germans would reach high peaks at times when the material and racial feelings were singularly stimulated. Two such occasions were the foundation of the German nation in 1871 and the take-off of its industry and economy ...

... work’. Issued in pamphlet form, Treitschke’s articles gave reinforcement and professional authoritativeness to the anti-Semitic movement. Treitschke spoke, the anti-Semites said, ‘for thousands, perhaps millions of his countrymen’.” 569 Poliakov calls Treitschke le maître à penser of the German nationalist youth, which is how he became known to us in an earlier chapter. It should in fairness be... nearly twenty years. It was as if all the quiet streams of prejudice conjoined in a massive flow of anti-Semitic hate, inundating the whole country. It began at the end of 1879, when Heinrich von Treitschke, National Liberal and prestigious professor of history at the University of Berlin, started a series of articles on the Jewish question in the Preussische Jahrbücher, which he edited. ‘Even in... be mentioned that Treitschke’s anti-Jewish writings caused a wave of disagreement. His foremost opponent in this was the great Latinist Theodor Mommsen, who warned that Treitschke had rendered anti-Semitism respectable and that it would lead to a conflict without mercy. “Till the end of his days Mommsen gave the best of his powers to a struggle against German chauvinism and racism, against ‘those ...

... were directly or indirectly under the control of World-Jewry. Given such logic, it would not take long before the Jews would be the cause of all that ached in the world. The revered Herr Professor Treitschke had already coined the formula: “The Jews are our misfortune.” Still further went the Germanenorden in its imitation of Freemasonry by prescribing rituals which an outsider might find slightly ...

... the middle class on the traditional, conservative right. They were the nurturing ground of the fanatically rightist university students at the feet of nationalist and anti-Semitic professors like Treitschke; and they constituted the reading public of authors like Lagarde, Langbehn, Bernhardi and Spengler who edged Germany on along its predestined glorious path of world hegemony. One finds the diverse ...

... principle; the Teutons represent the ‘moral world-order’”, wrote Nietzsche indignantly. “There is now a historiography that is reichsdeutsch ; there is even, I fear, an anti-Semitic one … and Herr von Treitschke is not ashamed.” 694 Wagner’s, and therefore Bayreuth’s, virulent anti-Semitism was another element inimical to Nietzsche’s feelings, who was convinced that a mixture of races would be beneficial ...

... several anthologies of sayings by the romantic and idealist thinkers were published in the later part of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Some such anthologies, for instance Treitschke’s Handbuch des Judentums, sold in enormous numbers and were reprinted till the end of the Third Reich. What the nationalist literature did not promulgate were the visionary predictions of a Romantic ...