Europe on the Brink, 1914 by John E. Moser

Author:John E. Moser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reacting Consortium Press

INTRODUCTION TO FRIEDRICH VON BERNHARDI, GERMANY AND THE NEXT WAR (1912)

Friedrich von Bernhardi was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1849, but in 1851 he moved with his family to the German province of Silesia. He served with distinction in the Franco-Prussian War, and in the victory parade through Paris that followed he was given the honor of being the first German soldier to ride through the Arc de Triomphe. He held a variety of posts in the years that followed, including head of the military history department of the General Staff. In 1909, however, he retired from active service in order to focus on writing. In this, his most famous work, he made the controversial claim that war, far from being something to be avoided, was “a biological necessity.”

Note that in this introduction Bernhardi focuses on the question of war in general. In the excerpts included in the “Supplemental Documents” section, he offers specific recommendations for German foreign and military policy.

Since 1795, when Immanuel Kant published in his old age his treatise on “Perpetual Peace,” many have considered it an established fact that war is the destruction of all good and the origin of all evil. In spite of all that history teaches, no conviction is felt that the struggle between nations is inevitable, and the growth of civilization is credited with a power to which war must yield. But, undisturbed by such human theories and the change of times, war has again and again marched from country to country with the clash of arms, and has proved its destructive as well as creative and purifying power. It has not succeeded in teaching mankind what its real nature is. Long periods of war, far from convincing men of the necessity of war, have, on the contrary, always revived the wish to exclude war, where possible, from the political intercourse of nations.

This wish and this hope are widely disseminated even to-day. The maintenance of peace is lauded as the only goal at which statesmanship should aim. This unqualified desire for peace has obtained in our days a quite peculiar power over men’s spirits. This aspiration finds its public expression in peace leagues and peace congresses; the Press of every country and of every party opens its columns to it. The current in this direction is, indeed, so strong that the majority of Governments profess—outwardly, at any rate—that the necessity of maintaining peace is the real aim of their policy; while when a war breaks out the aggressor is universally stigmatized, and all Governments exert themselves, partly in reality, partly in pretence, to extinguish the conflagration.…

This aspiration is directly antagonistic to the great universal laws which rule all life. War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilization. “War is the father of all things.”34 The sages of antiquity long before Darwin recognized this.

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