But the plan involved tearing up what were then regarded as the most sacred treaties, and throwing the neutrality of small countries that had done Germany no harm into the waste paper basket. It was the most ruthlessly cynical plan, to destroy the conventions that had bound European nations together, for the sake of the aggrandizement of Germany; and it was filed away years before the First World War broke out. If this plan had worked, Germany would have had France at her mercy within about 6 weeks; and the opinion of Major-General JFC Fuller (a tank expert of World War I) was that at the outset the odds looked 10:1 in favour of Germany winning. From our point of view, only a miracle saved us.
How does German “War Guilt” fit in with all this? Well, Goethe put into the mouth of the Harper in Wilhelm Meister the words, “For all guilt is avenged upon earth”. If that is right, just as it will be hundreds of years before Europe fully recovers from this crime, so it will be hundreds of years before Germany expiates its guilt. Of course the wars of the 20th century were not caused by the Thirty Years War of the 17th century; but one can trace a thread between the two. After the horrors and chaos of the one, it is understandable that Frederick William the First should have built up a Prussian army to make sure it did not happen again; and having built it up, that his son should have decided to use it. And Prussia having become one of the chief powers in Europe, it is understandable that Bismarck should have spent his life making Prussia the supreme power in Europe; and in the process created a war-party which the Kaiser was unable to control. These processes take hundreds of years to mature; and it takes hundreds of years to recover from them. And it is ironic that the desire of Frederick William the First to make sure that it did not happen again, should have led, through the folly of politicians and the romanticism of philosophers, to the destruction of many German cities by Allied bombing, the brutal invasion of East Prussia by Russian forces, and the total destruction of the German State and its armed forces in 1945.
Fortunately the Allies were capable of magnanimity in Victory; and the generosity of the Marshall Plan in particular prevented the worst horrors of starvation and disease, and laid the foundation of modern European prosperity. But it does leave unanswered the question: “Does the German frame of mind absolutely preclude any interpenetration by an Anglo-Saxon mind?” Although some friends would have told me to run for my life, why did I find the Romeo and Juliet situation so intractably insoluble? I think the answer is provided indirectly by my Theory of Consciousness, which after all sprang from my experience; all our attitudes of mind may be undermined by unspoken and unconscious assumptions, which contain too much error to permit mutual understanding. So people cling to their shibboleths, in order to believe that they see things as they really are. Nor is any true understanding possible between two people, save when their unspoken assumptions are roughly comparable.