It is not easy to see things in proportion. Indeed I have long held the view that it is the highest intellectual achievement; in colloquial language to see the wood for the trees. In the long run, this is far more important than having a detailed and profound technical knowledge of the intricacies of the wood. It might even be said to be wisdom: to see the salient features of life in true proportion. In the last century, we had two frightful world wars which most people think were the responsibility of Germany, whoever technically started them; although I expect we ought all to take a share of the blame in having created a spiritual world in which some people thought it was astute to begin war. As regards the 1914 War, H.A.L. Fisher in his History of Europe writes at the very end that the tragedy was that the War was fought on an issue that a few level-headed people could easily have composed, and with respect to which 99% of the population were wholly indifferent. And one cannot help thinking that if the Emperors of Germany, Austria, and Russia could have foreseen the end (that they would lose their thrones, that European civilization as it had existed in 1914 would be destroyed, and much of Europe reduced to chaos and starvation) they would have paused. They did not see it. But of course there was more to it than that. There was a seething mass of nationalism, and the dream of world conquest.
It came about like this. After the Franco-Prussian war, the third of Bismarck’s little adventures to unite the many German states, Jacob Burckhardt the Swiss historian declared it would be “the doom of Germany” when he heard that the Kaiser had allowed himself to be crowned Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. It was the doom of Germany, in the sense that these three successful wars created a war-party in Germany, which Bismarck might be able to hold in check, but which no-one else could contain when Bismarck was gone. And we all know what happened next! The Schlieffen Plan, conceived by Count Alfred von Schlieffen when he was Chief of the German General Staff between 1891 and 1906, and which aimed to get to Paris in six weeks, was not a plan to defend the Reich. It was a plan to make Germany supreme in Europe. After it had gone disastrously and miraculously wrong, and four years later, the German army had to ask for an armistice; and the Allied governments dictated as brutal a peace treaty at Versailles on Germany in 1919, as Germany had on France at Versailles in 1871. The treaty of 1919, however technically just, probably inhibited the ability of law-abiding bourgeois Germans to gain firmly the upper hand in their country in the years after the War, and probably indirectly opened the door to Hitler’s rise to power and the thirst for revenge. So it is instructive to hear what an intelligent German has to say about the complex of societies, statecraft and human relations.
Werner Heisenberg was an atomic physicist in the golden years of atomic research in the late 1920s. He played a leading role in trying to understand the nature of atomic structure, and the “Uncertainty Principle” is named after him. He was head of the German Atomic Energy Establishment for part of the 1939 War; and he claims he derailed any idea of Germany making an atomic bomb, by telling Hitler that it would take much longer than any war was likely to last. Well that may be true, or it may special pleading; but that difficult question can be left undecided. What one has to admit is that Heisenberg is brilliant at expressing difficult ideas in comprehensible language by his use of imaginative metaphors. And never more so than in his coining the metaphor of the God-World-I Triangle, to make the fiercely contrasting aspects of life comprehensible to ordinary people.