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No. 30. | Vienna, 27 July 1900. | 4th Year

An Ill-treated Word.

By O. Erter.

No vindication is intended. Lessing himself would strive in vain to put a stop to the wrong which for a considerable time past has been inflicted upon the conception of "Nationalism." When thoughtlessness and ill will stand in need of a catchword, they perpetrate the most brutal acts of violence upon the genius of the language; and since, as is well known, "Understanding has ever been with the few only," the majority — which, as is likewise well known, is "nonsense" — again and again arrives one day, in entire bona fide, at transforming a fair conception into a repellent one, at filling a good word with a bad content.

Or rather, it arrives at taking a worthless coin in place of one of full value, without troubling itself further about the forgers or the forgery.

But it is a base forgery that is committed a hundred times a day upon the word "Nationalism"; and since even a very eminent North German comic paper has lately named Chinese Boxerdom and "Nationalism" in one breath, it is surely worth the pains to hang lower the worthless tendency which is at play in this act of violence upon the genius of the language.

The Zionists have a peculiarly lively interest in unmasking the so-called "Nationalists," for to us reverence for nationality is the most precious and the most inalienable of all the virtues of a people. We know what a treasure of spiritual force and exaltation lies locked up in the belief in nature, in the mark of birth, and how vain it is to seek to divest oneself of that mark. But we also know how little the hatred of exclusiveness has to do with the avowal of a national community; and that the Germans too — they indeed first of all — have made of Nationalism a war-cry of hatred is the more unintelligible to us in that it was precisely one of the greatest German poets who, with the deepest pathos of human feeling, said:

Worthless is the nation That stakes not all upon its honour.

This poet has been called the conscience of his nation, and he has besides been for a hundred years the poet of German youth. And in truth the German nation owes more to the Nationalism which he planted in the soul of three generations than it is perhaps inclined to concede to-day. In the national rebirth of the German people no German save Bismarck has a greater share than Schiller. Of this one must be reminded ever anew, when the so-called Nationalism of to-day, which is the most shameful denial of all noble nationhood, revels in its orgies bursting with hatred and brutality. Schiller was a Nationalist — but what a Nationalist! He did not hold that a nation proves its right of existence by impairing and stunting the right of existence of another nation; before him hovered the great ideal of the neighbourly and friendly co-existence of all nations, and more than that: the recognition and support of the small nations by the great, of the weak by the strong.

This ideal Nationalism is now no more than a fair memory of the day before yesterday. Something else, its direct opposite, has usurped its name. The new national saints are named Treitschke, Schönerer, Drumont. What calls itself Nationalism to-day is a fraudulent catchword behind which nothing whatever lies concealed but Anti-Semitism. The German Nationalists are not concerned with the assertion of national power, nor the French with the recovery of their former international preponderance; despite all the antagonisms on this side and that of the Rhine, French Nationalism runs together with German in the common hatred against the Jews. One could feel the strong pulse-beat of genuine national sentiment in the song of the poet Nikolaus Becker, which with its clear refrain, "They shall not have it, the German Rhine!" thundered stormily across to France and called forth Alfred de Musset's fiery reply. But of that nothing, nothing at all, has remained in the spiteful pamphlets of Treitschke, in the worthless machinations of Mercier and the base calumnies of Drumont.