In July, Italy’s foremost daily, Corriere della Sera, published a short Op-Ed by the distinguished contributor, Sergio Romano, whose reputation comes from his historical essays rather than from having been an ambassador. The title was strong: “The rebirth of a great country. Ethical values of the Germans”. Romano emphasized that in 1870 the immense victory of Prussia in just two great battles of a war with France that Berlin exploited but did not start, launched a well-deserved primacy of Germany in Europe. The Reich which was born in the German space out of many kingdoms and principalities soon asserted itself as the Continent’s most important country, also its moral leader.

Italy for one took Germany as her model in several fields- industrial development, science, socio-political developments. Hitler and WW2, writes Romano, devastated the noble profile of that nation, “so for many years it was difficult to tell Italians about the vast patrimony of cultural excellence, industriousness, economic dynamism, scientific intelligence, philosophical depth, artistic and literary creativity, which Germany accumulated in less than two centuries. An extraordinary Renaissance”. This was so because the whole history of the German nation was marked by the specifically German virtues of seriousness, loyalty, and ethical strength.

Of course, Sergio Romano does not dodge the tragic questions raised by twelve years of Adolf Hitler -he rather underlines that the very moral and spiritual excellence of the national character saved Germany from her crimes, restoring her sanity.

One remark might be added, however: the qualities which make the endowment of the German race are not necessarily the positive ones. Germany is great because of her sins, too. Germans, while possessing the best of inheritances, also possess the worst ones. Luther’s rebellion to the papacy was the triumph of truth over expediency, the heroism of faith against evil. But Martin Luther was incapable of compassion when the German peasants tried to free themselves from subservience to their feudal masters.

The events of Hitler’s last years make it too clear that in specified conditions Germans could behave diabolically. Satan made deep inroads into the German soul. Germans have sinned more than other races, possibly because their minds and hearts were deeper. J.S.Bach concentrated more on higher religious thought in his music than all composers lumped together. Nietzsche, the prophet of new Gods, the last disciple of Dionysus, derided Christ but Tolstoj, the Christian socialist, described Nietzsche as his teacher. Schopenhauer too, even if the latter in his will donated a sum to the German soldiers who had put down the revolution in Berlin.

Germans nearer to our feelings taught us to penetrate the tragedies of modernity. Wrote Alfred Doeblin, born in Stettin 1878: “we must help God”. R.M.Rilke invoked the garden “wo Gott beginnt” (where God begins). Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the noble philosopher and patriot, claimed in 1808 that his people were “the interpreters of the world spirit, the only uncorrupted one”. For Thomas Carlyle, the English historian of the heroes, “pious Germany rose as Queen of Europe”.

Some of the virtues that Sergio Romano assigns to the Germans are shared by other nations. Swedes, for example, are serious, laborious, well organized: but lacking the greatness and the evil of Germans, they are  rather disregarded by history of man. In a way it might be said that Germans would be a humbler stock, if they had not generated mythical figures as opposed as Parsifal and Hitler, Wagner and Rilke.

There was a time when the intellectuals of France, Germany’s hereditary enemy, were deeply impressed, even fascinated, by the glory of the German thought. M.me de Stael had called Germany ‘the heart of Europe’. Notwithstanding the diplomatic crisis of 1840, the French philosopher and minister Victor Cousin kept praising everything spiritual of Goethe’s fatherland. For a period Ernest Renan believed that the real goal of his life had to be working to unite spiritually France and Germany. For Montesquieu  the spirit of freedom was born in the forests where the Germans, ‘our fathers’, lived in the distant past. Everything changed in France after 1870, when Germany triumphed. The French nationalism exploded, two world wars followed.

Nobody will ever be able to belittle the rational component of the German mind. But its irrational component is imposing. Romanticism, one of the greatest phases in the Western civilization, began in Heidelberg when Achim von Arnim launched the small review “Troest Einsamkeit”, “a journal for anchorites”.  Was a great reactionary thinker of France, Charles Maurras, wrong when he concluded “Nationalsocialism is the Islam of the North?

In conclusion, every single word that Sergio Romano wrote on Germany is right. In a very short article he could not possibly elaborate more. But the credits he assigns to such a nation are the bland, sedate ones. The German heritage is neither bland nor overly reasonable. Thomas Mann, before becoming in WW2  a propagandist of the Allied, plutodemocratic crusade, had meditated on the torment and tragedy of the German nature. He argued: “He who would like to transform Germany into a middle-class democracy, would deprive her of the best she is. Germany means abyss”.