Approaches to the
"German Problem"
HANNAH ARENDT
T
HE
"German problem" as we hear about it today has been resur–
rected from the past, and
if
it is now presented simply as the problem
of Germanic aggression it is because of the tender hopes for restora–
tion of the status quo in Europe. To achieve this in the face of the
civil war sweeping the continent it appeared necessary, first, to "re–
store" the meaning of the war to its nineteenth century sense of a
purely national conflict, in which countries rather than movements,
peoples rather than governments, suffer defeats and win victories.
Thus the literature on the "German problem" reads for the
most part like a revised edition of the propaganda of the last war,
which merely embellished the official viewpoint with the appropriate
historical learning, and was actually neither better nor worse than its
German counterpart. After the armistice, the papers of the erudite
gentlemen on both sides were allowed to pass into charitable oblivion.
The only interesting aspect of this literature was the eagerness with
which scholars and writers of international renown offered their ser–
vices-not to save their countries at the risk of their lives but to
serve their governments with a complete disregard for truth. The
one difference between the propagandists of the two world wars is
that this time quite a few of the former dispensers of German chauv–
inism have made themselves available to the Allied powers as "ex–
perts" on Germany and have lost through this switch not a bit of their
zeal or subservience.
These experts on the German problem, however, are the only
remnants of the last war. But while their adaptability, their willing–
ness to serve, their fear of intellectual and moral responsibility
remain constant, their political role has changed. During the First
World War, a war not ideological in character, the strategies of
political warfare had not yet been discovered, its propagandists were
little more than morale-builders, arousing or expressing the national
sense of the people. Perhaps they failed even in this task, if we are
to judge by the fairly general contempt in which they were held by
