GERMAN KULTUR. The meaning of the word kultur cannot be defined with too great care because the Germans themselves use the word with entirely different meanings in different connections. What the German people understand by German kultur to-day involves an idea which the word kultur did not suggest at all a quarter of a century ago and the dif ferent stages of the development did not bring into disuse the older meanings of the word. On the contrary, in the texts of to-day the word kultur is used in its various shades and this may easily lead to misunderstandings. A sentence which would be reasonable and modest with one meaning of the word, torn from its connection, would impress the reader as pre posterous when a different meaning is substi tuted. Originally the German scholars took kultur as the totality of the forms and products of national life. In this sense they spoke of kulturgeschichte. It was the history of every thing which social groups and individuals have produced since the dawn of socialized life. Language and customs, religion and law, com merce and industry, art and science, literature and life forms were all held together by the general term kultur. Hence it was no merit to have kultur: even the most primitive tribe of savages or the most degenerate and super stitious people must have some kind of re ligion and life form and language and accord ingly possess kultur.
The first differentiation consisted in a nar rowing of the conception. Only a complex and highly developed civilization was acknowledged as real kultur. The savages lacked such com plexity of life forms and social products and were therefore said to have no kultur, while between those primitive tribes and the most highly civilized nations stood the peoples with half-kultur. Then came, at about the end of the last century, a new and very characteristic shading. The Germans began to separate those elements of civilization which had a material, practical, technical character and those other elements which are more spiritual and moral and asthetic. Only the latter were now called kultur, while those more practical ones were held to gether by the word civilization. Writers who ac cepted this use began to discriminate carefully among factors which in the earlier use of the word kultur were mixed. Art, literature, science,
religion and law were true kultur, while indus try, commerce, transportation and similar traits of civilization were outside of true kultur. At this stage it was not unusual to read in German books that, for instance, the Australians have a high civilization but no kultur, because their technical life is as complex as that of any na tion, while their art and science and literature are simply borrowed from other peoples. No doubt much of the discussion of the world concerning German kultur has hinged on this meaning, as peoples other than Germans began to doubt whether the contribution of the Ger man people to art, science, literature, scholar ship, music and morals were equal to those of England, France and Italy. When the Germans pointed to Goethe and Schiller, to Leibnitz and Kant, to Bach and Beethoven, to Luther and Darer, to Hegel and Humboldt, and all those other leaders of German kultur, the last de fense of the critics was usually the claim that at any rate since the middle of the 19th century and still more since the foundation of the Prussianized German Empire, the stream of kultur has become shallow. The Germans pointed out that on the contrary it was a period in which scholars like Mommsen and Harnack, scientists like Helmholtz, Roentgen, Koch and Ehrlich, poets like Hauptmann and Suderman, artists like Boecklin and Leibi, musicians like Richard Strauss and Mahler, have created works not surpassed by the productive minds of the same generation in other countries. Above all, they showed that this recent period was un favorable to the production of great individ ual creations and was much more an age of socialized work and common production, char acterized by a new rising of the intellectual and wsthetic level all around. And here, they in sist, Germany's achievement was most remark able. On German soil the artistic city develop ment and architecture showed more originality than in any other land; music and arts and crafts were flourishing; lyric poetry and the drama found new forms of expression.