violins hang high up on to a shrill, intolerably eager note. There's a
sort of fever. And the big words! I thought Germans were stolid,
quiet people. But how they talk! And always in capital letters. They
talk in tremendous capitals about what they call the _deutscke
Standpunkt_; and the _deutsche Standpunkt_ is the most wonderful thing
you ever came across. Butter wouldn't melt in its mouth. It is too
great and good, almost, they give one to understand, for a world so far
behind in high qualities to appreciate. No other people has anything
approaching it. As far as I can make out, stripped of its decorations
its main idea is that what Germans do is right and what other people do
is wrong. Even when it is exactly the same thing. And also, that
wrong becomes right directly it has anything to do with Germans. Not
with _a_ German. The individual German can and does commit every sort
of wrong, just as other individuals do in other countries, and he gets
punished for them with tremendous harshness; Kloster says with
unfairness. But directly he is in the plural and becomes _Wir
Deutschen_, as they are forever saying, his crimes become virtues. As
a body he purifies, he has a purging quality. Today they were saying
at breakfast that if a crime is big enough, if it is on a grand scale,
it leaves off being a crime, for then it is a success, and success is
always virtue,--that is, I gather, if it is a German success; if it is
a French one it is an outrage. You mustn't rob a widow, for instance,
they said, because that is stupid; the result is small and you may be
found out and be cut by your friends. But you may rob a great many
widows and it will be a successful business deal. No one will say
anything, because you have been clever and successful.

I know this view is not altogether unknown in other countries, but they
don't hold it deliberately as a whole nation. Among other things that
Hilda Seeberg's father did which roused her unforgiveness was just