The Germans: Double History Of A Nation. Emil Grimm Ludwig

      Born about 1400 in Mayence, Johannes Gensfleisch, called Gutenberg, had emigrated with his father. He was not of the gentry, as has been asserted, but the son of a burgher, a member of the goldsmiths’ guild, for he was a gem cutter. He began to make mirrors, and while mounting them in metal frames with the help of a press, he conceived the idea of using a similar press to hold individual types, joined in words, sentences and pages, which might then be printed.

      Lack of money drove him, like most inventors, on his way. He returned to his home town, where he found a certain Fust, who has impressed himself upon history through no merit of his own. He was the type of avaricious and unimaginative financial backer who even today exploits the genius of artists and inventors, becoming the master of those whose shoelaces he is unworthy to loosen. Soon afterward the banker sued the genius—just as still happens today—because the debtor’s work had not progressed sufficiently. Fust won in court, though he himself was guilty of having defaulted on promised payments. The judge assigned Gutenberg’s type to him, and but for the intercession of a priest in Mayence, the inventor might have perished.

      For it was none other than the Church that first grasped the meaning of this most dangerous of all modern inventions—the same Church that should have destroyed it, burning the inventor together with his type! Did it not sense the diabolical spirit that dwelt in these little letters, these wooden frames, this black ink? Instead it became the first client of the new art. The first documents printed by the creator of the new light were those of the dark ages—letters of indulgence, in which the Church forgave the faithful their sins, for money. As in the fairy tale, it was a remote and legendary prince, the King of Cyprus, who was at the time rallying the faithful against the infidel Turks, so that he might save his inherited isle. To finance this war, the Pope had indulgences distributed throughout all the countries by his agents. The German agent found it useful to have the papers printed instead of written, for in this manner a few hours sufficed to broadcast a hundredfold that all souls were released from their sins for the years from 1452 to 1455—if they paid well.

      Gutenberg, then about sixty and all his life a bachelor because he gave all his time to inventions, had been called to the Archbishop of Nassau. He could now set about completing what he had long begun: the printing of a German Bible.

      Those who have handled this first forty-two–line Bible of 1455 (it is too heavy to be lifted and must be inspected on a lectern; one of the few still preserved is now in New York) marvel that instead of a first clumsy effort like the first steam engine or the first automobile they are face to face with a work that is perfect. Centuries of monastery practice in miniature are solemnly transferred to the initials on the printed page. This was precisely the problem facing the type cutter and founder—how to combine beauty and utility.

      GOTHIC CATHEDRAL IN ULM

      But while the invention of this German was conferring upon the world a boon, another menaced the world with his idea.

      As early as 1340, gunpowder had been produced in Germany. Clumsy blunderbusses too had been made, with bullets of stone and iron. The British won a battle with firearms, but they could not really shoot, winning merely by the sound of their guns. The invention has been attributed to a German monk, Berthold Schwarz. He is supposed to have ground a mixture of saltpeter, sulphur and charcoal in a mortar, whereupon the mortar exploded. Perhaps he was an alchemist whose avarice the Devil sought to cure in this manner, without betraying how much of the Devil the powder itself held. But, in the legend, the monk grasped the significance quickly and well, like his successor Nobel many years later, as peaceful a man as the monk. Around 1400, at any rate, other unknown inventors in Germany had built cannon and also small arms of bronze, loaded with bullets of lead—for a manuscript dated 1405, now in Göttingen, pictures them. Soon afterward a Frankish nobleman, in a work entitled Belliphents, the Sturdy Warrior, founded the literature of firearms. The fifteenth century was not yet over when the Germans had invented the lateral touch-pan, the matchlock, rifled barrels (in Vienna), the flintlock (in Nuremberg). A hundred years later the snaphance-lock was constructed by German gunsmiths.

      Thus the Germans, at about the same time, dropped two decisive inventions into the swirl of world events, in an epoch of general crisis and change like that of today. Here were two manifestations of the German character, directed to the two aspects toward which it aspired. Savagery, revenge and lust for destruction drove the German to find a terrible means for attack. Thirst for knowledge, aspiration and common sense led him to the book. The new weapons of war and of the spirit issued from German hands at the same time.

      They were soon to dash.