The Pentecost of Calamity by Owen Wister

Thus was Germany shut in from the world. Even her Socialist-Democrats abjectly conformed. China built a stone wall, Germany a wall of the mind.

To assert that any great nation has in these modern days deliberately built around herself such a wall, may seem an extreme statement, and I will therefore support it with an instance -- only one instance out of many, out of hundreds; it will suffice to indicate the sort of information about the world lying outside the wall that Germany has carefully prepared for the children in her schools. I quote from the letter of an American parent recently living in Berlin, who placed his children in a school there: "The text books were unique. I suppose there was not in any book of physics or chemistry that they studied an admission that a citizen of some other country had taken any forward step; every step was by some line of argument assigned to a German. As you might expect, the history of the modern world is the work of German Heroes. The oddest example, however, was the geography used by Katherine. (His daughter, aged thirteen.) This contained maps indicating the Deutsche Gebiete (the German "spheres of influence" in foreign lands) in striking colors. In North and South America, including the United States and Canada, there are said to be three classes of inhabitants -- negroes, Indians and Germans. For the United States there is a black belt for negroes and a middle-west section for Indians; but the rest is Deutsche Gebiete. Canada is occupied mainly by Indians. The matter was brought to my attention because one of Katherine's girl friends asked her whether she was of negro or Indian blood; and when she replied she was neither her friend pointed out that this was impossible for she surely was not German. " Information less laughable about the morals taught in the German schools I forbear to quote.