Discussion of the “German problem” has too often been smothered in a mist of understandable emotion, prejudice, and voluble ignorance. Samuel J. Hurwitz, who here attempts to rescue the facts of the situation through sober historical analysis, is a member of the Department of History at Brooklyn College.
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It is understandable that we should have a flood of books on German history, all bearing the imprint of a kind of compulsive urgency. By common consent the core of the ills that beset our time is Germany. Since Germany has been guilty of every crime but suicide, and balks at that, we demand from history some simple rational explanation to afford us consoling deliverance from the sense of past catastrophe and an ominous future.
But even more practical considerations motivate our interest. If we are to cure Germany, the plague-spot of Europe, we must know the cause of her malady. The key to the answer of “what to do about Germany” depends on our diagnosis of the nature of the German problem, characterized more than eighty years ago by Constantin Frantz, a German publicist, as “the most somber, the most complicated, the most comprehensive problem of all recent history.”
Unfortunately, some historians are physicians who announce the prognosis first, and then construct the diagnosis to fit, with little respect for the facts of the case record. Lord Vansittart is of the school that seems satisfied to offer reiterated allegations as a substitute for historic truth. But, lacking the brazenness of Hitler and Goebbels, he tries to reinforce his repetitive assertions with “historic evidence,” and fails where they succeeded. Writing the foreword to a history of Germany by a Pole writing under the very English pen name of W. M. Knight-Patterson (Germany from Defeat to Conquest, New York, Macmillan, 1946), Vansittart holds that “everyone who thinks that the Germans are as other people, only misled, is an enemy of other people. . . . Here is the proof and the story.” (Whatever the demerits of the book—and it has many—it is better than the thesis of Lord Vansittart’s foreword.)
A well-known British historian, F. J. H. Hearnshaw, entitles his story Germany the Aggressor Throughout the Ages (New York, Dutton, 1942). To him, Germany is “chronically dangerous” and “easily misguided.” Though definitely writing a “war book,” Hearnshaw cannot entirely cast off his cloak of learning and understanding, and the result is a medley of fact, fiction, and imprecation. Somewhat similar in tone, if more academic and more substantial, is the work of an American university professor who offers us The German Record—A Political Portrait (William Ebenstein, New York, Rinehart, 1945). Professor Ebenstein, who is not without hope that Germany “can change”—if but slowly—rejects, by writing his book, his own counsel on the German problem, namely, “to declare a moratorium of, say, two years, on books, articles, and lectures on the Germans and the problems they present to the world.” Of even less value is S. H. Steinberg’s A Short History of Germany (New York, Macmillan, 1945), an old-fashioned political narrative that substitutes exhortation for explanation.
The president of Hunter College, George N. Shuster, has for many years been concerned with the future of Germany and the world. His The Germans: An Inquiry and An Estimate (New York, L. MacVeagh-Dial) was published in 1932; and in 1944, in collaboration with Arnold Bergstraesser, he wrote Germany: A Short History (New York, W. W. Norton, 1944). Both works are characterized by a breadth of understanding and humaneness too often lacking in works dealing with Germany. The sickness of which Hitlerism is such a horrible example is seen as not restricted to that country. Yet one may question a diagnosis which assumes (in 1932) that “Dr. Bruening has been nothing short of a godsend to his countrymen and even to us,” even though his government “probably ruled against the wishes of the majority of Germans . . . by reason of the police power it was able to marshal.” Even in 1944, Bruening is still staunchly defended, and the “basic explanation for the triumph of Hitlerism” is “found not in the realm of rational calculation, economics, for example, but in that of ethical absolutes,” although “the conflict between social ideals and economic realities” is admitted.
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An undercurrent of economic ideas, if not realities, influences Wilhelm Ropke’s Die Deutsche Frage (Ehlenbach—Zürich, Switzerland, 1945). It is in many respects a superior work; much of what Ropke says is valid and relevant: he recognizes the importance of Germany to Europe and the wider significance of National Socialism, as well as the connection between regimentation and proletarization on the one hand and nationalism and totalitarianism on the other. Ropke is opposed to large-scale industry and monopoly, but his solution appears as impossible as it is archaic: to do away with “regimentation and proletarization.” He wants a confederation of autonomous states with an economic structure that is “pronouncedly anti-collectivist.” How to reverse the growth and tendencies of two hundred years of industrialization is not explained. Ropke does face up to the problem of modern production and totalitarianism, of the incidence of an economy which operates mechanically if not automatically; but his attempt to deal with the problem has about it the earmarks of the incantations of a witch doctor called upon to purge a patient of “evil spirits.”
Veit Valentin’s The German People (New York, Knopf, 1946) is a book as pretentious as it is shallow, full of errors and downright inanities, made all the more glaring by a very awkward translation. More of a chronicle than a history, it is a mere catalogue of names, events, and dates. Valentin’s account reminds one of Ambrose Bierce’s definition of history as “an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”
Historians, no angels, have not feared to tread, but psychiatrists have rushed in with heavy step.
A practicing psychiatrist, Richard L. Brickner (Is Germany Incurable? Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1943), explains the German problem as one of group paranoia. He solemnly tells us that the “deliberate massacre of all Germans is of course intolerable,” but offers no other specific remedies. A member of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University, David Abrahamsen (Men, Mind, and Power, New York, Columbia, 1945), offers us such helpful explanations as the following: “Life in the dark forests affected the thinking of the German tribes; they felt that the woods were full of secret beings who induced fear in the people living there. . . .” The German language is so full of harsh sounds because of “the belief that it was unmanly to talk nicely and smoothly. . . .” “It apparently did not occur to [Hitler] that he was conquering an entire country [Austria] in order to revenge himself on his father. . . .” “If [the Germans] could develop a taste for democracy, then they would be able to want a democracy.” The Germans are “materialistic, aggressive, and submissive” and also “romantic, seclusive, and idealistic.”
Gerhart Eisler and two collaborators have written The Lesson of Germany (New York, International, 1945), “a guide, a modest attempt to interpret the past history of Germany which will enable the reader better to study and understand the future course of the German people in the light of their past.” Unfortunately, after the reader has gone more than 200 pages, the authors deny the significance of Germany’s past altogether. However, one can hardly quarrel with such a conclusion when it is based on such an account of Germany’s past as these authors give.
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We Do not quite turn to the sublime with two other books, but one has real promise; the other represents substantial achievement. The first is Germany: A Self Portrait (New York, Oxford, 1944) which Harlen R. Crippen has edited with frequent editorial remarks. His comments alone are worth the price of the book. Though one may quarrel with his selections, my major criticism is not concerned with these, but rather with the fact that the hard-headed Mr. Crippen has been much too close-fisted with his own introductions and editorial remarks. Attacking “bargain-counter racism,” he sees the “obscene and criminal Third Reich” as “the manifestation of the profound maladjustments in German society.” While his approach is analytical, his mood and style are impressionistic; but some real insights result. His summary of the period before 1914 and his review of conditions between the wars express in a very few pages a terrible indictment of German—and world—society. It is to be hoped that Germany: A Self Portrait will be followed by Germany: A Portrait.
A distinguished example of historical writing is A. J. Taylor’s The Course of German History (New York, Coward McCann, 1946). Though it is dogmatic and arrogant, and Taylor’s wartime passions and resentments often get the better of his temper and tongue, The Course of German History demonstrates that the nature of the German problem rests in the history of the German people, who, like other peoples, have been shaped and influenced by social, economic, and political forces rather than by innate characteristics—racial or otherwise. Nurture, not nature, is the basis of the evil, and Taylor attempts to portray the influences that have shaped Germany and the Germans. He is not always successful, he is often exasperating, and he is sometimes illogical, yet there does emerge from his frequently brilliant pages, as from no other book, the history of Germany, the story of its development.
Significant is the geographical setting. In the center of Europe, Germany lacks geography: without natural frontiers, the German plain is intersected by great rivers that serve to divide, but neither to confine nor protect. Germany is in the center ethnographically as well. The artificiality and impermanence of its frontiers have made it the stamping ground of the peoples of Europe. No study of the “national character” of the Germans can ignore these influences; yet no serious study can see them as the all-controlling factors.
More important were the great geographical discoveries of the 16th century. In most of Western Europe this was a time of commercial prosperity, of national consolidation, the period of the rise of the modern state. The central location of Germany had made it for a time the highway and the entrepôt of world trade. But this very central position was to prove her undoing. The discoveries of the explorers of the 16th century shifted world commerce from land to sea, and thus spelled the decline of Central Europe. The collapse of Germany was inherent in the opening of the Cape route to India. The effects of the Lutheran Reformation only compounded the disastrous consequences.
As was to be true later in 1848, the masses took too literally the words of reform and revolution. Luther, shocked by the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525, turned to the princes and bolstered their fading power. The revival of feudal authority was a concomitant of the decline in trade, of the reversion to a more self-contained and stagnant economy; the Lutheran Reformation by strengthening that tendency helped to sunder Germany. Elsewhere in Western Europe, religious changes reinforced national power, but Lutheranism failed to establish itself as the religion of all Germans and thus accentuated disunity.
Sorely burdened, Germany left alone might yet have attained that nationhood achieved by her contemporaries, but the latter, fearing their own weakness as their neighbor became stronger, intervened. The Thirty Years War (1618-48) wasted Germany. The remarkably stable Peace of Westphalia (whose provisions remained generally operative for 150 years) made vested the interest of those who profited by a divided Germany. The result was that the multitudinous German states prospered—in the persons of their princes—while the people languished.
It is not strange that France, Germany’s strongest neighbor, always had a profound influence on the course of German history. France prevented German unity in the 17th century; in the 19th she acted as a spur to German unification. In one respect the French Revolution realized the aims of Richelieu—the destruction of the feudal lords and the centralization of power in the national state. But while Richelieu had sought to keep Germany divided, the French Revolution tended to unite her, even if only against the French. This unity was impossible on any firmer basis because of the lag in commercial and industrial development, and the economic backwardness of the bourgeoisie. There is reality behind the epigram: ‘The French rule the land, the English the sea, and the Germans the clouds.” Napoleon soon defeated the German coalition, but permitted the survival of Prussia.
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Bolstered by the final defeat of France, and jealously guarding their prerogatives, the Prussian and Austrian ruling classes engaged in a campaign against nationalism and liberalism. As Taylor puts it, “the classes that ruled Prussia would dig their own graves provided that they retained a monopoly of wielding the spade.” Yet economic necessities could not be ignored. With political unification thwarted, economic cooperation was established by the Zollverein. An economic ersatz for political unification, it was not a durable substitute. The revolutionary events of 1848 constituted an attempt to incorporate in political reality the economic facts of German life. The revolutions of 1848, inside and outside of Germany, were essentially middle class. Everywhere industrialism had bred a rising bourgeoisie, discontented and frustrated by the old forms of society, eager for a new world in its own image.
Not wholly successful anywhere, the revolutions of 1848 nevertheless set the stage for further advances everywhere except in Germany. There the fiasco led to disastrous consequences. The lack of success in Austria was just as complete, yet it was not fatal; it was but symptomatic of the industrial backwardness of the huge, sprawling, and incoherent Austrian Empire. Doomed to relative impotence, Austria did not develop the contradictions inherent in the functioning of a modern industrial economy within a feudal state. But for Germany, the failure of the middle class to realize its “rendezvous with destiny”—or at least with history—was to have tragic results.
The revolution was doomed to failure by circumstances beyond the control of any of its participants. The Germans sought to become, and were becoming, like everyone else, but much too late and hence too much. German industrialism was a late growth, vaulting where others grew slowly and integratedly. This belated but sudden growth of industry in Germany had created a working class that was less bourgeois in its outlook than the working class of other countries. Late industrialization had created large units. The small-scale enterprises so characteristic of Great Britain and France, which were the result of a relatively slow process of industrialization, were absent in Germany. Hence the German workers, employed in relatively large-scale establishments, with little hope of ever becoming capitalists themselves, were much more class-conscious than their counterparts in other countries. That more than anything else explains the appearance of a Marx in Germany.
Taylor ignores the reasons, but he is aware of the significance: “. . . the cause of national union must be adorned with the attractions of socialism. This was the program of Marx and Engels, to which they devoted the rest of their lives, until their national starting-point was almost forgotten. They advocated socialism so as to cause a revolution; only much later did their followers suppose that they had advocated revolution in order to accomplish socialism.” On the other hand, it was their fear of socialism that haunted the German middle classes for the next century. And it was the failure of 1848 that robbed them of faith in their own political capacities. The fiasco of ’48 and its “proof” of the inherent dangers of political action made the German middle classes not merely tired, but afraid.
While the events of 1848 set the pattern, the crisis of the 1860’s in Prussia saw it finally completed. The 1860’s were the period of liberalism’s great—and, in the light of subsequent events, final—opportunity to seize control of events in Germany. But the Prussian liberals, obsessed by the incubus of 1848, dared not press their advantage. This difficulty of the German bourgeoisie was Bismarck’s opportunity, and he exploited it to the full.
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Although Mr. Taylor brings forth little that is new to the well informed, his portrayal of Bismarck’s motives and actions must be much in the nature of a revelation to generations of American college students: Bismarck, his fanciful Memoirs notwithstanding, had not the slightest intention of unifying Germany when he assumed office as Prussian Chancellor. Nor did he, at the outset, favor war with Austria. His only program was the preservation of the Junker social order; what he would have most preferred was a return to the age of Metternich. A unified, single German national state was nowhere in his picture. Events forced his hand. Strength was needed against an Austria that had not given up its own “German policy.” With strife inevitable, Bismarck took the initiative. The Seven Weeks War of 1866 eliminated the Austrian bugbear, and the gratitude of the Prussian liberals was unbounded. By a vote of more than three to one, the Prussian parliament forgave Bismarck for his sins against the constitution. Liberalism had not disappeared; it simply disqualified itself as a force in German history. As nothing succeeds like success, the course of German history was now clear. Liberalism had sold its birthright, but for fifty years it had rich porridge.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1 was “inevitable”: Bismarck had to consolidate his gains; France needed to expiate her inept policies and “solve” her internal problems. The crushing defeat administered to France resolved any doubts about the future of German policy. The constitution of the German Reich, proclaimed not in Germany but in France’s Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, reflected the almost fictional character of German unification. A product essentially of the aristocracy, it was a loose confederation rather than a modern constitution based upon centralization of power. It was not a “dictatorship of Prussia” as Taylor dogmatically asserts. Nor is Taylor fully emancipated from the stock version, often repeated by the Germans themselves in a breast-beating mood, of the absolute impotence of the Reichstag (elected, incidentally, by universal manhood suffrage and by secret ballot, whereas in Great Britain, for example, the secret ballot was not attained until 1872 and universal manhood suffrage not until 1918). The Chancellor and the Bundesrat might fume and rant, but the only menace that the Reichstag faced was dissolution, with later re-election if the Reichstag members truly represented the wishes of their constituents. That is not to say that the Reichstag’s powers were comparable to those of the British House of Commons or the French Chamber of Deputies: unlike those bodies, the Reichstag had no direct control over the Chancellor and the ministers of state. The distinction is significant, but it should not blur the fact that the Reichstag possessed real power. (Nor should it be overlooked that the growth of cabinet government in Great Britain has tended to curtail the actual powers of the House of Commons.) It is preposterous to hold that “the government of Germany was as autocratic as the government of Tsarist Russia.”
But such extravagant statements do not seriously detract from Taylor’s keen analysis of the reasons for the introduction in Germany of direct universal manhood suffrage—opposed by the liberals of the 19th century. Both the liberals and Bismarck anticipated that universal suffrage would swamp the liberals, and their fear was Bismarck’s hope. It was precisely because German unification was achieved, at best, with the passive resistance of the liberals, that the fruits of unification were not liberal. The liberals accepted the constitution because it gave them unification—and prosperity. The workers gained the vote—and social legislation.
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The retarded unification of Germany was responsible for the failure of liberalism to take hold. Liberalism was on the wane in Western Europe after 1870, its best assets shrinking, its liabilities ever more apparent. Freedom of the individual, the dignity of man, could not be attained in a social order that thrived on inequality and exploitation. “Liberal” capitalism proved a contradiction in terms, and the faith that gave such spirit and buoyancy to most of the first hundred years after the French Revolution was ebbing. If one date and one event must be taken as the pivotal point, it was the crash of 1873, from which free capitalism never fully recovered. The lag characteristic of social institutions embalmed liberalism in Britain and France. Not perfectly, and even less in France than in Britain, but sufficient unto the day. (To be sure, even Britain showed evidences of strain on the eve of 1914, and the masses, as well as recalcitrant aristocrats who sought in a last desperate gamble to hold on to a show of power, chafed, while the middle class itself was progressively losing its confidence. But the resources of capitalism in Britain were not yet exhausted, and the sense of continuity, the pride of history, helped keep British society relatively well balanced.)
In Germany, the middle classes had in 1848 rejected a unification that carried in it the seeds of democracy and revolution. In the 1860’s they were confronted not merely with the possibility but with the fact of a unification that carried with it aristocratic rule. They acquiesced, to their economic glory but to their everlasting social and political humiliation. The formal proclamation of a unified German state in 1871 left the German middle classes with a sense of inferiority, shame, and guilt—a state of mind from which they never recovered and which their economic success all the more emphasized. Hence their grumbling, but also their restraint in never actually challenging Bismarck’s power. They achieved all their demands—except political and social power. To make things easier for them and to insure his own retention of power, Bismarck conjured up specters: France, the Catholics, the Social Democrats—all served, each in its time, to the point of exhaustion. By 1890 dictatorship seemed the only alternative, but the young and ambitious William II dismissed the “Iron Chancellor” and sought to resolve the internal difficulties by winning over the masses to the cause of German glory.
Everywhere in Europe—and in the United States, too—this was the period of imperialism and demagogic chauvinism. The resemblance between Theodore Roosevelt and William II is striking. By 1890 pose had replaced pomp. Bismarck had not lacked either, but William II was even more of a poseur. His policy was the logical continuation of 1871, just as Hitler’s policy was the logical continuation of 1890. The dismissal of Bismarck was approved by the Chief of the German General Staff, “who believed that a more demagogic policy would strengthen the army and so enable Germany to take a more forceful line in foreign affairs.”
For four years Chancellor Caprivi carried out a policy which, though it was more demagogic than real, proved too strong for the Junkers and National Liberals. Provoking extreme resistance, Caprivi could only remain in power by overthrowing the existing order. For this almost no one was prepared, and Germany returned to a more conservative policy under Hohenlohe and his successors. But it was already too late for that and that alone. A whipping boy had to be found; internal tensions and discontents had to be sublimated if the social order was to remain unchanged. “World Policy”—bluster and alarms—served as the great outlet and distraction. Bismarck’s policy, much exaggerated, became the touchstone of success. The French and the British did not neglect to act likewise—but Germany, with internal strife more pronounced, was forced into a position much more exaggerated.
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This policy lasted a dozen years and broke down in 1906. The failure of the Algeciras Conference marked the end of successes won by mere threat of force. Ultimately, the decision rested with strength itself, not merely the show of strength. The slogan “the Fatherland is in danger” continued to rally the country, but was becoming ineffectual in foreign affairs. Worse, it helped to make war unavoidable. Crippen best catches the mood: “The crazy zig-zags by which war was several times averted only served to strengthen the popular illusion that war was an illusion. Hairbreadth escapes encouraged the German rulers to engage in further rash enterprises—for bellicose acts and warlike words were usually followed by substantial concessions from other powers. And when thirteen years of the century had passed, the proudest boast of the Hohenzollerns was that there had been no war, and it was implied, there would be none. It was a thin story, but the Germans along with other nations wanted to believe.”
As with the liberals, the ubiquitous policy of the “lesser evil” had infected the German Social Democrats, despite their socialist catechisms. The unanimous Reichstag vote for war credits (after 96 out of the 110 Social Democratic deputies had previously, in a secret caucus, decided to support the government) came as a shock to Lenin, but merely proved that Bernstein’s plea for a revision of Marxism was a more realistic appraisal of the Social Democratic position in Germany. Mass education, popular suffrage, social insurance, and a standard of living higher than that in any other of the Continental countries had undermined revolutionary ideology. The German worker was a German first and foremost, and the laggards were rallied by the cry that the “Cossacks” would sweep down into Germany. And certainly the German working class did not wish to exchange the Kaiser for the knout.
Though they might differ as to aims, all Germans entered into the war of 1914 with high hopes. But as the war dragged on, unanimity was shattered; as hardships increased, so did discontent. As the home front grew more querulous under the strain of war, and the civilian government more inept, the army was forced to take over real control.
The failure of the German war effort meant the end of army rule. The military leaders were no “die-hards”; they were ready, willing, and anxious to relinquish the reins when they themselves failed. The dispatch with which the government of Germany was transformed into a democratic republic is more attributable to the consent of the army than the ardent desire of the Social Democrats to assume power.
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Shuster and Bergstraesser are at their best in describing the events of 1918 and 1919. Few really wanted the revolution but “one must not assume that the army command used revolution as a strategic device to transfer blame for the debacle on other shoulders. . . . It had simply lost its nerve.” Here, clearly, was a revolutionary situation, the opportunity for revolution so often looked forward to by the Social Democrats. But the Social Democrats and their millions of followers who had laboriously acquired a stake in German society saw in this situation only a threat to their own stability, and proceeded, not to revolution, but to save a society of which they felt themselves to be an integral part. No less than Ebert, who, as he himself said, “hated revolution like sin,” the German working class viewed with horror the possibility of revolution—with its expected uprooting and chaos; their abhorrence was made all the greater by the events in Russia. So long as the former ruling class did not press its demands, so long as the German working class achieved its major aims of peace and a democratic political organization, so long was the “revolution” successful and so long was it unnecessary to destroy the former ruling class physically.
As a matter of fact, the Social Democrats could not eliminate the Junkers and their adherents without destroying themselves. For close on the heels of the Social Democratic Revolution was the terror of an uprising on the Russian model. And it seemed plain to socialists and democrats, even as early as the end of 1918, that the Russian Revolution was a perversion of socialism. Having no other resources with which to resist the extreme Left, the government established an alliance with the High Command in order to preserve order. The Spartacists, unable to attain their ends by democratic means, preached—and practiced—violence almost as an end in itself. Against their own better judgment their leaders followed the irresponsible crowds—to death and destruction.
The Social Democrats were trade-union leaders, not revolutionaries; they endeavored to preserve the German state and most of its institutions. They sought a democratic regime, the ideal of 1848. And, indeed, the Weimar Constitution of 1919 was the most democratic constitution ever adopted by any state. All power resided in the people, and there were no “due process of law” clauses to prevent socialization. But neither did it provide for socialism automatically. The German people could have it, but first they must want it, and whether they did or not could be ascertained through the democratic process. Whatever the reason, this they never did. Even in the first post-revolution election, in January, 1919, the Social Democrats did not have a majority, nor would fusion with the more radical socialist groups have given them a majority. And the socialist vote, of every persuasion (the Spartacists, numerically insignificant, “boycotted” the election), reached its high-water mark in the election of January 1919. Never was it possible to achieve socialism in Germany by parliamentary means—a fact that has generally been ignored.
If democratic socialism was unachievable, so was reaction impossible without the destruction of the values of those groups in Germany which favored a middle-class republic along much the same lines as did analogous groups in the United States, France, and Great Britain. But the failure of democratic capitalism and the seeming impossibility of democratic socialism catapulted more and more German citizens into the ranks of a party which was bound to no past, and which, rootless and unfettered by coherent principles, could chameleon-like assume the colors of the moment. As rationality and responsibility failed in meeting the problems thrown up by the Great Depression, the party of irrationality and irresponsibility reaped the harvest. For between them, the inflation and the depression destroyed—figuratively if not literally—that class in Germany which has everywhere been the champion of democracy and liberalism.
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There was an integral and causal connection in the 19th century between the middle class, democracy, and liberalism. The great question of our time is whether this trinity still holds. Karl Marx, who had emphasized the original historical connection between capitalism and liberalism, held not merely that socialism, democracy, and liberalism were compatible, but that their synthesis was inherent and necessary if liberalism was to survive. He became a socialist for the very reason that, as he held, capitalism stifled liberalism. To him socialism was true liberalism, that liberalism which proclaimed the dignity of the individual as the sine qua non.
The failure of the Russian Revolution was chiefly responsible for the German “disenchantment” with socialism; the failure of democratic capitalism created the void in accepted values. National Socialism sought to occupy this vacuum.
The economic crisis that began in 1929 was worldwide, but its effects in Germany were greater than anywhere else. With fewer resources—material and spiritual—to meet the collapse, it is natural that the consequences were more catastrophic. It is true as Taylor says, “there was no reason at all why [the crisis] should justify a nationalistic policy and rearmament . . .” but it did result in just that, and not only in Germany. The question of “justification” is somewhat irrelevant. Wherein Germany differed was not in the policy, but in the degree of its application. Fully and even extravagantly applied, it was the policy of fascism or National Socialism—or totalitarianism.
Because of its previous history and the greater impact of the depression, the road to dictatorship was easier to mark out in Germany than in other countries. But one individual who must bear great responsibility for bringing Germany to the precipice from which there was no return is Chancellor Bruening. (It is ironic that one of our great universities should have made him professor of government.) Beginning in 1930, Bruening followed a method of ruling by emergency decrees—not over the protest of the Reichstag, it is true, but without its consent. This method paralyzed the republic; the policies were fatal. Retrenchment which involved the slashing of wages and social services completed the demoralization of those groups that had still remained loyal to the Republic and that now found it more and more impossible to countenance a state ruled by decrees—decrees, moreover, which served but to complete their economic ruin. Disheartened by the turn of events and having no faith in Communism, the democratic working class had the alternative of acquiescence and apathy, or National Socialism. Whichever they chose, Hitler found the going easy.
The British workers, too, had felt themselves betrayed by MacDonald in 1931, but Mac-Donald ruled through Parliament, and parliamentary majorities could be changed. Bruening ruled over Parliament and there was nothing to change, short of revolution. In Britain the middle class still had faith in Parliament and “democracy”; both could be turned to their own cause. Not so in Germany. Only dictatorship could be trusted in time of crisis. Fascism was not unique to Germany but its success was. And it succeeded in Germany because the pre-conditions were there: the breakdown of traditional values, the unwillingness—and perhaps inability—to embrace social revolution, and a literate and desperate population that could accept Caesarism.
For fascism—the negation of individual personality—requires active participation by the many. That is why Italian fascism was such a sham: Mussolini’s histrionics may have amused but they never seriously moved the great masses, who could no more “appreciate” and share in fascism than they could in democracy. The aspirations of Italian fascism were beyond Italy’s possibilities. A long-suffering, less literate population could not accept—nor could Mussolini successfully fashion, in an economically backward country—that synthesis summed up in the words “National Socialism.” In Germany, however, men grasped desperately for meaning, for a philosophy of living that was more consonant with their actual mode of behavior than the democratic liberalism of the 19th century which had failed them in the crucial test. Consequences notwithstanding, men sought a mythology, in the best sense of the word, to synthesize their experience, to organize their values, to make the events of their time intelligible.
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The events in Germany provide the lessons of our time. Do they but adumbrate the future? Whether or not we are our brother’s keeper, is his illness our illness? I think it was Dorothy Thompson who remarked some years back that the Jews were like everyone else, only more so. A haunting fear that this may be even more true of the Germans—and an effort to avoid the basic issues thus posed—may explain much in our current thinking about the nature of Germany’s past. The malady of our age can be glossed over and even denied if it can be made apparent that the Germans are like no one else and even more so.
If one may paraphrase Mussolini, it is Germany that is now the stinking corpse. Unable to be buried, unable to be ignored, with the smell of its death pervasive, Germany dead seems still to pollute the world as much as Germany living and aggressive. A horrible, if unvoiced, suspicion that her death rattle may have marked the final agony of Western civilization has focused attention on her as a case history. To prove the uniqueness of Germany, to divorce her from the stream of world history—that, apparently, has become the task. Eagerly and desperately, we have reached out for a formula that would provide a solution for our difficulties without requiring us to recast our lives or our society. The “devil theory” is probably as old as man, and age has not attenuated its appeal.
The significant problem in the study of Germany’s past (and present and future) is to recognize that Germany belongs, in its development, to the community of nations. Simply to outlaw Germany by fiat, as so many historians have done, is not only intellectually shallow and invalid; what is worse, it tends to lull us into a false sense of security and prevent even an attempt at a proper remedy.
Any study that is to explain Germany’s history as well as our own cannot a priori rule out those features which are common to our civilization. That is not to say that Germany’s past is exactly like our own, or that of Great Britain, or France—or Russia. The commercial decline of the German states in the 16th century, the Lutheran Reformation, the failure of the revolution of 1848, Bismarck, Versailles, postwar deflation and depression, all played their part in a culmination that was peculiar to Germany. But each of these factors is itself the product of forces that acted on all the Western European countries, influencing them at different times and with different strength. The process of industrialization, for “example, operated in all countries, creating, weakening, or strengthening groups with special interests and special political drives, and leading to common political configurations.
Germany, if we look at history with the eyes of historic objectivity, is neither “different” nor “the same.” Each country unquestionably has institutions peculiar to itself, products of its special historical development and growth. But the underlying and fundamental unity of the forces which make up our modern civilization forces itself into any analysis which is intended to make more clear the true conditions of our era. The task of the historian—or of anyone else who is concerned with our world—is to present a frame of reference by which we can evaluate similarities and differences. Only then can we judge, for example, whether fascism is generic in modern industrial society, and what institutions (political, social, economic, and cultural—if these can be separated) make society more readily susceptible to the blandishments of those who pretend to ride “the wave of the future.” What must we do to avoid having the bell toll for us?
“A fable agreed upon,” was Napoleon’s characterization of history. If the history of Germany cannot quite support the sins of the world, its historiography—history as written—too often now seeks to achieve this purpose. Germany, an outcast in the world, finds its counterpart in Germany an outcast in history. But this is the easy, dangerous way. More objective history will lead to a better understanding of the German case; and that in turn may help us to a deeper, truer understanding of the unsolved problems of the world we live in, and to an avoidance of perils that may lie latent in our own American industrial society.
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