The German Question

CONCLUSION. THE SOLUTION

The enemy who has merely been overthrown can rise again, but the enemy reconciled is truly overcome.

SCHILLER, Ueber Anmut und Würde

When civilized men fight cannibals they do not eat them.

G. K. CHESTERTON

THE THREEFOLD REVOLUTION

WE have treated of the nature of the German question to the best of our knowledge, in all conscientiousness, and at such length as the scale of this book permits. Now we have reached the point at which we may say how this question is to be solved, after the collapse of the whole political, economic, social, and mental and moral structure of Germany in a catastrophe such as world history can seldom have seen. We can be brief, as the solution follows naturally from our inquiry. We need only indicate its main lines, without giving reasons and without entering into details. The reasons have been supplied by the whole of this book, and as for the details they can easily be furnished when the time is ripe. We must issue a warning against repeating the mistake of 1919, and drafting a brand new Constitution for the Reich, without first giving deep consideration to the question of the political, economic, and moral foundations on which it must be based in order to fulfil its paper promises.

We will say at once that this is the world-historic hour in which the German question can truly and finally be settled to the satisfaction of Germany and Europe, if the insight and the energy can be summoned up to make use of the brief interval during which everything is in flux. Anything that is omitted in the months to come will remain, we fear, beyond reach for generations.

As after the first world war, the solution consists of a threefold revolution, in the moral, the political, and the economic and social field. For each of these three revolutions the time is now ripe as it has not been for generations.

We begin with the moral revolution, on which all else depends: the German question has at all times been essentially a mental and moral one. There is no hope for the Germans, no salvation for their civilization, and no prospect of any restoration of their position in the world, if they do not genuinely and unreservedly take account of the hard reality—of the measure and the causes of their disaster, of the fatal mistakes they have made, of the unspeakable crimes that have been committed in their name and by their fellow-countrymen inside and outside Germany, and of the crushing responsibility that is theirs. Now is the moment for the “repentance and rebirth” of which the German philosopher Max Scheler spoke after the first world war.

We believe that many Germans are ready for this. All the evidence goes to show that—as might well be expected—they are a people still completely stunned by the blow they have suffered. As great as their physical hunger will be their hunger for the truth. Now, after twelve years of lies and propaganda, they will be not only ready but eager to listen to a full and straightforward exposition of the causes of their misfortune, and thereafter to turn over a new leaf in their history. What the Germans want to know before all else is just what it is that has happened to them. The answer to that question should be placed in their hands as quickly as possible, before they can fall once more under the influence of demagogues—as quickly as possible, and in the most effective and authoritative form. Only Germans themselves can do this, while the most elementary psychology could tell us that any condescending lectures from outside would be worse than doing nothing at all.

Everything conceivable must be done to arouse the conscience of all Germans who have not been hopelessly corrupted by the diabolical system of National Socialism, in order to help them to discover the truth and to bring them on to the path of spiritual and moral recovery. They must be wrested from the hypnosis effected by twelve years of an infernal propaganda, and they must be convincingly shown that seldom in history has the responsibility for war lain so entirely on the shoulders of a single government or been so entirely indubitable as that of the Third Reich, and that it is the responsibility for the most frightful war of all ages. The Germans must be accustomed once more to sound and nourishing mental food, and must be given books that reveal the imperishable ultimate values of our Western civilization and the Satanism of Nazism. The crimes of the regime must be placed before them so relentlessly that not even the most obdurate can deny them any longer. Doubtful as has been the value of the much too elementary world propaganda about the concentration camps, it was undoubtedly salutary for the Germans, though, once more, the most elementary psychology forbids us to expect of them an open confession to their conquerors of their feelings of shame at the Nazi atrocities.1

There is no need to explain again here why we may count on the Germans to be ripe for this moral revolution. What they are suffering is the complete bankruptcy of a spirit, a policy, a type of patriotism and of collective morality, which the Nazis had utihzed in order to carry matters to the uttermost extreme. In blind obstinacy the wrong path was pursued to the end, until the leaders themselves saw no way out except through taking their own lives. The people, as such, will not commit suicide, but will turn back provided that they are shown a way back. The currency of the Greater Prussian collective morality has become as completely valueless as the mark did in November, 1923: there remains no alternative but to create a new spiritual currency.

This moral revolution is the more natural and inevitable since today, in contrast with November, 1918, the question of war guilt cannot but be answered quite plainly even by the most stupid or the most evilly-disposed person. That is the one and only good result of Hitler’s cynicism. Any attempt to talk of a new “war guilt lie” will be disposed of at once by that. Nor is it likely that a new “stab in the back” legend can find anything to feed on. The whole organisation of the German armed forces was involved in catastrophe, and the responsibility of the Generals for Hitler’s rule is so heavy and so unmistakable that they are bound to follow him in downfall and damnation. It is difficult, if not impossible, this time to think of saving any vestige of the glory of Prusso-German arms for a new cult of the flag after they have served under the blood-stained banner of the Swastika.

We also mentioned the first signs of awakening and return to reason of the German intellectuals, after we had had to speak plainly of their heavy responsibility. Here is the critical and also, perhaps, the most hopeful point of the moral revolution. Once the new ideas and principles have found their way into the Universities, the schools, the newspaper staffs, the Churches, and the law courts, we shall really be able to speak of a renascence of Germany. Thus every effort will have to be directed in the first place to furthering the gratifying beginnings of a new outlook among the German intellectuals, to ridding Universities, schools, courts, editorial staffs, and Churches of the unteachable, and to setting in their place the representatives of a new spirit. The all-important thing is to create a new intellectual élite, which will then see to the communication of the new ideas and standards to a wider public. But it will also be necessary that the men and women involved, completely exhausted in body and mind after twelve and a half years of isolation, brutalization, over-exertion, undernourishment, and nervous strain, shall be looked after and given rest and opportunity of spiritual recovery and of renewed contact with the world. Every effort and every expenditure to this end will repay itself a thousand times over. A world able to control its passions, and to listen only to the voice of reason, would probably regard it as one of the most valuable steps toward the solution of the German question to take some hundreds of German professors, clergymen, editors, and judges at once for several months to an Alpine hotel: there, amid the peaceful glories of nature, with good food and comfort, they would be able through constant touch with foreign colleagues, and through the study of the foreign books, periodicals, and newspapers of the last ten years, to recover the mental and physical energy with which they could successfully take up their office of educators of the people. We ought not to be surprised if it should prove that the Russians were ahead of the Western world in carrying out this idea of a “spiritual and moral sanatorium” on their own lines and for their own purposes.

With the moral revolution must come Germany’s political revolution. It can scarcely be necessary for us to say once more what this must consist of—the dissolution of the Bismarckian empire; the relegation of Prussia to the Elbe line, and the creation of a German Confederation of autonomous Länder (territorial States) which in turn will be ruled on the strict principle of local and regional self-government. It is a revolution that must follow the principle that the rebuilding of Germany must be effected not from above but from below, that is to say from the smallest political units of the Gemeinde, the Kreis, and the Land, a rebuilding that begins with the foundations and not with the roof. It is a further essential element of this revolution that the dominant influence of Prussia shall be broken and the buried tradition of the old German States resuscitated. That means that the Rhineland, Westphalia, Hanover, Hesse, Schleswig-Holstein, and the rest, must acquire the rank of independent German States or amalgamate into such States. This is the very cure that corresponds to our detailed diagnosis of the German malady. Germany must regain her character of a “nation of nations,” and return to the good traditions from which, three generations ago, she departed to her undoing.

This is at the same time the course that follows with compelling logic from the situation of today.

About a year ago, in a memorandum intended for the Allied diplomats, I wrote: “The whole edifice of the Reich will collapse, and much more completely than in 1918, since the whole framework of the national economy, of the monetary and financial system, of communications and administration, which in 1918 had largely remained intact, will now fall into hopeless ruin. Again in contrast with 1918, there will this time no longer be any organized political life, no parties and programmes, no group ready and able to take over the bankrupt estate of the Third Reich, but only prostration and an immense longing for peace, for civilized life, for order and privacy, a longing born of indescribable loathing for dragooning and propaganda, organization and centralization under command. All that is left of the authority and order and tradition of the past will be regarded as an infinite treasure—the classes representing tradition and continuity, especially the peasants; the unchallenged authority of the churches, of the local and regional notables, and perhaps of a monarch like Prince Rupert of Bavaria; the experience and the reputation of some of the former trade union leaders; and the leadership of the intellectual élite of whose latest development we have reported elsewhere.”

The memorandum went on:

“If we want a closer idea of what such a collapse of Germany really means, we must bear in mind that a cracking social edifice, like any other, will give way at the weakest point. But this weakest point is always the superimposed centre. We may therefore expect to find the whole centralized superstructure of Germany give way under the impact of military, political, and economic disaster, while the local and regional basis will remain standing. There will be no more orders from Berlin .and perhaps not even the technical means of transmitting them, but in the villages, the small towns, and even the great cities and the provinces, life will go on in the most elementary forms. The smaller the political units, the better will be the prospect of the early forming once more of an ordered administration, based on the most urgent requirements and on the past traditions of self-government; of the right men, personally known for their ability and integrity, taking the administration in hand; and of no new demagogues and mystical leaders interfering with the sober task of organizing life on a local or regional basis. Here the undeniable German sense of order and discipline and decency will show itself. After the Nazi scoundrels have been dealt with and new attempts to fish in troubled waters have been suppressed, anarchy will be the least likely thing in Germany, unless we give that name to the spontaneous decentralization that will then be inevitable. This spontaneous decentralization, which we must expect after the downfall of Nazi Germany, will be so much the stronger since it will imply the turning away from a centre, namely Prussia, which will then be regarded everywhere west of the Elbe as the symbol of a mentality that has lost, to put it mildly, a good deal of its authority.”

It was not difficult to be right in these forecasts. With the Third Reich, the German Reich founded by Bismarck came to its end. The third stroke is usually fatal. Germany can be reborn only if she completes the political revolution we have described: we will add a few considerations of importance as soon as we come to speak of the tasks of the victors.

Now, we said that the moral and the political revolution form a whole. If the political revolution is to be successful, it requires an accompanying moral one. The reverse is also true: the political revolution is the indispensable condition of the moral. Not only will it be an invaluable school of democracy and citizenship for the Germans, facing them with the concrete tasks of local self-administration, and preserving them in the smaller political units from the rule of the impersonal masses, but we are firmly convinced also that the Germans will find their way back to their better selves only if they are liberated from the violation which Greater Prussia and later the centralized unitary State meant for them, and return to the political structure of the period in which they showed to the world other and more likeable features. Is not the Austrian in many ways more attractive than the German of the Reich because he did not share the abnormal collective existence to which the German has been condemned from Bismarck’s time? We have as yet no idea of how the Bavarian, the Württemberger, the Rhinelander, or the Hanoverian may develop when he is no longer dependent on Berlin but returns to his own tradition—in other words, when he no longer has to live in the “dog-kennel” of which, as we mentioned at the outset of this book, Ludwig Bamberger wrote in 1860. Men speak rightly of the necessity of “re-educating” the German: this political revolution is the chief means of that process, more important than any broadcasting or films, and far more so than putting to school. We advise trying the experiment; there need be no fear about the result. It will be the sort of cure that is produced by giving the ailing body the vitamins it lacks.

Now we can reply at once to the stereotyped objection that this political revolution runs against the current of history, that after Greater Prussia has endured for so long the tradition of the German races is not now strong enough—or however else the objection may be formulated. In reply to this we have three things to say:

First, it is an entirely baseless contention that there is no such thing in history as a return to things that had been mistakenly abandoned. That would mean that there are no renascences, indeed, no return from a wrong path. It would mean, in short, that in history we must misquote Mephistopheles and say that everything that exists deserves not to be destroyed. Is a drunkard to be able to return to the principles of an earlier and better phase in his career—by renouncing alcohol—and not a whole nation? In the name of what philosophy? Surely, only in the name of a nineteenth-century philosophy of history, now largely discarded, which was under the spell of evolutionist thought.

Secondly, it is a complete mistake to suppose that the traditions of the German races have lost their appeal. All our information from Bavaria, Hanover, Westphalia, the Rhineland, and other German territories, goes to show the opposite. Fortunately, we may be assured that there is to be found everywhere in western Germany this thoroughly healthy and promising reaction against the herd-intoxication of the unitary State—“One Reich, one folk, one Führer!”—against Prussianism and against the neo-German spirit that came in with it. The former spirit is at least strong enough to be utilized by a clear-sighted and intelligent policy in order to carry out the political revolution we want.

It is almost tragic, however, that many people who have no more love than we have ourselves for the Prussian spirit regard our programme of Germany’s political revolution as romantic and old-fashioned and consequently unpractical. In doing so they capitulate, no doubt involuntarily, to a mentality which Bismarck sought to spread by every possible means when he gave currency to the defamatory epithets of “enemy of the Reich” or “particularist eccentricity.” Must we tell them yet again that Bismarck himself was the worst of separatists when he used armed force to expel Austria, one of the noblest members of the old Germany? So far as Germany is concerned, we must also bear in mind that the development undergone by the Austrian attitude toward the Reich can perfectly well extend to the other German States. Among the Austrians the “anti-particularists” (Socialists and those parties that represented the section of the middle class that was relatively free from bonds of creed and tradition) longed for Anschluss: then they had experience of what it was really like, and today they are unanimously fighting for their independence. They are doing what should be only natural also for the Bavarians, the Rhinelanders, and the Hanoverians. By what right can it be suggested that what is permitted to one of the victims of 1866, Austria, should be denied to the other, Hanover? Why should not the Bavarians, the Rhinelanders, the Hanoverian’s, be just as sick of Anschluss—which, moreover, was imposed on them by main force—as the Austrians? Anyone who imagines that they have got used to it is mistaken. They may have been more or less indifferent at the time when the Austrians wanted the Anschluss, but the experience of recent years, which has converted the Austrians to a man, will also have opened the eyes of many Bavarians, Hanoverians, and Rhinelanders.

It is undoubtedly true that in the new German Reich—most of all in its last, National Socialist phase—there has been a good deal of migration from State to State. This has, no doubt, smoothed away some of the regional differences and contributed to the making of the appalling Einheitsdeutscher—the “standardized” German—who betrays himself at once by his rasping Prussian accent. It is, however, an immense exaggeration, thank Heaven, to suggest that the Germans are already so reduced to a homogeneous pulp that its component parts are no longer distinguishable. Germany’s recovery depends essentially on this Einheitsdeutscher—who is simply the Bismarckdeutscher with his dangerous mentality—giving place once more to the true type of the Bavarian, Hanoverian, Rhinelander, or Württemberger. Any plan of reform that accepts the “pulp” must fail of its purpose, unless its purpose is actually to preserve the “pulp” on the ground that there is no alternative. The migration within Germany has mainly affected only the industrial centres or the great cities, especially Berlin, and even these in very different degrees, while the bulk of the population of western and southern Germany has been little affected. Munich, thank Heaven, is still Bavarian, Hamburg is still itself, Cologne is still Rhenish, and we can only congratulate ourselves if they are determined to remain so.

Thirdly, however, we must ask—Just what do you want? Do you want to retain the Greater Prussian Reich in any form? In that case you will have to take the German as he is, for he is the creature of that Reich, and the two are worthy of each other. But do you want another and a more satisfactory type of German, a “re-educated” type? If you want this, you must want the means to it, and must adopt those with goodwill and insight and intelligence. And do you clearly realize that this programme is the only hopeful one that you can oppose to the collectivist one announced from Moscow—and now from Berlin?

But this brings us to the third revolution, economic and social. The purpose of the moral revolution is to shake off the spirit of the Bismarckian Reich, and that of the political revolution is to get rid of its constitutional structure: the purpose of the economic revolution must be to make a complete change in its economic and social form. Germany has to be liberated from the degeneracies of monopoly-and-proletariat capitalism, of the growth of the masses, of agrarian and industrial feudalism, of proletarization, of concentration and over-organization, of the agglomeration of industrial power and the destruction of the individuality of labour, in short, from all the economic and social causes of the social crisis of our day, to which, as we have seen, she has fallen victim in so exceptional a degree since Bismarck. If the socio-economic malady which so ravaged Germany, and which prepared the way for Nazism, may be called pre-collectivism and collectivism, and if under Nazism it developed into an almost mortal fever, the cure can only consist in the completely opposite anti-collectivist programme I have described and defended elsewhere.2 By that may be measured the insanity of the idea of proposing to bring happiness to this unfortunate country with a collectivism that is distinguishable from that of Nazism only by its colour and by the different group that would lord it over the people and treat them to its myths and slogans and its own particular mental procrusteanism.

Here we are met at once by the objection that this very regime of collectivism of the past twelve years, with its war and mass bombings and defeat, has so transformed Germany into a pulp of proletarianized masses, used to a stereotyped pattern of community life, that any but a collectivist programme would be Utopian. If that means that these proletarianized masses, in their desperate state, would be particularly susceptible to a repetition of collectivist demagogy, unhappily we can only emphatically agree. If it means further that the victims of the bombings will long be condemned to the abnormal life of barracks and public kitchens and uprootedness, we can only bow to a lamentable fact. But if it means that at bottom these masses want nothing better in this life, then we can only shake our head.

If today one of these proletarianized Germans—one of the workmen or clerks or past members of the middle class—were asked his idea of Paradise, we may be sure that among his first aspirations would be a small house of his own with a garden and a goatshed, an undisturbed family life without training courses, mass meetings, processions, and political flag days; dignity and pleasure in his work, an independent if modest existence, harmony and concord in the family, the neighbourhood, the church, the immediate surroundings; leisure evenings on which he can read a good book, have a look at the seedlings, discuss the big and little questions of the day with his neighbours over the fence, or have a little music or potter about at home, without being upset by the broadcast bawling of some new collectivist Führer. He will be determined to do everything to bring nearer the fulfilment of this dream; he will work and save as never before; he will be happy over the most modest progress, after his experience of what real privation means, and will rather build his own cottage in the most primitive fashion than once more be boxed in a monster block of tenements. The very fact of the fearful destruction of the great German cities has made it possible and even perhaps necessary to proceed to really extensive decentralization of housing and of industries.

We are therefore of the opinion that Germany offers particularly favourable conditions for carrying out an anti-collectivist programme, for the very reason that she has pursued the collectivist path to the very end and must now return to her point of departure. Not everyone will clearly see this; many will only have a very vague feeling of what it is that they want. Such people will easily have their heads turned by the apostles of collectivism. But there are several reasons for believing that these apostles are themselves none too hopeful about the task in front of them: one is that even the “Free Germany Committee” founded and inspired by Moscow has not yet ventured to come forward with a collectivist economic programme, but has carried opportunism to the grotesque length of placing “free initiative in trade and industry” on its programme. These people probably say to themselves, not without justice, that they are sure of the Communists in any case and may count on being understood by them if they appeal to the other classes with reassuring items of this sort in working to secure political control in Germany, on the attainment of which they will be able to do as they like—tactics thoroughly reminiscent of those of Hitler.3 But the very fact that it is considered that these other classes can be won over by anti-collectivist slogans shows us that such subtle interpreters of the mind of the people as the Communists are entirely in agreement with us that the aspirations of the Germans today run absolutely counter to the Communist aim. So much the more reason have the rest of us to realize these aspirations and really to satisfy them, instead of cheating them as was done in the past by the Nazis when they promised freedom and independence to the peasants and artisans.

We need scarcely add that this economic and social revolution forms with the moral and the political revolution a whole whose parts mutually support each other. The moral revolution will only have a really profound effect if it is accompanied not only by the political but also by the economic and social revolution that will liberate the Germans from collectivism, mass-formation, and proletarization, as the political revolution will liberate them from Prussification, mass-democracy, and centralism.

No less intimate is the relation between the economic and social revolution and the political one. Only if the Germans are cured of regimentation and proletarization will they really turn away for good from the narcotics of nationalism and totalitarianism, and recoil in disgust from every sort of political mass-hysteria. It must further be borne in mind that the federative character of Germany, to which the political revolution must lead, can only be associated with an economic structure that is pronouncedly anti-collectivist, just as, conversely, federalism would make collectivism impossible in Germany in the future.4 It is therefore only logical that the new collectivists, who think of entering in Germany into the heritage of the Nazis, should be advocates of the unitary State, and should combat federalism with all the catchwords of the Greater Prussian mentality.

Finally, the close association between the moral, the political, and the economic revolution shows itself specially plainly in an important programme point which we mentioned when we were writing of the omissions of the revolution of 1918. There can no longer be any serious difference of opinion as to the necessity of making an end of the agrarian feudalism of the region east of the Elbe and of the industrial feudalism (that is, in the main, the heavy industries of the Ruhr) west of the Elbe: this is one of the strategic points for the real solution of the German question. The ending of agrarian feudalism east of the Elbe means that the Prussian system of great estates must at last give place to peasant farms and villages, not to an agrarian collectivism of the type, for instance, of the Kolkhozes, which is nothing but agrarian feudalism under another name and at best—even this is not certain—might bring a change in the occupants of the manor house. The ending of industrial feudalism west of the Elbe means today the same as in 1918—the ending of the monopoly of the heavy industries and a radical change in the economic policy (Customs, cartel law, and so on) to which the German heavy industries owed their morbidly monstrous growth and their monopoly position. Similar steps are required for the other powerful elements in German industry.5

THE TASK AND THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE VICTORS

The solution of the German question contained in this threefold revolution is the only one that holds out the promise of real permanence. It permits the fulfilment of all just and reasonable claims from the victors for the future security of Europe in face of Germany; and at the same time it is the solution which every German patriot with clear vision and goodwill must desire for his homeland, once he has himself recognized the nature of the German question. Germany had become a danger to her neighbours because she had become infected with a grave malady. It is therefore the common interest of victors and vanquished that she should at last be thoroughly cured.

Broadly, therefore, the victors need only desire and promote what the Germans themselves would have had to aim at if there had been no war and no defeat. Seldom in history can the conditions have been so favourable for a just and reasonable peace (which, so far as Germany is concerned, would have every prospect of being also a lasting peace), and for a treatment of the vanquished worthy of the civilization of the victors and of the cause on behalf of which they went to war. Broadly, the victors, if their aim is a reasonable and a just peace, that is to say a real solution of the German question, need only act in such a way as to promote the threefold revolution.

In the first place, so far as concerns the moral revolution, the conditions are favourable even from the point of view of the relation of the Germans to the Allies. This applies especially to the Western Allies, with regard to whom, in spite of all the propaganda of the Nazi Government, the Germans are satisfied that they intend to treat the vanquished with justice and in accordance with the principles of Western civilization, to which especially the German west of the Elbe adheres today more strongly than ever. The almost complete destruction of the German cities, which condemned hundreds of thousands to a terrible death and made just as many into beggars overnight, represents a very heavy mortgage on the future, but it is probable that it has made no substantial change in the readiness of the Germans to come to terms with the victors. It should be possible to convince the Germans that the bombing was part of the general conduct of the war into which the Nazis had forced the Allies to enter. Should the Germans have forgotten it, they will have to be reminded that they were the first to adopt this barbaric method, and that through their press they had given their enemies, who did not know that in a totalitarian State there is no public opinion, the impression that they felt nothing but satisfaction at the bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, or Coventry. The Germans, even those who were strongly anti-Nazi, must understand that the war could only be waged on the strictly territorial principle, and could thus make no distinction between just and unjust, and that to that extent the decent Germans were bound to share liability with the Nazis. So much the more strongly should the victors adhere to the view that while the war had to be waged on the territorial principle (locus regit actum, as the phrase runs in international private law), the peace should be concluded on the personal principle, that is to say with the strictest distinction between Nazis and the rest of the Germans.

This distinction between the seducers and their victims is the most important means by which the victors can promote the moral revolution; indeed, it seems to us to be the indispensable condition for it. It demands on the one hand that the whole Nazi hierarchy (all the leaders down to the Blockwart, all organs of the Parteigliederungen, all S.S. and S.A. men, all responsible Nazi journalists, and so on) shall be proceeded against with the utmost rigour; but on the other hand that the rest of the Germans shall be treated in a way that assures the victors of the collaboration without which they cannot administer Germany as civilized men, a way, moreover, that allows free play to the moral revolution in Germany. Either the problem of Germany will be solved with the Germans, or it will not be solved at all, and our principle supplies the only possibility of solution. It preserves the Germans from a nihilistic despair from which the worst would have to be feared. It opens to them the gateway to our common civilization, to which they must be won back if there is to be the slightest hope for our continent. It is the indispensable condition for the moral revolution in Germany, without which all else would be in vain.

This same principle of differentiation permits the victors to avoid the barbaric policy of summary punishment and reprisals that made the Nazis the curse of Europe. It gives them the opportunity of replying to barbarism with justice, reason, and humanity, and saves them from infection by the poison of collective hatred and national pride that brought Germany to the ground—a poison that today menaces the whole world. It is the principle so well expressed by G. K. Chesterton—“When civilized men fight cannibals they do not eat them.”

Let the leading Nazis, then, be treated with all the harshness they have so richly earned. Let them be expropriated and put into labour battalions for the rebuilding of Europe, so far as they are not to be condemned as criminals. But let the other Germans be given hope, and do not let the precious but fugitive moment pass in which the Germans will decide, according to the treatment they receive from the victors, whether to pursue the path of “repentance and rebirth,” or to turn away embittered and disappointed. Nothing would make a deeper impression on the Germans, after witnessing twelve and a half years’ triumph of injustice and summary judgment, than such a reign of equity, which would imply the restoration of civilization and of personal responsibility. Nothing would do more to produce a new and healthy condition of public life in Germany. “There would be little use in punishing the Hitlerites for their crimes if law and justice did not rule, and if totahtarian or police governments were to take the place of the German invaders,” said Mr. Churchill in his broadcast on May 13th, 1945, after the conclusion of the armistice agreement, and we may be sure that many Germans listened attentively—and with a little hope.

If the Allies proceeded differently from this, they would not merely be “eating the cannibals”—they would be playing into the hands of the Russians.

It is no longer particularly difficult to say what is the Russians game. They regard the zone of Germany under their occupation as their exclusive preserve, and as is shown by the feverish activity of their German committee, their ultimate aims are far-reaching. While they are excluding the Western Allies from all influence in the territory east of the Elbe, they are obviously pursuing a policy of infiltration in western Germany, in order in the end to bring this, too, under their influence with the aid of their agents, their broadcasting, and their Communist cells, in the name of the social revolution and also in that of the maintenance of the unity of the Reich and of its Prussian traditions. Meanwhile they will permit themselves, true to the tactics of the Communists in many other countries, to carry out the social revolution in such stages and with such tactics of opportunism as seem expedient. To attain this aim they will do all they can to gain the sympathy of the German masses. They will note with satisfaction the Western Allies’ hatred of Germany and the propaganda by means of which the Allies are actually promoting it; meanwhile, in spite of their own terrible sufferings at German hands, they will probably not permit themselves a policy of passion, which is always disastrous.

Nobody today6 has any reliable knowledge of what is going on behind the iron curtain with which the Russians have shut off their sphere east of the Elbe. They are allowing the world to know only what they want it to know—the world, and especially the western Germans. It is with this reservation that we must accept the news that in Berlin and in other cities the Russians are pursuing a reasonable and generous policy toward the Germans. In any case they want the western Germans to see them in this light, and in any case this is the policy demanded by common sense. The more the Western Allies were to do the opposite, the more certainly would the Russians attain the aim of their policy of infiltration. All the more so since they can point out, and not without truth, that the fearful work of destroying the German towns was left mainly to their Allies, a fact that in itself gives the Russians an advantage.

From the standpoint of the victors, too, the solution of the German question by means of the threefold revolution forms a whole, whose parts condition each other. They can carry out the policy of just and humane treatment of the Germans, which favours the moral revolution, with the more assurance the more resolutely they promote at the same time the political and the economic revolution.

If the Allies adopt our conception of the essential political revolution it will be well not to try to force it upon the Germans, but to make a point of avoiding anything that might disturb or even cripple the forces of Germany’s spontaneous political decentralization. They will find it useful to encourage the Germans with their own experience, and to give them advice in the task of building up a new political life once more in the small political units on democratic and Liberal principles. Sooner or later they will become convinced of the necessity of giving help to the industrial regions with their motley proletarian population, and to the inhabitants of the destroyed cities, as man to man. But everywhere the wisest thing will be to turn to the leading classes that represent tradition and continuity, and to the persons who enjoy natural authority, to collaborate with them—in the identification and punishment of the worst Nazis as in other matters—and to leave them as free a hand as possible in the work of reconstruction.

While in the smallest administrative districts the Allies should transfer sole responsibility as soon as possible to the Germans, they have a special task in connexion with the organization of these districts in larger units. Loose as the German federation of States may be at first, it will be necessary to set up a central authority for the temporary purpose of the fulfilment of the conditions of armistice and of peace and for the permanent task of ensuring a minimum of integration in trade and industry, currency and finance. This central co-ordination should be reserved by the Allies to themselves alone for a reasonable period, until we may have reason to hope that the German problem has been solved within the framework of a new European order. In this way they will give the German States time to strengthen their separate life and their regional consciousness to such a degree that they will later face a federal centre in German hands with the whole weight of a re-established regional tradition.

This task of the Allies stands out still more clearly if we indicate the two main errors they may commit. One would be to regard the imperial unit forged by Bismarck as inviolable and as an outcome of historic evolution that cannot be unmade. It has been one of the main purposes of this book to show that that view is unjustified and dangerous. To make it the basis of a policy for Germany would not only mean letting slip for a second time after 1918 a unique opportunity for solving the German question, but would actually result in making the problem more insoluble than ever. If the victors respect German “unity,” they will find themselves compelled to treat this “German lump” all the more harshly, in order to punish it and by main force to render it harmless for a long time to come. If Greater Prussia is left intact, logic will demand that it shall be held down by all sorts of measures of compulsion, territorial mutilations, a harsh occupation and strict control, and by a brutal weakening of its economic capacity. It is true that in this way peace, so far as it might be threatened by Germany, might be assured for some time—so long, in fact, as the existing alliances remain intact. But it is more than probable that the readiness of the Germans for reflection and regeneration would turn into hatred, treachery, and exasperation. The result would be the triumphant resurrection of Prussia and of a Prussianized Germany, perhaps under a Communist totalitarianism.

That would be one of the two main errors. The other would be a dismemberment of Germany with the open intention of punishing her and crippling her. Such an enforced partition of the Reich would be the surest way of hopelessly discrediting a movement that otherwise would be entirely natural and would correspond to the policy which sensible and clear-headed Germans would themselves regard as the only possible way of escape from their situation. Every German federalist would be regarded at once as a “separatist” and a traitor to the common German cause; all forces of spontaneous political decentralization would be crippled, and the Prussian mentality would triumph once more.

The second error would be the more unpardonable since it is completely unnecessary if all that has been said in this book carries any conviction.

Thus the sensible policy would be to carry out the political decentralization and de-Prussification of Germany with the Germans and not against them. It would be granted to them as a concession, not imposed as a punishment. In this way two birds would be killed with one stone: Europe—exactly as Heeren prophesied and demanded 120 years ago (see page 152)—would be protected from Germany in a way which every clear-minded German could at the same time regard as the one real solution of the problem of his own country, and which, as a good German and a good European, he could urgently recommend to his fellow-countrymen with the profoundest conviction. Thus the aim of rendering Germany impotent for any new offensive policy would be attained without any embittering measures, while the severest punishment of all who have been directly responsible for the Third Reich and its crimes would find nothing but enthusiastic assent from every honourable German.

By a prudent and well-considered policy of this sort, carried out with psychological tact and with judicious treatment of German public opinion, it should be possible largely to harmonize the interests and feelings of victors and of Germans, at least to the extent needed for the safeguarding of Germany’s moral revolution. Only then would every attempt at the “re-education of the Germans” be anything else but a labour of Sisyphus. Then, too, the last reason will be removed for a policy of mutilation of German industry, which would gravely injure not only Germany but Europe. The victors will also be able to be guided with so much the more freedom by the aims of the economic and social revolution we have described. Let us leave untouched at present the question of the extent to which Germany as a whole can and must make good the damage done in Europe by her criminal government. Only this must be said, that it would be short-sighted to demand more from the Germans than is compatible with the threefold revolution, that is to say with the solution of the German question, which must be of even more importance to Europe than the shortening of the period of reconstruction by a few years or months. It would also be unfair for the brave opponents of Nazism, who remained in Germany as “internal emigrants,’’ to be now further penalized with reparation claims, although they showed greater courage than not a few “external” emigrants who now might actually be receiving compensation from them. And if it is rightly intended to impose on Austria no reparation obligation or only a small one, with what justice could it be proposed to treat, say, Bavaria more severely? Was not Bavaria overrun by the Austrian Hitler in 1933 in exactly the same way as Austria in 1938, and did not the same elements offer resistance in the one case as in the other? Did not the first revolt of professors and students take place in Munich (spring, 1943), to be suppressed with bloodshed? And did not the Bavarians rise although, unlike the Austrians, no hope of special treatment was held out to them by the Allies? Is the case of the Rhineland very different? All this goes to show what caution will be needed in order to proceed with justice.

If, however, anyone should consider, in spite of all we have said, that the Germans as a whole must still be “punished” for Nazism and its crimes, we reply that it is already too late for this summary penal treatment. Anything worse than what the Germans have already endured and have still to endure could scarcely be devised. We will emphasize, however, that on the other hand the policy we have recommended does not exclude the most stringent military provisions (in particular the prohibition of the manufacture of armaments, the disbanding of the corps of officers, the razing of fortresses, and so on), nor reparations, nor ruthless suppression of any new stirring of German nationalism, nor any other necessary measures of precaution.

Now we have to meet the objection that our recommendations amount to inducing the victors, for the second time within a generation, to treat the Germans with an exaggerated leniency that seems even less justified today than in 1919.

This objection is based on a misunderstanding. To begin with, it is possible so to interpret the practical results of the peace treaty of Versailles that the blame for them is attributed not so much to the mildness of the provisions of the treaty as to that of their application. This, however, was largely the result of the breaking up of the alliances, which to any realistic observer should have appeared to be almost inevitable. If at that time there was exaggerated optimism, did it not he rather in the supposition that the diplomatic combination of 1919 could be made permanent, and that in consequence the system of military and economic control that depended on it could be effectively maintained for an indefinite time? Would it not have been better, in 1919 just as today, as farseeing Frenchmen familiar with the problem of Germany wanted, to go to the root of the problem and to make a radical change in Germany’s political structure, and at the same time to encourage the democratic and liberal elements of that country by as conciliatory a policy as possible?

Of still greater importance, we think, is a second point: the policy we recommend is the most prudent for the further reason that it leaves open every possibility for the future. It is impossible to modify the two other alternative pohcies for Germany, which we regard as mistaken, and later to change over from one of them to our policy. But our policy offers the opportunity of passing over to any other policy if it should prove that it is we who are mistaken. The injury done by either of the first-named pohcies for Germany will be beyond repair. What we propose instead can, on the contrary, cause no irreparable injury. This policy has also the further advantage that it is thoroughly elastic and can at any time be adjusted to changing circumstances and to experience gained, an advantage of particular importance in the case of a problem which, like that of Germany, contains so many unknown quantities. For a long time to come the federal link between the German States would be kept as loose as possible, and if one or another State should aim at full autonomy or at association with a foreign State, perhaps nothing should be put in its way. All this is the more possible since under our proposal the central control of the federation would he at first not in German hands at all but in the hands of the Allies. On this secure basis they could calmly watch further developments and take any necessary precautions. Should the Germans disappoint the Allies, the latter would still hold all the trumps. No one could undertake the responsibility of recommending another policy to them and advising a course that would end in their losing the peace once more. Only we must add that it is possible to lose the peace through other things besides mildness.

But now it is our duty to make clear one last point. This refers to the brutal fact that a line now runs right through Germany, dividing two worlds from each other—the hne that separates eastern Germany, under Russian occupation, from western Germany, under the occupation of the western Allies. Thus the Elbe has become a limes of the Western world, carrying with it complete segregation in the matter of moral, political, social, and economic principles. This limes runs farther south along the Bohemian forest and across Austria, involving for this latter country conclusions that may be similar to those which we have to draw for Germany.

How shall a solution be found for the problem of dividing Germany into occupation zones without thereby introducing at the same time zones of political influence and without making the common administration of the country impossible? At the Yalta Conference a compromise solution was envisaged under which a distinction was to be drawn between the purely military occupation by the individual Powers and central administration by an Interallied Commission. It must be said at once that this complicated plan seems scarcely practicable. The fundamental conceptions of the two groups of Allies, western and eastern, are far too different to permit of such a condominium, which is always extremely difficult and of which history has nothing but deterrent examples to show. In addition to this, the Interallied Commission is to have its headquarters in the Russian area, and one of its principal sections, the Reparation Commission, is actually to be in Moscow.

This plan seems practicable only in the most unlikely event of the western group placing themselves entirely under Russian leadership or vice versa. In practice it will prove that no clear-cut line can be drawn between the regional military occupation and the central general administration. The Allied General who “occupies” Hanover will be responsible at the same time for orderly administration and for a minimum of economic well-being in his command, and thus a certain solidarity of interests between him and the Germans under him will grow up automatically. It will be entirely natural that the Alhed General will be inclined to defend these mutual regional interests in face of instructions from a central authority which, far from being that of his own country, is actually under the strong influence of an enigmatic Power alien to the West, if the demands do not actually come direct from the Reparation Commission at Moscow. It does not seem a rash forecast that this situation west of the Elbe will strongly favour the regional autonomy we want. At the same time it will create a certain community of political, economic, and intellectual life in this part of Germany, which has always looked to the West rather than to the East. This community would correspond to that which binds together the Western Allies in spite of their avoidable and unavoidable rivalries.

In the foregoing pages we have spoken in general terms of a federation of all autonomous German States, but we must now take account for the present of the harsh reality of the limes. We come then to the conclusion that under the existing circumstances the federal reorganisation of Germany must for the present be confined to the German territory west of the Elbe, a West German Confederation being created with the Western Allies at its head. This plan would fit into the proposal of an “Atlantic Community’ ‘ made recently by Walter Lippmann in his book “U.S. War Aims.” It is indeed to be hoped that this federal West Germany, which would now be entirely separated from Prussia until the clarification of the Russian problem, and which forms the largest and most important part of Germany, would soon be admitted into the “Atlantic Community,” if this association of States, based on community of traditions, on geographical situation, and on political and economic interests, can be brought into existence in spite of the strong communistic currents in western Europe. We think the West German Confederation would prove a worthy and a valuable member after it had returned to the course which in 1866 it was compelled to abandon. It would form at present the most eastern section of the “Atlantic Community.”

All theseare proposals that give the impression of hard realism. But it is a realism that serves the highest ideals of Western civilization and marks, we fear, perhaps the only way it can still be preserved.

Within this narrower political and moral framework the solution must also be considered of the problem of Germany’s economic revolution. The character of our West German Confederation would take away from the Allies the last motive for mutilating the German economic potential and so doing a thing which, we repeat, would unquestionably run counter to their interests, and which would certainly not be done by the Russians if they were in the place of the Allies. If the Western Allies assure to themselves for a considerable time the control of the Confederation and exercise it with consideration for the Germans, they will have made sure of all the supervision they can want. By this central control the whole economic life of West Germany, and in particular currency, credit, communications, and finance, would be co-ordinated to the extent desired.

If, however, it is insisted that political, intellectual, and economic interconnexion shall be maintained between eastern Germany under the Russians and western Germany under the western Powers while we have to deal with a totahtarian Russia, and if the “Reich” is still considered as a unit for which constitutional plans can be forged, this will mean either a failure to grasp the realities or a deliberate intention to promote the Russians’ policy of extending their influence step by step throughout Germany. The more insistence there is upon Germany’s “unity,” the more generously opportunities will be offered for the Russian policy of infiltration and the more points of friction will be created between the two worlds, whose entanglement on German soil would be one of the greatest perils for peace. Far from favouring the “third world war” that is today the bogey of the Western world, the clear cut advocated between the two worlds would very greatly reduce that peril.

Thus the solution of the German question is a stage along the road to the mastery of the greater though remoter world problems which today, after Germany’s collapse, are coming into view. We firmly believe that an opportunity unique in all history is offered of settling the German question. But we should be lacking in candour if we failed to add with emphasis that the success of such a policy depends upon one supreme condition—that it is guided by cool reason that takes account of the future, and not by the passions of the moment. We know how infinitely difficult that is, but we regard it as our duty at this moment to draw attention to the pregnancy of the decisions with which the world is faced. We will close with the remark that the hand held out to us by History today will not be extended long. We must grasp it quickly.

 

________________

7To what we have written earlier on this appalling subject (pp. 58 sqq.), we will add here that when Germans declare that they knew nothing of the horrors of the concentration camps, there are many explanations that make it unnecessary to jump at once to the suspicion of obduracy, i. It is possible that they want to hide their shame from the victors. 2. It is possible that the phrase, “I know nothing about it” is the natural reaction of people who have learnt through twelve years to give evasive answers whenever they can, as the surest way of escaping from those very concentration camps. 3. It is possible that in a certain sense the Germans are right in saying that they knew nothing of these horrors. Naturally they had at all times a vague idea, and for that very reason a particularly terrifying one, of what went on in the concentration camps: it was, indeed, an essential element in the Nazi system of terrorism to spread that idea. But to know any details, and still more to talk about them, might cost a man his life.

We must add that it would be very unjust to forget that the Nazi fiends made a system of seeing to it that the members of a man’s family should suffer for any resistance of his. Thus the question arose: How much courage may a man show at the expense of his wife, his children, his parents, or his brothers and sisters, whom, if he offers open resistance, he will be delivering up to the Government’s executioners and torturers?

A Swiss witness, who, on the invitation of the French General de Lattre de Tassigny, made a journey through southern Germany in the summer of 1945, has told us that the French, too, had just discovered one of the horrible concentration camps, but found that the guards were largely French militiamen. On the other hand, Frenchmen who had been in the regular German prisons stated that they had been properly treated. The two facts illustrate the truth we have emphasized—one that is unfortunately too often forgotten—that it is a question of the system and the human type, not of the national spirit, and that it is such systems and such types that have to be made an end of, not the nations in which they are found. Finally, it should be said that most Germans would probably have been very glad if but a fraction of the present-day indignation about the concentration camps had been as vocal twelve years ago.

8In my books Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart (4th edition, Erlenbach-Zurich, 1944), Civitas humana (Erlenbach-Zurich, 1944; shortly to be published in translation by W. Hodge & Co.), Internationale Ordnung (Erlenbach-Zurich, 1945), and Die Lehre von der Wirtschaft (3rd edition, Erlenbach-Zurich, 1943).

9The publications of the Communist “Free Germany” committee show that it is not even taking any special trouble to conceal its double game. In the very issue of its organ Freies Deutschland (January, 1945) in which mention is made of the main points of its programme, there are other articles in the best Communist style.

10The incompatibility of federalism and collectivism is shown in my book Civitas humana (Zurich edition, pp. 67 sqq.).

11Cf. My books Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart (4th edition, pp. 364 sqq.) and Civitas humana (Zurich edition, pp. 293 sqq.).

12Spring, 1945.

• 1THE dictum placed as a motto in front of this book came in 1866 from the pen of a far-seeing and unbending opponent of Bismarck. In that same fateful year of German and European history, Ludwig Bamberger, the eminent German Liberal and economist, wrote to his friend von Stauffenberg, after a fresh meeting with his old comrade of the revolution of 1848, Carl Schurz, who later became a Senator and Home Secretary of the United States: “I have greatly enjoyed meeting Schurz. That is what we could become if we were not stuck in a dog-kennel.” Almost eighty years later, Roosevelt, President of the country to which Carl Schurz, like so many others of the best Germans, had rendered inestimable service after 1848, spoke of the Germans as the “tragic nation.”
• 2What strength, what inspiration has proceeded from that central country of our continent in those thousand years! What talent, what honest and indeed desperate endeavour to gain the mastery over fate! And again and again the Germans’ effort has been fruitless—so much so that the whole history of Germany until 1866 (the year in which Germany ceased to exist, making way for a Greater Prussia) may be described as simply a history of frustration. Nowhere is it more natural than on Swiss soil to note how close together lie here the two opposite examples of a federalization that succeeded and one that failed throughout a thousand years—Switzerland and Germany, two countries bearing much the same relation to each other as two animals subjected to biological experiment, one of them receiving a particular vitamin and the other not. An obvious question, however, is whether there is not a danger that the ultimate consequences of the German fiasco might have very undesirable repercussions on the success of any tolerably sound political, economic, social, and spiritual structure in other countries. What that implies will be considered later.
• 3Let us hold on to the fact that the Germans, who today have become odium generis humani, are a people with whom fate has played a more evil game than with any other—fate and their own failure. What is worst of all is that this unique history—above all in its last and most fateful hundred years—has left deep traces in the German character that have made the Germans one of the most complex and problematic and, in the end, one of the best-hated of all nations. Thus, on top of all their other troubles, they have to bear the dislike of the rest of the world, which still further worsens their situation. In this, as in so many other things, they strikingly resemble another tragic nation of world history, the Jews; this has been noted again and again by acute observers, and is probably the final cause of the quite peculiar relation between Germans and Jews, which departs from normal to fall now into hatred and now into liking.
• 4In Nazism the complete unscrupulousness in the choice of serviceable-looking slogans and the truly reckless speculation on human stupidity reached perhaps its zenith in the invention of the gigantic farce of the propaganda for “European solidarity against Bolshevism.” After ruining Europe by their crimes and at the same time openly challenging Soviet Russia, nothing better occurred to the Nazis than to paraphrase the old Wilhelmian slogan, “Peoples of Europe, guard your holiest possessions!” This they did (1) after inciting the Japanese against the Europeans in the Far East; (2) after it had become clear that a Hitlerite Europe was simply not worth saving; (3) after all Europe had realized that it was brazen impudence for the Nazis to rage against Bolshevism; and (4) after all Europe had come to ask who would save it from the grip of Nazism. And when these barbarians talked of three thousand years of European civilization being at stake, the only possible answer was roars of laughter. “The saviour of Europe,” Jacob Burckhardt said long ago, “is preeminently the man who saves her from the danger of a political, religious, and social Procrusteanism that threatens her specific character, namely the manifold wealth of her intellect.”.
• 5“It is probable that the same disposition of the moderns that leads them to prefer peace to war would at the outset give great advantages to the people forced by its government to become an aggressor. Nations absorbed in the enjoyment of their possessions would be slow to resist: they would abandon a portion of their rights in order to preserve the rest; they would hope to save their repose by the compromise of their liberty. By a very strange combination, the more peaceful the general spirit, the more would the State that entered into war against that spirit gain easy successes at the outset.” And a few pages further on we come to a passage that might have been written in our own day:
• 6“But the nations that become the victims of its deplorable obedience would be unable to give it credit for concealed feelings which its conduct belies. They blame the instruments for the crime of the hand that directs them.”
• 7Erich Eyck, Bismarck (Allen & Unwin)
• 8For the source of the structure of the Swiss State, see now William E. Rappard, Cinq siècles de sécurité collective (1291-1798), Geneva and Paris, 1945.
• 9Since we have touched on the exceedingly complicated relationship between Germans and Jews, we may also recall that again and again during the first world war there were attempts in the Allied countries to account for Germany’s unattractive traits as due not only to a “Prussification,” but also to a “Judification.” Max Scheler, in his interesting book on the origin of anti-Germanism (Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses, Leipzig, 1917, p. 114) was also driven to deal with that charge. Cf. now Karl Thieme, Das Schicksal der Deutschen, ein Versuch seiner geschichtlichen Erklärung, Basle, 1945, p. 35. We may quote Goethe as the greatest precursor of the view expressed in the text. He remarked to Riemer that “the antipathy of peoples against the Jewish type of humanity, an antipathy in which esteem increases distaste, is really to be compared only with another—that against the Germans, whose destined role and whose inward and outward situation among peoples reveal the most astonishing kinship with those of the Jews. He did not want, he said, to enlarge on the subject, but, he said, he confessed that at times he was overcome by a breath-taking fear that one day the united world hatred against the other salt of the earth, Germandom, would be liberated in a historic uprising.”
• 10Jacob Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, new impression, Basle, 1942, p. 144.
• 11Benjamin Constant, op. cit., p. 39 of the fourth edition (Paris, 1814).
• 12Benjamin Constant, op. cit. p. 58.