Mein Kampf

Title: Mein Kampf
Author: Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
Translated into English by James Murphy (died 1946).
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0200601.txt
Language: English
Date first posted: September 2002
Date most recently updated: September 2002

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* This translation of the unexpurgated edition of "MEIN KAMPF"
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title: Mein Kampf
Author: Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
Translated into English by James Murphy (died 1946).





INTRODUCTION

VOLUME I: A RETROSPECT

CHAPTER I IN THE HOME OF MY PARENTS
CHAPTER II YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING IN VIENNA
CHAPTER III POLITICAL REFLECTIONS ARISING OUT OF MY SOJOURN IN VIENNA
CHAPTER IV MUNICH
CHAPTER V THE WORLD WAR
CHAPTER VI WAR PROPAGANDA
CHAPTER VII THE REVOLUTION
CHAPTER VIII THE BEGINNING OF MY POLITICAL ACTIVITIES
CHAPTER IX THE GERMAN LABOUR PARTY
CHAPTER X WHY THE SECOND REICH COLLAPSED
CHAPTER XI RACE AND PEOPLE
CHAPTER XII THE FIRST STAGE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GERMAN NATIONAL
SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY

VOLUME II: THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST MOVEMENT

CHAPTER I WELTANSCHAUUNG AND PARTY
CHAPTER II THE STATE
CHAPTER III CITIZENS AND SUBJECTS OF THE STATE
CHAPTER IV PERSONALITY AND THE IDEAL OF THE PEOPLE'S STATE
CHAPTER V WELTANSCHAUUNG AND ORGANIZATION
CHAPTER VI THE FIRST PERIOD OF OUR STRUGGLE
CHAPTER VII THE CONFLICT WITH THE RED FORCES
CHAPTER VIII THE STRONG IS STRONGEST WHEN ALONE
CHAPTER IX FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS REGARDING THE NATURE AND ORGANIZATION OF
THE STORM TROOPS
CHAPTER X THE MASK OF FEDERALISM
CHAPTER XI PROPAGANDA AND ORGANIZATION
CHAPTER XII THE PROBLEM OF THE TRADE UNIONS
CHAPTER XIII THE GERMAN POST-WAR POLICY OF ALLIANCES
CHAPTER XIV GERMANY'S POLICY IN EASTERN EUROPE
CHAPTER XV THE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENCE
EPILOGUE





INTRODUCTION



AUTHOR'S PREFACE

On April 1st, 1924, I began to serve my sentence of detention in the
Fortress of Landsberg am Lech, following the verdict of the Munich
People's Court of that time.

After years of uninterrupted labour it was now possible for the first
time to begin a work which many had asked for and which I myself felt
would be profitable for the Movement. So I decided to devote two volumes
to a description not only of the aims of our Movement but also of its
development. There is more to be learned from this than from any purely
doctrinaire treatise.

This has also given me the opportunity of describing my own development
in so far as such a description is necessary to the understanding of the
first as well as the second volume and to destroy the legendary
fabrications which the Jewish Press have circulated about me.

In this work I turn not to strangers but to those followers of the
Movement whose hearts belong to it and who wish to study it more
profoundly. I know that fewer people are won over by the written word
than by the spoken word and that every great movement on this earth owes
its growth to great speakers and not to great writers.

Nevertheless, in order to produce more equality and uniformity in the
defence of any doctrine, its fundamental principles must be committed to
writing. May these two volumes therefore serve as the building stones
which I contribute to the joint work.

The Fortress, Landsberg am Lech.



At half-past twelve in the afternoon of November 9th, 1923, those whose
names are given below fell in front of the FELDHERRNHALLE and in the
forecourt of the former War Ministry in Munich for their loyal faith in
the resurrection of their people:

Alfarth, Felix, Merchant, born July 5th, 1901
Bauriedl, Andreas, Hatmaker, born May 4th, 1879
Casella, Theodor, Bank Official, born August 8th, 1900
Ehrlich, Wilhelm, Bank Official, born August 19th, 1894
Faust, Martin, Bank Official, born January 27th, 1901
Hechenberger, Anton, Locksmith, born September 28th, 1902
Koerner, Oskar, Merchant, born January 4th, 1875
Kuhn, Karl, Head Waiter, born July 25th, 1897
Laforce, Karl, Student of Engineering, born October 28th, 1904
Neubauer, Kurt, Waiter, born March 27th, 1899
Pape, Claus von, Merchant, born August 16th, 1904
Pfordten, Theodor von der, Councillor to the Superior Provincial Court,
born May 14th, 1873
Rickmers, Johann, retired Cavalry Captain, born May 7th, 1881
Scheubner-Richter, Max Erwin von, Dr. of Engineering, born January 9th,
1884
Stransky, Lorenz Ritter von, Engineer, born March 14th, 1899
Wolf, Wilhelm, Merchant, born October 19th, 1898

So-called national officials refused to allow the dead heroes a common
burial. So I dedicate the first volume of this work to them as a common
memorial, that the memory of those martyrs may be a permanent source of
light for the followers of our Movement.

The Fortress, Landsberg a/L.,

October 16th, 1924



TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

In placing before the reader this unabridged translation of Adolf
Hitler's book, MEIN KAMPF, I feel it my duty to call attention to
certain historical facts which must be borne in mind if the reader would
form a fair judgment of what is written in this extraordinary work.

The first volume of MEIN KAMPF was written while the author was
imprisoned in a Bavarian fortress. How did he get there and why? The
answer to that question is important, because the book deals with the
events which brought the author into this plight and because he wrote
under the emotional stress caused by the historical happenings of the
time. It was the hour of Germany's deepest humiliation, somewhat
parallel to that of a little over a century before, when Napoleon had
dismembered the old German Empire and French soldiers occupied almost
the whole of Germany.

In the beginning of 1923 the French invaded Germany, occupied the Ruhr
district and seized several German towns in the Rhineland. This was a
flagrant breach of international law and was protested against by every
section of British political opinion at that time. The Germans could not
effectively defend themselves, as they had been already disarmed under
the provisions of the Versailles Treaty. To make the situation more
fraught with disaster for Germany, and therefore more appalling in its
prospect, the French carried on an intensive propaganda for the
separation of the Rhineland from the German Republic and the
establishment of an independent Rhenania. Money was poured out lavishly
to bribe agitators to carry on this work, and some of the most insidious
elements of the German population became active in the pay of the
invader. At the same time a vigorous movement was being carried on in
Bavaria for the secession of that country and the establishment of an
independent Catholic monarchy there, under vassalage to France, as
Napoleon had done when he made Maximilian the first King of Bavaria in
1805.

The separatist movement in the Rhineland went so far that some leading
German politicians came out in favour of it, suggesting that if the
Rhineland were thus ceded it might be possible for the German Republic
to strike a bargain with the French in regard to Reparations. But in
Bavaria the movement went even farther. And it was more far-reaching in
its implications; for, if an independent Catholic monarchy could be set
up in Bavaria, the next move would have been a union with Catholic
German-Austria. possibly under a Habsburg King. Thus a Catholic BLOC
would have been created which would extend from the Rhineland through
Bavaria and Austria into the Danube Valley and would have been at least
under the moral and military, if not the full political, hegemony of
France. The dream seems fantastic now, but it was considered quite a
practical thing in those fantastic times. The effect of putting such a
plan into action would have meant the complete dismemberment of Germany;
and that is what French diplomacy aimed at. Of course such an aim no
longer exists. And I should not recall what must now seem "old, unhappy,
far-off things" to the modern generation, were it not that they were
very near and actual at the time MEIN KAMPF was written and were more
unhappy then than we can even imagine now.

By the autumn of 1923 the separatist movement in Bavaria was on the
point of becoming an accomplished fact. General von Lossow, the Bavarian
chief of the REICHSWEHR no longer took orders from Berlin. The flag of
the German Republic was rarely to be seen, Finally, the Bavarian Prime
Minister decided to proclaim an independent Bavaria and its secession
from the German Republic. This was to have taken place on the eve of the
Fifth Anniversary of the establishment of the German Republic (November
9th, 1918.)

Hitler staged a counter-stroke. For several days he had been mobilizing
his storm battalions in the neighbourhood of Munich, intending to make a
national demonstration and hoping that the REICHSWEHR would stand by him
to prevent secession. Ludendorff was with him. And he thought that the
prestige of the great German Commander in the World War would be
sufficient to win the allegiance of the professional army.

A meeting had been announced to take place in the Bürgerbräu Keller on
the night of November 8th. The Bavarian patriotic societies were
gathered there, and the Prime Minister, Dr. von Kahr, started to read
his official PRONUNCIAMENTO, which practically amounted to a
proclamation of Bavarian independence and secession from the Republic.
While von Kahr was speaking Hitler entered the hall, followed by
Ludendorff. And the meeting was broken up.

Next day the Nazi battalions took the street for the purpose of making a
mass demonstration in favour of national union. They marched in massed
formation, led by Hitler and Ludendorff. As they reached one of the
central squares of the city the army opened fire on them. Sixteen of the
marchers were instantly killed, and two died of their wounds in the
local barracks of the REICHSWEHR. Several others were wounded also.
Hitler fell on the pavement and broke a collar-bone. Ludendorff marched
straight up to the soldiers who were firing from the barricade, but not
a man dared draw a trigger on his old Commander.

Hitler was arrested with several of his comrades and imprisoned in the
fortress of Landsberg on the River Lech. On February 26th, 1924, he was
brought to trial before the VOLKSGERICHT, or People's Court in Munich.
He was sentenced to detention in a fortress for five years. With several
companions, who had been also sentenced to various periods of
imprisonment, he returned to Landsberg am Lech and remained there until
the 20th of the following December, when he was released. In all he
spent about thirteen months in prison. It was during this period that he
wrote the first volume of MEIN KAMPF.

If we bear all this in mind we can account for the emotional stress
under which MEIN KAMPF was written. Hitler was naturally incensed
against the Bavarian government authorities, against the footling
patriotic societies who were pawns in the French game, though often
unconsciously so, and of course against the French. That he should write
harshly of the French was only natural in the circumstances. At that
time there was no exaggeration whatsoever in calling France the
implacable and mortal enemy of Germany. Such language was being used by
even the pacifists themselves, not only in Germany but abroad. And even
though the second volume of MEIN KAMPF was written after Hitler's
release from prison and was published after the French had left the
Ruhr, the tramp of the invading armies still echoed in German ears, and
the terrible ravages that had been wrought in the industrial and
financial life of Germany, as a consequence of the French invasion, had
plunged the country into a state of social and economic chaos. In France
itself the franc fell to fifty per cent of its previous value. Indeed,
the whole of Europe had been brought to the brink of ruin, following the
French invasion of the Ruhr and Rhineland.

But, as those things belong to the limbo of a dead past that nobody
wishes to have remembered now, it is often asked: Why doesn't Hitler
revise MEIN KAMPF? The answer, as I think, which would immediately come
into the mind of an impartial critic is that MEIN KAMPF is an historical
document which bears the imprint of its own time. To revise it would
involve taking it out of its historical context. Moreover Hitler has
declared that his acts and public statements constitute a partial
revision of his book and are to be taken as such. This refers especially
to the statements in MEIN KAMPF regarding France and those German
kinsfolk that have not yet been incorporated in the REICH. On behalf of
Germany he has definitely acknowledged the German portion of South Tyrol
as permanently belonging to Italy and, in regard to France, he has again
and again declared that no grounds now exist for a conflict of political
interests between Germany and France and that Germany has no territorial
claims against France. Finally, I may note here that Hitler has also
declared that, as he was only a political leader and not yet a statesman
in a position of official responsibility, when he wrote this book, what
he stated in MEIN KAMPF does not implicate him as Chancellor of the
REICH.

I now come to some references in the text which are frequently recurring
and which may not always be clear to every reader. For instance, Hitler
speaks indiscriminately of the German REICH. Sometimes he means to refer
to the first REICH, or Empire, and sometimes to the German Empire as
founded under William I in 1871. Incidentally the regime which he
inaugurated in 1933 is generally known as the THIRD REICH, though this
expression is not used in MEIN KAMPF. Hitler also speaks of the Austrian
REICH and the East Mark, without always explicitly distinguishing
between the Habsburg Empire and Austria proper. If the reader will bear
the following historical outline in mind, he will understand the
references as they occur.

The word REICH, which is a German form of the Latin word REGNUM, does
not mean Kingdom or Empire or Republic. It is a sort of basic word that
may apply to any form of Constitution. Perhaps our word, Realm, would be
the best translation, though the word Empire can be used when the REICH
was actually an Empire. The forerunner of the first German Empire was
the Holy Roman Empire which Charlemagne founded in A.D. 800. Charlemagne
was King of the Franks, a group of Germanic tribes that subsequently
became Romanized. In the tenth century Charlemagne's Empire passed into
German hands when Otto I (936-973) became Emperor. As the Holy Roman
Empire of the German Nation, its formal appellation, it continued to
exist under German Emperors until Napoleon overran and dismembered
Germany during the first decade of the last century. On August 6th,
1806, the last Emperor, Francis II, formally resigned the German crown.
In the following October Napoleon entered Berlin in triumph, after the
Battle of Jena.

After the fall of Napoleon a movement set in for the reunion of the
German states in one Empire. But the first decisive step towards that
end was the foundation of the Second German Empire in 1871, after the
Franco-Prussian War. This Empire, however, did not include the German
lands which remained under the Habsburg Crown. These were known as
German Austria. It was Bismarck's dream to unite German Austria with the
German Empire; but it remained only a dream until Hitler turned it into
a reality in 1938'. It is well to bear that point in mind, because this
dream of reuniting all the German states in one REICH has been a
dominant feature of German patriotism and statesmanship for over a
century and has been one of Hitler's ideals since his childhood.

In MEIN KAMPF Hitler often speaks of the East Mark. This East Mark--i.e.
eastern frontier land--was founded by Charlemagne as the eastern bulwark
of the Empire. It was inhabited principally by Germano-Celtic tribes
called Bajuvari and stood for centuries as the firm bulwark of Western
Christendom against invasion from the East, especially against the
Turks. Geographically it was almost identical with German Austria.

There are a few points more that I wish to mention in this introductory
note. For instance, I have let the word WELTANSCHAUUNG stand in its
original form very often. We have no one English word to convey the same
meaning as the German word, and it would have burdened the text too much
if I were to use a circumlocution each time the word occurs.
WELTANSCHAUUNG literally means "Outlook-on-the World". But as generally
used in German this outlook on the world means a whole system of ideas
associated together in an organic unity--ideas of human life, human
values, cultural and religious ideas, politics, economics, etc., in fact
a totalitarian view of human existence. Thus Christianity could be
called a WELTANSCHAUUNG, and Mohammedanism could be called a
WELTANSCHAUUNG, and Socialism could be called a WELTANSCHAUUNG,
especially as preached in Russia. National Socialism claims definitely
to be a WELTANSCHAUUNG.

Another word I have often left standing in the original is VÖLKISCH. The
basic word here is VOLK, which is sometimes translated as PEOPLE; but
the German word, VOLK, means the whole body of the PEOPLE without any
distinction of class or caste. It is a primary word also that suggests
what might be called the basic national stock. Now, after the defeat in
1918, the downfall of the Monarchy and the destruction of the
aristocracy and the upper classes, the concept of DAS VOLK came into
prominence as the unifying co-efficient which would embrace the whole
German people. Hence the large number of VÖLKISCH societies that arose
after the war and hence also the National Socialist concept of
unification which is expressed by the word VOLKSGEMEINSCHAFT, or folk
community. This is used in contradistinction to the Socialist concept of
the nation as being divided into classes. Hitler's ideal is the
VÖLKISCHER STAAT, which I have translated as the People's State.

Finally, I would point out that the term Social Democracy may be
misleading in English, as it has not a democratic connotation in our
sense. It was the name given to the Socialist Party in Germany. And that
Party was purely Marxist; but it adopted the name Social Democrat in
order to appeal to the democratic sections of the German people.

JAMES MURPHY.

Abbots Langley, February, 1939





VOLUME I: A RETROSPECT




CHAPTER I



IN THE HOME OF MY PARENTS


It has turned out fortunate for me to-day that destiny appointed
Braunau-on-the-Inn to be my birthplace. For that little town is situated
just on the frontier between those two States the reunion of which
seems, at least to us of the younger generation, a task to which we
should devote our lives and in the pursuit of which every possible means
should be employed.

German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland. And not
indeed on any grounds of economic calculation whatsoever. No, no. Even
if the union were a matter of economic indifference, and even if it were
to be disadvantageous from the economic standpoint, still it ought to
take place. People of the same blood should be in the same REICH. The
German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy until
they shall have brought all their children together in the one State.
When the territory of the REICH embraces all the Germans and finds
itself unable to assure them a livelihood, only then can the moral right
arise, from the need of the people to acquire foreign territory. The
plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the daily
bread for the generations to come.

And so this little frontier town appeared to me as the symbol of a great
task. But in another regard also it points to a lesson that is
applicable to our day. Over a hundred years ago this sequestered spot
was the scene of a tragic calamity which affected the whole German
nation and will be remembered for ever, at least in the annals of German
history. At the time of our Fatherland's deepest humiliation a
bookseller, Johannes Palm, uncompromising nationalist and enemy of the
French, was put to death here because he had the misfortune to have
loved Germany well. He obstinately refused to disclose the names of his
associates, or rather the principals who were chiefly responsible for
the affair. Just as it happened with Leo Schlageter. The former, like
the latter, was denounced to the French by a Government agent. It was a
director of police from Augsburg who won an ignoble renown on that
occasion and set the example which was to be copied at a later date by
the neo-German officials of the REICH under Herr Severing's
regime (Note 1).

[Note 1. In order to understand the reference here, and similar
references in later portions of MEIN KAMPF, the following must be borne
in mind:

From 1792 to 1814 the French Revolutionary Armies overran Germany. In
1800 Bavaria shared in the Austrian defeat at Hohenlinden and the French
occupied Munich. In 1805 the Bavarian Elector was made King of Bavaria by
Napoleon and stipulated to back up Napoleon in all his wars with a force
of 30,000 men. Thus Bavaria became the absolute vassal of the French.
This was 'TheTime of Germany's Deepest Humiliation', Which is referred
to again and again by Hitler.

In 1806 a pamphlet entitled 'Germany's Deepest Humiliation' was
published in South Germany. Amnng those who helped to circulate the
pamphlet was the Nürnberg bookseller, Johannes Philipp Palm. He was
denounced to the French by a Bavarian police agent. At his trial he
refused to disclose thename of the author. By Napoleon's orders, he was
shot at Braunau-on-the-Innon August 26th, 1806. A monument erected to
him on the site of the executionwas one of the first public objects that
made an impression on Hitler asa little boy.

Leo Schlageter's case was in many respects parallel to that of Johannes
Palm. Schlageter was a German theological student who volunteered for
service in 1914. He became an artillery officer and won the Iron Cross of
both classes. When the French occupied the Ruhr in 1923 Schlageter helped
to organize the passive resistance on the German side. He and his
companions blew up a railway bridge for the purpose of making the
transport of coal to France more difficult.

Those who took part in the affair were denounced to the French by a
German informer. Schlageter took the whole responsibility on his own
shoulders and was condemned to death, his companions being sentenced to
various terms of imprisonment and penal servitude by the French Court.
Schlageter refused to disclose the identity of those who issued the order
to blow up the railway bridge and he would not plead for mercy before a
French Court. He was shot by a French firing-squad on May 26th, 1923.
Severing was at that time German Minister of the Interior. It is said
that representations were made, to himon Schlageter's behalf and that he
refused to interfere.

Schlageter has become the chief martyr of the German resistancc to the
French occupation of the Ruhr and also one of the great heroes of the
National Socialist Movement. He had joined the Movement at a very early
stage, his card of membership bearing the number 61.]

In this little town on the Inn, haloed by the memory of a German martyr,
a town that was Bavarian by blood but under the rule of the Austrian
State, my parents were domiciled towards the end of the last century. My
father was a civil servant who fulfilled his duties very
conscientiously. My mother looked after the household and lovingly
devoted herself to the care of her children. From that period I have not
retained very much in my memory; because after a few years my father had
to leave that frontier town which I had come to love so much and take up
a new post farther down the Inn valley, at Passau, therefore actually in
Germany itself.

In those days it was the usual lot of an Austrian civil servant to be
transferred periodically from one post to another. Not long after coming
to Passau my father was transferred to Linz, and while there he retired
finally to live on his pension. But this did not mean that the old
gentleman would now rest from his labours.

He was the son of a poor cottager, and while still a boy he grew
restless and left home. When he was barely thirteen years old he buckled
on his satchel and set forth from his native woodland parish. Despite
the dissuasion of villagers who could speak from 'experience,' he went
to Vienna to learn a trade there. This was in the fiftieth year of the
last century. It was a sore trial, that of deciding to leave home and
face the unknown, with three gulden in his pocket. By when the boy of
thirteen was a lad of seventeen and had passed his apprenticeship
examination as a craftsman he was not content. Quite the contrary. The
persistent economic depression of that period and the constant want and
misery strengthened his resolution to give up working at a trade and
strive for 'something higher.' As a boy it had seemed to him that the
position of the parish priest in his native village was the highest in
the scale of human attainment; but now that the big city had enlarged
his outlook the young man looked up to the dignity of a State official
as the highest of all. With the tenacity of one whom misery and trouble
had already made old when only half-way through his youth the young man
of seventeen obstinately set out on his new project and stuck to it
until he won through. He became a civil servant. He was about
twenty-three years old, I think, when he succeeded in making himself
what he had resolved to become. Thus he was able to fulfil the promise
he had made as a poor boy not to return to his native village until he
was 'somebody.'

He had gained his end. But in the village there was nobody who had
remembered him as a little boy, and the village itself had become
strange to him.

Now at last, when he was fifty-six years old, he gave up his active
career; but he could not bear to be idle for a single day. On the
outskirts of the small market town of Lambach in Upper Austria he bought
a farm and tilled it himself. Thus, at the end of a long and
hard-working career, he came back to the life which his father had led.

It was at this period that I first began to have ideals of my own. I
spent a good deal of time scampering about in the open, on the long road
from school, and mixing up with some of the roughest of the boys, which
caused my mother many anxious moments. All this tended to make me
something quite the reverse of a stay-at-home. I gave scarcely any
serious thought to the question of choosing a vocation in life; but I
was certainly quite out of sympathy with the kind of career which my
father had followed. I think that an inborn talent for speaking now
began to develop and take shape during the more or less strenuous
arguments which I used to have with my comrades. I had become a juvenile
ringleader who learned well and easily at school but was rather
difficult to manage. In my freetime I practised singing in the choir of
the monastery church at Lambach, and thus it happened that I was placed
in a very favourable position to be emotionally impressed again and
again by the magnificent splendour of ecclesiastical ceremonial. What
could be more natural for me than to look upon the Abbot as representing
the highest human ideal worth striving for, just as the position of the
humble village priest had appeared to my father in his own boyhood days?
At least, that was my idea for a while. But the juvenile disputes I had
with my father did not lead him to appreciate his son's oratorical gifts
in such a way as to see in them a favourable promise for such a career,
and so he naturally could not understand the boyish ideas I had in my
head at that time. This contradiction in my character made him feel
somewhat anxious.

As a matter of fact, that transitory yearning after such a vocation soon
gave way to hopes that were better suited to my temperament. Browsing
through my father's books, I chanced to come across some publications
that dealt with military subjects. One of these publications was a
popular history of the Franco-German War of 1870-71. It consisted of two
volumes of an illustrated periodical dating from those years. These
became my favourite reading. In a little while that great and heroic
conflict began to take first place in my mind. And from that time
onwards I became more and more enthusiastic about everything that was in
any way connected with war or military affairs.

But this story of the Franco-German War had a special significance for
me on other grounds also. For the first time, and as yet only in quite a
vague way, the question began to present itself: Is there a
difference--and if there be, what is it--between the Germans who fought
that war and the other Germans? Why did not Austria also take part in
it? Why did not my father and all the others fight in that struggle? Are
we not the same as the other Germans? Do we not all belong together?

That was the first time that this problem began to agitate my small
brain. And from the replies that were given to the questions which I
asked very tentatively, I was forced to accept the fact, though with a
secret envy, that not all Germans had the good luck to belong to
Bismarck's Empire. This was something that I could not understand.

It was decided that I should study. Considering my character as a whole,
and especially my temperament, my father decided that the classical
subjects studied at the Lyceum were not suited to my natural talents. He
thought that the REALSCHULE (Note 2) would suit me better. My obvious
talent for drawing confirmed him in that view; for in his opinion drawing
was a subject too much neglected in the Austrian GYMNASIUM. Probably also
the memory of the hard road which he himself had travelled contributed to
make him look upon classical studies as unpractical and accordingly to
set little value on them. At the back of his mind he had the idea that
his son also should become an official of the Government. Indeed he had
decided on that career for me. The difficulties through which he had to
struggle in making his own career led him to overestimate what he had
achieved, because this was exclusively the result of his own
indefatigable industry and energy. The characteristic pride of the
self-made man urged him towards the idea that his son should follow the
same calling and if possible rise to a higher position in it. Moreover,
this idea was strengthened by the consideration that the results of his
own life's industry had placed him in a position to facilitate his son's
advancement in the same career.

[Note 2. Non-classical secondary school. The Lyceum and GYMNASIUM were
classical or semi-classical secondary schools.]

He was simply incapable of imagining that I might reject what had meant
everything in life to him. My father's decision was simple, definite,
clear and, in his eyes, it was something to be taken for granted. A man
of such a nature who had become an autocrat by reason of his own hard
struggle for existence, could not think of allowing 'inexperienced' and
irresponsible young fellows to choose their own careers. To act in such
a way, where the future of his own son was concerned, would have been a
grave and reprehensible weakness in the exercise of parental authority
and responsibility, something utterly incompatible with his
characteristic sense of duty.

And yet it had to be otherwise.

For the first time in my life--I was then eleven years old--I felt
myself forced into open opposition. No matter how hard and determined my
father might be about putting his own plans and opinions into action,
his son was no less obstinate in refusing to accept ideas on which he
set little or no value.

I would not become a civil servant.

No amount of persuasion and no amount of 'grave' warnings could break
down that opposition. I would not become a State official, not on any
account. All the attempts which my father made to arouse in me a love or
liking for that profession, by picturing his own career for me, had only
the opposite effect. It nauseated me to think that one day I might be
fettered to an office stool, that I could not dispose of my own time but
would be forced to spend the whole of my life filling out forms.

One can imagine what kind of thoughts such a prospect awakened in the
mind of a young fellow who was by no means what is called a 'good boy'
in the current sense of that term. The ridiculously easy school tasks
which we were given made it possible for me to spend far more time in
the open air than at home. To-day, when my political opponents pry into
my life with diligent scrutiny, as far back as the days of my boyhood,
so as finally to be able to prove what disreputable tricks this Hitler
was accustomed to in his young days, I thank heaven that I can look back
to those happy days and find the memory of them helpful. The fields and
the woods were then the terrain on which all disputes were fought out.

Even attendance at the REALSCHULE could not alter my way of spending my
time. But I had now another battle to fight.

So long as the paternal plan to make a State functionary contradicted my
own inclinations only in the abstract, the conflict was easy to bear. I
could be discreet about expressing my personal views and thus avoid
constantly recurrent disputes. My own resolution not to become a
Government official was sufficient for the time being to put my mind
completely at rest. I held on to that resolution inexorably. But the
situation became more difficult once I had a positive plan of my own
which I might present to my father as a counter-suggestion. This
happened when I was twelve years old. How it came about I cannot exactly
say now; but one day it became clear to me that I would be a painter--I
mean an artist. That I had an aptitude for drawing was an admitted fact.
It was even one of the reasons why my father had sent me to the
REALSCHULE; but he had never thought of having that talent developed in
such a way that I could take up painting as a professional career. Quite
the contrary. When, as a result of my renewed refusal to adopt his
favourite plan, my father asked me for the first time what I myself
really wished to be, the resolution that I had already formed expressed
itself almost automatically. For a while my father was speechless. "A
painter? An artist-painter?" he exclaimed.

He wondered whether I was in a sound state of mind. He thought that he
might not have caught my words rightly, or that he had misunderstood
what I meant. But when I had explained my ideas to him and he saw how
seriously I took them, he opposed them with that full determination
which was characteristic of him. His decision was exceedingly simple and
could not be deflected from its course by any consideration of what my
own natural qualifications really were.

"Artist! Not as long as I live, never." As the son had inherited some of
the father's obstinacy, besides having other qualities of his own, my
reply was equally energetic. But it stated something quite the contrary.

At that our struggle became stalemate. The father would not abandon his
'Never', and I became all the more consolidated in my 'Nevertheless'.

Naturally the resulting situation was not pleasant. The old gentleman
was bitterly annoyed; and indeed so was I, although I really loved him.
My father forbade me to entertain any hopes of taking up the art of
painting as a profession. I went a step further and declared that I
would not study anything else. With such declarations the situation
became still more strained, so that the old gentleman irrevocably
decided to assert his parental authority at all costs. That led me to
adopt an attitude of circumspect silence, but I put my threat into
execution. I thought that, once it became clear to my father that I was
making no progress at the REALSCHULE, for weal or for woe, he would be
forced to allow me to follow the happy career I had dreamed of.

I do not know whether I calculated rightly or not. Certainly my failure
to make progress became quite visible in the school. I studied just the
subjects that appealed to me, especially those which I thought might be
of advantage to me later on as a painter. What did not appear to have
any importance from this point of view, or what did not otherwise appeal
to me favourably, I completely sabotaged. My school reports of that time
were always in the extremes of good or bad, according to the subject and
the interest it had for me. In one column my qualification read 'very
good' or 'excellent'. In another it read 'average' or even 'below
average'. By far my best subjects were geography and, even more so,
general history. These were my two favourite subjects, and I led the
class in them.

When I look back over so many years and try to judge the results of that
experience I find two very significant facts standing out clearly before
my mind.

First, I became a nationalist.

Second, I learned to understand and grasp the true meaning of history.

The old Austria was a multi-national State. In those days at least the
citizens of the German Empire, taken through and through, could not
understand what that fact meant in the everyday life of the individuals
within such a State. After the magnificent triumphant march of the
victorious armies in the Franco-German War the Germans in the REICH
became steadily more and more estranged from the Germans beyond their
frontiers, partly because they did not deign to appreciate those other
Germans at their true value or simply because they were incapable of
doing so.

The Germans of the REICH did not realize that if the Germans in Austria
had not been of the best racial stock they could never have given the
stamp of their own character to an Empire of 52 millions, so definitely
that in Germany itself the idea arose--though quite an erroneous
one--that Austria was a German State. That was an error which led to
dire consequences; but all the same it was a magnificent testimony to
the character of the ten million Germans in that East Mark. (Note 3)
Only very few of the Germans in the REICH itself had an idea of the bitter
struggle which those Eastern Germans had to carry on daily for the
preservation of their German language, their German schools and their
German character. Only to-day, when a tragic fate has torn several
millions of our kinsfolk away from the REICH and has forced them to live
under the rule of the stranger, dreaming of that common fatherland
towards which all their yearnings are directed and struggling to uphold
at least the sacred right of using their mother tongue--only now have
the wider circles of the German population come to realize what it means
to have to fight for the traditions of one's race. And so at last
perhaps there are people here and there who can assess the greatness of
that German spirit which animated the old East Mark and enabled those
people, left entirely dependent on their own resources, to defend the
Empire against the Orient for several centuries and subsequently to hold
fast the frontiers of the German language through a guerilla warfare of
attrition, at a time when the German Empire was sedulously cultivating
an interest for colonies but not for its own flesh and blood before the
threshold of its own door.

[Note 3. See Translator's Introduction.]

What has happened always and everywhere, in every kind of struggle,
happened also in the language fight which was carried on in the old
Austria. There were three groups--the fighters, the hedgers and the
traitors. Even in the schools this sifting already began to take place.
And it is worth noting that the struggle for the language was waged
perhaps in its bitterest form around the school; because this was the
nursery where the seeds had to be watered which were to spring up and
form the future generation. The tactical objective of the fight was the
winning over of the child, and it was to the child that the first
rallying cry was addressed:

"German youth, do not forget that you are a German," and "Remember,
little girl, that one day you must be a German mother."

Those who know something of the juvenile spirit can understand how youth
will always lend a glad ear to such a rallying cry. Under many forms the
young people led the struggle, fighting in their own way and with their
own weapons. They refused to sing non-German songs. The greater the
efforts made to win them away from their German allegiance, the more
they exalted the glory of their German heroes. They stinted themselves
in buying things to eat, so that they might spare their pennies to help
the war chest of their elders. They were incredibly alert in the
significance of what the non-German teachers said and they contradicted
in unison. They wore the forbidden emblems of their own kinsfolk and
were happy when penalised for doing so, or even physically punished. In
miniature they were mirrors of loyalty from which the older people might
learn a lesson.

And thus it was that at a comparatively early age I took part in the
struggle which the nationalities were waging against one another in the
old Austria. When meetings were held for the South Mark German League
and the School League we wore cornflowers and black-red-gold colours to
express our loyalty. We greeted one another with HEIL! and instead of
the Austrian anthem we sang our own DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES, despite
warnings and penalties. Thus the youth were educated politically at a
time when the citizens of a so-called national State for the most part
knew little of their own nationality except the language. Of course, I
did not belong to the hedgers. Within a little while I had become an
ardent 'German National', which has a different meaning from the party
significance attached to that phrase to-day.

I developed very rapidly in the nationalist direction, and by the time I
was 15 years old I had come to understand the distinction between
dynastic patriotism and nationalism based on the concept of folk, or
people, my inclination being entirely in favour of the latter.

Such a preference may not perhaps be clearly intelligible to those who
have never taken the trouble to study the internal conditions that
prevailed under the Habsburg Monarchy.

Among historical studies universal history was the subject almost
exclusively taught in the Austrian schools, for of specific Austrian
history there was only very little. The fate of this State was closely
bound up with the existence and development of Germany as a whole; so a
division of history into German history and Austrian history would be
practically inconceivable. And indeed it was only when the German people
came to be divided between two States that this division of German
history began to take place.

The insignia (Note 4) of a former imperial sovereignty which were still
preserved in Vienna appeared to act as magical relics rather than as the
visible guarantee of an everlasting bond of union.

[Note 4. When Francis II had laid down his title as Emperor of the Holy
Roman Empireof the German Nation, which he did at the command of Napoleon,
the Crownand Mace, as the Imperial Insignia, were kept in Vienna. After
the German Empire was refounded, in 1871, under William I, there were many
demands tohave the Insignia transferred to Berlin. But these went
unheeded. Hitler had them brought to Germany after the Austrian Anschluss
and displayed at Nuremberg during the Party Congress in September 1938.]

When the Habsburg State crumbled to pieces in 1918 the Austrian Germans
instinctively raised an outcry for union with their German fatherland.
That was the voice of a unanimous yearning in the hearts of the whole
people for a return to the unforgotten home of their fathers. But such a
general yearning could not be explained except by attributing the cause
of it to the historical training through which the individual Austrian
Germans had passed. Therein lay a spring that never dried up. Especially
in times of distraction and forgetfulness its quiet voice was a reminder
of the past, bidding the people to look out beyond the mere welfare of
the moment to a new future.

The teaching of universal history in what are called the middle schools
is still very unsatisfactory. Few teachers realize that the purpose of
teaching history is not the memorizing of some dates and facts, that the
student is not interested in knowing the exact date of a battle or the
birthday of some marshal or other, and not at all--or at least only very
insignificantly--interested in knowing when the crown of his fathers was
placed on the brow of some monarch. These are certainly not looked upon
as important matters.

To study history means to search for and discover the forces that are
the causes of those results which appear before our eyes as historical
events. The art of reading and studying consists in remembering the
essentials and forgetting what is not essential.

Probably my whole future life was determined by the fact that I had a
professor of history who understood, as few others understand, how to
make this viewpoint prevail in teaching and in examining. This teacher
was Dr. Leopold Poetsch, of the REALSCHULE at Linz. He was the ideal
personification of the qualities necessary to a teacher of history in
the sense I have mentioned above. An elderly gentleman with a decisive
manner but a kindly heart, he was a very attractive speaker and was able
to inspire us with his own enthusiasm. Even to-day I cannot recall
without emotion that venerable personality whose enthusiastic exposition
of history so often made us entirely forget the present and allow
ourselves to be transported as if by magic into the past. He penetrated
through the dim mist of thousands of years and transformed the
historical memory of the dead past into a living reality. When we
listened to him we became afire with enthusiasm and we were sometimes
moved even to tears.

It was still more fortunate that this professor was able not only to
illustrate the past by examples from the present but from the past he
was also able to draw a lesson for the present. He understood better
than any other the everyday problems that were then agitating our minds.
The national fervour which we felt in our own small way was utilized by
him as an instrument of our education, inasmuch as he often appealed to
our national sense of honour; for in that way he maintained order and
held our attention much more easily than he could have done by any other
means. It was because I had such a professor that history became my
favourite subject. As a natural consequence, but without the conscious
connivance of my professor, I then and there became a young rebel. But
who could have studied German history under such a teacher and not
become an enemy of that State whose rulers exercised such a disastrous
influence on the destinies of the German nation? Finally, how could one
remain the faithful subject of the House of Habsburg, whose past history
and present conduct proved it to be ready ever and always to betray the
interests of the German people for the sake of paltry personal
interests? Did not we as youngsters fully realize that the House of
Habsburg did not, and could not, have any love for us Germans?

What history taught us about the policy followed by the House of
Habsburg was corroborated by our own everyday experiences. In the north
and in the south the poison of foreign races was eating into the body of
our people, and even Vienna was steadily becoming more and more a
non-German city. The 'Imperial House' favoured the Czechs on every
possible occasion. Indeed it was the hand of the goddess of eternal
justice and inexorable retribution that caused the most deadly enemy of
Germanism in Austria, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to fall by the very
bullets which he himself had helped to cast. Working from above
downwards, he was the chief patron of the movement to make Austria a
Slav State.

The burdens laid on the shoulders of the German people were enormous and
the sacrifices of money and blood which they had to make were incredibly
heavy.

Yet anybody who was not quite blind must have seen that it was all in
vain. What affected us most bitterly was the consciousness of the fact
that this whole system was morally shielded by the alliance with
Germany, whereby the slow extirpation of Germanism in the old Austrian
Monarchy seemed in some way to be more or less sanctioned by Germany
herself. Habsburg hypocrisy, which endeavoured outwardly to make the
people believe that Austria still remained a German State, increased the
feeling of hatred against the Imperial House and at the same time
aroused a spirit of rebellion and contempt.

But in the German Empire itself those who were then its rulers saw
nothing of what all this meant. As if struck blind, they stood beside a
corpse and in the very symptoms of decomposition they believed that they
recognized the signs of a renewed vitality. In that unhappy alliance
between the young German Empire and the illusory Austrian State lay the
germ of the World War and also of the final collapse.

In the subsequent pages of this book I shall go to the root of the
problem. Suffice it to say here that in the very early years of my youth
I came to certain conclusions which I have never abandoned. Indeed I
became more profoundly convinced of them as the years passed. They were:
That the dissolution of the Austrian Empire is a preliminary condition
for the defence of Germany; further, that national feeling is by no
means identical with dynastic patriotism; finally, and above all, that
the House of Habsburg was destined to bring misfortune to the German
nation.

As a logical consequence of these convictions, there arose in me a
feeling of intense love for my German-Austrian home and a profound
hatred for the Austrian State.

That kind of historical thinking which was developed in me through my
study of history at school never left me afterwards. World history
became more and more an inexhaustible source for the understanding of
contemporary historical events, which means politics. Therefore I will
not "learn" politics but let politics teach me.

A precocious revolutionary in politics I was no less a precocious
revolutionary in art. At that time the provincial capital of Upper
Austria had a theatre which, relatively speaking, was not bad. Almost
everything was played there. When I was twelve years old I saw William
Tell performed. That was my first experience of the theatre. Some months
later I attended a performance of LOHENGRIN, the first opera I had ever
heard. I was fascinated at once. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth
Master knew no limits. Again and again I was drawn to hear his operas;
and to-day I consider it a great piece of luck that these modest
productions in the little provincial city prepared the way and made it
possible for me to appreciate the better productions later on.

But all this helped to intensify my profound aversion for the career
that my father had chosen for me; and this dislike became especially
strong as the rough corners of youthful boorishness became worn off, a
process which in my case caused a good deal of pain. I became more and
more convinced that I should never be happy as a State official. And now
that the REALSCHULE had recognized and acknowledged my aptitude for
drawing, my own resolution became all the stronger. Imprecations and
threats had no longer any chance of changing it. I wanted to become a
painter and no power in the world could force me to become a civil
servant. The only peculiar feature of the situation now was that as I
grew bigger I became more and more interested in architecture. I
considered this fact as a natural development of my flair for painting
and I rejoiced inwardly that the sphere of my artistic interests was
thus enlarged. I had no notion that one day it would have to be
otherwise.

The question of my career was decided much sooner than I could have
expected.

When I was in my thirteenth year my father was suddenly taken from us.
He was still in robust health when a stroke of apoplexy painlessly ended
his earthly wanderings and left us all deeply bereaved. His most ardent
longing was to be able to help his son to advance in a career and thus
save me from the harsh ordeal that he himself had to go through. But it
appeared to him then as if that longing were all in vain. And yet,
though he himself was not conscious of it, he had sown the seeds of a
future which neither of us foresaw at that time.

At first nothing changed outwardly.

My mother felt it her duty to continue my education in accordance with
my father's wishes, which meant that she would have me study for the
civil service. For my own part I was even more firmly determined than
ever before that under no circumstances would I become an official of
the State. The curriculum and teaching methods followed in the middle
school were so far removed from my ideals that I became profoundly
indifferent. Illness suddenly came to my assistance. Within a few weeks
it decided my future and put an end to the long-standing family
conflict. My lungs became so seriously affected that the doctor advised
my mother very strongly not under any circumstances to allow me to take
up a career which would necessitate working in an office. He ordered
that I should give up attendance at the REALSCHULE for a year at least.
What I had secretly desired for such a long time, and had persistently
fought for, now became a reality almost at one stroke.

Influenced by my illness, my mother agreed that I should leave the
REALSCHULE and attend the Academy.

Those were happy days, which appeared to me almost as a dream; but they
were bound to remain only a dream. Two years later my mother's death put
a brutal end to all my fine projects. She succumbed to a long and
painful illness which from the very beginning permitted little hope of
recovery. Though expected, her death came as a terrible blow to me. I
respected my father, but I loved my mother.

Poverty and stern reality forced me to decide promptly.

The meagre resources of the family had been almost entirely used up
through my mother's severe illness. The allowance which came to me as an
orphan was not enough for the bare necessities of life. Somehow or other
I would have to earn my own bread.

With my clothes and linen packed in a valise and with an indomitable
resolution in my heart, I left for Vienna. I hoped to forestall fate, as
my father had done fifty years before. I was determined to become
'something'--but certainly not a civil servant.




CHAPTER II



YEARS OF STUDY AND SUFFERING IN VIENNA


When my mother died my fate had already been decided in one respect.
During the last months of her illness I went to Vienna to take the
entrance examination for the Academy of Fine Arts. Armed with a bulky
packet of sketches, I felt convinced that I should pass the examination
quite easily. At the REALSCHULE I was by far the best student in the
drawing class, and since that time I had made more than ordinary
progress in the practice of drawing. Therefore I was pleased with myself
and was proud and happy at the prospect of what I considered an assured
success.

But there was one misgiving: It seemed to me that I was better qualified
for drawing than for painting, especially in the various branches of
architectural drawing. At the same time my interest in architecture was
constantly increasing. And I advanced in this direction at a still more
rapid pace after my first visit to Vienna, which lasted two weeks. I was
not yet sixteen years old. I went to the Hof Museum to study the
paintings in the art gallery there; but the building itself captured
almost all my interest, from early morning until late at night I spent
all my time visiting the various public buildings. And it was the
buildings themselves that were always the principal attraction for me.
For hours and hours I could stand in wonderment before the Opera and the
Parliament. The whole Ring Strasse had a magic effect upon me, as if it
were a scene from the Thousand-and-one-Nights.

And now I was here for the second time in this beautiful city,
impatiently waiting to hear the result of the entrance examination but
proudly confident that I had got through. I was so convinced of my
success that when the news that I had failed to pass was brought to me
it struck me like a bolt from the skies. Yet the fact was that I had
failed. I went to see the Rector and asked him to explain the reasons
why they refused to accept me as a student in the general School of
Painting, which was part of the Academy. He said that the sketches which
I had brought with me unquestionably showed that painting was not what I
was suited for but that the same sketches gave clear indications of my
aptitude for architectural designing. Therefore the School of Painting
did not come into question for me but rather the School of Architecture,
which also formed part of the Academy. At first it was impossible to
understand how this could be so, seeing that I had never been to a
school for architecture and had never received any instruction in
architectural designing.

When I left the Hansen Palace, on the SCHILLER PLATZ, I was quite
crestfallen. I felt out of sorts with myself for the first time in my
young life. For what I had heard about my capabilities now appeared to
me as a lightning flash which clearly revealed a dualism under which I
had been suffering for a long time, but hitherto I could give no clear
account whatsoever of the why and wherefore.

Within a few days I myself also knew that I ought to become an
architect. But of course the way was very difficult. I was now forced
bitterly to rue my former conduct in neglecting and despising certain
subjects at the REALSCHULE. Before taking up the courses at the School
of Architecture in the Academy it was necessary to attend the Technical
Building School; but a necessary qualification for entrance into this
school was a Leaving Certificate from the Middle School. And this I
simply did not have. According to the human measure of things my dream
of following an artistic calling seemed beyond the limits of
possibility.

After the death of my mother I came to Vienna for the third time. This
visit was destined to last several years. Since I had been there before
I had recovered my old calm and resoluteness. The former self-assurance
had come back, and I had my eyes steadily fixed on the goal. I would be
an architect. Obstacles are placed across our path in life, not to be
boggled at but to be surmounted. And I was fully determined to surmount
these obstacles, having the picture of my father constantly before my
mind, who had raised himself by his own efforts to the position of a
civil servant though he was the poor son of a village shoemaker. I had a
better start, and the possibilities of struggling through were better.
At that time my lot in life seemed to me a harsh one; but to-day I see
in it the wise workings of Providence. The Goddess of Fate clutched me
in her hands and often threatened to smash me; but the will grew
stronger as the obstacles increased, and finally the will triumphed.

I am thankful for that period of my life, because it hardened me and
enabled me to be as tough as I now am. And I am even more thankful
because I appreciate the fact that I was thus saved from the emptiness
of a life of ease and that a mother's darling was taken from tender arms
and handed over to Adversity as to a new mother. Though I then rebelled
against it as too hard a fate, I am grateful that I was thrown into a
world of misery and poverty and thus came to know the people for whom I
was afterwards to fight.

It was during this period that my eyes were opened to two perils, the
names of which I scarcely knew hitherto and had no notion whatsoever of
their terrible significance for the existence of the German people.
These two perils were Marxism and Judaism.

For many people the name of Vienna signifies innocent jollity, a festive
place for happy mortals. For me, alas, it is a living memory of the
saddest period in my life. Even to-day the mention of that city arouses
only gloomy thoughts in my mind. Five years of poverty in that Phaecian
(Note 5) town. Five years in which, first as a casual labourer and then as
a painter of little trifles, I had to earn my daily bread. And a meagre
morsel indeed it was, not even sufficient to still the hunger which I
constantly felt. That hunger was the faithful guardian which never left
me but took part in everything I did. Every book that I bought meant
renewed hunger, and every visit I paid to the opera meant the intrusion
of that inalienabl companion during the following days. I was always
struggling with my unsympathic friend. And yet during that time I
learned more than I had ever learned before. Outside my architectural
studies and rare visits to the opera, for which I had to deny myself
food, I had no other pleasure in life except my books.

[Note 5. The Phaecians were a legendary people, mentioned in Homer's
Odyssey. They were supposed to live on some unknown island in the Eastern
Mediterranean, sometimes suggested to be Corcyra, the modern Corfu. They
loved good living more than work, and so the name Phaecian has come to be
a synonym for parasite.]

I read a great deal then, and I pondered deeply over what I read. All
the free time after work was devoted exclusively to study. Thus within a
few years I was able to acquire a stock of knowledge which I find useful
even to-day.

But more than that. During those years a view of life and a definite
outlook on the world took shape in my mind. These became the granite
basis of my conduct at that time. Since then I have extended that
foundation only very little, and I have changed nothing in it.

On the contrary: I am firmly convinced to-day that, generally speaking,
it is in youth that men lay the essential groundwork of their creative
thought, wherever that creative thought exists. I make a distinction
between the wisdom of age--which can only arise from the greater
profundity and foresight that are based on the experiences of a long
life--and the creative genius of youth, which blossoms out in thought
and ideas with inexhaustible fertility, without being able to put these
into practice immediately, because of their very superabundance. These
furnish the building materials and plans for the future; and it is from
them that age takes the stones and builds the edifice, unless the
so-called wisdom of the years may have smothered the creative genius of
youth.

The life which I had hitherto led at home with my parents differed in
little or nothing from that of all the others. I looked forward without
apprehension to the morrow, and there was no such thing as a social
problem to be faced. Those among whom I passed my young days belonged to
the small bourgeois class. Therefore it was a world that had very little
contact with the world of genuine manual labourers. For, though at first
this may appear astonishing, the ditch which separates that class, which
is by no means economically well-off; from the manual labouring class is
often deeper than people think. The reason for this division, which we
may almost call enmity, lies in the fear that dominates a social group
which has only just risen above the level of the manual labourer--a fear
lest it may fall back into its old condition or at least be classed with
the labourers. Moreover, there is something repulsive in remembering the
cultural indigence of that lower class and their rough manners with one
another; so that people who are only on the first rung of the social
ladder find it unbearable to be forced to have any contact with the
cultural level and standard of living out of which they have passed.

And so it happens that very often those who belong to what can really be
called the upper classes find it much easier than do the upstarts to
descend to and intermingle with their fellow beings on the lowest social
level. For by the word upstart I mean everyone who has raised himself
through his own efforts to a social level higher than that to which he
formerly belonged. In the case of such a person the hard struggle
through which he passes often destroys his normal human sympathy. His
own fight for existence kills his sensibility for the misery of those
who have been left behind.

From this point of view fate had been kind to me. Circumstances forced
me to return to that world of poverty and economic insecurity above
which my father had raised himself in his early days; and thus the
blinkers of a narrow PETIT BOURGEOIS education were torn from my eyes.
Now for the first time I learned to know men and I learned to
distinguish between empty appearances or brutal manners and the real
inner nature of the people who outwardly appeared thus.

At the beginning of the century Vienna had already taken rank among
those cities where social conditions are iniquitous. Dazzling riches and
loathsome destitution were intermingled in violent contrast. In the
centre and in the Inner City one felt the pulse-beat of an Empire which
had a population of fifty-two millions, with all the perilous charm of a
State made up of multiple nationalities. The dazzling splendour of the
Court acted like a magnet on the wealth and intelligence of the whole
Empire. And this attraction was further strengthened by the dynastic
policy of the Habsburg Monarchy in centralizing everything in itself and
for itself.

This centralizing policy was necessary in order to hold together that
hotchpotch of heterogeneous nationalities. But the result of it was an
extraordinary concentration of higher officials in the city, which was
at one and the same time the metropolis and imperial residence.

But Vienna was not merely the political and intellectual centre of the
Danubian Monarchy; it was also the commercial centre. Besides the horde
of military officers of high rank, State officials, artists and
scientists, there was the still vaster horde of workers. Abject poverty
confronted the wealth of the aristocracy and the merchant class face to
face. Thousands of unemployed loitered in front of the palaces on the
Ring Strasse; and below that VIA TRIUMPHALIS of the old Austria the
homeless huddled together in the murk and filth of the canals.

There was hardly any other German city in which the social problem could
be studied better than in Vienna. But here I must utter a warning
against the illusion that this problem can be 'studied' from above
downwards. The man who has never been in the clutches of that crushing
viper can never know what its poison is. An attempt to study it in any
other way will result only in superficial talk and sentimental
delusions. Both are harmful. The first because it can never go to the
root of the question, the second because it evades the question
entirely. I do not know which is the more nefarious: to ignore social
distress, as do the majority of those who have been favoured by fortune
and those who have risen in the social scale through their own routine
labour, or the equally supercilious and often tactless but always
genteel condescension displayed by people who make a fad of being
charitable and who plume themselves on 'sympathising with the people.'
Of course such persons sin more than they can imagine from lack of
instinctive understanding. And thus they are astonished to find that the
'social conscience' on which they pride themselves never produces any
results, but often causes their good intentions to be resented; and then
they talk of the ingratitude of the people.

Such persons are slow to learn that here there is no place for merely
social activities and that there can be no expectation of gratitude; for
in this connection there is no question at all of distributing favours
but essentially a matter of retributive justice. I was protected against
the temptation to study the social question in the way just mentioned,
for the simple reason that I was forced to live in the midst of
poverty-stricken people. Therefore it was not a question of studying the
problem objectively, but rather one of testing its effects on myself.
Though the rabbit came through the ordeal of the experiment, this must
not be taken as evidence of its harmlessness.

When I try to-day to recall the succession of impressions received
during that time I find that I can do so only with approximate
completeness. Here I shall describe only the more essential impressions
and those which personally affected me and often staggered me. And I
shall mention the few lessons I then learned from this experience.

At that time it was for the most part not very difficult to find work,
because I had to seek work not as a skilled tradesman but as a so-called
extra-hand ready to take any job that turned up by chance, just for the
sake of earning my daily bread.

Thus I found myself in the same situation as all those emigrants who
shake the dust of Europe from their feet, with the cast-iron
determination to lay the foundations of a new existence in the New World
and acquire for themselves a new home. Liberated from all the paralysing
prejudices of class and calling, environment and tradition, they enter
any service that opens its doors to them, accepting any work that comes
their way, filled more and more with the idea that honest work never
disgraced anybody, no matter what kind it may be. And so I was resolved
to set both feet in what was for me a new world and push forward on my
own road.

I soon found out that there was some kind of work always to be got, but
I also learned that it could just as quickly and easily be lost. The
uncertainty of being able to earn a regular daily livelihood soon
appeared to me as the gloomiest feature in this new life that I had
entered.

Although the skilled worker was not so frequently thrown idle on the
streets as the unskilled worker, yet the former was by no means
protected against the same fate; because though he may not have to face
hunger as a result of unemployment due to the lack of demand in the
labour market, the lock-out and the strike deprived the skilled worker
of the chance to earn his bread. Here the element of uncertainty in
steadily earning one's daily bread was the bitterest feature of the
whole social-economic system itself.

The country lad who migrates to the big city feels attracted by what has
been described as easy work--which it may be in reality--and few working
hours. He is especially entranced by the magic glimmer spread over the
big cities. Accustomed in the country to earn a steady wage, he has been
taught not to quit his former post until a new one is at least in sight.
As there is a great scarcity of agricultural labour, the probability of
long unemployment in the country has been very small. It is a mistake to
presume that the lad who leaves the countryside for the town is not made
of such sound material as those who remain at home to work on the land.
On the contrary, experience shows that it is the more healthy and more
vigorous that emigrate, and not the reverse. Among these emigrants I
include not merely those who emigrate to America, but also the servant
boy in the country who decides to leave his native village and migrate
to the big city where he will be a stranger. He is ready to take the
risk of an uncertain fate. In most cases he comes to town with a little
money in his pocket and for the first few days he is not discouraged if
he should not have the good fortune to find work. But if he finds a job
and then loses it in a little while, the case is much worse. To find
work anew, especially in winter, is often difficult and indeed sometimes
impossible. For the first few weeks life is still bearable He receives
his out-of-work money from his trade union and is thus enabled to carry
on. But when the last of his own money is gone and his trade union
ceases to pay out because of the prolonged unemployment, then comes the
real distress. He now loiters about and is hungry. Often he pawns or
sells the last of his belongings. His clothes begin to get shabby and
with the increasing poverty of his outward appearance he descends to a
lower social level and mixes up with a class of human beings through
whom his mind is now poisoned, in addition to his physical misery. Then
he has nowhere to sleep and if that happens in winter, which is very
often the case, he is in dire distress. Finally he gets work. But the
old story repeats itself. A second time the same thing happens. Then a
third time; and now it is probably much worse. Little by little he
becomes indifferent to this everlasting insecurity. Finally he grows
used to the repetition. Thus even a man who is normally of industrious
habits grows careless in his whole attitude towards life and gradually
becomes an instrument in the hands of unscrupulous people who exploit
him for the sake of their own ignoble aims. He has been so often thrown
out of employment through no fault of his own that he is now more or
less indifferent whether the strike in which he takes part be for the
purpose of securing his economic rights or be aimed at the destruction
of the State, the whole social order and even civilization itself.
Though the idea of going on strike may not be to his natural liking, yet
he joins in it out of sheer indifference.

I saw this process exemplified before my eyes in thousands of cases. And
the longer I observed it the greater became my dislike for that mammoth
city which greedily attracts men to its bosom, in order to break them
mercilessly in the end. When they came they still felt themselves in
communion with their own people at home; if they remained that tie was
broken.

I was thrown about so much in the life of the metropolis that I
experienced the workings of this fate in my own person and felt the
effects of it in my own soul. One thing stood out clearly before my
eyes: It was the sudden changes from work to idleness and vice versa; so
that the constant fluctuations thus caused by earnings and expenditure
finally destroyed the 'sense of thrift for many people and also the
habit of regulating expenditure in an intelligent way. The body appeared
to grow accustomed to the vicissitudes of food and hunger, eating
heartily in good times and going hungry in bad. Indeed hunger shatters
all plans for rationing expenditure on a regular scale in better times
when employment is again found. The reason for this is that the
deprivations which the unemployed worker has to endure must be
compensated for psychologically by a persistent mental mirage in which
he imagines himself eating heartily once again. And this dream develops
into such a longing that it turns into a morbid impulse to cast off all
self-restraint when work and wages turn up again. Therefore the moment
work is found anew he forgets to regulate the expenditure of his
earnings but spends them to the full without thinking of to-morrow. This
leads to confusion in the little weekly housekeeping budget, because the
expenditure is not rationally planned. When the phenomenon which I have
mentioned first happens, the earnings will last perhaps for five days
instead of seven; on subsequent occasions they will last only for three
days; as the habit recurs, the earnings will last scarcely for a day;
and finally they will disappear in one night of feasting.

Often there are wife and children at home. And in many cases it happens
that these become infected by such a way of living, especially if the
husband is good to them and wants to do the best he can for them and
loves them in his own way and according to his own lights. Then the
week's earnings are spent in common at home within two or three days.
The family eat and drink together as long as the money lasts and at the
end of the week they hunger together. Then the wife wanders about
furtively in the neighbourhood, borrows a little, and runs up small
debts with the shopkeepers in an effort to pull through the lean days
towards the end of the week. They sit down together to the midday meal
with only meagre fare on the table, and often even nothing to eat. They
wait for the coming payday, talking of it and making plans; and while
they are thus hungry they dream of the plenty that is to come. And so
the little children become acquainted with misery in their early years.

But the evil culminates when the husband goes his own way from the
beginning of the week and the wife protests, simply out of love for the
children. Then there are quarrels and bad feeling and the husband takes
to drink according as he becomes estranged from his wife. He now becomes
drunk every Saturday. Fighting for her own existence and that of the
children, the wife has to hound him along the road from the factory to
the tavern in order to get a few shillings from him on payday. Then when
he finally comes home, maybe on the Sunday or the Monday, having parted
with his last shillings and pence, pitiable scenes follow, scenes that
cry out for God's mercy.

I have had actual experience of all this in hundreds of cases. At first
I was disgusted and indignant; but later on I came to recognize the
whole tragedy of their misfortune and to understand the profound causes
of it. They were the unhappy victims of evil circumstances.

Housing conditions were very bad at that time. The Vienna manual
labourers lived in surroundings of appalling misery. I shudder even
to-day when I think of the woeful dens in which people dwelt, the night
shelters and the slums, and all the tenebrous spectacles of ordure,
loathsome filth and wickedness.

What will happen one day when hordes of emancipated slaves come forth
from these dens of misery to swoop down on their unsuspecting fellow
men? For this other world does not think about such a possibility. They
have allowed these things to go on without caring and even without
suspecting--in their total lack of instinctive understanding--that
sooner or later destiny will take its vengeance unless it will have been
appeased in time.

To-day I fervidly thank Providence for having sent me to such a school.
There I could not refuse to take an interest in matters that did not
please me. This school soon taught me a profound lesson.

In order not to despair completely of the people among whom I then lived
I had to set on one side the outward appearances of their lives and on
the other the reasons why they had developed in that way. Then I could
hear everything without discouragement; for those who emerged from all
this misfortune and misery, from this filth and outward degradation,
were not human beings as such but rather lamentable results of
lamentable laws. In my own life similar hardships prevented me from
giving way to a pitying sentimentality at the sight of these degraded
products which had finally resulted from the pressure of circumstances.
No, the sentimental attitude would be the wrong one to adopt.

Even in those days I already saw that there was a two-fold method by
which alone it would be possible to bring about an amelioration of these
conditions. This method is: first, to create better fundamental
conditions of social development by establishing a profound feeling for
social responsibilities among the public; second, to combine this
feeling for social responsibilities with a ruthless determination to
prune away all excrescences which are incapable of being improved.

Just as Nature concentrates its greatest attention, not to the
maintenance of what already exists but on the selective breeding of
offspring in order to carry on the species, so in human life also it is
less a matter of artificially improving the existing generation--which,
owing to human characteristics, is impossible in ninety-nine cases out
of a hundred--and more a matter of securing from the very start a better
road for future development.

During my struggle for existence in Vienna I perceived very clearly that
the aim of all social activity must never be merely charitable relief,
which is ridiculous and useless, but it must rather be a means to find a
way of eliminating the fundamental deficiencies in our economic and
cultural life--deficiencies which necessarily bring about the
degradation of the individual or at least lead him towards such
degradation. The difficulty of employing every means, even the most
drastic, to eradicate the hostility prevailing among the working classes
towards the State is largely due to an attitude of uncertainty in
deciding upon the inner motives and causes of this contemporary
phenomenon. The grounds of this uncertainty are to be found exclusively
in the sense of guilt which each individual feels for having permitted
this tragedy of degradation. For that feeling paralyses every effort at
making a serious and firm decision to act. And thus because the people
whom it concerns are vacillating they are timid and half-hearted in
putting into effect even the measures which are indispensable for
self-preservation. When the individual is no longer burdened with his
own consciousness of blame in this regard, then and only then will he
have that inner tranquillity and outer force to cut off drastically and
ruthlessly all the parasite growth and root out the weeds.

But because the Austrian State had almost no sense of social rights or
social legislation its inability to abolish those evil excrescences was
manifest.

I do not know what it was that appalled me most at that time: the
economic misery of those who were then my companions, their crude
customs and morals, or the low level of their intellectual culture.

How often our bourgeoisie rises up in moral indignation on hearing from
the mouth of some pitiable tramp that it is all the same to him whether
he be a German or not and that he will find himself at home wherever he
can get enough to keep body and soul together. They protest sternly
against such a lack of 'national pride' and strongly express their
horror at such sentiments.

But how many people really ask themselves why it is that their own
sentiments are better? How many of them understand that their natural
pride in being members of so favoured a nation arises from the
innumerable succession of instances they have encountered which remind
them of the greatness of the Fatherland and the Nation in all spheres of
artistic and cultural life? How many of them realize that pride in the
Fatherland is largely dependent on knowledge of its greatness in all
those spheres? Do our bourgeois circles ever think what a ridiculously
meagre share the people have in that knowledge which is a necessary
prerequisite for the feeling of pride in one's fatherland?

It cannot be objected here that in other countries similar conditions
exist and that nevertheless the working classes in those countries have
remained patriotic. Even if that were so, it would be no excuse for our
negligent attitude. But it is not so. What we call chauvinistic
education--in the case of the French people, for example--is only the
excessive exaltation of the greatness of France in all spheres of
culture or, as the French say, civilization. The French boy is not
educated on purely objective principles. Wherever the importance of the
political and cultural greatness of his country is concerned he is
taught in the most subjective way that one can imagine.

This education will always have to be confined to general ideas in a
large perspective and these ought to be deeply engraven, by constant
repetition if necessary, on the memories and feelings of the people.

In our case, however, we are not merely guilty of negative sins of
omission but also of positively perverting the little which some
individuals had the luck to learn at school. The rats that poison our
body-politic gnaw from the hearts and memories of the broad masses even
that little which distress and misery have left.

Let the reader try to picture the following:

There is a lodging in a cellar and this lodging consists of two damp
rooms. In these rooms a workman and his family live--seven people in
all. Let us assume that one of the children is a boy of three years.
That is the age at which children first become conscious of the
impressions which they receive. In the case of highly gifted people
traces of the impressions received in those early years last in the
memory up to an advanced age. Now the narrowness and congestion of those
living quarters do not conduce to pleasant inter-relations. Thus
quarrels and fits of mutual anger arise. These people can hardly be said
to live with one another, but rather down on top of one another. The
small misunderstandings which disappear of themselves in a home where
there is enough space for people to go apart from one another for a
while, here become the source of chronic disputes. As far as the
children are concerned the situation is tolerable from this point of
view. In such conditions they are constantly quarrelling with one
another, but the quarrels are quickly and entirely forgotten. But when
the parents fall out with one another these daily bickerings often
descend to rudeness such as cannot be adequately imagined. The results
of such experiences must become apparent later on in the children. One
must have practical experience of such a MILIEU so as to be able to
picture the state of affairs that arises from these mutual
recriminations when the father physically assaults the mother and
maltreats her in a fit of drunken rage. At the age of six the child can
no longer ignore those sordid details which even an adult would find
revolting. Infected with moral poison, bodily undernourished, and the
poor little head filled with vermin, the young 'citizen' goes to the
primary school. With difficulty he barely learns to read and write.
There is no possibility of learning any lessons at home. Quite the
contrary. The father and mother themselves talk before the children in
the most disparaging way about the teacher and the school and they are
much more inclined to insult the teachers than to put their offspring
across the knee and knock sound reason into him. What the little fellow
hears at home does not tend to increase respect for his human
surroundings. Here nothing good is said of human nature as a whole and
every institution, from the school to the government, is reviled.
Whether religion and morals are concerned or the State and the social
order, it is all the same; they are all scoffed at. When the young lad
leaves school, at the age of fourteen, it would be difficult to say what
are the most striking features of his character, incredible ignorance in
so far as real knowledge is concerned or cynical impudence combined with
an attitude towards morality which is really startling at so young an
age.

What station in life can such a person fill, to whom nothing is sacred,
who has never experienced anything noble but, on the contrary, has been
intimately acquainted with the lowest kind of human existence? This
child of three has got into the habit of reviling all authority by the
time he is fifteen. He has been acquainted only with moral filth and
vileness, everything being excluded that might stimulate his thought
towards higher things. And now this young specimen of humanity enters
the school of life.

He leads the same kind of life which was exemplified for him by his
father during his childhood. He loiters about and comes home at all
hours. He now even black-guards that broken-hearted being who gave him
birth. He curses God and the world and finally ends up in a House of
Correction for young people. There he gets the final polish.

And his bourgeois contemporaries are astonished at the lack of
'patriotic enthusiasm' which this young 'citizen' manifests.

Day after day the bourgeois world are witnesses to the phenomenon of
spreading poison among the people through the instrumentality of the
theatre and the cinema, gutter journalism and obscene books; and yet
they are astonished at the deplorable 'moral standards' and 'national
indifference' of the masses. As if the cinema bilge and the gutter press
and suchlike could inculcate knowledge of the greatness of one's
country, apart entirely from the earlier education of the individual.

I then came to understand, quickly and thoroughly, what I had never been
aware of before. It was the following:

The question of 'nationalizing' a people is first and foremost one of
establishing healthy social conditions which will furnish the grounds
that are necessary for the education of the individual. For only when
family upbringing and school education have inculcated in the individual
a knowledge of the cultural and economic and, above all, the political
greatness of his own country--then, and then only, will it be possible
for him to feel proud of being a citizen of such a country. I can fight
only for something that I love. I can love only what I respect. And in
order to respect a thing I must at least have some knowledge of it.

As soon as my interest in social questions was once awakened I began to
study them in a fundamental way. A new and hitherto unknown world was
thus revealed to me.

In the years 1909-10 I had so far improved my, position that I no longer
had to earn my daily bread as a manual labourer. I was now working
independently as draughtsman, and painter in water colours. This MÉTIER
was a poor one indeed as far as earnings were concerned; for these were
only sufficient to meet the bare exigencies of life. Yet it had an
interest for me in view of the profession to which I aspired. Moreover,
when I came home in the evenings I was now no longer dead-tired as
formerly, when I used to be unable to look into a book without falling
asleep almost immediately. My present occupation therefore was in line
with the profession I aimed at for the future. Moreover, I was master of
my own time and could distribute my working-hours now better than
formerly. I painted in order to earn my bread, and I studied because I
liked it.

Thus I was able to acquire that theoretical knowledge of the social
problem which was a necessary complement to what I was learning through
actual experience. I studied all the books which I could find that dealt
with this question and I thought deeply on what I read. I think that the
MILIEU in which I then lived considered me an eccentric person.

Besides my interest in the social question I naturally devoted myself
with enthusiasm to the study of architecture. Side by side with music, I
considered it queen of the arts. To study it was for me not work but
pleasure. I could read or draw until the small hours of the morning
without ever getting tired. And I became more and more confident that my
dream of a brilliant future would become true, even though I should have
to wait long years for its fulfilment. I was firmly convinced that one
day I should make a name for myself as an architect.

The fact that, side by side with my professional studies, I took the
greatest interest in everything that had to do with politics did not
seem to me to signify anything of great importance. On the contrary: I
looked upon this practical interest in politics merely as part of an
elementary obligation that devolves on every thinking man. Those who
have no understanding of the political world around them have no right
to criticize or complain. On political questions therefore I still
continued to read and study a great deal. But reading had probably a
different significance for me from that which it has for the average run
of our so-called 'intellectuals'.

I know people who read interminably, book after book, from page to page,
and yet I should not call them 'well-read people'. Of course they 'know'
an immense amount; but their brain seems incapable of assorting and
classifying the material which they have gathered from books. They have
not the faculty of distinguishing between what is useful and useless in
a book; so that they may retain the former in their minds and if
possible skip over the latter while reading it, if that be not possible,
then--when once read--throw it overboard as useless ballast. Reading is
not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Its chief purpose is to
help towards filling in the framework which is made up of the talents
and capabilities that each individual possesses. Thus each one procures
for himself the implements and materials necessary for the fulfilment of
his calling in life, no matter whether this be the elementary task of
earning one's daily bread or a calling that responds to higher human
aspirations. Such is the first purpose of reading. And the second
purpose is to give a general knowledge of the world in which we live. In
both cases, however, the material which one has acquired through reading
must not be stored up in the memory on a plan that corresponds to the
successive chapters of the book; but each little piece of knowledge thus
gained must be treated as if it were a little stone to be inserted into
a mosaic, so that it finds its proper place among all the other pieces
and particles that help to form a general world-picture in the brain of
the reader. Otherwise only a confused jumble of chaotic notions will
result from all this reading. That jumble is not merely useless, but it
also tends to make the unfortunate possessor of it conceited. For he
seriously considers himself a well-educated person and thinks that he
understands something of life. He believes that he has acquired
knowledge, whereas the truth is that every increase in such 'knowledge'
draws him more and more away from real life, until he finally ends up in
some sanatorium or takes to politics and becomes a parliamentary deputy.

Such a person never succeeds in turning his knowledge to practical
account when the opportune moment arrives; for his mental equipment is
not ordered with a view to meeting the demands of everyday life. His
knowledge is stored in his brain as a literal transcript of the books he
has read and the order of succession in which he has read them. And if
Fate should one day call upon him to use some of his book-knowledge for
certain practical ends in life that very call will have to name the book
and give the number of the page; for the poor noodle himself would never
be able to find the spot where he gathered the information now called
for. But if the page is not mentioned at the critical moment the
widely-read intellectual will find himself in a state of hopeless
embarrassment. In a high state of agitation he searches for analogous
cases and it is almost a dead certainty that he will finally deliver the
wrong prescription.

If that is not a correct description, then how can we explain the
political achievements of our Parliamentary heroes who hold the highest
positions in the government of the country? Otherwise we should have to
attribute the doings of such political leaders, not to pathological
conditions but simply to malice and chicanery.

On the other hand, one who has cultivated the art of reading will
instantly discern, in a book or journal or pamphlet, what ought to be
remembered because it meets one's personal needs or is of value as
general knowledge. What he thus learns is incorporated in his mental
analogue of this or that problem or thing, further correcting the mental
picture or enlarging it so that it becomes more exact and precise.
Should some practical problem suddenly demand examination or solution,
memory will immediately select the opportune information from the mass
that has been acquired through years of reading and will place this
information at the service of one's powers of judgment so as to get a
new and clearer view of the problem in question or produce a definitive
solution.

Only thus can reading have any meaning or be worth while.

The speaker, for example, who has not the sources of information ready
to hand which are necessary to a proper treatment of his subject is
unable to defend his opinions against an opponent, even though those
opinions be perfectly sound and true. In every discussion his memory
will leave him shamefully in the lurch. He cannot summon up arguments to
support his statements or to refute his opponent. So long as the speaker
has only to defend himself on his own personal account, the situation is
not serious; but the evil comes when Chance places at the head of public
affairs such a soi-disant know-it-all, who in reality knows nothing.

From early youth I endeavoured to read books in the right way and I was
fortunate in having a good memory and intelligence to assist me. From
that point of view my sojourn in Vienna was particularly useful and
profitable. My experiences of everyday life there were a constant
stimulus to study the most diverse problems from new angles. Inasmuch as
I was in a position to put theory to the test of reality and reality to
the test of theory, I was safe from the danger of pedantic theorizing on
the one hand and, on the other, from being too impressed by the
superficial aspects of reality.

The experience of everyday life at that time determined me to make a
fundamental theoretical study of two most important questions outside of
the social question.

It is impossible to say when I might have started to make a thorough
study of the doctrine and characteristics of Marxism were it not for the
fact that I then literally ran head foremost into the problem.

What I knew of Social Democracy in my youth was precious little and that
little was for the most part wrong. The fact that it led the struggle
for universal suffrage and the secret ballot gave me an inner
satisfaction; for my reason then told me that this would weaken the
Habsburg regime, which I so thoroughly detested. I was convinced that
even if it should sacrifice the German element the Danubian State could
not continue to exist. Even at the price of a long and slow Slaviz-ation
of the Austrian Germans the State would secure no guarantee of a really
durable Empire; because it was very questionable if and how far the
Slavs possessed the necessary capacity for constructive politics.
Therefore I welcomed every movement that might lead towards the final
disruption of that impossible State which had decreed that it would
stamp out the German character in ten millions of people. The more this
babel of tongues wrought discord and disruption, even in the Parliament,
the nearer the hour approached for the dissolution of this Babylonian
Empire. That would mean the liberation of my German Austrian people, and
only then would it become possible for them to be re-united to the
Motherland.

Accordingly I had no feelings of antipathy towards the actual policy of
the Social Democrats. That its avowed purpose was to raise the level of
the working classes--which in my ignorance I then foolishly
believed--was a further reason why I should speak in favour of Social
Democracy rather than against it. But the features that contributed most
to estrange me from the Social Democratic movement was its hostile
attitude towards the struggle for the conservation of Germanism in
Austria, its lamentable cocotting with the Slav 'comrades', who received
these approaches favourably as long as any practical advantages were
forthcoming but otherwise maintained a haughty reserve, thus giving the
importunate mendicants the sort of answer their behaviour deserved.

And so at the age of seventeen the word 'Marxism' was very little known
to me, while I looked on 'Social Democracy' and 'Socialism' as
synonymous expressions. It was only as the result of a sudden blow from
the rough hand of Fate that my eyes were opened to the nature of this
unparalleled system for duping the public.

Hitherto my acquaintance with the Social Democratic Party was only that
of a mere spectator at some of their mass meetings. I had not the
slightest idea of the social-democratic teaching or the mentality of its
partisans. All of a sudden I was brought face to face with the products
of their teaching and what they called their WELTANSCHAUUNG. In this
way a few months sufficed for me to learn something which under other
circumstances might have necessitated decades of study--namely, that
under the cloak of social virtue and love of one's neighbour a veritable
pestilence was spreading abroad and that if this pestilence be not
stamped out of the world without delay it may eventually succeed in
exterminating the human race.

I first came into contact with the Social Democrats while working in the
building trade.

From the very time that I started work the situation was not very
pleasant for me. My clothes were still rather decent. I was careful of
my speech and I was reserved in manner. I was so occupied with thinking
of my own present lot and future possibilities that I did not take much
of an interest in my immediate surroundings. I had sought work so that I
shouldn't starve and at the same time so as to be able to make further
headway with my studies, though this headway might be slow. Possibly I
should not have bothered to be interested in my companions were it not
that on the third or fourth day an event occurred which forced me to
take a definite stand. I was ordered to join the trade union.

At that time I knew nothing about the trades unions. I had had no
opportunity of forming an opinion on their utility or inutility, as the
case might be. But when I was told that I must join the union I refused.
The grounds which I gave for my refusal were simply that I knew nothing
about the matter and that anyhow I would not allow myself to be forced
into anything. Probably the former reason saved me from being thrown out
right away. They probably thought that within a few days I might be
converted' and become more docile. But if they thought that they were
profoundly mistaken. After two weeks I found it utterly impossible for
me to take such a step, even if I had been willing to take it at first.
During those fourteen days I came to know my fellow workmen better, and
no power in the world could have moved me to join an organization whose
representatives had meanwhile shown themselves in a light which I found
so unfavourable.

During the first days my resentment was aroused.

At midday some of my fellow workers used to adjourn to the nearest
tavern, while the others remained on the building premises and there ate
their midday meal, which in most cases was a very scanty one. These were
married men. Their wives brought them the midday soup in dilapidated
vessels. Towards the end of the week there was a gradual increase in the
number of those who remained to eat their midday meal on the building
premises. I understood the reason for this afterwards. They now talked
politics.

I drank my bottle of milk and ate my morsel of bread somewhere on the
outskirts, while I circumspectly studied my environment or else fell to
meditating on my own harsh lot. Yet I heard more than enough. And I
often thought that some of what they said was meant for my ears, in the
hope of bringing me to a decision. But all that I heard had the effect
of arousing the strongest antagonism in me. Everything was
disparaged--the nation, because it was held to be an invention of the
'capitalist' class (how often I had to listen to that phrase!); the
Fatherland, because it was held to be an instrument in the hands of the
bourgeoisie for the exploitation of' the working masses; the authority
of the law, because that was a means of holding down the proletariat;
religion, as a means of doping the people, so as to exploit them
afterwards; morality, as a badge of stupid and sheepish docility. There
was nothing that they did not drag in the mud.

At first I remained silent; but that could not last very long. Then I
began to take part in the discussion and to reply to their statements. I
had to recognize, however, that this was bound to be entirely fruitless,
as long as I did not have at least a certain amount of definite
information about the questions that were discussed. So I decided to
consult the source from which my interlocutors claimed to have drawn
their so-called wisdom. I devoured book after book, pamphlet after
pamphlet.

Meanwhile, we argued with one another on the building premises. From day
to day I was becoming better informed than my companions in the subjects
on which they claimed to be experts. Then a day came when the more
redoubtable of my adversaries resorted to the most effective weapon they
had to replace the force of reason. This was intimidation and physical
force. Some of the leaders among my adversaries ordered me to leave the
building or else get flung down from the scaffolding. As I was quite
alone I could not put up any physical resistance; so I chose the first
alternative and departed, richer however by an experience.

I went away full of disgust; but at the same time so deeply moved that
it was quite impossible for me to turn my back on the whole situation
and think no more about it. When my anger began to calm down the spirit
of obstinacy got the upper hand and I decided that at all costs I would
get back to work again in the building trade. This decision became all
the stronger a few weeks later, when my little savings had entirely run
out and hunger clutched me once again in its merciless arms. No
alternative was left to me. I got work again and had to leave it for the
same reasons as before.

Then I asked myself: Are these men worthy of belonging to a great
people? The question was profoundly disturbing; for if the answer were
'Yes', then the struggle to defend one's nationality is no longer worth
all the trouble and sacrifice we demand of our best elements if it be in
the interests of such a rabble. On the other hand, if the answer had to
be 'No--these men are not worthy of the nation', then our nation is poor
indeed in men. During those days of mental anguish and deep meditation I
saw before my mind the ever-increasing and menacing army of people who
could no longer be reckoned as belonging to their own nation.

It was with quite a different feeling, some days later, that I gazed on
the interminable ranks, four abreast, of Viennese workmen parading at a
mass demonstration. I stood dumbfounded for almost two hours, watching
that enormous human dragon which slowly uncoiled itself there before me.
When I finally left the square and wandered in the direction of my
lodgings I felt dismayed and depressed. On my way I noticed the
ARBEITERZEITUNG (The Workman's Journal) in a tobacco shop. This was the
chief press-organ of the old Austrian Social Democracy. In a cheap café,
where the common people used to foregather and where I often went to
read the papers, the ARBEITERZEITUNG was also displayed. But hitherto I
could not bring myself to do more than glance at the wretched thing for
a couple of minutes: for its whole tone was a sort of mental vitriol to
me. Under the depressing influence of the demonstration I had witnessed,
some interior voice urged me to buy the paper in that tobacco shop and
read it through. So I brought it home with me and spent the whole
evening reading it, despite the steadily mounting rage provoked by this
ceaseless outpouring of falsehoods.

I now found that in the social democratic daily papers I could study the
inner character of this politico-philosophic system much better than in
all their theoretical literature.

For there was a striking discrepancy between the two. In the literary
effusions which dealt with the theory of Social Democracy there was a
display of high-sounding phraseology about liberty and human dignity and
beauty, all promulgated with an air of profound wisdom and serene
prophetic assurance; a meticulously-woven glitter of words to dazzle and
mislead the reader. On the other hand, the daily Press inculcated this
new doctrine of human redemption in the most brutal fashion. No means
were too base, provided they could be exploited in the campaign of
slander. These journalists were real virtuosos in the art of twisting
facts and presenting them in a deceptive form. The theoretical
literature was intended for the simpletons of the soi-disant
intellectuals belonging to the middle and, naturally, the upper classes.
The newspaper propaganda was intended for the masses.

This probing into books and newspapers and studying the teachings of
Social Democracy reawakened my love for my own people. And thus what at
first seemed an impassable chasm became the occasion of a closer
affection.

Having once understood the working of the colossal system for poisoning
the popular mind, only a fool could blame the victims of it. During the
years that followed I became more independent and, as I did so, I became
better able to understand the inner cause of the success achieved by
this Social Democratic gospel. I now realized the meaning and purpose of
those brutal orders which prohibited the reading of all books and
newspapers that were not 'red' and at the same time demanded that only
the 'red' meetings should be attended. In the clear light of brutal
reality I was able to see what must have been the inevitable
consequences of that intolerant teaching.

The PSYCHE of the broad masses is accessible only to what is strong and
uncompromising. Like a woman whose inner sensibilities are not so much
under the sway of abstract reasoning but are always subject to the
influence of a vague emotional longing for the strength that completes
her being, and who would rather bow to the strong man than dominate the
weakling--in like manner the masses of the people prefer the ruler to
the suppliant and are filled with a stronger sense of mental security by
a teaching that brooks no rival than by a teaching which offers them a
liberal choice. They have very little idea of how to make such a choice
and thus they are prone to feel that they have been abandoned. They feel
very little shame at being terrorized intellectually and they are
scarcely conscious of the fact that their freedom as human beings is
impudently abused; and thus they have not the slightest suspicion of the
intrinsic fallacy of the whole doctrine. They see only the ruthless
force and brutality of its determined utterances, to which they always
submit.

IF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY SHOULD BE OPPOSED BY A MORE TRUTHFUL TEACHING, THEN
EVEN, THOUGH THE STRUGGLE BE OF THE BITTEREST KIND, THIS TRUTHFUL
TEACHING WILL FINALLY PREVAIL PROVIDED IT BE ENFORCED WITH EQUAL
RUTHLESSNESS.

Within less than two years I had gained a clear understanding of Social
Democracy, in its teaching and the technique of its operations.

I recognized the infamy of that technique whereby the movement carried
on a campaign of mental terrorism against the bourgeoisie, who are
neither morally nor spiritually equipped to withstand such attacks. The
tactics of Social Democracy consisted in opening, at a given signal, a
veritable drum-fire of lies and calumnies against the man whom they
believed to be the most redoubtable of their adversaries, until the
nerves of the latter gave way and they sacrificed the man who was
attacked, simply in the hope of being allowed to live in peace. But the
hope proved always to be a foolish one, for they were never left in
peace.

The same tactics are repeated again and again, until fear of these mad
dogs exercises, through suggestion, a paralysing effect on their
Victims.

Through its own experience Social Democracy learned the value of
strength, and for that reason it attacks mostly those in whom it scents
stuff of the more stalwart kind, which is indeed a very rare possession.
On the other hand it praises every weakling among its adversaries, more
or less cautiously, according to the measure of his mental qualities
known or presumed. They have less fear of a man of genius who lacks
will-power than of a vigorous character with mediocre intelligence and
at the same time they highly commend those who are devoid of
intelligence and will-power.

The Social Democrats know how to create the impression that they alone
are the protectors of peace. In this way, acting very circumspectly but
never losing sight of their ultimate goal, they conquer one position
after another, at one time by methods of quiet intimidation and at
another time by sheer daylight robbery, employing these latter tactics
at those moments when public attention is turned towards other matters
from which it does not wish to be diverted, or when the public considers
an incident too trivial to create a scandal about it and thus provoke
the anger of a malignant opponent.

These tactics are based on an accurate estimation of human frailties and
must lead to success, with almost mathematical certainty, unless the
other side also learns how to fight poison gas with poison gas. The
weaker natures must be told that here it is a case of to be or not to
be.

I also came to understand that physical intimidation has its
significance for the mass as well as for the individual. Here again the
Socialists had calculated accurately on the psychological effect.

Intimidation in workshops and in factories, in assembly halls and at
mass demonstrations, will always meet with success as long as it does
not have to encounter the same kind of terror in a stronger form.

Then of course the Party will raise a horrified outcry, yelling blue
murder and appealing to the authority of the State, which they have just
repudiated. In doing this their aim generally is to add to the general
confusion, so that they may have a better opportunity of reaching their
own goal unobserved. Their idea is to find among the higher government
officials some bovine creature who, in the stupid hope that he may win
the good graces of these awe-inspiring opponents so that they may
remember him in case of future eventualities, will help them now to
break all those who may oppose this world pest.

The impression which such successful tactics make on the minds of the
broad masses, whether they be adherents or opponents, can be estimated
only by one who knows the popular mind, not from books but from
practical life. For the successes which are thus obtained are taken by
the adherents of Social Democracy as a triumphant symbol of the
righteousness of their own cause; on the other hand the beaten opponent
very often loses faith in the effectiveness of any further resistance.

The more I understood the methods of physical intimidation that were
employed, the more sympathy I had for the multitude that had succumbed
to it.

I am thankful now for the ordeal which I had to go through at that time;
for it was the means of bringing me to think kindly again of my own
people, inasmuch as the experience enabled me to distinguish between the
false leaders and the victims who have been led astray.

We must look upon the latter simply as victims. I have just now tried to
depict a few traits which express the mentality of those on the lowest
rung of the social ladder; but my picture would be disproportionate if I
do not add that amid the social depths I still found light; for I
experienced a rare spirit of self-sacrifice and loyal comradeship among
those men, who demanded little from life and were content amid their
modest surroundings. This was true especially of the older generation of
workmen. And although these qualities were disappearing more and more in
the younger generation, owing to the all-pervading influence of the big
city, yet among the younger generation also there were many who were
sound at the core and who were able to maintain themselves
uncontaminated amid the sordid surroundings of their everyday existence.
If these men, who in many cases meant well and were upright in
themselves, gave the support to the political activities carried on by
the common enemies of our people, that was because those decent
workpeople did not and could not grasp the downright infamy of the
doctrine taught by the socialist agitators. Furthermore, it was because
no other section of the community bothered itself about the lot of the
working classes. Finally, the social conditions became such that men who
otherwise would have acted differently were forced to submit to them,
even though unwillingly at first. A day came when poverty gained the
upper hand and drove those workmen into the Social Democratic ranks.

On innumerable occasions the bourgeoisie took a definite stand against
even the most legitimate human demands of the working classes. That
conduct was ill-judged and indeed immoral and could bring no gain
whatsoever to the bourgeois class. The result was that the honest
workman abandoned the original concept of the trades union organization
and was dragged into politics.

There were millions and millions of workmen who began by being hostile
to the Social Democratic Party; but their defences were repeatedly
stormed and finally they had to surrender. Yet this defeat was due to
the stupidity of the bourgeois parties, who had opposed every social
demand put forward by the working class. The short-sighted refusal to
make an effort towards improving labour conditions, the refusal to adopt
measures which would insure the workman in case of accidents in the
factories, the refusal to forbid child labour, the refusal to consider
protective measures for female workers, especially expectant
mothers--all this was of assistance to the Social Democratic leaders,
who were thankful for every opportunity which they could exploit for
forcing the masses into their net. Our bourgeois parties can never
repair the damage that resulted from the mistake they then made. For
they sowed the seeds of hatred when they opposed all efforts at social
reform. And thus they gave, at least, apparent grounds to justify the
claim put forward by the Social Democrats--namely, that they alone stand
up for the interests of the working class.

And this became the principal ground for the moral justification of the
actual existence of the Trades Unions, so that the labour organization
became from that time onwards the chief political recruiting ground to
swell the ranks of the Social Democratic Party.

While thus studying the social conditions around me I was forced,
whether I liked it or not, to decide on the attitude I should take
towards the Trades Unions. Because I looked upon them as inseparable
from the Social Democratic Party, my decision was hasty--and mistaken. I
repudiated them as a matter of course. But on this essential question
also Fate intervened and gave me a lesson, with the result that I
changed the opinion which I had first formed.

When I was twenty years old I had learned to distinguish between the
Trades Union as a means of defending the social rights of the employees
and fighting for better living conditions for them and, on the other
hand, the Trades Union as a political instrument used by the Party in
the class struggle.

The Social Democrats understood the enormous importance of the Trades
Union movement. They appropriated it as an instrument and used it with
success, while the bourgeois parties failed to understand it and thus
lost their political prestige. They thought that their own arrogant VETO
would arrest the logical development of the movement and force it into
an illogical position. But it is absurd and also untrue to say that the
Trades Union movement is in itself hostile to the nation. The opposite
is the more correct view. If the activities of the Trades Union are
directed towards improving the condition of a class, and succeed in
doing so, such activities are not against the Fatherland or the State
but are, in the truest sense of the word, national. In that way the
trades union organization helps to create the social conditions which
are indispensable in a general system of national education. It deserves
high recognition when it destroys the psychological and physical germs
of social disease and thus fosters the general welfare of the nation.

It is superfluous to ask whether the Trades Union is indispensable.

So long as there are employers who attack social understanding and have
wrong ideas of justice and fair play it is not only the right but also
the duty of their employees--who are, after all, an integral part of our
people--to protect the general interests against the greed and unreason
of the individual. For to safeguard the loyalty and confidence of the
people is as much in the interests of the nation as to safeguard public
health.

Both are seriously menaced by dishonourable employers who are not
conscious of their duty as members of the national community. Their
personal avidity or irresponsibility sows the seeds of future trouble.
To eliminate the causes of such a development is an action that surely
deserves well of the country.

It must not be answered here that the individual workman is free at any
time to escape from the consequences of an injustice which he has
actually suffered at the hands of an employer, or which he thinks he has
suffered--in other words, he can leave. No. That argument is only a ruse
to detract attention from the question at issue. Is it, or is it not, in
the interests of the nation to remove the causes of social unrest? If it
is, then the fight must be carried on with the only weapons that promise
success. But the individual workman is never in a position to stand up
against the might of the big employer; for the question here is not one
that concerns the triumph of right. If in such a relation right had been
recognized as the guiding principle, then the conflict could not have
arisen at all. But here it is a question of who is the stronger. If the
case were otherwise, the sentiment of justice alone would solve the
dispute in an honourable way; or, to put the case more correctly,
matters would not have come to such a dispute at all.

No. If unsocial and dishonourable treatment of men provokes resistance,
then the stronger party can impose its decision in the conflict until
the constitutional legislative authorities do away with the evil through
legislation. Therefore it is evident that if the individual workman is
to have any chance at all of winning through in the struggle he must be
grouped with his fellow workmen and present a united front before the
individual employer, who incorporates in his own person the massed
strength of the vested interests in the industrial or commercial
undertaking which he conducts.

Thus the trades unions can hope to inculcate and strengthen a sense of
social responsibility in workaday life and open the road to practical
results. In doing this they tend to remove those causes of friction
which are a continual source of discontent and complaint.

Blame for the fact that the trades unions do not fulfil this
much-desired function must be laid at the doors of those who barred the
road to legislative social reform, or rendered such a reform ineffective
by sabotaging it through their political influence.

The political bourgeoisie failed to understand--or, rather, they did not
wish to understand--the importance of the trades union movement. The
Social Democrats accordingly seized the advantage offered them by this
mistaken policy and took the labour movement under their exclusive
protection, without any protest from the other side. In this way they
established for themselves a solid bulwark behind which they could
safely retire whenever the struggle assumed a critical aspect. Thus the
genuine purpose of the movement gradually fell into oblivion, and was
replaced by new objectives. For the Social Democrats never troubled
themselves to respect and uphold the original purpose for which the
trade unionist movement was founded. They simply took over the Movement,
lock, stock and barrel, to serve their own political ends.

Within a few decades the Trades Union Movement was transformed, by the
expert hand of Social Democracy, from an instrument which had been
originally fashioned for the defence of human rights into an instrument
for the destruction of the national economic structure. The interests of
the working class were not allowed for a moment to cross the path of
this purpose; for in politics the application of economic pressure is
always possible if the one side be sufficiently unscrupulous and the
other sufficiently inert and docile. In this case both conditions were
fulfilled.

By the beginning of the present century the Trades Unionist Movement had
already ceased to recognize the purpose for which it had been founded.
From year to year it fell more and more under the political control of
the Social Democrats, until it finally came to be used as a
battering-ram in the class struggle. The plan was to shatter, by means
of constantly repeated blows, the economic edifice in the building of
which so much time and care had been expended. Once this objective had
been reached, the destruction of the State would become a matter of
course, because the State would already have been deprived of its
economic foundations. Attention to the real interests of the
working-classes, on the part of the Social Democrats, steadily decreased
until the cunning leaders saw that it would be in their immediate
political interests if the social and cultural demands of the broad
masses remained unheeded; for there was a danger that if these masses
once felt content they could no longer be employed as mere passive
material in the political struggle.

The gloomy prospect which presented itself to the eyes of the
CONDOTTIERI of the class warfare, if the discontent of the masses were
no longer available as a war weapon, created so much anxiety among them
that they suppressed and opposed even the most elementary measures of
social reform. And conditions were such that those leaders did not have
to trouble about attempting to justify such an illogical policy.

As the masses were taught to increase and heighten their demands the
possibility of satisfying them dwindled and whatever ameliorative
measures were taken became less and less significant; so that it was at
that time possible to persuade the masses that this ridiculous measure
in which the most sacred claims of the working-classes were being
granted represented a diabolical plan to weaken their fighting power in
this easy way and, if possible, to paralyse it. One will not be
astonished at the success of these allegations if one remembers what a
small measure of thinking power the broad masses possess.

In the bourgeois camp there was high indignation over the bad faith of
the Social Democratic tactics; but nothing was done to draw a practical
conclusion and organize a counter attack from the bourgeois side. The
fear of the Social Democrats, to improve the miserable conditions of the
working-classes ought to have induced the bourgeois parties to make the
most energetic efforts in this direction and thus snatch from the hands
of the class-warfare leaders their most important weapon; but nothing of
this kind happened.

Instead of attacking the position of their adversaries the bourgeoisie
allowed itself to be pressed and harried. Finally it adopted means that
were so tardy and so insignificant that they were ineffective and were
repudiated. So the whole situation remained just as it had been before
the bourgeois intervention; but the discontent had thereby become more
serious.

Like a threatening storm, the 'Free Trades Union' hovered above the
political horizon and above the life of each individual. It was one of
the most frightful instruments of terror that threatened the security
and independence of the national economic structure, the foundations of
the State and the liberty of the individual. Above all, it was the 'Free
Trades Union' that turned democracy into a ridiculous and scorned
phrase, insulted the ideal of liberty and stigmatized that of fraternity
with the slogan 'If you will not become our comrade we shall crack your
skull'.

It was thus that I then came to know this friend of humanity. During the
years that followed my knowledge of it became wider and deeper; but I
have never changed anything in that regard.

The more I became acquainted with the external forms of Social
Democracy, the greater became my desire to understand the inner nature
of its doctrines.

For this purpose the official literature of the Party could not help
very much. In discussing economic questions its statements were false
and its proofs unsound. In treating of political aims its attitude was
insincere. Furthermore, its modern methods of chicanery in the
presentation of its arguments were profoundly repugnant to me. Its
flamboyant sentences, its obscure and incomprehensible phrases,
pretended to contain great thoughts, but they were devoid of thought,
and meaningless. One would have to be a decadent Bohemian in one of our
modern cities in order to feel at home in that labyrinth of mental
aberration, so that he might discover 'intimate experiences' amid the
stinking fumes of this literary Dadism. These writers were obviously
counting on the proverbial humility of a certain section of our people,
who believe that a person who is incomprehensible must be profoundly
wise.

In confronting the theoretical falsity and absurdity of that doctrine
with the reality of its external manifestations, I gradually came to
have a clear idea of the ends at which it aimed.

During such moments I had dark presentiments and feared something evil.
I had before me a teaching inspired by egoism and hatred, mathematically
calculated to win its victory, but the triumph of which would be a
mortal blow to humanity.

Meanwhile I had discovered the relations existing between this
destructive teaching and the specific character of a people, who up to
that time had been to me almost unknown.

Knowledge of the Jews is the only key whereby one may understand the
inner nature and therefore the real aims of Social Democracy.

The man who has come to know this race has succeeded in removing from
his eyes the veil through which he had seen the aims and meaning of his
Party in a false light; and then, out of the murk and fog of social
phrases rises the grimacing figure of Marxism.

To-day it is hard and almost impossible for me to say when the word
'Jew' first began to raise any particular thought in my mind. I do not
remember even having heard the word at home during my father's lifetime.
If this name were mentioned in a derogatory sense I think the old
gentleman would just have considered those who used it in this way as
being uneducated reactionaries. In the course of his career he had come
to be more or less a cosmopolitan, with strong views on nationalism,
which had its effect on me as well. In school, too, I found no reason to
alter the picture of things I had formed at home.

At the REALSCHULE I knew one Jewish boy. We were all on our guard in our
relations with him, but only because his reticence and certain actions
of his warned us to be discreet. Beyond that my companions and myself
formed no particular opinions in regard to him.

It was not until I was fourteen or fifteen years old that I frequently
ran up against the word 'Jew', partly in connection with political
controversies. These references aroused a slight aversion in me, and I
could not avoid an uncomfortable feeling which always came over me when
I had to listen to religious disputes. But at that time I had no other
feelings about the Jewish question.

There were very few Jews in Linz. In the course of centuries the Jews
who lived there had become Europeanized in external appearance and were
so much like other human beings that I even looked upon them as Germans.
The reason why I did not then perceive the absurdity of such an illusion
was that the only external mark which I recognized as distinguishing
them from us was the practice of their strange religion. As I thought
that they were persecuted on account of their Faith my aversion to
hearing remarks against them grew almost into a feeling of abhorrence. I
did not in the least suspect that there could be such a thing as a
systematic anti-Semitism.

Then I came to Vienna.

Confused by the mass of impressions I received from the architectural
surroundings and depressed by my own troubles, I did not at first
distinguish between the different social strata of which the population
of that mammoth city was composed. Although Vienna then had about two
hundred thousand Jews among its population of two millions, I did not
notice them. During the first weeks of my sojourn my eyes and my mind
were unable to cope with the onrush of new ideas and values. Not until I
gradually settled down to my surroundings, and the confused picture
began to grow clearer, did I acquire a more discriminating view of my
new world. And with that I came up against the Jewish problem.

I will not say that the manner in which I first became acquainted with
it was particularly unpleasant for me. In the Jew I still saw only a man
who was of a different religion, and therefore, on grounds of human
tolerance, I was against the idea that he should be attacked because he
had a different faith. And so I considered that the tone adopted by the
anti-Semitic Press in Vienna was unworthy of the cultural traditions of
a great people. The memory of certain events which happened in the
middle ages came into my mind, and I felt that I should not like to see
them repeated. Generally speaking, these anti-Semitic newspapers did not
belong to the first rank--but I did not then understand the reason of
this--and so I regarded them more as the products of jealousy and envy
rather than the expression of a sincere, though wrong-headed, feeling.

My own opinions were confirmed by what I considered to be the infinitely
more dignified manner in which the really great Press replied to those
attacks or simply ignored them, which latter seemed to me the most
respectable way.

I diligently read what was generally called the World Press--NEUE FREIE
PRESSE, WIENER TAGEBLATT, etc.--and I was astonished by the abundance of
information they gave their readers and the impartial way in which they
presented particular problems. I appreciated their dignified tone; but
sometimes the flamboyancy of the style was unconvincing, and I did not
like it. But I attributed all this to the overpowering influence of the
world metropolis.

Since I considered Vienna at that time as such a world metropolis, I
thought this constituted sufficient grounds to excuse these shortcomings
of the Press. But I was frequently disgusted by the grovelling way in
which the Vienna Press played lackey to the Court. Scarcely a move took
place at the Hofburg which was not presented in glorified colours to the
readers. It was a foolish practice, which, especially when it had to do
with 'The Wisest Monarch of all Times', reminded one almost of the dance
which the mountain cock performs at pairing time to woo his mate. It was
all empty nonsense. And I thought that such a policy was a stain on the
ideal of liberal democracy. I thought that this way of currying favour
at the Court was unworthy of the people. And that was the first blot
that fell on my appreciation of the great Vienna Press.

While in Vienna I continued to follow with a vivid interest all the
events that were taking place in Germany, whether connected with
political or cultural question. I had a feeling of pride and admiration
when I compared the rise of the young German Empire with the decline of
the Austrian State. But, although the foreign policy of that Empire was
a source of real pleasure on the whole, the internal political
happenings were not always so satisfactory. I did not approve of the
campaign which at that time was being carried on against William II. I
looked upon him not only as the German Emperor but, above all, as the
creator of the German Navy. The fact that the Emperor was prohibited
from speaking in the Reichstag made me very angry, because the
prohibition came from a side which in my eyes had no authority to make
it. For at a single sitting those same parliamentary ganders did more
cackling together than the whole dynasty of Emperors, comprising even
the weakest, had done in the course of centuries.

It annoyed me to have to acknowledge that in a nation where any
half-witted fellow could claim for himself the right to criticize and
might even be let loose on the people as a 'Legislator' in the
Reichstag, the bearer of the Imperial Crown could be the subject of a
'reprimand' on the part of the most miserable assembly of drivellers
that had ever existed.

I was even more disgusted at the way in which this same Vienna Press
salaamed obsequiously before the meanest steed belonging to the Habsburg
royal equipage and went off into wild ecstacies of delight if the nag
wagged its tail in response. And at the same time these newspapers took
up an attitude of anxiety in matters that concerned the German Emperor,
trying to cloak their enmity by the serious air they gave themselves.
But in my eyes that enmity appeared to be only poorly cloaked. Naturally
they protested that they had no intention of mixing in Germany's
internal affairs--God forbid! They pretended that by touching a delicate
spot in such a friendly way they were fulfilling a duty that devolved
upon them by reason of the mutual alliance between the two countries and
at the same time discharging their obligations of journalistic
truthfulness. Having thus excused themselves about tenderly touching a
sore spot, they bored with the finger ruthlessly into the wound.

That sort of thing made my blood boil. And now I began to be more and
more on my guard when reading the great Vienna Press.

I had to acknowledge, however, that on such subjects one of the
anti-Semitic papers--the DEUTSCHE VOLKSBLATT--acted more decently.

What got still more on my nerves was the repugnant manner in which the
big newspapers cultivated admiration for France. One really had to feel
ashamed of being a German when confronted by those mellifluous hymns of
praise for 'the great culture-nation'. This wretched Gallomania more
often than once made me throw away one of those 'world newspapers'. I
now often turned to the VOLKSBLATT, which was much smaller in size but
which treated such subjects more decently. I was not in accord with its
sharp anti-Semitic tone; but again and again I found that its arguments
gave me grounds for serious thought.

Anyhow, it was as a result of such reading that I came to know the man
and the movement which then determined the fate of Vienna. These were
Dr. Karl Lueger and the Christian Socialist Movement. At the time I came
to Vienna I felt opposed to both. I looked on the man and the movement
as 'reactionary'.

But even an elementary sense of justice enforced me to change my opinion
when I had the opportunity of knowing the man and his work, and slowly
that opinion grew into outspoken admiration when I had better grounds
for forming a judgment. To-day, as well as then, I hold Dr. Karl Lueger
as the most eminent type of German Burgermeister. How many prejudices
were thrown over through such a change in my attitude towards the
Christian-Socialist Movement!

My ideas about anti-Semitism changed also in the course of time, but
that was the change which I found most difficult. It cost me a greater
internal conflict with myself, and it was only after a struggle between
reason and sentiment that victory began to be decided in favour of the
former. Two years later sentiment rallied to the side of reasons and
became a faithful guardian and counsellor.

At the time of this bitter struggle, between calm reason and the
sentiments in which I had been brought up, the lessons that I learned on
the streets of Vienna rendered me invaluable assistance. A time came
when I no longer passed blindly along the street of the mighty city, as
I had done in the early days, but now with my eyes open not only to
study the buildings but also the human beings.

Once, when passing through the inner City, I suddenly encountered a
phenomenon in a long caftan and wearing black side-locks. My first
thought was: Is this a Jew? They certainly did not have this appearance
in Linz. I watched the man stealthily and cautiously; but the longer I
gazed at the strange countenance and examined it feature by feature, the
more the question shaped itself in my brain: Is this a German?

As was always my habit with such experiences, I turned to books for help
in removing my doubts. For the first time in my life I bought myself
some anti-Semitic pamphlets for a few pence. But unfortunately they all
began with the assumption that in principle the reader had at least a
certain degree of information on the Jewish question or was even
familiar with it. Moreover, the tone of most of these pamphlets was such
that I became doubtful again, because the statements made were partly
superficial and the proofs extraordinarily unscientific. For weeks, and
indeed for months, I returned to my old way of thinking. The subject
appeared so enormous and the accusations were so far-reaching that I was
afraid of dealing with it unjustly and so I became again anxious and
uncertain.

Naturally I could no longer doubt that here there was not a question of
Germans who happened to be of a different religion but rather that there
was question of an entirely different people. For as soon as I began to
investigate the matter and observe the Jews, then Vienna appeared to me
in a different light. Wherever I now went I saw Jews, and the more I saw
of them the more strikingly and clearly they stood out as a different
people from the other citizens. Especially the Inner City and the
district northwards from the Danube Canal swarmed with a people who,
even in outer appearance, bore no similarity to the Germans.

But any indecision which I may still have felt about that point was
finally removed by the activities of a certain section of the Jews
themselves. A great movement, called Zionism, arose among them. Its aim
was to assert the national character of Judaism, and the movement was
strongly represented in Vienna.

To outward appearances it seemed as if only one group of Jews championed
this movement, while the great majority disapproved of it, or even
repudiated it. But an investigation of the situation showed that those
outward appearances were purposely misleading. These outward appearances
emerged from a mist of theories which had been produced for reasons of
expediency, if not for purposes of downright deception. For that part of
Jewry which was styled Liberal did not disown the Zionists as if they
were not members of their race but rather as brother Jews who publicly
professed their faith in an unpractical way, so as to create a danger
for Jewry itself.

Thus there was no real rift in their internal solidarity.

This fictitious conflict between the Zionists and the Liberal Jews soon
disgusted me; for it was false through and through and in direct
contradiction to the moral dignity and immaculate character on which
that race had always prided itself.

Cleanliness, whether moral or of another kind, had its own peculiar
meaning for these people. That they were water-shy was obvious on
looking at them and, unfortunately, very often also when not looking at
them at all. The odour of those people in caftans often used to make me
feel ill. Beyond that there were the unkempt clothes and the ignoble
exterior.

All these details were certainly not attractive; but the revolting
feature was that beneath their unclean exterior one suddenly perceived
the moral mildew of the chosen race.

What soon gave me cause for very serious consideration were the
activities of the Jews in certain branches of life, into the mystery of
which I penetrated little by little. Was there any shady undertaking,
any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one
Jew did not participate? On putting the probing knife carefully to that
kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a
putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light.

In my eyes the charge against Judaism became a grave one the moment I
discovered the Jewish activities in the Press, in art, in literature and
the theatre. All unctuous protests were now more or less futile. One
needed only to look at the posters announcing the hideous productions of
the cinema and theatre, and study the names of the authors who were
highly lauded there in order to become permanently adamant on Jewish
questions. Here was a pestilence, a moral pestilence, with which the
public was being infected. It was worse than the Black Plague of long
ago. And in what mighty doses this poison was manufactured and
distributed. Naturally, the lower the moral and intellectual level of
such an author of artistic products the more inexhaustible his
fecundity. Sometimes it went so far that one of these fellows, acting
like a sewage pump, would shoot his filth directly in the face of other
members of the human race. In this connection we must remember there is
no limit to the number of such people. One ought to realize that for
one, Goethe, Nature may bring into existence ten thousand such
despoilers who act as the worst kind of germ-carriers in poisoning human
souls. It was a terrible thought, and yet it could not be avoided, that
the greater number of the Jews seemed specially destined by Nature to
play this shameful part.

And is it for this reason that they can be called the chosen people?

I began then to investigate carefully the names of all the fabricators
of these unclean products in public cultural life. The result of that
inquiry was still more disfavourable to the attitude which I had
hitherto held in regard to the Jews. Though my feelings might rebel a
thousand time, reason now had to draw its own conclusions.

The fact that nine-tenths of all the smutty literature, artistic tripe
and theatrical banalities, had to be charged to the account of people
who formed scarcely one per cent. of the nation--that fact could not be
gainsaid. It was there, and had to be admitted. Then I began to examine
my favourite 'World Press', with that fact before my mind.

The deeper my soundings went the lesser grew my respect for that Press
which I formerly admired. Its style became still more repellent and I
was forced to reject its ideas as entirely shallow and superficial. To
claim that in the presentation of facts and views its attitude was
impartial seemed to me to contain more falsehood than truth. The writers
were--Jews.

Thousands of details that I had scarcely noticed before seemed to me now
to deserve attention. I began to grasp and understand things which I had
formerly looked at in a different light.

I saw the Liberal policy of that Press in another light. Its dignified
tone in replying to the attacks of its adversaries and its dead silence
in other cases now became clear to me as part of a cunning and
despicable way of deceiving the readers. Its brilliant theatrical
criticisms always praised the Jewish authors and its adverse, criticism
was reserved exclusively for the Germans.

The light pin-pricks against William II showed the persistency of its
policy, just as did its systematic commendation of French culture and
civilization. The subject matter of the feuilletons was trivial and
often pornographic. The language of this Press as a whole had the accent
of a foreign people. The general tone was openly derogatory to the
Germans and this must have been definitely intentional.

What were the interests that urged the Vienna Press to adopt such a
policy? Or did they do so merely by chance? In attempting to find an
answer to those questions I gradually became more and more dubious.

Then something happened which helped me to come to an early decision. I
began to see through the meaning of a whole series of events that were
taking place in other branches of Viennese life. All these were inspired
by a general concept of manners and morals which was openly put into
practice by a large section of the Jews and could be established as
attributable to them. Here, again, the life which I observed on the
streets taught me what evil really is.

The part which the Jews played in the social phenomenon of prostitution,
and more especially in the white slave traffic, could be studied here
better than in any other West-European city, with the possible exception
of certain ports in Southern France. Walking by night along the streets
of the Leopoldstadt, almost at every turn whether one wished it or not,
one witnessed certain happenings of whose existence the Germans knew
nothing until the War made it possible and indeed inevitable for the
soldiers to see such things on the Eastern front.

A cold shiver ran down my spine when I first ascertained that it was the
same kind of cold-blooded, thick-skinned and shameless Jew who showed
his consummate skill in conducting that revolting exploitation of the
dregs of the big city. Then I became fired with wrath.

I had now no more hesitation about bringing the Jewish problem to light
in all its details. No. Henceforth I was determined to do so. But as I
learned to track down the Jew in all the different spheres of cultural
and artistic life, and in the various manifestations of this life
everywhere, I suddenly came upon him in a position where I had least
expected to find him. I now realized that the Jews were the leaders of
Social Democracy. In face of that revelation the scales fell from my
eyes. My long inner struggle was at an end.

In my relations with my fellow workmen I was often astonished to find
how easily and often they changed their opinions on the same questions,
sometimes within a few days and sometimes even within the course of a
few hours. I found it difficult to understand how men who always had
reasonable ideas when they spoke as individuals with one another
suddenly lost this reasonableness the moment they acted in the mass.
That phenomenon often tempted one almost to despair. I used to dispute
with them for hours and when I succeeded in bringing them to what I
considered a reasonable way of thinking I rejoiced at my success. But
next day I would find that it had been all in vain. It was saddening to
think I had to begin it all over again. Like a pendulum in its eternal
sway, they would fall back into their absurd opinions.

I was able to understand their position fully. They were dissatisfied
with their lot and cursed the fate which had hit them so hard. They
hated their employers, whom they looked upon as the heartless
administrators of their cruel destiny. Often they used abusive language
against the public officials, whom they accused of having no sympathy
with the situation of the working people. They made public protests
against the cost of living and paraded through the streets in defence of
their claims. At least all this could be explained on reasonable
grounds. But what was impossible to understand was the boundless hatred
they expressed against their own fellow citizens, how they disparaged
their own nation, mocked at its greatness, reviled its history and
dragged the names of its most illustrious men in the gutter.

This hostility towards their own kith and kin, their own native land and
home was as irrational as it was incomprehensible. It was against
Nature.

One could cure that malady temporarily, but only for some days or at
least some weeks. But on meeting those whom one believed to have been
converted one found that they had become as they were before. That
malady against Nature held them once again in its clutches.

I gradually discovered that the Social Democratic Press was
predominantly controlled by Jews. But I did not attach special
importance to this circumstance, for the same state of affairs existed
also in other newspapers. But there was one striking fact in this
connection. It was that there was not a single newspaper with which Jews
were connected that could be spoken of as National, in the meaning that
my education and convictions attached to that word.

Making an effort to overcome my natural reluctance, I tried to read
articles of this nature published in the Marxist Press; but in doing so
my aversion increased all the more. And then I set about learning
something of the people who wrote and published this mischievous stuff.
From the publisher downwards, all of them were Jews. I recalled to mind
the names of the public leaders of Marxism, and then I realized that
most of them belonged to the Chosen Race--the Social Democratic
representatives in the Imperial Cabinet as well as the secretaries of
the Trades Unions and the street agitators. Everywhere the same sinister
picture presented itself. I shall never forget the row of
names--Austerlitz, David, Adler, Ellenbogen, and others. One fact became
quite evident to me. It was that this alien race held in its hands the
leadership of that Social Democratic Party with whose minor
representatives I had been disputing for months past. I was happy at
last to know for certain that the Jew is not a German.

Thus I finally discovered who were the evil spirits leading our people
astray. The sojourn in Vienna for one year had proved long enough to
convince me that no worker is so rooted in his preconceived notions that
he will not surrender them in face of better and clearer arguments and
explanations. Gradually I became an expert in the doctrine of the
Marxists and used this knowledge as an instrument to drive home my own
firm convictions. I was successful in nearly every case. The great
masses can be rescued, but a lot of time and a large share of human
patience must be devoted to such work.

But a Jew can never be rescued from his fixed notions.

It was then simple enough to attempt to show them the absurdity of their
teaching. Within my small circle I talked to them until my throat ached
and my voice grew hoarse. I believed that I could finally convince them
of the danger inherent in the Marxist follies. But I only achieved the
contrary result. It seemed to me that immediately the disastrous effects
of the Marxist Theory and its application in practice became evident,
the stronger became their obstinacy.

The more I debated with them the more familiar I became with their
argumentative tactics. At the outset they counted upon the stupidity of
their opponents, but when they got so entangled that they could not find
a way out they played the trick of acting as innocent simpletons. Should
they fail, in spite of their tricks of logic, they acted as if they
could not understand the counter arguments and bolted away to another
field of discussion. They would lay down truisms and platitudes; and, if
you accepted these, then they were applied to other problems and matters
of an essentially different nature from the original theme. If you faced
them with this point they would escape again, and you could not bring
them to make any precise statement. Whenever one tried to get a firm
grip on any of these apostles one's hand grasped only jelly and slime
which slipped through the fingers and combined again into a solid mass a
moment afterwards. If your adversary felt forced to give in to your
argument, on account of the observers present, and if you then thought
that at last you had gained ground, a surprise was in store for you on
the following day. The Jew would be utterly oblivious to what had
happened the day before, and he would start once again by repeating his
former absurdities, as if nothing had happened. Should you become
indignant and remind him of yesterday's defeat, he pretended
astonishment and could not remember anything, except that on the
previous day he had proved that his statements were correct. Sometimes I
was dumbfounded. I do not know what amazed me the more--the abundance of
their verbiage or the artful way in which they dressed up their
falsehoods. I gradually came to hate them.

Yet all this had its good side; because the more I came to know the
individual leaders, or at least the propagandists, of Social Democracy,
my love for my own people increased correspondingly. Considering the
Satanic skill which these evil counsellors displayed, how could their
unfortunate victims be blamed? Indeed, I found it extremely difficult
myself to be a match for the dialectical perfidy of that race. How
futile it was to try to win over such people with argument, seeing that
their very mouths distorted the truth, disowning the very words they had
just used and adopting them again a few moments afterwards to serve
their own ends in the argument! No. The more I came to know the Jew, the
easier it was to excuse the workers.

In my opinion the most culpable were not to be found among the workers
but rather among those who did not think it worth while to take the
trouble to sympathize with their own kinsfolk and give to the
hard-working son of the national family what was his by the iron logic
of justice, while at the same time placing his seducer and corrupter
against the wall.

Urged by my own daily experiences, I now began to investigate more
thoroughly the sources of the Marxist teaching itself. Its effects were
well known to me in detail. As a result of careful observation, its
daily progress had become obvious to me. And one needed only a little
imagination in order to be able to forecast the consequences which must
result from it. The only question now was: Did the founders foresee the
effects of their work in the form which those effects have shown
themselves to-day, or were the founders themselves the victims of an
error? To my mind both alternatives were possible.

If the second question must be answered in the affirmative, then it was
the duty of every thinking person to oppose this sinister movement with
a view to preventing it from producing its worst results. But if the
first question must be answered in the affirmative, then it must be
admitted that the original authors of this evil which has infected the
nations were devils incarnate. For only in the brain of a monster, and
not that of a man, could the plan of this organization take shape whose
workings must finally bring about the collapse of human civilization and
turn this world into a desert waste.

Such being the case the only alternative left was to fight, and in that
fight to employ all the weapons which the human spirit and intellect and
will could furnish leaving it to Fate to decide in whose favour the
balance should fall.

And so I began to gather information about the authors of this teaching,
with a view to studying the principles of the movement. The fact that I
attained my object sooner than I could have anticipated was due to the
deeper insight into the Jewish question which I then gained, my
knowledge of this question being hitherto rather superficial. This newly
acquired knowledge alone enabled me to make a practical comparison
between the real content and the theoretical pretentiousness of the
teaching laid down by the apostolic founders of Social Democracy;
because I now understood the language of the Jew. I realized that the
Jew uses language for the purpose of dissimulating his thought or at
least veiling it, so that his real aim cannot be discovered by what he
says but rather by reading between the lines. This knowledge was the
occasion of the greatest inner revolution that I had yet experienced.
From being a soft-hearted cosmopolitan I became an out-and-out
anti-Semite.

Only on one further occasion, and that for the last time, did I give way
to oppressing thoughts which caused me some moments of profound anxiety.

As I critically reviewed the activities of the Jewish people throughout
long periods of history I became anxious and asked myself whether for
some inscrutable reasons beyond the comprehension of poor mortals such
as ourselves, Destiny may not have irrevocably decreed that the final
victory must go to this small nation? May it not be that this people
which has lived only for the earth has been promised the earth as a
recompense? is our right to struggle for our own self-preservation based
on reality, or is it a merely subjective thing? Fate answered the
question for me inasmuch as it led me to make a detached and exhaustive
inquiry into the Marxist teaching and the activities of the Jewish
people in connection with it.

The Jewish doctrine of Marxism repudiates the aristocratic principle of
Nature and substitutes for it the eternal privilege of force and energy,
numerical mass and its dead weight. Thus it denies the individual worth
of the human personality, impugns the teaching that nationhood and race
have a primary significance, and by doing this it takes away the very
foundations of human existence and human civilization. If the Marxist
teaching were to be accepted as the foundation of the life of the
universe, it would lead to the disappearance of all order that is
conceivable to the human mind. And thus the adoption of such a law would
provoke chaos in the structure of the greatest organism that we know,
with the result that the inhabitants of this earthly planet would
finally disappear.

Should the Jew, with the aid of his Marxist creed, triumph over the
people of this world, his Crown will be the funeral wreath of mankind,
and this planet will once again follow its orbit through ether, without
any human life on its surface, as it did millions of years ago.

And so I believe to-day that my conduct is in accordance with the will
of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am
defending the handiwork of the Lord.




CHAPTER III



POLITICAL REFLECTIONS ARISING OUT OF MY SOJOURN IN VIENNA


Generally speaking a man should not publicly take part in politics
before he has reached the age of thirty, though, of course, exceptions
must be made in the case of those who are naturally gifted with
extraordinary political abilities. That at least is my opinion to-day.
And the reason for it is that until he reaches his thirtieth year or
thereabouts a man's mental development will mostly consist in acquiring
and sifting such knowledge as is necessary for the groundwork of a
general platform from which he can examine the different political
problems that arise from day to day and be able to adopt a definite
attitude towards each. A man must first acquire a fund of general ideas
and fit them together so as to form an organic structure of personal
thought or outlook on life--a WELTANSCHAUUNG. Then he will have that
mental equipment without which he cannot form his own judgments on
particular questions of the day, and he will have acquired those
qualities that are necessary for consistency and steadfastness in the
formation of political opinions. Such a man is now qualified, at least
subjectively, to take his part in the political conduct of public
affairs.

If these pre-requisite conditions are not fulfilled, and if a man should
enter political life without this equipment, he will run a twofold risk.
In the first place, he may find during the course of events that the
stand which he originally took in regard to some essential question was
wrong. He will now have to abandon his former position or else stick to
it against his better knowledge and riper wisdom and after his reason
and convictions have already proved it untenable. If he adopt the former
line of action he will find himself in a difficult personal situation;
because in giving up a position hitherto maintained he will appear
inconsistent and will have no right to expect his followers to remain as
loyal to his leadership as they were before. And, as regards the
followers themselves, they may easily look upon their leader's change of
policy as showing a lack of judgment inherent in his character.
Moreover, the change must cause in them a certain feeling of
discomfiture VIS-À-VIS those whom the leader formerly opposed.

If he adopts the second alternative--which so very frequently happens
to-day--then public pronouncements of the leader have no longer his
personal persuasion to support them. And the more that is the case the
defence of his cause will be all the more hollow and superficial. He now
descends to the adoption of vulgar means in his defence. While he
himself no longer dreams seriously of standing by his political
protestations to the last--for no man will die in defence of something
in which he does not believe--he makes increasing demands on his
followers. Indeed, the greater be the measure of his own insincerity,
the more unfortunate and inconsiderate become his claims on his party
adherents. Finally, he throws aside the last vestiges of true leadership
and begins to play politics. This means that he becomes one of those
whose only consistency is their inconsistency, associated with
overbearing insolence and oftentimes an artful mendacity developed to a
shamelessly high degree.

Should such a person, to the misfortune of all decent people, succeed in
becoming a parliamentary deputy it will be clear from the outset that
for him the essence of political activity consists in a heroic struggle
to keep permanent hold on this milk-bottle as a source of livelihood for
himself and his family. The more his wife and children are dependent on
him, the more stubbornly will he fight to maintain for himself the
representation of his parliamentary constituency. For that reason any
other person who gives evidence of political capacity is his personal
enemy. In every new movement he will apprehend the possible beginning of
his own downfall. And everyone who is a better man than himself will
appear to him in the light of a menace.

I shall subsequently deal more fully with the problem to which this kind
of parliamentary vermin give rise.

When a man has reached his thirtieth year he has still a great deal to
learn. That is obvious. But henceforward what he learns will principally
be an amplification of his basic ideas; it will be fitted in with them
organically so as to fill up the framework of the fundamental
WELTANSCHAUUNG which he already possesses. What he learns anew will not
imply the abandonment of principles already held, but rather a deeper
knowledge of those principles. And thus his colleagues will never have
the discomforting feeling that they have been hitherto falsely led by
him. On the contrary, their confidence is increased when they perceive
that their leader's qualities are steadily developing along the lines of
an organic growth which results from the constant assimilation of new
ideas; so that the followers look upon this process as signifying an
enrichment of the doctrines in which they themselves believe, in their
eyes every such development is a new witness to the correctness of that
whole body of opinion which has hitherto been held.

A leader who has to abandon the platform founded on his general
principles, because he recognizes the foundation as false, can act with
honour only when he declares his readiness to accept the final
consequences of his erroneous views. In such a case he ought to refrain
from taking public part in any further political activity. Having once
gone astray on essential things he may possibly go astray a second time.
But, anyhow, he has no right whatsoever to expect or demand that his
fellow citizens should continue to give him their support.

How little such a line of conduct commends itself to our public leaders
nowadays is proved by the general corruption prevalent among the cabal
which at the present moment feels itself called to political leadership.
In the whole cabal there is scarcely one who is properly equipped for
this task.

Although in those days I used to give more time than most others to the
consideration of political question, yet I carefully refrained from
taking an open part in politics. Only to a small circle did I speak of
those things which agitated my mind or were the cause of constant
preoccupation for me. The habit of discussing matters within such a
restricted group had many advantages in itself. Rather than talk at
them, I learned to feel my way into the modes of thought and views of
those men around me. Oftentimes such ways of thinking and such views
were quite primitive. Thus I took every possible occasion to increase my
knowledge of men.

Nowhere among the German people was the opportunity for making such a
study so favourable as in Vienna.

In the old Danubian Monarchy political thought was wider in its range
and had a richer variety of interests than in the Germany of that
epoch--excepting certain parts of Prussia, Hamburg and the districts
bordering on the North Sea. When I speak of Austria here I mean that
part of the great Habsburg Empire which, by reason of its German
population, furnished not only the historic basis for the formation of
this State but whose population was for several centuries also the
exclusive source of cultural life in that political system whose
structure was so artificial. As time went on the stability of the
Austrian State and the guarantee of its continued existence depended
more and more on the maintenance of this germ-cell of that Habsburg
Empire.

The hereditary imperial provinces constituted the heart of the Empire.
And it was this heart that constantly sent the blood of life pulsating
through the whole political and cultural system. Corresponding to the
heart of the Empire, Vienna signified the brain and the will. At that
time Vienna presented an appearance which made one think of her as an
enthroned queen whose authoritative sway united the conglomeration of
heterogenous nationalities that lived under the Habsburg sceptre. The
radiant beauty of the capital city made one forget the sad symptoms of
senile decay which the State manifested as a whole.

Though the Empire was internally rickety because of the terrific
conflict going on between the various nationalities, the outside
world--and Germany in particular--saw only that lovely picture of the
city. The illusion was all the greater because at that time Vienna
seemed to have risen to its highest pitch of splendour. Under a Mayor,
who had the true stamp of administrative genius, the venerable
residential City of the Emperors of the old Empire seemed to have the
glory of its youth renewed. The last great German who sprang from the
ranks of the people that had colonized the East Mark was not a
'statesman', in the official sense. This Dr. Luegar, however, in his
rôle as Mayor of 'the Imperial Capital and Residential City', had
achieved so much in almost all spheres of municipal activity, whether
economic or cultural, that the heart of the whole Empire throbbed with
renewed vigour. He thus proved himself a much greater statesman than the
so-called 'diplomats' of that period.

The fact that this political system of heterogeneous races called
AUSTRIA, finally broke down is no evidence whatsoever of political
incapacity on the part of the German element in the old East Mark. The
collapse was the inevitable result of an impossible situation. Ten
million people cannot permanently hold together a State of fifty
millions, composed of different and convicting nationalities, unless
certain definite pre-requisite conditions are at hand while there is
still time to avail of them.

The German-Austrian had very big ways of thinking. Accustomed to live in
a great Empire, he had a keen sense of the obligations incumbent on him
in such a situation. He was the only member of the Austrian State who
looked beyond the borders of the narrow lands belonging to the Crown and
took in all the frontiers of the Empire in the sweep of his mind. Indeed
when destiny severed him from the common Fatherland he tried to master
the tremendous task which was set before him as a consequence. This task
was to maintain for the German-Austrians that patrimony which, through
innumerable struggles, their ancestors had originally wrested from the
East. It must be remembered that the German-Austrians could not put
their undivided strength into this effort, because the hearts and minds
of the best among them were constantly turning back towards their
kinsfolk in the Motherland, so that only a fraction of their energy
remained to be employed at home.

The mental horizon of the German-Austrian was comparatively broad. His
commercial interests comprised almost every section of the heterogeneous
Empire. The conduct of almost all important undertakings was in his
hands. He provided the State, for the most part, with its leading
technical experts and civil servants. He was responsible for carrying on
the foreign trade of the country, as far as that sphere of activity was
not under Jewish control, The German-Austrian exclusively represented
the political cement that held the State together. His military duties
carried him far beyond the narrow frontiers of his homeland. Though the
recruit might join a regiment made up of the German element, the
regiment itself might be stationed in Herzegovina as well as in Vienna
or Galicia. The officers in the Habsburg armies were still Germans and
so was the predominating element in the higher branches of the civil
service. Art and science were in German hands. Apart from the new
artistic trash, which might easily have been produced by a negro tribe,
all genuine artistic inspiration came from the German section of the
population. In music, architecture, sculpture and painting, Vienna
abundantly supplied the entire Dual Monarchy. And the source never
seemed to show signs of a possible exhaustion. Finally, it was the
German element that determined the conduct of foreign policy, though a
small number of Hungarians were also active in that field.

All efforts, however, to save the unity of the State were doomed to end
in failure, because the essential pre-requisites were missing.

There was only one possible way to control and hold in check the
centrifugal forces of the different and differing nationalities. This
way was: to govern the Austrian State and organize it internally on the
principle of centralization. In no other way imaginable could the
existence of that State be assured.

Now and again there were lucid intervals in the higher ruling quarters
when this truth was recognized. But it was soon forgotten again, or else
deliberately ignored, because of the difficulties to be overcome in
putting it into practice. Every project which aimed at giving the Empire
a more federal shape was bound to be ineffective because there was no
strong central authority which could exercise sufficient power within
the State to hold the federal elements together. It must be remembered
in this connection that conditions in Austria were quite different from
those which characterized the German State as founded by Bismarck.
Germany was faced with only one difficulty, which was that of
transforming the purely political traditions, because throughout the
whole of Bismarck's Germany there was a common cultural basis. The
German Empire contained only members of one and the same racial or
national stock, with the exception of a few minor foreign fragments.

Demographic conditions in Austria were quite the reverse. With the
exception of Hungary there was no political tradition, coming down from
a great past, in any of the various affiliated countries. If there had
been, time had either wiped out all traces of it, or at least, rendered
them obscure. Moreover, this was the epoch when the principle of
nationality began to be in ascendant; and that phenomenon awakened the
national instincts in the various countries affiliated under the
Habsburg sceptre. It was difficult to control the action of these newly
awakened national forces; because, adjacent to the frontiers of the Dual
Monarchy, new national States were springing up whose people were of the
same or kindred racial stock as the respective nationalities that
constituted the Habsburg Empire. These new States were able to exercise
a greater influence than the German element.

Even Vienna could not hold out for a lengthy period in this conflict.
When Budapest had developed into a metropolis a rival had grown up whose
mission was, not to help in holding together the various divergent parts
of the Empire, but rather to strengthen one part. Within a short time
Prague followed the example of Budapest; and later on came Lemberg,
Laibach and others. By raising these places which had formerly been
provincial towns to the rank of national cities, rallying centres were
provided for an independent cultural life. Through this the local
national instincts acquired a spiritual foundation and therewith gained
a more profound hold on the people. The time was bound to come when the
particularist interests of those various countries would become stronger
than their common imperial interests. Once that stage had been reached,
Austria's doom was sealed.

The course of this development was clearly perceptible since the death
of Joseph II. Its rapidity depended on a number of factors, some of
which had their source in the Monarchy itself; while others resulted
from the position which the Empire had taken in foreign politics.

It was impossible to make anything like a successful effort for the
permanent consolidation of the Austrian State unless a firm and
persistent policy of centralization were put into force. Before
everything else the principle should have been adopted that only one
common language could be used as the official language of the State.
Thus it would be possible to emphasize the formal unity of that imperial
commonwealth. And thus the administration would have in its hands a
technical instrument without which the State could not endure as a
political unity. In the same way the school and other forms of education
should have been used to inculcate a feeling of common citizenship. Such
an objective could not be reached within ten or twenty years. The effort
would have to be envisaged in terms of centuries; just as in all
problems of colonization, steady perseverance is a far more important
element than the output of energetic effort at the moment.

It goes without saying that in such circumstances the country must be
governed and administered by strictly adhering to the principle of
uniformity.

For me it was quite instructive to discover why this did not take place,
or rather why it was not done. Those who were guilty of the omission
must be held responsible for the break-up of the Habsburg Empire.

More than any other State, the existence of the old Austria depended on
a strong and capable Government. The Habsburg Empire lacked ethnical
uniformity, which constitutes the fundamental basis of a national State
and will preserve the existence of such a State even though the ruling
power should be grossly inefficient. When a State is composed of a
homogeneous population, the natural inertia of such a population will
hold the Stage together and maintain its existence through astonishingly
long periods of misgovernment and maladministration. It may often seem
as if the principle of life had died out in such a body-politic; but a
time comes when the apparent corpse rises up and displays before the
world an astonishing manifestation of its indestructible vitality.

But the situation is utterly different in a country where the population
is not homogeneous, where there is no bond of common blood but only that
of one ruling hand. Should the ruling hand show signs of weakness in
such a State the result will not be to cause a kind of hibernation of
the State but rather to awaken the individualist instincts which are
slumbering in the ethnological groups. These instincts do not make
themselves felt as long as these groups are dominated by a strong
central will-to-govern. The danger which exists in these slumbering
separatist instincts can be rendered more or less innocuous only through
centuries of common education, common traditions and common interests.
The younger such States are, the more their existence will depend on the
ability and strength of the central government. If their foundation was
due only to the work of a strong personality or a leader who is a man of
genius, in many cases they will break up as soon as the founder
disappears; because, though great, he stood alone. But even after
centuries of a common education and experiences these separatist
instincts I have spoken of are not always completely overcome. They may
be only dormant and may suddenly awaken when the central government
shows weakness and the force of a common education as well as the
prestige of a common tradition prove unable to withstand the vital
energies of separatist nationalities forging ahead towards the shaping
of their own individual existence.

The failure to see the truth of all this constituted what may be called
the tragic crime of the Habsburg rulers.

Only before the eyes of one Habsburg ruler, and that for the last time,
did the hand of Destiny hold aloft the torch that threw light on the
future of his country. But the torch was then extinguished for ever.

Joseph II, Roman Emperor of the German nation, was filled with a growing
anxiety when he realized the fact that his House was removed to an
outlying frontier of his Empire and that the time would soon be at hand
when it would be overturned and engulfed in the whirlpool caused by that
Babylon of nationalities, unless something was done at the eleventh hour
to overcome the dire consequences resulting from the negligence of his
ancestors. With superhuman energy this 'Friend of Mankind' made every
possible effort to counteract the effects of the carelessness and
thoughtlessness of his predecessors. Within one decade he strove to
repair the damage that had been done through centuries. If Destiny had
only granted him forty years for his labours, and if only two
generations had carried on the work which he had started, the miracle
might have been performed. But when he died, broken in body and spirit
after ten years of rulership, his work sank with him into the grave and
rests with him there in the Capucin Crypt, sleeping its eternal sleep,
having never again showed signs of awakening.

His successors had neither the ability nor the will-power necessary for
the task they had to face.

When the first signs of a new revolutionary epoch appeared in Europe
they gradually scattered the fire throughout Austria. And when the fire
began to glow steadily it was fed and fanned not by the social or
political conditions but by forces that had their origin in the
nationalist yearnings of the various ethnic groups.

The European revolutionary movement of 1848 primarily took the form of a
class conflict in almost every other country, but in Austria it took the
form of a new racial struggle. In so far as the German-Austrians there
forgot the origins of the movement, or perhaps had failed to recognize
them at the start and consequently took part in the revolutionary
uprising, they sealed their own fate. For they thus helped to awaken the
spirit of Western Democracy which, within a short while, shattered the
foundations of their own existence.

The setting up of a representative parliamentary body, without insisting
on the preliminary that only one language should be used in all public
intercourse under the State, was the first great blow to the
predominance of the German element in the Dual Monarchy. From that
moment the State was also doomed to collapse sooner or later. All that
followed was nothing but the historical liquidation of an Empire.

To watch that process of progressive disintegration was a tragic and at
the same time an instructive experience. The execution of history's
decree was carried out in thousands of details. The fact that great
numbers of people went about blindfolded amid the manifest signs of
dissolution only proves that the gods had decreed the destruction of
Austria.

I do not wish to dwell on details because that would lie outside the
scope of this book. I want to treat in detail only those events which
are typical among the causes that lead to the decline of nations and
States and which are therefore of importance to our present age.
Moreover, the study of these events helped to furnish the basis of my
own political outlook.

Among the institutions which most clearly manifested unmistakable signs
of decay, even to the weak-sighted Philistine, was that which, of all
the institutions of State, ought to have been the most firmly founded--I
mean the Parliament, or the Reichsrat (Imperial Council) as it was
called in Austria.

The pattern for this corporate body was obviously that which existed in
England, the land of classic democracy. The whole of that excellent
organization was bodily transferred to Austria with as little alteration
as possible.

As the Austrian counterpart to the British two-chamber system a Chamber
of Deputies and a House of Lords (HERRENHAUS) were established in
Vienna. The Houses themselves, considered as buildings were somewhat
different. When Barry built his palaces, or, as we say the Houses of
Parliament, on the shore of the Thames, he could look to the history of
the British Empire for the inspiration of his work. In that history he
found sufficient material to fill and decorate the 1,200 niches,
brackets, and pillars of his magnificent edifice. His statues and
paintings made the House of Lords and the House of Commons temples
dedicated to the glory of the nation.

There it was that Vienna encountered the first difficulty. When Hansen,
the Danish architect, had completed the last gable of the marble palace
in which the new body of popular representatives was to be housed he had
to turn to the ancient classical world for subjects to fill out his
decorative plan. This theatrical shrine of 'Western Democracy' was
adorned with the statues and portraits of Greek and Roman statesmen and
philosophers. As if it were meant for a symbol of irony, the horses of
the quadriga that surmounts the two Houses are pulling apart from one
another towards all four quarters of the globe. There could be no better
symbol for the kind of activity going on within the walls of that same
building.

The 'nationalities' were opposed to any kind of glorification of
Austrian history in the decoration of this building, insisting that such
would constitute an offence to them and a provocation. Much the same
happened in Germany, where the Reich-stag, built by Wallot, was not
dedicated to the German people until the cannons were thundering in the
World War. And then it was dedicated by an inscription.

I was not yet twenty years of age when I first entered the Palace on the
Franzens-ring to watch and listen in the Chamber of Deputies. That first
experience aroused in me a profound feeling of repugnance.

I had always hated the Parliament, but not as an institution in itself.
Quite the contrary. As one who cherished ideals of political freedom I
could not even imagine any other form of government. In the light of my
attitude towards the House of Habsburg I should then have considered it
a crime against liberty and reason to think of any kind of dictatorship
as a possible form of government.

A certain admiration which I had for the British Parliament contributed
towards the formation of this opinion. I became imbued with that feeling
of admiration almost without my being conscious of the effect of it
through so much reading of newspapers while I was yet quite young. I
could not discard that admiration all in a moment. The dignified way in
which the British House of Commons fulfilled its function impressed me
greatly, thanks largely to the glowing terms in which the Austrian Press
reported these events. I used to ask myself whether there could be any
nobler form of government than self-government by the people.

But these considerations furnished the very motives of my hostility to
the Austrian Parliament. The form in which parliamentary government was
here represented seemed unworthy of its great prototype. The following
considerations also influenced my attitude:

The fate of the German element in the Austrian State depended on its
position in Parliament. Up to the time that universal suffrage by secret
ballot was introduced the German representatives had a majority in the
Parliament, though that majority was not a very substantial one. This
situation gave cause for anxiety because the Social-Democratic fraction
of the German element could not be relied upon when national questions
were at stake. In matters that were of critical concern for the German
element, the Social-Democrats always took up an anti-German stand
because they were afraid of losing their followers among the other
national groups. Already at that time--before the introduction of
universal suffrage--the Social-Democratic Party could no longer be
considered as a German Party. The introduction of universal suffrage put
an end even to the purely numerical predominance of the German element.
The way was now clear for the further 'de-Germanization' of the Austrian
State.

The national instinct of self-preservation made it impossible for me to
welcome a representative system in which the German element was not
really represented as such, but always betrayed by the Social-Democratic
fraction. Yet all these, and many others, were defects which could not
be attributed to the parliamentary system as such, but rather to the
Austrian State in particular. I still believed that if the German
majority could be restored in the representative body there would be no
occasion to oppose such a system as long as the old Austrian State
continued to exist.

Such was my general attitude at the time when I first entered those
sacred and contentious halls. For me they were sacred only because of
the radiant beauty of that majestic edifice. A Greek wonder on German
soil.

But I soon became enraged by the hideous spectacle that met my eyes.
Several hundred representatives were there to discuss a problem of great
economical importance and each representative had the right to have his
say.

That experience of a day was enough to supply me with food for thought
during several weeks afterwards.

The intellectual level of the debate was quite low. Some times the
debaters did not make themselves intelligible at all. Several of those
present did not speak German but only their Slav vernaculars or
dialects. Thus I had the opportunity of hearing with my own ears what I
had been hitherto acquainted with only through reading the newspapers. A
turbulent mass of people, all gesticulating and bawling against one
another, with a pathetic old man shaking his bell and making frantic
efforts to call the House to a sense of its dignity by friendly appeals,
exhortations, and grave warnings.

I could not refrain from laughing.

Several weeks later I paid a second visit. This time the House presented
an entirely different picture, so much so that one could hardly
recognize it as the same place. The hall was practically empty. They
were sleeping in the other rooms below. Only a few deputies were in
their places, yawning in each other's faces. One was speechifying. A
deputy speaker was in the chair. When he looked round it was quite plain
that he felt bored.

Then I began to reflect seriously on the whole thing. I went to the
Parliament whenever I had any time to spare and watched the spectacle
silently but attentively. I listened to the debates, as far as they
could be understood, and I studied the more or less intelligent features
of those 'elect' representatives of the various nationalities which
composed that motley State. Gradually I formed my own ideas about what I
saw.

A year of such quiet observation was sufficient to transform or
completely destroy my former convictions as to the character of this
parliamentary institution. I no longer opposed merely the perverted form
which the principle of parliamentary representation had assumed in
Austria. No. It had become impossible for me to accept the system in
itself. Up to that time I had believed that the disastrous deficiencies
of the Austrian Parliament were due to the lack of a German majority,
but now I recognized that the institution itself was wrong in its very
essence and form.

A number of problems presented themselves before my mind. I studied more
closely the democratic principle of 'decision by the majority vote', and
I scrutinized no less carefully the intellectual and moral worth of the
gentlemen who, as the chosen representatives of the nation, were
entrusted with the task of making this institution function.

Thus it happened that at one and the same time I came to know the
institution itself and those of whom it was composed. And it was thus
that, within the course of a few years, I came to form a clear and vivid
picture of the average type of that most lightly worshipped phenomenon
of our time--the parliamentary deputy. The picture of him which I then
formed became deeply engraved on my mind and I have never altered it
since, at least as far as essentials go.

Once again these object-lessons taken from real life saved me from
getting firmly entangled by a theory which at first sight seems so
alluring to many people, though that theory itself is a symptom of human
decadence.

Democracy, as practised in Western Europe to-day, is the fore-runner of
Marxism. In fact, the latter would not be conceivable without the
former. Democracy is the breeding-ground in which the bacilli of the
Marxist world pest can grow and spread. By the introduction of
parliamentarianism, democracy produced an abortion of filth and fire
(Note 6), the creative fire of which, however, seems to have died out.

[Note 6. SPOTTGEBURT VON DRECK UND FEUER. This is the epithet that Faust
hurls at Mephistopheles as the latter intrudes on the conversation
between Faust and Martha in the garden:

Mephistopheles: Thou, full of sensual, super-sensual desire,
A girl by the nose is leading thee.
Faust: Abortion, thou of filth and fire.]

I am more than grateful to Fate that this problem came to my notice when
I was still in Vienna; for if I had been in Germany at that time I might
easily have found only a superficial solution. If I had been in Berlin
when I first discovered what an illogical thing this institution is
which we call Parliament, I might easily have gone to the other extreme
and believed--as many people believed, and apparently not without good
reason--that the salvation of the people and the Empire could be secured
only by restrengthening the principle of imperial authority. Those who
had this belief did not discern the tendencies of their time and were
blind to the aspirations of the people.

In Austria one could not be so easily misled. There it was impossible to
fall from one error into another. If the Parliament were worthless, the
Habsburgs were worse; or at least not in the slightest degree better.
The problem was not solved by rejecting the parliamentary system.
Immediately the question arose: What then? To repudiate and abolish the
Vienna Parliament would have resulted in leaving all power in the hands
of the Habsburgs. For me, especially, that idea was impossible.

Since this problem was specially difficult in regard to Austria, I was
forced while still quite young to go into the essentials of the whole
question more thoroughly than I otherwise should have done.

The aspect of the situation that first made the most striking impression
on me and gave me grounds for serious reflection was the manifest lack
of any individual responsibility in the representative body.

The parliament passes some acts or decree which may have the most
devastating consequences, yet nobody bears the responsibility for it.
Nobody can be called to account. For surely one cannot say that a
Cabinet discharges its responsibility when it retires after having
brought about a catastrophe. Or can we say that the responsibility is
fully discharged when a new coalition is formed or parliament dissolved?
Can the principle of responsibility mean anything else than the
responsibility of a definite person?

Is it at all possible actually to call to account the leaders of a
parliamentary government for any kind of action which originated in the
wishes of the whole multitude of deputies and was carried out under
their orders or sanction? Instead of developing constructive ideas and
plans, does the business of a statesman consist in the art of making a
whole pack of blockheads understand his projects? Is it his business to
entreat and coach them so that they will grant him their generous
consent?

Is it an indispensable quality in a statesman that he should possess a
gift of persuasion commensurate with the statesman's ability to conceive
great political measures and carry them through into practice?

Does it really prove that a statesman is incompetent if he should fail
to win over a majority of votes to support his policy in an assembly
which has been called together as the chance result of an electoral
system that is not always honestly administered.

Has there ever been a case where such an assembly has worthily appraised
a great political concept before that concept was put into practice and
its greatness openly demonstrated through its success?

In this world is not the creative act of the genius always a protest
against the inertia of the mass?

What shall the statesman do if he does not succeed in coaxing the
parliamentary multitude to give its consent to his policy? Shall he
purchase that consent for some sort of consideration?

Or, when confronted with the obstinate stupidity of his fellow citizens,
should he then refrain from pushing forward the measures which he deems
to be of vital necessity to the life of the nation? Should he retire or
remain in power?

In such circumstances does not a man of character find himself face to
face with an insoluble contradiction between his own political insight
on the one hand and, on the other, his moral integrity, or, better
still, his sense of honesty?

Where can we draw the line between public duty and personal honour?

Must not every genuine leader renounce the idea of degrading himself to
the level of a political jobber?

And, on the other hand, does not every jobber feel the itch to 'play
politics', seeing that the final responsibility will never rest with him
personally but with an anonymous mass which can never be called to
account for their deeds?

Must not our parliamentary principle of government by numerical majority
necessarily lead to the destruction of the principle of leadership?

Does anybody honestly believe that human progress originates in the
composite brain of the majority and not in the brain of the individual
personality?

Or may it be presumed that for the future human civilization will be
able to dispense with this as a condition of its existence?

But may it not be that, to-day, more than ever before, the creative
brain of the individual is indispensable?

The parliamentary principle of vesting legislative power in the decision
of the majority rejects the authority of the individual and puts a
numerical quota of anonymous heads in its place. In doing so it
contradicts the aristrocratic principle, which is a fundamental law of
nature; but, of course, we must remember that in this decadent era of
ours the aristrocratic principle need not be thought of as incorporated
in the upper ten thousand.

The devastating influence of this parliamentary institution might not
easily be recognized by those who read the Jewish Press, unless the
reader has learned how to think independently and examine the facts for
himself. This institution is primarily responsible for the crowded
inrush of mediocre people into the field of politics. Confronted with
such a phenomenon, a man who is endowed with real qualities of
leadership will be tempted to refrain from taking part in political
life; because under these circumstances the situation does not call for
a man who has a capacity for constructive statesmanship but rather for a
man who is capable of bargaining for the favour of the majority. Thus
the situation will appeal to small minds and will attract them
accordingly.

The narrower the mental outlook and the more meagre the amount of
knowledge in a political jobber, the more accurate is his estimate of
his own political stock, and thus he will be all the more inclined to
appreciate a system which does not demand creative genius or even
high-class talent; but rather that crafty kind of sagacity which makes
an efficient town clerk. Indeed, he values this kind of small craftiness
more than the political genius of a Pericles. Such a mediocrity does not
even have to worry about responsibility for what he does. From the
beginning he knows that whatever be the results of his 'statesmanship'
his end is already prescribed by the stars; he will one day have to
clear out and make room for another who is of similar mental calibre.
For it is another sign of our decadent times that the number of eminent
statesmen grows according as the calibre of individual personality
dwindles. That calibre will become smaller and smaller the more the
individual politician has to depend upon parliamentary majorities. A man
of real political ability will refuse to be the beadle for a bevy of
footling cacklers; and they in their turn, being the representatives of
the majority--which means the dunder-headed multitude--hate nothing so
much as a superior brain.

For footling deputies it is always quite a consolation to be led by a
person whose intellectual stature is on a level with their own. Thus
each one may have the opportunity to shine in debate among such compeers
and, above all, each one feels that he may one day rise to the top. If
Peter be boss to-day, then why not Paul tomorrow?

This new invention of democracy is very closely connected with a
peculiar phenomenon which has recently spread to a pernicious extent,
namely the cowardice of a large section of our so-called political
leaders. Whenever important decisions have to be made they always find
themselves fortunate in being able to hide behind the backs of what they
call the majority.

In observing one of these political manipulators one notices how he
wheedles the majority in order to get their sanction for whatever action
he takes. He has to have accomplices in order to be able to shift
responsibility to other shoulders whenever it is opportune to do so.
That is the main reason why this kind of political activity is abhorrent
to men of character and courage, while at the same time it attracts
inferior types; for a person who is not willing to accept responsibility
for his own actions, but is always seeking to be covered by something,
must be classed among the knaves and the rascals. If a national leader
should come from that lower class of politicians the evil consequences
will soon manifest themselves. Nobody will then have the courage to take
a decisive step. They will submit to abuse and defamation rather than
pluck up courage to take a definite stand. And thus nobody is left who
is willing to risk his position and his career, if needs be, in support
of a determined line of policy.

One truth which must always be borne in mind is that the majority can
never replace the man. The majority represents not only ignorance but
also cowardice. And just as a hundred blockheads do not equal one man of
wisdom, so a hundred poltroons are incapable of any political line of
action that requires moral strength and fortitude.

The lighter the burden of responsibility on each individual leader, the
greater will be the number of those who, in spite of their sorry
mediocrity, will feel the call to place their immortal energies at the
disposal of the nation. They are so much on the tip-toe of expectation
that they find it hard to wait their turn. They stand in a long queue,
painfully and sadly counting the number of those ahead of them and
calculating the hours until they may eventually come forward. They watch
every change that takes place in the personnel of the office towards
which their hopes are directed, and they are grateful for every scandal
which removes one of the aspirants waiting ahead of them in the queue.
If somebody sticks too long to his office stool they consider this as
almost a breach of a sacred understanding based on their mutual
solidarity. They grow furious and give no peace until that inconsiderate
person is finally driven out and forced to hand over his cosy berth for
public disposal. After that he will have little chance of getting
another opportunity. Usually those placemen who have been forced to give
up their posts push themselves again into the waiting queue unless they
are hounded away by the protestations of the other aspirants.

The result of all this is that, in such a State, the succession of
sudden changes in public positions and public offices has a very
disquieting effect in general, which may easily lead to disaster when an
adverse crisis arises. It is not only the ignorant and the incompetent
person who may fall victim to those parliamentary conditions, for the
genuine leader may be affected just as much as the others, if not more
so, whenever Fate has chanced to place a capable man in the position of
leader. Let the superior quality of such a leader be once recognized and
the result will be that a joint front will be organized against him,
particularly if that leader, though not coming from their ranks, should
fall into the habit of intermingling with these illustrious nincompoops
on their own level. They want to have only their own company and will
quickly take a hostile attitude towards any man who might show himself
obviously above and beyond them when he mingles in their ranks. Their
instinct, which is so blind in other directions, is very sharp in this
particular.

The inevitable result is that the intellectual level of the ruling class
sinks steadily. One can easily forecast how much the nation and State
are bound to suffer from such a condition of affairs, provided one does
not belong to that same class of 'leaders'.

The parliamentary régime in the old Austria was the very archetype of
the institution as I have described it.

Though the Austrian Prime Minister was appointed by the King-Emperor,
this act of appointment merely gave practical effect to the will of the
parliament. The huckstering and bargaining that went on in regard to
every ministerial position showed all the typical marks of Western
Democracy. The results that followed were in keeping with the principles
applied. The intervals between the replacement of one person by another
gradually became shorter, finally ending up in a wild relay chase. With
each change the quality of the 'statesman' in question deteriorated,
until finally only the petty type of political huckster remained. In
such people the qualities of statesmanship were measured and valued
according to the adroitness with which they pieced together one
coalition after another; in other words, their craftiness in
manipulating the pettiest political transactions, which is the only kind
of practical activity suited to the aptitudes of these representatives.

In this sphere Vienna was the school which offered the most impressive
examples.

Another feature that engaged my attention quite as much as the features
I have already spoken of was the contrast between the talents and
knowledge of these representatives of the people on the one hand and, on
the other, the nature of the tasks they had to face. Willingly or
unwillingly, one could not help thinking seriously of the narrow
intellectual outlook of these chosen representatives of the various
constituent nationalities, and one could not avoid pondering on the
methods through which these noble figures in our public life were first
discovered.

It was worth while to make a thorough study and examination of the way
in which the real talents of these gentlemen were devoted to the service
of their country; in other words, to analyse thoroughly the technical
procedure of their activities.

The whole spectacle of parliamentary life became more and more desolate
the more one penetrated into its intimate structure and studied the
persons and principles of the system in a spirit of ruthless
objectivity. Indeed, it is very necessary to be strictly objective in
the study of the institution whose sponsors talk of 'objectivity' in
every other sentence as the only fair basis of examination and judgment.
If one studied these gentlemen and the laws of their strenuous existence
the results were surprising.

There is no other principle which turns out to be quite so ill-conceived
as the parliamentary principle, if we examine it objectively.

In our examination of it we may pass over the methods according to which
the election of the representatives takes place, as well as the ways
which bring them into office and bestow new titles on them. It is quite
evident that only to a tiny degree are public wishes or public
necessities satisfied by the manner in which an election takes place;
for everybody who properly estimates the political intelligence of the
masses can easily see that this is not sufficiently developed to enable
them to form general political judgments on their own account, or to
select the men who might be competent to carry out their ideas in
practice.

Whatever definition we may give of the term 'public opinion', only a
very small part of it originates from personal experience or individual
insight. The greater portion of it results from the manner in which
public matters have been presented to the people through an
overwhelmingly impressive and persistent system of 'information'.

In the religious sphere the profession of a denominational belief is
largely the result of education, while the religious yearning itself
slumbers in the soul; so too the political opinions of the masses are
the final result of influences systematically operating on human
sentiment and intelligence in virtue of a method which is applied
sometimes with almost-incredible thoroughness and perseverance.

By far the most effective branch of political education, which in this
connection is best expressed by the word 'propaganda', is carried on by
the Press. The Press is the chief means employed in the process of
political 'enlightenment'. It represents a kind of school for adults.
This educational activity, however, is not in the hands of the State but
in the clutches of powers which are partly of a very inferior character.
While still a young man in Vienna I had excellent opportunities for
coming to know the men who owned this machine for mass instruction, as
well as those who supplied it with the ideas it distributed. At first I
was quite surprised when I realized how little time was necessary for
this dangerous Great Power within the State to produce a certain belief
among the public; and in doing so the genuine will and convictions of
the public were often completely misconstrued. It took the Press only a
few days to transform some ridiculously trivial matter into an issue of
national importance, while vital problems were completely ignored or
filched and hidden away from public attention.

The Press succeeded in the magical art of producing names from nowhere
within the course of a few weeks. They made it appear that the great
hopes of the masses were bound up with those names. And so they made
those names more popular than any man of real ability could ever hope to
be in a long lifetime. All this was done, despite the fact that such
names were utterly unknown and indeed had never been heard of even up to
a month before the Press publicly emblazoned them. At the same time old
and tried figures in the political and other spheres of life quickly
faded from the public memory and were forgotten as if they were dead,
though still healthy and in the enjoyment of their full viguour. Or
sometimes such men were so vilely abused that it looked as if their
names would soon stand as permanent symbols of the worst kind of
baseness. In order to estimate properly the really pernicious influence
which the Press can exercise one had to study this infamous Jewish
method whereby honourable and decent people were besmirched with mud and
filth, in the form of low abuse and slander, from hundreds and hundreds
of quarters simultaneously, as if commanded by some magic formula.

These highway robbers would grab at anything which might serve their
evil ends.

They would poke their noses into the most intimate family affairs and
would not rest until they had sniffed out some petty item which could be
used to destroy the reputation of their victim. But if the result of all
this sniffing should be that nothing derogatory was discovered in the
private or public life of the victim, they continued to hurl abuse at
him, in the belief that some of their animadversions would stick even
though refuted a thousand times. In most cases it finally turned out
impossible for the victim to continue his defence, because the accuser
worked together with so many accomplices that his slanders were
re-echoed interminably. But these slanderers would never own that they
were acting from motives which influence the common run of humanity or
are understood by them. Oh, no. The scoundrel who defamed his
contemporaries in this villainous way would crown himself with a halo of
heroic probity fashioned of unctuous phraseology and twaddle about his
'duties as a journalist' and other mouldy nonsense of that kind. When
these cuttle-fishes gathered together in large shoals at meetings and
congresses they would give out a lot of slimy talk about a special kind
of honour which they called the professional honour of the journalist.
Then the assembled species would bow their respects to one another.

These are the kind of beings that fabricate more than two-thirds of what
is called public opinion, from the foam of which the parliamentary
Aphrodite eventually arises.

Several volumes would be needed if one were to give an adequate account
of the whole procedure and fully describe all its hollow fallacies. But
if we pass over the details and look at the product itself while it is
in operation I think this alone will be sufficient to open the eyes of
even the most innocent and credulous person, so that he may recognize
the absurdity of this institution by looking at it objectively.

In order to realize how this human aberration is as harmful as it is
absurd, the test and easiest method is to compare democratic
parliamentarianism with a genuine German democracy.

The remarkable characteristic of the parliamentary form of democracy is
the fact that a number of persons, let us say five hundred--including,
in recent time, women also--are elected to parliament and invested with
authority to give final judgment on anything and everything. In practice
they alone are the governing body; for although they may appoint a
Cabinet, which seems outwardly to direct the affairs of state, this
Cabinet has not a real existence of its own. In reality the so-called
Government cannot do anything against the will of the assembly. It can
never be called to account for anything, since the right of decision is
not vested in the Cabinet but in the parliamentary majority. The Cabinet
always functions only as the executor of the will of the majority. Its
political ability can be judged only according to how far it succeeds in
adjusting itself to the will of the majority or in persuading the
majority to agree to its proposals. But this means that it must descend
from the level of a real governing power to that of a mendicant who has
to beg the approval of a majority that may be got together for the time
being. Indeed, the chief preoccupation of the Cabinet must be to secure
for itself, in the case of' each individual measure, the favour of the
majority then in power or, failing that, to form a new majority that
will be more favourably disposed. If it should succeed in either of
these efforts it may go on 'governing' for a little while. If it should
fail to win or form a majority it must retire. The question whether its
policy as such has been right or wrong does not matter at all.

Thereby all responsibility is abolished in practice. To what
consequences such a state of affairs can lead may easily be understood
from the following simple considerations:

Those five hundred deputies who have been elected by the people come
from various dissimilar callings in life and show very varying degrees
of political capacity, with the result that the whole combination is
disjointed and sometimes presents quite a sorry picture. Surely nobody
believes that these chosen representatives of the nation are the choice
spirits or first-class intellects. Nobody, I hope, is foolish enough to
pretend that hundreds of statesmen can emerge from papers placed in the
ballot box by electors who are anything else but averagely intelligent.
The absurd notion that men of genius are born out of universal suffrage
cannot be too strongly repudiated. In the first place, those times may
be really called blessed when one genuine statesman makes his appearance
among a people. Such statesmen do not appear all at once in hundreds or
more. Secondly, among the broad masses there is instinctively a definite
antipathy towards every outstanding genius. There is a better chance of
seeing a camel pass through the eye of a needle than of seeing a really
great man 'discovered' through an election.

Whatever has happened in history above the level of the average of the
broad public has mostly been due to the driving force of an individual
personality.

But here five hundred persons of less than modest intellectual qualities
pass judgment on the most important problems affecting the nation. They
form governments which in turn learn to win the approval of the
illustrious assembly for every legislative step that may be taken, which
means that the policy to be carried out is actually the policy of the
five hundred.

And indeed, generally speaking, the policy bears the stamp of its
origin.

But let us pass over the intellectual qualities of these representatives
and ask what is the nature of the task set before them. If we consider
the fact that the problems which have to be discussed and solved belong
to the most varied and diverse fields we can very well realize how
inefficient a governing system must be which entrusts the right of
decision to a mass assembly in which only very few possess the knowledge
and experience such as would qualify them to deal with the matters that
have to be settled. The most important economic measures are submitted
to a tribunal in which not more than one-tenth of the members have
studied the elements of economics. This means that final authority is
vested in men who are utterly devoid of any preparatory training which
might make them competent to decide on the questions at issue.

The same holds true of every other problem. It is always a majority of
ignorant and incompetent people who decide on each measure; for the
composition of the institution does not vary, while the problems to be
dealt with come from the most varied spheres of public life. An
intelligent judgment would be possible only if different deputies had
the authority to deal with different issues. It is out of the question
to think that the same people are fitted to decide on transport
questions as well as, let us say, on questions of foreign policy, unless
each of them be a universal genius. But scarcely more than one genius
appears in a century. Here we are scarcely ever dealing with real
brains, but only with dilettanti who are as narrow-minded as they are
conceited and arrogant, intellectual DEMI-MONDES of the worst kind. This
is why these honourable gentlemen show such astonishing levity in
discussing and deciding on matters that would demand the most
painstaking consideration even from great minds. Measures of momentous
importance for the future existence of the State are framed and
discussed in an atmosphere more suited to the card-table. Indeed the
latter suggests a much more fitting occupation for these gentlemen than
that of deciding the destinies of a people.

Of course it would be unfair to assume that each member in such a
parliament was endowed by nature with such a small sense of
responsibility. That is out of the question.

But this system, by forcing the individual to pass judgment on questions
for which he is not competent gradually debases his moral character.
Nobody will have the courage to say: "Gentlemen, I am afraid we know
nothing about what we are talking about. I for one have no competency in
the matter at all." Anyhow if such a declaration were made it would not
change matters very much; for such outspoken honesty would not be
understood. The person who made the declaration would be deemed an
honourable ass who ought not to be allowed to spoil the game. Those who
have a knowledge of human nature know that nobody likes to be considered
a fool among his associates; and in certain circles honesty is taken as
an index of stupidity.

Thus it happens that a naturally upright man, once he finds himself
elected to parliament, may eventually be induced by the force of
circumstances to acquiesce in a general line of conduct which is base in
itself and amounts to a betrayal of the public trust. That feeling that
if the individual refrained from taking part in a certain decision his
attitude would not alter the situation in the least, destroys every real
sense of honour which might occasionally arouse the conscience of one
person or another. Finally, the otherwise upright deputy will succeed in
persuading himself that he is by no means the worst of the lot and that
by taking part in a certain line of action he may prevent something
worse from happening.

A counter argument may be put forward here. It may be said that of
course the individual member may not have the knowledge which is
requisite for the treatment of this or that question, yet his attitude
towards it is taken on the advice of his Party as the guiding authority
in each political matter; and it may further be said that the Party sets
up special committees of experts who have even more than the requisite
knowledge for dealing with the questions placed before them.

At first sight, that argument seems sound. But then another question
arises--namely, why are five hundred persons elected if only a few have
the wisdom which is required to deal with the more important problems?

It is not the aim of our modern democratic parliamentary system to bring
together an assembly of intelligent and well-informed deputies. Not at
all. The aim rather is to bring together a group of nonentities who are
dependent on others for their views and who can be all the more easily
led, the narrower the mental outlook of each individual is. That is the
only way in which a party policy, according to the evil meaning it has
to-day, can be put into effect. And by this method alone it is possible
for the wirepuller, who exercises the real control, to remain in the
dark, so that personally he can never be brought to account for his
actions. For under such circumstances none of the decisions taken, no
matter how disastrous they may turn out for the nation as a whole, can
be laid at the door of the individual whom everybody knows to be the
evil genius responsible for the whole affair. All responsibility is
shifted to the shoulders of the Party as a whole.

In practice no actual responsibility remains. For responsibility arises
only from personal duty and not from the obligations that rest with a
parliamentary assembly of empty talkers.

The parliamentary institution attracts people of the badger type, who do
not like the open light. No upright man, who is ready to accept personal
responsibility for his acts, will be attracted to such an institution.

That is the reason why this brand of democracy has become a tool in the
hand of that race which, because of the inner purposes it wishes to
attain, must shun the open light, as it has always done and always will
do. Only a Jew can praise an institution which is as corrupt and false
as himself.

As a contrast to this kind of democracy we have the German democracy,
which is a true democracy; for here the leader is freely chosen and is
obliged to accept full responsibility for all his actions and omissions.
The problems to be dealt with are not put to the vote of the majority;
but they are decided upon by the individual, and as a guarantee of
responsibility for those decisions he pledges all he has in the world
and even his life.

The objection may be raised here that under such conditions it would be
very difficult to find a man who would be ready to devote himself to so
fateful a task. The answer to that objection is as follows:

We thank God that the inner spirit of our German democracy will of
itself prevent the chance careerist, who may be intellectually worthless
and a moral twister, from coming by devious ways to a position in which
he may govern his fellow-citizens. The fear of undertaking such
far-reaching responsibilities, under German democracy, will scare off
the ignorant and the feckless.

But should it happen that such a person might creep in surreptitiously
it will be easy enough to identify him and apostrophize him ruthlessly.
somewhat thus: "Be off, you scoundrel. Don't soil these steps with your
feet; because these are the steps that lead to the portals of the
Pantheon of History, and they are not meant for place-hunters but for
men of noble character."

Such were the views I formed after two years of attendance at the
sessions of the Viennese Parliament. Then I went there no more.

The parliamentary regime became one of the causes why the strength of
the Habsburg State steadily declined during the last years of its
existence. The more the predominance of the German element was whittled
away through parliamentary procedure, the more prominent became the
system of playing off one of the various constituent nationalities
against the other. In the Imperial Parliament it was always the German
element that suffered through the system, which meant that the results
were detrimental to the Empire as a whole; for at the close of the
century even the most simple-minded people could recognize that the
cohesive forces within the Dual Monarchy no longer sufficed to
counterbalance the separatist tendencies of the provincial
nationalities. On the contrary!

The measures which the State adopted for its own maintenance became more
and more mean spirited and in a like degree the general disrespect for
the State increased. Not only Hungary but also the various Slav
provinces gradually ceased to identify themselves with the monarchy
which embraced them all, and accordingly they did not feel its weakness
as in any way detrimental to themselves. They rather welcomed those
manifestations of senile decay. They looked forward to the final
dissolution of the State, and not to its recovery.

The complete collapse was still forestalled in Parliament by the
humiliating concessions that were made to every kind of importunate
demands, at the cost of the German element. Throughout the country the
defence of the State rested on playing off the various nationalities
against one another. But the general trend of this development was
directed against the Germans. Especially since the right of succession
to the throne conferred certain influence on the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, the policy of increasing the power of the Czechs was carried
out systematically from the upper grades of the administration down to
the lower. With all the means at his command the heir to the Dual
Monarchy personally furthered the policy that aimed at eliminating the
influence of the German element, or at least he acted as protector of
that policy. By the use of State officials as tools, purely German
districts were gradually but decisively brought within the danger zone
of the mixed languages. Even in Lower Austria this process began to make
headway with a constantly increasing tempo and Vienna was looked upon by
the Czechs as their biggest city.

In the family circle of this new Habsburger the Czech language was
favoured. The wife of the Archduke had formerly been a Czech Countess
and was wedded to the Prince by a morganatic marriage. She came from an
environment where hostility to the Germans had been traditional. The
leading idea in the mind of the Archduke was to establish a Slav State
in Central Europe, which was to be constructed on a purely Catholic
basis, so as to serve as a bulwark against Orthodox Russia.

As had happened often in Habsburg history, religion was thus exploited
to serve a purely political policy, and in this case a fatal policy, at
least as far as German interests were concerned. The result was
lamentable in many respects.

Neither the House of Habsburg nor the Catholic Church received the
reward which they expected. Habsburg lost the throne and the Church lost
a great State. By employing religious motives in the service of
politics, a spirit was aroused which the instigators of that policy had
never thought possible.

From the attempt to exterminate Germanism in the old monarchy by every
available means arose the Pan-German Movement in Austria, as a response.

In the 'eighties of the last century Manchester Liberalism, which was
Jewish in its fundamental ideas, had reached the zenith of its influence
in the Dual Monarchy, or had already passed that point. The reaction
which set in did not arise from social but from nationalistic
tendencies, as was always the case in the old Austria. The instinct of
self-preservation drove the German element to defend itself
energetically. Economic considerations only slowly began to gain an
important influence; but they were of secondary concern. But of the
general political chaos two party organizations emerged. The one was
more of a national, and the other more of a social, character; but both
were highly interesting and instructive for the future.

After the war of 1866, which had resulted in the humiliation of Austria,
the House of Habsburg contemplated a REVANCHE on the battlefield. Only
the tragic end of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico prevented a still
closer collaboration with France. The chief blame for Maximilian's
disastrous expedition was attributed to Napoleon III and the fact that
the Frenchman left him in the lurch aroused a general feeling of
indignation. Yet the Habsburgs were still lying in wait for their
opportunity. If the war of 1870-71 had not been such a singular triumph,
the Viennese Court might have chanced the game of blood in order to get
its revenge for Sadowa. But when the first reports arrived from the
Franco-German battlefield, which, though true, seemed miraculous and
almost incredible, the 'most wise' of all monarchs recognized that the
moment was inopportune and tried to accept the unfavourable situation
with as good a grace as possible.

The heroic conflict of those two years (1870-71) produced a still
greater miracle; for with the Habsburgs the change of attitude never
came from an inner heartfelt urge but only from the pressure of
circumstances. The German people of the East Mark, however, were
entranced by the triumphant glory of the newly established German Empire
and were profoundly moved when they saw the dream of their fathers
resurgent in a magnificent reality.

For--let us make no mistake about it--the true German-Austrian realized
from this time onward, that Königgrätz was the tragic, though necessary,
pre-condition for the re-establishment of an Empire which should no
longer be burdened with the palsy of the old alliance and which indeed
had no share in that morbid decay. Above all, the German-Austrian had
come to feel in the very depths of his own being that the historical
mission of the House of Habsburg had come to an end and that the new
Empire could choose only an Emperor who was of heroic mould and was
therefore worthy to wear the 'Crown of the Rhine'. It was right and just
that Destiny should be praised for having chosen a scion of that House
of which Frederick the Great had in past times given the nation an
elevated and resplendent symbol for all time to come.

After the great war of 1870-71 the House of Habsburg set to work with
all its determination to exterminate the dangerous German element--about
whose inner feelings and attitude there could be no doubt--slowly but
deliberately. I use the word exterminate, because that alone expresses
what must have been the final result of the Slavophile policy. Then it
was that the fire of rebellion blazed up among the people whose
extermination had been decreed. That fire was such as had never been
witnessed in modern German history.

For the first time nationalists and patriots were transformed into
rebels.

Not rebels against the nation or the State as such but rebels against
that form of government which they were convinced, would inevitably
bring about the ruin of their own people. For the first time in modern
history the traditional dynastic patriotism and national love of
fatherland and people were in open conflict.

It was to the merit of the Pan-German movement in Austria during the
closing decade of the last century that it pointed out clearly and
unequivocally that a State is entitled to demand respect and protection
for its authority only when such authority is administered in accordance
with the interests of the nation, or at least not in a manner
detrimental to those interests.

The authority of the State can never be an end in itself; for, if that
were so, any kind of tyranny would be inviolable and sacred.

If a government uses the instruments of power in its hands for the
purpose of leading a people to ruin, then rebellion is not only the
right but also the duty of every individual citizen.

The question of whether and when such a situation exists cannot be
answered by theoretical dissertations but only by the exercise of force,
and it is success that decides the issue.

Every government, even though it may be the worst possible and even
though it may have betrayed the nation's trust in thousands of ways,
will claim that its duty is to uphold the authority of the State. Its
adversaries, who are fighting for national self-preservation, must use
the same weapons which the government uses if they are to prevail
against such a rule and secure their own freedom and independence.
Therefore the conflict will be fought out with 'legal' means as long as
the power which is to be overthrown uses them; but the insurgents will
not hesitate to apply illegal means if the oppressor himself employs
them.

Generally speaking, we must not forget that the highest aim of human
existence is not the maintenance of a State of Government but rather the
conservation of the race.

If the race is in danger of being oppressed or even exterminated the
question of legality is only of secondary importance. The established
power may in such a case employ only those means which are recognized as
'legal'. yet the instinct of self-preservation on the part of the
oppressed will always justify, to the highest degree, the employment of
all possible resources.

Only on the recognition of this principle was it possible for those
struggles to be carried through, of which history furnishes magnificent
examples in abundance, against foreign bondage or oppression at home.

Human rights are above the rights of the State. But if a people be
defeated in the struggle for its human rights this means that its weight
has proved too light in the scale of Destiny to have the luck of being
able to endure in this terrestrial world.

The world is not there to be possessed by the faint-hearted races.



Austria affords a very clear and striking example of how easy it is for
tyranny to hide its head under the cloak of what is called 'legality'.

The legal exercise of power in the Habsburg State was then based on the
anti-German attitude of the parliament, with its non-German majorities,
and on the dynastic House, which was also hostile to the German element.
The whole authority of the State was incorporated in these two factors.
To attempt to alter the lot of the German element through these two
factors would have been senseless. Those who advised the 'legal' way as
the only possible way, and also obedience to the State authority, could
offer no resistance; because a policy of resistance could not have been
put into effect through legal measures. To follow the advice of the
legalist counsellors would have meant the inevitable ruin of the German
element within the Monarchy, and this disaster would not have taken long
to come. The German element has actually been saved only because the
State as such collapsed.

The spectacled theorist would have given his life for his doctrine
rather than for his people.

Because man has made laws he subsequently comes to think that he exists
for the sake of the laws.

A great service rendered by the pan-German movement then was that it
abolished all such nonsense, though the doctrinaire theorists and other
fetish worshippers were shocked.

When the Habsburgs attempted to come to close quarters with the German
element, by the employment of all the means of attack which they had at
their command, the Pan-German Party hit out ruthlessly against the
'illustrious' dynasty. This Party was the first to probe into and expose
the corrupt condition of the State; and in doing so they opened the eyes
of hundreds of thousands. To have liberated the high ideal of love for
one's country from the embrace of this deplorable dynasty was one of the
great services rendered by the Pan-German movement.

When that Party first made its appearance it secured a large
following--indeed, the movement threatened to become almost an
avalanche. But the first successes were not maintained. At the time I
came to Vienna the pan-German Party had been eclipsed by the
Christian-Socialist Party, which had come into power in the meantime.
Indeed, the Pan-German Party had sunk to a level of almost complete
insignificance.

The rise and decline of the Pan-German movement on the one hand and the
marvellous progress of the Christian-Socialist Party on the other,
became a classic object of study for me, and as such they played an
important part in the development of my own views.

When I came to Vienna all my sympathies were exclusively with the
Pan-German Movement.

I was just as much impressed by the fact that they had the courage to
shout HEIL HOHENZOLLERN as I rejoiced at their determination to consider
themselves an integral part of the German Empire, from which they were
separated only provisionally. They never missed an opportunity to
explain their attitude in public, which raised my enthusiasm and
confidence. To avow one's principles publicly on every problem that
concerned Germanism, and never to make any compromises, seemed to me the
only way of saving our people. What I could not understand was how this
movement broke down so soon after such a magnificent start; and it was
no less incomprehensible that the Christian-Socialists should gain such
tremendous power within such a short time. They had just reached the
pinnacle of their popularity.

When I began to compare those two movements Fate placed before me the
best means of understanding the causes of this puzzling problem. The
action of Fate in this case was hastened by my own straitened
circumstances.

I shall begin my analysis with an account of the two men who must be
regarded as the founders and leaders of the two movements. These were
George von Schönerer and Dr. Karl Lueger.

As far as personality goes, both were far above the level and stature of
the so-called parliamentary figures. They lived lives of immaculate and
irreproachable probity amidst the miasma of all-round political
corruption. Personally I first liked the Pan-German representative,
Schönerer, and it was only afterwards and gradually that I felt an equal
liking for the Christian-Socialist leader.

When I compared their respective abilities Schönerer seemed to me a
better and more profound thinker on fundamental problems. He foresaw the
inevitable downfall of the Austrian State more clearly and accurately
than anyone else. If this warning in regard to the Habsburg Empire had
been heeded in Germany the disastrous world war, which involved Germany
against the whole of Europe, would never have taken place.

But though Schönerer succeeded in penetrating to the essentials of a
problem he was very often much mistaken in his judgment of men.

And herein lay Dr. Lueger's special talent. He had a rare gift of
insight into human nature and he was very careful not to take men as
something better than they were in reality. He based his plans on the
practical possibilities which human life offered him, whereas Schönerer
had only little discrimination in that respect. All ideas that this
Pan-German had were right in the abstract, but he did not have the
forcefulness or understanding necessary to put his ideas across to the
broad masses. He was not able to formulate them so that they could be
easily grasped by the masses, whose powers of comprehension are limited
and will always remain so. Therefore all Schönerer's knowledge was only
the wisdom of a prophet and he never could succeed in having it put into
practice.

This lack of insight into human nature led him to form a wrong estimate
of the forces behind certain movements and the inherent strength of old
institutions.

Schönerer indeed realized that the problems he had to deal with were in
the nature of a WELTANSCHAUUNG; but he did not understand that only the
broad masses of a nation can make such convictions prevail, which are
almost of a religious nature.

Unfortunately he understood only very imperfectly how feeble is the
fighting spirit of the so-called bourgeoisie. That weakness is due to
their business interests, which individuals are too much afraid of
risking and which therefore deter them from taking action. And,
generally speaking, a WELTANSCHAUUNG can have no prospect of success
unless the broad masses declare themselves ready to act as its
standard-bearers and to fight on its behalf wherever and to whatever
extent that may be necessary.

This failure to understand the importance of the lower strata of the
population resulted in a very inadequate concept of the social problem.

In all this Dr. Lueger was the opposite of Schönerer. His profound
knowledge of human nature enabled him to form a correct estimate of the
various social forces and it saved him from under-rating the power of
existing institutions. And it was perhaps this very quality which
enabled him to utilize those institutions as a means to serve the
purposes of his policy.

He saw only too clearly that, in our epoch, the political fighting power
of the upper classes is quite insignificant and not at all capable of
fighting for a great new movement until the triumph of that movement be
secured. Thus he devoted the greatest part of his political activity to
the task of winning over those sections of the population whose
existence was in danger and fostering the militant spirit in them rather
than attempting to paralyse it. He was also quick to adopt all available
means for winning the support of long-established institutions, so as to
be able to derive the greatest possible advantage for his movement from
those old sources of power.

Thus it was that, first of all, he chose as the social basis of his new
Party that middle class which was threatened with extinction. In this
way he secured a solid following which was willing to make great
sacrifices and had good fighting stamina. His extremely wise attitude
towards the Catholic Church rapidly won over the younger clergy in such
large numbers that the old Clerical Party was forced to retire from the
field of action or else, which was the wiser course, join the new Party,
in the hope of gradually winning back one position after another.

But it would be a serious injustice to the man if we were to regard this
as his essential characteristic. For he possessed the qualities of an
able tactician, and had the true genius of a great reformer; but all
these were limited by his exact perception of the possibilities at hand
and also of his own capabilities.

The aims which this really eminent man decided to pursue were intensely
practical. He wished to conquer Vienna, the heart of the Monarchy. It
was from Vienna that the last pulses of life beat through the diseased
and worn-out body of the decrepit Empire. If the heart could be made
healthier the others parts of the body were bound to revive. That idea
was correct in principle; but the time within which it could be applied
in practice was strictly limited. And that was the man's weak point.

His achievements as Burgomaster of the City of Vienna are immortal, in
the best sense of the word. But all that could not save the Monarchy. It
came too late.

His rival, Schönerer, saw this more clearly. What Dr. Lueger undertook
to put into practice turned out marvellously successful. But the results
which he expected to follow these achievements did not come. Schönerer
did not attain the ends he had proposed to himself; but his fears were
realized, alas, in a terrible fashion. Thus both these men failed to
attain their further objectives. Lueger could not save Austria and
Schönerer could not prevent the downfall of the German people in
Austria.

To study the causes of failure in the case of these two parties is to
learn a lesson that is highly instructive for our own epoch. This is
specially useful for my friends, because in many points the
circumstances of our own day are similar to those of that time.
Therefore such a lesson may help us to guard against the mistakes which
brought one of those movements to an end and rendered the other barren
of results.

In my opinion, the wreck of the Pan-German Movement in Austria must be
attributed to three causes.

The first of these consisted in the fact that the leaders did not have a
clear concept of the importance of the social problem, particularly for
a new movement which had an essentially revolutionary character.
Schönerer and his followers directed their attention principally to the
bourgeois classes. For that reason their movement was bound to turn out
mediocre and tame. The German bourgeoisie, especially in its upper
circles, is pacifist even to the point of complete
self-abnegation--though the individual may not be aware of
this--wherever the internal affairs of the nation or State are
concerned. In good times, which in this case means times of good
government, such a psychological attitude makes this social layer
extraordinarily valuable to the State. But when there is a bad
government, such a quality has a destructive effect. In order to assure
the possibility of carrying through a really strenuous struggle, the
Pan-German Movement should have devoted its efforts to winning over the
masses. The failure to do this left the movement from the very beginning
without the elementary impulse which such a wave needs if it is not to
ebb within a short while.

In failing to see the truth of this principle clearly at the very outset
of the movement and in neglecting to put it into practice the new Party
made an initial mistake which could not possibly be rectified
afterwards. For the numerous moderate bourgeois elements admitted into
the movements increasingly determined its internal orientation and thus
forestalled all further prospects of gaining any appreciable support
among the masses of the people. Under such conditions such a movement
could not get beyond mere discussion and criticism. Quasi-religious
faith and the spirit of sacrifice were not to be found in the movement
any more. Their place was taken by the effort towards 'positive'
collaboration, which in this case meant the acknowledgment of the
existing state of affairs, gradually whittling away the rough corners of
the questions in dispute, and ending up with the making of a
dishonourable peace.

Such was the fate of the Pan-German Movement, because at the start the
leaders did not realize that the most important condition of success was
that they should recruit their following from the broad masses of the
people. The Movement thus became bourgeois and respectable and radical
only in moderation.

From this failure resulted the second cause of its rapid decline.

The position of the Germans in Austria was already desperate when
Pan-Germanism arose. Year after year Parliament was being used more and
more as an instrument for the gradual extinction of the German-Austrian
population. The only hope for any eleventh-hour effort to save it lay in
the overthrow of the parliamentary system; but there was very little
prospect of this happening.

Therewith the Pan-German Movement was confronted with a question of
primary importance.

To overthrow the Parliament, should the Pan-Germanists have entered it
'to undermine it from within', as the current phrase was? Or should they
have assailed the institution as such from the outside?

They entered the Parliament and came out defeated. But they had found
themselves obliged to enter.

For in order to wage an effective war against such a power from the
outside, indomitable courage and a ready spirit of sacrifice were
necessary weapons. In such cases the bull must be seized by the horns.
Furious drives may bring the assailant to the ground again and again;
but if he has a stout heart he will stand up, even though some bones may
be broken, and only after a long and tough struggle will he achieve his
triumph. New champions are attracted to a cause by the appeal of great
sacrifices made for its sake, until that indomitable spirit is finally
crowned with success.

For such a result, however, the children of the people from the great
masses are necessary. They alone have the requisite determination and
tenacity to fight a sanguinary issue through to the end. But the
Pan-German Movement did not have these broad masses as its champions,
and so no other means of solution could be tried out except that of
entering Parliamcnt.

It would be a mistake to think that this decision resulted from a long
series of internal hesitations of a moral kind, or that it was the
outcome of careful calculation. No. They did not even think of another
solution. Those who participated in this blunder were actuated by
general considerations and vague notions as to what would be the
significance and effect of taking part in such a special way in that
institution which they had condemned on principle. In general they hoped
that they would thus have the means of expounding their cause to the
great masses of the people, because they would be able to speak before
'the forum of the whole nation'. Also, it seemed reasonable to believe
that by attacking the evil in the root they would be more effective than
if the attack came from outside. They believed that, if protected by the
immunity of Parliament, the position of the individual protagonists
would be strengthened and that thus the force of their attacks would be
enhanced.

In reality everything turned out quite otherwise.

The Forum before which the Pan-German representatives spoke had not
grown greater, but had actually become smaller; for each spoke only to
the circle that was ready to listen to him or could read the report of
his speech in the newspapers.

But the greater forum of immediate listeners is not the parliamentary
auditorium: it is the large public meeting. For here alone will there be
thousands of men who have come simply to hear what a speaker has to say,
whereas in the parliamentary sittings only a few hundred are present;
and for the most part these are there only to earn their daily allowance
for attendance and not to be enlightened by the wisdom of one or other
of the 'representatives of the people'.

The most important consideration is that the same public is always
present and that this public does not wish to learn anything new;
because, setting aside the question of its intelligence, it lacks even
that modest quantum of will-power which is necessary for the effort of
learning.

Not one of the representatives of the people will pay homage to a
superior truth and devote himself to its service. No. Not one of these
gentry will act thus, except he has grounds for hoping that by such a
conversion he may be able to retain the representation of his
constituency in the coming legislature. Therefore, only when it becomes
quite clear that the old party is likely to have a bad time of it at the
forthcoming elections--only then will those models of manly virtue set
out in search of a new party or a new policy which may have better
electoral prospects; but of course this change of position will be
accompanied by a veritable deluge of high moral motives to justify it.
And thus it always happens that when an existing Party has incurred such
general disfavour among the public that it is threatened with the
probability of a crushing defeat, then a great migration commences. The
parliamentary rats leave the Party ship.

All this happens not because the individuals in the case have become
better informed on the questions at issue and have resolved to act
accordingly. These changes of front are evidence only of that gift of
clairvoyance which warns the parliamentary flea at the right moment and
enables him to hop into another warm Party bed.

To speak before such a forum signifies casting pearls before certain
animals.

Verily it does not repay the pains taken; for the result must always be
negative.

And that is actually what happened. The Pan-German representatives might
have talked themselves hoarse, but to no effect whatsoever.

The Press either ignored them totally or so mutilated their speeches
that the logical consistency was destroyed or the meaning twisted round
in such a way that the public got only a very wrong impression regarding
the aims of the new movement. What the individual members said was not
of importance. The important matter was what people read as coming from
them. This consisted of mere extracts which had been torn out of the
context of the speeches and gave an impression of incoherent nonsense,
which indeed was purposely meant. Thus the only public before which they
really spoke consisted merely of five hundred parliamentarians; and that
says enough.

The worst was the following:

The Pan-German Movement could hope for success only if the leaders
realized from the very first moment that here there was no question so
much of a new Party as of a new WELTANSCHAUUNG. This alone could arouse
the inner moral forces that were necessary for such a gigantic struggle.
And for this struggle the leaders must be men of first-class brains and
indomitable courage. If the struggle on behalf of a WELTANSCHAUUNG is
not conducted by men of heroic spirit who are ready to sacrifice,
everything, within a short while it will become impossible to find real
fighting followers who are ready to lay down their lives for the cause.
A man who fights only for his own existence has not much left over for
the service of the community.

In order to secure the conditions that are necessary for success,
everybody concerned must be made to understand that the new movement
looks to posterity for its honour and glory but that it has no
recompense to offer to the present-day members. If a movement should
offer a large number of positions and offices that are easily accessible
the number of unworthy candidates admitted to membership will be
constantly on the increase and eventually a day will come when there
will be such a preponderance of political profiteers among the
membership of a successful Party that the combatants who bore the brunt
of the battle in the earlier stages of the movement can now scarcely
recognize their own Party and may be ejected by the later arrivals as
unwanted ballast. Therewith the movement will no longer have a mission
to fulfil.

Once the Pan-Germanists decided to collaborate with Parliament they were
no longer leaders and combatants in a popular movement, but merely
parliamentarians. Thus the Movement sank to the common political party
level of the day and no longer had the strength to face a hostile fate
and defy the risk of martyrdom. Instead of fighting, the Pan-German
leaders fell into the habit of talking and negotiating. The new
parliamentarians soon found that it was a more satisfactory, because
less risky, way of fulfilling their task if they would defend the new
WELTANSCHAUUNG with the spiritual weapon of parliamentary rhetoric
rather than take up a fight in which they placed their lives in danger,
the outcome of which also was uncertain and even at the best could offer
no prospect of personal gain for themselves.

When they had taken their seats in Parliament their adherents outside
hoped and waited for miracles to happen. Naturally no such miracles
happened or could happen. Whereupon the adherents of the movement soon
grew impatient, because reports they read about their own deputies did
not in the least come up to what had been expected when they voted for
these deputies at the elections. The reason for this was not far to
seek. It was due to the fact that an unfriendly Press refrained from
giving a true account of what the Pan-German representatives of the
people were actually doing.

According as the new deputies got to like this mild form of
'revolutionary' struggle in Parliament and in the provincial diets they
gradually became reluctant to resume the more hazardous work of
expounding the principles of the movement before the broad masses of the
people.

Mass meetings in public became more and more rare, though these are the
only means of exercising a really effective influence on the people;
because here the influence comes from direct personal contact and in
this way the support of large sections of the people can be obtained.

When the tables on which the speakers used to stand in the great
beer-halls, addressing an assembly of thousands, were deserted for the
parliamentary tribune and the speeches were no longer addressed to the
people directly but to the so-called 'chosen' representatives, the
Pan-German Movement lost its popular character and in a little while
degenerated to the level of a more or less serious club where problems
of the day are discussed academically.

The wrong impression created by the Press was no longer corrected by
personal contact with the people through public meetings, whereby the
individual representatives might have given a true account of their
activities. The final result of this neglect was that the word
'Pan-German' came to have an unpleasant sound in the ears of the masses.

The knights of the pen and the literary snobs of to-day should be made
to realize that the great transformations which have taken place in this
world were never conducted by a goosequill. No. The task of the pen must
always be that of presenting the theoretical concepts which motivate
such changes. The force which has ever and always set in motion great
historical avalanches of religious and political movements is the magic
power of the spoken word.

The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of
rhetoric than to any other force. All great movements are popular
movements. They are the volcanic eruptions of human passions and
emotions, stirred into activity by the ruthless Goddess of Distress or
by the torch of the spoken word cast into the midst of the people. In no
case have great movements been set afoot by the syrupy effusions of
aesthetic littérateurs and drawing-room heroes.

The doom of a nation can be averted only by a storm of glowing passion;
but only those who are passionate themselves can arouse passion in
others. It is only through the capacity for passionate feeling that
chosen leaders can wield the power of the word which, like hammer blows,
will open the door to the hearts of the people.

He who is not capable of passionate feeling and speech was never chosen
by Providence to be the herald of its will. Therefore a writer should
stick to his ink-bottle and busy himself with theoretical questions if
he has the requisite ability and knowledge. He has not been born or
chosen to be a leader.

A movement which has great ends to achieve must carefully guard against
the danger of losing contact with the masses of the people. Every
problem encountered must be examined from this viewpoint first of all
and the decision to be made must always be in harmony with this
principle.

The movement must avoid everything which might lessen or weaken its
power of influencing the masses; not from demagogical motives but
because of the simple fact that no great idea, no matter how sublime and
exalted it may appear, can be realized in practice without the effective
power which resides in the popular masses. Stern reality alone must mark
the way to the goal. To be unwilling to walk the road of hardship means,
only too often in this world, the total renunciation of our aims and
purposes, whether that renunciation be consciously willed or not.

The moment the Pan-German leaders, in virtue of their acceptance of the
parliamentary principle, moved the centre of their activities away from
the people and into Parliament, in that moment they sacrificed the
future for the sake of a cheap momentary success. They chose the easier
way in the struggle and in doing so rendered themselves unworthy of the
final victory.

While in Vienna I used to ponder seriously over these two questions, and
I saw that the main reason for the collapse of the Pan-German Movement
lay in the fact that these very questions were not rightly appreciated.
To my mind at that time the Movement seemed chosen to take in its hands
the leadership of the German element in Austria.

These first two blunders which led to the downfall of the Pan-German
Movement were very closely connected with one another. Faulty
recognition of the inner driving forces that urge great movements
forward led to an inadequate appreciation of the part which the broad
masses play in bringing about such changes. The result was that too
little attention was given to the social problem and that the attempts
made by the movement to capture the minds of the lower classes were too
few and too weak. Another result was the acceptance of the parliamentary
policy, which had a similar effect in regard to the importance of the
masses.

If there had been a proper appreciation of the tremendous powers of
endurance always shown by the masses in revolutionary movements a
different attitude towards the social problem would have been taken, and
also a different policy in the matter of propaganda. Then the centre of
gravity of the movement would not have been transferred to the
Parliament but would have remained in the workshops and in the streets.

There was a third mistake, which also had its roots in the failure to
understand the worth of the masses. The masses are first set in motion,
along a definite direction, by men of superior talents; but then these
masses once in motion are like a flywheel inasmuch as they sustain the
momentum and steady balance of the offensive.

The policy of the Pan-German leaders in deciding to carry through a
difficult fight against the Catholic Church can be explained only by
attributing it to an inadequate understanding of the spiritual character
of the people.

The reasons why the new Party engaged in a violent campaign against Rome
were as follows:

As soon as the House of Habsburg had definitely decided to transform
Austria into a Slav State all sorts of means were adopted which seemed
in any way serviceable for that purpose. The Habsburg rulers had no
scruples of conscience about exploiting even religious institutions in
the service of this new 'State Idea'. One of the many methods thus
employed was the use of Czech parishes and their clergy as instruments
for spreading Slav hegemony throughout Austria. This proceeding was
carried out as follows:

Parish priests of Czech nationality were appointed in purely German
districts. Gradually but steadily pushing forward the interests of the
Czech people before those of the Church, the parishes and their priests
became generative cells in the process of de-Germanization.

Unfortunately the German-Austrian clergy completely failed to counter
this procedure. Not only were they incapable of taking a similar
initiative on the German side, but they showed themselves unable to meet
the Czech offensive with adequate resistance. The German element was
accordingly pushed backwards, slowly but steadily, through the
perversion of religious belief for political ends on the one side, and
the Jack of proper resistance on the other side. Such were the tactics
used in dealing with the smaller problems; but those used in dealing
with the larger problems were not very different.

The anti-German aims pursued by the Habsburgs, especially through the
instrumentality of the higher clergy, did not meet with any vigorous
resistance, while the clerical representatives of the German interests
withdrew completely to the rear. The general impression created could
not be other than that the Catholic clergy as such were grossly
neglecting the rights of the German population.

Therefore it looked as if the Catholic Church was not in sympathy with
the German people but that it unjustly supported their adversaries. The
root of the whole evil, especially according to Schönerer's opinion, lay
in the fact that the leadership of the Catholic Church was not in
Germany, and that this fact alone was sufficient reason for the hostile
attitude of the Church towards the demands of our people.

The so-called cultural problem receded almost completely into the
background, as was generally the case everywhere throughout Austria at
that time. In assuming a hostile attitude towards the Catholic Church,
the Pan-German leaders were influenced not so much by the Church's
position in questions of science but principally by the fact that the
Church did not defend German rights, as it should have done, but always
supported those who encroached on these rights, especially then Slavs.

George Schönerer was not a man who did things by halves. He went into
battle against the Church because he was convinced that this was the
only way in which the German people could be saved. The LOS-VON-ROM
(Away from Rome) Movement seemed the most formidable, but at the same
time most difficult, method of attacking and destroying the adversary's
citadel. Schönerer believed that if this movement could be carried
through successfully the unfortunate division between the two great
religious denominations in Germany would be wiped out and that the inner
forces of the German Empire and Nation would be enormously enhanced by
such a victory.

But the premises as well as the conclusions in this case were both
erroneous.

It was undoubtedly true that the national powers of resistance, in
everything concerning Germanism as such, were much weaker among the
German Catholic clergy than among their non-German confrères, especially
the Czechs. And only an ignorant person could be unaware of the fact
that it scarcely ever entered the mind of the German clergy to take the
offensive on behalf of German interests.

But at the same time everybody who is not blind to facts must admit that
all this should be attributed to a characteristic under which we Germans
have all been doomed to suffer. This characteristic shows itself in our
objective way of regarding our own nationality, as if it were something
that lay outside of us.

While the Czech priest adopted a subjective attitude towards his own
people and only an objective attitude towards the Church, the German
parish priest showed a subjective devotion to his Church and remained
objective in regard to his nation. It is a phenomenon which,
unfortunately for us, can be observed occurring in exactly the same way
in thousands of other cases.

It is by no means a peculiar inheritance from Catholicism; but it is
something in us which does not take long to gnaw the vitals of almost
every institution, especially institutions of State and those which have
ideal aims. Take, for example, the attitude of our State officials in
regard to the efforts made for bringing about a national resurgence and
compare that attitude with the stand which the public officials of any
other nation would have taken in such a case. Or is it to be believed
that the military officers of any other country in the world would
refuse to come forward on behalf of the national aspirations, but would
rather hide behind the phrase 'Authority of the State', as has been the
case in our country during the last five years and has even been deemed
a meritorious attitude? Or let us take another example. In regard to the
Jewish problem, do not the two Christian denominations take up a
standpoint to-day which does not respond to the national exigencies or
even the interests of religion? Consider the attitude of a Jewish Rabbi
towards any question, even one of quite insignificant importance,
concerning the Jews as a race, and compare his attitude with that of the
majority of our clergy, whether Catholic or Protestant.

We observe the same phenomenon wherever it is a matter of standing up
for some abstract idea.

'Authority of the State', 'Democracy', 'Pacifism', 'International
Solidarity', etc., all such notions become rigid, dogmatic concepts with
us; and the more vital the general necessities of the nation, the more
will they be judged exclusively in the light of those concepts.

This unfortunate habit of looking at all national demands from the
viewpoint of a pre-conceived notion makes it impossible for us to see
the subjective side of a thing which objectively contradicts one's own
doctrine. It finally leads to a complete reversion in the relation of
means to an end. Any attempt at a national revival will be opposed if
the preliminary condition of such a revival be that a bad and pernicious
regime must first of all be overthrown; because such an action will be
considered as a violation of the 'Authority of the State'. In the eyes
of those who take that standpoint, the 'Authority of the State' is not a
means which is there to serve an end but rather, to the mind of the
dogmatic believer in objectivity, it is an end in itself; and he looks
upon that as sufficient apology for his own miserable existence. Such
people would raise an outcry, if, for instance, anyone should attempt to
set up a dictatorship, even though the man responsible for it were
Frederick the Great and even though the politicians for the time being,
who constituted the parliamentary majority, were small and incompetent
men or maybe even on a lower grade of inferiority; because to such
sticklers for abstract principles the law of democracy is more sacred
than the welfare of the nation. In accordance with his principles, one
of these gentry will defend the worst kind of tyranny, though it may be
leading a people to ruin, because it is the fleeting embodiment of the
'Authority of the State', and another will reject even a highly
beneficent government if it should happen not to be in accord with his
notion of 'democracy'.

In the same way our German pacifist will remain silent while the nation
is groaning under an oppression which is being exercised by a sanguinary
military power, when this state of affairs gives rise to active
resistance; because such resistance means the employment of physical
force, which is against the spirit of the pacifist associations. The
German International Socialist may be rooked and plundered by his
comrades in all the other countries of the world in the name of
'solidarity', but he responds with fraternal kindness and never thinks
of trying to get his own back, or even of defending himself. And why?
Because he is a--German.

It may be unpleasant to dwell on such truths, but if something is to be
changed we must start by diagnosing the disease.

The phenomenon which I have just described also accounts for the feeble
manner in which German interests are promoted and defended by a section
of the clergy.

Such conduct is not the manifestation of a malicious intent, nor is it
the outcome of orders given from 'above', as we say; but such a lack of
national grit and determination is due to defects in our educational
system. For, instead of inculcating in the youth a lively sense of their
German nationality, the aim of the educational system is to make the
youth prostrate themselves in homage to the idea, as if the idea were an
idol.

The education which makes them the devotees of such abstract notions as
'Democracy', 'International Socialism', 'Pacifism', etc., is so
hard-and-fast and exclusive and, operating as it does from within
outwards, is so purely subjective that in forming their general picture
of outside life as a whole they are fundamentally influenced by these
A PRIORI notions. But, on the other hand, the attitude towards their own
German nationality has been very objective from youth upwards. The
Pacifist--in so far as he is a German--who surrenders himself
subjectively, body and soul, to the dictates of his dogmatic principles,
will always first consider the objective right or wrong of a situation
when danger threatens his own people, even though that danger be grave
and unjustly wrought from outside. But he will never take his stand in
the ranks of his own people and fight for and with them from the sheer
instinct of self-preservation.

Another example may further illustrate how far this applies to the
different religious denominations. In so far as its origin and tradition
are based on German ideals, Protestantism of itself defends those ideals
better. But it fails the moment it is called upon to defend national
interests which do not belong to the sphere of its ideals and
traditional development, or which, for some reason or other, may be
rejected by that sphere.

Therefore Protestantism will always take its part in promoting German
ideals as far as concerns moral integrity or national education, when
the German spiritual being or language or spiritual freedom are to be
defended: because these represent the principles on which Protestantism
itself is grounded. But this same Protestantism violently opposes every
attempt to rescue the nation from the clutches of its mortal enemy;
because the Protestant attitude towards the Jews is more or less rigidly
and dogmatically fixed. And yet this is the first problem which has to
be solved, unless all attempts to bring about a German resurgence or to
raise the level of the nation's standing are doomed to turn out
nonsensical and impossible.

During my sojourn in Vienna I had ample leisure and opportunity to study
this problem without allowing any prejudices to intervene; and in my
daily intercourse with people I was able to establish the correctness of
the opinion I formed by the test of thousands of instances.

In this focus where the greatest varieties of nationality had converged
it was quite clear and open to everybody to see that the German pacifist
was always and exclusively the one who tried to consider the interests
of his own nation objectively; but you could never find a Jew who took a
similar attitude towards his own race. Furthermore, I found that only
the German Socialist is 'international' in the sense that he feels
himself obliged not to demand justice for his own people in any other
manner than by whining and wailing to his international comrades. Nobody
could ever reproach Czechs or Poles or other nations with such conduct.
In short, even at that time, already I recognized that this evil is only
partly a result of the doctrines taught by Socialism, Pacifism, etc.,
but mainly the result of our totally inadequate system of education, the
defects of which are responsible for the lack of devotion to our own
national ideals.

Therefore the first theoretical argument advanced by the Pan-German
leaders as the basis of their offensive against Catholicism was quite
entenable.

The only way to remedy the evil I have been speaking of is to train the
Germans from youth upwards to an absolute recognition of the rights of
their own people, instead of poisoning their minds, while they are still
only children, with the virus of this curbed 'objectivity', even in
matters concerning the very maintenance of our own existence. The result
of this would be that the Catholic in Germany, just as in Ireland,
Poland or France, will be a German first and foremost. But all this
presupposes a radical change in the national government.

The strongest proof in support of my contention is furnished by what
took place at that historical juncture when our people were called for
the last time before the tribunal of History to defend their own
existence, in a life-or-death struggle.

As long as there was no lack of leadership in the higher circles, the
people fulfilled their duty and obligations to an overwhelming extent.
Whether Protestant pastor or Catholic priest, each did his very utmost
in helping our powers of resistance to hold out, not only in the
trenches but also, and even more so, at home. During those years, and
especially during the first outburst of enthusiasm, in both religious
camps there was one undivided and sacred German Empire for whose
preservation and future existence they all prayed to Heaven.

The Pan-German Movement in Austria ought to have asked itself this one
question: Is the maintenance of the German element in Austria possible
or not, as long as that element remains within the fold of the Catholic
Faith? If that question should have been answered in the affirmative,
then the political Party should not have meddled in religious and
denominational questions. But if the question had to be answered in the
negative, then a religious reformation should have been started and not
a political party movement.

Anyone who believes that a religious reformation can be achieved through
the agency of a political organization shows that he has no idea of the
development of religious conceptions and doctrines of faith and how
these are given practical effect by the Church.

No man can serve two masters. And I hold that the foundation or
overthrow of a religion has far greater consequences than the foundation
or overthrow of a State, to say nothing of a Party.

It is no argument to the contrary to say that the attacks were only
defensive measures against attacks from the other side.

Undoubtedly there have always been unscrupulous rogues who did not
hesitate to degrade religion to the base uses of politics. Nearly always
such a people had nothing else in their minds except to make a business
of religions and politics. But on the other hand it would be wrong to
hold religion itself, or a religious denomination, responsible for a
number of rascals who exploit the Church for their own base interests
just as they would exploit anything else in which they had a part.

Nothing could be more to the taste of one of these parliamentary
loungers and tricksters than to be able to find a scapegoat for his
political sharp-practice--after the event, of course. The moment
religion or a religious denomination is attacked and made responsible
for his personal misdeeds this shrewd fellow will raise a row at once
and call the world to witness how justified he was in acting as he did,
proclaiming that he and his eloquence alone have saved religion and the
Church. The public, which is mostly stupid and has a very short memory,
is not capable of recognizing the real instigator of the quarrel in the
midst of the turmoil that has been raised. Frequently it does not
remember the beginning of the fight and so the rogue gets by with his
stunt.

A cunning fellow of that sort is quite well aware that his misdeeds have
nothing to do with religion. And so he will laugh up his sleeve all the
more heartily when his honest but artless adversary loses the game and,
one day losing all faith in humanity, retires from the activities of
public life.

But from another viewpoint also it would be wrong to make religion, or
the Church as such, responsible for the misdeeds of individuals. If one
compares the magnitude of the organization, as it stands visible to
every eye, with the average weakness of human nature we shall have to
admit that the proportion of good to bad is more favourable here than
anywhere else. Among the priests there may, of course, be some who use
their sacred calling to further their political ambitions. There are
clergy who unfortunately forget that in the political mêlée they ought
to be the paladins of the more sublime truths and not the abettors of
falsehood and slander. But for each one of these unworthy specimens we
can find a thousand or more who fulfil their mission nobly as the
trustworthy guardians of souls and who tower above the level of our
corrupt epoch, as little islands above the seaswamp.

I cannot condemn the Church as such, and I should feel quite as little
justified in doing so if some depraved person in the robe of a priest
commits some offence against the moral law. Nor should I for a moment
think of blaming the Church if one of its innumerable members betrays
and besmirches his compatriots, especially not in epochs when such
conduct is quite common. We must not forget, particularly in our day,
that for one such Ephialtes (Note 7) there are a thousand whose hearts
bleed in sympathy with their people during these years of misfortune and
who, together with the best of our nation, yearn for the hour when fortune
will smile on us again.

[Note 7. Herodotus (Book VII, 213-218) tells the story of how a Greek
traitor, Ephialtes, helped the Persian invaders at the Battle of
Thermopylae (480 B.C.) When the Persian King, Xerxes, had begun to
despair of being able tobreak through the Greek defence, Ephialtes came
to him and, on being promiseda definite payment, told the King of a
pathway over the shoulder of the mountainto the Greek end of the Pass.
The bargain being clinched, Ephialtes led adetachment of the Persian
troops under General Hydarnes over the mountainpathway. Thus taken in
the rear, the Greek defenders, under Leonidas, King of Sparta, had to
fight in two opposite directions within the narrow pass. Terrible
slaughter ensued and Leonidas fell in the thick of the fighting.

The bravery of Leonidas and the treason of Ephialtes impressed Hitler,
asit does almost every schoolboy. The incident is referred to again in
MEIN KAMPF (Chap. VIII, Vol. I), where Hitler compares the German troops
thatfell in France and Flanders to the Greeks at Thermopylae, the
treachery of Ephialtes being suggested as the prototype of the defeatist
policy of the German politicians towards the end of the Great War.]

If it be objected that here we are concerned not with the petty problems
of everyday life but principally with fundamental truths and questions
of dogma, the only way of answering that objection is to ask a question:

Do you feel that Providence has called you to proclaim the Truth to the
world? If so, then go and do it. But you ought to have the courage to do
it directly and not use some political party as your mouthpiece; for in
this way you shirk your vocation. In the place of something that now
exists and is bad put something else that is better and will last into
the future.

If you lack the requisite courage or if you yourself do not know clearly
what your better substitute ought to be, leave the whole thing alone.
But, whatever happens, do not try to reach the goal by the roundabout
way of a political party if you are not brave enough to fight with your
visor lifted.

Political parties have no right to meddle in religious questions except
when these relate to something that is alien to the national well-being
and thus calculated to undermine racial customs and morals.

If some ecclesiastical dignitaries should misuse religious ceremonies or
religious teaching to injure their own nation their opponents ought
never to take the same road and fight them with the same weapons.

To a political leader the religious teachings and practices of his
people should be sacred and inviolable. Otherwise he should not be a
statesman but a reformer, if he has the necessary qualities for such a
mission.

Any other line of conduct will lead to disaster, especially in Germany.

In studying the Pan-German Movement and its conflict with Rome I was
then firmly persuaded, and especially in the course of later years, that
by their failure to understand the importance of the social problem the
Pan-Germanists lost the support of the broad masses, who are the
indispensable combatants in such a movement. By entering Parliament the
Pan-German leaders deprived themselves of the great driving force which
resides in the masses and at the same time they laid on their own
shoulders all the defects of the parliamentary institution. Their
struggle against the Church made their position impossible in numerous
circles of the lower and middle class, while at the same time it robbed
them of innumerable high-class elements--some of the best indeed that
the nation possessed. The practical outcome of the Austrian Kulturkampf
was negative.

Although they succeeded in winning 100,000 members away from the Church,
that did not do much harm to the latter. The Church did not really need
to shed any tears over these lost sheep, for it lost only those who had
for a long time ceased to belong to it in their inner hearts. The
difference between this new reformation and the great Reformation was
that in the historic epoch of the great Reformation some of the best
members left the Church because of religious convictions, whereas in
this new reformation only those left who had been indifferent before and
who were now influenced by political considerations. From the political
point of view alone the result was as ridiculous as it was deplorable.

Once again a political movement which had promised so much for the
German nation collapsed, because it was not conducted in a spirit of
unflinching adherence to naked reality, but lost itself in fields where
it was bound to get broken up.

The Pan-German Movement would never have made this mistake if it had
properly understood the PSYCHE of the broad masses. If the leaders had
known that, for psychological reasons alone, it is not expedient to
place two or more sets of adversaries before the masses--since that
leads to a complete splitting up of their fighting strength--they would
have concentrated the full and undivided force of their attack against a
single adversary. Nothing in the policy of a political party is so
fraught with danger as to allow its decisions to be directed by people
who want to have their fingers in every pie though they do not know how
to cook the simplest dish.

But even though there is much that can really be said against the
various religious denominations, political leaders must not forget that
the experience of history teaches us that no purely political party in
similar circumstances ever succeeded in bringing about a religious
reformation. One does not study history for the purpose of forgetting or
mistrusting its lessons afterwards, when the time comes to apply these
lessons in practice. It would be a mistake to believe that in this
particular case things were different, so that the eternal truths of
history were no longer applicable. One learns history in order to be
able to apply its lessons to the present time and whoever fails to do
this cannot pretend to be a political leader. In reality he is quite a
superficial person or, as is mostly the case, a conceited simpleton
whose good intentions cannot make up for his incompetence in practical
affairs.

The art of leadership, as displayed by really great popular leaders in
all ages, consists in consolidating the attention of the people against
a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that
attention into sections. The more the militant energies of the people
are directed towards one objective the more will new recruits join the
movement, attracted by the magnetism of its unified action, and thus the
striking power will be all the more enhanced. The leader of genius must
have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged
to the one category; for weak and wavering natures among a leader's
following may easily begin to be dubious about the justice of their own
cause if they have to face different enemies.

As soon as the vacillating masses find themselves facing an opposition
that is made up of different groups of enemies their sense of
objectivity will be aroused and they will ask how is it that all the
others can be in the wrong and they themselves, and their movement,
alone in the right.

Such a feeling would be the first step towards a paralysis of their
fighting vigour. Where there are various enemies who are split up into
divergent groups it will be necessary to block them all together as
forming one solid front, so that the mass of followers in a popular
movement may see only one common enemy against whom they have to fight.
Such uniformity intensifies their belief in the justice of their own
cause and strengthens their feeling of hostility towards the opponent.

The Pan-German Movement was unsuccessful because the leaders did not
grasp the significance of that truth. They saw the goal clearly and
their intentions were right; but they took the wrong road. Their action
may be compared to that of an Alpine climber who never loses sight of
the peak he wants to reach, who has set out with the greatest
determination and energy, but pays no attention to the road beneath his
feet. With his eye always fixed firmly on the goal he does not think
over or notice the nature of the ascent and finally he fails.

The manner in which the great rival of the Pan-German Party set out to
attain its goal was quite different. The way it took was well and
shrewdly chosen; but it did not have a clear vision of the goal. In
almost all the questions where the Pan-German Movement failed, the
policy of the Christian-Socialist Party was correct and systematic.

They assessed the importance of the masses correctly, and thus they
gained the support of large numbers of the popular masses by emphasizing
the social character of the Movement from the very start. By directing
their appeal especially to the lower middle class and the artisans, they
gained adherents who were faithful, persevering and self-sacrificing.
The Christian-Socialist leaders took care to avoid all controversy with
the institutions of religion and thus they secured the support of that
mighty organization, the Catholic Church. Those leaders recognized the
value of propaganda on a large scale and they were veritable virtuosos
in working up the spiritual instincts of the broad masses of their
adherents.

The failure of this Party to carry into effect the dream of saving
Austria from dissolution must be attributed to two main defects in the
means they employed and also the lack of a clear perception of the ends
they wished to reach.

The anti-Semitism of the Christian-Socialists was based on religious
instead of racial principles. The reason for this mistake gave rise to
the second error also.

The founders of the Christian-Socialist Party were of the opinion that
they could not base their position on the racial principle if they
wished to save Austria, because they felt that a general disintegration
of the State might quickly result from the adoption of such a policy. In
the opinion of the Party chiefs the situation in Vienna demanded that
all factors which tended to estrange the nationalities from one another
should be carefully avoided and that all factors making for unity should
be encouraged.

At that time Vienna was so honeycombed with foreign elements, especially
the Czechs, that the greatest amount of tolerance was necessary if these
elements were to be enlisted in the ranks of any party that was not
anti-German on principle. If Austria was to be saved those elements were
indispensable. And so attempts were made to win the support of the small
traders, a great number of whom were Czechs, by combating the liberalism
of the Manchester School; and they believed that by adopting this
attitude they had found a slogan against Jewry which, because of its
religious implications, would unite all the different nationalities
which made up the population of the old Austria.

It was obvious, however, that this kind of anti-Semitism did not upset
the Jews very much, simply because it had a purely religious foundation.
If the worst came to the worst a few drops of baptismal water would
settle the matter, hereupon the Jew could still carry on his business
safely and at the same time retain his Jewish nationality.

On such superficial grounds it was impossible to deal with the whole
problem in an earnest and rational way. The consequence was that many
people could not understand this kind of anti-Semitism and therefore
refused to take part in it.

The attractive force of the idea was thus restricted exclusively to
narrow-minded circles, because the leaders failed to go beyond the mere
emotional appeal and did not ground their position on a truly rational
basis. The intellectuals were opposed to such a policy on principle. It
looked more and more as if the whole movement was a new attempt to
proselytize the Jews, or, on the other hand, as if it were merely
organized from the wish to compete with other contemporary movements.
Thus the struggle lost all traces of having been organized for a
spiritual and sublime mission. Indeed, it seemed to some people--and
these were by no means worthless elements--to be immoral and
reprehensible. The movement failed to awaken a belief that here there
was a problem of vital importance for the whole of humanity and on the
solution of which the destiny of the whole Gentile world depended.

Through this shilly-shally way of dealing with the problem the
anti-Semitism of the Christian-Socialists turned out to be quite
ineffective.

It was anti-Semitic only in outward appearance. And this was worse than
if it had made no pretences at all to anti-Semitism; for the pretence
gave rise to a false sense of security among people who believed that
the enemy had been taken by the ears; but, as a matter of fact, the
people themselves were being led by the nose.

The Jew readily adjusted himself to this form of anti-Semitism and found
its continuance more profitable to him than its abolition would be.

This whole movement led to great sacrifices being made for the sake of
that State which was composed of many heterogeneous nationalities; but
much greater sacrifices had to be made by the trustees of the German
element.

One did not dare to be 'nationalist', even in Vienna, lest the ground
should fall away from under one's feet. It was hoped that the Habsburg
State might be saved by a silent evasion of the nationalist question;
but this policy led that State to ruin. The same policy also led to the
collapse of Christian Socialism, for thus the Movement was deprived of
the only source of energy from which a political party can draw the
necessary driving force.

During those years I carefully followed the two movements and observed
how they developed, one because my heart was with it and the other
because of my admiration for that remarkable man who then appeared to me
as a bitter symbol of the whole German population in Austria.

When the imposing funeral CORTÈGE of the dead Burgomaster wound its way
from the City Hall towards the Ring Strasse I stood among the hundreds
of thousands who watched the solemn procession pass by. As I stood there
I felt deeply moved, and my instinct clearly told me that the work of
this man was all in vain, because a sinister Fate was inexorably leading
this State to its downfall. If Dr. Karl Lueger had lived in Germany he
would have been ranked among the great leaders of our people. It was a
misfortune for his work and for himseif that he had to live in this
impossible State.

When he died the fire had already been enkindled in the Balkans and was
spreading month by month. Fate had been merciful in sparing him the
sight of what, even to the last, he had hoped to prevent.

I endeavoured to analyse the cause which rendered one of those movements
futile and wrecked the progress of the other. The result of this
investigation was the profound conviction that, apart from the inherent
impossibility of consolidating the position of the State in the old
Austria, the two parties made the following fatal mistake:

The Pan-German Party was perfectly right in its fundamental ideas
regarding the aim of the Movement, which was to bring about a German
restoration, but it was unfortunate in its choice of means. It was
nationalist, but unfortunately it paid too little heed to the social
problem, and thus it failed to gain the support of the masses. Its
anti-Jewish policy, however, was grounded on a correct perception of the
significance of the racial problem and not on religious principles. But
it was mistaken in its assessment of facts and adopted the wrong tactics
when it made war against one of the religious denominations.

The Christian-Socialist Movement had only a vague concept of a German
revival as part of its object, but it was intelligent and fortunate in
the choice of means to carry out its policy as a Party. The
Christian-Socialists grasped the significance of the social question;
but they adopted the wrong principles in their struggle against Jewry,
and they utterly failed to appreciate the value of the national idea as
a source of political energy.

If the Christian-Socialist Party, together with its shrewd judgment in
regard to the worth of the popular masses, had only judged rightly also
on the importance of the racial problem--which was properly grasped by
the Pan-German Movement--and if this party had been really nationalist;
or if the Pan-German leaders, on the other hand, in addition to their
correct judgment of the Jewish problem and of the national idea, had
adopted the practical wisdom of the Christian-Socialist Party, and
particularly their attitude towards Socialism--then a movement would
have developed which, in my opinion, might at that time have
successfully altered the course of German destiny.

If things did not turn out thus, the fault lay for the most part in the
inherent nature of the Austrian State.

I did not find my own convictions upheld by any party then in existence,
and so I could not bring myself to enlist as a member in any of the
existing organizations or even lend a hand in their struggle. Even at
that time all those organizations seemed to me to be already jaded in
their energies and were therefore incapable of bringing about a national
revival of the German people in a really profound way, not merely
outwardly.

My inner aversion to the Habsburg State was increasing daily.

The more I paid special attention to questions of foreign policy, the
more the conviction grew upon me that this phantom State would surely
bring misfortune on the Germans. I realized more and more that the
destiny of the German nation could not be decisively influenced from
here but only in the German Empire itself. And this was true not only in
regard to general political questions but also--and in no less a
degree--in regard to the whole sphere of cultural life.

Here, also, in all matters affecting the national culture and art, the
Austrian State showed all the signs of senile decrepitude, or at least
it was ceasing to be of any consequence to the German nation, as far as
these matters were concerned. This was especially true of its
architecture. Modern architecture could not produce any great results in
Austria because, since the building of the Ring Strasse--at least in
Vienna--architectural activities had become insignificant when compared
with the progressive plans which were being thought out in Germany.

And so I came more and more to lead what may be called a twofold
existence. Reason and reality forced me to continue my harsh
apprenticeship in Austria, though I must now say that this
apprenticeship turned out fortunate in the end. But my heart was
elsewhere.

A feeling of discontent grew upon me and made me depressed the more I
came to realize the inside hollowness of this State and the
impossibility of saving it from collapse. At the same time I felt
perfectly certain that it would bring all kinds of misfortune to the
German people.

I was convinced that the Habsburg State would balk and hinder every
German who might show signs of real greatness, while at the same time it
would aid and abet every non-German activity.

This conglomerate spectacle of heterogeneous races which the capital of
the Dual Monarchy presented, this motley of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians,
Ruthenians, Serbs and Croats, etc., and always that bacillus which is
the solvent of human society, the Jew, here and there and
everywhere--the whole spectacle was repugnant to me. The gigantic city
seemed to be the incarnation of mongrel depravity.

The German language, which I had spoken from the time of my boyhood, was
the vernacular idiom of Lower Bavaria. I never forgot that particular
style of speech, and I could never learn the Viennese dialect. The
longer I lived in that city the stronger became my hatred for the
promiscuous swarm of foreign peoples which had begun to batten on that
old nursery ground of German culture. The idea that this State could
maintain its further existence for any considerable time was quite
absurd.

Austria was then like a piece of ancient mosaic in which the cohesive
cement had dried up and become old and friable. As long as such a work
of art remains untouched it may hold together and continue to exist; but
the moment some blow is struck on it then it breaks up into thousands of
fragments. Therefore it was now only a question of when the blow would
come.

Because my heart was always with the German Empire and not with the
Austrian Monarchy, the hour of Austria's dissolution as a State appeared
to me only as the first step towards the emancipation of the German
nation.

All these considerations intensified my yearning to depart for that
country for which my heart had been secretly longing since the days of
my youth.

I hoped that one day I might be able to make my mark as an architect and
that I could devote my talents to the service of my country on a large
or small scale, according to the will of Fate.

A final reason was that I longed to be among those who lived and worked
in that land from which the movement should be launched, the object of
which would be the fulfilment of what my heart had always longed for,
namely, the union of the country in which I was born with our common
fatherland, the German Empire.

There are many who may not understand how such a yearning can be so
strong; but I appeal especially to two groups of people. The first
includes all those who are still denied the happiness I have spoken of,
and the second embraces those who once enjoyed that happiness but had it
torn from them by a harsh fate. I turn to all those who have been torn
from their motherland and who have to struggle for the preservation of
their most sacred patrimony, their native language, persecuted and
harried because of their loyalty and love for the homeland, yearning
sadly for the hour when they will be allowed to return to the bosom of
their father's household. To these I address my words, and I know that
they will understand.

Only he who has experienced in his own inner life what it means to be
German and yet to be denied the right of belonging to his fatherland can
appreciate the profound nostalgia which that enforced exile causes. It
is a perpetual heartache, and there is no place for joy and contentment
until the doors of paternal home are thrown open and all those through
whose veins kindred blood is flowing will find peace and rest in their
common REICH.

Vienna was a hard school for me; but it taught me the most profound
lessons of my life. I was scarcely more than a boy when I came to live
there, and when I left it I had grown to be a man of a grave and pensive
nature. In Vienna I acquired the foundations of a WELTANSCHAUUNG in
general and developed a faculty for analysing political questions in
particular. That WELTANSCHAUUNG and the political ideas then formed
have never been abandoned, though they were expanded later on in some
directions. It is only now that I can fully appreciate how valuable
those years of apprenticeship were for me.

That is why I have given a detailed account of this period. There, in
Vienna, stark reality taught me the truths that now form the fundamental
principles of the Party which within the course of five years has grown
from modest beginnings to a great mass movement. I do not know what my
attitude towards Jewry, Social-Democracy, or rather Marxism in general,
to the social problem, etc., would be to-day if I had not acquired a
stock of personal beliefs at such an early age, by dint of hard study
and under the duress of Fate.

For, although the misfortunes of the Fatherland may have stimulated
thousands and thousands to ponder over the inner causes of the collapse,
that could not lead to such a thorough knowledge and deep insight as a
man may develop who has fought a hard struggle for many years so that he
might be master of his own fate.




CHAPTER

MUNICH


At last I came to Munich, in the spring of 1912.

The city itself was as familiar to me as if I had lived for years within
its walls.

This was because my studies in architecture had been constantly turning
my attention to the metropolis of German art. One must know Munich if
one would know Germany, and it is impossible to acquire a knowledge of
German art without seeing Munich.

All things considered, this pre-war sojourn was by far the happiest and
most contented time of my life. My earnings were very slender; but after
all I did not live for the sake of painting. I painted in order to get
the bare necessities of existence while I continued my studies. I was
firmly convinced that I should finally succeed in reaching the goal I
had marked out for myself. And this conviction alone was strong enough
to enable me to bear the petty hardships of everyday life without
worrying very much about them.

Moreover, almost from the very first moment of my sojourn there I came
to love that city more than any other place known to me. A German city!
I said to myself. How different to Vienna. It was with a feeling of
disgust that my imagination reverted to that Babylon of races. Another
pleasant feature here was the way the people spoke German, which was
much nearer my own way of speaking than the Viennese idiom. The Munich
idiom recalled the days of my youth, especially when I spoke with those
who had come to Munich from Lower Bavaria. There were a thousand or more
things which I inwardly loved or which I came to love during the course
of my stay. But what attracted me most was the marvellous wedlock of
native folk-energy with the fine artistic spirit of the city, that
unique harmony from the Hofbräuhaus to the Odeon, from the October
Festival to the PINAKOTHEK, etc. The reason why my heart's strings are
entwined around this city as around no other spot in this world is
probably because Munich is and will remain inseparably connected with
the development of my own career; and the fact that from the beginning
of my visit I felt inwardly happy and contented is to be attributed to
the charm of the marvellous Wittelsbach Capital, which has attracted
probably everybody who is blessed with a feeling for beauty instead of
commercial instincts.

Apart from my professional work, I was most interested in the study of
current political events, particularly those which were connected with
foreign relations. I approached these by way of the German policy of
alliances which, ever since my Austrian days, I had considered to be an
utterly mistaken one. But in Vienna I had not yet seen quite clearly how
far the German Empire had gone in the process of' self-delusion. In
Vienna I was inclined to assume, or probably I persuaded myself to do so
in order to excuse the German mistake, that possibly the authorities in
Berlin knew how weak and unreliable their ally would prove to be when
brought face to face with realities, but that, for more or less
mysterious reasons, they refrained from allowing their opinions on this
point to be known in public. Their idea was that they should support the
policy of alliances which Bismarck had initiated and the sudden
discontinuance of which might be undesirable, if for no other reason
than that it might arouse those foreign countries which were lying in
wait for their chance or might alarm the Philistines at home.

But my contact with the people soon taught me, to my horror, that my
assumptions were wrong. I was amazed to find everywhere, even in circles
otherwise well informed, that nobody had the slightest intimation of the
real character of the Habsburg Monarchy. Among the common people in
particular there was a prevalent illusion that the Austrian ally was a
Power which would have to be seriously reckoned with and would rally its
man-power in the hour of need. The mass of the people continued to look
upon the Dual Monarchy as a 'German State' and believed that it could be
relied upon. They assumed that its strength could be measured by the
millions of its subjects, as was the case in Germany. First of all, they
did not realize that Austria had ceased to be a German State and,
secondly, that the conditions prevailing within the Austrian Empire were
steadily pushing it headlong to the brink of disaster.

At that time I knew the condition of affairs in the Austrian State
better than the professional diplomats. Blindfolded, as nearly always,
these diplomats stumbled along on their way to disaster. The opinions
prevailing among the bulk of the people reflected only what had been
drummed into them from official quarters above. And these higher
authorities grovelled before the 'Ally', as the people of old bowed down
before the Golden Calf. They probably thought that by being polite and
amiable they might balance the lack of honesty on the other side. Thus
they took every declaration at its full face value.

Even while in Vienna I used to be annoyed again and again by the
discrepancy between the speeches of the official statesmen and the
contents of the Viennese Press. And yet Vienna was still a German city,
at least as far as appearances went. But one encountered an utterly
different state of things on leaving Vienna, or rather German-Austria,
and coming into the Slav provinces. It needed only a glance at the
Prague newspapers in order to see how the whole exalted hocus-pocus of
the Triple Alliance was judged from there. In Prague there was nothing
but gibes and sneers for that masterpiece of statesmanship. Even in the
piping times of peace, when the two emperors kissed each other on the
brow in token of friendship, those papers did not cloak their belief
that the alliance would be liquidated the moment a first attempt was
made to bring it down from the shimmering glory of a Nibelungen ideal to
the plane of practical affairs.

Great indignation was aroused a few years later, when the alliances were
put to the first practical test. Italy not only withdrew from the Triple
Alliance, leaving the other two members to march by themselves. but she
even joined their enemies. That anybody should believe even for a moment
in the possibility of such a miracle as that of Italy fighting on the
same side as Austria would be simply incredible to anyone who did not
suffer from the blindness of official diplomacy. And that was just how
people felt in Austria also.

In Austria only the Habsburgs and the German-Austrians supported the
alliance. The Habsburgs did so from shrewd calculation of their own
interests and from necessity. The Germans did it out of good faith and
political ignorance. They acted in good faith inasmuch as they believed
that by establishing the Triple Alliance they were doing a great service
to the German Empire and were thus helping to strengthen it and
consolidate its defence. They showed their political ignorance, however,
in holding such ideas, because, instead of helping the German Empire
they really chained it to a moribund State which might bring its
associate into the grave with itself; and, above all, by championing
this alliance they fell more and more a prey to the Habsburg policy of
de-Germanization. For the alliance gave the Habsburgs good grounds for
believing that the German Empire would not interfere in their domestic
affairs and thus they were in a position to carry into effect, with more
ease and less risk, their domestic policy of gradually eliminating the
German element. Not only could the 'objectiveness' of the German
Government be counted upon, and thus there need be no fear of protest
from that quarter, but one could always remind the German-Austrians of
the alliance and thus silence them in case they should ever object to
the reprehensible means that were being employed to establish a Slav
hegemony in the Dual Monarchy.

What could the German-Austrians do, when the people of the German Empire
itself had openly proclaimed their trust and confidence in the Habsburg
régime?

Should they resist, and thus be branded openly before their kinsfolk in
the REICH as traitors to their own national interests? They, who for so
many decades had sacrificed so much for the sake of their German
tradition!

Once the influence of the Germans in Austria had been wiped out, what
then would be the value of the alliance? If the Triple Alliance were to
be advantageous to Germany, was it not a necessary condition that the
predominance of the German element in Austria should be maintained? Or
did anyone really believe that Germany could continue to be the ally of
a Habsburg Empire under the hegemony of the Slavs?

The official attitude of German diplomacy, as well as that of the
general public towards internal problems affecting the Austrian
nationalities was not merely stupid, it was insane. On the alliance, as
on a solid foundation, they grounded the security and future existence
of a nation of seventy millions, while at the same time they allowed
their partner to continue his policy of undermining the sole foundation
of that alliance methodically and resolutely, from year to year. A day
must come when nothing but a formal contract with Viennese diplomats
would be left. The alliance itself, as an effective support, would be
lost to Germany.

As far as concerned Italy, such had been the case from the outset.

If people in Germany had studied history and the psychology of nations a
little more carefully not one of them could have believed for a single
hour that the Quirinal and the Viennese Hofburg could ever stand
shoulder to shoulder on a common battle front. Italy would have exploded
like a volcano if any Italian government had dared to send a single
Italian soldier to fight for the Habsburg State. So fanatically hated
was this State that the Italians could stand in no other relation to it
on a battle front except as enemies. More than once in Vienna I have
witnessed explosions of the contempt and profound hatred which 'allied'
the Italian to the Austrian State. The crimes which the House of
Habsburg committed against Italian freedom and independence during
several centuries were too grave to be forgiven, even with the best of
goodwill. But this goodwill did not exist, either among the rank and
file of the population or in the government. Therefore for Italy there
were only two ways of co-existing with Austria--alliance or war. By
choosing the first it was possible to prepare leisurely for the second.

Especially since relations between Russia and Austria tended more and
more towards the arbitrament of war, the German policy of alliances was
as senseless as it was dangerous. Here was a classical instance which
demonstrated the lack of any broad or logical lines of thought.

But what was the reason for forming the alliance at all? It could not
have been other than the wish to secure the future of the REICH better
than if it were to depend exclusively on its own resources. But the
future of the REICH could not have meant anything else than the problem
of securing the means of existence for the German people.

The only questions therefore were the following: What form shall the
life of the nation assume in the near future--that is to say within such
a period as we can forecast? And by what means can the necessary
foundation and security be guaranteed for this development within the
framework of the general distribution of power among the European
nations? A clear analysis of the principles on which the foreign policy
of German statecraft were to be based should have led to the following
conclusions:

The annual increase of population in Germany amounts to almost 900,000
souls. The difficulties of providing for this army of new citizens must
grow from year to year and must finally lead to a catastrophe, unless
ways and means are found which will forestall the danger of misery and
hunger. There were four ways of providing against this terrible
calamity:

(1) It was possible to adopt the French example and artificially
restrict the number of births, thus avoiding an excess of population.

Under certain circumstances, in periods of distress or under bad
climatic condition, or if the soil yields too poor a return, Nature
herself tends to check the increase of population in some countries and
among some races, but by a method which is quite as ruthless as it is
wise. It does not impede the procreative faculty as such; but it does
impede the further existence of the offspring by submitting it to such
tests and privations that everything which is less strong or less
healthy is forced to retreat into the bosom of tile unknown. Whatever
survives these hardships of existence has been tested and tried a
thousandfold, hardened and renders fit to continue the process of
procreation; so that the same thorough selection will begin all over
again. By thus dealing brutally with the individual and recalling him
the very moment he shows that he is not fitted for the trials of life,
Nature preserves the strength of the race and the species and raises it
to the highest degree of efficiency.

The decrease in numbers therefore implies an increase of strength, as
far as the individual is concerned, and this finally means the
invigoration of the species.

But the case is different when man himself starts the process of
numerical restriction. Man is not carved from Nature's wood. He is made
of 'human' material. He knows more than the ruthless Queen of Wisdom. He
does not impede the preservation of the individual but prevents
procreation itself. To the individual, who always sees only himself and
not the race, this line of action seems more humane and just than the
opposite way. But, unfortunately, the consequences are also the
opposite.

By leaving the process of procreation unchecked and by submitting the
individual to the hardest preparatory tests in life, Nature selects the
best from an abundance of single elements and stamps them as fit to live
and carry on the conservation of the species. But man restricts the
procreative faculty and strives obstinately to keep alive at any cost
whatever has once been born. This correction of the Divine Will seems to
him to be wise and humane, and he rejoices at having trumped Nature's
card in one game at least and thus proved that she is not entirely
reliable. The dear little ape of an all-mighty father is delighted to
see and hear that he has succeeded in effecting a numerical restriction;
but he would be very displeased if told that this, his system, brings
about a degeneration in personal quality.

For as soon as the procreative faculty is thwarted and the number of
births diminished, the natural struggle for existence which allows only
healthy and strong individuals to survive is replaced by a sheer craze
to 'save' feeble and even diseased creatures at any cost. And thus the
seeds are sown for a human progeny which will become more and more
miserable from one generation to another, as long as Nature's will is
scorned.

But if that policy be carried out the final results must be that such a
nation will eventually terminate its own existence on this earth; for
though man may defy the eternal laws of procreation during a certain
period, vengeance will follow sooner or later. A stronger race will oust
that which has grown weak; for the vital urge, in its ultimate form,
will burst asunder all the absurd chains of this so-called humane
consideration for the individual and will replace it with the humanity
of Nature, which wipes out what is weak in order to give place to the
strong.

Any policy which aims at securing the existence of a nation by
restricting the birth-rate robs that nation of its future.

(2) A second solution is that of internal colonization. This is a
proposal which is frequently made in our own time and one hears it
lauded a good deal. It is a suggestion that is well-meant but it is
misunderstood by most people, so that it is the source of more mischief
than can be imagined.

It is certainly true that the productivity of the soil can be increased
within certain limits; but only within defined limits and not
indefinitely. By increasing the productive powers of the soil it will be
possible to balance the effect of a surplus birth-rate in Germany for a
certain period of time, without running any danger of hunger. But we
have to face the fact that the general standard of living is rising more
quickly than even the birth rate. The requirements of food and clothing
are becoming greater from year to year and are out of proportion to
those of our ancestors of, let us say, a hundred years ago. It would,
therefore, be a mistaken view that every increase in the productive
powers of the soil will supply the requisite conditions for an increase
in the population. No. That is true up to a certain point only, for at
least a portion of the increased produce of the soil will be consumed by
the margin of increased demands caused by the steady rise in the
standard of living. But even if these demands were to be curtailed to
the narrowest limits possible and if at the same time we were to use all
our available energies in the intenser cultivation, we should here reach
a definite limit which is conditioned by the inherent nature of the soil
itself. No matter how industriously we may labour we cannot increase
agricultural production beyond this limit. Therefore, though we may
postpone the evil hour of distress for a certain time, it will arrive at
last. The first phenomenon will be the recurrence of famine periods from
time to time, after bad harvests, etc. The intervals between these
famines will become shorter and shorter the more the population
increases; and, finally, the famine times will disappear only in those
rare years of plenty when the granaries are full. And a time will
ultimately come when even in those years of plenty there will not be
enough to go round; so that hunger will dog the footsteps of the nation.
Nature must now step in once more and select those who are to survive,
or else man will help himself by artificially preventing his own
increase, with all the fatal consequences for the race and the species
which have been already mentioned.

It may be objected here that, in one form or another, this future is in
store for all mankind and that the individual nation or race cannot
escape the general fate.

At first glance, that objection seems logical enough; but we have to
take the following into account:

The day will certainly come when the whole of mankind will be forced to
check the augmentation of the human species, because there will be no
further possibility of adjusting the productivity of the soil to the
perpetual increase in the population. Nature must then be allowed to use
her own methods or man may possibly take the task of regulation into his
own hands and establish the necessary equilibrium by the application of
better means than we have at our disposal to-day. But then it will be a
problem for mankind as a whole, whereas now only those races have to
suffer from want which no longer have the strength and daring to acquire
sufficient soil to fulfil their needs. For, as things stand to-day, vast
spaces still lie uncultivated all over the surface of the globe. Those
spaces are only waiting for the ploughshare. And it is quite certain
that Nature did not set those territories apart as the exclusive
pastures of any one nation or race to be held unutilized in reserve for
the future. Such land awaits the people who have the strength to acquire
it and the diligence to cultivate it.

Nature knows no political frontiers. She begins by establishing life on
this globe and then watches the free play of forces. Those who show the
greatest courage and industry are the children nearest to her heart and
they will be granted the sovereign right of existence.

If a nation confines itself to 'internal colonization' while other races
are perpetually increasing their territorial annexations all over the
globe, that nation will be forced to restrict the numerical growth of
its population at a time when the other nations are increasing theirs.
This situation must eventually arrive. It will arrive soon if the
territory which the nation has at its disposal be small. Now it is
unfortunately true that only too often the best nations--or, to speak
more exactly, the only really cultured nations, who at the same time are
the chief bearers of human progress--have decided, in their blind
pacifism, to refrain from the acquisition of new territory and to be
content with 'internal colonization.' But at the same time nations of
inferior quality succeed in getting hold of large spaces for
colonization all over the globe. The state of affairs which must result
from this contrast is the following:

Races which are culturally superior but less ruthless would be forced to
restrict their increase, because of insufficient territory to support
the population, while less civilized races could increase indefinitely,
owing to the vast territories at their disposal. In other words: should
that state of affairs continue, then the world will one day be possessed
by that portion of mankind which is culturally inferior but more active
and energetic.

A time will come, even though in the distant future, when there can be
only two alternatives: Either the world will be ruled according to our
modern concept of democracy, and then every decision will be in favour
of the numerically stronger races; or the world will be governed by the
law of natural distribution of power, and then those nations will be
victorious who are of more brutal will and are not the nations who have
practised self-denial.

Nobody can doubt that this world will one day be the scene of dreadful
struggles for existence on the part of mankind. In the end the instinct
of self-preservation alone will triumph. Before its consuming fire this
so-called humanitarianism, which connotes only a mixture of fatuous
timidity and self-conceit, will melt away as under the March sunshine.
Man has become great through perpetual struggle. In perpetual peace his
greatness must decline.

For us Germans, the slogan of 'internal colonization' is fatal, because
it encourages the belief that we have discovered a means which is in
accordance with our innate pacifism and which will enable us to work for
our livelihood in a half slumbering existence. Such a teaching, once it
were taken seriously by our people, would mean the end of all effort to
acquire for ourselves that place in the world which we deserve. If. the
average German were once convinced that by this measure he has the
chance of ensuring his livelihood and guaranteeing his future, any
attempt to take an active and profitable part in sustaining the vital
demands of his country would be out of the question. Should the nation
agree to such an attitude then any really useful foreign policy might be
looked upon as dead and buried, together with all hope for the future of
the German people.

Once we know what the consequences of this 'internal colonization'
theory would be we can no longer consider as a mere accident the fact
that among those who inculcate this quite pernicious mentality among our
people the Jew is always in the first line. He knows his softies only
too well not to know that they are ready to be the grateful victims of
every swindle which promises them a gold-block in the shape of a
discovery that will enable them to outwit Nature and thus render
superfluous the hard and inexorable struggle for existence; so that
finally they may become lords of the planet partly by sheer DOLCE FAR
NIENTE and partly by working when a pleasing opportunity arises.

It cannot be too strongly emphasised that any German 'internal
colonization' must first of all be considered as suited only for the
relief of social grievances. To carry out a system of internal
colonization, the most important preliminary measure would be to free
the soil from the grip of the speculator and assure that freedom. But
such a system could never suffice to assure the future of the nation
without the acquisition of new territory.

If we adopt a different plan we shall soon reach a point beyond which
the resources of our soil can no longer be exploited, and at the same
time we shall reach a point beyond which our man-power cannot develop.

In conclusion, the following must be said:

The fact that only up to a limited extent can internal colonization be
practised in a national territory which is of definitely small area and
the restriction of the procreative faculty which follows as a result of
such conditions--these two factors have a very unfavourable effect on
the military and political standing of a nation.

The extent of the national territory is a determining factor in the
external security of the nation. The larger the territory which a people
has at its disposal the stronger are the national defences of that
people. Military decisions are more quickly, more easily, more
completely and more effectively gained against a people occupying a
national territory which is restricted in area, than against States
which have extensive territories. Moreover, the magnitude of a national
territory is in itself a certain assurance that an outside Power will
not hastily risk the adventure of an invasion; for in that case the
struggle would have to be long and exhausting before victory could be
hoped for. The risk being so great. there would have to be extraordinary
reasons for such an aggressive adventure. Hence it is that the
territorial magnitude of a State furnishes a basis whereon national
liberty and independence can be maintained with relative ease; while, on
the contrary, a State whose territory is small offers a natural
temptation to the invader.

As a matter of fact, so-called national circles in the German REICH
rejected those first two possibilities of establishing a balance between
the constant numerical increase in the population and a national
territory which could not expand proportionately. But the reasons given
for that rejection were different from those which I have just
expounded. It was mainly on the basis of certain moral sentiments that
restriction of the birth-rate was objected to. Proposals for internal
colonization were rejected indignantly because it was suspected that
such a policy might mean an attack on the big landowners, and that this
attack might be the forerunner of a general assault against the
principle of private property as a whole. The form in which the latter
solution--internal colonization--was recommended justified the
misgivings of the big landowners.

But the form in which the colonization proposal was rejected was not
very clever, as regards the impression which such rejection might be
calculated to make on the mass of the people, and anyhow it did not go
to the root of the problem at all.

Only two further ways were left open in which work and bread could be
secured for the increasing population.

(3) It was possible to think of acquiring new territory on which a
certain portion of' the increasing population could be settled each
year; or else

(4) Our industry and commerce had to be organized in such a manner as to
secure an increase in the exports and thus be able to support our people
by the increased purchasing power accruing from the profits made on
foreign markets.

Therefore the problem was: A policy of territorial expansion or a
colonial and commercial policy. Both policies were taken into
consideration, examined, recommended and rejected, from various
standpoints, with the result that the second alternative was finally
adopted. The sounder alternative, however, was undoubtedly the first.

The principle of acquiring new territory, on which the surplus
population could be settled, has many advantages to recommend it,
especially if we take the future as well as the present into account.

In the first place, too much importance cannot be placed on the
necessity for adopting a policy which will make it possible to maintain
a healthy peasant class as the basis of the national community. Many of
our present evils have their origin exclusively in the disproportion
between the urban and rural portions of the population. A solid stock of
small and medium farmers has at all times been the best protection which
a nation could have against the social diseases that are prevalent
to-day. Moreover, that is the only solution which guarantees the daily
bread of a nation within the framework of its domestic national economy.
With this condition once guaranteed, industry and commerce would retire
from the unhealthy position of foremost importance which they hold
to-day and would take their due place within the general scheme of
national economy, adjusting the balance between demand and supply. Thus
industry and commerce would no longer constitute the basis of the
national subsistence, but would be auxiliary institutions. By fulfilling
their proper function, which is to adjust the balance between national
production and national consumption, they render the national
subsistence more or less independent of foreign countries and thus
assure the freedom and independence of the nation, especially at
critical junctures in its history.

Such a territorial policy, however, cannot find its fulfilment in the
Cameroons but almost exclusively here in Europe. One must calmly and
squarely face the truth that it certainly cannot be part of the
dispensation of Divine Providence to give a fifty times larger share of
the soil of this world to one nation than to another. In considering
this state of affairs to-day, one must not allow existing political
frontiers to distract attention from what ought to exist on principles
of strict justice. If this earth has sufficient room for all, then we
ought to have that share of the soil which is absolutely necessary for
our existence.

Of course people will not voluntarily make that accommodation. At this
point the right of self-preservation comes into effect. And when
attempts to settle the difficulty in an amicable way are rejected the
clenched hand must take by force that which was refused to the open hand
of friendship. If in the past our ancestors had based their political
decisions on similar pacifist nonsense as our present generation does,
we should not possess more than one-third of the national territory that
we possess to-day and probably there would be no German nation to worry
about its future in Europe. No. We owe the two Eastern Marks (Note 8) of
the Empire to the natural determination of our forefathers in their
struggle for existence, and thus it is to the same determined policy that
we owe the inner strength which is based on the extent of our political
and racial territories and which alone has made it possible for us to
exist up to now.

[Note 8. German Austria was the East Mark on the South and East Prussia
was the East Mark on the North.]

And there is still another reason why that solution would have been the
correct one:

Many contemporary European States are like pyramids standing on their
apexes. The European territory which these States possess is
ridiculously small when compared with the enormous overhead weight of
their colonies, foreign trade, etc. It may be said that they have the
apex in Europe and the base of the pyramid all over the world; quite
different from the United States of America, which has its base on the
American Continent and is in contact with the rest of the world only
through its apex. Out of that situation arises the incomparable inner
strength of the U.S.A. and the contrary situation is responsible for the
weakness of most of the colonial European Powers.

England cannot be suggested as an argument against this assertion,
though in glancing casually over the map of the British Empire one is
inclined easily to overlook the existence of a whole Anglo-Saxon world.
England's position cannot be compared with that of any other State in
Europe, since it forms a vast community of language and culture together
with the U.S.A.

Therefore the only possibility which Germany had of carrying a sound
territorial policy into effect was that of acquiring new territory in
Europe itself. Colonies cannot serve this purpose as long as they are
not suited for settlement by Europeans on a large scale. In the
nineteenth century it was no longer possible to acquire such colonies by
peaceful means. Therefore any attempt at such a colonial expansion would
have meant an enormous military struggle. Consequently it would have
been more practical to undertake that military struggle for new
territory in Europe rather than to wage war for the acquisition of
possessions abroad.

Such a decision naturally demanded that the nation's undivided energies
should be devoted to it. A policy of that kind which requires for its
fulfilment every ounce of available energy on the part of everybody
concerned, cannot be carried into effect by half-measures or in a
hesitating manner. The political leadership of the German Empire should
then have been directed exclusively to this goal. No political step
should have been taken in response to other considerations than this
task and the means of accomplishing it. Germany should have been alive
to the fact that such a goal could have been reached only by war, and
the prospect of war should have been faced with calm and collected
determination.

The whole system of alliances should have been envisaged and valued from
that standpoint. If new territory were to be acquired in Europe it must
have been mainly at Russia's cost, and once again the new German Empire
should have set out on its march along the same road as was formerly
trodden by the Teutonic Knights, this time to acquire soil for the
German plough by means of the German sword and thus provide the nation
with its daily bread.

For such a policy, however, there was only one possible ally in Europe.
That was England.

Only by alliance with England was it possible to safeguard the rear of
the new German crusade. The justification for undertaking such an
expedition was stronger than the justification which our forefathers had
for setting out on theirs. Not one of our pacifists refuses to eat the
bread made from the grain grown in the East; and yet the first plough
here was that called the 'Sword'.

No sacrifice should have been considered too great if it was a necessary
means of gaining England's friendship. Colonial and naval ambitions
should have been abandoned and attempts should not have been made to
compete against British industries.

Only a clear and definite policy could lead to such an achievement. Such
a policy would have demanded a renunciation of the endeavour to conquer
the world's markets, also a renunciation of colonial intentions and
naval power. All the means of power at the disposal of the State should
have been concentrated in the military forces on land. This policy would
have involved a period of temporary self-denial, for the sake of a great
and powerful future.

There was a time when England might have entered into negotiations with
us, on the grounds of that proposal. For England would have well
understood that the problems arising from the steady increase in
population were forcing Germany to look for a solution either in Europe
with the help of England or, without England, in some other part of the
world.

This outlook was probably the chief reason why London tried to draw
nearer to Germany about the turn of the century. For the first time in
Germany an attitude was then manifested which afterwards displayed
itself in a most tragic way. People then gave expression to an
unpleasant feeling that we might thus find ourselves obliged to pull
England's chestnuts out of the fire. As if an alliance could be based on
anything else than mutual give-and-take! And England would have become a
party to such a mutual bargain. British diplomats were still wise enough
to know that an equivalent must be forthcoming as a consideration for
any services rendered.

Let us suppose that in 1904 our German foreign policy was managed
astutely enough to enable us to take the part which Japan played. It is
not easy to measure the greatness of the results that might have accrued
to Germany from such a policy.

There would have been no world war. The blood which would have been shed
in 1904 would not have been a tenth of that shed from 1914 to 1918. And
what a position Germany would hold in the world to-day?

In any case the alliance with Austria was then an absurdity.

For this mummy of a State did not attach itself to Germany for the
purpose of carrying through a war, but rather to maintain a perpetual
state of peace which was meant to be exploited for the purpose of slowly
but persistently exterminating the German element in the Dual Monarchy.

Another reason for the impossible character of this alliance was that
nobody could expect such a State to take an active part in defending
German national interests, seeing that it did not have sufficient
strength and determination to put an end to the policy of
de-Germanization within its own frontiers. If Germany herself was not
moved by a sufficiently powerful national sentiment and was not
sufficiently ruthless to take away from that absurd Habsburg State the
right to decide the destinies of ten million inhabitants who were of the
same nationality as the Germans themselves, surely it was out of the
question to expect the Habsburg State to be a collaborating party in any
great and courageous German undertaking. The attitude of the old REICH
towards the Austrian question might have been taken as a test of its
stamina for the struggle where the destinies of the whole nation were at
stake.

In any case, the policy of oppression against the German population in
Austria should not have been allowed to be carried on and to grow
stronger from year to year; for the value of Austria as an ally could be
assured only by upholding the German element there. But that course was
not followed.

Nothing was dreaded so much as the possibility of an armed conflict; but
finally, and at a most unfavourable moment, the conflict had to be faced
and accepted. They thought to cut loose from the cords of destiny, but
destiny held them fast.

They dreamt of maintaining a world peace and woke up to find themselves
in a world war.

And that dream of peace was a most significant reason why the
above-mentioned third alternative for the future development of Germany
was not even taken into consideration. The fact was recognized that new
territory could be gained only in the East; but this meant that there
would be fighting ahead, whereas they wanted peace at any cost. The
slogan of German foreign policy at one time used to be: The use of all
possible means for the maintenance of the German nation. Now it was
changed to: Maintenance of world peace by all possible means. We know
what the result was. I shall resume the discussion of this point in
detail later on.

There remained still another alternative, which we may call the fourth.
This was: Industry and world trade, naval power and colonies.

Such a development might certainly have been attained more easily and
more rapidly. To colonize a territory is a slow process, often extending
over centuries. Yet this fact is the source of its inner strength, for
it is not through a sudden burst of enthusiasm that it can be put into
effect, but rather through a gradual and enduring process of growth
quite different from industrial progress, which can be urged on by
advertisement within a few years. The result thus achieved, however, is
not of lasting quality but something frail, like a soap-bubble. It is
much easier to build quickly than to carry through the tough task of
settling a territory with farmers and establishing farmsteads. But the
former is more quickly destroyed than the latter.

In adopting such a course Germany must have known that to follow it out
would necessarily mean war sooner or later. Only children could believe
that sweet and unctuous expressions of goodness and persistent avowals
of peaceful intentions could get them their bananas through this
'friendly competition between the nations', with the prospect of never
having to fight for them.

No. Once we had taken this road, England was bound to be our enemy at
some time or other to come. Of course it fitted in nicely with our
innocent assumptions, but still it was absurd to grow indignant at the
fact that a day came when the English took the liberty of opposing our
peaceful penetration with the brutality of violent egoists.

Naturally, we on our side would never have done such a thing.

If a European territorial policy against Russia could have been put into
practice only in case we had England as our ally, on the other hand a
colonial and world-trade policy could have been carried into effect only
against English interests and with the support of Russia. But then this
policy should have been adopted in full consciousness of all the
consequences it involved and, above all things, Austria should have been
discarded as quickly as possible.

At the turn of the century the alliance with Austria had become a
veritable absurdity from all points of view.

But nobody thought of forming an alliance with Russia against England,
just as nobody thought of making England an ally against Russia; for in
either case the final result would inevitably have meant war. And to
avoid war was the very reason why a commercial and industrial policy was
decided upon. It was believed that the peaceful conquest of the world by
commercial means provided a method which would permanently supplant the
policy of force. Occasionally, however, there were doubts about the
efficiency of this principle, especially when some quite
incomprehensible warnings came from England now and again. That was the
reason why the fleet was built. It was not for the purpose of attacking
or annihilating England but merely to defend the concept of world-peace,
mentioned above, and also to protect the principle of conquering the
world by 'peaceful' means. Therefore this fleet was kept within modest
limits, not only as regards the number and tonnage of the vessels but
also in regard to their armament, the idea being to furnish new proofs
of peaceful intentions.

The chatter about the peaceful conquest of the world by commercial means
was probably the most completely nonsensical stuff ever raised to the
dignity of a guiding principle in the policy of a State, This nonsense
became even more foolish when England was pointed out as a typical
example to prove how the thing could be put into practice. Our doctrinal
way of regarding history and our professorial ideas in that domain have
done irreparable harm and offer a striking 'proof' of how people 'learn'
history without understanding anything of it. As a matter of fact,
England ought to have been looked upon as a convincing argument against
the theory of the pacific conquest of the world by commercial means. No
nation prepared the way for its commercial conquests more brutally than
England did by means of the sword, and no other nation has defended such
conquests more ruthlessly. Is it not a characteristic quality of British
statecraft that it knows how to use political power in order to gain
economic advantages and, inversely, to turn economic conquests into
political power? What an astounding error it was to believe that England
would not have the courage to give its own blood for the purposes of its
own economic expansion! The fact that England did not possess a national
army proved nothing; for it is not the actual military structure of the
moment that matters but rather the will and determination to use
whatever military strength is available. England has always had the
armament which she needed. She always fought with those weapons which
were necessary for success. She sent mercenary troops, to fight as long
as mercenaries sufficed; but she never hesitated to draw heavily and
deeply from the best blood of the whole nation when victory could be
obtained only by such a sacrifice. And in every case the fighting
spirit, dogged determination, and use of brutal means in conducting
military operations have always remained the same.

But in Germany, through the medium of the schools, the Press and the
comic papers, an idea of the Englishman was gradually formed which was
bound eventually to lead to the worst kind of self-deception. This
absurdity slowly but persistently spread into every quarter of German
life. The result was an undervaluation for which we have had to pay a
heavy penalty. The delusion was so profound that the Englishman was
looked upon as a shrewd business man, but personally a coward even to an
incredible degree. Unfortunately our lofty teachers of professorial
history did not bring home to the minds of their pupils the truth that
it is not possible to build up such a mighty organization as the British
Empire by mere swindle and fraud. The few who called attention to that
truth were either ignored or silenced. I can vividly recall to mind the
astonished looks of my comrades when they found themselves personally
face to face for the first time with the Tommies in Flanders. After a
few days of fighting the consciousness slowly dawned on our soldiers
that those Scotsmen were not like the ones we had seen described and
caricatured in the comic papers and mentioned in the communiqués.

It was then that I formed my first ideas of the efficiency of various
forms of propaganda.

Such a falsification, however, served the purpose of those who had
fabricated it. This caricature of the Englishman, though false, could be
used to prove the possibility of conquering the world peacefully by
commercial means. Where the Englishman succeeded we should also succeed.
Our far greater honesty and our freedom from that specifically English
'perfidy' would be assets on our side. Thereby it was hoped that the
sympathy of the smaller nations and the confidence of the greater
nations could be gained more easily.

We did not realize that our honesty was an object of profound aversion
for other people because we ourselves believed in it. The rest of the
world looked on our behaviour as the manifestation of a shrewd
deceitfulness; but when the revolution came, then they were amazed at
the deeper insight it gave them into our mentality, sincere even beyond
the limits of stupidity.

Once we understand the part played by that absurd notion of conquering
the world by peaceful commercial means we can clearly understand how
that other absurdity, the Triple Alliance, came to exist. With what
State then could an alliance have been made? In alliance with Austria we
could not acquire new territory by military means, even in Europe. And
this very fact was the real reason for the inner weakness of the Triple
Alliance. A Bismarck could permit himself such a makeshift for the
necessities of the moment, but certainly not any of his bungling
successors, and least of all when the foundations no longer existed on
which Bismarck had formed the Triple Alliance. In Bismarck's time
Austria could still be looked upon as a German State; but the gradual
introduction of universal suffrage turned the country into a
parliamentary Babel, in which the German voice was scarcely audible.

From the viewpoint of racial policy, this alliance with Austria was
simply disastrous. A new Slavic Great Power was allowed to grow up close
to the frontiers of the German Empire. Later on this Power was bound to
adopt towards Germany an attitude different from that of Russia, for
example. The Alliance was thus bound to become more empty and more
feeble, because the only supporters of it were losing their influence
and were being systematically pushed out of the more important public
offices.

About the year 1900 the Alliance with Austria had already entered the
same phase as the Alliance between Austria and Italy.

Here also only one alternative was possible: Either to take the side of
the Habsburg Monarchy or to raise a protest against the oppression of
the German element in Austria. But, generally speaking, when one takes
such a course it is bound eventually to lead to open conflict.

From the psychological point of view also, the Triple decreases
according as such an alliance limits its object to the defence of the
STATUS QUO. But, on the other hand, an alliance will increase its
cohesive strength the more the parties concerned in it may hope to use
it as a means of reaching some practical goal of expansion. Here, as
everywhere else, strength does not lie in defence but in attack.

This truth was recognized in various quarters but, unfortunately, not by
the so-called elected representatives of the people. As early as 1912
Ludendorff, who was then Colonel and an Officer of the General Staff,
pointed out these weak features of the Alliance in a memorandum which he
then drew up. But of course the 'statesmen' did not attach any
importance or value to that document. In general it would seem as if
reason were a faculty that is active only in the case of ordinary
mortals but that it is entirely absent when we come to deal with that
branch of the species known as 'diplomats'.

It was lucky for Germany that the war of 1914 broke out with Austria as
its direct cause, for thus the Habsburgs were compelled to participate.
Had the origin of the War been otherwise, Germany would have been left
to her own resources. The Habsburg State would never have been ready or
willing to take part in a war for the origin of which Germany was
responsible. What was the object of so much obloquy later in the case of
Italy's decision would have taken place, only earlier, in the case of
Austria. In other words, if Germany had been forced to go to war for
some reason of its own, Austria would have remained 'neutral' in order
to safeguard the State against a revolution which might begin
immediately after the war had started. The Slav element would have
preferred to smash up the Dual Monarchy in 1914 rather than permit it to
come to the assistance of Germany. But at that time there were only a
few who understood all the dangers and aggravations which resulted from
the alliance with the Danubian Monarchy.

In the first place, Austria had too many enemies who were eagerly
looking forward to obtain the heritage of that decrepit State, so that
these people gradually developed a certain animosity against Germany,
because Germany was an obstacle to their desires inasmuch as it kept the
Dual Monarchy from falling to pieces, a consummation that was hoped for
and yearned for on all sides. The conviction developed that Vienna could
be reached only by passing through Berlin.

In the second place, by adopting this policy Germany lost its best and
most promising chances of other alliances. In place of these
possibilities one now observed a growing tension in the relations with
Russia and even with Italy. And this in spite of the fact that the
general attitude in Rome was just as favourable to Germany as it was
hostile to Austria, a hostility which lay dormant in the individual
Italian and broke out violently on occasion.

Since a commercial and industrial policy had been adopted, no motive was
left for waging war against Russia. Only the enemies of the two
countries, Germany and Russia, could have an active interest in such a
war under these circumstances. As a matter of fact, it was only the Jews
and the Marxists who tried to stir up bad blood between the two States.

In the third place, the Alliance constituted a permanent danger to
German security; for any great Power that was hostile to Bismarck's
Empire could mobilize a whole lot of other States in a war against
Germany by promising them tempting spoils at the expense of the Austrian
ally.

It was possible to arouse the whole of Eastern Europe against Austria,
especially Russia, and Italy also. The world coalition which had
developed under the leadership of King Edward could never have become a
reality if Germany's ally, Austria, had not offered such an alluring
prospect of booty. It was this fact alone which made it possible to
combine so many heterogeneous States with divergent interests into one
common phalanx of attack. Every member could hope to enrich himself at
the expense of Austria if he joined in the general attack against
Germany. The fact that Turkey was also a tacit party to the unfortunate
alliance with Austria augmented Germany's peril to an extraordinary
degree.

Jewish international finance needed this bait of the Austrian heritage
in order to carry out its plans of ruining Germany; for Germany had not
yet surrendered to the general control which the international captains
of finance and trade exercised over the other States. Thus it was
possible to consolidate that coalition and make it strong enough and
brave enough, through the sheer weight of numbers, to join in bodily
conflict with the 'horned' Siegfried. (Note 9)

[Note 9. Carlyle explains the epithet thus: "First then, let no one from
the title GEHOERNTE (Horned, Behorned), fancy that our brave Siegfried,
who was the loveliest as well as the bravest of men, was actually
cornuted, and had hornson his brow, though like Michael Angelo's Moses; or
even that his skin, to which the epithet BEHORNED refers, was hard like a
crocodile's, and not softer than the softest shamey, for the truth is,
his Hornedness means only an Invulnerability, like that of Achilles..."]

The alliance with the Habsburg Monarchy, which I loathed while still in
Austria, was the subject of grave concern on my part and caused me to
meditate on it so persistently that finally I came to the conclusions
which I have mentioned above.

In the small circles which I frequented at that time I did not conceal
my conviction that this sinister agreement with a State doomed to
collapse would also bring catastrophe to Germany if she did not free
herself from it in time. I never for a moment wavered in that firm
conviction, even when the tempest of the World War seemed to have made
shipwreck of the reasoning faculty itself and had put blind enthusiasm
in its place, even among those circles where the coolest and hardest
objective thinking ought to have held sway. In the trenches I voiced and
upheld my own opinion whenever these problems came under discussion. I
held that to abandon the Habsburg Monarchy would involve no sacrifice if
Germany could thereby reduce the number of her own enemies; for the
millions of Germans who had donned the steel helmet had done so not to
fight for the maintenance of a corrupt dynasty but rather for the
salvation of the German people.

Before the War there were occasions on which it seemed that at least one
section of the German public had some slight misgivings about the
political wisdom of the alliance with Austria. From time to time German
conservative circles issued warnings against being over-confident about
the worth of that alliance; but, like every other reasonable suggestion
made at that time, it was thrown to the winds. The general conviction
was that the right measures had been adopted to 'conquer' the world,
that the success of these measures would be enormous and the sacrifices
negligible.

Once again the 'uninitiated' layman could do nothing but observe how the
'elect' were marching straight ahead towards disaster and enticing their
beloved people to follow them, as the rats followed the Pied Piper of
Hamelin.

If we would look for the deeper grounds which made it possible to foist
on the people this absurd notion of peacefully conquering the world
through commercial penetration, and how it was possible to put forward
the maintenance of world-peace as a national aim, we shall find that
these grounds lay in a general morbid condition that had pervaded the
whole body of German political thought.

The triumphant progress of technical science in Germany and the
marvellous development of German industries and commerce led us to
forget that a powerful State had been the necessary pre-requisite of
that success. On the contrary, certain circles went even so far as to
give vent to the theory that the State owed its very existence to these
phenomena; that it was, above all, an economic institution and should be
constituted in accordance with economic interests. Therefore, it was
held, the State was dependent on the economic structure. This condition
of things was looked upon and glorified as the soundest and most normal
arrangement.

Now, the truth is that the State in itself has nothing whatsoever to do
with any definite economic concept or a definite economic development.
It does not arise from a compact made between contracting parties,
within a certain delimited territory, for the purpose of serving
economic ends. The State is a community of living beings who have
kindred physical and spiritual natures, organized for the purpose of
assuring the conservation of their own kind and to help towards
fulfilling those ends which Providence has assigned to that particular
race or racial branch. Therein, and therein alone, lie the purpose and
meaning of a State. Economic activity is one of the many auxiliary means
which are necessary for the attainment of those aims. But economic
activity is never the origin or purpose of a State, except where a State
has been originally founded on a false and unnatural basis. And this
alone explains why a State as such does not necessarily need a certain
delimited territory as a condition of its establishment. This condition
becomes a necessary pre-requisite only among those people who would
provide and assure subsistence for their kinsfolk through their own
industry, which means that they are ready to carry on the struggle for
existence by means of their own work. People who can sneak their way,
like parasites, into the human body politic and make others work for
them under various pretences can form a State without possessing any
definite delimited territory. This is chiefly applicable to that
parasitic nation which, particularly at the present time preys upon the
honest portion of mankind; I mean the Jews.

The Jewish State has never been delimited in space. It has been spread
all over the world, without any frontiers whatsoever, and has always
been constituted from the membership of one race exclusively. That is
why the Jews have always formed a State within the State. One of the
most ingenious tricks ever devised has been that of sailing the Jewish
ship-of-state under the flag of Religion and thus securing that
tolerance which Aryans are always ready to grant to different religious
faiths. But the Mosaic Law is really nothing else than the doctrine of
the preservation of the Jewish race. Therefore this Law takes in all
spheres of sociological, political and economic science which have a
bearing on the main end in view.

The instinct for the preservation of one's own species is the primary
cause that leads to the formation of human communities. Hence the State
is a racial organism, and not an economic organization. The difference
between the two is so great as to be incomprehensible to our
contemporary so-called 'statesmen'. That is why they like to believe
that the State may be constituted as an economic structure, whereas the
truth is that it has always resulted from the exercise of those
qualities which are part of the will to preserve the species and the
race. But these qualities always exist and operate through the heroic
virtues and have nothing to do with commercial egoism; for the
conservation of the species always presupposes that the individual is
ready to sacrifice himself. Such is the meaning of the poet's lines:

UND SETZET IHR NICHT DAS LEBEN EIN,
NIE WIRD EUCH DAS LEBEN GEWONNEN SEIN.

(AND IF YOU DO NOT STAKE YOUR LIFE,
YOU WILL NEVER WIN LIFE FOR YOURSELF.)

[Note 10. Lines quoted from the Song of the Curassiers in Schiller's
WALLENSTEIN.]

The sacrifice of the individual existence is necessary in order to
assure the conservation of the race. Hence it is that the most essential
condition for the establishment and maintenance of a State is a certain
feeling of solidarity, wounded in an identity of character and race and
in a resolute readiness to defend these at all costs. With people who
live on their own territory this will result in a development of the
heroic virtues; with a parasitic people it will develop the arts of
subterfuge and gross perfidy unless we admit that these characteristics
are innate and that the varying political forms through which the
parasitic race expresses itself are only the outward manifestations of
innate characteristics. At least in the beginning, the formation of a
State can result only from a manifestation of the heroic qualities I
have spoken of. And the people who fail in the struggle for existence,
that is to say those, who become vassals and are thereby condemned to
disappear entirely sooner or later, are those who do not display the
heroic virtues in the struggle, or those who fall victims to the perfidy
of the parasites. And even in this latter case the failure is not so
much due to lack of intellectual powers, but rather to a lack of courage
and determination. An attempt is made to conceal the real nature of this
failing by saying that it is the humane feeling.

The qualities which are employed for the foundation and preservation of
a State have accordingly little or nothing to do with the economic
situation. And this is conspicuously demonstrated by the fact that the
inner strength of a State only very rarely coincides with what is called
its economic expansion. On the contrary, there are numerous examples to
show that a period of economic prosperity indicates the approaching
decline of a State. If it were correct to attribute the foundation of
human communities to economic forces, then the power of the State as
such would be at its highest pitch during periods of economic
prosperity, and not vice versa.

It is specially difficult to understand how the belief that the State is
brought into being and preserved by economic forces could gain currency
in a country which has given proof of the opposite in every phase of its
history. The history of Prussia shows in a manner particularly clear and
distinct, that it is out of the moral virtues of the people and not from
their economic circumstances that a State is formed. It is only under
the protection of those virtues that economic activities can be
developed and the latter will continue to flourish until a time comes
when the creative political capacity declines. Therewith the economic
structure will also break down, a phenomenon which is now happening in
an alarming manner before our eyes. The material interest of mankind can
prosper only in the shade of the heroic virtues. The moment they become
the primary considerations of life they wreck the basis of their own
existence.

Whenever the political power of Germany was specially strong the
economic situation also improved. But whenever economic interests alone
occupied the foremost place in the life of the people, and thrust
transcendent ideals into the back.-ground, the State collapsed and
economic ruin followed readily.

If we consider the question of what those forces actually are which are
necessary to the creation and preservation of a State, we shall find
that they are: The capacity and readiness to sacrifice the individual to
the common welfare. That these qualities have nothing at all to do with
economics can be proved by referring to the simple fact that man does
not sacrifice himself for material interests. In other words, he will
die for an ideal but not for a business. The marvellous gift for public
psychology which the English have was never shown better than the way in
which they presented their case in the World War. We were fighting for
our bread; but the English declared that they were fighting for
'freedom', and not at all for their own freedom. Oh, no, but for the
freedom of the small nations. German people laughed at that effrontery
and were angered by it; but in doing so they showed how political
thought had declined among our so-called diplomats in Germany even
before the War. These diplomatists did not have the slightest notion of
what that force was which brought men to face death of their own free
will and determination.

As long as the German people, in the War of 1914, continued to believe
that they were fighting for ideals they stood firm. As soon as they were
told that they were fighting only for their daily bread they began to
give up the struggle.

Our clever 'statesmen' were greatly amazed at this change of feeling.
They never understood that as soon as man is called upon to struggle for
purely material causes he will avoid death as best he can; for death and
the enjoyment of the material fruits of a victory are quite incompatible
concepts. The frailest woman will become a heroine when the life of her
own child is at stake. And only the will to save the race and native
land or the State, which offers protection to the race, has in all ages
been the urge which has forced men to face the weapons of their enemies.

The following may be proclaimed as a truth that always holds good:

A State has never arisen from commercial causes for the purpose of
peacefully serving commercial ends; but States have always arisen from
the instinct to maintain the racial group, whether this instinct
manifest itself in the heroic sphere or in the sphere of cunning and
chicanery. In the first case we have the Aryan States, based on the
principles of work and cultural development. In the second case we have
the Jewish parasitic colonies. But as soon as economic interests begin
to predominate over the racial and cultural instincts in a people or a
State, these economic interests unloose the causes that lead to
subjugation and oppression.

The belief, which prevailed in Germany before the War, that the world
could be opened up and even conquered for Germany through a system of
peaceful commercial penetration and a colonial policy was a typical
symptom which indicated the decline of those real qualities whereby
States are created and preserved, and indicated also the decline of that
insight, will-power and practical determination which belong to those
qualities. The World War with its consequences, was the natural
liquidation of that decline.

To anyone who had not thought over the matter deeply, this attitude of
the German people--which was quite general--must have seemed an
insoluble enigma. After all, Germany herself was a magnificent example
of an empire that had been built up purely by a policy of power.
Prussia, which was the generative cell of the German Empire, had been
created by brilliant heroic deeds and not by a financial or commercial
compact. And the Empire itself was but the magnificent recompense for a
leadership that had been conducted on a policy of power and military
valour.

How then did it happen that the political instincts of this very same
German people became so degenerate? For it was not merely one isolated
phenomenon which pointed to this decadence, but morbid symptoms which
appeared in alarming numbers, now all over the body politic, or eating
into the body of the nation like a gangrenous ulcer. It seemed as if
some all-pervading poisonous fluid had been injected by some mysterious
hand into the bloodstream of this once heroic body, bringing about a
creeping paralysis that affected the reason and the elementary instinct
of self-preservation.

During the years 1912-1914 I used to ponder perpetually on those
problems which related to the policy of the Triple Alliance and the
economic policy then being pursued by the German Empire. Once again I
came to the conclusion that the only explanation of this enigma lay in
the operation of that force which I had already become acquainted with
in Vienna, though from a different angle of vision. The force to which I
refer was the Marxist teaching and WELTANSCHAUUNG and its organized
action throughout the nation.

For the second time in my life I plunged deep into the study of that
destructive teaching. This time, however, I was not urged by the study
of the question by the impressions and influences of my daily
environment, but directed rather by the observation of general phenomena
in the political life of Germany. In delving again into the theoretical
literature of this new world and endeavouring to get a clear view of the
possible consequences of its teaching, I compared the theoretical
principles of Marxism with the phenomena and happenings brought about by
its activities in the political, cultural, and economic spheres.

For the first time in my life I now turned my attention to the efforts
that were being made to subdue this universal pest.

I studied Bismarck's exceptional legislation in its original concept,
its operation and its results. Gradually I formed a basis for my own
opinions, which has proved as solid as a rock, so that never since have
I had to change my attitude towards the general problem. I also made a
further and more thorough analysis of the relations between Marxism and
Jewry.

During my sojourn in Vienna I used to look upon Germany as an
imperturbable colossus; but even then serious doubts and misgivings
would often disturb me. In my own mind and in my conversation with my
small circle of acquaintances I used to criticize Germany's foreign
policy and the incredibly superficial way, according to my thinking, in
which Marxism was dealt with, though it was then the most important
problem in Germany. I could not understand how they could stumble
blindfolded into the midst of this peril, the effects of which would be
momentous if the openly declared aims of Marxism could be put into
practice. Even as early as that time I warned people around me, just as
I am warning a wider audience now, against that soothing slogan of all
indolent and feckless nature: NOTHING CAN HAPPEN TO US. A similar mental
contagion had already destroyed a mighty empire. Can Germany escape the
operation of those laws to which all other human communities are
subject?

In the years 1913 and 1914 I expressed my opinion for the first time in
various circles, some of which are now members of the National Socialist
Movement, that the problem of how the future of the German nation can be
secured is the problem of how Marxism can be exterminated.

I considered the disastrous policy of the Triple Alliance as one of the
consequences resulting from the disintegrating effects of the Marxist
teaching; for the alarming feature was that this teaching was invisibly
corrupting the foundations of a healthy political and economic outlook.
Those who had been themselves contaminated frequently did not realise
that their aims and actions sprang from this WELTANSCHAUUNG, which they
otherwise openly repudiated.

Long before then the spiritual and moral decline of the German people
had set in, though those who were affected by the morbid decadence were
frequently unaware--as often happens--of the forces which were breaking
up their very existence. Sometimes they tried to cure the disease by
doctoring the symptoms, which were taken as the cause. But since nobody
recognized, or wanted to recognize, the real cause of the disease this
way of combating Marxism was no more effective than the application of
some quack's ointment.




CHAPTER V



THE WORLD WAR


During the boisterous years of my youth nothing used to damp my wild
spirits so much as to think that I was born at a time when the world had
manifestly decided not to erect any more temples of fame except in
honour of business people and State officials. The tempest of historical
achievements seemed to have permanently subsided, so much so that the
future appeared to be irrevocably delivered over to what was called
peaceful competition between the nations. This simply meant a system of
mutual exploitation by fraudulent means, the principle of resorting to
the use of force in self-defence being formally excluded. Individual
countries increasingly assumed the appearance of commercial
undertakings, grabbing territory and clients and concessions from each
other under any and every kind of pretext. And it was all staged to an
accompaniment of loud but innocuous shouting. This trend of affairs
seemed destined to develop steadily and permanently. Having the support
of public approbation, it seemed bound eventually to transform the world
into a mammoth department store. In the vestibule of this emporium there
would be rows of monumental busts which would confer immortality on
those profiteers who had proved themselves the shrewdest at their trade
and those administrative officials who had shown themselves the most
innocuous. The salesmen could be represented by the English and the
administrative functionaries by the Germans; whereas the Jews would be
sacrificed to the unprofitable calling of proprietorship, for they are
constantly avowing that they make no profits and are always being called
upon to 'pay out'. Moreover they have the advantage of being versed in
the foreign languages.

Why could I not have been born a hundred years ago? I used to ask
myself. Somewhere about the time of the Wars of Liberation, when a man
was still of some value even though he had no 'business'.

Thus I used to think it an ill-deserved stroke of bad luck that I had
arrived too late on this terrestrial globe, and I felt chagrined at the
idea that my life would have to run its course along peaceful and
orderly lines. As a boy I was anything but a pacifist and all attempts
to make me so turned out futile.

Then the Boer War came, like a glow of lightning on the far horizon. Day
after day I used to gaze intently at the newspapers and I almost
'devoured' the telegrams and COMMUNIQUES, overjoyed to think that I
could witness that heroic struggle, even though from so great a
distance.

When the Russo-Japanese War came I was older and better able to judge
for myself. For national reasons I then took the side of the Japanese in
our discussions. I looked upon the defeat of the Russians as a blow to
Austrian Slavism.

Many years had passed between that time and my arrival in Munich. I now
realized that what I formerly believed to be a morbid decadence was only
the lull before the storm. During my Vienna days the Balkans were
already in the grip of that sultry pause which presages the violent
storm. Here and there a flash of lightning could be occasionally seen;
but it rapidly disappeared in sinister gloom. Then the Balkan War broke
out; and therewith the first gusts of the forthcoming tornado swept
across a highly-strung Europe. In the supervening calm men felt the
atmosphere oppressive and foreboding, so much so that the sense of an
impending catastrophe became transformed into a feeling of impatient
expectance. They wished that Heaven would give free rein to the fate
which could now no longer be curbed. Then the first great bolt of
lightning struck the earth. The storm broke and the thunder of the
heavens intermingled with the roar of the cannons in the World War.

When the news came to Munich that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been
murdered, I had been at home all day and did not get the particulars of
how it happened. At first I feared that the shots may have been fired by
some German-Austrian students who had been aroused to a state of furious
indignation by the persistent pro-Slav activities of the Heir to the
Habsburg Throne and therefore wished to liberate the German population
from this internal enemy. It was quite easy to imagine what the result
of such a mistake would have been. It would have brought on a new wave
of persecution, the motives of which would have been 'justified' before
the whole world. But soon afterwards I heard the names of the presumed
assassins and also that they were known to be Serbs. I felt somewhat
dumbfounded in face of the inexorable vengeance which Destiny had
wrought. The greatest friend of the Slavs had fallen a victim to the
bullets of Slav patriots.

It is unjust to the Vienna government of that time to blame it now for
the form and tenor of the ultimatum which was then presented. In a
similar position and under similar circumstances, no other Power in the
world would have acted otherwise. On her southern frontiers Austria had
a relentless mortal foe who indulged in acts of provocation against the
Dual Monarchy at intervals which were becoming more and more frequent.
This persistent line of conduct would not have been relaxed until the
arrival of the opportune moment for the destruction of the Empire. In
Austria there was good reason to fear that, at the latest, this moment
would come with the death of the old Emperor. Once that had taken place,
it was quite possible that the Monarchy would not be able to offer any
serious resistance. For some years past the State had been so completely
identified with the personality of Francis Joseph that, in the eyes of
the great mass of the people, the death of this venerable
personification of the Empire would be tantamount to the death of the
Empire itself. Indeed it was one of the clever artifices of Slav policy
to foster the impression that the Austrian State owed its very existence
exclusively to the prodigies and rare talents of that monarch. This kind
of flattery was particularly welcomed at the Hofburg, all the more
because it had no relation whatsoever to the services actually rendered
by the Emperor. No effort whatsoever was made to locate the carefully
prepared sting which lay hidden in this glorifying praise. One fact
which was entirely overlooked, perhaps intentionally, was that the more
the Empire remained dependent on the so-called administrative talents of
'the wisest Monarch of all times', the more catastrophic would be the
situation when Fate came to knock at the door and demand its tribute.

Was it possible even to imagine the Austrian Empire without its
venerable ruler? Would not the tragedy which befell Maria Theresa be
repeated at once?

It is really unjust to the Vienna governmental circles to reproach them
with having instigated a war which might have been prevented. The war
was bound to come. Perhaps it might have been postponed for a year or
two at the most. But it had always been the misfortune of German, as
well as Austrian, diplomats that they endeavoured to put off the
inevitable day of reckoning, with the result that they were finally
compelled to deliver their blow at a most inopportune moment.

No. Those who did not wish this war ought to have had the courage to
take the consequences of the refusal upon themselves. Those consequences
must necessarily have meant the sacrifice of Austria. And even then war
would have come, not as a war in which all the nations would have been
banded against us but in the form of a dismemberment of the Habsburg
Monarchy. In that case we should have had to decide whether we should
come to the assistance of the Habsburg or stand aside as spectators,
with our arms folded, and thus allow Fate to run its course.

Just those who are loudest in their imprecations to-day and make a great
parade of wisdom in judging the causes of the war are the very same
people whose collaboration was the most fatal factor in steering towards
the war.

For several decades previously the German Social-Democrats had been
agitating in an underhand and knavish way for war against Russia;
whereas the German Centre Party, with religious ends in view, had worked
to make the Austrian State the chief centre and turning-point of German
policy. The consequences of this folly had now to be borne. What came
was bound to come and under no circumstances could it have been avoided.
The fault of the German Government lay in the fact that, merely for the
sake of preserving peace at all costs, it continued to miss the
occasions that were favourable for action, got entangled in an alliance
for the purpose of preserving the peace of the world, and thus finally
became the victim of a world coalition which opposed the German effort
for the maintenance of peace and was determined to bring about the world
war.

Had the Vienna Government of that time formulated its ultimatum in less
drastic terms, that would not have altered the situation at all: but
such a course might have aroused public indignation. For, in the eyes of
the great masses, the ultimatum was too moderate and certainly not
excessive or brutal. Those who would deny this to-day are either
simpletons with feeble memories or else deliberate falsehood-mongers.

The War of 1914 was certainly not forced on the masses; it was even
desired by the whole people.

There was a desire to bring the general feeling of uncertainty to an end
once and for all. And it is only in the light of this fact that we can
understand how more than two million German men and youths voluntarily
joined the colours, ready to shed the last drop of their blood for the
cause.

For me these hours came as a deliverance from the distress that had
weighed upon me during the days of my youth. I am not ashamed to
acknowledge to-day that I was carried away by the enthusiasm of the
moment and that I sank down upon my knees and thanked Heaven out of the
fullness of my heart for the favour of having been permitted to live in
such a time.

The fight for freedom had broken out on an unparalleled scale in the
history of the world. From the moment that Fate took the helm in hand
the conviction grew among the mass of the people that now it was not a
question of deciding the destinies of Austria or Serbia but that the
very existence of the German nation itself was at stake.

At last, after many years of blindness, the people saw clearly into the
future. Therefore, almost immediately after the gigantic struggle had
begun, an excessive enthusiasm was replaced by a more earnest and more
fitting undertone, because the exaltation of the popular spirit was not
a mere passing frenzy. It was only too necessary that the gravity of the
situation should be recognized. At that time there was, generally
speaking, not the slightest presentiment or conception of how long the
war might last. People dreamed of the soldiers being home by Christmas
and that then they would resume their daily work in peace.

Whatever mankind desires, that it will hope for and believe in. The
overwhelming majority of the people had long since grown weary of the
perpetual insecurity in the general condition of public affairs. Hence
it was only natural that no one believed that the Austro-Serbian
conflict could be shelved. Therefore they looked forward to a radical
settlement of accounts. I also belonged to the millions that desired
this.

The moment the news of the Sarajevo outrage reached Munich two ideas
came into my mind: First, that war was absolutely inevitable and,
second, that the Habsburg State would now be forced to honour its
signature to the alliance. For what I had feared most was that one day
Germany herself, perhaps as a result of the Alliance, would become
involved in a conflict the first direct cause of which did not affect
Austria. In such a contingency, I feared that the Austrian State, for
domestic political reasons, would find itself unable to decide in favour
of its ally. But now this danger was removed. The old State was
compelled to fight, whether it wished to do so or not.

My own attitude towards the conflict was equally simple and clear. I
believed that it was not a case of Austria fighting to get satisfaction
from Serbia but rather a case of Germany fighting for her own
existence--the German nation for its own to-be-or-not-to-be, for its
freedom and for its future. The work of Bismarck must now be carried on.
Young Germany must show itself worthy of the blood shed by our fathers
on so many heroic fields of battle, from Weissenburg to Sedan and Paris.
And if this struggle should bring us victory our people will again rank
foremost among the great nations. Only then could the German Empire
assert itself as the mighty champion of peace, without the necessity of
restricting the daily bread of its children for the sake of maintaining
the peace.

As a boy and as a young man, I often longed for the occasion to prove
that my national enthusiasm was not mere vapouring. Hurrahing sometimes
seemed to me to be a kind of sinful indulgence, though I could not give
any justification for that feeling; for, after all, who has the right to
shout that triumphant word if he has not won the right to it there where
there is no play-acting and where the hand of the Goddess of Destiny
puts the truth and sincerity of nations and men through her inexorable
test? Just as millions of others, I felt a proud joy in being permitted
to go through this test. I had so often sung DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES and
so often roared 'HEIL' that I now thought it was as a kind of
retro-active grace that I was granted the right of appearing before the
Court of Eternal Justice to testify to the truth of those sentiments.

One thing was clear to me from the very beginning, namely, that in the
event of war, which now seemed inevitable, my books would have to be
thrown aside forthwith. I also realized that my place would have to be
there where the inner voice of conscience called me.

I had left Austria principally for political reasons. What therefore
could be more rational than that I should put into practice the logical
consequences of my political opinions, now that the war had begun. I had
no desire to fight for the Habsburg cause, but I was prepared to die at
any time for my own kinsfolk and the Empire to which they really
belonged.

On August 3rd, 1914, I presented an urgent petition to His Majesty, King
Ludwig III, requesting to be allowed to serve in a Bavarian regiment. In
those days the Chancellery had its hands quite full and therefore I was
all the more pleased when I received the answer a day later, that my
request had been granted. I opened the document with trembling hands;
and no words of mine could now describe the satisfaction I felt on
reading that I was instructed to report to a Bavarian regiment. Within a
few days I was wearing that uniform which I was not to put oft again for
nearly six years.

For me, as for every German, the most memorable period of my life now
began. Face to face with that mighty struggle, all the past fell away
into oblivion. With a wistful pride I look back on those days,
especially because we are now approaching the tenth anniversary of that
memorable happening. I recall those early weeks of war when kind fortune
permitted me to take my place in that heroic struggle among the nations.

As the scene unfolds itself before my mind, it seems only like
yesterday. I see myself among my young comrades on our first parade
drill, and so on until at last the day came on which we were to leave
for the front.

In common with the others, I had one worry during those days. This was a
fear that we might arrive too late for the fighting at the front. Time
and again that thought disturbed me and every announcement of a
victorious engagement left a bitter taste, which increased as the news
of further victories arrived.

At long last the day came when we left Munich on war service. For the
first time in my life I saw the Rhine, as we journeyed westwards to
stand guard before that historic German river against its traditional
and grasping enemy. As the first soft rays of the morning sun broke
through the light mist and disclosed to us the Niederwald Statue, with
one accord the whole troop train broke into the strains of DIE WACHT AM
RHEIN. I then felt as if my heart could not contain its spirit.

And then followed a damp, cold night in Flanders. We marched in silence
throughout the night and as the morning sun came through the mist an
iron greeting suddenly burst above our heads. Shrapnel exploded in our
midst and spluttered in the damp ground. But before the smoke of the
explosion disappeared a wild 'Hurrah' was shouted from two hundred
throats, in response to this first greeting of Death. Then began the
whistling of bullets and the booming of cannons, the shouting and
singing of the combatants. With eyes straining feverishly, we pressed
forward, quicker and quicker, until we finally came to close-quarter
fighting, there beyond the beet-fields and the meadows. Soon the strains
of a song reached us from afar. Nearer and nearer, from company to
company, it came. And while Death began to make havoc in our ranks we
passed the song on to those beside us: DEUTSCHLAND, DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER
ALLES, ÜBER ALLES IN DER WELT.

After four days in the trenches we came back. Even our step was no
longer what it had been. Boys of seventeen looked now like grown men.
The rank and file of the List Regiment (Note 11) had not been properly
trained in the art of warfare, but they knew how to die like old soldiers.

[Note 11. The Second Infantry Bavarian Regiment, in which Hitler served
as a volunteer.]

That was the beginning. And thus we carried on from year to year. A
feeling of horror replaced the romantic fighting spirit. Enthusiasm
cooled down gradually and exuberant spirits were quelled by the fear of
the ever-present Death. A time came when there arose within each one of
us a conflict between the urge to self-preservation and the call of
duty. And I had to go through that conflict too. As Death sought its
prey everywhere and unrelentingly a nameless Something rebelled within
the weak body and tried to introduce itself under the name of Common
Sense; but in reality it was Fear, which had taken on this cloak in
order to impose itself on the individual. But the more the voice which
advised prudence increased its efforts and the more clear and persuasive
became its appeal, resistance became all the stronger; until finally the
internal strife was over and the call of duty was triumphant. Already in
the winter of 1915-16 I had come through that inner struggle. The will
had asserted its incontestable mastery. Whereas in the early days I went
into the fight with a cheer and a laugh, I was now habitually calm and
resolute. And that frame of mind endured. Fate might now put me through
the final test without my nerves or reason giving way. The young
volunteer had become an old soldier.

This same transformation took place throughout the whole army. Constant
fighting had aged and toughened it and hardened it, so that it stood
firm and dauntless against every assault.

Only now was it possible to judge that army. After two and three years
of continuous fighting, having been thrown into one battle after
another, standing up stoutly against superior numbers and superior
armament, suffering hunger and privation, the time had come when one
could assess the value of that singular fighting force.

For a thousand years to come nobody will dare to speak of heroism
without recalling the German Army of the World War. And then from the
dim past will emerge the immortal vision of those solid ranks of steel
helmets that never flinched and never faltered. And as long as Germans
live they will be proud to remember that these men were the sons of
their forefathers.

I was then a soldier and did not wish to meddle in politics, all the
more so because the time was inopportune. I still believe that the most
modest stable-boy of those days served his country better than the best
of, let us say, the 'parliamentary deputies'. My hatred for those
footlers was never greater than in those days when all decent men who
had anything to say said it point-blank in the enemy's face; or, failing
this, kept their mouths shut and did their duty elsewhere. I despised
those political fellows and if I had had my way I would have formed them
into a Labour Battalion and given them the opportunity of babbling
amongst themselves to their hearts' content, without offence or harm to
decent people.

In those days I cared nothing for politics; but I could not help forming
an opinion on certain manifestations which affected not only the whole
nation but also us soldiers in particular. There were two things which
caused me the greatest anxiety at that time and which I had come to
regard as detrimental to our interests.

Shortly after our first series of victories a certain section of the
Press already began to throw cold water, drip by drip, on the enthusiasm
of the public. At first this was not obvious to many people. It was done
under the mask of good intentions and a spirit of anxious care. The
public was told that big celebrations of victories were somewhat out of
place and were not worthy expressions of the spirit of a great nation.
The fortitude and valour of German soldiers were accepted facts which
did not necessarily call for outbursts of celebration. Furthermore, it
was asked, what would foreign opinion have to say about these
manifestations? Would not foreign opinion react more favourably to a
quiet and sober form of celebration rather than to all this wild
jubilation? Surely the time had come--so the Press declared--for us
Germans to remember that this war was not our work and that hence there
need be no feeling of shame in declaring our willingness to do our share
towards effecting an understanding among the nations. For this reason it
would not be wise to sully the radiant deeds of our army with unbecoming
jubilation; for the rest of the world would never understand this.
Furthermore, nothing is more appreciated than the modesty with which a
true hero quietly and unassumingly carries on and forgets. Such was the
gist of their warning.

Instead of catching these fellows by their long ears and dragging them
to some ditch and looping a cord around their necks, so that the
victorious enthusiasm of the nation should no longer offend the
aesthetic sensibilities of these knights of the pen, a general Press
campaign was now allowed to go on against what was called 'unbecoming'
and 'undignified' forms of victorious celebration.

No one seemed to have the faintest idea that when public enthusiasm is
once damped, nothing can enkindle it again, when the necessity arises.
This enthusiasm is an intoxication and must be kept up in that form.
Without the support of this enthusiastic spirit how would it be possible
to endure in a struggle which, according to human standards, made such
immense demands on the spiritual stamina of the nation?

I was only too well acquainted with the psychology of the broad masses
not to know that in such cases a magnaminous 'aestheticism' cannot fan
the fire which is needed to keep the iron hot. In my eyes it was even a
mistake not to have tried to raise the pitch of public enthusiasm still
higher. Therefore I could not at all understand why the contrary policy
was adopted, that is to say, the policy of damping the public spirit.

Another thing which irritated me was the manner in which Marxism was
regarded and accepted. I thought that all this proved how little they
knew about the Marxist plague. It was believed in all seriousness that
the abolition of party distinctions during the War had made Marxism a
mild and moderate thing.

But here there was no question of party. There was question of a
doctrine which was being expounded for the express purpose of leading
humanity to its destruction. The purport of this doctrine was not
understood because nothing was said about that side of the question in
our Jew-ridden universities and because our supercilious bureaucratic
officials did not think it worth while to read up a subject which had
not been prescribed in their university course. This mighty
revolutionary trend was going on beside them; but those 'intellectuals'
would not deign to give it their attention. That is why State enterprise
nearly always lags behind private enterprise. Of these gentry once can
truly say that their maxim is: What we don't know won't bother us. In
the August of 1914 the German worker was looked upon as an adherent of
Marxist socialism. That was a gross error. When those fateful hours
dawned the German worker shook off the poisonous clutches of that
plague; otherwise he would not have been so willing and ready to fight.
And people were stupid enough to imagine that Marxism had now become
'national', another apt illustration of the fact that those in authority
had never taken the trouble to study the real tenor of the Marxist
teaching. If they had done so, such foolish errors would not have been
committed.

Marxism, whose final objective was and is and will continue to be the
destruction of all non-Jewish national States, had to witness in those
days of July 1914 how the German working classes, which it had been
inveigling, were aroused by the national spirit and rapidly ranged
themselves on the side of the Fatherland. Within a few days the
deceptive smoke-screen of that infamous national betrayal had vanished
into thin air and the Jewish bosses suddenly found themselves alone and
deserted. It was as if not a vestige had been left of that folly and
madness with which the masses of the German people had been inoculated
for sixty years. That was indeed an evil day for the betrayers of German
Labour. The moment, however, that the leaders realized the danger which
threatened them they pulled the magic cap of deceit over their ears and,
without being identified, played the part of mimes in the national
reawakening.

The time seemed to have arrived for proceeding against the whole Jewish
gang of public pests. Then it was that action should have been taken
regardless of any consequent whining or protestation. At one stroke, in
the August of 1914, all the empty nonsense about international
solidarity was knocked out of the heads of the German working classes. A
few weeks later, instead of this stupid talk sounding in their ears,
they heard the noise of American-manufactured shrapnel bursting above
the heads of the marching columns, as a symbol of international
comradeship. Now that the German worker had rediscovered the road to
nationhood, it ought to have been the duty of any Government which had
the care of the people in its keeping, to take this opportunity of
mercilessly rooting out everything that was opposed to the national
spirit.

While the flower of the nation's manhood was dying at the front, there
was time enough at home at least to exterminate this vermin. But,
instead of doing so, His Majesty the Kaiser held out his hand to these
hoary criminals, thus assuring them his protection and allowing them to
regain their mental composure.

And so the viper could begin his work again. This time, however, more
carefully than before, but still more destructively. While honest people
dreamt of reconciliation these perjured criminals were making
preparations for a revolution.

Naturally I was distressed at the half-measures which were adopted at
that time; but I never thought it possible that the final consequences
could have been so disastrous?

But what should have been done then? Throw the ringleaders into gaol,
prosecute them and rid the nation of them? Uncompromising military
measures should have been adopted to root out the evil. Parties should
have been abolished and the Reichstag brought to its senses at the point
of the bayonet, if necessary. It would have been still better if the
Reichstag had been dissolved immediately. Just as the Republic to-day
dissolves the parties when it wants to, so in those days there was even
more justification for applying that measure, seeing that the very
existence of the nation was at stake. Of course this suggestion would
give rise to the question: Is it possible to eradicate ideas by force of
arms? Could a WELTANSCHAUUNG be attacked by means of physical force?

At that time I turned these questions over and over again in my mind. By
studying analogous cases, exemplified in history, particularly those
which had arisen from religious circumstances, I came to the following
fundamental conclusion:

Ideas and philosophical systems as well as movements grounded on a
definite spiritual foundation, whether true or not, can never be broken
by the use of force after a certain stage, except on one condition:
namely, that this use of force is in the service of a new idea or
WELTANSCHAUUNG which burns with a new flame.

The application of force alone, without moral support based on a
spiritual concept, can never bring about the destruction of an idea or
arrest the propagation of it, unless one is ready and able ruthlessly to
exterminate the last upholders of that idea even to a man, and also wipe
out any tradition which it may tend to leave behind. Now in the majority
of cases the result of such a course has been to exclude such a State,
either temporarily or for ever, from the comity of States that are of
political significance; but experience has also shown that such a
sanguinary method of extirpation arouses the better section of the
population under the persecuting power. As a matter of fact, every
persecution which has no spiritual motives to support it is morally
unjust and raises opposition among the best elements of the population;
so much so that these are driven more and more to champion the ideas
that are unjustly persecuted. With many individuals this arises from the
sheer spirit of opposition to every attempt at suppressing spiritual
things by brute force.

In this way the number of convinced adherents of the persecuted doctrine
increases as the persecution progresses. Hence the total destruction of
a new doctrine can be accomplished only by a vast plan of extermination;
but this, in the final analysis, means the loss of some of the best
blood in a nation or State. And that blood is then avenged, because such
an internal and total clean-up brings about the collapse of the nation's
strength. And such a procedure is always condemned to futility from the
very start if the attacked doctrine should happen to have spread beyond
a small circle.

That is why in this case, as with all other growths, the doctrine can be
exterminated in its earliest stages. As time goes on its powers of
resistance increase, until at the approach of age it gives way to
younger elements, but under another form and from other motives.

The fact remains that nearly all attempts to exterminate a doctrine,
without having some spiritual basis of attack against it, and also to
wipe out all the organizations it has created, have led in many cases to
the very opposite being achieved; and that for the following reasons:

When sheer force is used to combat the spread of a doctrine, then that
force must be employed systematically and persistently. This means that
the chances of success in the suppression of a doctrine lie only in the
persistent and uniform application of the methods chosen. The moment
hesitation is shown, and periods of tolerance alternate with the
application of force, the doctrine against which these measures are
directed will not only recover strength but every successive persecution
will bring to its support new adherents who have been shocked by the
oppressive methods employed. The old adherents will become more
embittered and their allegiance will thereby be strengthened. Therefore
when force is employed success is dependent on the consistent manner in
which it is used. This persistence, however, is nothing less than the
product of definite spiritual convictions. Every form of force that is
not supported by a spiritual backing will be always indecisive and
uncertain. Such a force lacks the stability that can be found only in a
WELTANSCHAUUNG which has devoted champions. Such a force is the
expression of the individual energies; therefore it is from time to time
dependent on the change of persons in whose hands it is employed and
also on their characters and capacities.

But there is something else to be said: Every WELTANSCHAUUNG, whether
religious or political--and it is sometimes difficult to say where the
one ends and the other begins--fights not so much for the negative
destruction of the opposing world of ideas as for the positive
realization of its own ideas. Thus its struggle lies in attack rather
than in defence. It has the advantage of knowing where its objective
lies, as this objective represents the realization of its own ideas.
Inversely, it is difficult to say when the negative aim for the
destruction of a hostile doctrine is reached and secured. For this
reason alone a WELTANSCHAUUNG which is of an aggressive character is
more definite in plan and more powerful and decisive in action than a
WELTANSCHAUUNG which takes up a merely defensive attitude. If force be
used to combat a spiritual power, that force remains a defensive measure
only so long as the wielders of it are not the standard-bearers and
apostles of a new spiritual doctrine.

To sum up, the following must be borne in mind: That every attempt to
combat a WELTANSCHAUUNG by means of force will turn out futile in the
end if the struggle fails to take the form of an offensive for the
establishment of an entirely new spiritual order of' things. It is only
in the struggle between two Weltan-schauungen that physical force,
consistently and ruthlessly applied, will eventually turn the scales in
its own favour. It was here that the fight against Marxism had hitherto
failed.

This was also the reason why Bismarck's anti-socialist legislation
failed and was bound to fail in the long run, despite everything. It
lacked the basis of a new WELTANSCHAUUNG for whose development and
extension the struggle might have been taken up. To say that the serving
up of drivel about a so-called 'State-Authority' or 'Law-and-Order' was
an adequate foundation for the spiritual driving force in a
life-or-death struggle is only what one would expect to hear from the
wiseacres in high official positions.

It was because there were no adequate spiritual motives back of this
offensive that Bismarck was compelled to hand over the administration of
his socialist legislative measures to the judgment and approval of those
circles which were themselves the product of the Marxist teaching. Thus
a very ludicrous state of affairs prevailed when the Iron Chancellor
surrendered the fate of his struggle against Marxism to the goodwill of
the bourgeois democracy. He left the goat to take care of the garden.
But this was only the necessary result of the failure to find a
fundamentally new WELTANSCHAUUNG which would attract devoted champions
to its cause and could be established on the ground from which Marxism
had been driven out. And thus the result of the Bismarckian campaign was
deplorable.

During the World War, or at the beginning of it, were the conditions any
different? Unfortunately, they were not.

The more I then pondered over the necessity for a change in the attitude
of the executive government towards Social-Democracy, as the
incorporation of contemporary Marxism, the more I realized the want of a
practical substitute for this doctrine. Supposing Social-Democracy were
overthrown, what had one to offer the masses in its stead? Not a single
movement existed which promised any success in attracting vast numbers
of workers who would be now more or less without leaders, and holding
these workers in its train. It is nonsensical to imagine that the
international fanatic who has just severed his connection with a class
party would forthwith join a bourgeois party, or, in other words,
another class organization. For however unsatisfactory these various
organizations may appear to be, it cannot be denied that bourgeois
politicians look on the distinction between classes as a very important
factor in social life, provided it does not turn out politically
disadvantageous to them. If they deny this fact they show themselves not
only impudent but also mendacious.

Generally speaking, one should guard against considering the broad
masses more stupid than they really are. In political matters it
frequently happens that feeling judges more correctly than intellect.
But the opinion that this feeling on the part of the masses is
sufficient proof of their stupid international attitude can be
immediately and definitely refuted by the simple fact that pacifist
democracy is no less fatuous, though it draws its supporters almost
exclusively from bourgeois circles. As long as millions of citizens
daily gulp down what the social-democratic Press tells them, it ill
becomes the 'Masters' to joke at the expense of the 'Comrades'; for in
the long run they all swallow the same hash, even though it be dished up
with different spices. In both cases the cook is one and the same--the
Jew.

One should be careful about contradicting established facts. It is an
undeniable fact that the class question has nothing to do with questions
concerning ideals, though that dope is administered at election time.
Class arrogance among a large section of our people, as well as a
prevailing tendency to look down on the manual labourer, are obvious
facts and not the fancies of some day-dreamer. Nevertheless it only
illustrates the mentality of our so-called intellectual circles, that
they have not yet grasped the fact that circumstances which are
incapable of preventing the growth of such a plague as Marxism are
certainly not capable of restoring what has been lost.

The bourgeois' parties--a name coined by themselves--will never again be
able to win over and hold the proletarian masses in their train. That is
because two worlds stand opposed to one another here, in part naturally
and in part artificially divided. These two camps have one leading
thought, and that is that they must fight one another. But in such a
fight the younger will come off victorious; and that is Marxism.

In 1914 a fight against Social-Democracy was indeed quite conceivable.
But the lack of any practical substitute made it doubtful how long the
fight could be kept up. In this respect there was a gaping void.

Long before the War I was of the same opinion and that was the reason
why I could not decide to join any of the parties then existing. During
the course of the World War my conviction was still further confirmed by
the manifest impossibility of fighting Social-Democracy in anything like
a thorough way: because for that purpose there should have been a
movement that was something more than a mere 'parliamentary' party, and
there was none such.

I frequently discussed that want with my intimate comrades. And it was
then that I first conceived the idea of taking up political work later
on. As I have often assured my friends, it was just this that induced me
to become active on the public hustings after the War, in addition to my
professional work. And I am sure that this decision was arrived at after
much earnest thought.




CHAPTER VI



WAR PROPAGANDA


In watching the course of political events I was always struck by the
active part which propaganda played in them. I saw that it was an
instrument, which the Marxist Socialists knew how to handle in a
masterly way and how to put it to practical uses. Thus I soon came to
realize that the right use of propaganda was an art in itself and that
this art was practically unknown to our bourgeois parties. The
Christian-Socialist Party alone, especially in Lueger's time, showed a
certain efficiency in the employment of this instrument and owed much of
their success to it.

It was during the War, however, that we had the best chance of
estimating the tremendous results which could be obtained by a
propagandist system properly carried out. Here again, unfortunately,
everything was left to the other side, the work done on our side being
worse than insignificant. It was the total failure of the whole German
system of information--a failure which was perfectly obvious to every
soldier--that urged me to consider the problem of propaganda in a
comprehensive way. I had ample opportunity to learn a practical lesson
in this matter; for unfortunately it was only too well taught us by the
enemy. The lack on our side was exploited by the enemy in such an
efficient manner that one could say it showed itself as a real work of
genius. In that propaganda carried on by the enemy I found admirable
sources of instruction. The lesson to be learned from this had
unfortunately no attraction for the geniuses on our own side. They were
simply above all such things, too clever to accept any teaching. Anyhow
they did not honestly wish to learn anything.

Had we any propaganda at all? Alas, I can reply only in the negative.
All that was undertaken in this direction was so utterly inadequate and
misconceived from the very beginning that not only did it prove useless
but at times harmful. In substance it was insufficient. Psychologically
it was all wrong. Anybody who had carefully investigated the German
propaganda must have formed that judgment of it. Our people did not seem
to be clear even about the primary question itself: Whether propaganda
is a means or an end?

Propaganda is a means and must, therefore, be judged in relation to the
end it is intended to serve. It must be organized in such a way as to be
capable of attaining its objective. And, as it is quite clear that the
importance of the objective may vary from the standpoint of general
necessity, the essential internal character of the propaganda must vary
accordingly. The cause for which we fought during the War was the
noblest and highest that man could strive for. We were fighting for the
freedom and independence of our country, for the security of our future
welfare and the honour of the nation. Despite all views to the contrary,
this honour does actually exist, or rather it will have to exist; for a
nation without honour will sooner or later lose its freedom and
independence. This is in accordance with the ruling of a higher justice,
for a generation of poltroons is not entitled to freedom. He who would
be a slave cannot have honour; for such honour would soon become an
object of general scorn.

Germany was waging war for its very existence. The purpose of its war
propaganda should have been to strengthen the fighting spirit in that
struggle and help it to victory.

But when nations are fighting for their existence on this earth, when
the question of 'to be or not to be' has to be answered, then all humane
and aesthetic considerations must be set aside; for these ideals do not
exist of themselves somewhere in the air but are the product of man's
creative imagination and disappear when he disappears. Nature knows
nothing of them. Moreover, they are characteristic of only a small
number of nations, or rather of races, and their value depends on the
measure in which they spring from the racial feeling of the latter.
Humane and aesthetic ideals will disappear from the inhabited earth when
those races disappear which are the creators and standard-bearers of
them.

All such ideals are only of secondary importance when a nation is
struggling for its existence. They must be prevented from entering into
the struggle the moment they threaten to weaken the stamina of the
nation that is waging war. That is always the only visible effect
whereby their place in the struggle is to be judged.

In regard to the part played by humane feeling, Moltke stated that in
time of war the essential thing is to get a decision as quickly as
possible and that the most ruthless methods of fighting are at the same
time the most humane. When people attempt to answer this reasoning by
highfalutin talk about aesthetics, etc., only one answer can be given. It
is that the vital questions involved in the struggle of a nation for its
existence must not be subordinated to any aesthetic considerations. The
yoke of slavery is and always will remain the most unpleasant experience
that mankind can endure. Do the Schwabing (Note 12) decadents look upon
Germany's lot to-day as 'aesthetic'? Of course, one doesn't discuss such
a question with the Jews, because they are the modern inventors of this
cultural perfume. Their very existence is an incarnate denial of the
beauty of God's image in His creation.

[Note 12. Schwabing is the artistic quarter in Munich where artists have
their studios and litterateurs, especially of the Bohemian class,
foregather.]

Since these ideas of what is beautiful and humane have no place in
warfare, they are not to be used as standards of war propaganda.

During the War, propaganda was a means to an end. And this end was the
struggle for existence of the German nation. Propaganda, therefore,
should have been regarded from the standpoint of its utility for that
purpose. The most cruel weapons were then the most humane, provided they
helped towards a speedier decision; and only those methods were good and
beautiful which helped towards securing the dignity and freedom of the
nation. Such was the only possible attitude to adopt towards war
propaganda in the life-or-death struggle.

If those in what are called positions of authority had realized this
there would have been no uncertainty about the form and employment of
war propaganda as a weapon; for it is nothing but a weapon, and indeed a
most terrifying weapon in the hands of those who know how to use it.

The second question of decisive importance is this: To whom should
propaganda be made to appeal? To the educated intellectual classes? Or
to the less intellectual?

Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people.
For the intellectual classes, or what are called the intellectual
classes to-day, propaganda is not suited, but only scientific
exposition. Propaganda has as little to do with science as an
advertisement poster has to do with art, as far as concerns the form in
which it presents its message. The art of the advertisement poster
consists in the ability of the designer to attract the attention of the
crowd through the form and colours he chooses. The advertisement poster
announcing an exhibition of art has no other aim than to convince the
public of the importance of the exhibition. The better it does that, the
better is the art of the poster as such. Being meant accordingly to
impress upon the public the meaning of the exposition, the poster can
never take the place of the artistic objects displayed in the exposition
hall. They are something entirely different. Therefore. those who wish
to study the artistic display must study something that is quite
different from the poster; indeed for that purpose a mere wandering
through the exhibition galleries is of no use. The student of art must
carefully and thoroughly study each exhibit in order slowly to form a
judicious opinion about it.

The situation is the same in regard to what we understand by the word,
propaganda. The purpose of propaganda is not the personal instruction of
the individual, but rather to attract public attention to certain
things, the importance of which can be brought home to the masses only
by this means.

Here the art of propaganda consists in putting a matter so clearly and
forcibly before the minds of the people as to create a general
conviction regarding the reality of a certain fact, the necessity of
certain things and the just character of something that is essential.
But as this art is not an end in itself and because its purpose must be
exactly that of the advertisement poster, to attract the attention of
the masses and not by any means to dispense individual instructions to
those who already have an educated opinion on things or who wish to form
such an opinion on grounds of objective study--because that is not the
purpose of propaganda, it must appeal to the feelings of the public
rather than to their reasoning powers.

All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its
intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least
intellectual of those to whom it is directed. Thus its purely
intellectual level will have to be that of the lowest mental common
denominator among the public it is desired to reach. When there is
question of bringing a whole nation within the circle of its influence,
as happens in the case of war propaganda, then too much attention cannot
be paid to the necessity of avoiding a high level, which presupposes a
relatively high degree of intelligence among the public.

The more modest the scientific tenor of this propaganda and the more it
is addressed exclusively to public sentiment, the more decisive will be
its success. This is the best test of the value of a propaganda, and not
the approbation of a small group of intellectuals or artistic people.

The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the
imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in
finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the
attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. That this is
not understood by those among us whose wits are supposed to have been
sharpened to the highest pitch is only another proof of their vanity or
mental inertia.

Once we have understood how necessary it is to concentrate the
persuasive forces of propaganda on the broad masses of the people, the
following lessons result therefrom:

That it is a mistake to organize the direct propaganda as if it were a
manifold system of scientific instruction.

The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their
understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such
being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare
essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped
formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very
last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. If
this principle be forgotten and if an attempt be made to be abstract and
general, the propaganda will turn out ineffective; for the public will
not be able to digest or retain what is offered to them in this way.
Therefore, the greater the scope of the message that has to be
presented, the more necessary it is for the propaganda to discover that
plan of action which is psychologically the most efficient.

It was, for example, a fundamental mistake to ridicule the worth of the
enemy as the Austrian and German comic papers made a chief point of
doing in their propaganda. The very principle here is a mistaken one;
for, when they came face to face with the enemy, our soldiers had quite
a different impression. Therefore, the mistake had disastrous results.
Once the German soldier realised what a tough enemy he had to fight he
felt that he had been deceived by the manufacturers of the information
which had been given him. Therefore, instead of strengthening and
stimulating his fighting spirit, this information had quite the contrary
effect. Finally he lost heart.

On the other hand, British and American war propaganda was
psychologically efficient. By picturing the Germans to their own people
as Barbarians and Huns, they were preparing their soldiers for the
horrors of war and safeguarding them against illusions. The most
terrific weapons which those soldiers encountered in the field merely
confirmed the information that they had already received and their
belief in the truth of the assertions made by their respective
governments was accordingly reinforced. Thus their rage and hatred
against the infamous foe was increased. The terrible havoc caused by the
German weapons of war was only another illustration of the Hunnish
brutality of those barbarians; whereas on the side of the Entente no
time was left the soldiers to meditate on the similar havoc which their
own weapons were capable of. Thus the British soldier was never allowed
to feel that the information which he received at home was untrue.
Unfortunately the opposite was the case with the Germans, who finally
wound up by rejecting everything from home as pure swindle and humbug.
This result was made possible because at home they thought that the work
of propaganda could be entrusted to the first ass that came along,
braying of his own special talents, and they had no conception of the
fact that propaganda demands the most skilled brains that can be found.

Thus the German war propaganda afforded us an incomparable example of
how the work of 'enlightenment' should not be done and how such an
example was the result of an entire failure to take any psychological
considerations whatsoever into account.

From the enemy, however, a fund of valuable knowledge could be gained by
those who kept their eyes open, whose powers of perception had not yet
become sclerotic, and who during four-and-a-half years had to experience
the perpetual flood of enemy propaganda.

The worst of all was that our people did not understand the very first
condition which has to be fulfilled in every kind of propaganda; namely,
a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be
dealt with. In this regard so many errors were committed, even from the
very beginning of the war, that it was justifiable to doubt whether so
much folly could be attributed solely to the stupidity of people in
higher quarters.

What, for example, should we say of a poster which purported to
advertise some new brand of soap by insisting on the excellent qualities
of the competitive brands? We should naturally shake our heads. And it
ought to be just the same in a similar kind of political advertisement.
The aim of propaganda is not to try to pass judgment on conflicting
rights, giving each its due, but exclusively to emphasize the right
which we are asserting. Propaganda must not investigate the truth
objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side,
present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must
present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own
side.

It was a fundamental mistake to discuss the question of who was
responsible for the outbreak of the war and declare that the sole
responsibility could not be attributed to Germany. The sole
responsibility should have been laid on the shoulders of the enemy,
without any discussion whatsoever.

And what was the consequence of these half-measures? The broad masses of
the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public
jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned
judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who
are constantly wavering between one idea and another. As soon as our own
propaganda made the slightest suggestion that the enemy had a certain
amount of justice on his side, then we laid down the basis on which the
justice of our own cause could be questioned. The masses are not in a
position to discern where the enemy's fault ends and where our own
begins. In such a case they become hesitant and distrustful, especially
when the enemy does not make the same mistake but heaps all the blame on
his adversary. Could there be any clearer proof of this than the fact
that finally our own people believed what was said by the enemy's
propaganda, which was uniform and consistent in its assertions, rather
than what our own propaganda said? And that, of course, was increased by
the mania for objectivity which addicts our people. Everybody began to
be careful about doing an injustice to the enemy, even at the cost of
seriously injuring, and even ruining his own people and State.

Naturally the masses were not conscious of the fact that those in
authority had failed to study the subject from this angle.

The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and
outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than
by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple
and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the
negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth
and falsehood. Its notions are never partly this and partly that.
English propaganda especially understood this in a marvellous way and
put what they understood into practice. They allowed no half-measures
which might have given rise to some doubt.

Proof of how brilliantly they understood that the feeling of the masses
is something primitive was shown in their policy of publishing tales of
horror and outrages which fitted in with the real horrors of the time,
thereby cleverly and ruthlessly preparing the ground for moral
solidarity at the front, even in times of great defeats. Further, the
way in which they pilloried the German enemy as solely responsible for
the war--which was a brutal and absolute falsehood--and the way in which
they proclaimed his guilt was excellently calculated to reach the
masses, realizing that these are always extremist in their feelings. And
thus it was that this atrocious lie was positively believed.

The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda is well illustrated by the
fact that after four-and-a-half years, not only was the enemy still
carrying on his propagandist work, but it was already undermining the
stamina of our people at home.

That our propaganda did not achieve similar results is not to be
wondered at, because it had the germs of inefficiency lodged in its very
being by reason of its ambiguity. And because of the very nature of its
content one could not expect it to make the necessary impression on the
masses. Only our feckless 'statesmen' could have imagined that on
pacifists slops of such a kind the enthusiasm could be nourished which
is necessary to enkindle that spirit which leads men to die for their
country.

And so this product of ours was not only worthless but detrimental.

No matter what an amount of talent employed in the organization of
propaganda, it will have no result if due account is not taken of these
fundamental principles. Propaganda must be limited to a few simple
themes and these must be represented again and again. Here, as in
innumerable other cases, perseverance is the first and most important
condition of success.

Particularly in the field of propaganda, placid aesthetes and blase
intellectuals should never be allowed to take the lead. The former would
readily transform the impressive character of real propaganda into
something suitable only for literary tea parties. As to the second class
of people, one must always beware of this pest; for, in consequence of
their insensibility to normal impressions, they are constantly seeking
new excitements.

Such people grow sick and tired of everything. They always long for
change and will always be incapable of putting themselves in the
position of picturing the wants of their less callous fellow-creatures
in their immediate neighbourhood, let alone trying to understand them.
The blase intellectuals are always the first to criticize propaganda, or
rather its message, because this appears to them to be outmoded and
trivial. They are always looking for something new, always yearning for
change; and thus they become the mortal enemies of every effort that may
be made to influence the masses in an effective way. The moment the
organization and message of a propagandist movement begins to be
orientated according to their tastes it becomes incoherent and
scattered.

It is not the purpose of propaganda to create a series of alterations in
sentiment with a view to pleasing these blase gentry. Its chief function
is to convince the masses, whose slowness of understanding needs to be
given time in order that they may absorb information; and only constant
repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of
the crowd.

Every change that is made in the subject of a propagandist message must
always emphasize the same conclusion. The leading slogan must of course
be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one
must always return to the assertion of the same formula. In this way
alone can propaganda be consistent and dynamic in its effects.

Only by following these general lines and sticking to them steadfastly,
with uniform and concise emphasis, can final success be reached. Then
one will be rewarded by the surprising and almost incredible results
that such a persistent policy secures.

The success of any advertisement, whether of a business or political
nature, depends on the consistency and perseverance with which it is
employed.

In this respect also the propaganda organized by our enemies set us an
excellent example. It confined itself to a few themes, which were meant
exclusively for mass consumption, and it repeated these themes with
untiring perseverance. Once these fundamental themes and the manner of
placing them before the world were recognized as effective, they adhered
to them without the slightest alteration for the whole duration of the
War. At first all of it appeared to be idiotic in its impudent
assertiveness. Later on it was looked upon as disturbing, but finally it
was believed.

But in England they came to understand something further: namely, that
the possibility of success in the use of this spiritual weapon consists
in the mass employment of it, and that when employed in this way it
brings full returns for the large expenses incurred.

In England propaganda was regarded as a weapon of the first order,
whereas with us it represented the last hope of a livelihood for our
unemployed politicians and a snug job for shirkers of the modest hero
type.

Taken all in all, its results were negative.




CHAPTER VII


THE REVOLUTION


In 1915 the enemy started his propaganda among our soldiers. From 1916
onwards it steadily became more intensive, and at the beginning of 1918
it had swollen into a storm flood. One could now judge the effects of
this proselytizing movement step by step. Gradually our soldiers began
to think just in the way the enemy wished them to think. On the German
side there was no counter-propaganda.

At that time the army authorities, under our able and resolute
Commander, were willing and ready to take up the fight in the propaganda
domain also, but unfortunately they did not have the necessary means to
carry that intention into effect. Moreover, the army authorities would
have made a psychological mistake had they undertaken this task of
mental training. To be efficacious it had come from the home front. For
only thus could it be successful among men who for nearly four years now
had been performing immortal deeds of heroism and undergoing all sorts
of privations for the sake of that home. But what were the people at
home doing? Was their failure to act merely due to unintelligence or bad
faith?

In the midsummer of 1918, after the evacuation of the southern bank of
the hearne, the German Press adopted a policy which was so woefully
inopportune, and even criminally stupid, that I used to ask myself a
question which made me more and more furious day after day: Is it really
true that we have nobody who will dare to put an end to this process of
spiritual sabotage which is being carried on among our heroic troops?

What happened in France during those days of 1914, when our armies
invaded that country and were marching in triumph from one victory to
another? What happened in Italy when their armies collapsed on the
Isonzo front? What happened in France again during the spring of 1918,
when German divisions took the main French positions by storm and heavy
long-distance artillery bombarded Paris?

How they whipped up the flagging courage of those troops who were
retreating and fanned the fires of national enthusiasm among them! How
their propaganda and their marvellous aptitude in the exercise of
mass-influence reawakened the fighting spirit in that broken front and
hammered into the heads of the soldiers a, firm belief in final victory!

Meanwhile, what were our people doing in this sphere? Nothing, or even
worse than nothing. Again and again I used to become enraged and
indignant as I read the latest papers and realized the nature of the
mass-murder they were committing: through their influence on the minds
of the people and the soldiers. More than once I was tormented by the
thought that if Providence had put the conduct of German propaganda into
my hands, instead of into the hands of those incompetent and even
criminal ignoramuses and weaklings, the outcome of the struggle might
have been different.

During those months I felt for the first time that Fate was dealing
adversely with me in keeping me on the fighting front and in a position
where any chance bullet from some nigger or other might finish me,
whereas I could have done the Fatherland a real service in another
sphere. For I was then presumptuous enough to believe that I would have
been successful in managing the propaganda business.

But I was a being without a name, one among eight millions. Hence it was
better for me to keep my mouth shut and do my duty as well as I could in
the position to which I had been assigned.

In the summer of 1915 the first enemy leaflets were dropped on our
trenches. They all told more or less the same story, with some
variations in the form of it. The story was that distress was steadily
on the increase in Germany; that the War would last indefinitely; that
the prospect of victory for us was becoming fainter day after day; that
the people at home were yearning for peace, but that 'Militarism' and
the 'Kaiser' would not permit it; that the world--which knew this very
well--was not waging war against the German people but only against the
man who was exclusively responsible, the Kaiser; that until this enemy
of world-peace was removed there could be no end to the conflict; but
that when the War was over the liberal and democratic nations would
receive the Germans as colleagues in the League for World Peace. This
would be done the moment 'Prussian Militarism' had been finally
destroyed.

To illustrate and substantiate all these statements, the leaflets very
often contained 'Letters from Home', the contents of which appeared to
confirm the enemy's propagandist message.

Generally speaking, we only laughed at all these efforts. The leaflets
were read, sent to base headquarters, then forgotten until a favourable
wind once again blew a fresh contingent into the trenches. These were
mostly dropped from aeroplanes which were used specially for that
purpose.

One feature of this propaganda was very striking. It was that in
sections where Bavarian troops were stationed every effort was made by
the enemy propagandists to stir up feeling against the Prussians,
assuring the soldiers that Prussia and Prussia alone was the guilty
party who was responsible for bringing on and continuing the War, and
that there was no hostility whatsoever towards the Bavarians; but that
there could be no possibility of coming to their assistance so long as
they continued to serve Prussian interests and helped to pull the
Prussian chestnuts out of the fire.

This persistent propaganda began to have a real influence on our
soldiers in 1915. The feeling against Prussia grew quite noticeable
among the Bavarian troops, but those in authority did nothing to
counteract it. This was something more than a mere crime of omission;
for sooner or later not only the Prussians were bound to have to atone
severely for it but the whole German nation and consequently the
Bavarians themselves also.

In this direction the enemy propaganda began to achieve undoubted
success from 1916 onwards.

In a similar way letters coming directly from home had long since been
exercising their effect. There was now no further necessity for the
enemy to broadcast such letters in leaflet form. And also against this
influence from home nothing was done except a few supremely stupid
'warnings' uttered by the executive government. The whole front was
drenched in this poison which thoughtless women at home sent out,
without suspecting for a moment that the enemy's chances of final
victory were thus strengthened or that the sufferings of their own men
at the front were thus being prolonged and rendered more severe. These
stupid letters written by German women eventually cost the lives of
hundreds of thousands of our men.

Thus in 1916 several distressing phenomena were already manifest. The
whole front was complaining and grousing, discontented over many things
and often justifiably so. While they were hungry and yet patient, and
their relatives at home were in distress, in other quarters there was
feasting and revelry. Yes; even on the front itself everything was not
as it ought to have been in this regard.

Even in the early stages of the war the soldiers were sometimes prone to
complain; but such criticism was confined to 'internal affairs'. The man
who at one moment groused and grumbled ceased his murmur after a few
moments and went about his duty silently, as if everything were in
order. The company which had given signs of discontent a moment earlier
hung on now to its bit of trench, defending it tooth and nail, as if
Germany's fate depended on these few hundred yards of mud and
shell-holes. The glorious old army was still at its post. A sudden
change in my own fortunes soon placed me in a position where I had
first-hand experience of the contrast between this old army and the home
front. At the end of September 1916 my division was sent into the Battle
of the Somme. For us this was the first of a series of heavy
engagements, and the impression created was that of a veritable inferno,
rather than war. Through weeks of incessant artillery bombardment we
stood firm, at times ceding a little ground but then taking it back
again, and never giving way. On October 7th, 1916, I was wounded but had
the luck of being able to get back to our lines and was then ordered to
be sent by ambulance train to Germany.

Two years had passed since I had left home, an almost endless period in
such circumstances. I could hardly imagine what Germans looked like
without uniforms. In the clearing hospital at Hermies I was startled
when I suddenly heard the voice of a German woman who was acting as
nursing sister and talking with one of the wounded men lying near me.
Two years! And then this voice for the first time!

The nearer our ambulance train approached the German frontier the more
restless each one of us became. En route we recognised all these places
through which we passed two years before as young volunteers--Brussels,
Louvain, Liège--and finally we thought we recognized the first German
homestead, with its familiar high gables and picturesque
window-shutters. Home!

What a change! From the mud of the Somme battlefields to the spotless
white beds in this wonderful building. One hesitated at first before
entering them. It was only by slow stages that one could grow accustomed
to this new world again. But unfortunately there were certain other
aspects also in which this new world was different.

The spirit of the army at the front appeared to be out of place here.
For the first time I encountered something which up to then was unknown
at the front: namely, boasting of one's own cowardice. For, though we
certainly heard complaining and grousing at the front, this was never in
the spirit of any agitation to insubordination and certainly not an
attempt to glorify one's fear. No; there at the front a coward was a
coward and nothing else, And the contempt which his weakness aroused in
the others was quite general, just as the real hero was admired all
round. But here in hospital the spirit was quite different in some
respects. Loudmouthed agitators were busy here in heaping ridicule on
the good soldier and painting the weak-kneed poltroon in glorious
colours. A couple of miserable human specimens were the ringleaders in
this process of defamation. One of them boasted of having intentionally
injured his hand in barbed-wire entanglements in order to get sent to
hospital. Although his wound was only a slight one, it appeared that he
had been here for a very long time and would be here interminably. Some
arrangement for him seemed to be worked by some sort of swindle, just as
he got sent here in the ambulance train through a swindle. This
pestilential specimen actually had the audacity to parade his knavery as
the manifestation of a courage which was superior to that of the brave
soldier who dies a hero's death. There were many who heard this talk in
silence; but there were others who expressed their assent to what the
fellow said.

Personally I was disgusted at the thought that a seditious agitator of
this kind should be allowed to remain in such an institution. What could
be done? The hospital authorities here must have known who and what he
was; and actually they did know. But still they did nothing about it.

As soon as I was able to walk once again I obtained leave to visit
Berlin.

Bitter want was in evidence everywhere. The metropolis, with its teeming
millions, was suffering from hunger. The talk that was current in the
various places of refreshment and hospices visited by the soldiers was
much the same as that in our hospital. The impression given was that
these agitators purposely singled out such places in order to spread
their views.

But in Munich conditions were far worse. After my discharge from
hospital, I was sent to a reserve battalion there. I felt as in some
strange town. Anger, discontent, complaints met one's ears wherever one
went. To a certain extent this was due to the infinitely maladroit
manner in which the soldiers who had returned from the front were
treated by the non-commissioned officers who had never seen a day's
active service and who on that account were partly incapable of adopting
the proper attitude towards the old soldiers. Naturally those old
soldiers displayed certain characteristics which had been developed from
the experiences in the trenches. The officers of the reserve units could
not understand these peculiarities, whereas the officer home from active
service was at least in a position to understand them for himself. As a
result he received more respect from the men than officers at the home
headquarters. But, apart from all this, the general spirit was
deplorable. The art of shirking was looked upon as almost a proof of
higher intelligence, and devotion to duty was considered a sign of
weakness or bigotry. Government offices were staffed by Jews. Almost
every clerk was a Jew and every Jew was a clerk. I was amazed at this
multitude of combatants who belonged to the chosen people and could not
help comparing it with their slender numbers in the fighting lines.

In the business world the situation was even worse. Here the Jews had
actually become 'indispensable'. Like leeches, they were slowly sucking
the blood from the pores of the national body. By means of newly floated
War Companies an instrument had been discovered whereby all national
trade was throttled so that no business could be carried on freely

Special emphasis was laid on the necessity for unhampered
centralization. Hence as early as 1916-17 practically all production was
under the control of Jewish finance.

But against whom was the anger of the people directed? It was then that
I already saw the fateful day approaching which must finally bring the
DEBACLE, unless timely preventive measures were taken.

While Jewry was busy despoiling the nation and tightening the screws of
its despotism, the work of inciting the people against the Prussians
increased. And just as nothing was done at the front to put a stop to
the venomous propaganda, so here at home no official steps were taken
against it. Nobody seemed capable of understanding that the collapse of
Prussia could never bring about the rise of Bavaria. On the contrary,
the collapse of the one must necessarily drag the other down with it.

This kind of behaviour affected me very deeply. In it I could see only a
clever Jewish trick for diverting public attention from themselves to
others. While Prussians and Bavarians were squabbling, the Jews were
taking away the sustenance of both from under their very noses. While
Prussians were being abused in Bavaria the Jews organized the revolution
and with one stroke smashed both Prussia and Bavaria.

I could not tolerate this execrable squabbling among people of the same
German stock and preferred to be at the front once again. Therefore,
just after my arrival in Munich I reported myself for service again. At
the beginning of March 1917 I rejoined my old regiment at the front.

Towards the end of 1917 it seemed as if we had got over the worst phases
of moral depression at the front. After the Russian collapse the whole
army recovered its courage and hope, and all were gradually becoming
more and more convinced that the struggle would end in our favour. We
could sing once again. The ravens were ceasing to croak. Faith in the
future of the Fatherland was once more in the ascendant.

The Italian collapse in the autumn of 1917 had a wonderful effect; for
this victory proved that it was possible to break through another front
besides the Russian. This inspiring thought now became dominant in the
minds of millions at the front and encouraged them to look forward with
confidence to the spring of 1918. It was quite obvious that the enemy
was in a state of depression. During this winter the front was somewhat
quieter than usual. But that was the calm before the storm.

Just when preparations were being made to launch a final offensive which
would bring this seemingly eternal struggle to an end, while endless
columns of transports were bringing men and munitions to the front, and
while the men were being trained for that final onslaught, then it was
that the greatest act of treachery during the whole War was accomplished
in Germany.

Germany must not win the War. At that moment when victory seemed ready
to alight on the German standards, a conspiracy was arranged for the
purpose of striking at the heart of the German spring offensive with one
blow from the rear and thus making victory impossible. A general strike
in the munition factories was organized.

If this conspiracy could achieve its purpose the German front would have
collapsed and the wishes of the VORWÄRTS (the organ of the
Social-Democratic Party) that this time victory should not take the side
of the German banners, would have been fulfilled. For want of munitions
the front would be broken through within a few weeks, the offensive
would be effectively stopped and the Entente saved. Then International
Finance would assume control over Germany and the internal objective of
the Marxist national betrayal would be achieved. That objective was the
destruction of the national economic system and the establishment of
international capitalistic domination in its stead. And this goal has
really been reached, thanks to the stupid credulity of the one side and
the unspeakable treachery of the other.

The munition strike, however, did not bring the final success that had
been hoped for: namely, to starve the front of ammunition. It lasted too
short a time for the lack of ammunitions as such to bring disaster to
the army, as was originally planned. But the moral damage was much more
terrible.

In the first place. what was the army fighting for if the people at home
did not wish it to be victorious? For whom then were these enormous
sacrifices and privations being made and endured? Must the soldiers
fight for victory while the home front goes on strike against it?

In the second place, what effect did this move have on the enemy?

In the winter of 1917-18 dark clouds hovered in the firmament of the
Entente. For nearly four years onslaught after onslaught has been made
against the German giant, but they failed to bring him to the ground. He
had to keep them at bay with one arm that held the defensive shield
because his other arm had to be free to wield the sword against his
enemies, now in the East and now in the South. But at last these enemies
were overcome and his rear was now free for the conflict in the West.
Rivers of blood had been shed for the accomplishment of that task; but
now the sword was free to combine in battle with the shield on the
Western Front. And since the enemy had hitherto failed to break the
German defence here, the Germans themselves had now to launch the
attack. The enemy feared and trembled before the prospect of this German
victory.

At Paris and London conferences followed one another in unending series.
Even the enemy propaganda encountered difficulties. It was no longer so
easy to demonstrate that the prospect of a German victory was hopeless.
A prudent silence reigned at the front, even among the troops of the
Entente. The insolence of their masters had suddenly subsided. A
disturbing truth began to dawn on them. Their opinion of the German
soldier had changed. Hitherto they were able to picture him as a kind of
fool whose end would be destruction; but now they found themselves face
to face with the soldier who had overcome their Russian ally. The policy
of restricting the offensive to the East, which had been imposed on the
German military authorities by the necessities of the situation, now
seemed to the Entente as a tactical stroke of genius. For three years
these Germans had been battering away at the Russian front without any
apparent success at first. Those fruitless efforts were almost sneered
at; for it was thought that in the long run the Russian giant would
triumph through sheer force of numbers. Germany would be worn out
through shedding so much blood. And facts appeared to confirm this hope.

Since the September days of 1914, when for the first time interminable
columns of Russian war prisoners poured into Germany after the Battle of
Tannenberg, it seemed as if the stream would never end but that as soon
as one army was defeated and routed another would take its place. The
supply of soldiers which the gigantic Empire placed at the disposal of
the Czar seemed inexhaustible; new victims were always at hand for the
holocaust of war. How long could Germany hold out in this competition?
Would not the day finally have to come when, after the last victory
which the Germans would achieve, there would still remain reserve armies
in Russia to be mustered for the final battle? And what then? According
to human standards a Russian victory over Germany might be delayed but
it would have to come in the long run.

All the hopes that had been based on Russia were now lost. The Ally who
had sacrificed the most blood on the altar of their mutual interests had
come to the end of his resources and lay prostrate before his
unrelenting foe. A feeling of terror and dismay came over the Entente
soldiers who had hitherto been buoyed up by blind faith. They feared the
coming spring. For, seeing that hitherto they had failed to break the
Germans when the latter could concentrate only part of the fighting
strength on the Western Front, how could they count on victory now that
the undivided forces of that amazing land of heroes appeared to be
gathered for a massed attack in the West?

The shadow of the events which had taken place in South Tyrol, the
spectre of General Cadorna's defeated armies, were reflected in the
gloomy faces of the Entente troops in Flanders. Faith in victory gave
way to fear of defeat to come.

Then, on those cold nights, when one almost heard the tread of the
German armies advancing to the great assault, and the decision was being
awaited in fear and trembling, suddenly a lurid light was set aglow in
Germany and sent its rays into the last shell-hole on the enemy's front.
At the very moment when the German divisions were receiving their final
orders for the great offensive a general strike broke out in Germany.

At first the world was dumbfounded. Then the enemy propaganda began
activities once again and pounced on this theme at the eleventh hour.
All of a sudden a means had come which could be utilized to revive the
sinking confidence of the Entente soldiers. The probabilities of victory
could now be presented as certain, and the anxious foreboding in regard
to coming events could now be transformed into a feeling of resolute
assurance. The regiments that had to bear the brunt of the Greatest
German onslaught in history could now be inspired with the conviction
that the final decision in this war would not be won by the audacity of
the German assault but rather by the powers of endurance on the side of
the defence. Let the Germans now have whatever victories they liked, the
revolution and not the victorious army was welcomed in the Fatherland.

British, French and American newspapers began to spread this belief
among their readers while a very ably managed propaganda encouraged the
morale of their troops at the front.

'Germany Facing Revolution! An Allied Victory Inevitable!' That was the
best medicine to set the staggering Poilu and Tommy on their feet once
again. Our rifles and machine-guns could now open fire once again; but
instead of effecting a panic-stricken retreat they were now met with a
determined resistance that was full of confidence.

That was the result of the strike in the munitions factories. Throughout
the enemy countries faith in victory was thus revived and strengthened,
and that paralysing feeling of despair which had hitherto made itself
felt on the Entente front was banished. Consequently the strike cost the
lives of thousands of German soldiers. But the despicable instigators of
that dastardly strike were candidates for the highest public positions
in the Germany of the Revolution.

At first it was apparently possible to overcome the repercussion of
these events on the German soldiers, but on the enemy's side they had a
lasting effect. Here the resistance had lost all the character of an
army fighting for a lost cause. In its place there was now a grim
determination to struggle through to victory. For, according to all
human rules of judgment, victory would now be assured if the Western
front could hold out against the German offensive even for only a few
months. The Allied parliaments recognized the possibilities of a better
future and voted huge sums of money for the continuation of the
propaganda which was employed for the purpose of breaking up the
internal cohesion of Germany.

It was my luck that I was able to take part in the first two offensives
and in the final offensive. These have left on me the most stupendous
impressions of my life--stupendous, because now for the last time the
struggle lost its defensive character and assumed the character of an
offensive, just as it was in 1914. A sigh of relief went up from the
German trenches and dug-outs when finally, after three years of
endurance in that inferno, the day for the settling of accounts had
come. Once again the lusty cheering of victorious battalions was heard,
as they hung the last crowns of the immortal laurel on the standards
which they consecrated to Victory. Once again the strains of patriotic
songs soared upwards to the heavens above the endless columns of
marching troops, and for the last time the Lord smiled on his ungrateful
children.

In the midsummer of 1918 a feeling of sultry oppression hung over the
front. At home they were quarrelling. About what? We heard a great deal
among various units at the front. The War was now a hopeless affair, and
only the foolhardy could think of victory. It was not the people but the
capitalists and the Monarchy who were interested in carrying on. Such
were the ideas that came from home and were discussed at the front.

At first this gave rise to only very slight reaction. What did universal
suffrage matter to us? Is this what we had been fighting for during four
years? It was a dastardly piece of robbery thus to filch from the graves
of our heroes the ideals for which they had fallen. It was not to the
slogan, 'Long Live Universal Suffrage,' that our troops in Flanders once
faced certain death but with the cry, 'DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES IN DER
WELT'. A small but by no means an unimportant difference. And the
majority of those who were shouting for this suffrage were absent when
it came to fighting for it. All this political rabble were strangers to
us at the front. During those days only a fraction of these
parliamentarian gentry were to be seen where honest Germans
foregathered.

The old soldiers who had fought at the front had little liking for those
new war aims of Messrs. Ebert, Scheidemann, Barth, Liebknecht and
others. We could not understand why, all of a sudden, the shirkers
should abrogate all executive powers to themselves, without having any
regard to the army.

From the very beginning I had my own definite personal views. I
intensely loathed the whole gang of miserable party politicians who had
betrayed the people. I had long ago realized that the interests of the
nation played only a very small part with this disreputable crew and
that what counted with them was the possibility of filling their own
empty pockets. My opinion was that those people thoroughly deserved to
be hanged, because they were ready to sacrifice the peace and if
necessary allow Germany to be defeated just to serve their own ends. To
consider their wishes would mean to sacrifice the interests of the
working classes for the benefit of a gang of thieves. To meet their
wishes meant that one should agree to sacrifice Germany.

Such, too, was the opinion still held by the majority of the army. But
the reinforcements which came from home were fast becoming worse and
worse; so much so that their arrival was a source of weakness rather
than of strength to our fighting forces. The young recruits in
particular were for the most part useless. Sometimes it was hard to
believe that they were sons of the same nation that sent its youth into
the battles that were fought round Ypres.

In August and September the symptoms of moral disintegration increased
more and more rapidly, although the enemy's offensive was not at all
comparable to the frightfulness of our own former defensive battles. In
comparison with this offensive the battles fought on the Somme and in
Flanders remained in our memories as the most terrible of all horrors.

At the end of September my division occupied, for the third time, those
positions which we had once taken by storm as young volunteers. What a
memory!

Here we had received our baptism of fire, in October and November 1914.
With a burning love of the homeland in their hearts and a song on their
lips, our young regiment went into action as if going to a dance. The
dearest blood was given freely here in the belief that it was shed to
protect the freedom and independence of the Fatherland.

In July 1917 we set foot for the second time on what we regarded as
sacred soil. Were not our best comrades at rest here, some of them
little more than boys--the soldiers who had rushed into death for their
country's sake, their eyes glowing with enthusiastic love.

The older ones among us, who had been with the regiment from the
beginning, were deeply moved as we stood on this sacred spot where we
had sworn 'Loyalty and Duty unto Death'. Three years ago the regiment
had taken this position by storm; now it was called upon to defend it in
a gruelling struggle.

With an artillery bombardment that lasted three weeks the English
prepared for their great offensive in Flanders. There the spirits of the
dead seemed to live again. The regiment dug itself into the mud, clung
to its shell-holes and craters, neither flinching nor wavering, but
growing smaller in numbers day after day. Finally the British launched
their attack on July 31st, 1917.

We were relieved in the beginning of August. The regiment had dwindled
down to a few companies, who staggered back, mud-crusted, more like
phantoms than human beings. Besides a few hundred yards of shell-holes,
death was the only reward which the English gained.

Now in the autumn of 1918 we stood for the third time on the ground we
had stormed in 1914. The village of Comines, which formerly had served
us as a base, was now within the fighting zone. Although little had
changed in the surrounding district itself, yet the men had become
different, somehow or other. They now talked politics. Like everywhere
else, the poison from home was having its effect here also. The young
drafts succumbed to it completely. They had come directly from home.

During the night of October 13th-14th, the British opened an attack with
gas on the front south of Ypres. They used the yellow gas whose effect
was unknown to us, at least from personal experience. I was destined to
experience it that very night. On a hill south of Werwick, in the
evening of October 13th, we were subjected for several hours to a heavy
bombardment with gas bombs, which continued throughout the night with
more or less intensity. About midnight a number of us were put out of
action, some for ever. Towards morning I also began to feel pain. It
increased with every quarter of an hour; and about seven o'clock my eyes
were scorching as I staggered back and delivered the last dispatch I was
destined to carry in this war. A few hours later my eyes were like
glowing coals and all was darkness around me.

I was sent into hospital at Pasewalk in Pomerania, and there it was that
I had to hear of the Revolution.

For a long time there had been something in the air which was
indefinable and repulsive. People were saying that something was bound
to happen within the next few weeks, although I could not imagine what
this meant. In the first instance I thought of a strike similar to the
one which had taken place in spring. Unfavourable rumours were
constantly coming from the Navy, which was said to be in a state of
ferment. But this seemed to be a fanciful creation of a few isolated
young people. It is true that at the hospital they were all talking abut
the end of the war and hoping that this was not far off, but nobody
thought that the decision would come immediately. I was not able to read
the newspapers.

In November the general tension increased. Then one day disaster broke
in upon us suddenly and without warning. Sailors came in motor-lorries
and called on us to rise in revolt. A few Jew-boys were the leaders in
that combat for the 'Liberty, Beauty, and Dignity' of our National
Being. Not one of them had seen active service at the front. Through the
medium of a hospital for venereal diseases these three Orientals had
been sent back home. Now their red rags were being hoisted here.

During the last few days I had begun to feel somewhat better. The
burning pain in the eye-sockets had become less severe. Gradually I was
able to distinguish the general outlines of my immediate surroundings.
And it was permissible to hope that at least I would recover my sight
sufficiently to be able to take up some profession later on. That I
would ever be able to draw or design once again was naturally out of the
question. Thus I was on the way to recovery when the frightful hour
came.

My first thought was that this outbreak of high treason was only a local
affair. I tried to enforce this belief among my comrades. My Bavarian
hospital mates, in particular, were readily responsive. Their
inclinations were anything but revolutionary. I could not imagine this
madness breaking out in Munich; for it seemed to me that loyalty to the
House of Wittelsbach was, after all, stronger than the will of a few
Jews. And so I could not help believing that this was merely a revolt in
the Navy and that it would be suppressed within the next few days.

With the next few days came the most astounding information of my life.
The rumours grew more and more persistent. I was told that what I had
considered to be a local affair was in reality a general revolution. In
addition to this, from the front came the shameful news that they wished
to capitulate! What! Was such a thing possible?

On November 10th the local pastor visited the hospital for the purpose
of delivering a short address. And that was how we came to know the
whole story.

I was in a fever of excitement as I listened to the address. The
reverend old gentleman seemed to be trembling when he informed us that
the House of Hohen-zollern should no longer wear the Imperial Crown,
that the Fatherland had become a 'Republic', that we should pray to the
Almighty not to withhold His blessing from the new order of things and
not to abandon our people in the days to come. In delivering this
message he could not do more than briefly express appreciation of the
Royal House, its services to Pomerania, to Prussia, indeed, to the whole
of the German Fatherland, and--here he began to weep. A feeling of
profound dismay fell on the people in that assembly, and I do not think
there was a single eye that withheld its tears. As for myself, I broke
down completely when the old gentleman tried to resume his story by
informing us that we must now end this long war, because the war was
lost, he said, and we were at the mercy of the victor. The Fatherland
would have to bear heavy burdens in the future. We were to accept the
terms of the Armistice and trust to the magnanimity of our former
enemies. It was impossible for me to stay and listen any longer.
Darkness surrounded me as I staggered and stumbled back to my ward and
buried my aching head between the blankets and pillow.

I had not cried since the day that I stood beside my mother's grave.
Whenever Fate dealt cruelly with me in my young days the spirit of
determination within me grew stronger and stronger. During all those
long years of war, when Death claimed many a true friend and comrade
from our ranks, to me it would have appeared sinful to have uttered a
word of complaint. Did they not die for Germany? And, finally, almost in
the last few days of that titanic struggle, when the waves of poison gas
enveloped me and began to penetrate my eyes, the thought of becoming
permanently blind unnerved me; but the voice of conscience cried out
immediately: Poor miserable fellow, will you start howling when there
are thousands of others whose lot is a hundred times worse than yours?
And so I accepted my misfortune in silence, realizing that this was the
only thing to be done and that personal suffering was nothing when
compared with the misfortune of one's country.

So all had been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations, in
vain the hunger and thirst for endless months, in vain those hours that
we stuck to our posts though the fear of death gripped our souls, and in
vain the deaths of two millions who fell in discharging this duty. Think
of those hundreds of thousands who set out with hearts full of faith in
their fatherland, and never returned; ought not their graves to open, so
that the spirits of those heroes bespattered with mud and blood should
come home and take vengeance on those who had so despicably betrayed the
greatest sacrifice which a human being can make for his country? Was it
for this that the soldiers died in August and September 1914, for this
that the volunteer regiments followed the old comrades in the autumn of
the same year? Was it for this that those boys of seventeen years of age
were mingled with the earth of Flanders? Was this meant to be the fruits
of the sacrifice which German mothers made for their Fatherland when,
with heavy hearts, they said good-bye to their sons who never returned?
Has all this been done in order to enable a gang of despicable criminals
to lay hands on the Fatherland?

Was this then what the German soldier struggled for through sweltering
heat and blinding snowstorm, enduring hunger and thirst and cold,
fatigued from sleepless nights and endless marches? Was it for this that
he lived through an inferno of artillery bombardments, lay gasping and
choking during gas attacks, neither flinching nor faltering, but
remaining staunch to the thought of defending the Fatherland against the
enemy? Certainly these heroes also deserved the epitaph:

Traveller, when you come to Germany, tell the Homeland that we lie
here, true to the Fatherland and faithful to our duty. (Note 13)

[Note 13. Here again we have the defenders of Thermopylae recalled as the
prototype of German valour in the Great War. Hitler's quotation is a
German variant of the couplet inscribed on the monument erected at
Thermopylae to the memory of Leonidas and his Spartan soldiers who fell
defending the Pass. As given by Herodotus, who claims that he saw the
inscription himself, the original text may be literally translated thus:

Go, tell the Spartans, thou who passeth by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.]

And at Home? But--was this the only sacrifice that we had to consider?
Was the Germany of the past a country of little worth? Did she not owe a
certain duty to her own history? Were we still worthy to partake in the
glory of the past? How could we justify this act to future generations?

What a gang of despicable and depraved criminals!

The more I tried then to glean some definite information of the terrible
events that had happened the more my head became afire with rage and
shame. What was all the pain I suffered in my eyes compared with this
tragedy?

The following days were terrible to bear, and the nights still worse. To
depend on the mercy of the enemy was a precept which only fools or
criminal liars could recommend. During those nights my hatred
increased--hatred for the orignators of this dastardly crime.

During the following days my own fate became clear to me. I was forced
now to scoff at the thought of my personal future, which hitherto had
been the cause of so much worry to me. Was it not ludicrous to think of
building up anything on such a foundation? Finally, it also became clear
to me that it was the inevitable that had happened, something which I
had feared for a long time, though I really did not have the heart to
believe it.

Emperor William II was the first German Emperor to offer the hand of
friendship to the Marxist leaders, not suspecting that they were
scoundrels without any sense of honour. While they held the imperial
hand in theirs, the other hand was already feeling for the dagger.

There is no such thing as coming to an understanding with the Jews. It
must be the hard-and-fast 'Either-Or.'

For my part I then decided that I would take up political work.




CHAPTER VIII



THE BEGINNING OF MY POLITICAL ACTIVITIES


Towards the end of November I returned to Munich. I went to the depot of
my regiment, which was now in the hands of the 'Soldiers' Councils'. As
the whole administration was quite repulsive to me, I decided to leave
it as soon as I possibly could. With my faithful war-comrade,
Ernst-Schmidt, I came to Traunstein and remained there until the camp
was broken up. In March 1919 we were back again in Munich.

The situation there could not last as it was. It tended irresistibly to
a further extension of the Revolution. Eisner's death served only to
hasten this development and finally led to the dictatorship of the
Councils--or, to put it more correctly, to a Jewish hegemony, which
turned out to be transitory but which was the original aim of those who
had contrived the Revolution.

At that juncture innumerable plans took shape in my mind. I spent whole
days pondering on the problem of what could be done, but unfortunately
every project had to give way before the hard fact that I was quite
unknown and therefore did not have even the first pre-requisite
necessary for effective action. Later on I shall explain the reasons why
I could not decide to join any of the parties then in existence.

As the new Soviet Revolution began to run its course in Munich my first
activities drew upon me the ill-will of the Central Council. In the
early morning of April 27th, 1919, I was to have been arrested; but the
three fellows who came to arrest me did not have the courage to face my
rifle and withdrew just as they had arrived.

A few days after the liberation of Munich I was ordered to appear before
the Inquiry Commission which had been set up in the 2nd Infantry
Regiment for the purpose of watching revolutionary activities. That was
my first incursion into the more or less political field.

After another few weeks I received orders to attend a course of lectures
which were being given to members of the army. This course was meant to
inculcate certain fundamental principles on which the soldier could base
his political ideas. For me the advantage of this organization was that
it gave me a chance of meeting fellow soldiers who were of the same way
of thinking and with whom I could discuss the actual situation. We were
all more or less firmly convinced that Germany could not be saved from
imminent disaster by those who had participated in the November
treachery--that is to say, the Centre and the Social-Democrats; and also
that the so-called Bourgeois-National group could not make good the
damage that had been done, even if they had the best intentions. They
lacked a number of requisites without which such a task could never be
successfully undertaken. The years that followed have justified the
opinions which we held at that time.

In our small circle we discussed the project of forming a new party. The
leading ideas which we then proposed were the same as those which were
carried into effect afterwards, when the German Labour Party was
founded. The name of the new movement which was to be founded should be
such that of itself, it would appeal to the mass of the people; for all
our efforts would turn out vain and useless if this condition were
lacking. And that was the reason why we chose the name
'Social-Revolutionary Party', particularly because the social principles
of our new organization were indeed revolutionary.

But there was also a more fundamental reason. The attention which I had
given to economic problems during my earlier years was more or less
confined to considerations arising directly out of the social problem.
Subsequently this outlook broadened as I came to study the German policy
of the Triple Alliance. This policy was very largely the result of an
erroneous valuation of the economic situation, together with a confused
notion as to the basis on which the future subsistence of the German
people could be guaranteed. All these ideas were based on the principle
that capital is exclusively the product of labour and that, just like
labour, it was subject to all the factors which can hinder or promote
human activity. Hence, from the national standpoint, the significance of
capital depended on the greatness and freedom and power of the State,
that is to say, of the nation, and that it is this dependence alone
which leads capital to promote the interests of the State and the
nation, from the instinct of self-preservation and for the sake of its
own development.

On such principles the attitude of the State towards capital would be
comparatively simple and clear. Its only object would be to make sure
that capital remained subservient to the State and did not allocate to
itself the right to dominate national interests. Thus it could confine
its activities within the two following limits: on the one side, to
assure a vital and independent system of national economy and, on the
other, to safeguard the social rights of the workers.

Previously I did not recognize with adequate clearness the difference
between capital which is purely the product of creative labour and the
existence and nature of capital which is exclusively the result of
financial speculation. Here I needed an impulse to set my mind thinking
in this direction; but that impulse had hitherto been lacking.

The requisite impulse now came from one of the men who delivered
lectures in the course I have already mentioned. This was Gottfried
Feder.

For the first time in my life I heard a discussion which dealt with the
principles of stock-exchange capital and capital which was used for loan
activities. After hearing the first lecture delivered by Feder, the idea
immediately came into my head that I had now found a way to one of the
most essential pre-requisites for the founding of a new party.

To my mind, Feder's merit consisted in the ruthless and trenchant way in
which he described the double character of the capital engaged in
stock-exchange and loan transaction, laying bare the fact that this
capital is ever and always dependent on the payment of interest. In
fundamental questions his statements were so full of common sense that
those who criticized him did not deny that AU FOND his ideas were sound
but they doubted whether it be possible to put these ideas into
practice. To me this seemed the strongest point in Feder's teaching,
though others considered it a weak point.

It is not the business of him who lays down a theoretical programme to
explain the various ways in which something can be put into practice.
His task is to deal with the problem as such; and, therefore, he has to
look to the end rather than the means. The important question is whether
an idea is fundamentally right or not. The question of whether or not it
may be difficult to carry it out in practice is quite another matter.
When a man whose task it is to lay down the principles of a programme or
policy begins to busy himself with the question as to whether it is
expedient and practical, instead of confining himself to the statement
of the absolute truth, his work will cease to be a guiding star to those
who are looking about for light and leading and will become merely a
recipe for every-day iife. The man who lays down the programme of a
movement must consider only the goal. It is for the political leader to
point out the way in which that goal may be reached. The thought of the
former will, therefore, be determined by those truths that are
everlasting, whereas the activity of the latter must always be guided by
taking practical account of the circumstances under which those truths
have to be carried into effect.

The greatness of the one will depend on the absolute truth of his idea,
considered in the abstract; whereas that of the other will depend on
whether or not he correctly judges the given realities and how they may
be utilized under the guidance of the truths established by the former.
The test of greatness as applied to a political leader is the success of
his plans and his enterprises, which means his ability to reach the goal
for which he sets out; whereas the final goal set up by the political
philosopher can never be reached; for human thought may grasp truths and
picture ends which it sees like clear crystal, though such ends can
never be completely fulfilled because human nature is weak and
imperfect. The more an idea is correct in the abstract, and, therefore,
all the more powerful, the smaller is the possibility of putting it into
practice, at least as far as this latter depends on human beings. The
significance of a political philosopher does not depend on the practical
success of the plans he lays down but rather on their absolute truth and
the influence they exert on the progress of mankind. If it were
otherwise, the founders of religions could not be considered as the
greatest men who have ever lived, because their moral aims will never be
completely or even approximately carried out in practice. Even that
religion which is called the Religion of Love is really no more than a
faint reflex of the will of its sublime Founder. But its significance
lies in the orientation which it endeavoured to give to human
civilization, and human virtue and morals.

This very wide difference between the functions of a political
philosopher and a practical political leader is the reason why the
qualifications necessary for both functions are scarcely ever found
associated in the same person. This applies especially to the so-called
successful politician of the smaller kind, whose activity is indeed
hardly more than practising the art of doing the possible, as Bismarck
modestly defined the art of politics in general. If such a politician
resolutely avoids great ideas his success will be all the easier to
attain; it will be attained more expeditely and frequently will be more
tangible. By reason of this very fact, however, such success is doomed
to futility and sometimes does not even survive the death of its author.
Generally speaking, the work of politicians is without significance for
the following generation, because their temporary success was based on
the expediency of avoiding all really great decisive problems and ideas
which would be valid also for future generations.

To pursue ideals which will still be of value and significance for the
future is generally not a very profitable undertaking and he who follows
such a course is only very rarely understood by the mass of the people,
who find beer and milk a more persuasive index of political values than
far-sighted plans for the future, the realization of which can only take
place later on and the advantages of which can be reaped only by
posterity.

Because of a certain vanity, which is always one of the blood-relations
of unintelligence, the general run of politicians will always eschew
those schemes for the future which are really difficult to put into
practice; and they will practise this avoidance so that they may not
lose the immediate favour of the mob. The importance and the success of
such politicians belong exclusively to the present and will be of no
consequence for the future. But that does not worry small-minded people;
they are quite content with momentary results.

The position of the constructive political philosopher is quite
different. The importance of his work must always be judged from the
standpoint of the future; and he is frequently described by the word
WELTFREMD, or dreamer. While the ability of the politician consists in
mastering the art of the possible, the founder of a political system
belongs to those who are said to please the gods only because they wish
for and demand the impossible. They will always have to renounce
contemporary fame; but if their ideas be immortal, posterity will grant
them its acknowledgment.

Within long spans of human progress it may occasionally happen that the
practical politician and political philosopher are one. The more
intimate this union is, the greater will be the obstacles which the
activity of the politician will have to encounter. Such a man does not
labour for the purpose of satisfying demands that are obvious to every
philistine, but he reaches out towards ends which can be understood only
by the few. His life is torn asunder by hatred and love. The protest of
his contemporaries, who do not understand the man, is in conflict with
the recognition of posterity, for whom he also works.

For the greater the work which a man does for the future, the less will
he be appreciated by his contemporaries. His struggle will accordingly
be all the more severe, and his success all the rarer. When, in the
course of centuries, such a man appears who is blessed with success
then, towards the end of his days, he may have a faint prevision of his
future fame. But such great men are only the Marathon runners of
history. The laurels of contemporary fame are only for the brow of the
dying hero.

The great protagonists are those who fight for their ideas and ideals
despite the fact that they receive no recognition at the hands of their
contemporaries. They are the men whose memories will be enshrined in the
hearts of the future generations. It seems then as if each individual
felt it his duty to make retroactive atonement for the wrong which great
men have suffered at the hands of their contemporaries. Their lives and
their work are then studied with touching and grateful admiration.
Especially in dark days of distress, such men have the power of healing
broken hearts and elevating the despairing spirit of a people.

To this group belong not only the genuinely great statesmen but all the
great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great we have such men as
Martin Luther and Richard Wagner.

When I heard Gottfried Feder's first lecture on 'The Abolition of the
Interest-Servitude', I understood immediately that here was a truth of
transcendental importance for the future of the German people. The
absolute separation of stock-exchange capital from the economic life of
the nation would make it possible to oppose the process of
internationalization in German business without at the same time
attacking capital as such, for to do this would jeopardize the
foundations of our national independence. I clearly saw what was
developing in Germany and I realized then that the stiffest fight we
would have to wage would not be against the enemy nations but against
international capital. In Feder's speech I found an effective
rallying-cry for our coming struggle.

Here, again, later events proved how correct was the impression we then
had. The fools among our bourgeois politicians do not mock at us on this
point any more; for even those politicians now see--if they would speak
the truth--that international stock-exchange capital was not only the
chief instigating factor in bringing on the War but that now when the
War is over it turns the peace into a hell.

The struggle against international finance capital and loan-capital has
become one of the most important points in the programme on which the
German nation has based its fight for economic freedom and independence.

Regarding the objections raised by so-called practical people, the
following answer must suffice: All apprehensions concerning the fearful
economic consequences that would follow the abolition of the servitude
that results from interest-capital are ill-timed; for, in the first
place, the economic principles hitherto followed have proved quite fatal
to the interests of the German people. The attitude adopted when the
question of maintaining our national existence arose vividly recalls
similar advice once given by experts--the Bavarian Medical College, for
example--on the question of introducing railroads. The fears expressed
by that august body of experts were not realized. Those who travelled in
the coaches of the new 'Steam-horse' did not suffer from vertigo. Those
who looked on did not become ill and the hoardings which had been
erected to conceal the new invention were eventually taken down. Only
those blinds which obscure the vision of the would-be 'experts', have
remained. And that will be always so.

In the second place, the following must be borne in mind: Any idea may
be a source of danger if it be looked upon as an end in itself, when
really it is only the means to an end. For me and for all genuine
National-Socialists there is only one doctrine. PEOPLE AND FATHERLAND.

What we have to fight for is the necessary security for the existence
and increase of our race and people, the subsistence of its children and
the maintenance of our racial stock unmixed, the freedom and
independence of the Fatherland; so that our people may be enabled to
fulfil the mission assigned to it by the Creator.

All ideas and ideals, all teaching and all knowledge, must serve these
ends. It is from this standpoint that everything must be examined and
turned to practical uses or else discarded. Thus a theory can never
become a mere dead dogma since everything will have to serve the
practical ends of everyday life.

Thus the judgment arrived at by Gottfried Feder determined me to make a
fundamental study of a question with which I had hitherto not been very
familiar.

I began to study again and thus it was that I first came to understand
perfectly what was the substance and purpose of the life-work of the
Jew, Karl Marx. His CAPITAL became intelligible to me now for the first
time. And in the light of it I now exactly understood the fight of the
Social-Democrats against national economics, a fight which was to
prepare the ground for the hegemony of a real international and
stock-exchange capital.

In another direction also this course of lectures had important
consequences for me.

One day I put my name down as wishing to take part in the discussion.
Another of the participants thought that he would break a lance for the
Jews and entered into a lengthy defence of them. This aroused my
opposition. An overwhelming number of those who attended the lecture
course supported my views. The consequence of it all was that, a few
days later, I was assigned to a regiment then stationed at Munich and
given a position there as 'instruction officer'.

At that time the spirit of discipline was rather weak among those
troops. It was still suffering from the after-effects of the period when
the Soldiers' Councils were in control. Only gradually and carefully
could a new spirit of military discipline and obedience be introduced in
place of 'voluntary obedience', a term which had been used to express
the ideal of military discipline under Kurt Eisner's higgledy-piggledy
regime. The soldiers had to be taught to think and feel in a national
and patriotic way. In these two directions lay my future line of action.

I took up my work with the greatest delight and devotion. Here I was
presented with an opportunity of speaking before quite a large audience.
I was now able to confirm what I had hitherto merely felt, namely, that
I had a talent for public speaking. My voice had become so much better
that I could be well understood, at least in all parts of the small hall
where the soldiers assembled.

No task could have been more pleasing to me than this one; for now,
before being demobilized, I was in a position to render useful service
to an institution which had been infinitely dear to my heart: namely,
the army.

I am able to state that my talks were successful. During the course of
my lectures I have led back hundreds and even thousands of my fellow
countrymen to their people and their fatherland. I 'nationalized' these
troops and by so doing I helped to restore general discipline.

Here again I made the acquaintance of several comrades whose thought ran
along the same lines as my own and who later became members of the first
group out of which the new movement developed.




CHAPTER IX



THE GERMAN LABOUR PARTY


One day I received an order from my superiors to investigate the nature
of an association which was apparently political. It called itself 'The
German Labour Party' and was soon to hold a meeting at which Gottfried
Feder would speak. I was ordered to attend this meeting and report on
the situation.

The spirit of curiosity in which the army authorities then regarded
political parties can be very well understood. The Revolution had
granted the soldiers the right to take an active part in politics and it
was particularly those with the smallest experience who had availed
themselves of this right. But not until the Centre and the
Social-Democratic parties were reluctantly forced to recognize that the
sympathies of the soldiers had turned away from the revolutionary
parties towards the national movement and the national reawakening, did
they feel obliged to withdraw from the army the right to vote and to
forbid it all political activity.

The fact that the Centre and Marxism had adopted this policy was
instructive, because if they had not thus curtailed the 'rights of the
citizen'--as they described the political rights of the soldiers after
the Revolution--the government which had been established in November
1918 would have been overthrown within a few years and the dishonour and
disgrace of the nation would not have been further prolonged. At that
time the soldiers were on the point of taking the best way to rid the
nation of the vampires and valets who served the cause of the Entente in
the interior of the country. But the fact that the so-called 'national'
parties voted enthusiastically for the doctrinaire policy of the
criminals who organized the Revolution in November (1918) helped also to
render the army ineffective as an instrument of national restoration and
thus showed once again where men might be led by the purely abstract
notions accepted by these most gullible people.

The minds of the bourgeois middle classes had become so fossilized that
they sincerely believed the army could once again become what it had
previously been, namely, a rampart of German valour; while the Centre
Party and the Marxists intended only to extract the poisonous tooth of
nationalism, without which an army must always remain just a police
force but can never be in the position of a military organization
capable of fighting against the outside enemy. This truth was
sufficiently proved by subsequent events.

Or did our 'national' politicians believe, after all, that the
development of our army could be other than national? This belief might
be possible and could be explained by the fact that during the War they
were not soldiers but merely talkers. In other words, they were
parliamentarians, and, as such, they did not have the slightest idea of
what was passing in the hearts of those men who remembered the greatness
of their own past and also remembered that they had once been the first
soldiers in the world.

I decided to attend the meeting of this Party, which had hitherto been
entirely unknown to me. When I arrived that evening in the guest room of
the former Sternecker Brewery--which has now become a place of
historical significance for us--I found approximately 20-25 persons
present, most of them belonging to the lower classes.

The theme of Feder's lecture was already familiar to me; for I had heard
it in the lecture course I have spoken of. Therefore, I could
concentrate my attention on studying the society itself.

The impression it made upon me was neither good nor bad. I felt that
here was just another one of these many new societies which were being
formed at that time. In those days everybody felt called upon to found a
new Party whenever he felt displeased with the course of events and had
lost confidence in all the parties already existing. Thus it was that
new associations sprouted up all round, to disappear just as quickly,
without exercising any effect or making any noise whatsoever. Generally
speaking, the founders of such associations did not have the slightest
idea of what it means to bring together a number of people for the
foundations of a party or a movement. Therefore these associations
disappeared because of their woeful lack of anything like an adequate
grasp of the necessities of the situation.

My opinion of the 'German Labour Party' was not very different after I
had listened to their proceedings for about two hours. I was glad when
Feder finally came to a close. I had observed enough and was just about
to leave when it was announced that anybody who wished was free to open
a discussion. Thereupon, I decided to remain. But the discussion seemed
to proceed without anything of vital importance being mentioned, when
suddenly a 'professor' commenced to speak. He opened by throwing doubt
on the accuracy of what Feder had said, and then. after Feder had
replied very effectively, the professor suddenly took up his position on
what he called 'the basis of facts,' but before this he recommended the
young party most urgently to introduce the secession of Bavaria from
Prussia as one of the leading proposals in its programme. In the most
self-assured way, this man kept on insisting that German-Austria would
join Bavaria and that the peace would then function much better. He made
other similarly extravagant statements. At this juncture I felt bound to
ask for permission to speak and to tell the learned gentleman what I
thought. The result was that the honourable gentleman who had last
spoken slipped out of his place, like a whipped cur, without uttering a
sound. While I was speaking the audience listened with an expression of
surprise on their faces. When I was just about to say good-night to the
assembly and to leave, a man came after me quickly and introduced
himself. I did not grasp the name correctly; but he placed a little book
in my hand, which was obviously a political pamphlet, and asked me very
earnestly to read it.

I was quite pleased; because in this way, I could come to know about
this association without having to attend its tiresome meetings.
Moreover, this man, who had the appearance of a workman, made a good
impression on me. Thereupon, I left the hall.

At that time I was living in one of the barracks of the 2nd Infantry
Regiment. I had a little room which still bore the unmistakable traces
of the Revolution. During the day I was mostly out, at the quarters of
Light Infantry No. 41 or else attending meetings or lectures, held at
some other branch of the army. I spent only the night at the quarters
where I lodged. Since I usually woke up about five o'clock every morning
I got into the habit of amusing myself with watching little mice which
played around in my small room. I used to place a few pieces of hard
bread or crust on the floor and watch the funny little beasts playing
around and enjoying themselves with these delicacies. I had suffered so
many privations in my own life that I well knew what hunger was and
could only too well picture to myself the pleasure these little
creatures were experiencing.

So on the morning after the meeting I have mentioned, it happened that
about five o'clock I lay fully awake in bed, watching the mice playing
and vying with each other. As I was not able to go to sleep again, I
suddenly remembered the pamphlet that one of the workers had given me at
the meeting. It was a small pamphlet of which this worker was the
author. In his little book he described how his mind had thrown off the
shackles of the Marxist and trades-union phraseology, and that he had
come back to the nationalist ideals. That was the reason why he had
entitled his little book: "My Political Awakening". The pamphlet secured
my attention the moment I began to read, and I read it with interest to
the end. The process here described was similar to that which I had
experienced in my own case ten years previously. Unconsciously my own
experiences began to stir again in my mind. During that day my thoughts
returned several times to what I had read; but I finally decided to give
the matter no further attention. A week or so later, however, I received
a postcard which informed me, to my astonishment, that I had been
admitted into the German Labour Party. I was asked to answer this
communication and to attend a meeting of the Party Committee on
Wednesday next.

This manner of getting members rather amazed me, and I did not know
whether to be angry or laugh at it. Hitherto I had not any idea of
entering a party already in existence but wanted to found one of my own.
Such an invitation as I now had received I looked upon as entirely out
of the question for me.

I was about to send a written reply when my curiosity got the better of
me, and I decided to attend the gathering at the date assigned, so that
I might expound my principles to these gentlemen in person.

Wednesday came. The tavern in which the meeting was to take place was
the 'Alte Rosenbad' in the Herrnstrasse, into which apparently only an
occasional guest wandered. This was not very surprising in the year
1919, when the bills of fare even at the larger restaurants were only
very modest and scanty in their pretensions and thus not very attractive
to clients. But I had never before heard of this restaurant.

I went through the badly-lighted guest-room, where not a single guest
was to be seen, and searched for the door which led to the side room;
and there I was face-to-face with the 'Congress'. Under the dim light
shed by a grimy gas-lamp I could see four young people sitting around a
table, one of them the author of the pamphlet. He greeted me cordially
and welcomed me as a new member of the German Labour Party.

I was taken somewhat aback on being informed that actually the National
President of the Party had not yet come; so I decided that I would keep
back my own exposition for the time being. Finally the President
appeared. He was the man who had been chairman of the meeting held in
the Sternecker Brewery, when Feder spoke.

My curiosity was stimulated anew and I sat waiting for what was going to
happen. Now I got at least as far as learning the names of the gentlemen
who had been parties to the whole affair. The REICH National President
of the Association was a certain Herr Harrer and the President for the
Munich district was Anton Drexler.

The minutes of the previous meeting were read out and a vote of
confidence in the secretary was passed. Then came the treasurer's
report. The Society possessed a total fund of seven marks and fifty
pfennigs (a sum corresponding to 7s. 6d. in English money at par),
whereupon the treasurer was assured that he had the confidence of the
members. This was now inserted in the minutes. Then letters of reply
which had been written by the Chairman were read; first, to a letter
received from Kiel, then to one from Düsseldorf and finally to one from
Berlin. All three replies received the approval of all present. Then the
incoming letters were read--one from Berlin, one from Düsseldorf and one
from Kiel. The reception of these letters seemed to cause great
satisfaction. This increasing bulk of correspondence was taken as the
best and most obvious sign of the growing importance of the German
Labour Party. And then? Well, there followed a long discussion of the
replies which would be given to these newly-received letters.

It was all very awful. This was the worst kind of parish-pump clubbism.
And was I supposed to become a member of such a club?

The question of new members was next discussed--that is to say, the
question of catching myself in the trap.

I now began to ask questions. But I found that, apart from a few general
principles, there was nothing--no programme, no pamphlet, nothing at all
in print, no card of membership, not even a party stamp, nothing but
obvious good faith and good intentions.

I no longer felt inclined to laugh; for what else was all this but a
typical sign of the most complete perplexity and deepest despair in
regard to all political parties, their programmes and views and
activities? The feeling which had induced those few young people to join
in what seemed such a ridiculous enterprise was nothing but the call of
the inner voice which told them--though more intuitively than
consciously--that the whole party system as it had hitherto existed was
not the kind of force that could restore the German nation or repair the
damages that had been done to the German people by those who hitherto
controlled the internal affairs of the nation. I quickly read through
the list of principles that formed the platform of the party. These
principles were stated on typewritten sheets. Here again I found
evidence of the spirit of longing and searching, but no sign whatever of
a knowledge of the conflict that had to be fought. I myself had
experienced the feelings which inspired those people. It was the longing
for a movement which should be more than a party, in the hitherto
accepted meaning of that word.

When I returned to my room in the barracks that evening I had formed a
definite opinion on this association and I was facing the most difficult
problem of my life. Should I join this party or refuse?

From the side of the intellect alone, every consideration urged me to
refuse; but my feelings troubled me. The more I tried to prove to myself
how senseless this club was, on the whole, the more did my feelings
incline me to favour it. During the following days I was restless.

I began to consider all the pros and cons. I had long ago decided to
take an active part in politics. The fact that I could do so only
through a new movement was quite clear to me; but I had hitherto lacked
the impulse to take concrete action. I am not one of those people who
will begin something to-day and just give it up the next day for the
sake of something new. That was the main reason which made it so
difficult for me to decide in joining something newly founded; for this
must become the real fulfilment of everything I dreamt, or else it had
better not be started at all. I knew that such a decision should bind me
for ever and that there could be no turning back. For me there could be
no idle dallying but only a cause to be championed ardently. I had
already an instinctive feeling against people who took up everything,
but never carried anything through to the end. I loathed these
Jacks-of-all-Trades, and considered the activities of such people to be
worse than if they were to remain entirely quiescent.

Fate herself now seemed to supply the finger-post that pointed out the
way. I should never have entered one of the big parties already in
existence and shall explain my reasons for this later on. This ludicrous
little formation, with its handful of members, seemed to have the unique
advantage of not yet being fossilized into an 'organization' and still
offered a chance for real personal activity on the part of the
individual. Here it might still be possible to do some effective work;
and, as the movement was still small, one could all the easier give it
the required shape. Here it was still possible to determine the
character of the movement, the aims to be achieved and the road to be
taken, which would have been impossible in the case of the big parties
already existing.

The longer I reflected on the problem, the more my opinion developed
that just such a small movement would best serve as an instrument to
prepare the way for the national resurgence, but that this could never
be done by the political parliamentary parties which were too firmly
attached to obsolete ideas or had an interest in supporting the new
regime. What had to be proclaimed here was a new WELTANSCHAUUNG and not
a new election cry.

It was, however, infinitely difficult to decide on putting the intention
into practice. What were the qualifications which I could bring to the
accomplishment of such a task?

The fact that I was poor and without resources could, in my opinion, be
the easiest to bear. But the fact that I was utterly unknown raised a
more difficult problem. I was only one of the millions which Chance
allows to exist or cease to exist, whom even their next-door neighbours
will not consent to know. Another difficulty arose from the fact that I
had not gone through the regular school curriculum.

The so-called 'intellectuals' still look down with infinite
superciliousness on anyone who has not been through the prescribed
schools and allowed them to pump the necessary knowledge into him. The
question of what a man can do is never asked but rather, what has he
learned? 'Educated' people look upon any imbecile who is plastered with
a number of academic certificates as superior to the ablest young fellow
who lacks these precious documents. I could therefore easily imagine how
this 'educated' world would receive me and I was wrong only in so far as
I then believed men to be for the most part better than they proved to
be in the cold light of reality. Because of their being as they are, the
few exceptions stand out all the more conspicuously. I learned more and
more to distinguish between those who will always be at school and those
who will one day come to know something in reality.

After two days of careful brooding and reflection I became convinced
that I must take the contemplated step.

It was the most fateful decision of my life. No retreat was possible.

Thus I declared myself ready to accept the membership tendered me by the
German Labour Party and received a provisional certificate of
membership. I was numbered SEVEN.




CHAPTER X



WHY THE SECOND REICH COLLAPSED


The depth of a fall is always measured by the difference between the
level of the original position from which a body has fallen and that in
which it is now found. The same holds good for Nations and States. The
matter of greatest importance here is the height of the original level,
or rather the greatest height that had been attained before the descent
began.

For only the profound decline or collapse of that which was capable of
reaching extraordinary heights can make a striking impression on the eye
of the beholder. The collapse of the Second REICH was all the more
bewildering for those who could ponder over it and feel the effect of it
in their hearts, because the REICH had fallen from a height which can
hardly be imagined in these days of misery and humiliation.

The Second REICH was founded in circumstances of such dazzling splendour
that the whole nation had become entranced and exalted by it. Following
an unparalleled series of victories, that Empire was handed over as the
guerdon of immortal heroism to the children and grandchildren of the
heroes. Whether they were fully conscious of it or not does not matter;
anyhow, the Germans felt that this Empire had not been brought into
existence by a series of able political negotiations through
parliamentary channels, but that it was different from political
institutions founded elsewhere by reason of the nobler circumstances
that had accompanied its establishment. When its foundations were laid
the accompanying music was not the chatter of parliamentary debates but
the thunder and boom of war along the battle front that encircled Paris.
It was thus that an act of statesmanship was accomplished whereby the
Germans, princes as well as people, established the future REICH and
restored the symbol of the Imperial Crown. Bismarck's State was not
founded on treason and assassination by deserters and shirkers but by
the regiments that had fought at the front. This unique birth and
baptism of fire sufficed of themselves to surround the Second Empire
with an aureole of historical splendour such as few of the older States
could lay claim to.

And what an ascension then began! A position of independence in regard
to the outside world guaranteed the means of livelihood at home. The
nation increased in numbers and in worldly wealth. The honour of the
State and therewith the honour of the people as a whole were secured and
protected by an army which was the most striking witness of the
difference between this new REICH and the old German Confederation.

But the downfall of the Second Empire and the German people has been so
profound that they all seem to have been struck dumbfounded and rendered
incapable of feeling the significance of this downfall or reflecting on
it. It seems as if people were utterly unable to picture in their minds
the heights to which the Empire formerly attained, so visionary and
unreal appears the greatness and splendour of those days in contrast to
the misery of the present. Bearing this in mind we can understand why
and how people become so dazed when they try to look back to the sublime
past that they forget to look for the symptoms of the great collapse
which must certainly have been present in some form or other. Naturally
this applies only to those for whom Germany was more than merely a place
of abode and a source of livelihood. These are the only people who have
been able to feel the present conditions as really catastrophic, whereas
others have considered these conditions as the fulfilment of what they
had looked forward to and hitherto silently wished.

The symptoms of future collapse were definitely to be perceived in those
earlier days, although very few made any attempt to draw a practical
lesson from their significance. But this is now a greater necessity than
it ever was before. For just as bodily ailments can be cured only when
their origin has been diagnosed, so also political disease can be
treated only when it has been diagnosed. It is obvious of course that
the external symptoms of any disease can be more readily detected than
its internal causes, for these symptoms strike the eye more easily. This
is also the reason why so many people recognize only external effects
and mistake them for causes. Indeed they will sometimes try to deny the
existence of such causes. And that is why the majority of people among
us recognize the German collapse only in the prevailing economic
distress and the results that have followed therefrom. Almost everyone
has to carry his share of this burden, and that is why each one looks on
the economic catastrophe as the cause of the present deplorable state of
affairs. The broad masses of the people see little of the cultural,
political, and moral background of this collapse. Many of them
completely lack both the necessary feeling and powers of understanding
for it.

That the masses of the people should thus estimate the causes of
Germany's downfall is quite understandable. But the fact that
intelligent sections of the community regard the German collapse
primarily as an economic catastrophe, and consequently think that a cure
for it may be found in an economic solution, seems to me to be the
reason why hitherto no improvement has been brought about. No
improvement can be brought about until it be understood that economics
play only a second or third role, while the main part is played by
political, moral and racial factors. Only when this is understood will
it be possible to understand the causes of the present evil and
consequently to find the ways and means of remedying them.

Therefore the question of why Germany really collapsed is one of the
most urgent significance, especially for a political movement which aims
at overcoming this disaster.

In scrutinizing the past with a view to discovering the causes of the
German break-up, it is necessary to be careful lest we may be unduly
impressed by external results that readily strike the eye and thus
ignore the less manifest causes of these results.

The most facile, and therefore the most generally accepted, way of
accounting for the present misfortune is to say that it is the result of
a lost war, and that this is the real cause of the present misfortune.
Probably there are many who honestly believe in this absurd explanation
but there are many more in whose mouths it is a deliberate and conscious
falsehood. This applies to all those who are now feeding at the
Government troughs. For the prophets of the Revolution again and again
declared to the people that it would be immaterial to the great masses
what the result of the War might be. On the contrary, they solemnly
assured the public that it was High Finance which was principally
interested in a victorious outcome of this gigantic struggle among the
nations but that the German people and the German workers had no
interest whatsoever in such an outcome. Indeed the apostles of world
conciliation habitually asserted that, far from any German downfall, the
opposite was bound to take place--namely, the resurgence of the German
people--once 'militarism' had been crushed. Did not these self-same
circles sing the praises of the Entente and did they not also lay the
whole blame for the sanguinary struggle on the shoulders of Germany?
Without this explanation, would they have been able to put forward the
theory that a military defeat would have no political consequences for
the German people? Was not the whole Revolution dressed up in gala
colours as blocking the victorious advance of the German banners and
that thus the German people would be assured its liberty both at home
and abroad?

Is not that so, you miserable, lying rascals?

That kind of impudence which is typical of the Jews was necessary in
order to proclaim the defeat of the army as the cause of the German
collapse. Indeed the Berlin VORWÄRTS, that organ and mouthpiece of
sedition then wrote on this occasion that the German nation should not
be permitted to bring home its banners triumphantly.

And yet they attribute our collapse to the military defeat.

Of course it would be out of the question to enter into an argument with
these liars who deny at one moment what they said the moment before. I
should waste no further words on them were it not for the fact that
there are many thoughtless people who repeat all this in parrot fashion,
without being necessarily inspired by any evil motives. But the
observations I am making here are also meant for our fighting followers,
seeing that nowadays one's spoken words are often forgotten and twisted
in their meaning.

The assertion that the loss of the War was the cause of the German
collapse can best be answered as follows:

It is admittedly a fact that the loss of the War was of tragic
importance for the future of our country. But that loss was not in
itself a cause. It was rather the consequence of other causes. That a
disastrous ending to this life-or-death conflict must have involved
catastrophes in its train was clearly seen by everyone of insight who
could think in a straightforward manner. But unfortunately there were
also people whose powers of understanding seemed to fail them at that
critical moment. And there were other people who had first questioned
that truth and then altogether denied it. And there were people who,
after their secret desire had been fulfilled, were suddenly faced with
the subsequent facts that resulted from their own collaboration. Such
people are responsible for the collapse, and not the lost war, though
they now want to attribute everything to this. As a matter of fact the
loss of the War was a result of their activities and not the result of
bad leadership as they now would like to maintain. Our enemies were not
cowards. They also know how to die. From the very first day of the War
they outnumbered the German Army, and the arsenals and armament
factories of the whole world were at their disposal for the
replenishment of military equipment. Indeed it is universally admitted
that the German victories, which had been steadily won during four years
of warfare against the whole world, were due to superior leadership,
apart of course from the heroism of the troops. And the organization was
solely due to the German military leadership. That organization and
leadership of the German Army was the most mighty thing that the world
has ever seen. Any shortcomings which became evident were humanly
unavoidable. The collapse of that army was not the cause of our present
distress. It was itself the consequence of other faults. But this
consequence in its turn ushered in a further collapse, which was more
visible. That such was actually the case can be shown as follows:

Must a military defeat necessarily lead to such a complete overthrow of
the State and Nation? Whenever has this been the result of an unlucky
war? As a matter of fact, are nations ever ruined by a lost war and by
that alone? The answer to this question can be briefly stated by
referring to the fact that military defeats are the result of internal
decay, cowardice, want of character, and are a retribution for such
things. If such were not the causes then a military defeat would lead to
a national resurgence and bring the nation to a higher pitch of effort.
A military defeat is not the tombstone of national life. History affords
innumerable examples to confirm the truth of that statement.

Unfortunately Germany's military overthrow was not an undeserved
catastrophe, but a well-merited punishment which was in the nature of an
eternal retribution. This defeat was more than deserved by us; for it
represented the greatest external phenomenon of decomposition among a
series of internal phenomena, which, although they were visible, were
not recognized by the majority of the people, who follow the tactics of
the ostrich and see only what they want to see.

Let us examine the symptoms that were evident in Germany at the time
that the German people accepted this defeat. Is it not true that in
several circles the misfortunes of the Fatherland were even joyfully
welcomed in the most shameful manner? Who could act in such a way
without thereby meriting vengeance for his attitude? Were there not
people who even went further and boasted that they had gone to the
extent of weakening the front and causing a collapse? Therefore it was
not the enemy who brought this disgrace upon our shoulders but rather
our own countrymen. If they suffered misfortune for it afterwards, was
that misfortune undeserved? Was there ever a case in history where a
people declared itself guilty of a war, and that even against its better
conscience and its better knowledge?

No, and again no. In the manner in which the German nation reacted to
its defeat we can see that the real cause of our collapse must be looked
for elsewhere and not in the purely military loss of a few positions or
the failure of an offensive. For if the front as such had given way and
thus brought about a national disaster, then the German nation would
have accepted the defeat in quite another spirit. They would have borne
the subsequent misfortune with clenched teeth, or they would have been
overwhelmed by sorrow. Regret and fury would have filled their hearts
against an enemy into whose hands victory had been given by a chance
event or the decree of Fate; and in that case the nation, following the
example of the Roman Senate (Note 14), would have faced the defeated
legions on their return and expressed their thanks for the sacrifices that
had been made and would have requested them not to lose faith in the
Empire. Even the capitulation would have been signed under the sway of
calm reason, while the heart would have beaten in the hope of the coming
REVANCHE.

[Note 14. Probably the author has two separate incidents in mind. The
first happened in 390 B.C., when, as the victorious Gauls descended on
Rome, the Senators ordered their ivory chairs to be placed in the Forum
before the Temples ofthe Gods. There, clad in their robes of state, they
awaited the invader, hoping to save the city by sacrificing themselves.
This noble gesture failed for the time being; but it had an inspiring
influence on subsequent generations. The second incident, which has more
historical authenticity, occurred after the Roman defeat at Cannae in 216
B.C. On that occasion Varro, the Roman commander, who, though in great
part responsible for the disaster, made an effort to carry on the
struggle, was, on his return to Rome, met by the citizens of all ranks
and publicly thanked because he had not despaired of the Republic. The
consequence was that the Republic refused to make peace with the
victorious Carthagenians.]

That is the reception that would have been given to a military defeat
which had to be attributed only to the adverse decree of Fortune. There
would have been neither joy-making nor dancing. Cowardice would not have
been boasted of, and the defeat would not have been honoured. On
returning from the Front, the troops would not have been mocked at, and
the colours would not have been dragged in the dust. But above all, that
disgraceful state of affairs could never have arisen which induced a
British officer, Colonel Repington, to declare with scorn: Every third
German is a traitor! No, in such a case this plague would never have
assumed the proportions of a veritable flood which, for the past five
years, has smothered every vestige of respect for the German nation in
the outside world.

This shows only too clearly how false it is to say that the loss of the
War was the cause of the German break-up. No. The military defeat was
itself but the consequence of a whole series of morbid symptoms and
their causes which had become active in the German nation before the War
broke out. The War was the first catastrophal consequence, visible to
all, of how traditions and national morale had been poisoned and how the
instinct of self-preservation had degenerated. These were the
preliminary causes which for many years had been undermining the
foundations of the nation and the Empire.

But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for
falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute
responsibility for the downfall precisely to the man who alone had shown
a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe
which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete
overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world
war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral
right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed
in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice. All this was
inspired by the principle--which is quite true in itself--that in the
big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the
broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper
strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and
thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall
victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often
tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to
large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to
fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others
could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though
the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their
minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that
there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always
leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact
which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire
together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use
falsehood for the basest purposes.

From time immemorial. however, the Jews have known better than any
others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very
existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious
community, whereas in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of
the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for
all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. He
(Schopenhauer) called the Jew "The Great Master of Lies". Those who do
not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it,
will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail.

We may regard it as a great stroke of fortune for the German nation that
its period of lingering suffering was so suddenly curtailed and
transformed into such a terrible catastrophe. For if things had gone on
as they were the nation would have more slowly, but more surely, gone to
ruin. The disease would have become chronic; whereas, in the acute form
of the disaster, it at least showed itself clearly to the eyes of a
considerable number of observers. It was not by accident that man
conquered the black plague more easily than he conquered tuberculosis.
The first appeared in terrifying waves of death that shook the whole of
mankind, the other advances insidiously; the first induces terror, the
other gradual indifference. The result is, however, that men opposed the
first with all the energy they were capable of, whilst they try to
arrest tuberculosis by feeble means. Thus man has mastered the black
plague, while tuberculosis still gets the better of him.

The same applies to diseases in nations. So long as these diseases are
not of a catastrophic character, the population will slowly accustom
itself to them and later succumb. It is then a stroke of luck--although
a bitter one--when Fate decides to interfere in this slow process of
decay and suddenly brings the victim face to face with the final stage
of the disease. More often than not the result of a catastrophe is that
a cure is at once undertaken and carried through with rigid
determination.

But even in such a case the essential preliminary condition is always
the recognition of the internal causes which have given rise to the
disease in question.

The important question here is the differentiation of the root causes
from the circumstances developing out of them. This becomes all the more
difficult the longer the germs of disease remain in the national body
and the longer they are allowed to become an integral part of that body.
It may easily happen that, as time goes on, it will become so difficult
to recognize certain definite virulent poisons as such that they are
accepted as belonging to the national being; or they are merely
tolerated as a necessary evil, so that drastic attempts to locate those
alien germs are not held to be necessary.

During the long period of peace prior to the last war certain evils were
apparent here and there although, with one or two exceptions, very
little effort was made to discover their origin. Here again these
exceptions were first and foremost those phenomena in the economic life
of the nation which were more apparent to the individual than the evil
conditions existing in a good many other spheres.

There were many signs of decay which ought to have been given serious
thought. As far as economics were concerned, the following may be
said:--

The amazing increase of population in Germany before the war brought the
question of providing daily bread into a more and more prominent
position in all spheres of political and economic thought and action.
But unfortunately those responsible could not make up their minds to
arrive at the only correct solution and preferred to reach their
objective by cheaper methods. Repudiation of the idea of acquiring fresh
territory and the substitution for it of the mad desire for the
commercial conquest of the world was bound to lead eventually to
unlimited and injurious industrialization.

The first and most fatal result brought about in this way was the
weakening of the agricultural classes, whose decline was proportionate
to the increase in the proletariat of the urban areas, until finally the
equilibrium was completely upset.

The big barrier dividing rich and poor now became apparent. Luxury and
poverty lived so close to each other that the consequences were bound to
be deplorable. Want and frequent unemployment began to play havoc with
the people and left discontent and embitterment behind them. The result
of this was to divide the population into political classes. Discontent
increased in spite of commercial prosperity. Matters finally reached
that stage which brought about the general conviction that 'things
cannot go on as they are', although no one seemed able to visualize what
was really going to happen.

These were typical and visible signs of the depths which the prevailing
discontent had reached. Far worse than these, however, were other
consequences which became apparent as a result of the industrialization
of the nation.

In proportion to the extent that commerce assumed definite control of
the State, money became more and more of a God whom all had to serve and
bow down to. Heavenly Gods became more and more old-fashioned and were
laid away in the corners to make room for the worship of mammon. And
thus began a period of utter degeneration which became specially
pernicious because it set in at a time when the nation was more than
ever in need of an exalted idea, for a critical hour was threatening.
Germany should have been prepared to protect with the sword her efforts
to win her own daily bread in a peaceful way.

Unfortunately, the predominance of money received support and sanction
in the very quarter which ought to have been opposed to it. His Majesty,
the Kaiser, made a mistake when he raised representatives of the new
finance capital to the ranks of the nobility. Admittedly, it may be
offered as an excuse that even Bismarck failed to realize the
threatening danger in this respect. In practice, however, all ideal
virtues became secondary considerations to those of money, for it was
clear that having once taken this road, the nobility of the sword would
very soon rank second to that of finance.

Financial operations succeed easier than war operations. Hence it was no
longer any great attraction for a true hero or even a statesman to be
brought into touch with the nearest Jew banker. Real merit was not
interested in receiving cheap decorations and therefore declined them
with thanks. But from the standpoint of good breeding such a development
was deeply regrettable. The nobility began to lose more and more of the
racial qualities that were a condition of its very existence, with the
result that in many cases the term 'plebeian' would have been more
appropriate.

A serious state of economic disruption was being brought about by the
slow elimination of the personal control of vested interests and the
gradual transference of the whole economic structure into the hands of
joint stock companies.

In this way labour became degraded into an object of speculation in the
hands of unscrupulous exploiters.

The de-personalization of property ownership increased on a vast scale.
Financial exchange circles began to triumph and made slow but sure
progress in assuming control of the whole of national life.

Before the War the internationalization of the German economic structure
had already begun by the roundabout way of share issues. It is true that
a section of the German industrialists made a determined attempt to
avert the danger, but in the end they gave way before the united attacks
of money-grabbing capitalism, which was assisted in this fight by its
faithful henchmen in the Marxist movement.

The persistent war against German 'heavy industries' was the visible
start of the internationalization of German economic life as envisaged
by the Marxists. This, however, could only be brought to a successful
conclusion by the victory which Marxism was able to gain in the
Revolution. As I write these words, success is attending the general
attack on the German State Railways which are now to be turned over to
international capitalists. Thus 'International Social-Democracy' has
once again attained one of its main objectives.

The best evidence of how far this 'commercialization' of the German
nation was able to go can be plainly seen in the fact that when the War
was over one of the leading captains of German industry and commerce
gave it as his opinion that commerce as such was the only force which
could put Germany on its feet again.

This sort of nonsense was uttered just at the time when France was
restoring public education on a humanitarian basis, thus doing away with
the idea that national life is dependent on commerce rather than ideal
values. The statement which Stinnes broadcasted to the world at that
time caused incredible confusion. It was immediately taken up and has
become the leading motto of all those humbugs and babblers--the
'statesmen' whom Fate let loose on Germany after the Revolution.

One of the worst evidences of decadence in Germany before the War was
the ever increasing habit of doing things by halves. This was one of the
consequences of the insecurity that was felt all round. And it is to be
attributed also to a certain timidity which resulted from one cause or
another. And the latter malady was aggravated by the educational system.

German education in pre-War times had an extraordinary number of weak
features. It was simply and exclusively limited to the production of
pure knowledge and paid little attention to the development of practical
ability. Still less attention was given to the development of individual
character, in so far as this is ever possible. And hardly any attention
at all was paid to the development of a sense of responsibility, to
strengthening the will and the powers of decision. The result of this
method was to produce erudite people who had a passion for knowing
everything. Before the War we Germans were accepted and estimated
accordingly. The German was liked because good use could be made of him;
but there was little esteem for him personally, on account of this
weakness of character. For those who can read its significance aright,
there is much instruction in the fact that among all nationalities
Germans were the first to part with their national citizenship when they
found themselves in a foreign country. And there is a world of meaning
in the saying that was then prevalent: 'With the hat in the hand one can
go through the whole country'.

This kind of social etiquette turned out disastrous when it prescribed
the exclusive forms that had to be observed in the presence of His
Majesty. These forms insisted that there should be no contradiction
whatsoever, but that everything should be praised which His Majesty
condescended to like.

It was just here that the frank expression of manly dignity, and not
subservience, was most needed. Servility in the presence of monarchs may
be good enough for the professional lackey and place-hunter, in fact for
all those decadent beings who are more pleased to be found moving in the
high circles of royalty than among honest citizens. These exceedingly
'humble' creatures however, though they grovel before their lord and
bread-giver, invariably put on airs of boundless superciliousness
towards other mortals, which was particularly impudent when they posed
as the only people who had the right to be called 'monarchists'. This
was a gross piece of impertinence such as only despicable specimens
among the newly-ennobled or yet-to-be-ennobled could be capable of.

And these have always been just the people who have prepared the way for
the downfall of monarchy and the monarchical principle. It could not be
otherwise. For when a man is prepared to stand up for a cause, come what
may, he never grovels before its representative. A man who is serious
about the maintenance and welfare of an institution will not allow
himself to be discouraged when the representatives of that institution
show certain faults and failings. And he certainly will not run around
to tell the world about it, as certain false democratic 'friends' of the
monarchy have done; but he will approach His Majesty, the bearer of the
Crown himself, to warn him of the seriousness of a situation and
persuade the monarch to act. Furthermore, he will not take up the
standpoint that it must be left to His Majesty to act as the latter
thinks fit, even though the course which he would take must plainly lead
to disaster. But the man I am thinking of will deem it his duty to
protect the monarchy against the monarch himself, no matter what
personal risk he may run in doing so. If the worth of the monarchical
institution be dependent on the person of the monarch himself, then it
would be the worst institution imaginable; for only in rare cases are
kings found to be models of wisdom and understanding, and integrity of
character, though we might like to think otherwise. But this fact is
unpalatable to the professional knaves and lackeys. Yet all upright men,
and they are the backbone of the nation, repudiate the nonsensical
fiction that all monarchs are wise, etc. For such men history is history
and truth is truth, even where monarchs are concerned. But if a nation
should have the good luck to possess a great king or a great man it
ought to consider itself as specially favoured above all the other
nations, and these may be thankful if an adverse fortune has not
allotted the worst to them.

It is clear that the worth and significance of the monarchical principle
cannot rest in the person of the monarch alone, unless Heaven decrees
that the crown should be set on the head of a brilliant hero like
Frederick the Great, or a sagacious person like William I. This may
happen once in several centuries, but hardly oftener than that. The
ideal of the monarchy takes precedence of the person of the monarch,
inasmuch as the meaning of the institution must lie in the institution
it self. Thus the monarchy may be reckoned in the category of those
whose duty it is to serve. He, too, is but a wheel in this machine and
as such he is obliged to do his duty towards it. He has to adapt himself
for the fulfilment of high aims. If, therefore, there were no
significance attached to the idea itself and everything merely centred
around the 'sacred' person, then it would never be possible to depose a
ruler who has shown himself to be an imbecile.

It is essential to insist upon this truth at the present time, because
recently those phenomena have appeared again and were in no small
measure responsible for the collapse of the monarchy. With a certain
amount of native impudence these persons once again talk about 'their
King'--that is to say, the man whom they shamefully deserted a few years
ago at a most critical hour. Those who refrain from participating in
this chorus of lies are summarily classified as 'bad Germans'. They who
make the charge are the same class of quitters who ran away in 1918 and
took to wearing red badges. They thought that discretion was the better
part of valour. They were indifferent about what happened to the Kaiser.
They camouflaged themselves as 'peaceful citizens' but more often than
not they vanished altogether. All of a sudden these champions of royalty
were nowhere to be found at that time. Circumspectly, one by one, these
'servants and counsellors' of the Crown reappeared, to resume their
lip-service to royalty but only after others had borne the brunt of the
anti-royalist attack and suppressed the Revolution for them. Once again
they were all there. remembering wistfully the flesh-pots of Egypt and
almost bursting with devotion for the royal cause. This went on until
the day came when red badges were again in the ascendant. Then this
whole ramshackle assembly of royal worshippers scuttled anew like mice
from the cats.

If monarchs were not themselves responsible for such things one could
not help sympathizing with them. But they must realize that with such
champions thrones can be lost but certainly never gained.

All this devotion was a mistake and was the result of our whole system
of education, which in this case brought about a particularly severe
retribution. Such lamentable trumpery was kept up at the various courts
that the monarchy was slowly becoming under mined. When finally it did
begin to totter, everything was swept away. Naturally, grovellers and
lick-spittles are never willing to die for their masters. That monarchs
never realize this, and almost on principle never really take the
trouble to learn it, has always been their undoing.

One visible result of wrong educational system was the fear of
shouldering responsibility and the resultant weakness in dealing with
obvious vital problems of existence.

The starting point of this epidemic, however, was in our parliamentary
institution where the shirking of responsibility is particularly
fostered. Unfortunately the disease slowly spread to all branches of
everyday life but particularly affected the sphere of public affairs.
Responsibility was being shirked everywhere and this led to insufficient
or half-hearted measures being taken, personal responsibility for each
act being reduced to a minimum.

If we consider the attitude of various Governments towards a whole
series of really pernicious phenomena in public life, we shall at once
recognize the fearful significance of this policy of half-measures and
the lack of courage to undertake responsibilities. I shall single out
only a few from the large numbers of instances known to me.

In journalistic circles it is a pleasing custom to speak of the Press as
a 'Great Power' within the State. As a matter of fact its importance is
immense. One cannot easily overestimate it, for the Press continues the
work of education even in adult life. Generally, readers of the Press
can be classified into three groups:

First, those who believe everything they read;

Second, those who no longer believe anything;

Third, those who critically examine what they read and form their
judgments accordingly.

Numerically, the first group is by far the strongest, being composed of
the broad masses of the people. Intellectually, it forms the simplest
portion of the nation. It cannot be classified according to occupation
but only into grades of intelligence. Under this category come all those
who have not been born to think for themselves or who have not learnt to
do so and who, partly through incompetence and partly through ignorance,
believe everything that is set before them in print. To these we must
add that type of lazy individual who, although capable of thinking for
himself out of sheer laziness gratefully absorbs everything that others
had thought over, modestly believing this to have been thoroughly done.
The influence which the Press has on all these people is therefore
enormous; for after all they constitute the broad masses of a nation.
But, somehow they are not in a position or are not willing personally to
sift what is being served up to them; so that their whole attitude
towards daily problems is almost solely the result of extraneous
influence. All this can be advantageous where public enlightenment is of
a serious and truthful character, but great harm is done when scoundrels
and liars take a hand at this work.

The second group is numerically smaller, being partly composed of those
who were formerly in the first group and after a series of bitter
disappointments are now prepared to believe nothing of what they see in
print. They hate all newspapers. Either they do not read them at all or
they become exceptionally annoyed at their contents, which they hold to
be nothing but a congeries of lies and misstatements. These people are
difficult to handle; for they will always be sceptical of the truth.
Consequently, they are useless for any form of positive work.

The third group is easily the smallest, being composed of real
intellectuals whom natural aptitude and education have taught to think
for themselves and who in all things try to form their own judgments,
while at the same time carefully sifting what they read. They will not
read any newspaper without using their own intelligence to collaborate
with that of the writer and naturally this does not set writers an easy
task. Journalists appreciate this type of reader only with a certain
amount of reservation.

Hence the trash that newspapers are capable of serving up is of little
danger--much less of importance--to the members of the third group of
readers. In the majority of cases these readers have learnt to regard
every journalist as fundamentally a rogue who sometimes speaks the
truth. Most unfortunately, the value of these readers lies in their
intelligence and not in their numerical strength, an unhappy state of
affairs in a period where wisdom counts for nothing and majorities for
everything. Nowadays when the voting papers of the masses are the
deciding factor; the decision lies in the hands of the numerically
strongest group; that is to say the first group, the crowd of simpletons
and the credulous.

It is an all-important interest of the State and a national duty to
prevent these people from falling into the hands of false, ignorant or
even evil-minded teachers. Therefore it is the duty of the State to
supervise their education and prevent every form of offence in this
respect. Particular attention should be paid to the Press; for its
influence on these people is by far the strongest and most penetrating
of all; since its effect is not transitory but continual. Its immense
significance lies in the uniform and persistent repetition of its
teaching. Here, if anywhere, the State should never forget that all
means should converge towards the same end. It must not be led astray by
the will-o'-the-wisp of so-called 'freedom of the Press', or be talked
into neglecting its duty, and withholding from the nation that which is
good and which does good. With ruthless determination the State must
keep control of this instrument of popular education and place it at the
service of the State and the Nation.

But what sort of pabulum was it that the German Press served up for the
consumption of its readers in pre-War days? Was it not the worst
virulent poison imaginable? Was not pacifism in its worst form
inoculated into our people at a time when others were preparing slowly
but surely to pounce upon Germany? Did not this self-same Press of ours
in peace time already instil into the public mind a doubt as to the
sovereign rights of the State itself, thereby already handicapping the
State in choosing its means of defence? Was it not the German Press that
under stood how to make all the nonsensical talk about 'Western
democracy' palatable to our people, until an exuberant public was
eventually prepared to entrust its future to the League of Nations? Was
not this Press instrumental in bringing in a state of moral degradation
among our people? Were not morals and public decency made to look
ridiculous and classed as out-of-date and banal, until finally our
people also became modernized? By means of persistent attacks, did not
the Press keep on undermining the authority of the State, until one blow
sufficed to bring this institution tottering to the ground? Did not the
Press oppose with all its might every movement to give the State that
which belongs to the State, and by means of constant criticism, injure
the reputation of the army, sabotage general conscription and demand
refusal of military credits, etc.--until the success of this campaign
was assured?

The function of the so-called liberal Press was to dig the grave for the
German people and REICH. No mention need be made of the lying Marxist
Press. To them the spreading of falsehood is as much a vital necessity
as the mouse is to a cat. Their sole task is to break the national
backbone of the people, thus preparing the nation to become the slaves
of international finance and its masters, the Jews.

And what measures did the State take to counteract this wholesale
poisoning of the public mind? None, absolutely nothing at all. By this
policy it was hoped to win the favour of this pest--by means of
flattery, by a recognition of the 'value' of the Press, its
'importance', its 'educative mission' and similar nonsense. The Jews
acknowledged all this with a knowing smile and returned thanks.

The reason for this ignominious failure on the part of the State lay not
so much in its refusal to realize the danger as in the out-and-out
cowardly way of meeting the situation by the adoption of faulty and
ineffective measures. No one had the courage to employ any energetic and
radical methods. Everyone temporised in some way or other; and instead
of striking at its heart, the viper was only further irritated. The
result was that not only did everything remain as it was, but the power
of this institution which should have been combated grew greater from
year to year.

The defence put up by the Government in those days against a mainly
Jew-controlled Press that was slowly corrupting the nation, followed no
definite line of action, it had no determination behind it and above
all, no fixed objective whatsoever in view. This is where official
understanding of the situation completely failed both in estimating the
importance of the struggle, choosing the means and deciding on a
definite plan. They merely tinkered with the problem. Occasionally, when
bitten, they imprisoned one or another journalistic viper for a few
weeks or months, but the whole poisonous brood was allowed to carry on
in peace.

It must be admitted that all this was partly the result of extraordinary
crafty tactics on the part of Jewry on the one hand, and obvious
official stupidity or naïveté on the other hand. The Jews were too
clever to allow a simultaneous attack to be made on the whole of their
Press. No one section functioned as cover for the other. While the
Marxist newspaper, in the most despicable manner possible, reviled
everything that was sacred, furiously attacked the State and Government
and incited certain classes of the community against each other, the
bourgeois-democratic papers, also in Jewish hands, knew how to
camouflage themselves as model examples of objectivity. They studiously
avoided harsh language, knowing well that block-heads are capable of
judging only by external appearances and never able to penetrate to the
real depth and meaning of anything. They measure the worth of an object
by its exterior and not by its content. This form of human frailty was
carefully studied and understood by the Press.

For this class of blockheads the FRANKFURTER ZEITUNG would be
acknowledged as the essence of respectability. It always carefully
avoided calling a spade a spade. It deprecated the use of every form of
physical force and persistently appealed to the nobility of fighting
with 'intellectual' weapons. But this fight, curiously enough, was most
popular with the least intellectual classes. That is one of the results
of our defective education, which turns the youth away from the
instinctive dictates of Nature, pumps into them a certain amount of
knowledge without however being able to bring them to what is the
supreme act of knowing. To this end diligence and goodwill are of no
avail, if innate understanding fail. This final knowledge at which man
must aim is the understanding of causes which are instinctively
perceived.

Let me explain: Man must not fall into the error of thinking that he was
ever meant to become lord and master of Nature. A lopsided education has
helped to encourage that illusion. Man must realize that a fundamental
law of necessity reigns throughout the whole realm of Nature and that
his existence is subject to the law of eternal struggle and strife. He
will then feel that there cannot be a separate law for mankind in a
world in which planets and suns follow their orbits, where moons and
planets trace their destined paths, where the strong are always the
masters of the weak and where those subject to such laws must obey them
or be destroyed. Man must also submit to the eternal principles of this
supreme wisdom. He may try to understand them but he can never free
himself from their sway.

It is just for intellectual DEMI-MONDE that the Jew writes those papers
which he calls his 'intellectual' Press. For them the FRANKFURTER
ZEITUNG and BERLINER TAGEBLATT are written, the tone being adapted to
them, and it is over these people that such papers have an influence.
While studiously avoiding all forms of expression that might strike the
reader as crude, the poison is injected from other vials into the hearts
of the clientele. The effervescent tone and the fine phraseology lug the
readers into believing that a love for knowledge and moral principle is
the sole driving force that determines the policy of such papers,
whereas in reality these features represent a cunning way of disarming
any opposition that might be directed against the Jews and their Press.

They make such a parade of respectability that the imbecile readers are
all the more ready to believe that the excesses which other papers
indulge in are only of a mild nature and not such as to warrant legal
action being taken against them. Indeed such action might trespass on
the freedom of the Press, that expression being a euphemism under which
such papers escape legal punishment for deceiving the public and
poisoning the public mind. Hence the authorities are very slow indeed to
take any steps against these journalistic bandits for fear of
immediately alienating the sympathy of the so-called respectable Press.
A fear that is only too well founded, for the moment any attempt is made
to proceed against any member of the gutter press all the others rush to
its assistance at once, not indeed to support its policy but simply and
solely to defend the principle of freedom of the Press and liberty of
public opinion. This outcry will succeed in cowering the most stalwart;
for it comes from the mouth of what is called decent journalism.

And so this poison was allowed to enter the national bloodstream and
infect public life without the Government taking any effectual measures
to master the course of the disease. The ridiculous half-measures that
were taken were in themselves an indication of the process of
disintegration that was already threatening to break up the Empire. For
an institution practically surrenders its existence when it is no longer
determined to defend itself with all the weapons at its command. Every
half-measure is the outward expression of an internal process of decay
which must lead to an external collapse sooner or later.

I believe that our present generation would easily master this danger if
they were rightly led. For this generation has gone through certain
experiences which must have strengthened the nerves of all those who did
not become nervously broken by them. Certainly in days to come the Jews
will raise a tremendous cry throughout their newspapers once a hand is
laid on their favourite nest, once a move is made to put an end to this
scandalous Press and once this instrument which shapes public opinion is
brought under State control and no longer left in the hands of aliens
and enemies of the people. I am certain that this will be easier for us
than it was for our fathers. The scream of the twelve-inch shrapnel is
more penetrating than the hiss from a thousand Jewish newspaper vipers.
Therefore let them go on with their hissing.

A further example of the weak and hesitating way in which vital national
problems were dealt with in pre-War Germany is the following: Hand in
hand with the political and moral process of infecting the nation, for
many years an equally virulent process of infection had been attacking
the public health of the people. In large cities, particularly, syphilis
steadily increased and tuberculosis kept pace with it in reaping its
harvest of death almost in every part of the country.

Although in both cases the effect on the nation was alarming, it seemed
as if nobody was in a position to undertake any decisive measures
against these scourges.

In the case of syphilis especially the attitude of the State and public
bodies was one of absolute capitulation. To combat this state of affairs
something of far wider sweep should have been undertaken than was really
done. The discovery of a remedy which is of a questionable nature and
the excellent way in which it was placed on the market were only of
little assistance in fighting such a scourge. Here again the only course
to adopt is to attack the disease in its causes rather than in its
symptoms. But in this case the primary cause is to be found in the
manner in which love has been prostituted. Even though this did not
directly bring about the fearful disease itself, the nation must still
suffer serious damage thereby, for the moral havoc resulting from this
prostitution would be sufficient to bring about the destruction of the
nation, slowly but surely. This Judaizing of our spiritual life and
mammonizing of our natural instinct for procreation will sooner or later
work havoc with our whole posterity. For instead of strong, healthy
children, blessed with natural feelings, we shall see miserable
specimens of humanity resulting from economic calculation. For economic
considerations are becoming more and more the foundations of marriage
and the sole preliminary condition of it. And love looks for an outlet
elsewhere.

Here, as elsewhere, one may defy Nature for a certain period of time;
but sooner or later she will take her inexorable revenge. And when man
realizes this truth it is often too late.

Our own nobility furnishes an example of the devastating consequences
that follow from a persistent refusal to recognize the primary
conditions necessary for normal wedlock. Here we are openly brought face
to face with the results of those reproductive habits which on the one
hand are determined by social pressure and, on the other, by financial
considerations. The one leads to inherited debility and the other to
adulteration of the blood-strain; for all the Jewish daughters of the
department store proprietors are looked upon as eligible mates to
co-operate in propagating His Lordship's stock. And the stock certainly
looks it. All this leads to absolute degeneration. Nowadays our
bourgeoise are making efforts to follow in the same path, They will come
to the same journey's end.

These unpleasant truths are hastily and nonchalantly brushed aside, as
if by so doing the real state of affairs could also be abolished. But
no. It cannot be denied that the population of our great towns and
cities is tending more and more to avail of prostitution in the exercise
of its amorous instincts and is thus becoming more and more contaminated
by the scourge of venereal disease. On the one hand, the visible effects
of this mass-infection can be observed in our insane asylums and, on the
other hand, alas! among the children at home. These are the doleful and
tragic witnesses to the steadily increasing scourge that is poisoning
our sexual life. Their sufferings are the visible results of parental
vice.

There are many ways of becoming resigned to this unpleasant and terrible
fact. Many people go about seeing nothing or, to be more correct, not
wanting to see anything. This is by far the simplest and cheapest
attitude to adopt. Others cover themselves in the sacred mantle of
prudery, as ridiculous as it is false. They describe the whole condition
of affairs as sinful and are profoundly indignant when brought face to
face with a victim. They close their eyes in reverend abhorrence to this
godless scourge and pray to the Almighty that He--if possible after
their own death--may rain down fire and brimstone as on Sodom and
Gomorrah and so once again make an out standing example of this
shameless section of humanity. Finally, there are those who are well
aware of the terrible results which this scourge will and must bring
about, but they merely shrug their shoulders, fully convinced of their
inability to undertake anything against this peril. Hence matters are
allowed to take their own course.

Undoubtedly all this is very convenient and simple, only it must not be
overlooked that this convenient way of approaching things can have fatal
consequences for our national life. The excuse that other nations are
also not faring any better does not alter the fact of our own
deterioration, except that the feeling of sympathy for other stricken
nations makes our own suffering easier to bear. But the important
question that arises here is: Which nation will be the first to take the
initiative in mastering this scourge, and which nations will succumb to
it? This will be the final upshot of the whole situation. The present is
a period of probation for racial values. The race that fails to come
through the test will simply die out and its place will be taken by the
healthier and stronger races, which will be able to endure greater
hardships. As this problem primarily concerns posterity, it belongs to
that category of which it is said with terrible justification that the
sins of the fathers are visited on their offspring unto the tenth
generation. This is a consequence which follows on an infringement of
the laws of blood and race.

The sin against blood and race is the hereditary sin in this world and
it brings disaster on every nation that commits it.

The attitude towards this one vital problem in pre-War Germany was most
regrettable. What measures were undertaken to arrest the infection of
our youth in the large cities? What was done to put an end to the
contamination and mammonization of sexual life among us? What was done
to fight the resultant spreading of syphilis throughout the whole of our
national life? The reply to this question can best be illustrated by
showing what should have been done.

Instead of tackling this problem in a haphazard way, the authorities
should have realized that the fortunes or misfortunes of future
generations depended on its solution. But to admit this would have
demanded that active measures be carried out in a ruthless manner. The
primary condition would have been that the enlightened attention of the
whole country should be concentrated on this terrible danger, so that
every individual would realize the importance of fighting against it. It
would be futile to impose obligations of a definite character--which are
often difficult to bear--and expect them to become generally effective,
unless the public be thoroughly instructed on the necessity of imposing
and accepting such obligations. This demands a widespread and systematic
method of enlightenment and all other daily problems that might distract
public attention from this great central problem should be relegated to
the background.

In every case where there are exigencies or tasks that seem impossible
to deal with successfully public opinion must be concentrated on the one
problem, under the conviction that the solution of this problem alone is
a matter of life or death. Only in this way can public interest be
aroused to such a pitch as will urge people to combine in a great
voluntary effort and achieve important results.

This fundamental truth applies also to the individual, provided he is
desirous of attaining some great end. He must always concentrate his
efforts to one definitely limited stage of his progress which has to be
completed before the next step be attempted. Those who do not endeavour
to realize their aims step by step and who do not concentrate their
energy in reaching the individual stages, will never attain the final
objective. At some stage or other they will falter and fail. This
systematic way of approaching an objective is an art in itself, and
always calls for the expenditure of every ounce of energy in order to
conquer step after step of the road.

Therefore the most essential preliminary condition necessary for an
attack on such a difficult stage of the human road is that the
authorities should succeed in convincing the masses that the immediate
objective which is now being fought for is the only one that deserves to
be considered and the only one on which everything depends. The broad
masses are never able clearly to see the whole stretch of the road lying
in front of them without becoming tired and thus losing faith in their
ability to complete the task. To a certain extent they will keep the
objective in mind, but they are only able to survey the whole road in
small stages, as in the case of the traveller who knows where his
journey is going to end but who masters the endless stretch far better
by attacking it in degrees. Only in this way can he keep up his
determination to reach the final objective.

It is in this way, with the assistance of every form of propaganda, that
the problem of fighting venereal disease should be placed before the
public--not as a task for the nation but as THE main task. Every
possible means should be employed to bring the truth about this scourge
home to the minds of the people, until the whole nation has been
convinced that everything depends on the solution of this problem; that
is to say, a healthy future or national decay.

Only after such preparatory measures--if necessary spread over a period
of many years--will public attention and public resolution be fully
aroused, and only then can serious and definite measures be undertaken
without running the risk of not being fully understood or of being
suddenly faced with a slackening of the public will. It must be made
clear to all that a serious fight against this scourge calls for vast
sacrifices and an enormous amount of work.

To wage war against syphilis means fighting against prostitution,
against prejudice, against old-established customs, against current
fashion, public opinion, and, last but not least, against false prudery
in certain circles.

The first preliminary condition to be fulfilled before the State can
claim a moral right to fight against all these things is that the young
generation should be afforded facilities for contracting early
marriages. Late marriages have the sanction of a custom which, from
whatever angle we view it, is and will remain a disgrace to humanity.

Prostitution is a disgrace to humanity and cannot be removed simply by
charitable or academic methods. Its restriction and final extermination
presupposes the removal of a whole series of contributory circumstances.
The first remedy must always be to establish such conditions as will
make early marriages possible, especially for young men--for women are,
after all, only passive subjects in this matter.

An illustration of the extent to which people have so often been led
astray nowadays is afforded by the fact that not infrequently one hears
mothers in so-called 'better' circles openly expressing their
satisfaction at having found as a husband for their daughter a man who
has already sown his wild oats, etc. As there is usually so little
shortage in men of this type, the poor girl finds no difficulty in
getting a mate of this description, and the children of this marriage
are a visible result of such supposedly sensible unions.

When one realizes, apart from this, that every possible effort is being
made to hinder the process of procreation and that Nature is being
wilfully cheated of her rights, there remains really only one question:
Why is such an institution as marriage still in existence, and what are
its functions? Is it really nothing better than prostitution? Does our
duty to posterity no longer play any part? Or do people not realize the
nature of the curse they are inflicting on themselves and their
offspring by such criminally foolish neglect of one of the primary laws
of Nature? This is how civilized nations degenerate and gradually
perish.

Marriage is not an end in itself but must serve the greater end, which
is that of increasing and maintaining the human species and the race.
This is its only meaning and purpose.

This being admitted, then it is clear that the institution of marriage
must be judged by the manner in which its allotted function is
fulfilled. Therefore early marriages should be the rule, because thus
the young couple will still have that pristine force which is the
fountain head of a healthy posterity with unimpaired powers of
resistance. Of course early marriages cannot be made the rule unless a
whole series of social measures are first undertaken without which early
marriages cannot be even thought of. In other words, a solution of this
question, which seems a small problem in itself, cannot be brought about
without adopting radical measures to alter the social background. The
importance of such measures ought to be studied and properly estimated,
especially at a time when the so-called 'social' Republic has shown
itself unable to solve the housing problem and thus has made it
impossible for innumerable couples to get married. That sort of policy
prepares the way for the further advance of prostitution.

Another reason why early marriages are impossible is our nonsensical
method of regulating the scale of salaries, which pays far too little
attention to the problem of family support. Prostitution, therefore, can
only be really seriously tackled if, by means of a radical social
reform, early marriage is made easier than hitherto. This is the first
preliminary necessity for the solution of this problem.

Secondly, a whole series of false notions must be eradicated from our
system of bringing up and educating children--things which hitherto no
one seems to have worried about. In our present educational system a
balance will have to be established, first and foremost, between mental
instruction and physical training.

What is known as GYMNASIUM (Grammar School) to-day is a positive insult
to the Greek institution. Our system of education entirely loses sight
of the fact that in the long run a healthy mind can exist only in a
healthy body. This statement, with few exceptions, applies particularly
to the broad masses of the nation.

In the pre-War Germany there was a time when no one took the trouble to
think over this truth. Training of the body was criminally neglected,
the one-sided training of the mind being regarded as a sufficient
guarantee for the nation's greatness. This mistake was destined to show
its effects sooner than had been anticipated. It is not pure chance that
the Bolshevic teaching flourishes in those regions whose degenerate
population has been brought to the verge of starvation, as, for example,
in the case of Central Germany, Saxony, and the Ruhr Valley. In all
these districts there is a marked absence of any serious resistance,
even by the so-called intellectual classes, against this Jewish
contagion. And the simple reason is that the intellectual classes are
themselves physically degenerate, not through privation but through
education. The exclusive intellectualism of the education in vogue among
our upper classes makes them unfit for life's struggle at an epoch in
which physical force and not mind is the dominating factor. Thus they
are neither capable of maintaining themselves nor of making their way in
life. In nearly every case physical disability is the forerunner of
personal cowardice.

The extravagant emphasis laid on purely intellectual education and the
consequent neglect of physical training must necessarily lead to sexual
thoughts in early youth. Those boys whose constitutions have been
trained and hardened by sports and gymnastics are less prone to sexual
indulgence than those stay-at-homes who have been fed exclusively with
mental pabulum. Sound methods of education cannot, however, afford to
disregard this, and we must not forget that the expectations of a
healthy young man from a woman will differ from those of a weakling who
has been prematurely corrupted.

Thus in every branch of our education the day's curriculum must be
arranged so as to occupy a boy's free time in profitable development of
his physical powers. He has no right in those years to loaf about,
becoming a nuisance in public streets and in cinemas; but when his day's
work is done he ought to harden his young body so that his strength may
not be found wanting when the occasion arises. To prepare for this and
to carry it out should be the function of our educational system and not
exclusively to pump in knowledge or wisdom. Our school system must also
rid itself of the notion that the training of the body is a task that
should be left to the individual himself. There is no such thing as
allowing freedom of choice to sin against posterity and thus against the
race.

The fight against pollution of the mind must be waged simultaneously
with the training of the body. To-day the whole of our public life may
be compared to a hot-house for the forced growth of sexual notions and
incitements. A glance at the bill-of-fare provided by our cinemas,
playhouses, and theatres suffices to prove that this is not the right
food, especially for our young people. Hoardings and advertisements
kiosks combine to attract the public in the most vulgar manner. Anyone
who has not altogether lost contact with adolescent yearnings will
realize that all this must have very grave consequences. This seductive
and sensuous atmosphere puts notions into the heads of our youth which,
at their age, ought still to be unknown to them. Unfortunately, the
results of this kind of education can best be seen in our contemporary
youth who are prematurely grown up and therefore old before their time.
The law courts from time to time throw a distressing light on the
spiritual life of our 14- and 15-year old children. Who, therefore, will
be surprised to learn that venereal disease claims its victims at this
age? And is it not a frightful shame to see the number of physically
weak and intellectually spoiled young men who have been introduced to
the mysteries of marriage by the whores of the big cities?

No; those who want seriously to combat prostitution must first of all
assist in removing the spiritual conditions on which it thrives. They
will have to clean up the moral pollution of our city 'culture'
fearlessly and without regard for the outcry that will follow. If we do
not drag our youth out of the morass of their present environment they
will be engulfed by it. Those people who do not want to see these things
are deliberately encouraging them and are guilty of spreading the
effects of prostitution to the future--for the future belongs to our
young generation. This process of cleansing our 'Kultur' will have to be
applied in practically all spheres. The stage, art, literature, the
cinema, the Press and advertisement posters, all must have the stains of
pollution removed and be placed in the service of a national and
cultural idea. The life of the people must be freed from the
asphyxiating perfume of our modern eroticism and also from every unmanly
and prudish form of insincerity. In all these things the aim and the
method must be determined by thoughtful consideration for the
preservation of our national well-being in body and soul. The right to
personal freedom comes second in importance to the duty of maintaining
the race.

Only after such measures have been put into practice can a medical
campaign against this scourge begin with some hope of success. But, here
again, half-measures will be valueless. Far-reaching and important
decisions will have to be made. It would be doing things by halves if
incurables were given the opportunity of infecting one healthy person
after another. This would be that kind of humanitarianism which would
allow hundreds to perish in order to save the suffering of one
individual. The demand that it should be made impossible for defective
people to continue to propagate defective offspring is a demand that is
based on most reasonable grounds, and its proper fulfilment is the most
humane task that mankind has to face. Unhappy and undeserved suffering
in millions of cases will be spared, with the result that there will be
a gradual improvement in national health. A determined decision to act
in this manner will at the same time provide an obstacle against the
further spread of venereal disease. It would then be a case, where
necessary, of mercilessly isolating all incurables--perhaps a barbaric
measure for those unfortunates--but a blessing for the present
generation and for posterity. The temporary pain thus experienced in
this century can and will spare future thousands of generations from
suffering.

The fight against syphilis and its pace-maker, prostitution, is one of
the gigantic tasks of mankind; gigantic, because it is not merely a case
of solving a single problem but the removal of a whole series of evils
which are the contributory causes of this scourge. Disease of the body
in this case is merely the result of a diseased condition of the moral,
social, and racial instincts.

But if for reasons of indolence or cowardice this fight is not fought to
a finish we may imagine what conditions will be like 500 years hence.
Little of God's image will be left in human nature, except to mock the
Creator.

But what has been done in Germany to counteract this scourge? If we
think calmly over the answer we shall find it distressing. It is true
that in governmental circles the terrible and injurious effects of this
disease were well known, but the counter-measures which were officially
adopted were ineffective and a hopeless failure. They tinkered with
cures for the symptoms, wholly regardless of the cause of the disease.
Prostitutes were medically examined and controlled as far as possible,
and when signs of infection were apparent they were sent to hospital.
When outwardly cured, they were once more let loose on humanity.

It is true that 'protective legislation' was introduced which made
sexual intercourse a punishable offence for all those not completely
cured, or those suffering from venereal disease. This legislation was
correct in theory, but in practice it failed completely. In the first
place, in the majority of cases women will decline to appear in court as
witnesses against men who have robbed them of their health. Women would
be exposed far more than men to uncharitable remarks in such cases, and
one can imagine what their position would be if they had been infected
by their own husbands. Should women in that case lay a charge? Or what
should they do?

In the case of the man there is the additional fact that he frequently
is unfortunate enough to run up against this danger when he is under the
influence of alcohol. His condition makes it impossible for him to
assess the qualities of his 'amorous beauty,' a fact which is well known
to every diseased prostitute and makes them single out men in this ideal
condition for preference. The result is that the unfortunate man is not
able to recollect later on who his compassionate benefactress was, which
is not surprising in cities like Berlin and Munich. Many of such cases
are visitors from the provinces who, held speechless and enthralled by
the magic charm of city life, become an easy prey for prostitutes.

In the final analysis who is able to say whether he has been infected or
not?

Are there not innumerable cases on record where an apparently cured
person has a relapse and does untold harm without knowing it?

Therefore in practice the results of these legislative measures are
negative. The same applies to the control of prostitution, and, finally,
even medical treatment and cure are nowadays unsafe and doubtful. One
thing only is certain. The scourge has spread further and further in
spite of all measures, and this alone suffices definitely to stamp and
substantiate their inefficiency.

Everything else that was undertaken was just as inefficient as it was
absurd. The spiritual prostitution of the people was neither arrested
nor was anything whatsoever undertaken in this direction.

Those, however, who do not regard this subject as a serious one would do
well to examine the statistical data of the spread of this disease,
study its growth in the last century and contemplate the possibilities
of its further development. The ordinary observer, unless he were
particularly stupid, would experience a cold shudder if the position
were made clear to him.

The half-hearted and wavering attitude adopted in pre-War Germany
towards this iniquitous condition can assuredly be taken as a visible
sign of national decay. When the courage to fight for one's own health
is no longer in evidence, then the right to live in this world of
struggle also ceases.

One of the visible signs of decay in the old REICH was the slow setback
which the general cultural level experienced. But by 'Kultur' I do not
mean that which we nowadays style as civilization, which on the contrary
may rather be regarded as inimical to the spiritual elevation of life.

At the turn of the last century a new element began to make its
appearance in our world. It was an element which had been hitherto
absolutely unknown and foreign to us. In former times there had
certainly been offences against good taste; but these were mostly
departures from the orthodox canons of art, and posterity could
recognize a certain historical value in them. But the new products
showed signs, not only of artistic aberration but of spiritual
degeneration. Here, in the cultural sphere, the signs of the coming
collapse first became manifest.

The Bolshevization of art is the only cultural form of life and the only
spiritual manifestation of which Bolshevism is capable.

Anyone to whom this statement may appear strange need only take a glance
at those lucky States which have become Bolshevized and, to his horror,
he will there recognize those morbid monstrosities which have been
produced by insane and degenerate people. All those artistic aberrations
which are classified under the names of cubism and dadism, since the
opening of the present century, are manifestations of art which have
come to be officially recognized by the State itself. This phenomenon
made its appearance even during the short-lived period of the Soviet
Republic in Bavaria. At that time one might easily have recognized how
all the official posters, propagandist pictures and newspapers, etc.,
showed signs not only of political but also of cultural decadence.

About sixty years ago a political collapse such as we are experiencing
to-day would have been just as inconceivable as the cultural decline
which has been manifested in cubist and futurist pictures ever since
1900. Sixty years ago an exhibition of so-called dadistic 'experiences'
would have been an absolutely preposterous idea. The organizers of such
an exhibition would then have been certified for the lunatic asylum,
whereas, to-day they are appointed presidents of art societies. At that
time such an epidemic would never have been allowed to spread. Public
opinion would not have tolerated it, and the Government would not have
remained silent; for it is the duty of a Government to save its people
from being stampeded into such intellectual madness. But intellectual
madness would have resulted from a development that followed the
acceptance of this kind of art. It would have marked one of the worst
changes in human history; for it would have meant that a retrogressive
process had begun to take place in the human brain, the final stages of
which would be unthinkable.

If we study the course of our cultural life during the last twenty-five
years we shall be astonished to note how far we have already gone in
this process of retrogression. Everywhere we find the presence of those
germs which give rise to protuberant growths that must sooner or later
bring about the ruin of our culture. Here we find undoubted symptoms of
slow corruption; and woe to the nations that are no longer able to bring
that morbid process to a halt.

In almost all the various fields of German art and culture those morbid
phenomena may be observed. Here everything seems to have passed the
culminating point of its excellence and to have entered the curve of a
hasty decline. At the beginning of the century the theatres seemed
already degenerating and ceasing to be cultural factors, except the
Court theatres, which opposed this prostitution of the national art.
With these exceptions, and also a few other decent institutions, the
plays produced on the stage were of such a nature that the people would
have benefited by not visiting them at all. A sad symptom of decline was
manifested by the fact that in the case of many 'art centres' the sign
was posted on the entrance doors: FOR ADULTS ONLY.

Let it be borne in mind that these precautions had to be taken in regard
to institutions whose main purpose should have been to promote the
education of the youth and not merely to provide amusement for
sophisticated adults. What would the great dramatists of other times
have said of such measures and, above all, of the conditions which made
these measures necessary? How exasperated Schiller would have been, and
how Goethe would have turned away in disgust!

But what are Schiller, Goethe and Shakespeare when confronted with the
heroes of our modern German literature? Old and frowsy and outmoded and
finished. For it was typical of this epoch that not only were its own
products bad but that the authors of such products and their backers
reviled everything that had really been great in the past. This is a
phenomenon that is very characteristic of such epochs. The more vile and
miserable are the men and products of an epoch, the more they will hate
and denigrate the ideal achievements of former generations. What these
people would like best would be completely to destroy every vestige of
the past, in order to do away with that sole standard of comparison
which prevents their own daubs from being looked upon as art. Therefore
the more lamentable and wretched are the products of each new era, the
more it will try to obliterate all the memorials of the past. But any
real innovation that is for the benefit of mankind can always face
comparison with the best of what has gone before; and frequently it
happens that those monuments of the past guarantee the acceptance of
those modern productions. There is no fear that modern productions of
real worth will look pale and worthless beside the monuments of the
past. What is contributed to the general treasury of human culture often
fulfils a part that is necessary in order to keep the memory of old
achievements alive, because this memory alone is the standard whereby
our own works are properly appreciated. Only those who have nothing of
value to give to the world will oppose everything that already exists
and would have it destroyed at all costs.

And this holds good not only for new phenomena in the cultural domain
but also in politics. The more inferior new revolutionary movements are,
the more will they try to denigrate the old forms. Here again the desire
to pawn off their shoddy products as great and original achievements
leads them into a blind hatred against everything which belongs to the
past and which is superior to their own work. As long as the historical
memory of Frederick the Great, for instance, still lives, Frederick
Ebert can arouse only a problematic admiration. The relation of the hero
of Sans Souci to the former republican of Bremen may be compared to that
of the sun to the moon; for the moon can shine only after the direct
rays of the sun have left the earth. Thus we can readily understand why
it is that all the new moons in human history have hated the fixed
stars. In the field of politics, if Fate should happen temporarily to
place the ruling power in the hands of those nonentities they are not
only eager to defile and revile the past but at the same time they will
use all means to evade criticism of their own acts. The Law for the
Protection of the Republic, which the new German State enacted, may be
taken as one example of this truth.

One has good grounds to be suspicious in regard to any new idea, or any
doctrine or philosophy, any political or economical movement, which
tries to deny everything that the past has produced or to present it as
inferior and worthless. Any renovation which is really beneficial to
human progress will always have to begin its constructive work at the
level where the last stones of the structure have been laid. It need not
blush to utilize those truths which have already been established; for
all human culture, as well as man himself, is only the result of one
long line of development, where each generation has contributed but one
stone to the building of the whole structure. The meaning and purpose of
revolutions cannot be to tear down the whole building but to take away
what has not been well fitted into it or is unsuitable, and to rebuild
the free space thus caused, after which the main construction of the
building will be carried on.

Thus alone will it be possible to talk of human progress; for otherwise
the world would never be free of chaos, since each generation would feel
entitled to reject the past and to destroy all the work of the past, as
the necessary preliminary to any new work of its own.

The saddest feature of the condition in which our whole civilization
found itself before the War was the fact that it was not only barren of
any creative force to produce its own works of art and civilization but
that it hated, defiled and tried to efface the memory of the superior
works produced in the past. About the end of the last century people
were less interested in producing new significant works of their
own--particularly in the fields of dramatic art and literature--than in
defaming the best works of the past and in presenting them as inferior
and antiquated. As if this period of disgraceful decadence had the
slightest capacity to produce anything of superior quality! The efforts
made to conceal the past from the eyes of the present afforded clear
evidence of the fact that these apostles of the future acted from an
evil intent. These symptoms should have made it clear to all that it was
not a question of new, though wrong, cultural ideas but of a process
which was undermining the very foundations of civilization. It threw the
artistic feeling which had hitherto been quite sane into utter
confusion, thus spiritually preparing the way for political Bolshevism.
If the creative spirit of the Periclean age be manifested in the
Parthenon, then the Bolshevist era is manifested through its cubist
grimace.

In this connection attention must be drawn once again to the want of
courage displayed by one section of our people, namely, by those who, in
virtue of their education and position, ought to have felt themselves
obliged to take up a firm stand against this outrage on our culture. But
they refrained from offering serious resistance and surrendered to what
they considered the inevitable. This abdication of theirs was due,
however, to sheer funk lest the apostles of Bolshevist art might raise a
rumpus; for those apostles always violently attacked everyone who was
not ready to recognize them as the choice spirits of artistic creation,
and they tried to strangle all opposition by saying that it was the
product of philistine and backwater minds. People trembled in fear lest
they might be accused by these yahoos and swindlers of lacking artistic
appreciation, as if it would have been a disgrace not to be able to
understand and appreciate the effusions of those mental degenerates or
arrant rogues. Those cultural disciples, however, had a very simple way
of presenting their own effusions as works of the highest quality. They
offered incomprehensible and manifestly crazy productions to their
amazed contemporaries as what they called 'an inner experience'. Thus
they forestalled all adverse criticism at very little cost indeed. Of
course nobody ever doubted that there could have been inner experiences
like that, but some doubt ought to have arisen as to whether or not
there was any justification for exposing these hallucinations of
psychopaths or criminals to the sane portion of human society. The works
produced by a Moritz von Schwind or a Böcklin were also externalizations
of an inner experience, but these were the experiences of divinely
gifted artists and not of buffoons.

This situation afforded a good opportunity of studying the miserable
cowardliness of our so-called intellectuals who shirked the duty of
offering serious resistance to the poisoning of the sound instincts of
our people. They left it to the people themselves to formulate their own
attitude towards his impudent nonsense. Lest they might be considered as
understanding nothing of art, they accepted every caricature of art,
until they finally lost the power of judging what is really good or bad.

Taken all in all, there were superabundant symptoms to show that a
diseased epoch had begun.

Still another critical symptom has to be considered. In the course of
the nineteenth century our towns and cities began more and more to lose
their character as centres of civilization and became more and more
centres of habitation. In our great modern cities the proletariat does
not show much attachment to the place where it lives. This feeling
results from the fact that their dwelling-place is nothing but an
accidental abode, and that feeling is also partly due to the frequent
change of residence which is forced upon them by social conditions.
There is no time for the growth of any attachment to the town in which
they live. But another reason lies in the cultural barrenness and
superficiality of our modern cities. At the time of the German Wars of
Liberation our German towns and cities were not only small in number but
also very modest in size. The few that could really be called great
cities were mostly the residential cities of princes; as such they had
almost always a definite cultural value and also a definite cultural
aspect. Those few towns which had more than fifty thousand inhabitants
were, in comparison with modern cities of the same size, rich in
scientific and artistic treasures. At the time when Munich had not more
than sixty thousand souls it was already well on the way to become one
of the first German centres of art. Nowadays almost every industrial
town has a population at least as large as that, without having anything
of real value to call its own. They are agglomerations of tenement
houses and congested dwelling barracks, and nothing else. It would be a
miracle if anybody should grow sentimentally attached to such a
meaningless place. Nobody can grow attached to a place which offers only
just as much or as little as any other place would offer, which has no
character of its own and where obviously pains have been taken to avoid
everything that might have any resemblance to an artistic appearance.

But this is not all. Even the great cities become more barren of real
works of art the more they increase in population. They assume more and
more a neutral atmosphere and present the same aspect, though on a
larger scale, as the wretched little factory towns. Everything that our
modern age has contributed to the civilization of our great cities is
absolutely deficient. All our towns are living on the glory and the
treasures of the past. If we take away from the Munich of to-day
everything that was created under Ludwig II we should be horror-stricken
to see how meagre has been the output of important artistic creations
since that time. One might say much the same of Berlin and most of our
other great towns.

But the following is the essential thing to be noticed: Our great modern
cities have no outstanding monuments that dominate the general aspect of
the city and could be pointed to as the symbols of a whole epoch. Yet
almost every ancient town had a monument erected to its glory. It was
not in private dwellings that the characteristic art of ancient cities
was displayed but in the public monuments, which were not meant to have
a transitory interest but an enduring one. And this was because they did
not represent the wealth of some individual citizen but the greatness
and importance of the community. It was under this inspiration that
those monuments arose which bound the individual inhabitants to their
own town in a manner that is often almost incomprehensible to us to-day.
What struck the eye of the individual citizen was not a number of
mediocre private buildings, but imposing structures that belonged to the
whole community. In contradistinction to these, private dwellings were
of only very secondary importance indeed.

When we compare the size of those ancient public buildings with that of
the private dwellings belonging to the same epoch then we can understand
the great importance which was given to the principle that those works
which reflected and affected the life of the community should take
precedence of all others.

Among the broken arches and vast spaces that are covered with ruins from
the ancient world the colossal riches that still arouse our wonder have
not been left to us from the commercial palaces of these days but from
the temples of the Gods and the public edifices that belonged to the
State. The community itself was the owner of those great edifices. Even
in the pomp of Rome during the decadence it was not the villas and
palaces of some citizens that filled the most prominent place but rather
the temples and the baths, the stadia, the circuses, the aqueducts, the
basilicas, etc., which belonged to the State and therefore to the people
as a whole.

In medieval Germany also the same principle held sway, although the
artistic outlook was quite different. In ancient times the theme that
found its expression in the Acropolis or the Pantheon was now clothed in
the forms of the Gothic Cathedral. In the medieval cities these
monumental structures towered gigantically above the swarm of smaller
buildings with their framework walls of wood and brick. And they remain
the dominant feature of these cities even to our own day, although they
are becoming more and more obscured by the apartment barracks. They
determine the character and appearance of the locality. Cathedrals,
city-halls, corn exchanges, defence towers, are the outward expression
of an idea which has its counterpart only in the ancient world.

The dimensions and quality of our public buildings to-day are in
deplorable contrast to the edifices that represent private interests. If
a similar fate should befall Berlin as befell Rome future generations
might gaze upon the ruins of some Jewish department stores or
joint-stock hotels and think that these were the characteristic
expressions of the culture of our time. In Berlin itself, compare the
shameful disproportion between the buildings which belong to the REICH
and those which have been erected for the accommodation of trade and
finance.

The credits that are voted for public buildings are in most cases
inadequate and really ridiculous. They are not built as structures that
were meant to last but mostly for the purpose of answering the need of
the moment. No higher idea influenced those who commissioned such
buildings. At the time the Berlin Schloss was built it had a quite
different significance from what the new library has for our time,
seeing that one battleship alone represents an expenditure of about
sixty million marks, whereas less than half that sum was allotted for
the building of the Reichstag, which is the most imposing structure
erected for the REICH and which should have been built to last for ages.
Yet, in deciding the question of internal decoration, the Upper House
voted against the use of stone and ordered that the walls should be
covered with stucco. For once, however, the parliamentarians made an
appropriate decision on that occasion; for plaster heads would be out of
place between stone walls.

The community as such is not the dominant characteristic of our
contemporary cities, and therefore it is not to be wondered at if the
community does not find itself architecturally represented. Thus we must
eventually arrive at a veritable civic desert which will at last be
reflected in the total indifference of the individual citizen towards
his own country.

This is also a sign of our cultural decay and general break-up. Our era
is entirely preoccupied with little things which are to no purpose, or
rather it is entirely preoccupied in the service of money. Therefore it
is not to be wondered at if, with the worship of such an idol, the sense
of heroism should entirely disappear. But the present is only reaping
what the past has sown.

All these symptoms which preceded the final collapse of the Second
Empire must be attributed to the lack of a definite and uniformly
accepted WELTANSCHAUUNG and the general uncertainty of outlook
consequent on that lack. This uncertainty showed itself when the great
questions of the time had to be considered one after another and a
decisive policy adopted towards them. This lack is also accountable for
the habit of doing everything by halves, beginning with the educational
system, the shilly-shally, the reluctance to undertake responsibilites
and, finally, the cowardly tolerance of evils that were even admitted to
be destructive. Visionary humanitarianisms became the fashion. In weakly
submitting to these aberrations and sparing the feelings of the
individual, the future of millions of human beings was sacrificed.

An examination of the religious situation before the War shows that the
general process of disruption had extended to this sphere also. A great
part of the nation itself had for a long time already ceased to have any
convictions of a uniform and practical character in their ideological
outlook on life. In this matter the point of primary importance was by
no means the number of people who renounced their church membership but
rather the widespread indifference. While the two Christian
denominations maintained missions in Asia and Africa, for the purpose of
securing new adherents to the Faith, these same denominations were
losing millions and millions of their adherents at home in Europe. These
former adherents either gave up religion wholly as a directive force in
their lives or they adopted their own interpretation of it. The
consequences of this were specially felt in the moral life of the
country. In parenthesis it may be remarked that the progress made by the
missions in spreading the Christian Faith abroad was only quite modest
in comparison with the spread of Mohammedanism.

It must be noted too that the attack on the dogmatic principles
underlying ecclesiastical teaching increased steadily in violence. And
yet this human world of ours would be inconceivable without the
practical existence of a religious belief. The great masses of a nation
are not composed of philosophers. For the masses of the people,
especially faith is absolutely the only basis of a moral outlook on
life. The various substitutes that have been offered have not shown any
results that might warrant us in thinking that they might usefully
replace the existing denominations. But if religious teaching and
religious faith were once accepted by the broad masses as active forces
in their lives, then the absolute authority of the doctrines of faith
would be the foundation of all practical effort. There may be a few
hundreds of thousands of superior men who can live wisely and
intelligently without depending on the general standards that prevail in
everyday life, but the millions of others cannot do so. Now the place
which general custom fills in everyday life corresponds to that of
general laws in the State and dogma in religion. The purely spiritual
idea is of itself a changeable thing that may be subjected to endless
interpretations. It is only through dogma that it is given a precise and
concrete form without which it could not become a living faith.
Otherwise the spiritual idea would never become anything more than a
mere metaphysical concept, or rather a philosophical opinion.
Accordingly the attack against dogma is comparable to an attack against
the general laws on which the State is founded. And so this attack would
finally lead to complete political anarchy if it were successful, just
as the attack on religion would lead to a worthless religious nihilism.

The political leader should not estimate the worth of a religion by
taking some of its shortcomings into account, but he should ask himself
whether there be any practical substitute in a view which is
demonstrably better. Until such a substitute be available only fools and
criminals would think of abolishing the existing religion.

Undoubtedly no small amount of blame for the present unsatisfactory
religious situation must be attributed to those who have encumbered the
ideal of religion with purely material accessories and have thus given
rise to an utterly futile conflict between religion and science. In this
conflict victory will nearly always be on the side of science, even
though after a bitter struggle, while religion will suffer heavily in
the eyes of those who cannot penetrate beneath the mere superficial
aspects of science.

But the greatest damage of all has come from the practice of debasing
religion as a means that can be exploited to serve political interests,
or rather commercial interests. The impudent and loud-mouthed liars who
do this make their profession of faith before the whole world in
stentorian tones so that all poor mortals may hear--not that they are
ready to die for it if necessary but rather that they may live all the
better. They are ready to sell their faith for any political QUID PRO
QUO. For ten parliamentary mandates they would ally themselves with the
Marxists, who are the mortal foes of all religion. And for a seat in the
Cabinet they would go the length of wedlock with the devil, if the
latter had not still retained some traces of decency.

If religious life in pre-war Germany had a disagreeable savour for the
mouths of many people this was because Christianity had been lowered to
base uses by political parties that called themselves Christian and
because of the shameful way in which they tried to identify the Catholic
Faith with a political party.

This substitution was fatal. It procured some worthless parliamentary
mandates for the party in question, but the Church suffered damage
thereby.

The consequences of that situation had to be borne by the whole nation;
for the laxity that resulted in religious life set in at a juncture when
everything was beginning to lose hold and vacillate and the traditional
foundations of custom and of morality were threatening to fall asunder.

Yet all those cracks and clefts in the social organism might not have
been dangerous if no grave burdens had been laid upon it; but they
became disastrous when the internal solidarity of the nation was the
most important factor in withstanding the storm of big events.

In the political field also observant eyes might have noticed certain
anomalies of the REICH which foretold disaster unless some alteration
and correction took place in time. The lack of orientation in German
policy, both domestic and foreign, was obvious to everyone who was not
purposely blind. The best thing that could be said about the practice of
making compromises is that it seemed outwardly to be in harmony with
Bismarck's axiom that 'politics is the art of the possible'. But
Bismarck was a slightly different man from the Chancellors who followed
him. This difference allowed the former to apply that formula to the
very essence of his policy, while in the mouths of the others it took on
an utterly different significance. When he uttered that phrase Bismarck
meant to say that in order to attain a definite political end all
possible means should be employed or at least that all possibilities
should be tried. But his successors see in that phrase only a solemn
declaration that one is not necessarily bound to have political
principles or any definite political aims at all. And the political
leaders of the REICH at that time had no far-seeing policy. Here, again,
the necessary foundation was lacking, namely, a definite
WELTANSCHAUUNG, and these leaders also lacked that clear insight into
the laws of political evolution which is a necessary quality in
political leadership.

Many people who took a gloomy view of things at that time condemned the
lack of ideas and lack of orientation which were evident in directing
the policy of the REICH. They recognized the inner weakness and futility
of this policy. But such people played only a secondary role in
politics. Those who had the Government of the country in their hands
were quite as indifferent to principles of civil wisdom laid down by
thinkers like Houston Stewart Chamberlain as our political leaders now
are. These people are too stupid to think for themselves, and they have
too much self-conceit to take from others the instruction which they
need. Oxenstierna (Note 14a) gave expression to a truth which has lasted
since time immemorial, when he said that the world is governed by only a
particle of wisdom. Almost every civil servant of councillor rank might
naturally be supposed to possess only an atom or so belonging to this
particle. But since Germany became a Republic even this modicum is
wanting. And that is why they had to promulgate the Law for the Defence
of the Republic, which prohibits the holding of such views or expressing
them. It was fortunate for Oxenstierna that he lived at that time and
not in this wise Republic of our time.

[Note 14a. Swedish Chancellor who took over the reins of Government after
the death of Gustavus Adolphus]

Already before the War that institution which should have represented
the strength of the Reich--the Parliament, the Reichstag--was widely
recognized as its weakest feature. Cowardliness and fear of shouldering
responsibilities were associated together there in a perfect fashion.

One of the silliest notions that one hears expressed to-day is that in
Germany the parliamentary institution has ceased to function since the
Revolution. This might easily be taken to imply that the case was
different before the Revolution. But in reality the parliamentary
institution never functioned except to the detriment of the country. And
it functioned thus in those days when people saw nothing or did not wish
to see anything. The German downfall is to be attributed in no small
degree to this institution. But that the catastrophe did not take place
sooner is not to be credited to the Parliament but rather to those who
opposed the influence of this institution which, during peace times, was
digging the grave of the German Nation and the German REICH.

From the immense mass of devastating evils that were due either directly
or indirectly to the Parliament I shall select one the most intimately
typical of this institution which was the most irresponsible of all
time. The evil I speak of was seen in the appalling shilly-shally and
weakness in conducting the internal and external affairs of the REICH.
It was attributable in the first place to the action of the Reichstag
and was one of the principal causes of the political collapse.

Everything subject to the influence of Parliament was done by halves, no
matter from what aspect you may regard it.

The foreign policy of the REICH in the matter of alliances was an
example of shilly-shally. They wished to maintain peace, but in doing so
they steered straight. into war.

Their Polish policy was also carried out by half-measures. It resulted
neither in a German triumph nor Polish conciliation, and it made enemies
of the Russians.

They tried to solve the Alsace-Lorraine question through half-measures.
Instead of crushing the head of the French hydra once and for all with
the mailed fist and granting Alsace-Lorraine equal rights with the other
German States, they did neither the one nor the other. Anyhow, it was
impossible for them to do otherwise, for they had among their ranks the
greatest traitors to the country, such as Herr Wetterlé of the Centre
Party.

But still the country might have been able to bear with all this
provided the half-measure policy had not victimized that force in which,
as the last resort, the existence of the Empire depended: namely, the
Army.

The crime committed by the so-called German Reichstag in this regard was
sufficient of itself to draw down upon it the curses of the German
Nation for all time. On the most miserable of pretexts these
parliamentary party henchmen filched from the hands of the nation and
threw away the weapons which were needed to maintain its existence and
therewith defend the liberty and independence of our people. If the
graves on the plains of Flanders were to open to-day the bloodstained
accusers would arise, hundreds of thousands of our best German youth who
were driven into the arms of death by those conscienceless parliamentary
ruffians who were either wrongly educated for their task or only
half-educated. Those youths, and other millions of the killed and
mutilated, were lost to the Fatherland simply and solely in order that a
few hundred deceivers of the people might carry out their political
manoeuvres and their exactions or even treasonably pursue their
doctrinaire theories.

By means of the Marxist and democratic Press, the Jews spread the
colossal falsehood about 'German Militarism' throughout the world and
tried to inculpate Germany by every possible means, while at the same
time the Marxist and democratic parties refused to assent to the
measures that were necessary for the adequate training of our national
defence forces. The appalling crime thus committed by these people ought
to have been obvious to everybody who foresaw that in case of war the
whole nation would have to be called to arms and that, because of the
mean huckstering of these noble 'representatives of the people', as they
called themselves, millions of Germans would have to face the enemy
ill-equipped and insufficiently trained. But even apart from the
consequences of the crude and brutal lack of conscience which these
parliamentarian rascals displayed, it was quite clear that the lack of
properly trained soldiers at the beginning of a war would most probably
lead to the loss of such a war; and this probability was confirmed in a
most terrible way during the course of the world war.

Therefore the German people lost the struggle for the freedom and
independence of their country because of the half-hearted and defective
policy employed during times of peace in the organization and training
of the defensive strength of the nation.

The number of recruits trained for the land forces was too small; but
the same half-heartedness was shown in regard to the navy and made this
weapon of national self-preservation more or less ineffective.
Unfortunately, even the naval authorities themselves were contaminated
with this spirit of half-heartedness. The tendency to build the ship on
the stocks somewhat smaller than that just launched by the British did
not show much foresight and less genius. A fleet which cannot be brought
to the same numerical strength as that of the probable enemy ought to
compensate for this inferiority by the superior fighting power of the
individual ship. It is the weight of the fighting power that counts and
not any sort of traditional quality. As a matter of fact, modern
technical development is so advanced and so well proportioned among the
various civilized States that it must be looked on as practically
impossible for one Power to build vessels which would have a superior
fighting quality to that of the vessels of equal size built by the other
Powers. But it is even less feasible to build vessels of smaller
displacement which will be superior in action to those of larger
displacement.

As a matter of fact, the smaller proportions of the German vessels could
be maintained only at the expense of speed and armament. The phrase used
to justify this policy was in itself an evidence of the lack of logical
thinking on the part of the naval authorities who were in charge of
these matters in times of peace. They declared that the German guns were
definitely superior to the British 30.5 cm. as regards striking
efficiency.

But that was just why they should have adopted the policy of building
30.5 cm. guns also; for it ought to have been their object not to
achieve equality but superiority in fighting strength. If that were not
so then it would have been superfluous to equip the land forces with 42
cm. mortars; for the German 21 cm. mortar could be far superior to any
high-angle guns which the French possessed at that time and since the
fortresses could probably have been taken by means of 30.5 cm. mortars.
The army authorities unfortunately failed to do so. If they refrained
from assuring superior efficiency in the artillery as in the velocity,
this was because of the fundamentally false 'principle of risk' which
they adopted. The naval authorities, already in times of peace,
renounced the principle of attack and thus had to follow a defensive
policy from the very beginning of the War. But by this attitude they
renounced also the chances of final success, which can be achieved only
by an offensive policy.

A vessel with slower speed and weaker armament will be crippled and
battered by an adversary that is faster and stronger and can frequently
shoot from a favourable distance. A large number of cruisers have been
through bitter experiences in this matter. How wrong were the ideas
prevalent among the naval authorities in times of peace was proved
during the War. They were compelled to modify the armament of the old
vessels and to equip the new ones with better armament whenever there
was a chance to do so. If the German vessels in the Battle of the
Skagerrak had been of equal size, the same armament and the same speed
as the English, the British Fleet would have gone down under the tempest
of the German 38 centimeter shells, which hit their aims more accurately
and were more effective.

Japan had followed a different kind of naval policy. There, care was
principally taken to create with every single new vessel a fighting
force that would be superior to those of the eventual adversaries. But,
because of this policy, it was afterwards possible to use the fleet for
the offensive.

While the army authorities refused to adopt such fundamentally erroneous
principles, the navy--which unfortunately had more representatives in
Parliament--succumbed to the spirit that ruled there. The navy was not
organized on a strong basis, and it was later used in an unsystematic
and irresolute way. The immortal glory which the navy won, in spite of
these drawbacks, must be entirely credited to the good work and the
efficiency and incomparable heroism of officers and crews. If the former
commanders-in-chief had been inspired with the same kind of genius all
the sacrifices would not have been in vain.

It was probably the very parliamentarian skill displayed by the chief of
the navy during the years of peace which later became the cause of the
fatal collapse, since parliamentarian considerations had begun to play a
more important role in the construction of the navy than fighting
considerations. The irresolution, the weakness and the failure to adopt
a logically consistent policy, which is typical of the parliamentary
system, contaminated the naval authorities.

As I have already emphasized, the military authorities did not allow
themselves to be led astray by such fundamentally erroneous ideas.
Ludendorff, who was then a Colonel in the General Staff, led a desperate
struggle against the criminal vacillations with which the Reichstag
treated the most vital problems of the nation and in most cases voted
against them. If the fight which this officer then waged remained
unsuccessful this must be debited to the Parliament and partly also to
the wretched and weak attitude of the Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg.

Yet those who are responsible for Germany's collapse do not hesitate now
to lay all the blame on the shoulders of the one man who took a firm
stand against the neglectful manner in which the interests of the nation
were managed. But one falsehood more or less makes no difference to
these congenital tricksters.

Anybody who thinks of all the sacrifices which this nation has had to
bear, as a result of the criminal neglect of those irresponsible
individuals; anybody who thinks of the number of those who died or were
maimed unnecessarily; anybody who thinks of the deplorable shame and
dishonour which has been heaped upon us and of the illimitable distress
into which our people are now plunged--anybody who realizes that in
order to prepare the way to a few seats in Parliament for some
unscrupulous place-hunters and arrivists will understand that such
hirelings can be called by no other name than that of rascal and
criminal; for otherwise those words could have no meaning. In comparison
with traitors who betrayed the nation's trust every other kind of
twister may be looked upon as an honourable man.

It was a peculiar feature of the situation that all the real faults of
the old Germany were exposed to the public gaze only when the inner
solidarity of the nation could be injured by doing so. Then, indeed,
unpleasant truths were openly proclaimed in the ears of the broad
masses, while many other things were at other times shamefully hushed up
or their existence simply denied, especially at times when an open
discussion of such problems might have led to an improvement in their
regard. The higher government authorities knew little or nothing of the
nature and use of propaganda in such matters. Only the Jew knew that by
an able and persistent use of propaganda heaven itself can be presented
to the people as if it were hell and, vice versa, the most miserable
kind of life can be presented as if it were paradise. The Jew knew this
and acted accordingly. But the German, or rather his Government, did not
have the slightest suspicion of it. During the War the heaviest of
penalties had to be paid for that ignorance.

Over against the innumerable drawbacks which I have mentioned here and
which affected German life before the War there were many outstanding
features on the positive side. If we take an impartial survey we must
admit that most of our drawbacks were in great measure prevalent also in
other countries and among the other nations, and very often in a worse
form than with us; whereas among us there were many real advantages
which the other did not have.

The leading phase of Germany's superiority arose from the fact that,
almost alone among all the other European nations, the German nation had
made the strongest effort to preserve the national character of its
economic structure and for this reason was less subject than other
countries to the power of international finance, though indeed there
were many untoward symptoms in this regard also.

And yet this superiority was a perilous one and turned out later to be
one of the chief causes of the world war.

But even if we disregard this advantage of national independence in
economic matters there were certain other positive features of our
social and political life which were of outstanding excellence. These
features were represented by three institutions which were constant
sources of regeneration. In their respective spheres they were models of
perfection and were partly unrivalled.

The first of these was the statal form as such and the manner in which
it had been developed for Germany in modern times. Of course we must
except those monarchs who, as human beings, were subject to the failings
which afflict this life and its children. If we were not so tolerant in
these matters, then the case of the present generation would be
hopeless; for if we take into consideration the personal capabilities
and character of the representative figures in our present regime it
would be difficult to imagine a more modest level of intelligence and
moral character. If we measure the 'value' of the German Revolution by
the personal worth and calibre of the individuals whom this revolution
has presented to the German people since November 1918 then we may feel
ashamed indeed in thinking of the judgment which posterity will pass on
these people, when the Law for the Protection of the Republic can no
longer silence public opinion. Coming generations will surely decide
that the intelligence and integrity of our new German leaders were in
adverse ratio to their boasting and their vices.

It must be admitted that the monarchy had become alien in spirit to many
citizens and especially the broad masses. This resulted from the fact
that the monarchs were not always surrounded by the highest
intelligence--so to say--and certainly not always by persons of the most
upright character. Unfortunately many of them preferred flatterers to
honest-spoken men and hence received their 'information' from the
former. This was a source of grave danger at a time when the world was
passing through a period in which many of the old conditions were
changing and when this change was affecting even the traditions of the
Court.

The average man or woman could not have felt a wave of enthusiasm
surging within the breast when, for example, at the turn of the century,
a princess in uniform and on horseback had the soldiers file past her on
parade. Those high circles had apparently no idea of the impression
which such a parade made on the minds of ordinary people; else such
unfortunate occurrences would not have taken place. The sentimental
humanitarianism--not always very sincere--which was professed in those
high circles was often more repulsive than attractive. When, for
instance, the Princess X condescended to taste the products of a soup
kitchen and found them excellent, as usual, such a gesture might have
made an excellent impression in times long past, but on this occasion it
had the opposite effect to what was intended. For even if we take it for
granted that Her Highness did not have the slightest idea, that on the
day she sampled it, the food was not quite the same as on other days, it
sufficed that the people knew it. Even the best of intentions thus
became an object of ridicule or a cause of exasperation.

Descriptions of the proverbial frugality practised by the monarch, his
much too early rise in the morning and the drudgery he had to go through
all day long until late at night, and especially the constantly
expressed fears lest he might become undernourished--all this gave rise
to ominous expression on the part of the people. Nobody was keen to know
what and how much the monarch ate or drank. Nobody grudged him a full
meal, or the necessary amount of sleep. Everybody was pleased when the
monarch, as a man and a personality, brought honour on his family and
his country and fulfilled his duties as a sovereign. All the legends
which were circulated about him helped little and did much damage.

These and such things, however, are only mere bagatelle. What was much
worse was the feeling, which spread throughout large sections of the
nation, that the affairs of the individual were being taken care of from
above and that he did not need to bother himself with them. As long as
the Government was really good, or at least moved by goodwill, no
serious objections could be raised.

But the country was destined to disaster when the old Government, which
had at least striven for the best, became replaced by a new regime which
was not of the same quality. Then the docile obedience and infantile
credulity which formerly offered no resistance was bound to be one of
the most fatal evils that can be imagined.

But against these and other defects there were certain qualities which
undoubtedly had a positive effect.

First of all the monarchical form of government guarantees stability in
the direction of public affairs and safeguards public offices from the
speculative turmoil of ambitious politicians. Furthermore, the venerable
tradition which this institution possesses arouses a feeling which gives
weight to the monarchical authority. Beyond this there is the fact that
the whole corps of officials, and the army in particular, are raised
above the level of political party obligations. And still another
positive feature was that the supreme rulership of the State was
embodied in the monarch, as an individual person, who could serve as the
symbol of responsibility, which a monarch has to bear more seriously
than any anonymous parliamentary majority. Indeed, the proverbial
honesty and integrity of the German administration must be attributed
chiefly to this fact. Finally, the monarchy fulfilled a high cultural
function among the German people, which made amends for many of its
defects. The German residential cities have remained, even to our time,
centres of that artistic spirit which now threatens to disappear and is
becoming more and more materialistic. The German princes gave a great
deal of excellent and practical encouragement to art and science,
especially during the nineteenth century. Our present age certainly has
nothing of equal worth.

During that process of disintegration which was slowly extending
throughout the social order the most positive force of resistance was
that offered by the army. This was the strongest source of education
which the German people possessed. For that reason all the hatred of our
enemies was directed against the paladin of our national
self-preservation and our liberty. The strongest testimony in favour of
this unique institution is the fact that it was derided, hated and
fought against, but also feared, by worthless elements all round. The
fact that the international profiteers who gathered at Versailles,
further to exploit and plunder the nations directed their enmity
specially against the old German army proved once again that it deserved
to be regarded as the institution which protected the liberties of our
people against the forces of the international stock-exchange. If the
army had not been there to sound the alarm and stand on guard, the
purposes of the Versailles representatives would have been carried out
much sooner. There is only one word to express what the German people
owe to this army--Everything!

It was the army that still inculcated a sense of responsibility among
the people when this quality had become very rare and when the habit of
shirking every kind of responsibility was steadily spreading. This habit
had grown up under the evil influences of Parliament, which was itself
the very model of irresponsibility. The army trained the people to
personal courage at a time when the virtue of timidity threatened to
become an epidemic and when the spirit of sacrificing one's personal
interests for the good of the community was considered as something that
amounted almost to weak-mindedness. At a time when only those were
estimated as intelligent who knew how to safeguard and promote their own
egotistic interests, the army was the school through which individual
Germans were taught not to seek the salvation of their nation in the
false ideology of international fraternization between negroes, Germans,
Chinese, French and English, etc., but in the strength and unity of
their own national being.

The army developed the individual's powers of resolute decision, and
this at a time when a spirit of indecision and scepticism governed human
conduct. At a time when the wiseacres were everywhere setting the
fashion it needed courage to uphold the principle that any command is
better than none. This one principle represents a robust and sound style
of thought, of which not a trace would have been left in the other
branches of life if the army had not furnished a constant rejuvenation
of this fundamental force. A sufficient proof of this may be found in
the appalling lack of decision which our present government authorities
display. They cannot shake off their mental and moral lethargy and
decide on some definite line of action except when they are forced to
sign some new dictate for the exploitation of the German people. In that
case they decline all responsibility while at the same time they sign
everything which the other side places before them; and they sign with
the readiness of an official stenographer. Their conduct is here
explicable on the ground that in this case they are not under the
necessity of coming to a decision; for the decision is dictated to them.

The army imbued its members with a spirit of idealism and developed
their readiness to sacrifice themselves for their country and its
honour, while greed and materialism dominated in all the other branches
of life. The army united a people who were split up into classes: and in
this respect had only one defect, which was the One Year Military
Service, a privilege granted to those who had passed through the high
schools. It was a defect, because the principle of absolute equality was
thereby violated; and those who had a better education were thus placed
outside the cadres to which the rest of their comrades belonged. The
reverse would have been better. Since our upper classes were really
ignorant of what was going on in the body corporate of the nation and
were becoming more and more estranged from the life of the people, the
army would have accomplished a very beneficial mission if it had refused
to discriminate in favour of the so-called intellectuals, especially
within its own ranks. It was a mistake that this was not done; but in
this world of ours can we find any institution that has not at least one
defect? And in the army the good features were so absolutely predominant
that the few defects it had were far below the average that generally
rises from human weakness.

But the greatest credit which the army of the old Empire deserves is
that, at a time when the person of the individual counted for nothing
and the majority was everything, it placed individual personal values
above majority values. By insisting on its faith in personality, the
army opposed that typically Jewish and democratic apotheosis of the
power of numbers. The army trained what at that time was most surely
needed: namely, real men. In a period when men were falling a prey to
effeminacy and laxity, 350,000 vigorously trained young men went from
the ranks of the army each year to mingle with their fellow-men. In the
course of their two years' training they had lost the softness of their
young days and had developed bodies as tough as steel. The young man who
had been taught obedience for two years was now fitted to command. The
trained soldier could be recognized already by his walk.

This was the great school of the German nation; and it was not without
reason that it drew upon its head all the bitter hatred of those who
wanted the Empire to be weak and defenceless, because they were jealous
of its greatness and were themselves possessed by a spirit of rapacity
and greed. The rest of the world recognized a fact which many Germans
did not wish to see, either because they were blind to facts or because
out of malice they did not wish to see it. This fact was that the German
Army was the most powerful weapon for the defence and freedom of the
German nation and the best guarantee for the livelihood of its citizens.

There was a third institution of positive worth, which has to be placed
beside that of the monarchy and the army. This was the civil service.

German administration was better organized and better carried out than
the administration of other countries. There may have been objections to
the bureaucratic routine of the officials, but from this point of view
the state of affairs was similar, if not worse, in the other countries.
But the other States did not have the wonderful solidarity which this
organization possessed in Germany, nor were their civil servants of that
same high level of scrupulous honesty. It is certainly better to be a
trifle over-bureaucratic and honest and loyal than to be
over-sophisticated and modern, the latter often implying an inferior
type of character and also ignorance and inefficiency. For if it be
insinuated to-day that the German administration of the pre-War period
may have been excellent so far as bureaucratic technique goes, but that
from the practical business point of view it was incompetent, I can only
give the following reply: What other country in the world possessed a
better-organized and administered business enterprise than the German
State Railways, for instance? It was left to the Revolution to destroy
this standard organization, until a time came when it was taken out of
the hands of the nation and socialized, in the sense which the founders
of the Republic had given to that word, namely, making it subservient to
the international stock-exchange capitalists, who were the wire-pullers
of the German Revolution.

The most outstanding trait in the civil service and the whole body of
the civil administration was its independence of the vicissitudes of
government, the political mentality of which could exercise no influence
on the attitude of the German State officials. Since the Revolution this
situation has been completely changed. Efficiency and capability have
been replaced by the test of party-adherence; and independence of
character and initiative are no longer appreciated as positive qualities
in a public official. They rather tell against him.

The wonderful might and power of the old Empire was based on the
monarchical form of government, the army and the civil service. On these
three foundations rested that great strength which is now entirely
lacking; namely, the authority of the State. For the authority of the
State cannot be based on the babbling that goes on in Parliament or in
the provincial diets and not upon laws made to protect the State, or
upon sentences passed by the law courts to frighten those who have had
the hardihood to deny the authority of the State, but only on the
general confidence which the management and administration of the
community establishes among the people. This confidence is in its turn,
nothing else than the result of an unshakable inner conviction that the
government and administration of a country is inspired by disinterested
and honest goodwill and on the feeling that the spirit of the law is in
complete harmony with the moral convictions of the people. In the long
run, systems of government are not maintained by terrorism but on the
belief of the people in the merits and sincerity of those who administer
and promote the public interests.

Though it be true that in the period preceding the War certain grave
evils tended to infect and corrode the inner strength of the nation, it
must be remembered that the other States suffered even more than Germany
from these drawbacks and yet those other States did not fail and break
down when the time of crisis came. If we remember further that those
defects in pre-War Germany were outweighed by great positive qualities
we shall have to look elsewhere for the effective cause of the collapse.
And elsewhere it lay.

The ultimate and most profound reason of the German downfall is to be
found in the fact that the racial problem was ignored and that its
importance in the historical development of nations was not grasped. For
the events that take place in the life of nations are not due to chance
but are the natural results of the effort to conserve and multiply the
species and the race, even though men may not be able consciously to
picture to their minds the profound motives of their conduct.




CHAPTER XI



RACE AND PEOPLE


There are certain truths which stand out so openly on the roadsides of
life, as it were, that every passer-by may see them. Yet, because of
their very obviousness, the general run of people disregard such truths
or at least they do not make them the object of any conscious knowledge.
People are so blind to some of the simplest facts in every-day life that
they are highly surprised when somebody calls attention to what
everybody ought to know. Examples of The Columbus Egg lie around us in
hundreds of thousands; but observers like Columbus are rare.

Walking about in the garden of Nature, most men have the self-conceit to
think that they know everything; yet almost all are blind to one of the
outstanding principles that Nature employs in her work. This principle
may be called the inner isolation which characterizes each and every
living species on this earth.

Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable
forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a
fundamental law--one may call it an iron law of Nature--which compels
the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own
life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind. Each animal
mates only with one of its own species. The titmouse cohabits only with
the titmouse, the finch with the finch, the stork with the stork, the
field-mouse with the field-mouse, the house-mouse with the house-mouse,
the wolf with the she-wolf, etc.

Deviations from this law take place only in exceptional circumstances.
This happens especially under the compulsion of captivity, or when some
other obstacle makes procreative intercourse impossible between
individuals of the same species. But then Nature abhors such intercourse
with all her might; and her protest is most clearly demonstrated by the
fact that the hybrid is either sterile or the fecundity of its
descendants is limited. In most cases hybrids and their progeny are
denied the ordinary powers of resistance to disease or the natural means
of defence against outer attack.

Such a dispensation of Nature is quite logical. Every crossing between
two breeds which are not quite equal results in a product which holds an
intermediate place between the levels of the two parents. This means
that the offspring will indeed be superior to the parent which stands in
the biologically lower order of being, but not so high as the higher
parent. For this reason it must eventually succumb in any struggle
against the higher species. Such mating contradicts the will of Nature
towards the selective improvements of life in general. The favourable
preliminary to this improvement is not to mate individuals of higher and
lower orders of being but rather to allow the complete triumph of the
higher order. The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker,
which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the
born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so
it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if
such a law did not direct the process of evolution then the higher
development of organic life would not be conceivable at all.

This urge for the maintenance of the unmixed breed, which is a
phenomenon that prevails throughout the whole of the natural world,
results not only in the sharply defined outward distinction between one
species and another but also in the internal similarity of
characteristic qualities which are peculiar to each breed or species.
The fox remains always a fox, the goose remains a goose, and the tiger
will retain the character of a tiger. The only difference that can exist
within the species must be in the various degrees of structural strength
and active power, in the intelligence, efficiency, endurance, etc., with
which the individual specimens are endowed. It would be impossible to
find a fox which has a kindly and protective disposition towards geese,
just as no cat exists which has a friendly disposition towards mice.

That is why the struggle between the various species does not arise from
a feeling of mutual antipathy but rather from hunger and love. In both
cases Nature looks on calmly and is even pleased with what happens. The
struggle for the daily livelihood leaves behind in the ruck everything
that is weak or diseased or wavering; while the fight of the male to
possess the female gives to the strongest the right, or at least, the
possibility to propagate its kind. And this struggle is a means of
furthering the health and powers of resistance in the species. Thus it
is one of the causes underlying the process of development towards a
higher quality of being.

If the case were different the progressive process would cease, and even
retrogression might set in. Since the inferior always outnumber the
superior, the former would always increase more rapidly if they
possessed the same capacities for survival and for the procreation of
their kind; and the final consequence would be that the best in quality
would be forced to recede into the background. Therefore a corrective
measure in favour of the better quality must intervene. Nature supplies
this by establishing rigorous conditions of life to which the weaker
will have to submit and will thereby be numerically restricted; but even
that portion which survives cannot indiscriminately multiply, for here a
new and rigorous selection takes place, according to strength and
health.

If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the
stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle
with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout
hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher
stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.

History furnishes us with innumerable instances that prove this law. It
shows, with a startling clarity, that whenever Aryans have mingled their
blood with that of an inferior race the result has been the downfall of
the people who were the standard-bearers of a higher culture. In North
America, where the population is prevalently Teutonic, and where those
elements intermingled with the inferior race only to a very small
degree, we have a quality of mankind and a civilization which are
different from those of Central and South America. In these latter
countries the immigrants--who mainly belonged to the Latin races--mated
with the aborigines, sometimes to a very large extent indeed. In this
case we have a clear and decisive example of the effect produced by the
mixture of races. But in North America the Teutonic element, which has
kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial
stock, has come to dominate the American Continent and will remain
master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit
of adulterating its blood.

In short, the results of miscegenation are always the following:

(a) The level of the superior race becomes lowered;

(b) physical and mental degeneration sets in, thus leading slowly but
steadily towards a progressive drying up of the vital sap.

The act which brings about such a development is a sin against the will
of the Eternal Creator. And as a sin this act will be avenged.

Man's effort to build up something that contradicts the iron logic of
Nature brings him into conflict with those principles to which he
himself exclusively owes his own existence. By acting against the laws
of Nature he prepares the way that leads to his ruin.

Here we meet the insolent objection, which is Jewish in its inspiration
and is typical of the modern pacifist. It says: "Man can control even
Nature."

There are millions who repeat by rote that piece of Jewish babble and
end up by imagining that somehow they themselves are the conquerors of
Nature. And yet their only weapon is just a mere idea, and a very
preposterous idea into the bargain; because if one accepted it, then it
would be impossible even to imagine the existence of the world.

The real truth is that, not only has man failed to overcome Nature in
any sphere whatsoever but that at best he has merely succeeded in
getting hold of and lifting a tiny corner of the enormous veil which she
has spread over her eternal mysteries and secret. He never creates
anything. All he can do is to discover something. He does not master
Nature but has only come to be the master of those living beings who
have not gained the knowledge he has arrived at by penetrating into some
of Nature's laws and mysteries. Apart from all this, an idea can never
subject to its own sway those conditions which are necessary for the
existence and development of mankind; for the idea itself has come only
from man. Without man there would be no human idea in this world. The
idea as such is therefore always dependent on the existence of man and
consequently is dependent on those laws which furnish the conditions of
his existence.

And not only that. Certain ideas are even confined to certain people.
This holds true with regard to those ideas in particular which have not
their roots in objective scientific truth but in the world of feeling.
In other words, to use a phrase which is current to-day and which well
and clearly expresses this truth: THEY REFLECT AN INNER EXPERIENCE. All
such ideas, which have nothing to do with cold logic as such but
represent mere manifestations of feeling, such as ethical and moral
conceptions, etc., are inextricably bound up with man's existence. It is
to the creative powers of man's imagination that such ideas owe their
existence.

Now, then, a necessary condition for the maintenance of such ideas is
the existence of certain races and certain types of men. For example,
anyone who sincerely wishes that the pacifist idea should prevail in
this world ought to do all he is capable of doing to help the Germans
conquer the world; for in case the reverse should happen it may easily
be that the last pacifist would disappear with the last German. I say
this because, unfortunately, only our people, and no other people in the
world, fell a prey to this idea. Whether you like it or not, you would
have to make up your mind to forget wars if you would achieve the
pacifist ideal. Nothing less than this was the plan of the American
world-redeemer, Woodrow Wilson. Anyhow that was what our visionaries
believed, and they thought that through his plans their ideals would be
attained.

The pacifist-humanitarian idea may indeed become an excellent one when
the most superior type of manhood will have succeeded in subjugating the
world to such an extent that this type is then sole master of the earth.
This idea could have an injurious effect only in the measure according
to which its application would become difficult and finally impossible.
So, first of all, the fight and then pacifism. If the case were
different it would mean that mankind has already passed the zenith of
its development, and accordingly the end would not be the supremacy of
some moral ideal but degeneration into barbarism and consequent chaos.
People may laugh at this statement; but our planet has been moving
through the spaces of ether for millions and millions of years,
uninhabited by men, and at some future date may easily begin to do so
again--if men should forget that wherever they have reached a superior
level of existence, it was not the result of following the ideas of
crazy visionaries but by acknowledging and rigorously observing the iron
laws of Nature.

All that we admire in the world to-day, its science, its art, its
technical developments and discoveries, are the products of the creative
activities of a few peoples, and it may be true that their first
beginnings must be attributed to one race. The maintenance of
civilization is wholly dependent on such peoples. Should they perish,
all that makes this earth beautiful will descend with them into the
grave.

However great, for example, be the influence which the soil exerts on
men, this influence will always vary according to the race in which it
produces its effect. Dearth of soil may stimulate one race to the most
strenuous efforts and highest achievement; while, for another race, the
poverty of the soil may be the cause of misery and finally of
undernourishment, with all its consequences. The internal
characteristics of a people are always the causes which determine the
nature of the effect that outer circumstances have on them. What reduces
one race to starvation trains another race to harder work.

All the great civilizations of the past became decadent because the
originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the
blood.

The most profound cause of such a decline is to be found in the fact
that the people ignored the principle that all culture depends on men,
and not the reverse. In other words, in order to preserve a certain
culture, the type of manhood that creates such a culture must be
preserved. But such a preservation goes hand-in-hand with the inexorable
law that it is the strongest and the best who must triumph and that they
have the right to endure.

He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this
world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to
exist.

Such a saying may sound hard; but, after all, that is how the matter
really stands. Yet far harder is the lot of him who believes that he can
overcome Nature and thus in reality insults her. Distress, misery, and
disease are her rejoinders.

Whoever ignores or despises the laws of race really deprives himself of
the happiness to which he believes he can attain. For he places an
obstacle in the victorious path of the superior race and, by so doing,
he interferes with a prerequisite condition of all human progress.
Loaded with the burden of humanitarian sentiment, he falls back to the
level of those who are unable to raise themselves in the scale of being.

It would be futile to attempt to discuss the question as to what race or
races were the original standard-bearers of human culture and were
thereby the real founders of all that we understand by the word
humanity. It is much simpler to deal with this question in so far as it
relates to the present time. Here the answer is simple and clear. Every
manifestation of human culture, every product of art, science and
technical skill, which we see before our eyes to-day, is almost
exclusively the product of the Aryan creative power. This very fact
fully justifies the conclusion that it was the Aryan alone who founded a
superior type of humanity; therefore he represents the architype of what
we understand by the term: MAN. He is the Prometheus of mankind, from
whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed
forth, always kindling anew that fire which, in the form of knowledge,
illuminated the dark night by drawing aside the veil of mystery and thus
showing man how to rise and become master over all the other beings on
the earth. Should he be forced to disappear, a profound darkness will
descend on the earth; within a few thousand years human culture will
vanish and the world will become a desert.

If we divide mankind into three categories--founders of culture, bearers
of culture, and destroyers of culture--the Aryan alone can be considered
as representing the first category. It was he who laid the groundwork
and erected the walls of every great structure in human culture. Only
the shape and colour of such structures are to be attributed to the
individual characteristics of the various nations. It is the Aryan who
has furnished the great building-stones and plans for the edifices of
all human progress; only the way in which these plans have been executed
is to be attributed to the qualities of each individual race. Within a
few decades the whole of Eastern Asia, for instance, appropriated a
culture and called such a culture its own, whereas the basis of that
culture was the Greek mind and Teutonic skill as we know it. Only the
external form--at least to a certain degree--shows the traits of an
Asiatic inspiration. It is not true, as some believe, that Japan adds
European technique to a culture of her own. The truth rather is that
European science and technics are just decked out with the peculiar
characteristics of Japanese civilization. The foundations of actual life
in Japan to-day are not those of the native Japanese culture, although
this characterizes the external features of the country, which features
strike the eye of European observers on account of their fundamental
difference from us; but the real foundations of contemporary Japanese
life are the enormous scientific and technical achievements of Europe
and America, that is to say, of Aryan peoples. Only by adopting these
achievements as the foundations of their own progress can the various
nations of the Orient take a place in contemporary world progress. The
scientific and technical achievements of Europe and America provide the
basis on which the struggle for daily livelihood is carried on in the
Orient. They provide the necessary arms and instruments for this
struggle, and only the outer forms of these instruments have become
gradually adapted to Japanese ways of life.

If, from to-day onwards, the Aryan influence on Japan would cease--and
if we suppose that Europe and America would collapse--then the present
progress of Japan in science and technique might still last for a short
duration; but within a few decades the inspiration would dry up, and
native Japanese character would triumph, while the present civilization
would become fossilized and fall back into the sleep from which it was
aroused about seventy years ago by the impact of Aryan culture. We may
therefore draw the conclusion that, just as the present Japanese
development has been due to Aryan influence, so in the immemorial past
an outside influence and an outside culture brought into existence the
Japanese culture of that day. This opinion is very strongly supported by
the fact that the ancient civilization of Japan actually became
fossilizied and petrified. Such a process of senility can happen only if
a people loses the racial cell which originally had been creative or if
the outside influence should be withdrawn after having awakened and
maintained the first cultural developments in that region. If it be
shown that a people owes the fundamental elements of its culture to
foreign races, assimilating and elaborating such elements, and if
subsequently that culture becomes fossilized whenever the external
influence ceases, then such a race may be called the depository but
never the creator of a culture.

If we subject the different peoples to a strict test from this
standpoint we shall find that scarcely any one of them has originally
created a culture, but almost all have been merely the recipients of a
culture created elsewhere.

This development may be depicted as always happening somewhat in the
following way:

Aryan tribes, often almost ridiculously small in number, subjugated
foreign peoples and, stimulated by the conditions of life which their
new country offered them (fertility, the nature of the climate, etc.),
and profiting also by the abundance of manual labour furnished them by
the inferior race, they developed intellectual and organizing faculties
which had hitherto been dormant in these conquering tribes. Within the
course of a few thousand years, or even centuries, they gave life to
cultures whose primitive traits completely corresponded to the character
of the founders, though modified by adaptation to the peculiarities of
the soil and the characteristics of the subjugated people. But finally
the conquering race offended against the principles which they first had
observed, namely, the maintenance of their racial stock unmixed, and
they began to intermingle with the subjugated people. Thus they put an
end to their own separate existence; for the original sin committed in
Paradise has always been followed by the expulsion of the guilty
parties.

After a thousand years or more the last visible traces of those former
masters may then be found in a lighter tint of the skin which the Aryan
blood had bequeathed to the subjugated race, and in a fossilized culture
of which those Aryans had been the original creators. For just as the
blood. of the conqueror, who was a conqueror not only in body but also
in spirit, got submerged in the blood of the subject race, so the
substance disappeared out of which the torch of human culture and
progress was kindled. In so far as the blood of the former ruling race
has left a light nuance of colour in the blood of its descendants, as a
token and a memory, the night of cultural life is rendered less dim and
dark by a mild light radiated from the products of those who were the
bearers of the original fire. Their radiance shines across the barbarism
to which the subjected race has reverted and might often lead the
superficial observer to believe that he sees before him an image of the
present race when he is really looking into a mirror wherein only the
past is reflected.

It may happen that in the course of its history such a people will come
into contact a second time, and even oftener, with the original founders
of their culture and may not even remember that distant association.
Instinctively the remnants of blood left from that old ruling race will
be drawn towards this new phenomenon and what had formerly been possible
only under compulsion can now be successfully achieved in a voluntary
way. A new cultural wave flows in and lasts until the blood of its
standard-bearers becomes once again adulterated by intermixture with the
originally conquered race.

It will be the task of those who set themselves to the study of a
universal history of civilization to investigate history from this point
of view instead of allowing themselves to be smothered under the mass of
external data, as is only too often the case with our present historical
science.

This short sketch of the changes that take place among those races that
are only the depositories of a culture also furnishes a picture of the
development and the activity and the disappearance of those who are the
true founders of culture on this earth, namely the Aryans themselves.

Just as in our daily life the so-called man of genius needs a particular
occasion, and sometimes indeed a special stimulus, to bring his genius
to light, so too in the life of the peoples the race that has genius in
it needs the occasion and stimulus to bring that genius to expression.
In the monotony and routine of everyday life even persons of
significance seem just like the others and do not rise beyond the
average level of their fellow-men. But as soon as such men find
themselves in a special situation which disconcerts and unbalances the
others, the humble person of apparently common qualities reveals traits
of genius, often to the amazement of those who have hitherto known him
in the small things of everyday life. That is the reason why a prophet
only seldom counts for something in his own country. War offers an
excellent occasion for observing this phenomenon. In times of distress,
when the others despair, apparently harmless boys suddenly spring up and
become heroes, full of determination, undaunted in the presence of Death
and manifesting wonderful powers of calm reflection under such
circumstances. If such an hour of trial did not come nobody would have
thought that the soul of a hero lurked in the body of that beardless
youth. A special impulse is almost always necessary to bring a man of
genius into the foreground. The sledge-hammer of Fate which strikes down
the one so easily suddenly finds the counter-impact of steel when it
strikes at the other. And, after the common shell of everyday life is
broken, the core that lay hidden in it is displayed to the eyes of an
astonished world. This surrounding world then grows obstinate and will
not believe that what had seemed so like itself is really of that
different quality so suddenly displayed. This is a process which is
repeated probably every time a man of outstanding significance appears.

Though an inventor, for example, does not establish his fame until the
very day that he carries through his invention, it would be a mistake to
believe that the creative genius did not become alive in him until that
moment. From the very hour of his birth the spark of genius is living
within the man who has been endowed with the real creative faculty. True
genius is an innate quality. It can never be the result of education or
training.

As I have stated already, this holds good not merely of the individual
but also of the race. Those peoples who manifest creative abilities in
certain periods of their history have always been fundamentally
creative. It belongs to their very nature, even though this fact may
escape the eyes of the superficial observer. Here also recognition from
outside is only the consequence of practical achievement. Since the rest
of the world is incapable of recognizing genius as such, it can only see
the visible manifestations of genius in the form of inventions,
discoveries, buildings, painting, etc.; but even here a long time passes
before recognition is given. Just as the individual person who has been
endowed with the gift of genius, or at least talent of a very high
order, cannot bring that endowment to realization until he comes under
the urge of special circumstances, so in the life of the nations the
creative capacities and powers frequently have to wait until certain
conditions stimulate them to action.

The most obvious example of this truth is furnished by that race which
has been, and still is, the standard-bearer of human progress: I mean
the Aryan race. As soon as Fate brings them face to face with special
circumstances their powers begin to develop progressively and to be
manifested in tangible form. The characteristic cultures which they
create under such circumstances are almost always conditioned by the
soil, the climate and the people they subjugate. The last factor--that
of the character of the people--is the most decisive one. The more
primitive the technical conditions under which the civilizing activity
takes place, the more necessary is the existence of manual labour which
can be organized and employed so as to take the place of mechanical
power. Had it not been possible for them to employ members of the
inferior race which they conquered, the Aryans would never have been in
a position to take the first steps on the road which led them to a later
type of culture; just as, without the help of certain suitable animals
which they were able to tame, they would never have come to the
invention of mechanical power which has subsequently enabled them to do
without these beasts. The phrase, 'The Moor has accomplished his
function, so let him now depart', has, unfortunately, a profound
application. For thousands of years the horse has been the faithful
servant of man and has helped him to lay the foundations of human
progress, but now motor power has dispensed with the use of the horse.
In a few years to come the use of the horse will cease entirely; and yet
without its collaboration man could scarcely have come to the stage of
development which he has now created.

For the establishment of superior types of civilization the members of
inferior races formed one of the most essential pre-requisites. They
alone could supply the lack of mechanical means without which no
progress is possible. It is certain that the first stages of human
civilization were not based so much on the use of tame animals as on the
employment of human beings who were members of an inferior race.

Only after subjugated races were employed as slaves was a similar fate
allotted to animals, and not vice versa, as some people would have us
believe. At first it was the conquered enemy who had to draw the plough
and only afterwards did the ox and horse take his place. Nobody else but
puling pacifists can consider this fact as a sign of human degradation.
Such people fail to recognize that this evolution had to take place in
order that man might reach that degree of civilization which these
apostles now exploit in an attempt to make the world pay attention to
their rigmarole.

The progress of mankind may be compared to the process of ascending an
infinite ladder. One does not reach the higher level without first
having climbed the lower rungs. The Aryan therefore had to take that
road which his sense of reality pointed out to him and not that which
the modern pacifist dreams of. The path of reality is, however,
difficult and hard to tread; yet it is the only one which finally leads
to the goal where the others envisage mankind in their dreams. But the
real truth is that those dreamers help only to lead man away from his
goal rather than towards it.

It was not by mere chance that the first forms of civilization arose
there where the Aryan came into contact with inferior races, subjugated
them and forced them to obey his command. The members of the inferior
race became the first mechanical tools in the service of a growing
civilization.

Thereby the way was clearly indicated which the Aryan had to follow. As
a conqueror, he subjugated inferior races and turned their physical
powers into organized channels under his own leadership, forcing them to
follow his will and purpose. By imposing on them a useful, though hard,
manner of employing their powers he not only spared the lives of those
whom he had conquered but probably made their lives easier than these
had been in the former state of so-called 'freedom'. While he ruthlessly
maintained his position as their master, he not only remained master but
he also maintained and advanced civilization. For this depended
exclusively on his inborn abilities and, therefore, on the preservation
of the Aryan race as such. As soon, however, as his subject began to
rise and approach the level of their conqueror, a phase of which
ascension was probably the use of his language, the barriers that had
distinguished master from servant broke down. The Aryan neglected to
maintain his own racial stock unmixed and therewith lost the right to
live in the paradise which he himself had created. He became submerged
in the racial mixture and gradually lost his cultural creativeness,
until he finally grew, not only mentally but also physically, more like
the aborigines whom he had subjected rather than his own ancestors. For
some time he could continue to live on the capital of that culture which
still remained; but a condition of fossilization soon set in and he sank
into oblivion.

That is how cultures and empires decline and yield their places to new
formations.

The adulteration of the blood and racial deterioration conditioned
thereby are the only causes that account for the decline of ancient
civilizations; for it is never by war that nations are ruined, but by
the loss of their powers of resistance, which are exclusively a
characteristic of pure racial blood. In this world everything that is
not of sound racial stock is like chaff. Every historical event in the
world is nothing more nor less than a manifestation of the instinct of
racial self-preservation, whether for weal or woe.

The question as to the ground reasons for the predominant importance of
Aryanism can be answered by pointing out that it is not so much that the
Aryans are endowed with a stronger instinct for self-preservation, but
rather that this manifests itself in a way which is peculiar to
themselves. Considered from the subjective standpoint, the will-to-live
is of course equally strong all round and only the forms in which it is
expressed are different. Among the most primitive organisms the instinct
for self-preservation does not extend beyond the care of the individual
ego. Egotism, as we call this passion, is so predominant that it
includes even the time element; which means that the present moment is
deemed the most important and that nothing is left to the future. The
animal lives only for itself, searching for food only when it feels
hunger and fighting only for the preservation of its own life. As long
as the instinct for self-preservation manifests itself exclusively in
such a way, there is no basis for the establishment of a community; not
even the most primitive form of all, that is to say the family. The
society formed by the male with the female, where it goes beyond the
mere conditions of mating, calls for the extension of the instinct of
self-preservation, since the readiness to fight for one's own ego has to
be extended also to the mate. The male sometimes provides food for the
female, but in most cases both parents provide food for the offspring.
Almost always they are ready to protect and defend each other; so that
here we find the first, though infinitely simple, manifestation of the
spirit of sacrifice. As soon as this spirit extends beyond the narrow
limits of the family, we have the conditions under which larger
associations and finally even States can be formed.

The lowest species of human beings give evidence of this quality only to
a very small degree, so that often they do not go beyond the formation
of the family society. With an increasing readiness to place their
immediate personal interests in the background, the capacity for
organizing more extensive communities develops.

The readiness to sacrifice one's personal work and, if necessary, even
one's life for others shows its most highly developed form in the Aryan
race. The greatness of the Aryan is not based on his intellectual
powers, but rather on his willingness to devote all his faculties to the
service of the community. Here the instinct for self-preservation has
reached its noblest form; for the Aryan willingly subordinates his own
ego to the common weal and when necessity calls he will even sacrifice
his own life for the community.

The constructive powers of the Aryan and that peculiar ability he has
for the building up of a culture are not grounded in his intellectual
gifts alone. If that were so they might only be destructive and could
never have the ability to organize; for the latter essentially depends
on the readiness of the individual to renounce his own personal opinions
and interests and to lay both at the service of the human group. By
serving the common weal he receives his reward in return. For example,
he does not work directly for himself but makes his productive work a
part of the activity of the group to which he belongs, not only for his
own benefit but for the general. The spirit underlying this attitude is
expressed by the word: WORK, which to him does not at all signify a
means of earning one's daily livelihood but rather a productive activity
which cannot clash with the interests of the community. Whenever human
activity is directed exclusively to the service of the instinct for
self-preservation it is called theft or usury, robbery or burglary, etc.

This mental attitude, which forces self-interest to recede into the
background in favour of the common weal, is the first prerequisite for
any kind of really human civilization. It is out of this spirit alone
that great human achievements have sprung for which the original doers
have scarcely ever received any recompense but which turns out to be the
source of abundant benefit for their descendants. It is this spirit
alone which can explain why it so often happens that people can endure a
harsh but honest existence which offers them no returns for their toil
except a poor and modest livelihood. But such a livelihood helps to
consolidate the foundations on which the community exists. Every worker
and every peasant, every inventor, state official, etc., who works
without ever achieving fortune or prosperity for himself, is a
representative of this sublime idea, even though he may never become
conscious of the profound meaning of his own activity.

Everything that may be said of that kind of work which is the
fundamental condition of providing food and the basic means of human
progress is true even in a higher sense of work that is done for the
protection of man and his civilization. The renunciation of one's own
life for the sake of the community is the crowning significance of the
idea of all sacrifice. In this way only is it possible to protect what
has been built up by man and to assure that this will not be destroyed
by the hand of man or of nature.

In the German language we have a word which admirably expresses this
underlying spirit of all work: It is Pflichterfüllung, which means the
service of the common weal before the consideration of one's own
interests. The fundamental spirit out of which this kind of activity
springs is the contradistinction of 'Egotism' and we call it 'Idealism'.
By this we mean to signify the willingness of the individual to make
sacrifices for the community and his fellow-men.

It is of the utmost importance to insist again and again that idealism
is not merely a superfluous manifestation of sentiment but rather
something which has been, is and always will be, a necessary
precondition of human civilization; it is even out of this that the very
idea of the word 'Human' arises. To this kind of mentality the Aryan
owes his position in the world. And the world is indebted to the Aryan
mind for having developed the concept of 'mankind'; for it is out of
this spirit alone that the creative force has come which in a unique way
combined robust muscular power with a first-class intellect and thus
created the monuments of human civilization.

Were it not for idealism all the faculties of the intellect, even the
most brilliant, would be nothing but intellect itself, a mere external
phenomenon without inner value and never a creative force.

Since true idealism, however, is essentially the subordination of the
interests and life of the individual to the interests and life of the
community, and since the community on its part represents the
pre-requisite condition of every form of organization, this idealism
accords in its innermost essence with the final purpose of Nature. This
feeling alone makes men voluntarily acknowledge that strength and power
are entitled to take the lead and thus makes them a constituent particle
in that order out of which the whole universe is shaped and formed.

Without being conscious of it, the purest idealism is always associated
with the most profound knowledge. How true this is and how little
genuine idealism has to do with fantastic self-dramatization will become
clear the moment we ask an unspoilt child, a healthy boy for example, to
give his opinion. The very same boy who listens to the rantings of an
'idealistic' pacifist without understanding them, and even rejects them,
would readily sacrifice his young life for the ideal of his people.

Unconsciously his instinct will submit to the knowledge that the
preservation of the species, even at the cost of the individual life, is
a primal necessity and he will protest against the fantasies of pacifist
ranters, who in reality are nothing better than cowardly egoists, even
though camouflaged, who contradict the laws of human development. For it
is a necessity of human evolution that the individual should be imbued
with the spirit of sacrifice in favour of the common weal, and that he
should not be influenced by the morbid notions of those knaves who
pretend to know better than Nature and who have the impudencc to
criticize her decrees.

It is just at those junctures when the idealistic attitude threatens to
disappear that we notice a weakening of this force which is a necessary
constituent in the founding and maintenance of the community and is
thereby a necessary condition of civilization. As soon as the spirit of
egotism begins to prevail among a people then the bonds of the social
order break and man, by seeking his own personal happiness, veritably
tumbles out of heaven and falls into hell.

Posterity will not remember those who pursued only their own individual
interests, but it will praise those heroes who renounced their own
happiness.

The Jew offers the most striking contrast to the Aryan. There is
probably no other people in the world who have so developed the instinct
of self-preservation as the so-called 'chosen' people. The best proof of
this statement is found in the simple fact that this race still exists.
Where can another people be found that in the course of the last two
thousand years has undergone so few changes in mental outlook and
character as the Jewish people? And yet what other people has taken such
a constant part in the great revolutions? But even after having passed
through the most gigantic catastrophes that have overwhelmed mankind,
the Jews remain the same as ever. What an infinitely tenacious
will-to-live, to preserve one's kind, is demonstrated by that fact!

The intellectual faculties of the Jew have been trained through
thousands of years. To-day the Jew is looked upon as specially
'cunning'; and in a certain sense he has been so throughout the ages.
His intellectual powers, however, are not the result of an inner
evolution but rather have been shaped by the object-lessons which the
Jew has received from others. The human spirit cannot climb upwards
without taking successive steps. For every step upwards it needs the
foundation of what has been constructed before--the past--which in, the
comprehensive sense here employed, can have been laid only in a general
civilization. All thinking originates only to a very small degree in
personal experience. The largest part is based on the accumulated
experiences of the past. The general level of civilization provides the
individual, who in most cases is not consciously aware of the fact, with
such an abundance of preliminary knowledge that with this equipment he
can more easily take further steps on the road of progress. The boy of
to-day, for example, grows up among such an overwhelming mass of
technical achievement which has accumulated during the last century that
he takes as granted many things which a hundred years ago were still
mysteries even to the greatest minds of those times. Yet these things
that are not so much a matter of course are of enormous importance to
those who would understand the progress we have made in these matters
and would carry on that progress a step farther. If a man of genius
belonging to the 'twenties of the last century were to arise from his
grave to-day he would find it more difficult to understand our present
age than the contemporary boy of fifteen years of age who may even have
only an average intelligence. The man of genius, thus come back from the
past, would need to provide himself with an extraordinary amount of
preliminary information which our contemporary youth receive
automatically, so to speak, during the time they are growing up among
the products of our modern civilization.

Since the Jew--for reasons that I shall deal with immediately--never had
a civilization of his own, he has always been furnished by others with a
basis for his: intellectual work. His intellect has always developed by
the use of those cultural achievements which he has found ready-to-hand
around him.

The process has never been the reverse.

For, though among the Jews the instinct of self-preservation has not
been weaker but has been much stronger than among other peoples, and
though the impression may easily be created that the intellectual powers
of the Jew are at least equal to those of other races, the Jews
completely lack the most essential pre-requisite of a cultural people,
namely the idealistic spirit. With the Jewish people the readiness for
sacrifice does not extend beyond the simple instinct of individual
preservation. In their case the feeling of racial solidarity which they
apparently manifest is nothing but a very primitive gregarious instinct,
similar to that which may be found among other organisms in this world.
It is a remarkable fact that this herd instinct brings individuals
together for mutual protection only as long as there is a common danger
which makes mutual assistance expedient or inevitable. The same pack of
wolves which a moment ago joined together in a common attack on their
victim will dissolve into individual wolves as soon as their hunger has
been satisfied. This is also sure of horses, which unite to defend
themselves against any aggressor but separate the moment the danger is
over.

It is much the same with the Jew. His spirit of sacrifice is only
apparent. It manifests itself only so long as the existence of the
individual makes this a matter of absolute necessity. But as soon as the
common foe is conquered and the danger which threatened the individual
Jews is overcome and the prey secured, then the apparent harmony
disappears and the original conditions set in again. Jews act in concord
only when a common danger threatens them or a common prey attracts them.
Where these two motives no longer exist then the most brutal egotism
appears and these people who before had lived together in unity will
turn into a swarm of rats that bitterly fight against each other.

If the Jews were the only people in the world they would be wallowing in
filth and mire and would exploit one another and try to exterminate one
another in a bitter struggle, except in so far as their utter lack of
the ideal of sacrifice, which shows itself in their cowardly spirit,
would prevent this struggle from developing.

Therefore it would be a complete mistake to interpret the mutual help
which the Jews render one another when they have to fight--or, to put it
more accurately, to exploit--their fellow being, as the expression of a
certain idealistic spirit of sacrifice.

Here again the Jew merely follows the call of his individual egotism.
That is why the Jewish State, which ought to be a vital organization to
serve the purpose of preserving or increasing the race, has absolutely
no territorial boundaries. For the territorial delimitation of a State
always demands a certain idealism of spirit on the part of the race
which forms that State and especially a proper acceptance of the idea of
work. A State which is territorially delimited cannot be established or
maintained unless the general attitude towards work be a positive one.
If this attitude be lacking, then the necessary basis of a civilization
is also lacking.

That is why the Jewish people, despite the intellectual powers with
which they are apparently endowed, have not a culture--certainly not a
culture of their own. The culture which the Jew enjoys to-day is the
product of the work of others and this product is debased in the hands
of the Jew.

In order to form a correct judgment of the place which the Jew holds in
relation to the whole problem of human civilization, we must bear in
mind the essential fact that there never has been any Jewish art and
consequently that nothing of this kind exists to-day. We must realize
that especially in those two royal domains of art, namely architecture
and music, the Jew has done no original creative work. When the Jew
comes to producing something in the field of art he merely bowdler-izes
something already in existence or simply steals the intellectual word,
of others. The Jew essentially lacks those qualities which are
characteristic of those creative races that are the founders of
civilization.

To what extent the Jew appropriates the civilization built up by
others--or rather corrupts it, to speak more accurately--is indicated by
the fact that he cultivates chiefly the art which calls for the smallest
amount of original invention, namely the dramatic art. And even here he
is nothing better than a kind of juggler or, perhaps more correctly
speaking, a kind of monkey imitator; for in this domain also he lacks
the creative elan which is necessary for the production of all really
great work. Even here, therefore, he is not a creative genius but rather
a superficial imitator who, in spite of all his retouching and tricks,
cannot disguise the fact that there is no inner vitality in the shape he
gives his products. At this juncture the Jewish Press comes in and
renders friendly assistance by shouting hosannas over the head of even
the most ordinary bungler of a Jew, until the rest of the world is
stampeded into thinking that the object of so much praise must really be
an artist, whereas in reality he may be nothing more than a low-class
mimic.

No; the Jews have not the creative abilities which are necessary to the
founding of a civilization; for in them there is not, and never has
been, that spirit of idealism which is an absolutely necessary element
in the higher development of mankind. Therefore the Jewish intellect
will never be constructive but always destructive. At best it may serve
as a stimulus in rare cases but only within the meaning of the poet's
lines: 'THE POWER WHICH ALWAYS WILLS THE BAD, AND ALWAYS WORKS THE GOOD'
(KRAFT, DIE STETS DAS BÖSE WILL UND STETS DAS GUTE SCHAFFT). (Note 15) It
is not through his help but in spite of his help that mankind makes any
progress.

[Note 15. When Mephistopheles first appears to Faust, in the latter's
study, Faust inquires: "What is thy name?" To which Mephistopheles
replies: "A part ofthe Power which always wills the Bad and always works
the Good." And when Faust asks him what is meant by this riddle and why he
should call himself'a part,' the gist of Mephistopheles' reply is that he
is the Spirit of Negation and exists through opposition to the positive
Truth and Order and Beauty which proceed from the never-ending creative
energy of the Deity. In the Prologue to Faust the Lord declares that
man's active nature would grow sluggishin working the good and that
therefore he has to be aroused by the Spirit of Opposition. This Spirit
wills the Bad, but of itself it can do nothing positive, and by its
opposition always works the opposite of what it wills.]

Since the Jew has never had a State which was based on territorial
delimitations, and therefore never a civilization of his own, the idea
arose that here we were dealing with a people who had to be considered
as Nomads. That is a great and mischievous mistake. The true nomad does
actually possess a definite delimited territory where he lives. It is
merely that he does not cultivate it, as the settled farmer does, but
that he lives on the products of his herds, with which he wanders over
his domain. The natural reason for this mode of existence is to be found
in the fact that the soil is not fertile and that it does not give the
steady produce which makes a fixed abode possible. Outside of this
natural cause, however, there is a more profound cause: namely, that no
mechanical civilization is at hand to make up for the natural poverty of
the region in question. There are territories where the Aryan can
establish fixed settlements by means of the technical skill which he has
developed in the course of more than a thousand years, even though these
territories would otherwise have to be abandoned, unless the Aryan were
willing to wander about them in nomadic fashion; but his technical
tradition and his age-long experience of the use of technical means
would probably make the nomadic life unbearable for him. We ought to
remember that during the first period of American colonization numerous
Aryans earned their daily livelihood as trappers and hunters, etc.,
frequently wandering about in large groups with their women and
children, their mode of existence very much resembling that of ordinary
nomads. The moment, however, that they grew more numerous and were able
to accumulate larger resources, they cleared the land and drove out the
aborigines, at the same time establishing settlements which rapidly
increased all over the country.

The Aryan himself was probably at first a nomad and became a settler in
the course of ages. But yet he was never of the Jewish kind. The Jew is
not a nomad; for the nomad has already a definite attitude towards the
concept of 'work', and this attitude served as the basis of a later
cultural development, when the necessary intellectual conditions were at
hand. There is a certain amount of idealism in the general attitude of
the nomad, even though it be rather primitive. His whole character may,
therefore, be foreign to Aryan feeling but it will never be repulsive.
But not even the slightest trace of idealism exists in the Jewish
character. The Jew has never been a nomad, but always a parasite,
battening on the substance of others. If he occasionally abandoned
regions where he had hitherto lived he did not do it voluntarily. He did
it because from time to time he was driven out by people who were tired
of having their hospitality abused by such guests. Jewish self-expansion
is a parasitic phenomenon--since the Jew is always looking for new
pastures for his race.

But this has nothing to do with nomadic life as such; because the Jew
does not ever think of leaving a territory which he has once occupied.
He sticks where he is with such tenacity that he can hardly be driven
out even by superior physical force. He expands into new territories
only when certain conditions for his existence are provided therein; but
even then--unlike the nomad--he will not change his former abode. He is
and remains a parasite, a sponger who, like a pernicious bacillus,
spreads over wider and wider areas according as some favourable area
attracts him. The effect produced by his presence is also like that of
the vampire; for wherever he establishes himself the people who grant
him hospitality are bound to be bled to death sooner or later. Thus the
Jew has at all times lived in States that have belonged to other races
and within the organization of those States he had formed a State of his
own, which is, however, hidden behind the mask of a 'religious
community', as long as external circumstances do not make it advisable
for this community to declare its true nature. As soon as the Jew feels
himself sufficiently established in his position to be able to hold it
without a disguise, he lifts the mask and suddenly appears in the
character which so many did not formerly believe or wish to see: namely
that of the Jew.

The life which the Jew lives as a parasite thriving on the substance of
other nations and States has resulted in developing that specific
character which Schopenhauer once described when he spoke of the Jew as
'The Great Master of Lies'. The kind of existence which he leads forces
the Jew to the systematic use of falsehood, just as naturally as the
inhabitants of northern climates are forced to wear warm clothes.

He can live among other nations and States only as long as he succeeds
in persuading them that the Jews are not a distinct people but the
representatives of a religious faith who thus constitute a 'religious
community', though this be of a peculiar character.

As a matter of fact, however, this is the first of his great falsehoods.

He is obliged to conceal his own particular character and mode of life
that he may be allowed to continue his existence as a parasite among the
nations. The greater the intelligence of the individual Jew, the better
will he succeed in deceiving others. His success in this line may even
go so far that the people who grant him hospitality may be led to
believe that the Jew among them is a genuine Frenchman, for instance, or
Englishman or German or Italian, who just happens to belong to a
religious denomination which is different from that prevailing in these
countries. Especially in circles concerned with the executive
administration of the State, where the officials generally have only a
minimum of historical sense, the Jew is able to impose his infamous
deception with comparative ease. In these circles independent thinking
is considered a sin against the sacred rules according to which official
promotion takes place. It is therefore not surprising that even to-day
in the Bavarian government offices, for example, there is not the
slightest suspicion that the Jews form a distinct nation themselves and
are not merely the adherents of a 'Confession', though one glance at the
Press which belongs to the Jews ought to furnish sufficient evidence to
the contrary even for those who possess only the smallest degree of
intelligence. The JEWISH ECHO, however, is not an official gazette and
therefore not authoritative in the eyes of those government potentates.

Jewry has always been a nation of a definite racial character and never
differentiated merely by the fact of belonging to a certain religion. At
a very early date, urged on by the desire to make their way in the
world, the Jews began to cast about for a means whereby they might
distract such attention as might prove inconvenient for them. What could
be more effective and at the same time more above suspicion than to
borrow and utilize the idea of the religious community? Here also
everything is copied, or rather stolen; for the Jew could not possess
any religious institution which had developed out of his own
consciousness, seeing that he lacks every kind of idealism; which means
that belief in a life beyond this terrestrial existence is foreign to
him. In the Aryan mind no religion can ever be imagined unless it
embodies the conviction that life in some form or other will continue
after death. As a matter of fact, the Talmud is not a book that lays
down principles according to which the individual should prepare for the
life to come. It only furnishes rules for a practical and convenient
life in this world.

The religious teaching of the Jews is principally a collection of
instructions for maintaining the Jewish blood pure and for regulating
intercourse between Jews and the rest of the world: that is to say,
their relation with non-Jews. But the Jewish religious teaching is not
concerned with moral problems. It is rather concerned with economic
problems, and very petty ones at that. In regard to the moral value of
the religious teaching of the Jews there exist and always have existed
quite exhaustive studies (not from the Jewish side; for whatever the
Jews have written on this question has naturally always been of a
tendentious character) which show up the kind of religion that the Jews
have in a light that makes it look very uncanny to the Aryan mind. The
Jew himself is the best example of the kind of product which this
religious training evolves. His life is of this world only and his
mentality is as foreign to the true spirit of Christianity as his
character was foreign to the great Founder of this new creed two
thousand years ago. And the Founder of Christianity made no secret
indeed of His estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it
necessary He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of
God; because then, as always, they used religion as a means of advancing
their commercial interests. But at that time Christ was nailed to the
Cross for his attitude towards the Jews; whereas our modern Christians
enter into party politics and when elections are being held they debase
themselves to beg for Jewish votes. They even enter into political
intrigues with the atheistic Jewish parties against the interests of
their own Christian nation.

On this first and fundamental lie, the purpose of which is to make
people believe that Jewry is not a nation but a religion, other lies are
subsequently based. One of those further lies, for example, is in
connection with the language spoken by the Jew. For him language is not
an instrument for the expression of his inner thoughts but rather a
means of cloaking them. When talking French his thoughts are Jewish and
when writing German rhymes he only gives expression to the character of
his own race.

As long as the Jew has not succeeded in mastering other peoples he is
forced to speak their language whether he likes it or not. But the
moment that the world would become the slave of the Jew it would have to
learn some other language (Esperanto, for example) so that by this means
the Jew could dominate all the more easily.

How much the whole existence of this people is based on a permanent
falsehood is proved in a unique way by 'The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion', which are so violently repudiated by the Jews. With groans and
moans, the FRANKFURTER ZEITUNG repeats again and again that these are
forgeries. This alone is evidence in favour of their authenticity. What
many Jews unconsciously wish to do is here clearly set forth. It is not
necessary to ask out of what Jewish brain these revelations sprang; but
what is of vital interest is that they disclose, with an almost
terrifying precision, the mentality and methods of action characteristic
of the Jewish people and these writings expound in all their various
directions the final aims towards which the Jews are striving. The study
of real happenings, however, is the best way of judging the authenticity
of those documents. If the historical developments which have taken
place within the last few centuries be studied in the light of this book
we shall understand why the Jewish Press incessantly repudiates and
denounces it. For the Jewish peril will be stamped out the moment the
general public come into possession of that book and understand it.

In order to get to know the Jew properly it is necessary to study the
road which he has been following among the other peoples during the last
few centuries. One example will suffice to give a clear insight here.
Since his career has been the same at all epochs--just as the people at
whose expense he has lived have remained the same--for the purposes of
making the requisite analysis it will be best to mark his progress by
stages. For the sake of simplicity we shall indicate these stages by
letters of the alphabet.

The first Jews came into what was then called Germania during the period
of the Roman invasion; and, as usual, they came as merchants. During the
turmoil caused by the great migrations of the German tribes the Jews
seem to have disappeared. We may therefore consider the period when the
Germans formed the first political communities as the beginning of that
process whereby Central and Northern Europe was again, and this time
permanently, Judaized. A development began which has always been the
same or similar wherever and whenever Jews came into contact with Aryan
peoples.

(a) As soon as the first permanent settlements had been established the
Jew was suddenly 'there'. He arrived as a merchant and in the beginning
did not trouble to disguise his nationality. He still remained openly a
Jew, partly it may be because he knew too little of the language. It may
also be that people of other races refused to mix with him, so that he
could not very well adopt any other appearance than that of a foreign
merchant. Because of his subtlety and cunning and the lack of experience
on the part of the people whose guest he became, it was not to his
disadvantage openly to retain his Jewish character. This may even have
been advantageous to him; for the foreigner was received kindly.

(b) Slowly but steadily he began to take part in the economic life
around him; not as a producer, however, but only as a middleman. His
commercial cunning, acquired through thousands of years of negotiation
as an intermediary, made him superior in this field to the Aryans, who
were still quite ingenuous and indeed clumsy and whose honesty was
unlimited; so that after a short while commerce seemed destined to
become a Jewish monopoly. The Jew began by lending out money at usurious
interest, which is a permanent trade of his. It was he who first
introduced the payment of interest on borrowed money. The danger which
this innovation involved was not at first recognized; indeed the
innovation was welcomed, because it offered momentary advantages.

(c) At this stage the Jew had become firmly settled down; that is to
say, he inhabited special sections of the cities and towns and had his
own quarter in the market-places. Thus he gradually came to form a State
within a State. He came to look upon the commercial domain and all money
transactions as a privilege belonging exclusively to himself and he
exploited it ruthlessly.

(d) At this stage finance and trade had become his complete monopoly.
Finally, his usurious rate of interest aroused opposition and the
increasing impudence which the Jew began to manifest all round stirred
up popular indignation, while his display of wealth gave rise to popular
envy. The cup of his iniquity became full to the brim when he included
landed property among his commercial wares and degraded the soil to the
level of a market commodity. Since he himself never cultivated the soil
but considered it as an object to be exploited, on which the peasant may
still remain but only on condition that he submits to the most heartless
exactions of his new master, public antipathy against the Jew steadily
increased and finally turned into open animosity. His extortionate
tyranny became so unbearable that people rebelled against his control
and used physical violence against him. They began to scrutinize this
foreigner somewhat more closely, and then began to discover the
repulsive traits and characteristics inherent in him, until finally an
abyss opened between the Jews and their hosts, across which abyss there
could be no further contact.

In times of distress a wave of public anger has usually arisen against
the Jew; the masses have taken the law into their own hands; they have
seized Jewish property and ruined the Jew in their urge to protect
themselves against what they consider to be a scourge of God. Having
come to know the Jew intimately through the course of centuries, in
times of distress they looked upon his presence among them as a public
danger comparable only to the plague.

(e) But then the Jew began to reveal his true character. He paid court
to governments, with servile flattery, used his money to ingratiate
himself further and thus regularly secured for himself once again the
privilege of exploiting his victim. Although public wrath flared up
against this eternal profiteer and drove him out, after a few years he
reappeared in those same places and carried on as before. No persecution
could force him to give up his trade of exploiting other people and no
amount of harrying succeeded in driving him out permanently. He always
returned after a short time and it was always the old story with him.

In an effort to save at least the worst from happening, legislation was
passed which debarred the Jew from obtaining possession of the land.

(f) In proportion as the powers of kings and princes increased, the Jew
sidled up to them. He begged for 'charters' and 'privileges' which those
gentlemen, who were generally in financial straits, gladly granted if
they received adequate payment in return. However high the price he has
to pay, the Jew will succeed in getting it back within a few years from
operating the privilege he has acquired, even with interest and compound
interest. He is a real leech who clings to the body of his unfortunate
victims and cannot be removed; so that when the princes found themselves
in need once again they took the blood from his swollen veins with their
own hands.

This game was repeated unendingly. In the case of those who were called
'German Princes', the part they played was quite as contemptible as that
played by the Jew. They were a real scourge for their people. Their
compeers may be found in some of the government ministers of our time.

It was due to the German princes that the German nation could not
succeed in definitely freeing itself from the Jewish peril.
Unfortunately the situation did not change at a later period. The
princes finally received the reward which they had a thousand-fold
deserved for all the crimes committed by them against their own people.
They had allied themselves with Satan and later on they discovered that
they were in Satan's embrace.

(g) By permitting themselves to be entangled in the toils of the Jew,
the princes prepared their own downfall. The position which they held
among their people was slowly but steadily undermined not only by their
continued failure to guard the interests of their subjects but by the
positive exploitation of them. The Jew calculated exactly the time when
the downfall of the princes was approaching and did his best to hasten
it. He intensified their financial difficulties by hindering them in the
exercise of their duty towards their people, by inveigling them through
the most servile flatteries into further personal display, whereby he
made himself more and more indispensable to them. His astuteness, or
rather his utter unscrupulousness, in money affairs enabled him to exact
new income from the princes, to squeeze the money out of them and then
have it spent as quickly as possible. Every Court had its 'Court Jews',
as this plague was called, who tortured the innocent victims until they
were driven to despair; while at the same time this Jew provided the
means which the princes squandered on their own pleasures. It is not to
be wondered at that these ornaments of the human race became the
recipients of official honours and even were admitted into the ranks of
the hereditary nobility, thus contributing not only to expose that
social institution to ridicule but also to contaminate it from the
inside.

Naturally the Jew could now exploit the position to which he had
attained and push himself forward even more rapidly than before. Finally
he became baptized and thus entitled to all the rights and privileges
which belonged to the children of the nation on which he preyed. This
was a high-class stroke of business for him, and he often availed
himself of it, to the great joy of the Church, which was proud of having
gained a new child in the Faith, and also to the joy of Israel, which
was happy at seeing the trick pulled off successfully.

(h) At this stage a transformation began to take place in the world of
Jewry. Up to now they had been Jews--that is to say, they did not
hitherto set any great value on pretending to be something else; and
anyhow the distinctive characteristics which separated them from other
races could not be easily overcome. Even as late as the time of
Frederick the Great nobody looked upon the Jews as other than a
'foreign' people, and Goethe rose up in revolt against the failure
legally to prohibit marriage between Christians and Jews. Goethe was
certainly no reactionary and no time-server. What he said came from the
voice of the blood and the voice of reason. Notwithstanding the
disgraceful happenings taking place in Court circles, the people
recognized instinctively that the Jew was the foreign body in their own
flesh and their attitude towards him was directed by recognition of that
fact.

But a change was now destined to take place. In the course of more than
a thousand years the Jew had learned to master the language of his hosts
so thoroughly that he considered he might now lay stress on his Jewish
character and emphasize the 'Germanism' a bit more. Though it must have
appeared ridiculous and absurd at first sight, he was impudent enough to
call himself a 'Teuton', which in this case meant a German. In that way
began one of the most infamous impositions that can be imagined. The Jew
did not possess the slightest traces of the German character. He had
only acquired the art of twisting the German language to his own uses,
and that in a disgusting way, without having assimilated any other
feature of the German character. Therefore his command of the language
was the sole ground on which he could pretend to be a German. It is not
however by the tie of language, but exclusively by the tie of blood that
the members of a race are bound together. And the Jew himself knows this
better than any other, seeing that he attaches so little importance to
the preservation of his own language while at the same time he strives
his utmost to maintain his blood free from intermixture with that of
other races. A man may acquire and use a new language without much
trouble; but it is only his old ideas that he expresses through the new
language. His inner nature is not modified thereby. The best proof of
this is furnished by the Jew himself. He may speak a thousand tongues
and yet his Jewish nature will remain always one and the same. His
distinguishing characteristics were the same when he spoke the Latin
language at Ostia two thousand years ago as a merchant in grain, as they
are to-day when he tries to sell adulterated flour with the aid of his
German gibberish. He is always the same Jew. That so obvious a fact is
not recognized by the average head-clerk in a German government
department, or by an officer in the police administration, is also a
self-evident and natural fact; since it would be difficult to find
another class of people who are so lacking in instinct and intelligence
as the civil servants employed by our modern German State authorities.

The reason why, at the stage I am dealing with, the Jew so suddenly
decided to transform himself into a German is not difficult to discover.
He felt the power of the princes slowly crumbling and therefore looked
about to find a new social plank on which he might stand. Furthermore,
his financial domination over all the spheres of economic life had
become so powerful that he felt he could no longer sustain that enormous
structure or add to it unless he were admitted to the full enjoyment of
the 'rights of citizenship.' He aimed at both, preservation and
expansion; for the higher he could climb the more alluring became the
prospect of reaching the old goal, which was promised to him in ancient
times, namely world-rulership, and which he now looked forward to with
feverish eyes, as he thought he saw it visibly approaching. Therefore
all his efforts were now directed to becoming a fully-fledged citizen,
endowed with all civil and political rights.

That was the reason for his emancipation from the Ghetto.

(i) And thus the Court Jew slowly developed into the national Jew. But
naturally he still remained associated with persons in higher quarters
and he even attempted to push his way further into the inner circles of
the ruling set. But at the same time some other representatives of his
race were currying favour with the people. If we remember the crimes the
Jew had committed against the masses of the people in the course of so
many centuries, how repeatedly and ruthlessly he exploited them and how
he sucked out even the very marrow of their substance, and when we
further remember how they gradually came to hate him and finally
considered him as a public scourge--then we may well understand how
difficult the Jew must have found this final transformation. Yes,
indeed, it must tax all their powers to be able to present themselves as
'friends of humanity' to the poor victims whom they have skinned raw.

Therefore the Jew began by making public amends for the crimes which he
had committed against the people in the past. He started his
metamorphosis by first appearing as the 'benefactor' of humanity. Since
his new philanthropic policy had a very concrete aim in view, he could
not very well apply to himself the biblical counsel, not to allow the
left hand to know what the right hand is giving. He felt obliged to let
as many people as possible know how deeply the sufferings of the masses
grieved him and to what excesses of personal sacrifice he was ready to
go in order to help them. With this manifestation of innate modesty, so
typical of the Jew, he trumpeted his virtues before the world until
finally the world actually began to believe him. Those who refused to
share this belief were considered to be doing him an injustice. Thus
after a little while he began to twist things around, so as to make it
appear that it was he who had always been wronged, and vice versa. There
were really some particularly foolish people who could not help pitying
this poor unfortunate creature of a Jew.

Attention may be called to the fact that, in spite of his proclaimed
readiness to make personal sacrifices, the Jew never becomes poor
thereby. He has a happy knack of always making both ends meet.
Occasionally his benevolence might be compared to the manure which is
not spread over the field merely for the purpose of getting rid of it,
but rather with a view to future produce. Anyhow, after a comparatively
short period of time, the world was given to know that the Jew had
become a general benefactor and philanthropist. What a transformation!

What is looked upon as more or less natural when done by other people
here became an object of astonishment, and even sometimes of admiration,
because it was considered so unusual in a Jew. That is why he has
received more credit for his acts of benevolence than ordinary mortals.

And something more: The Jew became liberal all of a sudden and began to
talk enthusiastically of how human progress must be encouraged.
Gradually he assumed the air of being the herald of a new age.

Yet at the same time he continued to undermine the ground-work of that
part of the economic system in which the people have the most practical
interest. He bought up stock in the various national undertakings and
thus pushed his influence into the circuit of national production,
making this latter an object of buying and selling on the stock
exchange, or rather what might be called the pawn in a financial game of
chess, and thus ruining the basis on which personal proprietorship alone
is possible. Only with the entrance of the Jew did that feeling of
estrangement, between employers and employees begin which led at a later
date to the political class-struggle.

Finally the Jew gained an increasing influence in all economic
undertakings by means of his predominance in the stock-exchange. If not
the ownership, at least he secured control of the working power of the
nation.

In order to strengthen his political position, he directed his efforts
towards removing the barrier of racial and civic discrimination which
had hitherto hindered his advance at every turn. With characteristic
tenacity he championed the cause of religious tolerance for this
purpose; and in the freemason organization, which had fallen completely
into his hands, he found a magnificent weapon which helped him to
achieve his ends. Government circles, as well as the higher sections of
the political and commercial bourgeoisie, fell a prey to his plans
through his manipulation of the masonic net, though they themselves did
not even suspect what was happening.

Only the people as such, or rather the masses which were just becoming
conscious of their own power and were beginning to use it in the fight
for their rights and liberties, had hitherto escaped the grip of the
Jew. At least his influence had not yet penetrated to the deeper and
wider sections of the people. This was unsatisfactory to him. The most
important phase of his policy was therefore to secure control over the
people. The Jew realized that in his efforts to reach the position of
public despot he would need a 'peace-maker.' And he thought he could
find a peace-maker if he could whip-in sufficient extensive sections of
the bourgeois. But the freemasons failed to catch the
glove-manufacturers and the linen-weavers in the frail meshes of their
net. And so it became necessary to find a grosser and withal a more
effective means. Thus another weapon beside that of freemasonry would
have to be secured. This was the Press. The Jew exercised all his skill
and tenacity in getting hold of it. By means of the Press he began
gradually to control public life in its entirety. He began to drive it
along the road which he had chosen to reach his own ends; for he was now
in a position to create and direct that force which, under the name of
'public opinion' is better known to-day than it was some decades ago.

Simultaneously the Jew gave himself the air of thirsting after
knowledge. He lauded every phase of progress, particularly those phases
which led to the ruin of others; for he judges all progress and
development from the standpoint of the advantages which these bring to
his own people. When it brings him no such advantages he is the deadly
enemy of enlightenment and hates all culture which is real culture as
such. All the knowledge which he acquires in the schools of others is
exploited by him exclusively in the service of his own race.

Even more watchfully than ever before, he now stood guard over his
Jewish nationality. Though bubbling over with 'enlightenment',
'progress', 'liberty', 'humanity', etc., his first care was to preserve
the racial integrity of his own people. He occasionally bestowed one of
his female members on an influential Christian; but the racial stock of
his male descendants was always preserved unmixed fundamentally. He
poisons the blood of others but preserves his own blood unadulterated.
The Jew scarcely ever marries a Christian girl, but the Christian takes
a Jewess to wife. The mongrels that are a result of this latter union
always declare themselves on the Jewish side. Thus a part of the higher
nobility in particular became completely degenerate. The Jew was well
aware of this fact and systematically used this means of disarming the
intellectual leaders of the opposite race. To mask his tactics and fool
his victims, he talks of the equality of all men, no matter what their
race or colour may be. And the simpletons begin to believe him.

Since his whole nature still retains too foreign an odour for the broad
masses of the people to allow themselves to be caught in his snare, he
uses the Press to put before the public a picture of himself which is
entirely untrue to life but well designed to serve his purpose. In the
comic papers special efforts are made to represent the Jews as an
inoffensive little race which, like all others, has its peculiarities.
In spite of their manners, which may seem a bit strange, the comic
papers present the Jews as fundamentally good-hearted and honourable.
Attempts are generally made to make them appear insignificant rather
than dangerous.

During this phase of his progress the chief goal of the Jew was the
victory of democracy, or rather the supreme hegemony of the
parliamentary system, which embodies his concept of democracy. This
institution harmonises best with his purposes; for thus the personal
element is eliminated and in its place we have the dunder-headed
majority, inefficiency and, last but by no means least, knavery.

The final result must necessarily have been the overthrow of the
monarchy, which had to happen sooner or later.

(j) A tremendous economic development transformed the social structure
of the nation. The small artisan class slowly disappeared and the
factory worker, who took its place, had scarcely any chance of
establishing an independent existence of his own but sank more and more
to the level of a proletariat. An essential characteristic of the
factory worker is that he is scarcely ever able to provide for an
independent source of livelihood which will support him in later life.
In the true sense of the word, he is 'disinherited'. His old age is a
misery to him and can hardly be called life at all.

In earlier times a similar situation had been created, which had
imperatively demanded a solution and for which a solution was found.
Side by side with the peasant and the artisan, a new class was gradually
developed, namely that of officials and employees, especially those
employed in the various services of the State. They also were a
'disinherited' class, in the true sense of the word. But the State found
a remedy for this unhealthy situation by taking upon itself the duty of
providing for the State official who could establish nothing that would
be an independent means of livelihood for himself in his old age. Thus
the system of pensions and retiring allowances was introduced. Private
enterprises slowly followed this example in increasing numbers; so that
to-day every permanent non-manual worker receives a pension in his later
years, if the firm which he has served is one that has reached or gone
beyond a certain size. It was only by virtue of the assurance given of
State officials, that they would be cared for in their old age. that
such a high degree of unselfish devotion to duty was developed, which in
pre-war times was one of the distinguising characteristics of German
officials.

Thus a whole class which had no personal property was saved from
destitution by an intelligent system of provision, and found a place in
the social structure of the national community.

The problem is now put before the State and nation, but this time in a
much larger form. When the new industries sprang up and developed,
millions of people left the countryside and the villages to take up
employment in the big factories. The conditions under which this new
class found itself forced to live were worse than miserable. The more or
less mechanical transformation of the methods of work hitherto in vogue
among the artisans and peasants did not fit in well with the habits or
mentality of this new working-class. The way in which the peasants and
artisans had formerly worked had nothing comparable to the intensive
labour of the new factory worker. In the old trades time did not play a
highly important role, but it became an essential element in the new
industrial system. The formal taking over of the old working hours into
the mammoth industrial enterprises had fatal results. The actual amount
of work hitherto accomplished within a certain time was comparatively
small, because the modern methods of intensive production were then
unknown. Therefore, though in the older system a working day of fourteen
or even fifteen hours was not unendurable, now it was beyond the
possibilities of human endurance because in the new system every minute
was utilized to the extreme. This absurd transference of the old working
hours to the new industrial system proved fatal in two directions.
First, it ruined the health of the workers; secondly, it destroyed their
faith in a superior law of justice. Finally, on the one hand a miserable
wage was received and, on the other, the employer held a much more
lucrative position than before. Hence a striking difference between the
ways of life on the one side and on the other.

In the open country there could be no social problem, because the master
and the farm-hand were doing the same kind of work and doing it
together. They ate their food in common, and sometimes even out of the
same dish. But in this sphere also the new system introduced an entirely
different set of conditions between masters and men.

The division created between employer and employees seems not to have
extended to all branches of life. How far this Judaizing process has
been allowed to take effect among our people is illustrated by the fact
that manual labour not only receives practically no recognition but is
even considered degrading. That is not a natural German attitude. It is
due to the introduction of a foreign element into our lives, and that
foreign element is the Jewish spirit, one of the effects of which has
been to transform the high esteem in which our handicrafts once were
held into a definite feeling that all physical labour is something base
and unworthy.

Thus a new social class has grown up which stands in low esteem; and the
day must come when we shall have to face the question of whether the
nation will be able to make this class an integral part of the social
community or whether the difference of status now existing will become a
permanent gulf separating this class from the others.

One thing, however, is certain: This class does not include the worst
elements of the community in its ranks. Rather the contrary is the
truth: it includes the most energetic parts of the nation. The
sophistication which is the result of a so-called civilization has not
yet exercised its disintegrating and degenerating influence on this
class. The broad masses of this new lower class, constituted by the
manual labourers, have not yet fallen a prey to the morbid weakness of
pacifism. These are still robust and, if necessary, they can be brutal.

While our bourgeoisie middle class paid no attention at all to this
momentous problem and indifferently allowed events to take their course,
the Jew seized upon the manifold possibilities which the situation
offered him for the future. While on the one hand he organized
capitalistic methods of exploitation to their ultimate degree of
efficiency, he curried favour with the victims of his policy and his
power and in a short while became the leader of their struggle against
himself. 'Against himself' is here only a figurative way of speaking;
for this 'Great Master of Lies' knows how to appear in the guise of the
innocent and throw the guilt on others. Since he had the impudence to
take a personal lead among the masses, they never for a moment suspected
that they were falling a prey to one of the most infamous deceits ever
practised. And yet that is what it actually was.

The moment this new class had arisen out of the general economic
situation and taken shape as a definite body in the social order, the
Jew saw clearly where he would find the necessary pacemaker for his own
progressive march. At first he had used the bourgeois class as a
battering-ram against the feudal order; and now he used the worker
against the bourgeois world. Just as he succeeded in obtaining civic
rights by intrigues carried on under the protection of the bourgeois
class, he now hoped that by joining in the struggle which the workers
were waging for their own existence he would be able to obtain full
control over them.

When that moment arrives, then the only objective the workers will have
to fight for will be the future of the Jewish people. Without knowing
it, the worker is placing himself at the service of the very power
against which he believes he is fighting. Apparently he is made to fight
against capital and thus he is all the more easily brought to fight for
capitalist interests. Outcries are systematically raised against
international capital but in reality it is against the structure of
national economics that these slogans are directed. The idea is to
demolish this structure and on its ruins triumphantly erect the
structure of the International Stock Exchange.

In this line of action the procedure of the Jew was as follows:

He kowtowed to the worker, hypocritically pretended to feel pity for him
and his lot, and even to be indignant at the misery and poverty which
the worker had to endure. That is the way in which the Jew endeavoured
to gain the confidence of the working class. He showed himself eager to
study their various hardships, whether real or imaginary, and strove to
awaken a yearning on the part of the workers to change the conditions
under which they lived. The Jew artfully enkindled that innate yearning
for social justice which is a typical Aryan characteristic. Once that
yearning became alive it was transformed into hatred against those in
more fortunate circumstances of life. The next stage was to give a
precise philosophical aspect to the struggle for the elimination of
social wrongs. And thus the Marxist doctrine was invented.

By presenting his doctrine as part and parcel of a just revindication of
social rights, the Jew propagated the doctrine all the more effectively.
But at the same time he provoked the opposition of decent people who
refused to admit these demands which, because of the form and
pseudo-philosophical trimmings in which they are presented, seemed
fundamentally unjust and impossible for realization. For, under the
cloak of purely social concepts there are hidden aims which are of a
Satanic character. These aims are even expounded in the open with the
clarity of unlimited impudence. This Marxist doctrine is an individual
mixture of human reason and human absurdity; but the combination is
arranged in such a way that only the absurd part of it could ever be put
into practice, but never the reasonable part of it. By categorically
repudiating the personal worth of the individual and also the nation and
its racial constituent, this doctrine destroys the fundamental basis of
all civilization; for civilization essentially depends on these very
factors. Such is the true essence of the Marxist WELTANSCHAUUNG, so far
as the word WELTANSCHAUUNG can be applied at all to this phantom
arising from a criminal brain. The destruction of the concept of
personality and of race removes the chief obstacle which barred the way
to domination of the social body by its inferior elements, which are the
Jews.

The very absurdity of the economic and political theories of Marxism
gives the doctrine its peculiar significance. Because of its
pseudo-logic, intelligent people refuse to support it, while all those
who are less accustomed to use their intellectual faculties, or who have
only a rudimentary notion of economic principles, join the Marxist cause
with flying banners. The intelligence behind the movement--for even this
movement needs intelligence if it is to subsist--is supplied by the Jews
themselves, naturally of course as a gratuitous service which is at the
same time a sacrifice on their part.

Thus arose a movement which was composed exclusively of manual workers
under the leadership of Jews. To all external appearances, this movement
strives to ameliorate the conditions under which the workers live; but
in reality its aim is to enslave and thereby annihilate the non-Jewish
races.

The propaganda which the freemasons had carried on among the so-called
intelligentsia, whereby their pacifist teaching paralysed the instinct
for national self-preservation, was now extended to the broad masses of
the workers and bourgeoisie by means of the Press, which was almost
everywhere in Jewish hands. To those two instruments of disintegration a
third and still more ruthless one was added, namely, the organization of
brute physical force among the masses. As massed columns of attacks, the
Marxist troops stormed those parts of the social order which had been
left standing after the two former undermining operations had done their
work.

The combined activity of all these forces has been marvellously managed.
And it will not be surprising if it turns out that those institutions
which have always appeared as the organs of the more or less traditional
authority of the State should now fall before the Marxist attack. Among
our higher and highest State officials, with very few exceptions, the
Jew has found the cost complacent backers in his work of destruction. An
attitude of sneaking servility towards 'superiors' and supercilious
arrogance towards 'inferiors' are the characteristics of this class of
people, as well as a grade of stupidity which is really frightening and
at the same time a towering self-conceit, which has been so consistently
developed to make it amusing.

But these qualities are of the greatest utility to the Jew in his
dealings with our authorities. Therefore they are qualities which he
appreciates most in the officials.

If I were to sketch roughly the actual struggle which is now beginning I
should describe it somewhat thus:

Not satisfied with the economic conquest of the world, but also
demanding that it must come under his political control, the Jew
subdivides the organized Marxist power into two parts, which correspond
to the ultimate objectives that are to be fought for in this struggle
which is carried on under the direction of the Jew. To outward
appearance, these seem to be two independent movements, but in reality
they constitute an indivisible unity. The two divisions are: The
political movement and the trades union movement.

The trades union movement has to gather in the recruits. It offers
assistance and protection to the workers in the hard struggle which they
have to wage for the bare means of existence, a struggle which has been
occasioned by the greediness and narrow-mindedness of many of the
industrialists. Unless the workers be ready to surrender all claims to
an existence which the dignity of human nature itself demands, and
unless they are ready to submit their fate to the will of employers who
in many cases have no sense of human responsibilities and are utterly
callous to human wants, then the worker must necessarily take matters
into his own hands, seeing that the organized social community--that is
to say, the State--pays no attention to his needs.

The so-called national-minded bourgeoisie, blinded by its own material
interests, opposes this life-or-death struggle of the workers and places
the most difficult obstacles in their way. Not only does this
bourgeoisie hinder all efforts to enact legislation which would shorten
the inhumanly long hours of work, prohibit child-labour, grant security
and protection to women and improve the hygienic conditions of the
workshops and the dwellings of the working-class, but while the
bourgeoisie hinders all this the shrewd Jew takes the cause of the
oppressed into his own hands. He gradually becomes the leader of the
trades union movements, which is an easy task for him, because he does
not genuinely intend to find remedies for the social wrong: he pursues
only one objective, namely, to gather and consolidate a body of
followers who will act under his commands as an armed weapon in the
economic war for the destruction of national economic independence. For,
while a sound social policy has to move between the two poles of
securing a decent level of public health and welfare on the one hand
and, on the other, that of safeguarding the independence of the economic
life of the nation, the Jew does not take these poles into account at
all. The destruction of both is one of his main objects. He would ruin,
rather than safeguard, the independence of the national economic system.
Therefore, as the leader of the trades union movement, he has no
scruples about putting forward demands which not only go beyond the
declared purpose of the movement but could not be carried into effect
without ruining the national economic structure. On the other hand, he
has no interest in seeing a healthy and sturdy population develop; he
would be more content to see the people degenerate into an unthinking
herd which could be reduced to total subjection. Because these are his
final objectives, he can afford to put forward the most absurd claims.
He knows very well that these claims can never be realized and that
therefore nothing in the actual state of affairs could be altered by
them, but that the most they can do is to arouse the spirit of unrest
among the masses. That is exactly the purpose which he wishes such
propaganda to serve and not a real and honest improvement of the social
conditions.

The Jews will therefore remain the unquestioned leaders of the trades
union movement so long as a campaign is not undertaken, which must be
carried out on gigantic lines, for the enlightenment of the masses; so
that they will be enabled better to understand the causes of their
misery. Or the same end might be achieved if the government authorities
would get rid of the Jew and his work. For as long as the masses remain
so ill-informed as they actually are to-day, and as long as the State
remains as indifferent to their lot as it now is, the masses will follow
whatever leader makes them the most extravagant promises in regard to
economic matters. The Jew is a past master at this art and his
activities are not hampered by moral considerations of any kind.

Naturally it takes him only a short time to defeat all his competitors
in this field and drive them from the scene of action. In accordance
with the general brutality and rapacity of his nature, he turns the
trades union movement into an organization for the exercise of physical
violence. The resistance of those whose common sense has hitherto saved
them from surrendering to the Jewish dictatorship is now broken down by
terrorization. The success of that kind of activity is enormous.

Parallel with this, the political organization advances. It operates
hand-in-hand with the trades union movement, inasmuch as the latter
prepares the masses for the political organization and even forces them
into it. This is also the source that provides the money which the
political organization needs to keep its enormous apparatus in action.
The trades union organization is the organ of control for the political
activity of its members and whips in the masses for all great political
demonstrations. In the end it ceases to struggle for economic interests
but places its chief weapon, the refusal to continue work--which takes
the form of a general strike--at the disposal of the political movement.

By means of a Press whose contents are adapted to the level of the most
ignorant readers, the political and trades union organizations are
provided with an instrument which prepares the lowest stratum of the
nation for a campaign of ruthless destruction. It is not considered part
of the purpose of this Press to inspire its readers with ideals which
might help them to lift their minds above the sordid conditions of their
daily lives; but, on the contrary, it panders to their lowest instincts.
Among the lazy-minded and self-seeking sections of the masses this kind
of speculation turns out lucrative.

It is this Press above all which carries on a fanatical campaign of
calumny, strives to tear down everything that might be considered as a
mainstay of national independence and to sabotage all cultural values as
well as to destroy the autonomy of the national economic system.

It aims its attack especially against all men of character who refuse to
fall into line with the Jewish efforts to obtain control over the State
or who appear dangerous to the Jews merely because of their superior
intelligence. For in order to incur the enmity of the Jew it is not
necessary to show any open hostility towards him. It is quite sufficient
if one be considered capable of opposing the Jew some time in the future
or using his abilities and character to enhance the power and position
of a nation which the Jew finds hostile to himself.

The Jewish instinct, which never fails where these problems have to be
dealt with, readily discerns the true mentality of those whom the Jew
meets in everyday life; and those who are not of a kindred spirit with
him may be sure of being listed among his enemies. Since the Jew is not
the object of aggression but the aggressor himself, he considers as his
enemies not only those who attack him but also those who may be capable
of resisting him. The means which he employs to break people of this
kind, who may show themselves decent and upright, are not the open means
generally used in honourable conflict, but falsehood and calumny.

He will stop at nothing. His utterly low-down conduct is so appalling
that one really cannot be surprised if in the imagination of our people
the Jew is pictured as the incarnation of Satan and the symbol of evil.

The ignorance of the broad masses as regards the inner character of the
Jew, and the lack of instinct and insight that our upper classes
display, are some of the reasons which explain how it is that so many
people fall an easy prey to the systematic campaign of falsehood which
the Jew carries on.

While the upper classes, with their innate cowardliness, turn away from
anyone whom the Jew thus attacks with lies and calumny, the common
people are credulous of everything, whether because of their ignorance
or their simple-mindedness. Government authorities wrap themselves up in
a robe of silence, but more frequently they persecute the victims of
Jewish attacks in order to stop the campaign in the Jewish Press. To the
fatuous mind of the government official such a line of conduct appears
to belong to the policy of upholding the authority of the State and
preserving public order. Gradually the Marxist weapon in the hands of
the Jew becomes a constant bogy to decent people. Sometimes the fear of
it sticks in the brain or weighs upon them as a kind of nightmare.
People begin to quail before this fearful foe and therewith become his
victims.

(k) The Jewish domination in the State seems now so fully assured that
not only can he now afford to call himself a Jew once again, but he even
acknowledges freely and openly what his ideas are on racial and
political questions. A section of the Jews avows itself quite openly as
an alien people, but even here there is another falsehood. When the
Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the new national
consciousness of the Jews will be satisfied by the establishment of a
Jewish State in Palestine, the Jews thereby adopt another means to dupe
the simple-minded Gentile. They have not the slightest intention of
building up a Jewish State in Palestine so as to live in it. What they
really are aiming at is to establish a central organization for their
international swindling and cheating. As a sovereign State, this cannot
be controlled by any of the other States. Therefore it can serve as a
refuge for swindlers who have been found out and at the same time a
high-school for the training of other swindlers.

As a sign of their growing presumption and sense of security, a certain
section of them openly and impudently proclaim their Jewish nationality
while another section hypocritically pretend that they are German,
French or English as the case may be. Their blatant behaviour in their
relations with other people shows how clearly they envisage their day of
triumph in the near future.

The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically
glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce,
adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own
people. The Jew uses every possible means to undermine the racial
foundations of a subjugated people. In his systematic efforts to ruin
girls and women he strives to break down the last barriers of
discrimination between him and other peoples. The Jews were responsible
for bringing negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of
bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its
cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate. For as long
as a people remain racially pure and are conscious of the treasure of
their blood, they can never be overcome by the Jew. Never in this world
can the Jew become master of any people except a bastardized people.

That is why the Jew systematically endeavours to lower the racial
quality of a people by permanently adulterating the blood of the
individuals who make up that people.

In the field of politics he now begins to replace the idea of democracy
by introducing the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the masses
organized under the Marxist banners he has found a weapon which makes it
possible for him to discard democracy, so as to subjugate and rule in a
dictatorial fashion by the aid of brute force. He is systematically
working in two ways to bring about this revolution. These ways are the
economic and the political respectively.

Aided by international influences, he forms a ring of enemies around
those nations which have proved themselves too sturdy for him in
withstanding attacks from within. He would like to force them into war
and then, if it should be necessary to his plans, he will unfurl the
banners of revolt even while the troops are actually fighting at the
front.

Economically he brings about the destruction of the State by a
systematic method of sabotaging social enterprises until these become so
costly that they are taken out of the hands of the State and then
submitted to the control of Jewish finance. Politically he works to
withdraw from the State its means of susbsistence, inasmuch as he
undermines the foundations of national resistance and defence, destroys
the confidence which the people have in their Government, reviles the
past and its history and drags everything national down into the gutter.

Culturally his activity consists in bowdlerizing art, literature and the
theatre, holding the expressions of national sentiment up to scorn,
overturning all concepts of the sublime and beautiful, the worthy and
the good, finally dragging the people to the level of his own low
mentality.

Of religion he makes a mockery. Morality and decency are described as
antiquated prejudices and thus a systematic attack is made to undermine
those last foundations on which the national being must rest if the
nation is to struggle for its existence in this world.

(l) Now begins the great and final revolution. As soon as the Jew is in
possession of political power he drops the last few veils which have
hitherto helped to conceal his features. Out of the democratic Jew, the
Jew of the People, arises the 'Jew of the Blood', the tyrant of the
peoples. In the course of a few years he endeavours to exterminate all
those who represent the national intelligence. And by thus depriving the
peoples of their natural intellectual leaders he fits them for their
fate as slaves under a lasting despotism.

Russia furnishes the most terrible example of such a slavery. In that
country the Jew killed or starved thirty millions of the people, in a
bout of savage fanaticism and partly by the employment of inhuman
torture. And he did this so that a gang of Jewish literati and financial
bandits should dominate over a great people.

But the final consequence is not merely that the people lose all their
freedom under the domination of the Jews, but that in the end these
parasites themselves disappear. The death of the victim is followed
sooner or later by that of the vampire.

If we review all the causes which contributed to bring about the
downfall of the German people we shall find that the most profound and
decisive cause must be attributed to the lack of insight into the racial
problem and especially in the failure to recognize the Jewish danger.

It would have been easy enough to endure the defeats suffered on the
battlefields in August 1918. They were nothing when compared with the
military victories which our nation had achieved. Our downfall was not
the result of those defeats; but we were overthrown by that force which
had prepared those defeats by systematically operating for several
decades to destroy those political instincts and that moral stamina
which alone enable a people to struggle for its existence and therewith
secure the right to exist.

By neglecting the problem of preserving the racial foundations of our
national life, the old Empire abrogated the sole right which entitles a
people to live on this planet. Nations that make mongrels of their
people, or allow their people to be turned into mongrels, sin against
the Will of Eternal Providence. And thus their overthrow at the hands of
a stronger opponent cannot be looked upon as a wrong but, on the
contrary, as a restoration of justice. If a people refuses to guard and
uphold the qualities with which it has been endowed by Nature and which
have their roots in the racial blood, then such a people has no right to
complain over the loss of its earthly existence.

Everything on this earth can be made into something better. Every defeat
may be made the foundation of a future victory. Every lost war may be
the cause of a later resurgence. Every visitation of distress can give a
new impetus to human energy. And out of every oppression those forces
can develop which bring about a new re-birth of the national
soul--provided always that the racial blood is kept pure.

But the loss of racial purity will wreck inner happiness for ever. It
degrades men for all time to come. And the physical and moral
consequences can never be wiped out.

If this unique problem be studied and compared with the other problems
of life we shall easily recognize how small is their importance in
comparison with this. They are all limited to time; but the problem of
the maintenance or loss of the purity of the racial blood will last as
long as man himself lasts.

All the symptoms of decline which manifested themselves already in
pre-war times can be traced back to the racial problem.

Whether one is dealing with questions of general law, or monstrous
excrescences in economic life, of phenomena which point to a cultural
decline or political degeneration, whether it be a question of defects
in the school-system or of the evil influence which the Press exerts
over the adult population--always and everywhere these phenomena are at
bottom caused by a lack of consideration for the interests of the race
to which one's own nation belongs, or by the failure to recognize the
danger that comes from allowing a foreign race to exist within the
national body.

That is why all attempts at reform, all institutions for social relief,
all political striving, all economic progress and all apparent increase
in the general stock of knowledge, were doomed to be unproductive of any
significant results. The nation, as well as the organization which
enables it to exist--namely, the State--were not developing in inner
strength and stability, but, on the contrary, were visibly losing their
vitality. The false brilliance of the Second Empire could not disguise
the inner weakness. And every attempt to invigorate it anew failed
because the main and most important problem was left out of
consideration.

It would be a mistake to think that the followers of the various
political parties which tried to doctor the condition of the German
people, or even all their leaders, were bad in themselves or meant
wrong. Their activity even at best was doomed to fail, merely because of
the fact that they saw nothing but the symptoms of our general malady
and they tried to doctor the symptoms while they overlooked the real
cause of the disease. If one makes a methodical study of the lines along
which the old Empire developed one cannot help seeing, after a careful
political analysis, that a process of inner degeneration had already set
in even at the time when the united Empire was formed and the German
nation began to make rapid external progress. The general situation was
declining, in spite of the apparent political success and in spite of
the increasing economic wealth. At the elections to the Reichstag the
growing number of Marxist votes indicated that the internal breakdown
and the political collapse were then rapidly approaching. All the
victories of the so-called bourgeois parties were fruitless, not only
because they could not prevent the numerical increase in the growing
mass of Marxist votes, even when the bourgeois parties triumphed at the
polls, but mainly because they themselves were already infected with the
germs of decay. Though quite unaware of it, the bourgeois world was
infected from within with the deadly virus of Marxist ideas. The fact
that they sometimes openly resisted was to be explained by the
competitive strife among ambitious political leaders, rather than by
attributing it to any opposition in principle between adversaries who
were determined to fight one another to the bitter end. During all those
years only one protagonist was fighting with steadfast perseverance.
This was the Jew. The Star of David steadily ascended as the will to
national self-preservation declined.

Therefore it was not a solid national phalanx that, of itself and out of
its own feeling of solidarity, rushed to the battlefields in August
1914. But it was rather the manifestation of the last flicker from the
instinct of national self-preservation against the progress of the
paralysis with which the pacifist and Marxist doctrine threatened our
people. Even in those days when the destinies of the nation were in the
balance the internal enemy was not recognized; therefore all efforts to
resist the external enemy were bound to be in vain. Providence did not
grant the reward to the victorious sword, but followed the eternal law
of retributive justice. A profound recognition of all this was the
source of those principles and tendencies which inspire our new
movement. We were convinced that only by recognizing such truths could
we stop the national decline in Germany and lay a granite foundation on
which the State could again be built up, a State which would not be a
piece of mechanism alien to our people, constituted for economic
purposes and interests, but an organism created from the soul of the
people themselves.

A GERMAN STATE IN A GERMAN NATION




CHAPTER XII


THE FIRST STAGE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GERMAN
NATIONAL SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY


Here at the close of the volume I shall describe the first stage in the
progress of our movement and shall give a brief account of the problems
we had to deal with during that period. In doing this I have no
intention of expounding the ideals which we have set up as the goal of
our movement; for these ideals are so momentous in their significance
that an exposition of them will need a whole volume. Therefore I shall
devote the second volume of this book to a detailed survey of the
principles which form the programme of our movement and I shall attempt
to draw a picture of what we mean by the word 'State'. When I say 'we'
in this connection I mean to include all those hundreds of thousands who
have fundamentally the same longing, though in the individual cases they
cannot find adequate words to describe the vision that hovers before
their eyes. It is a characteristic feature of all great reforms that in
the beginning there is only one single protagonist to come forward on
behalf of several millions of people. The final goal of a great
reformation has often been the object of profound longing on the parts
of hundreds of thousands for many centuries before, until finally one
among them comes forward as a herald to announce the will of that
multitude and become the standard-bearer of the old yearning, which he
now leads to a realization in a new idea.

The fact that millions of our people yearn at heart for a radical change
in our present conditions is proved by the profound discontent which
exists among them. This feeling is manifested in a thousand ways. Some
express it in a form of discouragement and despair. Others show it in
resentment and anger and indignation. Among some the profound discontent
calls forth an attitude of indifference, while it urges others to
violent manifestations of wrath. Another indication of this feeling may
be seen on the one hand in the attitude of those who abstain from voting
at elections and, on the other, in the large numbers of those who side
with the fanatical extremists of the left wing.

To these latter people our young movement had to appeal first of all. It
was not meant to be an organization for contented and satisfied people,
but was meant to gather in all those who were suffering from profound
anxiety and could find no peace, those who were unhappy and
discontented. It was not meant to float on the surface of the nation but
rather to push its roots deep among the masses.

Looked at from the purely political point of view, the situation in 1918
was as follows: A nation had been torn into two parts. One part, which
was by far the smaller of the two, contained the intellectual classes of
the nation from which all those employed in physical labour were
excluded. On the surface these intellectual classes appeared to be
national-minded, but that word meant nothing else to them except a very
vague and feeble concept of the duty to defend what they called the
interests of the State, which in turn seemed identical with those of the
dynastic regime. This class tried to defend its ideas and reach its aims
by carrying on the fight with the aid of intellectual weapons, which
could be used only here and there and which had only a superficial
effect against the brutal measures employed by the adversaries, in the
face of which the intellectual weapons were of their very nature bound
to fail. With one violent blow the class which had hitherto governed was
now struck down. It trembled with fear and accepted every humiliation
imposed on it by the merciless victor.

Over against this class stood the broad masses of manual labourers who
were organized in movements with a more or less radically Marxist
tendency. These organized masses were firmly determined to break any
kind of intellectual resistance by the use of brute force. They had no
nationalist tendencies whatsoever and deliberately repudiated the idea
of advancing the interests of the nation as such. On the contrary, they
promoted the interests of the foreign oppressor. Numerically this class
embraced the majority of the population and, what is more important,
included all those elements of the nation without whose collaboration a
national resurgence was not only a practical impossibility but was even
inconceivable.

For already in 1918 one thing had to be clearly recognized; namely, that
no resurgence of the German nation could take place until we had first
restored our national strength to face the outside world. For this
purpose arms are not the preliminary necessity, though our bourgeois
'statesmen' always blathered about it being so; what was wanted was
will-power. At one time the German people had more than sufficient
military armament. And yet they were not able to defend their liberty
because they lacked those energies which spring from the instinct of
national self-preservation and the will to hold on to one's own. The
best armament is only dead and worthless material as long as the spirit
is wanting which makes men willing and determined to avail themselves of
such weapons. Germany was rendered defenceless not because she lacked
arms, but because she lacked the will to keep her arms for the
maintenance of her people.

To-day our Left-wing politicians in particular are constantly insisting
that their craven-hearted and obsequious foreign policy necessarily
results from the disarmament of Germany, whereas the truth is that this
is the policy of traitors. To all that kind of talk the answer ought to
be: No, the contrary is the truth. Your action in delivering up the arms
was dictated by your anti-national and criminal policy of abandoning the
interests of the nation. And now you try to make people believe that
your miserable whining is fundamentally due to the fact that you have no
arms. Just like everything else in your conduct, this is a lie and a
falsification of the true reason.

But the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It
was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who
came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms. The
conservative politicians have neither right nor reason on their side
when they appeal to disarmament as the cause which compelled them to
adopt a policy of prudence (that is to say, cowardice). Here, again, the
contrary is the truth. Disarmament is the result of their lack of
spirit.

Therefore the problem of restoring Germany's power is not a question of
how can we manufacture arms but rather a question of how we can produce
that spirit which enables a people to bear arms. Once this spirit
prevails among a people then it will find a thousand ways, each of which
leads to the necessary armament. But a coward will not fire even a
single shot when attacked though he may be armed with ten pistols. For
him they are of less value than a blackthorn in the hands of a man of
courage.

The problem of re-establishing the political power of our nation is
first of all a problem of restoring the instinct of national
self-preservation for if no other reason than that every preparatory
step in foreign policy and every foreign judgment on the worth of a
State has been proved by experience to be grounded not on the material
size of the armament such a State may possess but rather on the moral
capacity for resistance which such a State has or is believed to have.
The question whether or not a nation be desirable as an ally is not so
much determined by the inert mass of arms which it has at hand but by
the obvious presence of a sturdy will to national self-preservation and
a heroic courage which will fight through to the last breath. For an
alliance is not made between arms but between men.

The British nation will therefore be considered as the most valuable
ally in the world as long as it can be counted upon to show that
brutality and tenacity in its government, as well as in the spirit of
the broad masses, which enables it to carry through to victory any
struggle that it once enters upon, no matter how long such a struggle
may last, or however great the sacrifice that may be necessary or
whatever the means that have to be employed; and all this even though
the actual military equipment at hand may be utterly inadequate when
compared with that of other nations.

Once it is understood that the restoration of Germany is a question of
reawakening the will to political self-preservation we shall see quite
clearly that it will not be enough to win over those elements that are
already national-minded but that the deliberately anti-national masses
must be converted to believe in the national ideals.

A young movement that aims at re-establishing a German State with full
sovereign powers will therefore have to make the task of winning over
the broad masses a special objective of its plan of campaign. Our
so-called 'national bourgeoisie' are so lamentably supine, generally
speaking, and their national spirit appears so feckless, that we may
feel sure they will offer no serious resistance against a vigorous
national foreign--or domestic policy. Even though the narrow-minded
German bourgeoisie should keep up a passive resistance when the hour of
deliverance is at hand, as they did in Bismarck's time, we shall never
have to fear any active resistance on their part, because of their
recognized proverbial cowardice.

It is quite different with the masses of our population, who are imbued
with ideas of internationalism. Through the primitive roughness of their
natures they are disposed to accept the preaching of violence, while at
the same time their Jewish leaders are more brutal and ruthless. They
will crush any attempt at a German revival, just as they smashed the
German Army by striking at it from the rear. Above all, these organized
masses will use their numerical majority in this Parliamentarian State
not only to hinder any national foreign policy, but also to prevent
Germany from restoring her political power and therewith her prestige
abroad. Thus she becomes excluded from the ranks of desirable allies.
For it is not we ourselves alone who are aware of the handicap that
results from the existence of fifteen million Marxists, democrats,
pacifists and followers of the Centre, in our midst, but foreign nations
also recognize this internal burden which we have to bear and take it
into their calculations when estimating the value of a possible alliance
with us. Nobody would wish to form an alliance with a State where the
active portion of the population is at least passively opposed to any
resolute foreign policy.

The situation is made still worse by reason of the fact that the leaders
of those parties which were responsible for the national betrayal are
ready to oppose any and every attempt at a revival, simply because they
want to retain the positions they now hold. According to the laws that
govern human history it is inconceivable that the German people could
resume the place they formerly held without retaliating on those who
were both cause and occasion of the collapse that involved the ruin of
our State. Before the judgment seat of posterity November 1918 will not
be regarded as a simple rebellion but as high treason against the
country.

Therefore it is not possible to think of re-establishing German
sovereignty and political independence without at the same time
reconstructing a united front within the nation, by a peaceful
conversion of the popular will.

Looked at from the standpoint of practical ways and means, it seems
absurd to think of liberating Germany from foreign bondage as long as
the masses of the people are not willing to support such an ideal of
freedom. After carefully considering this problem from the purely
military point of view, everybody, and in particular every officer, will
agree that a war cannot be waged against an outside enemy by battalions
of students; but that, together with the brains of the nation, the
physical strength of the nation is also necessary. Furthermore it must
be remembered that the nation would be robbed of its irreplaceable
assets by a national defence in which only the intellectual circles, as
they are called, were engaged. The young German intellectuals who joined
the volunteer regiments and fell on the battlefields of Flanders in the
autumn of 1914 were bitterly missed later on. They were the dearest
treasure which the nation possessed and their loss could not be made
good in the course of the war. And it is not only the struggle itself
which could not be waged if the working masses of the nation did not
join the storm battalions, but the necessary technical preparations
could not be made without a unified will and a common front within the
nation itself. Our nation which has to exist disarmed, under the
thousand eyes appointed by the Versailles Peace Treaty, cannot make any
technical preparations for the recovery of its freedom and human
independence until the whole army of spies employed within the country
is cut down to those few whose inborn baseness would lead them to betray
anything and everything for the proverbial thirty pieces of silver. But
we can deal with such people. The millions, however, who are opposed to
every kind of national revival simply because of their political
opinions, constitute an insurmountable obstacle. At least the obstacle
will remain insurmountable as long as the cause of their opposition,
which is international Marxism, is not overcome and its teachings
banished from both their hearts and heads.

From whatever point of view we may examine the possibility of recovering
our independence as a State and a people, whether we consider the
problem from the standpoint of technical rearmament or from that of the
actual struggle itself, the necessary pre-requisite always remains the
same. This pre-requisite is that the broad masses of the people must
first be won over to accept the principle of our national independence.

If we do not regain our external freedom every step forward in domestic
reform will at best be an augmentation of our productive powers for the
benefit of those nations that look upon us as a colony to be exploited.
The surplus produced by any so-called improvement would only go into the
hands of our international controllers and any social betterment would
at best increase the product of our labour in favour of those people. No
cultural progress can be made by the German nation, because such
progress is too much bound up with the political independence and
dignity of a people.

Therefore, as we can find a satisfactory solution for the problem of
Germany's future only by winning over the broad masses of our people for
the support of the national idea, this work of education must be
considered the highest and most important task to be accomplished by a
movement which does not strive merely to satisfy the needs of the moment
but considers itself bound to examine in the light of future results
everything it decides to do or refrain from doing.

As early as 1919 we were convinced that the nationalization of the
masses would have to constitute the first and paramount aim of the new
movement. From the tactical standpoint, this decision laid a certain
number of obligations on our shoulders.

(1) No social sacrifice could be considered too great in this effort to
win over the masses for the national revival.

In the field of national economics, whatever concessions are granted
to-day to the employees are negligible when compared with the benefit to
be reaped by the whole nation if such concessions contribute to bring
back the masses of the people once more to the bosom of their own
nation. Nothing but meanness and shortsightedness, which are
characteristics that unfortunately are only too prevalent among our
employers, could prevent people from recognizing that in the long run no
economic improvement and therefore no rise in profits are possible
unless internal solidarity be restored among the bulk of the people who
make up our nation.

If the German trades unions had defended the interests of the
working-classes uncompromisingly during the War; if even during the War
they had used the weapon of the strike to force the industrialists--who
were greedy for higher dividends--to grant the demands of the workers
for whom the unions acted; if at the same time they had stood up as good
Germans for the defence of the nation as stoutly as for their own
claims, and if they had given to their country what was their country's
due--then the War would never have been lost. How ludicrously
insignificant would all, and even the greatest, economic concession have
been in face of the tremendous importance of such a victory.

For a movement which would restore the German worker to the German
people it is therefore absolutely necessary to understand clearly that
economic sacrifices must be considered light in such cases, provided of
course that they do not go the length of endangering the independence
and stability of the national economic system.

(2) The education of the masses along national lines can be carried out
only indirectly, by improving their social conditions; for only by such
a process can the economic conditions be created which enable everybody
to share in the cultural life of the nation.

(3) The nationalization of the broad masses can never be achieved by
half-measures--that is to say, by feebly insisting on what is called the
objective side of the question--but only by a ruthless and devoted
insistence on the one aim which must be achieved. This means that a
people cannot be made 'national' according to the signification attached
to that word by our bourgeois class to-day--that is to say, nationalism
with many reservations--but national in the vehement and extreme sense.
Poison can be overcome only by a counter-poison, and only the supine
bourgeois mind could think that the Kingdom of Heaven can be attained by
a compromise.

The broad masses of a nation are not made up of professors and
diplomats. Since these masses have only a poor acquaintance with
abstract ideas, their reactions lie more in the domain of the feelings,
where the roots of their positive as well as their negative attitudes
are implanted. They are susceptible only to a manifestation of strength
which comes definitely either from the positive or negative side, but
they are never susceptible to any half-hearted attitude that wavers
between one pole and the other. The emotional grounds of their attitude
furnish the reason for their extraordinary stability. It is always more
difficult to fight successfully against Faith than against knowledge.
Love is less subject to change than respect. Hatred is more lasting than
mere aversion. And the driving force which has brought about the most
tremendous revolutions on this earth has never been a body of scientific
teaching which has gained power over the masses, but always a devotion
which has inspired them, and often a kind of hysteria which has urged
them to action.

Whoever wishes to win over the masses must know the key that will open
the door to their hearts. It is not objectivity, which is a feckless
attitude, but a determined will, backed up by force, when necessary.

(4) The soul of the masses can be won only if those who lead the
movement for that purpose are determined not merely to carry through the
positive struggle for their own aims but are also determined to destroy
the enemy that opposes them.

When they see an uncompromising onslaught against an adversary the
people have at all times taken this as a proof that right is on the side
of the active aggressor; but if the aggressor should go only half-way
and fail to push home his success by driving his opponent entirely from
the scene of action, the people will look upon this as a sign that the
aggressor is uncertain of the justice of his own cause and his half-way
policy may even be an acknowledgment that his cause is unjust.

The masses are but a part of Nature herself. Their feeling is such that
they cannot understand mutual hand-shakings between men who are declared
enemies. Their wish is to see the stronger side win and the weaker wiped
out or subjected unconditionally to the will of the stronger.

The nationalization of the masses can be successfully achieved only if,
in the positive struggle to win the soul of the people, those who spread
the international poison among them are exterminated.

(5) All the great problems of our time are problems of the moment and
are only the results of certain definite causes. And among all those
there is only one that has a profoundly causal significance. This is the
problem of preserving the pure racial stock among the people. Human
vigour or decline depends on the blood. Nations that are not aware of
the importance of their racial stock, or which neglect to preserve it,
are like men who would try to educate the pug-dog to do the work of the
greyhound, not understanding that neither the speed of the greyhound nor
the imitative faculties of the poodle are inborn qualities which cannot
be drilled into the one or the other by any form of training. A people
that fails to preserve the purity of its racial blood thereby destroys
the unity of the soul of the nation in all its manifestations. A
disintegrated national character is the inevitable consequence of a
process of disintegration in the blood. And the change which takes place
in the spiritual and creative faculties of a people is only an effect of
the change that has modified its racial substance.

If we are to free the German people from all those failings and ways of
acting which do not spring from their original character, we must first
get rid of those foreign germs in the national body which are the cause
of its failings and false ways.

The German nation will never revive unless the racial problem is taken
into account and dealt with. The racial problem furnishes the key not
only to the understanding of human history but also to the understanding
of every kind of human culture.

(6) By incorporating in the national community the masses of our people
who are now in the international camp we do not thereby mean to renounce
the principle that the interests of the various trades and professions
must be safeguarded. Divergent interests in the various branches of
labour and in the trades and professions are not the same as a division
between the various classes, but rather a feature inherent in the
economic situation. Vocational grouping does not clash in the least with
the idea of a national community, for this means national unity in
regard to all those problems that affect the life of the nation as such.

To incorporate in the national community, or simply the State, a stratum
of the people which has now formed a social class the standing of the
higher classes must not be lowered but that of the lower classes must be
raised. The class which carries through this process is never the higher
class but rather the lower one which is fighting for equality of rights.
The bourgeoisie of to-day was not incorporated in the State through
measures enacted by the feudal nobility but only through its own energy
and a leadership that had sprung from its own ranks.

The German worker cannot be raised from his present standing and
incorporated in the German folk-community by means of goody-goody
meetings where people talk about the brotherhood of the people, but
rather by a systematic improvement in the social and cultural life of
the worker until the yawning abyss between him and the other classes can
be filled in. A movement which has this for its aim must try to recruit
its followers mainly from the ranks of the working class. It must
include members of the intellectual classes only in so far as such
members have rightly understood and accepted without reserve the ideal
towards which the movement is striving. This process of transformation
and reunion cannot be completed within ten or twenty years. It will take
several generations, as the history of such movements has shown.

The most difficult obstacle to the reunion of our contemporary worker in
the national folk-community does not consist so much in the fact that he
fights for the interests of his fellow-workers, but rather in the
international ideas with which he is imbued and which are of their
nature at variance with the ideas of nationhood and fatherland. This
hostile attitude to nation and fatherland has been inculcated by the
leaders of the working class. If they were inspired by the principle of
devotion to the nation in all that concerns its political and social
welfare, the trades unions would make those millions of workers most
valuable members of the national community, without thereby affecting
their own constant struggle for their economic demands.

A movement which sincerely endeavours to bring the German worker back
into his folk-community, and rescue him from the folly of
internationalism, must wage a vigorous campaign against certain notions
that are prevalent among the industrialists. One of these notions is
that according to the concept of the folk-community, the employee is
obliged to surrender all his economic rights to the employer and,
further, that the workers would come into conflict with the
folk-community if they should attempt to defend their own just and vital
interests. Those who try to propagate such a notion are deliberate
liars. The idea of a folk-community does not impose any obligations on
the one side that are not imposed on the other.

A worker certainly does something which is contrary to the spirit of
folk-community if he acts entirely on his own initiative and puts
forward exaggerated demands without taking the common good into
consideration or the maintenance of the national economic structure. But
an industrialist also acts against the spirit of the folk-community if
he adopts inhuman methods of exploitation and misuses the working forces
of the nation to make millions unjustly for himself from the sweat of
the workers. He has no right to call himself 'national' and no right to
talk of a folk-community, for he is only an unscrupulous egoist who sows
the seeds of social discontent and provokes a spirit of conflict which
sooner or later must be injurious to the interests of the country.

The reservoir from which the young movement has to draw its members will
first of all be the working masses. Those masses must be delivered from
the clutches of the international mania. Their social distress must be
eliminated. They must be raised above their present cultural level,
which is deplorable, and transformed into a resolute and valuable factor
in the folk-community, inspired by national ideas and national
sentiment.

If among those intellectual circles that are nationalist in their
outlook men can be found who genuinely love the people and look forward
eagerly to the future of Germany, and at the same time have a sound
grasp of the importance of a struggle whose aim is to win over the soul
of the masses, such men are cordially welcomed in the ranks of our
movement, because they can serve as a valuable intellectual force in the
work that has to be done. But this movement can never aim at recruiting
its membership from the unthinking herd of bourgeois voters. If it did
so the movement would be burdened with a mass of people whose whole
mentality would only help to paralyse the effort of our campaign to win
the mass of the people. In theory it may be very fine to say that the
broad masses ought to be influenced by a combined leadership of the
upper and lower social strata within the framework of the one movement;
but, notwithstanding all this, the fact remains that though it may be
possible to exercise a psychological influence on the bourgeois classes
and to arouse some enthusiasm or even awaken some understanding among
them by our public demonstrations, their traditional characteristics
cannot be changed. In other words, we could not eliminate from the
bourgeois classes the inefficiency and supineness which are part of a
tradition that has developed through centuries. The difference between
the cultural levels of the two groups and between their respective
attitudes towards social-economic questions is still so great that it
would turn out a hindrance to the movement the moment the first
enthusiasm aroused by our demonstrations calmed down.

Finally, it is not part of our programme to transform the nationalist
camp itself, but rather to win over those who are anti-national in their
outlook. It is from this viewpoint that the strategy of the whole
movement must finally be decided.

(7) This one-sided but accordingly clear and definite attitude must be
manifested in the propaganda of the movement; and, on the other hand,
this is absolutely necessary to make the propaganda itself effective.

If propaganda is to be of service to the movement it must be addressed
to one side alone; for if it should vary the direction of its appeal it
will not be understood in the one camp or may be rejected by the other,
as merely insisting on obvious and uninteresting truisms; for the
intellectual training of the two camps that come into question here has
been very different.

Even the manner in which something is presented and the tone in which
particular details are emphasized cannot have the same effect in those
two strata that belong respectively to the opposite extremes of the
social structure. If the propaganda should refrain from using primitive
forms of expression it will not appeal to the sentiments of the masses.
If, on the other hand, it conforms to the crude sentiments of the masses
in its words and gestures the intellectual circles will be averse to it
because of its roughness and vulgarity. Among a hundred men who call
themselves orators there are scarcely ten who are capable of speaking
with effect before an audience of street-sweepers, locksmiths and
navvies, etc., to-day and expound the same subject with equal effect
to-morrow before an audience of university professors and students.
Among a thousand public speakers there may be only one who can speak
before a composite audience of locksmiths and professors in the same
hall in such a way that his statements can be fully comprehended by each
group while at the same time he effectively influences both and awakens
enthusiasm, on the one side as well as on the other, to hearty applause.
But it must be remembered that in most cases even the most beautiful
idea embodied in a sublime theory can be brought home to the public only
through the medium of smaller minds. The thing that matters here is not
the vision of the man of genius who created the great idea but rather
the success which his apostles achieve in shaping the expression of this
idea so as to bring it home to the minds of the masses.

Social-Democracy and the whole Marxist movement were particularly
qualified to attract the great masses of the nation, because of the
uniformity of the public to which they addressed their appeal. The more
limited and narrow their ideas and arguments, the easier it was for the
masses to grasp and assimilate them; for those ideas and arguments were
well adapted to a low level of intelligence.

These considerations led the new movement to adopt a clear and simple
line of policy, which was as follows:

In its message as well as in its forms of expression the propaganda must
be kept on a level with the intelligence of the masses, and its value
must be measured only by the actual success it achieves.

At a public meeting where the great masses are gathered together the
best speaker is not he whose way of approaching a subject is most akin
to the spirit of those intellectuals who may happen to be present, but
the speaker who knows how to win the hearts of the masses.

An educated man who is present and who finds fault with an address
because he considers it to be on an intellectual plane that is too low,
though he himself has witnessed its effect on the lower intellectual
groups whose adherence has to be won, only shows himself completely
incapable of rightly judging the situation and therewith proves that he
can be of no use in the new movement. Only intellectuals can be of use
to a movement who understand its mission and its aims so well that they
have learned to judge our methods of propaganda exclusively by the
success obtained and never by the impression which those methods made on
the intellectuals themselves. For our propaganda is not meant to serve
as an entertainment for those people who already have a nationalist
outlook, but its purpose is to win the adhesion of those who have
hitherto been hostile to national ideas and who are nevertheless of our
own blood and race.

In general, those considerations of which I have given a brief summary
in the chapter on 'War Propaganda' became the guiding rules and
principles which determined the kind of propaganda we were to adopt in
our campaign and the manner in which we were to put it into practice.
The success that has been obtained proves that our decision was right.

(8) The ends which any political reform movement sets out to attain can
never be reached by trying to educate the public or influence those in
power but only by getting political power into its hands. Every idea
that is meant to move the world has not only the right but also the
obligation of securing control of those means which will enable the idea
to be carried into effect. In this world success is the only rule of
judgment whereby we can decide whether such an undertaking was right or
wrong. And by the word 'success' in this connection I do not mean such a
success as the mere conquest of power in 1918 but the successful issue
whereby the common interests of the nation have been served. A COUP
D'ETAT cannot be considered successful if, as many empty-headed
government lawyers in Germany now believe, the revolutionaries succeeded
in getting control of the State into their hands but only if, in
comparison with the state of affairs under the old regime, the lot of
the nation has been improved when the aims and intentions on which the
revolution was based have been put into practice. This certainly does
not apply to the German Revolution, as that movement was called, which
brought a gang of bandits into power in the autumn of 1918.

But if the conquest of political power be a requisite preliminary for
the practical realization of the ideals that inspire a reform movement,
then any movement which aims at reform must, from the very first day of
its activity, be considered by its leaders as a movement of the masses
and not as a literary tea club or an association of philistines who meet
to play ninepins.

(9) The nature and internal organization of the new movement make it
anti-parliamentarian. That is to say, it rejects in general and in its
own structure all those principles according to which decisions are to
be taken on the vote of the majority and according to which the leader
is only the executor of the will and opinion of others. The movement
lays down the principle that, in the smallest as well as in the greatest
problems, one person must have absolute authority and bear all
responsibility.

In our movement the practical consequences of this principle are the
following:

The president of a large group is appointed by the head of the group
immediately above his in authority. He is then the responsible leader of
his group. All the committees are subject to his authority and not he to
theirs. There is no such thing as committees that vote but only
committees that work. This work is allotted by the responsible leader,
who is the president of the group. The same principle applies to the
higher organizations--the Bezirk (district), the KREIS (urban circuit)
and the GAU (the region). In each case the president is appointed from
above and is invested with full authority and executive power. Only the
leader of the whole party is elected at the general meeting of the
members. But he is the sole leader of the movement. All the committees
are responsible to him, but he is not responsible to the committees. His
decision is final, but he bears the whole responsibility of it. The
members of the movement are entitled to call him to account by means of
a new election, or to remove him from office if he has violated the
principles of the movement or has not served its interests adequately.
He is then replaced by a more capable man. who is invested with the same
authority and obliged to bear the same responsibility.

One of the highest duties of the movement is to make this principle
imperative not only within its own ranks but also for the whole State.

The man who becomes leader is invested with the highest and unlimited
authority, but he also has to bear the last and gravest responsibility.

The man who has not the courage to shoulder responsibility for his
actions is not fitted to be a leader. Only a man of heroic mould can
have the vocation for such a task.

Human progress and human cultures are not founded by the multitude. They
are exclusively the work of personal genius and personal efficiency.

Because of this principle, our movement must necessarily be
anti-parliamentarian, and if it takes part in the parliamentary
institution it is only for the purpose of destroying this institution
from within; in other words, we wish to do away with an institution
which we must look upon as one of the gravest symptoms of human decline.

(10) The movement steadfastly refuses to take up any stand in regard to
those problems which are either outside of its sphere of political work
or seem to have no fundamental importance for us. It does not aim at
bringing about a religious reformation, but rather a political
reorganization of our people. It looks upon the two religious
denominations as equally valuable mainstays for the existence of our
people, and therefore it makes war on all those parties which would
degrade this foundation, on which the religious and moral stability of
our people is based, to an instrument in the service of party interests.

Finally, the movement does not aim at establishing any one form of State
or trying to destroy another, but rather to make those fundamental
principles prevail without which no republic and no monarchy can exist
for any length of time. The movement does not consider its mission to be
the establishment of a monarchy or the preservation of the Republic but
rather to create a German State.

The problem concerning the outer form of this State, that is to say, its
final shape, is not of fundamental importance. It is a problem which
must be solved in the light of what seems practical and opportune at the
moment.

Once a nation has understood and appreciated the great problems that
affect its inner existence, the question of outer formalities will never
lead to any internal conflict.

(11) The problem of the inner organization of the movement is not one of
principle but of expediency.

The best kind of organization is not that which places a large
intermediary apparatus between the leadership of the movement and the
individual followers but rather that which works successfully with the
smallest possible intermediary apparatus. For it is the task of such an
organization to transmit a certain idea which originated in the brain of
one individual to a multitude of people and to supervise the manner in
which this idea is being put into practice.

Therefore, from any and every viewpoint, the organization is only a
necessary evil. At best it is only a means of reaching certain ends. The
worst happens when it becomes an end in itself.

Since the world produces more mechanical than intelligent beings, it
will always be easier to develop the form of an organization than its
substance; that is to say, the ideas which it is meant to serve.

The march of any idea which strives towards practical fulfilment, and in
particular those ideas which are of a reformatory character, may be
roughly sketched as follows:

A creative idea takes shape in the mind of somebody who thereupon feels
himself called upon to transmit this idea to the world. He propounds his
faith before others and thereby gradually wins a certain number of
followers. This direct and personal way of promulgating one's ideas
among one's contemporaries is the most natural and the most ideal. But
as the movement develops and secures a large number of followers it
gradually becomes impossible for the original founder of the doctrine on
which the movement is based to carry on his propaganda personally among
his innumerable followers and at the same time guide the course of the
movement.

According as the community of followers increases, direct communication
between the head and the individual followers becomes impossible. This
intercourse must then take place through an intermediary apparatus
introduced into the framework of the movement. Thus ideal conditions of
inter-communication cease, and organization has to be introduced as a
necessary evil. Small subsidiary groups come into existence, as in the
political movement, for example, where the local groups represent the
germ-cells out of which the organization develops later on.

But such sub-divisions must not be introduced into the movement until
the authority of the spiritual founder and of the school he has created
are accepted without reservation. Otherwise the movement would run the
risk of becoming split up by divergent doctrines. In this connection too
much emphasis cannot be laid on the importance of having one geographic
centre as the chief seat of the movement. Only the existence of such a
seat or centre, around which a magic charm such as that of Mecca or Rome
is woven, can supply a movement with that permanent driving force which
has its sources in the internal unity of the movement and the
recognition of one head as representing this unity.

When the first germinal cells of the organization are being formed care
must always be taken to insist on the importance of the place where the
idea originated. The creative, moral and practical greatness of the
place whence the movement went forth and from which it is governed must
be exalted to a supreme symbol, and this must be honoured all the more
according as the original cells of the movement become so numerous that
they have to be regrouped into larger units in the structure of the
organization.

When the number of individual followers became so large that direct
personal contact with the head of the movement was out of the question,
then we had to form those first local groups. As those groups multiplied
to an extraordinary number it was necessary to establish higher cadres
into which the local groups were distributed. Examples of such cadres in
the political organization are those of the region (GAU) and the
district (BEZIRK).

Though it may be easy enough to maintain the original central authority
over the lowest groups, it is much more difficult to do so in relation
to the higher units of organization which have now developed. And yet we
must succeed in doing this, for this is an indispensable condition if
the unity of the movement is to be guaranteed and the idea of it carried
into effect.

Finally, when those larger intermediary organizations have to be
combined in new and still higher units it becomes increasingly difficult
to maintain over them the absolute supremacy of the original seat of the
movement and the school attached to it.

Consequently the mechanical forms of an organization must only be
introduced if and in so far as the spiritual authority and the ideals of
the central seat of the organization are shown to be firmly established.
In the political sphere it may often happen that this supremacy can be
maintained only when the movement has taken over supreme political
control of the nation.

Having taken all these considerations into account, the following
principles were laid down for the inner structure of the movement:

(a) That at the beginning all activity should be concentrated in one
town: namely, Munich. That a band of absolutely reliable followers
should be trained and a school founded which would subsequently help to
propagate the idea of the movement. That the prestige of the movement,
for the sake of its subsequent extension, should first be established
here through gaining as many successful and visible results as possible
in this one place. To secure name and fame for the movement and its
leader it was necessary, not only to give in this one town a striking
example to shatter the belief that the Marxist doctrine was invincible
but also to show that a counter-doctrine was possible.

(b) That local groups should not be established before the supremacy of
the central authority in Munich was definitely established and
acknowledged.

(c) That District, Regional, and Provincial groups should be formed only
after the need for them has become evident and only after the supremacy
of the central authority has been satisfactorily guaranteed.

Further, that the creation of subordinate organisms must depend on
whether or not those persons can be found who are qualified to undertake
the leadership of them.

Here there were only two solutions:

(a) That the movement should acquire the necessary funds to attract and
train intelligent people who would be capable of becoming leaders. The
personnel thus obtained could then be systematically employed according
as the tactical situation and the necessity for efficiency demanded.

This solution was the easier and the more expedite. But it demanded
large financial resources; for this group of leaders could work in the
movement only if they could be paid a salary.

(b) Because the movement is not in a position to employ paid officials
it must begin by depending on honorary helpers. Naturally this solution
is slower and more difficult.

It means that the leaders of the movement have to allow vast territories
to lie fallow unless in these respective districts one of the members
comes forward who is capable and willing to place himself at the service
of the central authority for the purpose of organizing and directing the
movement in the region concerned.

It may happen that in extensive regions no such leader can be found, but
that at the same time in other regions two or three or even more persons
appear whose capabilities are almost on a level. The difficulty which
this situation involves is very great and can be overcome only with the
passing of the years.

For the establishment of any branch of the organization the decisive
condition must always be that a person can be found who is capable of
fulfilling the functions of a leader.

Just as the army and all its various units of organization are useless
if there are no officers, so any political organization is worthless if
it has not the right kind of leaders.

If an inspiring personality who has the gift of leadership cannot be
found for the organization and direction of a local group it is better
for the movement to refrain from establishing such a group than to run
the risk of failure after the group has been founded.

The will to be a leader is not a sufficient qualification for
leadership. For the leader must have the other necessary qualities.
Among these qualities will-power and energy must be considered as more
serviceable than the intellect of a genius. The most valuable
association of qualities is to be found in a combination of talent,
determination and perseverance.

(12) The future of a movement is determined by the devotion, and even
intolerance, with which its members fight for their cause. They must
feel convinced that their cause alone is just, and they must carry it
through to success, as against other similar organizations in the same
field.

It is quite erroneous to believe that the strength of a movement must
increase if it be combined with other movements of a similar kind. Any
expansion resulting from such a combination will of course mean an
increase in external development, which superficial observers might
consider as also an increase of power; but in reality the movement thus
admits outside elements which will subsequently weaken its
constitutional vigour.

Though it may be said that one movement is identical in character with
another, in reality no such identity exists. If it did exist then
practically there would not be two movements but only one. And whatever
the difference may be, even if it consist only of the measure in which
the capabilities of the one set of leaders differ from those of the
other, there it is. It is against the natural law of all development to
couple dissimilar organisms, or the law is that the stronger must
overcome the weaker and, through the struggle necessary for such a
conquest, increase the constitutional vigour and effective strength of
the victor.

By amalgamating political organizations that are approximately alike,
certain immediate advantages may be gained, but advantages thus gained
are bound in the long run to become the cause of internal weaknesses
which will make their appearance later on.

A movement can become great only if the unhampered development of its
internal strength be safeguarded and steadfastly augmented, until
victory over all its competitors be secured.

One may safely say that the strength of a movement and its right to
existence can be developed only as long as it remains true to the
principle that struggle is a necessary condition of its progress and
that its maximum strength will be reached only as soon as complete
victory has been won.

Therefore a movement must not strive to obtain successes that will be
only immediate and transitory, but it must show a spirit of
uncompromising perseverance in carrying through a long struggle which
will secure for it a long period of inner growth.

All those movements which owe their expansion to a so-called combination
of similar organisms, which means that their external strength is due to
a policy of compromise, are like plants whose growth is forced in a
hothouse. They shoot up externally but they lack that inner strength
which enables the natural plant to grow into a tree that will withstand
the storms of centuries.

The greatness of every powerful organization which embodies a creative
idea lies in the spirit of religious devotion and intolerance with which
it stands out against all others, because it has an ardent faith in its
own right. If an idea is right in itself and, furnished with the
fighting weapons I have mentioned, wages war on this earth, then it is
invincible and persecution will only add to its internal strength.

The greatness of Christianity did not arise from attempts to make
compromises with those philosophical opinions of the ancient world which
had some resemblance to its own doctrine, but in the unrelenting and
fanatical proclamation and defence of its own teaching.

The apparent advance that a movement makes by associating itself with
other movements will be easily reached and surpassed by the steady
increase of strength which a doctrine and its organization acquires if
it remains independent and fights its own cause alone.

(13) The movement ought to educate its adherents to the principle that
struggle must not be considered a necessary evil but as something to be
desired in itself. Therefore they must not be afraid of the hostility
which their adversaries manifest towards them but they must take it as a
necessary condition on which their whole right to existence is based.
They must not try to avoid being hated by those who are the enemies of
our people and our philosophy of life, but must welcome such hatred.
Lies and calumnies are part of the method which the enemy employs to
express his chagrin.

The man who is not opposed and vilified and slandered in the Jewish
Press is not a staunch German and not a true National Socialist. The
best rule whereby the sincerity of his convictions, his character and
strength of will, can be measured is the hostility which his name
arouses among the mortal enemies of our people.

The followers of the movement, and indeed the whole nation, must be
reminded again and again of the fact that, through the medium of his
newspapers, the Jew is always spreading falsehood and that if he tells
the truth on some occasions it is only for the purpose of masking some
greater deceit, which turns the apparent truth into a deliberate
falsehood. The Jew is the Great Master of Lies. Falsehood and duplicity
are the weapons with which he fights.

Every calumny and falsehood published by the Jews are tokens of honour
which can be worn by our comrades. He whom they decry most is nearest to
our hearts and he whom they mortally hate is our best friend.

If a comrade of ours opens a Jewish newspaper in the morning and does
not find himself vilified there, then he has spent yesterday to no
account. For if he had achieved something he would be persecuted,
slandered, derided and abused. Those who effectively combat this mortal
enemy of our people, who is at the same time the enemy of all Aryan
peoples and all culture, can only expect to arouse opposition on the
part of this race and become the object of its slanderous attacks.

When these truths become part of the flesh and blood, as it were, of our
members, then the movement will be impregnable and invincible.

(14) The movement must use all possible means to cultivate respect for
the individual personality. It must never forget that all human values
are based on personal values, and that every idea and achievement is the
fruit of the creative power of one man. We must never forget that
admiration for everything that is great is not only a tribute to one
creative personality but that all those who feel such admiration become
thereby united under one covenant.

Nothing can take the place of the individual, especially if the
individual embodies in himself not the mechanical element but the
element of cultural creativeness. No pupil can take the place of the
master in completing a great picture which he has left unfinished; and
just in the same way no substitute can take the place of the great poet
or thinker, or the great statesman or military general. For the source
of their power is in the realm of artistic creativeness. It can never be
mechanically acquired, because it is an innate product of divine grace.

The greatest revolutions and the greatest achievements of this world,
its greatest cultural works and the immortal creations of great
statesmen, are inseparably bound up with one name which stands as a
symbol for them in each respective case. The failure to pay tribute to
one of those great spirits signifies a neglect of that enormous source
of power which lies in the remembrance of all great men and women.

The Jew himself knows this best. He, whose great men have always been
great only in their efforts to destroy mankind and its civilization,
takes good care that they are worshipped as idols. But the Jew tries to
degrade the honour in which nations hold their great men and women. He
stigmatizes this honour as 'the cult of personality'.

As soon as a nation has so far lost its courage as to submit to this
impudent defamation on the part of the Jews it renounces the most
important source of its own inner strength. This inner force cannot
arise from a policy of pandering to the masses but only from the worship
of men of genius, whose lives have uplifted and ennobled the nation
itself.

When men's hearts are breaking and their souls are plunged into the
depths of despair, their great forebears turn their eyes towards them
from the dim shadows of the past--those forebears who knew how to
triumph over anxiety and affliction, mental servitude and physical
bondage--and extend their eternal hands in a gesture of encouragement to
despairing souls. Woe to the nation that is ashamed to clasp those
hands.

During the initial phase of our movement our greatest handicap was the
fact that none of us were known and our names meant nothing, a fact
which then seemed to some of us to make the chances of final success
problematical. Our most difficult task then was to make our members
firmly believe that there was a tremendous future in store for the
movement and to maintain this belief as a living faith; for at that time
only six, seven or eight persons came to hear one of our speakers.

Consider that only six or seven poor devils who were entirely unknown
came together to found a movement which should succeed in doing what the
great mass-parties had failed to do: namely, to reconstruct the German
REICH, even in greater power and glory than before. We should have been
very pleased if we were attacked or even ridiculed. But the most
depressing fact was that nobody paid any attention to us whatever. This
utter lack of interest in us caused me great mental pain at that time.

When I entered the circle of those men there was not yet any question of
a party or a movement. I have already described the impression which was
made on me when I first came into contact with that small organization.
Subsequently I had time, and also the occasion, to study the form of
this so-called party which at first had made such a woeful impression.
The picture was indeed quite depressing and discouraging. There was
nothing, absolutely nothing at all. There was only the name of a party.
And the committee consisted of all the party members. Somehow or other
it seemed just the kind of thing we were about to fight against--a
miniature parliament. The voting system was employed. When the great
parliament cried until they were hoarse--at least they shouted over
problems of importance--here this small circle engaged in interminable
discussions as to the form in which they might answer the letters which
they were delighted to have received.

Needless to say, the public knew nothing of all this. In Munich nobody
knew of the existence of such a party, not even by name, except our few
members and their small circle of acquaintances.

Every Wednesday what was called a committee meeting was held in one of
the cafés, and a debate was arranged for one evening each week. In the
beginning all the members of the movement were also members of the
committee, therefore the same persons always turned up at both meetings.
The first step that had to be taken was to extend the narrow limits of
this small circle and get new members, but the principal necessity was
to utilize all the means at our command for the purpose of making the
movement known.

We chose the following methods: We decided to hold a monthly meeting to
which the public would be invited. Some of the invitations were
typewritten, and some were written by hand. For the first few meetings
we distributed them in the streets and delivered them personally at
certain houses. Each one canvassed among his own acquaintances and tried
to persuade some of them to attend our meetings. The result was
lamentable.

I still remember once how I personally delivered eighty of these
invitations and how we waited in the evening for the crowds to come.
After waiting in vain for a whole hour the chairman finally had to open
the meeting. Again there were only seven people present, the old
familiar seven.

We then changed our methods. We had the invitations written with a
typewriter in a Munich stationer's shop and then multigraphed them.

The result was that a few more people attended our next meeting. The
number increased gradually from eleven to thirteen to seventeen, to
twenty-three and finally to thirty-four. We collected some money within
our own circle, each poor devil giving a small contribution, and in that
way we raised sufficient funds to be able to advertise one of our
meetings in the MUNICH OBSERVER, which was still an independent paper.

This time we had an astonishing success. We had chosen the Munich
HOFBRÄU HAUS KELLER (which must not be confounded with the Munich
HOFBRÄU HAUS FESTSAAL) as our meeting-place. It was a small hall and
would accommodate scarcely more than 130 people. To me, however, the
hall seemed enormous, and we were all trembling lest this tremendous
edifice would remain partly empty on the night of the meeting.

At seven o'clock 111 persons were present, and the meeting was opened. A
Munich professor delivered the principal address, and I spoke after him.
That was my first appearance in the role of public orator. The whole
thing seemed a very daring adventure to Herr Harrer, who was then
chairman of the party. He was a very decent fellow; but he had an
A PRIORI conviction that, although I might have quite a number of good
qualities, I certainly did not have a talent for public speaking. Even
later he could not be persuaded to change his opinion. But he was
mistaken. Twenty minutes had been allotted to me for my speech on this
occasion, which might be looked upon as our first public meeting.

I talked for thirty minutes, and what I always had felt deep down in my
heart, without being able to put it to the test, was here proved to be
true: I could make a good speech. At the end of the thirty minutes it
was quite clear that all the people in the little hall had been
profoundly impressed. The enthusiasm aroused among them found its first
expression in the fact that my appeal to those present brought us
donations which amounted to three hundred marks. That was a great relief
for us. Our finances were at that time so meagre that we could not
afford to have our party prospectus printed, or even leaflets. Now we
possessed at least the nucleus of a fund from which we could pay the
most urgent and necessary expenses.

But the success of this first larger meeting was also important from
another point of view. I had already begun to introduce some young and
fresh members into the committee. During the long period of my military
service I had come to know a large number of good comrades whom I was
now able to persuade to join our party. All of them were energetic and
disciplined young men who, through their years of military service, had
been imbued with the principle that nothing is impossible and that where
there's a will there's a way.

The need for this fresh blood supply became evident to me after a few
weeks of collaboration with the new members. Herr Harrer, who was then
chairman of the party, was a journalist by profession, and as such he
was a man of general knowledge. But as leader of the party he had one
very serious handicap: he could not speak to the crowd. Though he did
his work conscientiously, it lacked the necessary driving force,
probably for the reason that he had no oratorical gifts whatsoever. Herr
Drexler, at that time chairman of the Munich local group, was a simple
working man. He, too, was not of any great importance as a speaker.
Moreover, he was not a soldier. He had never done military service, even
during the War. So that this man who was feeble and diffident by nature
had missed the only school which knows how to transform diffident and
weakly natures into real men. Therefore neither of those two men were of
the stuff that would have enabled them to stir up an ardent and
indomitable faith in the ultimate triumph of the movement and to brush
aside, with obstinate force and if necessary with brutal ruthlessness,
all obstacles that stood in the path of the new idea. Such a task could
be carried out only by men who had been trained, body and soul, in those
military virtues which make a man, so to speak, agile as a greyhound,
tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel.

At that time I was still a soldier. Physically and mentally I had the
polish of six years of service, so that in the beginning this circle
must have looked on me as quite a stranger. In common with my army
comrades, I had forgotten such phrases as: "That will not go", or "That
is not possible", or "We ought not to take such a risk; it is too
dangerous".

The whole undertaking was of its very nature dangerous. At that time
there were many parts of Germany where it would have been absolutely
impossible openly to invite people to a national meeting that dared to
make a direct appeal to the masses. Those who attended such meetings
were usually dispersed and driven away with broken heads. It certainly
did not call for any great qualities to be able to do things in that
way. The largest so-called bourgeois mass meetings were accustomed to
dissolve, and those in attendance would run away like rabbits when
frightened by a dog as soon as a dozen communists appeared on the scene.
The Reds used to pay little attention to those bourgeois organizations
where only babblers talked. They recognized the inner triviality of such
associations much better than the members themselves and therefore felt
that they need not be afraid of them. On the contrary, however, they
were all the more determined to use every possible means of annihilating
once and for all any movement that appeared to them to be a danger to
their own interests. The most effective means which they always employed
in such cases were terror and brute force.

The Marxist leaders, whose business consisted in deceiving and
misleading the public, naturally hated most of all a movement whose
declared aim was to win over those masses which hitherto had been
exclusively at the service of international Marxism in the Jewish and
Stock Exchange parties. The title alone, 'German Labour party',
irritated them. It could easily be foreseen that at the first opportune
moment we should have to face the opposition of the Marxist despots, who
were still intoxicated with their triumph in 1918.

People in the small circles of our own movement at that time showed a
certain amount of anxiety at the prospect of such a conflict. They
wanted to refrain as much as possible from coming out into the open,
because they feared that they might be attacked and beaten. In their
minds they saw our first public meetings broken up and feared that the
movement might thus be ruined for ever. I found it difficult to defend
my own position, which was that the conflict should not be evaded but
that it should be faced openly and that we should be armed with those
weapons which are the only protection against brute force. Terror cannot
be overcome by the weapons of the mind but only by counter-terror. The
success of our first public meeting strengthened my own position. The
members felt encouraged to arrange for a second meeting, even on a
larger scale.

Some time in October 1919 the second larger meeting took place in the
EBERLBRÄU KELLER. The theme of our speeches was 'Brest-Litowsk and
Versailles'. There were four speakers. I talked for almost an hour, and
the success was even more striking than at our first meeting. The number
of people who attended had grown to more than 130. An attempt to disturb
the proceedings was immediately frustrated by my comrades. The would-be
disturbers were thrown down the stairs, bearing imprints of violence on
their heads.

A fortnight later another meeting took place in the same hall. The
number in attendance had now increased to more than 170, which meant
that the room was fairly well filled. I spoke again, and once more the
success obtained was greater than at the previous meeting.

Then I proposed that a larger hall should be found. After looking around
for some time we discovered one at the other end of the town, in the
'Deutschen REICH' in the Dachauer Strasse. The first meeting at this new
rendezvous had a smaller attendance than the previous meeting. There
were just less than 140 present. The members of the committee began to
be discouraged, and those who had always been sceptical were now
convinced that this falling-off in the attendance was due to the fact
that we were holding the meetings at too short intervals. There were
lively discussions, in which I upheld my own opinion that a city with
700,000 inhabitants ought to be able not only to stand one meeting every
fortnight but ten meetings every week. I held that we should not be
discouraged by one comparative setback, that the tactics we had chosen
were correct, and that sooner or later success would be ours if we only
continued with determined perseverance to push forward on our road. This
whole winter of 1919-20 was one continual struggle to strengthen
confidence in our ability to carry the movement through to success and
to intensify this confidence until it became a burning faith that could
move mountains.

Our next meeting in the small hall proved the truth of my contention.
Our audience had increased to more than 200. The publicity effect and
the financial success were splendid. I immediately urged that a further
meeting should be held. It took place in less than a fortnight, and
there were more than 270 people present. Two weeks later we invited our
followers and their friends, for the seventh time, to attend our
meeting. The same hall was scarcely large enough for the number that
came. They amounted to more than four hundred.

During this phase the young movement developed its inner form. Sometimes
we had more or less hefty discussions within our small circle. From
various sides--it was then just the same as it is to-day--objections
were made against the idea of calling the young movement a party. I have
always considered such criticism as a demonstration of practical
incapability and narrow-mindedness on the part of the critic. Those
objections have always been raised by men who could not differentiate
between external appearances and inner strength, but tried to judge the
movement by the high-sounding character of the name attached to it. To
this end they ransacked the vocabulary of our ancestors, with
unfortunate results.

At that time it was very difficult to make the people understand that
every movement is a party as long as it has not brought its ideals to
final triumph and thus achieved its purpose. It is a party even if it
give itself a thousand difterent names.

Any person who tries to carry into practice an original idea whose
realization would be for the benefit of his fellow men will first have
to look for disciples who are ready to fight for the ends he has in
view. And if these ends did not go beyond the destruction of the party
system and therewith put a stop to the process of disintegration, then
all those who come forward as protagonists and apostles of such an ideal
are a party in themselves as long as their final goal is reached. It is
only hair-splitting and playing with words when these antiquated
theorists, whose practical success is in reverse ratio to their wisdom,
presume to think they can change the character of a movement which is at
the same time a party, by merely changing its name.

On the contrary, it is entirely out of harmony with the spirit of the
nation to keep harping on that far-off and forgotten nomenclature which
belongs to the ancient Germanic times and does not awaken any distinct
association in our age. This habit of borrowing words from the dead past
tends to mislead the people into thinking that the external trappings of
its vocabulary are the important feature of a movement. It is really a
mischievous habit; but it is quite prevalent nowadays.

At that time, and subsequently, I had to warn followers repeatedly
against these wandering scholars who were peddling Germanic folk-lore
and who never accomplished anything positive or practical, except to
cultivate their own superabundant self-conceit. The new movement must
guard itself against an influx of people whose only recommendation is
their own statement that they have been fighting for these very same
ideals during the last thirty or forty years.

Now if somebody has fought for forty years to carry into effect what he
calls an idea, and if these alleged efforts not only show no positive
results but have not even been able to hinder the success of the
opposing party, then the story of those forty years of futile effort
furnishes sufficient proof for the incompetence of such a protagonist.
People of that kind are specially dangerous because they do not want to
participate in the movement as ordinary members. They talk rather of the
leading positions which would be the only fitting posts for them, in
view of their past work and also so that they might be enabled to carry
on that work further. But woe to a young movement if the conduct of it
should fall into the hands of such people. A business man who has been
in charge of a great firm for forty years and who has completely ruined
it through his mismanagement is not the kind of person one would
recommend for the founding of a new firm. And it is just the same with a
new national movement. Nobody of common sense would appoint to a leading
post in such a movement some Teutonic Methuselah who had been
ineffectively preaching some idea for a period of forty years, until
himself and his idea had entered the stage of senile decay.

Furthermore, only a very small percentage of such people join a new
movement with the intention of serving its end unselfishly and helping
in the spread of its principles. In most cases they come because they
think that, under the aegis of the new movement, it will be possible for
them to promulgate their old ideas to the misfortune of their new
listeners. Anyhow, nobody ever seems able to describe what exactly these
ideas are.

It is typical of such persons that they rant about ancient Teutonic
heroes of the dim and distant ages, stone axes, battle spears and
shields, whereas in reality they themselves are the woefullest poltroons
imaginable. For those very same people who brandish Teutonic tin swords
that have been fashioned carefully according to ancient models and wear
padded bear-skins, with the horns of oxen mounted over their bearded
faces, proclaim that all contemporary conflicts must be decided by the
weapons of the mind alone. And thus they skedaddle when the first
communist cudgel appears. Posterity will have little occasion to write a
new epic on these heroic gladiators.

I have seen too much of that kind of people not to feel a profound
contempt for their miserable play-acting. To the masses of the nation
they are just an object of ridicule; but the Jew finds it to his own
interest to treat these folk-lore comedians with respect and to prefer
them to real men who are fighting to establish a German State. And yet
these comedians are extremely proud of themselves. Notwithstanding their
complete fecklessness, which is an established fact, they pretend to
know everything better than other people; so much so that they make
themselves a veritable nuisance to all sincere and honest patriots, to
whom not only the heroism of the past is worthy of honour but who also
feel bound to leave examples of their own work for the inspiration of
the coming generation.

Among those people there were some whose conduct can be explained by
their innate stupidity and incompetence; but there are others who have a
definite ulterior purpose in view. Often it is difficult to distinguish
between the two classes. The impression which I often get, especially of
those so-called religious reformers whose creed is grounded on ancient
Germanic customs, is that they are the missionaries and protégés of
those forces which do not wish to see a national revival taking place in
Germany. All their activities tend to turn the attention of the people
away from the necessity of fighting together in a common cause against
the common enemy, namely the Jew. Moreover, that kind of preaching
induces the people to use up their energies, not in fighting for the
common cause, but in absurd and ruinous religious controversies within
their own ranks. There are definite grounds that make it absolutely
necessary for the movement to be dominated by a strong central force
which is embodied in the authoritative leadership. In this way alone is
it possible to counteract the activity of such fatal elements. And that
is just the reason why these folk-lore Ahasueruses are vigorously
hostile to any movement whose members are firmly united under one leader
and one discipline. Those people of whom I have spoken hate such a
movement because it is capable of putting a stop to their mischief.

It was not without good reason that when we laid down a clearly defined
programme for the new movement we excluded the word VÖLKISCH from it.
The concept underlying the term VÖLKISCH cannot serve as the basis of a
movement, because it is too indefinite and general in its application.
Therefore, if somebody called himself VÖLKISCH such a designation could
not be taken as the hall-mark of some definite, party affiliation.

Because this concept is so indefinite from the practical viewpoint, it
gives rise to various interpretations and thus people can appeal to it
all the more easily as a sort of personal recommendation. Whenever such
a vague concept, which is subject to so many interpretations, is
admitted into a political movement it tends to break up the disciplined
solidarity of the fighting forces. No such solidarity can be maintained
if each individual member be allowed to define for himself what he
believes and what he is willing to do.

One feels it a disgrace when one notices the kind of people who float
about nowadays with the VÖLKISCH symbol stuck in their buttonholes, and
at the same time to notice how many people have various ideas of their
own as to the significance of that symbol. A well-known professor in
Bavaria, a famous combatant who fights only with the weapons of the mind
and who boasts of having marched against Berlin--by shouldering the
weapons of the mind, of course--believes that the word VÖLKISCH is
synonymous with 'monarchical'. But this learned authority has hitherto
neglected to explain how our German monarchs of the past can be
identified with what we generally mean by the word VÖLKISCH to-day. I am
afraid he will find himself at a loss if he is asked to give a precise
answer. For it would be very difficult indeed to imagine anything less
VÖLKISCH than most of those German monarchical States were. Had they
been otherwise they would not have disappeared; or if they were
VÖLKISCH, then the fact of their downfall may be taken as evidence that
the VÖLKISCH outlook on the world (WELTANSCHAUUNG) is a false outlook.

Everybody interprets this concept in his own way. But such multifarious
opinions cannot be adopted as the basis of a militant political
movement. I need not call attention to the absolute lack of worldly
wisdom, and especially the failure to understand the soul of the nation,
which is displayed by these Messianic Precursors of the Twentieth
Century. Sufficient attention has been called to those people by the
ridicule which the left-wing parties have bestowed on them. They allow
them to babble on and sneer at them.

I do not set much value on the friendship of people who do not succeed
in getting disliked by their enemies. Therefore, we considered the
friendship of such people as not only worthless but even dangerous to
our young movement. That was the principal reason why we first called
ourselves a PARTY. We hoped that by giving ourselves such a name we
might scare away a whole host of VÖLKISCH dreamers. And that was the
reason also why we named our Party, THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN LABOUR
PARTY.

The first term, Party, kept away all those dreamers who live in the past
and all the lovers of bombastic nomenclature, as well as those who went
around beating the big drum for the VÖLKISCH idea. The full name of the
Party kept away all those heroes whose weapon is the sword of the spirit
and all those whining poltroons who take refuge behind their so-called
'intelligence' as if it were a kind of shield.

It was only to be expected that this latter class would launch a massed
attack against us after our movement had started; but, of course, it was
only a pen-and-ink attack, for the goose-quill is the only weapon which
these VÖLKISCH lancers wield. We had declared one of our principles
thus: "We shall meet violence with violence in our own defence".
Naturally that principle disturbed the equanimity of the knights of the
pen. They reproached us bitterly not only for what they called our crude
worship of the cudgel but also because, according to them, we had no
intellectual forces on our side. These charlatans did not think for a
moment that a Demosthenes could be reduced to silence at a mass-meeting
by fifty idiots who had come there to shout him down and use their fists
against his supporters. The innate cowardice of the pen-and-ink
charlatan prevents him from exposing himself to such a danger, for he
always works in safe retirement and never dares to make a noise or come
forward in public.

Even to-day I must warn the members of our young movement in the
strongest possible terms to guard against the danger of falling into the
snare of those who call themselves 'silent workers'. These 'silent
workers' are not only a whitelivered lot but are also, and always will
be, ignorant do-nothings. A man who is aware of certain happenings and
knows that a certain danger threatens, and at the same time sees a
certain remedy which can be employed against it, is in duty bound not to
work in silence but to come into the open and publicly fight for the
destruction of the evil and the acceptance of his own remedy. If he does
not do so, then he is neglecting his duty and shows that he is weak in
character and that he fails to act either because of his timidity, or
indolence or incompetence. Most of these 'silent workers' generally
pretend to know God knows what. Not one of them is capable of any real
achievement, but they keep on trying to fool the world with their
antics. Though quite indolent, they try to create the impression that
their 'silent work' keeps them very busy. To put it briefly, they are
sheer swindlers, political jobbers who feel chagrined by the honest work
which others are doing. When you find one of these VÖLKISCH moths
buzzing over the value of his 'silent work' you may be sure that you are
dealing with a fellow who does no productive work at all but steals from
others the fruits of their honest labour.

In addition to all this one ought to note the arrogance and conceited
impudence with which these obscurantist idlers try to tear to pieces the
work of other people, criticizing it with an air of superiority, and
thus playing into the hands of the mortal enemy of our people.

Even the simplest follower who has the courage to stand on the table in
some beer-hall where his enemies are gathered, and manfully and openly
defend his position against them, achieves a thousand times more than
these slinking hypocrites. He at least will convert one or two people to
believe in the movement. One can examine his work and test its
effectiveness by its actual results. But those knavish swindlers--who
praise their own 'silent work' and shelter themselves under the cloak of
anonymity, are just worthless drones, in the truest sense of the term,
and are utterly useless for the purpose of our national reconstruction.

In the beginning of 1920 I put forward the idea of holding our first
mass meeting. On this proposal there were differences of opinion amongst
us. Some leading members of our party thought that the time was not ripe
for such a meeting and that the result might be detrimental. The Press
of the Left had begun to take notice of us and we were lucky enough in
being able gradually to arouse their wrath. We had begun to appear at
other meetings and to ask questions or contradict the speakers, with the
natural result that we were shouted down forthwith. But still we thereby
gained some of our ends. People began to know of our existence and the
better they understood us, the stronger became their aversion and their
enmity. Therefore we might expect that a large contingent of our friends
from the Red Camp would attend our first mass meeting.

I fully realized that our meeting would probably be broken up. But we
had to face the fight; if not now, then some months later. Since the
first day of our foundation we were resolved to secure the future of the
movement by fighting our way forward in a spirit of blind faith and
ruthless determination. I was well acquainted with the mentality of all
those who belonged to the Red Camp, and I knew quite well that if we
opposed them tooth and nail not only would we make an impression on them
but that we even might win new followers for ourselves. Therefore I felt
that we must decide on a policy of active opposition.

Herr Harrer was then chairman of our party. He did not see eye to eye
with me as to the opportune time for our first mass meeting. Accordingly
he felt himself obliged to resign from the leadership of the movement,
as an upright and honest man. Herr Anton Drexler took his place. I kept
the work of organizing the propaganda in my own hands and I listened to
no compromise in carrying it out.

We decided on February 24th 1920 as the date for the first great popular
meeting to be held under the aegis of this movement which was hitherto
unknown.

I made all the preparatory arrangements personally. They did not take
very long. The whole apparatus of our organization was set in motion for
the purpose of being able to secure a rapid decision as to our policy.
Within twenty-four hours we had to decide on the attitude we should take
in regard to the questions of the day which would be put forward at the
mass meeting. The notices which advertised the meeting had to bring
these points before the public. In this direction we were forced to
depend on the use of posters and leaflets, the contents of which and the
manner in which they were displayed were decided upon in accordance with
the principles which I have already laid down in dealing with propaganda
in general. They were produced in a form which would appeal to the
crowd. They concentrated on a few points which were repeated again and
again. The text was concise and definite, an absolutely dogmatic form of
expression being used. We distributed these posters and leaflets with a
dogged energy and then we patiently waited for the effect they would
produce.

For our principal colour we chose red, as it has an exciting effect on
the eye and was therefore calculated to arouse the attention of our
opponents and irritate them. Thus they would have to take notice of
us--whether they liked it or not--and would not forget us.

One result of our tactics was to show up clearly the close political
fraternization that existed also here in Bavaria between the Marxists
and the Centre Party. The political party that held power in Bavaria,
which was the Bavarian People's Party (affiliated with the Centre Party)
did its best to counteract the effect which our placards were having on
the 'Red' masses. Thus they made a definite step to fetter our
activities. If the police could find no other grounds for prohibiting
our placards, then they might claim that we were disturbing the traffic
in the streets. And thus the so-called German National People's Party
calmed the anxieties of their 'Red' allies by completely prohibiting
those placards which proclaimed a message that was bringing back to the
bosom of their own people hundreds of thousands of workers who had been
misled by international agitators and incensed against their own nation.
These placards bear witness to the bitterness of the struggle in which
the young movement was then engaged. Future generations will find in
these placards a documentary proof of our determination and the justice
of our own cause. And these placards will also prove how the so-called
national officials took arbitrary action to strangle a movement that did
not please them, because it was nationalizing the broad masses of the
people and winning them back to their own racial stock.

These placards will also help to refute the theory that there was then a
national government in Bavaria and they will afford documentary
confirmation of the fact that if Bavaria remained nationally-minded
during the years 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922 and 1923, this was not due to a
national government but it was because the national spirit gradually
gained a deeper hold on the people and the Government was forced to
follow public feeling. The Government authorities themselves did
everything in their power to hamper this process of recovery and make it
impossible. But in this connection two officials must be mentioned as
outstanding exceptions.

Ernst Pöhner was Chief of Police at the time. He had a loyal counsellor
in Dr. Frick, who was his chief executive official. These were the only
men among the higher officials who had the courage to place the
interests of their country before their own interests in holding on to
their jobs. Of those in responsible positions Ernst Pöhner was the only
one who did not pay court to the mob but felt that his duty was towards
the nation as such and was ready to risk and sacrifice everything, even
his personal livelihood, to help in the restoration of the German
people, whom he dearly loved. For that reason he was a bitter thorn in
the side of the venal group of Government officials. It was not the
interests of the nation or the necessity of a national revival that
inspired or directed their conduct. They simply truckled to the wishes
of the Government, so as to secure their daily bread for themselves, but
they had no thought whatsoever for the national welfare that had been
entrusted to their care.

Above all, Pöhner was one of those people who, in contradistinction to
the majority of our so-called defenders of the authority of the State,
did not fear to incur the enmity of the traitors to the country and the
nation but rather courted it as a mark of honour and honesty. For such
men the hatred of the Jews and Marxists and the lies and calumnies they
spread, were their only source of happiness in the midst of the national
misery. Pöhner was a man of granite loyalty. He was like one of the
ascetic characters of the classical era and was at the same time that
kind of straightforward German for whom the saying 'Better dead than a
slave' is not an empty phrase but a veritable heart's cry.

In my opinion he and his collaborator, Dr. Frick, are the only men
holding positions then in Bavaria who have the right to be considered as
having taken active part in the creation of a national Bavaria.

Before holding our first great mass meeting it was necessary not only to
have our propaganda material ready but also to have the main items of
our programme printed.

In the second volume of this book I shall give a detailed account of the
guiding principles which we then followed in drawing up our programme.
Here I will only say that the programme was arranged not merely to set
forth the form and content of the young movement but also with an eye to
making it understood among the broad masses. The so-called intellectual
circles made jokes and sneered at it and then tried to criticize it. But
the effect of our programme proved that the ideas which we then held
were right.

During those years I saw dozens of new movements arise and disappear
without leaving a trace behind. Only one movement has survived. It is
the National Socialist German Labour Party. To-day I am more convinced
than ever before that, though they may combat us and try to paralyse our
movement, and though pettifogging party ministers may forbid us the
right of free speech, they cannot prevent the triumph of our ideas. When
the present system of statal administration and even the names of the
political parties that represent it will be forgotten, the programmatic
basis of the National Socialist movement will supply the groundwork on
which the future State will be built.

The meetings which we held before January 1920 had enabled us to collect
the financial means that were necessary to have our first pamphlets and
posters and programmes printed.

I shall bring the first part of this book to a close by referring to our
first great mass meeting, because that meeting marked the occasion on
which our framework as a small party had to be broken up and we started
to become the most powerful factor of this epoch in the influence we
exercised on public opinion. At that time my chief anxiety was that we
might not fill the hall and that we might have to face empty benches. I
myself was firmly convinced that if only the people would come this day
would turn out a great success for the young movement. That was my
feeling as I waited impatiently for the hour to come.

It had been announced that the meeting would begin at 7.30. A
quarter-of-an-hour before the opening time I walked through the chief
hall of the Hofbräuhaus on the PLATZ in Munich and my heart was nearly
bursting with joy. The great hall--for at that time it seemed very big
to me--was filled to overflowing. Nearly 2,000 people were present. And,
above all, those people had come whom we had always wished to reach.
More than half the audience consisted of persons who seemed to be
communists or independents. Our first great demonstration was destined,
in their view, to come to an abrupt end.

But things happened otherwise. When the first speaker had finished I got
up to speak. After a few minutes I was met with a hailstorm of
interruptions and violent encounters broke out in the body of the hall.
A handful of my loyal war comrades and some other followers grappled
with the disturbers and restored order in a little while. I was able to
continue my speech. After half an hour the applause began to drown the
interruptions and the hootings. Then interruptions gradually ceased and
applause took their place. When I finally came to explain the
twenty-five points and laid them, point after point, before the masses
gathered there and asked them to pass their own judgment on each point,
one point after another was accepted with increasing enthusiasm. When
the last point was reached I had before me a hall full of people united
by a new conviction, a new faith and a new will.

Nearly four hours had passed when the hall began to clear. As the masses
streamed towards the exits, crammed shoulder to shoulder, shoving and
pushing, I knew that a movement was now set afoot among the German
people which would never pass into oblivion.

A fire was enkindled from whose glowing heat the sword would be
fashioned which would restore freedom to the German Siegfried and bring
back life to the German nation.

Beside the revival which I then foresaw, I also felt that the Goddess of
Vengeance was now getting ready to redress the treason of the 9th of
November, 1918. The hall was emptied. The movement was on the march.





VOLUME II: THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST MOVEMENT




CHAPTER I



WELTANSCHAUUNG AND PARTY


On February 24th, 1920, the first great mass meeting under the auspices
of the new movement took place. In the Banquet Hall of the Hofbräuhaus
in Munich the twenty-five theses which constituted the programme of our
new party were expounded to an audience of nearly two thousand people
and each thesis was enthusiastically received.

Thus we brought to the knowledge of the public those first principles
and lines of action along which the new struggle was to be conducted for
the abolition of a confused mass of obsolete ideas and opinions which
had obscure and often pernicious tendencies. A new force was to make its
appearance among the timid and feckless bourgeoisie. This force was
destined to impede the triumphant advance of the Marxists and bring the
Chariot of Fate to a standstill just as it seemed about to reach its
goal.

It was evident that this new movement could gain the public significance
and support which are necessary pre-requisites in such a gigantic
struggle only if it succeeded from the very outset in awakening a
sacrosanct conviction in the hearts of its followers, that here it was
not a case of introducing a new electoral slogan into the political
field but that an entirely new WELTANSCHAUUNG, which was of a radical
significance, had to be promoted.

One must try to recall the miserable jumble of opinions that used to be
arrayed side by side to form the usual Party Programme, as it was
called, and one must remember how these opinions used to be brushed up
or dressed in a new form from time to time. If we would properly
understand these programmatic monstrosities we must carefully
investigate the motives which inspired the average bourgeois 'programme
committee'.

Those people are always influenced by one and the same preoccupation
when they introduce something new into their programme or modify
something already contained in it. That preoccupation is directed
towards the results of the next election. The moment these artists in
parliamentary government have the first glimmering of a suspicion that
their darling public may be ready to kick up its heels and escape from
the harness of the old party wagon they begin to paint the shafts with
new colours. On such occasions the party astrologists and horoscope
readers, the so-called 'experienced men' and 'experts', come forward.
For the most part they are old parliamentary hands whose political
schooling has furnished them with ample experience. They can remember
former occasions when the masses showed signs of losing patience and
they now diagnose the menace of a similar situation arising. Resorting
to their old prescription, they form a 'committee'. They go around among
the darling public and listen to what is being said. They dip their
noses into the newspapers and gradually begin to scent what it is that
their darlings, the broad masses, are wishing for, what they reject and
what they are hoping for. The groups that belong to each trade or
business, and even office employees, are carefully studied and their
innermost desires are investigated. The 'malicious slogans' of the
opposition from which danger is threatened are now suddenly looked upon
as worthy of reconsideration, and it often happens that these slogans,
to the great astonishment of those who originally coined and circulated
them, now appear to be quite harmless and indeed are to be found among
the dogmas of the old parties.

So the committees meet to revise the old programme and draw up a new
one.

For these people change their convictions just as the soldier changes
his shirt in war--when the old one is bug-eaten. In the new programme
everyone gets everything he wants. The farmer is assured that the
interests of agriculture will be safeguarded. The industrialist is
assured of protection for his products. The consumer is assured that his
interests will be protected in the market prices. Teachers are given
higher salaries and civil servants will have better pensions. Widows and
orphans will receive generous assistance from the State. Trade will be
promoted. The tariff will be lowered and even the taxes, though they
cannot be entirely abolished, will be almost abolished. It sometimes
happens that one section of the public is forgotten or that one of the
demands mooted among the public has not reached the ears of the party.
This is also hurriedly patched on to the whole, should there be any
space available for it: until finally it is felt that there are good
grounds for hoping that the whole normal host of philistines, including
their wives, will have their anxieties laid to rest and will beam with
satisfaction once again. And so, internally armed with faith in the
goodness of God and the impenetrable stupidity of the electorate, the
struggle for what is called 'the reconstruction of the REICH' can now
begin.

When the election day is over and the parliamentarians have held their
last public meeting for the next five years, when they can leave their
job of getting the populace to toe the line and can now devote
themselves to higher and more pleasing tasks--then the programme
committee is dissolved and the struggle for the progressive
reorganization of public affairs becomes once again a business of
earning one's daily bread, which for the parliamentarians means merely
the attendance that is required in order to be able to draw their daily
remunerations. Morning after morning the honourable deputy wends his way
to the House, and though he may not enter the Chamber itself he gets at
least as far as the front hall, where he will find the register on which
the names of the deputies in attendance have to be inscribed. As a part
of his onerous service to his constituents he enters his name, and in
return receives a small indemnity as a well-earned reward for his
unceasing and exhausting labours.

When four years have passed, or in the meantime if there should be some
critical weeks during which the parliamentary corporations have to face
the danger of being dissolved, these honourable gentlemen become
suddenly seized by an irresistible desire to act. Just as the grub-worm
cannot help growing into a cock-chafer, these parliamentarian worms
leave the great House of Puppets and flutter on new wings out among the
beloved public. They address the electors once again, give an account of
the enormous labours they have accomplished and emphasize the malicious
obstinacy of their opponents. They do not always meet with grateful
applause; for occasionally the unintelligent masses throw rude and
unfriendly remarks in their faces. When this spirit of public
ingratitude reaches a certain pitch there is only one way of saving the
situation. The prestige of the party must be burnished up again. The
programme has to be amended. The committee is called into existence once
again. And the swindle begins anew. Once we understand the impenetrable
stupidity of our public we cannot be surprised that such tactics turn
out successful. Led by the Press and blinded once again by the alluring
appearance of the new programme, the bourgeois as well as the
proletarian herds of voters faithfully return to the common stall and
re-elect their old deceivers. The 'people's man' and labour candidate
now change back again into the parliamentarian grub and become fat and
rotund as they batten on the leaves that grow on the tree of public
life--to be retransformed into the glittering butterfly after another
four years have passed.

Scarcely anything else can be so depressing as to watch this process in
sober reality and to be the eyewitness of this repeatedly recurring
fraud. On a spiritual training ground of that kind it is not possible
for the bourgeois forces to develop the strength which is necessary to
carry on the fight against the organized might of Marxism. Indeed they
have never seriously thought of doing so. Though these parliamentary
quacks who represent the white race are generally recognized as persons
of quite inferior mental capacity, they are shrewd enough to know that
they could not seriously entertain the hope of being able to use the
weapon of Western Democracy to fight a doctrine for the advance of which
Western Democracy, with all its accessories, is employed as a means to
an end. Democracy is exploited by the Marxists for the purpose of
paralysing their opponents and gaining for themselves a free hand to put
their own methods into action. When certain groups of Marxists use all
their ingenuity for the time being to make it be believed that they are
inseparably attached to the principles of democracy, it may be well to
recall the fact that when critical occasions arose these same gentlemen
snapped their fingers at the principle of decision by majority vote, as
that principle is understood by Western Democracy. Such was the case in
those days when the bourgeois parliamentarians, in their monumental
shortsightedness, believed that the security of the REICH was guaranteed
because it had an overwhelming numerical majority in its favour, and the
Marxists did not hesitate suddenly to grasp supreme power in their own
hands, backed by a mob of loafers, deserters, political place-hunters
and Jewish dilettanti. That was a blow in the face for that democracy in
which so many parliamentarians believed. Only those credulous
parliamentary wizards who represented bourgeois democracy could have
believed that the brutal determination of those whose interest it is to
spread the Marxist world-pest, of which they are the carriers, could for
a moment, now or in the future, be held in check by the magical formulas
of Western Parliamentarianism. Marxism will march shoulder to shoulder
with democracy until it succeeds indirectly in securing for its own
criminal purposes even the support of those whose minds are nationally
orientated and whom Marxism strives to exterminate. But if the Marxists
should one day come to believe that there was a danger that from this
witch's cauldron of our parliamentary democracy a majority vote might be
concocted, which by reason of its numerical majority would be empowered
to enact legislation and might use that power seriously to combat
Marxism, then the whole parliamentarian hocus-pocus would be at an end.
Instead of appealing to the democratic conscience, the standard bearers
of the Red International would immediately send forth a furious
rallying-cry among the proletarian masses and the ensuing fight would
not take place in the sedate atmosphere of Parliament but in the
factories and the streets. Then democracy would be annihilated
forthwith. And what the intellectual prowess of the apostles who
represented the people in Parliament had failed to accomplish would now
be successfully carried out by the crow-bar and the sledge-hammer of the
exasperated proletarian masses--just as in the autumn of 1918. At a blow
they would awaken the bourgeois world to see the madness of thinking
that the Jewish drive towards world-conquest can be effectually opposed
by means of Western Democracy.

As I have said, only a very credulous soul could think of binding
himself to observe the rules of the game when he has to face a player
for whom those rules are nothing but a mere bluff or a means of serving
his own interests, which means he will discard them when they prove no
longer useful for his purpose.

All the parties that profess so-called bourgeois principles look upon
political life as in reality a struggle for seats in Parliament. The
moment their principles and convictions are of no further use in that
struggle they are thrown overboard, as if they were sand ballast. And
the programmes are constructed in such a way that they can be dealt with
in like manner. But such practice has a correspondingly weakening effect
on the strength of those parties. They lack the great magnetic force
which alone attracts the broad masses; for these masses always respond
to the compelling force which emanates from absolute faith in the ideas
put forward, combined with an indomitable zest to fight for and defend
them.

At a time in which the one side, armed with all the fighting power that
springs from a systematic conception of life--even though it be criminal
in a thousand ways--makes an attack against the established order the
other side will be able to resist when it draws its strength from a new
faith, which in our case is a political faith. This faith must supersede
the weak and cowardly command to defend. In its stead we must raise the
battle-cry of a courageous and ruthless attack. Our present movement is
accused, especially by the so-called national bourgeois cabinet
ministers--the Bavarian representatives of the Centre, for example--of
heading towards a revolution. We have one answer to give to those
political pigmies. We say to them: We are trying to make up for that
which you, in your criminal stupidity, have failed to carry out. By your
parliamentarian jobbing you have helped to drag the nation into ruin.
But we, by our aggressive policy, are setting up a new WELTANSCHAUUNG
which we shall defend with indomitable devotion. Thus we are building
the steps on which our nation once again may ascend to the temple of
freedom.

And so during the first stages of founding our movement we had to take
special care that our militant group which fought for the establishment
of a new and exalted political faith should not degenerate into a
society for the promotion of parliamentarian interests.

The first preventive measure was to lay down a programme which of itself
would tend towards developing a certain moral greatness that would scare
away all the petty and weakling spirits who make up the bulk of our
present party politicians.

Those fatal defects which finally led to Germany's downfall afford the
clearest proof of how right we were in considering it absolutely
necessary to set up programmatic aims which were sharply and distinctly
defined.

Because we recognized the defects above mentioned, we realized that a
new conception of the State had to be formed, which in itself became a
part of our new conception of life in general.

In the first volume of this book I have already dealt with the term
VÖLKISCH, and I said then that this term has not a sufficiently precise
meaning to furnish the kernel around which a closely consolidated
militant community could be formed. All kinds of people, with all kinds
of divergent opinions, are parading about at the present moment under
the device VÖLKISCH on their banners. Before I come to deal with the
purposes and aims of the National Socialist Labour Party I want to
establish a clear understanding of what is meant by the concept VÖLKISCH
and herewith explain its relation to our party movement. The word
VÖLKISCH does not express any clearly specified idea. It may be
interpreted in several ways and in practical application it is just as
general as the word 'religious', for instance. It is difficult to attach
any precise meaning to this latter word, either as a theoretical concept
or as a guiding principle in practical life. The word 'religious'
acquires a precise meaning only when it is associated with a distinct
and definite form through which the concept is put into practice. To say
that a person is 'deeply religious' may be very fine phraseology; but,
generally speaking, it tells us little or nothing. There may be some few
people who are content with such a vague description and there may even
be some to whom the word conveys a more or less definite picture of the
inner quality of a person thus described. But, since the masses of the
people are not composed of philosophers or saints, such a vague
religious idea will mean for them nothing else than to justify each
individual in thinking and acting according to his own bent. It will not
lead to that practical faith into which the inner religious yearning is
transformed only when it leaves the sphere of general metaphysical ideas
and is moulded to a definite dogmatic belief. Such a belief is certainly
not an end in itself, but the means to an end. Yet it is a means without
which the end could never be reached at all. This end, however, is not
merely something ideal; for at the bottom it is eminently practical. We
must always bear in mind the fact that, generally speaking, the highest
ideals are always the outcome of some profound vital need, just as the
most sublime beauty owes its nobility of shape, in the last analysis, to
the fact that the most beautiful form is the form that is best suited to
the purpose it is meant to serve.

By helping to lift the human being above the level of mere animal
existence, Faith really contributes to consolidate and safeguard its own
existence. Taking humanity as it exists to-day and taking into
consideration the fact that the religious beliefs which it generally
holds and which have been consolidated through our education, so that
they serve as moral standards in practical life, if we should now
abolish religious teaching and not replace it by anything of equal value
the result would be that the foundations of human existence would be
seriously shaken. We may safely say that man does not live merely to
serve higher ideals, but that these ideals, in their turn, furnish the
necessary conditions of his existence as a human being. And thus the
circle is closed.

Of course, the word 'religious' implies some ideas and beliefs that are
fundamental. Among these we may reckon the belief in the immortality of
the soul, its future existence in eternity, the belief in the existence
of a Higher Being, and so on. But all these ideas, no matter how firmly
the individual believes in them, may be critically analysed by any
person and accepted or rejected accordingly, until the emotional concept
or yearning has been transformed into an active service that is governed
by a clearly defined doctrinal faith. Such a faith furnishes the
practical outlet for religious feeling to express itself and thus opens
the way through which it can be put into practice.

Without a clearly defined belief, the religious feeling would not only
be worthless for the purposes of human existence but even might
contribute towards a general disorganization, on account of its vague
and multifarious tendencies.

What I have said about the word 'religious' can also be applied to the
term VÖLKISCH. This word also implies certain fundamental ideas. Though
these ideas are very important indeed, they assume such vague and
indefinite forms that they cannot be estimated as having a greater value
than mere opinions, until they become constituent elements in the
structure of a political party. For in order to give practical force to
the ideals that grow out of a WELTANSCHAUUNG and to answer the demands
which are a logical consequence of such ideals, mere sentiment and inner
longing are of no practical assistance, just as freedom cannot be won by
a universal yearning for it. No. Only when the idealistic longing for
independence is organized in such a way that it can fight for its ideal
with military force, only then can the urgent wish of a people be
transformed into a potent reality.

Any WELTANSCHAUUNG, though a thousandfold right and supremely
beneficial to humanity, will be of no practical service for the
maintenance of a people as long as its principles have not yet become
the rallying point of a militant movement. And, on its own side, this
movement will remain a mere party until is has brought its ideals to
victory and transformed its party doctrines into the new foundations of
a State which gives the national community its final shape.

If an abstract conception of a general nature is to serve as the basis
of a future development, then the first prerequisite is to form a clear
understanding of the nature and character and scope of this conception.
For only on such a basis can a movement he founded which will be able to
draw the necessary fighting strength from the internal cohesion of its
principles and convictions. From general ideas a political programme
must be constructed and a general WELTANSCHAUUNG must receive the stamp
of a definite political faith. Since this faith must be directed towards
ends that have to be attained in the world of practical reality, not
only must it serve the general ideal as such but it must also take into
consideration the means that have to be employed for the triumph of the
ideal. Here the practical wisdom of the statesman must come to the
assistance of the abstract idea, which is correct in itself. In that way
an eternal ideal, which has everlasting significance as a guiding star
to mankind, must be adapted to the exigencies of human frailty so that
its practical effect may not be frustrated at the very outset through
those shortcomings which are general to mankind. The exponent of truth
must here go hand in hand with him who has a practical knowledge of the
soul of the people, so that from the realm of eternal verities and
ideals what is suited to the capacities of human nature may be selected
and given practical form. To take abstract and general principles,
derived from a WELTANSCHAUUNG which is based on a solid foundation of
truth, and transform them into a militant community whose members have
the same political faith--a community which is precisely defined,
rigidly organized, of one mind and one will--such a transformation is
the most important task of all; for the possibility of successfully
carrying out the idea is dependent on the successful fulfilment of that
task. Out of the army of millions who feel the truth of these ideas, and
even may understand them to some extent, one man must arise. This man
must have the gift of being able to expound general ideas in a clear and
definite form, and, from the world of vague ideas shimmering before the
minds of the masses, he must formulate principles that will be as
clear-cut and firm as granite. He must fight for these principles as the
only true ones, until a solid rock of common faith and common will
emerges above the troubled waves of vagrant ideas. The general
justification of such action is to be sought in the necessity for it and
the individual will be justified by his success.

If we try to penetrate to the inner meaning of the word VÖLKISCH we
arrive at the following conclusions:

The current political conception of the world is that the State, though
it possesses a creative force which can build up civilizations, has
nothing in common with the concept of race as the foundation of the
State. The State is considered rather as something which has resulted
from economic necessity, or, at best, the natural outcome of the play of
political forces and impulses. Such a conception of the foundations of
the State, together with all its logical consequences, not only ignores
the primordial racial forces that underlie the State, but it also leads
to a policy in which the importance of the individual is minimized. If
it be denied that races differ from one another in their powers of
cultural creativeness, then this same erroneous notion must necessarily
influence our estimation of the value of the individual. The assumption
that all races are alike leads to the assumption that nations and
individuals are equal to one another. And international Marxism is
nothing but the application--effected by the Jew, Karl Marx--of a
general conception of life to a definite profession of political faith;
but in reality that general concept had existed long before the time of
Karl Marx. If it had not already existed as a widely diffused infection
the amazing political progress of the Marxist teaching would never have
been possible. In reality what distinguished Karl Marx from the millions
who were affected in the same way was that, in a world already in a
state of gradual decomposition, he used his keen powers of prognosis to
detect the essential poisons, so as to extract them and concentrate
them, with the art of a necromancer, in a solution which would bring
about the rapid destruction of the independent nations on the globe. But
all this was done in the service of his race.

Thus the Marxist doctrine is the concentrated extract of the mentality
which underlies the general concept of life to-day. For this reason
alone it is out of the question and even ridiculous to think that what
is called our bourgeois world can put up any effective fight against
Marxism. For this bourgeois world is permeated with all those same
poisons and its conception of life in general differs from Marxism only
in degree and in the character of the persons who hold it. The bourgeois
world is Marxist but believes in the possibility of a certain group of
people--that is to say, the bourgeoisie--being able to dominate the
world, while Marxism itself systematically aims at delivering the world
into the hands of the Jews.

Over against all this, the VÖLKISCH concept of the world recognizes that
the primordial racial elements are of the greatest significance for
mankind. In principle, the State is looked upon only as a means to an
end and this end is the conservation of the racial characteristics of
mankind. Therefore on the VÖLKISCH principle we cannot admit that one
race is equal to another. By recognizing that they are different, the
VÖLKISCH concept separates mankind into races of superior and inferior
quality. On the basis of this recognition it feels bound in conformity
with the eternal Will that dominates the universe, to postulate the
victory of the better and stronger and the subordination of the inferior
and weaker. And so it pays homage to the truth that the principle
underlying all Nature's operations is the aristocratic principle and it
believes that this law holds good even down to the last individual
organism. It selects individual values from the mass and thus operates
as an organizing principle, whereas Marxism acts as a disintegrating
solvent. The VÖLKISCH belief holds that humanity must have its ideals,
because ideals are a necessary condition of human existence itself. But,
on the other hand, it denies that an ethical ideal has the right to
prevail if it endangers the existence of a race that is the
standard-bearer of a higher ethical ideal. For in a world which would be
composed of mongrels and negroids all ideals of human beauty and
nobility and all hopes of an idealized future for our humanity would be
lost forever.

On this planet of ours human culture and civilization are indissolubly
bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he should be exterminated or
subjugated, then the dark shroud of a new barbarian era would enfold the
earth.

To undermine the existence of human culture by exterminating its
founders and custodians would be an execrable crime in the eyes of those
who believe that the folk-idea lies at the basis of human existence.
Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against that highest image of
God among His creatures would sin against the bountiful Creator of this
marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise.

Hence the folk concept of the world is in profound accord with Nature's
will; because it restores the free play of the forces which will lead
the race through stages of sustained reciprocal education towards a
higher type, until finally the best portion of mankind will possess the
earth and will be free to work in every domain all over the world and
even reach spheres that lie outside the earth.

We all feel that in the distant future many may be faced with problems
which can be solved only by a superior race of human beings, a race
destined to become master of all the other peoples and which will have
at its disposal the means and resources of the whole world.

It is evident that such a general sketch of the ideas implied in the
folk concept of the world may easily be interpreted in a thousand
different ways. As a matter of fact there is scarcely one of our recent
political movements that does not refer at some point to this conception
of the world. But the fact that this conception of the world still
maintains its independent existence in face of all the others proves
that their ways of looking at life are quite difierent from this. Thus
the Marxist conception, directed by a central organization endowed with
supreme authority, is opposed by a motley crew of opinions which is not
very impressive in face of the solid phalanx presented by the enemy.
Victory cannot be achieved with such weak weapons. Only when the
international idea, politically organized by Marxism, is confronted by
the folk idea, equally well organized in a systematic way and equally
well led--only then will the fighting energy in the one camp be able to
meet that of the other on an equal footing; and victory will be found on
the side of eternal truth.

But a general conception of life can never be given an organic
embodiment until it is precisely and definitely formulated. The function
which dogma fulfils in religious belief is parallel to the function
which party principles fulfil for a political party which is in the
process of being built up. Therefore, for the conception of life that is
based on the folk idea it is necessary that an instrument be forged
which can be used in fighting for this ideal, similar to the Marxist
party organization which clears the way for internationalism.

And this is the aim which the German National Socialist Labour Movement
pursues.

The folk conception must therefore be definitely formulated so that it
may be organically incorporated in the party. That is a necessary
prerequisite for the success of this idea. And that it is so is very
clearly proved even by the indirect acknowledgment of those who oppose
such an amalgamation of the folk idea with party principles. The very
people who never tire of insisting again and again that the conception
of life based on the folk idea can never be the exclusive property of a
single group, because it lies dormant or 'lives' in myriads of hearts,
only confirm by their own statements the simple fact that the general
presence of such ideas in the hearts of millions of men has not proved
sufficient to impede the victory of the opposing ideas, which are
championed by a political party organized on the principle of class
conflict. If that were not so, the German people ought already to have
gained a gigantic victory instead of finding themselves on the brink of
the abyss. The international ideology achieved success because it was
organized in a militant political party which was always ready to take
the offensive. If hitherto the ideas opposed to the international
concept have had to give way before the latter the reason is that they
lacked a united front to fight for their cause. A doctrine which forms a
definite outlook on life cannot struggle and triumph by allowing the
right of free interpretation of its general teaching, but only by
defining that teaching in certain articles of faith that have to be
accepted and incorporating it in a political organization.

Therefore I considered it my special duty to extract from the extensive
but vague contents of a general WELTANSCHAUUNG the ideas which were
essential and give them a more or less dogmatic form. Because of their
precise and clear meaning, these ideas are suited to the purpose of
uniting in a common front all those who are ready to accept them as
principles. In other words: The German National Socialist Labour Party
extracts the essential principles from the general conception of the
world which is based on the folk idea. On these principles it
establishes a political doctrine which takes into account the practical
realities of the day, the nature of the times, the available human
material and all its deficiencies. Through this political doctrine it is
possible to bring great masses of the people into an organization which
is constructed as rigidly as it could be. Such an organization is the
main preliminary that is necessary for the final triumph of this ideal.




CHAPTER II



THE STATE


Already in 1920-1921 certain circles belonging to the effete bourgeois
class accused our movement again and again of taking up a negative
attitude towards the modern State. For that reason the motley gang of
camp followers attached to the various political parties, representing a
heterogeneous conglomeration of political views, assumed the right of
utilizing all available means to suppress the protagonists of this young
movement which was preaching a new political gospel. Our opponents
deliberately ignored the fact that the bourgeois class itself stood for
no uniform opinion as to what the State really meant and that the
bourgeoisie did not and could not give any coherent definition of this
institution. Those whose duty it is to explain what is meant when we
speak of the State, hold chairs in State universities, often in the
department of constitutional law, and consider it their highest duty to
find explanations and justifications for the more or less fortunate
existence of that particular form of State which provides them with
their daily bread. The more absurd such a form of State is the more
obscure and artificial and incomprehensible are the definitions which
are advanced to explain the purpose of its existence. What, for
instance, could a royal and imperial university professor write about
the meaning and purpose of a State in a country whose statal form
represented the greatest monstrosity of the twentieth century? That
would be a difficult undertaking indeed, in view of the fact that the
contemporary professor of constitutional law is obliged not so much to
serve the cause of truth but rather to serve a certain definite purpose.
And this purpose is to defend at all costs the existence of that
monstrous human mechanism which we now call the State. Nobody can be
surprised if concrete facts are evaded as far as possible when the
problem of the State is under discussion and if professors adopt the
tactics of concealing themselves in morass of abstract values and duties
and purposes which are described as 'ethical' and 'moral'.

Generally speaking, these various theorists may be classed in three
groups:

1. Those who hold that the State is a more or less voluntary association
of men who have agreed to set up and obey a ruling authority.

This is numerically the largest group. In its ranks are to be found
those who worship our present principle of legalized authority. In their
eyes the will of the people has no part whatever in the whole affair.
For them the fact that the State exists is sufficient reason to consider
it sacred and inviolable. To accept this aberration of the human brain
one would have to have a sort of canine adoration for what is called the
authority of the State. In the minds of these people the means is
substituted for the end, by a sort of sleight-of-hand movement. The
State no longer exists for the purpose of serving men but men exist for
the purpose of adoring the authority of the State, which is vested in
its functionaries, even down to the smallest official. So as to prevent
this placid and ecstatic adoration from changing into something that
might become in any way disturbing, the authority of the State is
limited simply to the task of preserving order and tranquillity.
Therewith it is no longer either a means or an end. The State must see
that public peace and order are preserved and, in their turn, order and
peace must make the existence of the State possible. All life must move
between these two poles. In Bavaria this view is upheld by the artful
politicians of the Bavarian Centre, which is called the 'Bavarian
Populist Party'. In Austria the Black-and-Yellow legitimists adopt a
similar attitude. In the REICH, unfortunately, the so-called
conservative elements follow the same line of thought.

2. The second group is somewhat smaller in numbers. It includes those
who would make the existence of the State dependent on some conditions
at least. They insist that not only should there be a uniform system of
government but also, if possible, that only one language should be used,
though solely for technical reasons of administration. In this view the
authority of the State is no longer the sole and exclusive end for which
the State exists. It must also promote the good of its subjects. Ideas
of 'freedom', mostly based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of that
word, enter into the concept of the State as it exists in the minds of
this group. The form of government is no longer considered inviolable
simply because it exists. It must submit to the test of practical
efficiency. Its venerable age no longer protects it from being
criticized in the light of modern exigencies. Moreover, in this view the
first duty laid upon the State is to guarantee the economic well-being
of the individual citizens. Hence it is judged from the practical
standpoint and according to general principles based on the idea of
economic returns. The chief representatives of this theory of the State
are to be found among the average German bourgeoisie, especially our
liberal democrats.

3. The third group is numerically the smallest. In the State they
discover a means for the realization of tendencies that arise from a
policy of power, on the part of a people who are ethnically homogeneous
and speak the same language. But those who hold this view are not clear
about what they mean by 'tendencies arising from a policy of power'. A
common language is postulated not only because they hope that thereby
the State would be furnished with a solid basis for the extension of its
power outside its own frontiers, but also because they think--though
falling into a fundamental error by doing so--that such a common
language would enable them to carry out a process of nationalization in
a definite direction.

During the last century it was lamentable for those who had to witness
it, to notice how in these circles I have just mentioned the word
'Germanization' was frivolously played with, though the practice was
often well intended. I well remember how in the days of my youth this
very term used to give rise to notions which were false to an incredible
degree. Even in Pan-German circles one heard the opinion expressed that
the Austrian Germans might very well succeed in Germanizing the Austrian
Slavs, if only the Government would be ready to co-operate. Those people
did not understand that a policy of Germanization can be carried out
only as regards human beings. What they mostly meant by Germanization
was a process of forcing other people to speak the German language. But
it is almost inconceivable how such a mistake could be made as to think
that a Nigger or a Chinaman will become a German because he has learned
the German language and is willing to speak German for the future, and
even to cast his vote for a German political party. Our bourgeois
nationalists could never clearly see that such a process of
Germanization is in reality de-Germanization; for even if all the
outstanding and visible differences between the various peoples could be
bridged over and finally wiped out by the use of a common language, that
would produce a process of bastardization which in this case would not
signify Germanization but the annihilation of the German element. In the
course of history it has happened only too often that a conquering race
succeeded by external force in compelling the people whom they subjected
to speak the tongue of the conqueror and that after a thousand years
their language was spoken by another people and that thus the conqueror
finally turned out to be the conquered.

What makes a people or, to be more correct, a race, is not language but
blood. Therefore it would be justifiable to speak of Germanization only
if that process could change the blood of the people who would be
subjected to it, which is obviously impossible. A change would be
possible only by a mixture of blood, but in this case the quality of the
superior race would be debased. The final result of such a mixture would
be that precisely those qualities would be destroyed which had enabled
the conquering race to achieve victory over an inferior people. It is
especially the cultural creativeness which disappears when a superior
race intermixes with an inferior one, even though the resultant mongrel
race should excel a thousandfold in speaking the language of the race
that once had been superior. For a certain time there will be a conflict
between the different mentalities, and it may be that a nation which is
in a state of progressive degeneration will at the last moment rally its
cultural creative power and once again produce striking examples of that
power. But these results are due only to the activity of elements that
have remained over from the superior race or hybrids of the first
crossing in whom the superior blood has remained dominant and seeks to
assert itself. But this will never happen with the final descendants of
such hybrids. These are always in a state of cultural retrogression.

We must consider it as fortunate that a Germanization of Austria
according to the plan of Joseph II did not succeed. Probably the result
would have been that the Austrian State would have been able to survive,
but at the same time participation in the use of a common language would
have debased the racial quality of the German element. In the course of
centuries a certain herd instinct might have been developed but the herd
itself would have deteriorated in quality. A national State might have
arisen, but a people who had been culturally creative would have
disappeared.

For the German nation it was better that this process of intermixture
did not take place, although it was not renounced for any high-minded
reasons but simply through the short-sighted pettiness of the Habsburgs.
If it had taken place the German people could not now be looked upon as
a cultural factor.

Not only in Austria, however, but also in the REICH, these so-called
national circles were, and still are, under the influence of similar
erroneous ideas. Unfortunately, a policy towards Poland, whereby the
East was to be Germanized, was demanded by many and was based on the
same false reasoning. Here again it was believed that the Polish people
could be Germanized by being compelled to use the German language. The
result would have been fatal. A people of foreign race would have had to
use the German language to express modes of thought that were foreign to
the German, thus compromising by its own inferiority the dignity and
nobility of our nation.

It is revolting to think how much damage is indirectly done to German
prestige to-day through the fact that the German patois of the Jews when
they enter the United States enables them to be classed as Germans,
because many Americans are quite ignorant of German conditions. Among
us, nobody would think of taking these unhygienic immigrants from the
East for members of the German race and nation merely because they
mostly speak German.

What has been beneficially Germanized in the course of history was the
land which our ancestors conquered with the sword and colonized with
German tillers of the soil. To the extent that they introduced foreign
blood into our national body in this colonization, they have helped to
disintegrate our racial character, a process which has resulted in our
German hyper-individualism, though this latter characteristic is even
now frequently praised.

In this third group also there are people who, to a certain degree,
consider the State as an end in itself. Hence they consider its
preservation as one of the highest aims of human existence. Our analysis
may be summed up as follows:

All these opinions have this common feature and failing: that they are
not grounded in a recognition of the profound truth that the capacity
for creating cultural values is essentially based on the racial element
and that, in accordance with this fact, the paramount purpose of the
State is to preserve and improve the race; for this is an indispensable
condition of all progress in human civilization.

Thus the Jew, Karl Marx, was able to draw the final conclusions from
these false concepts and ideas on the nature and purpose of the State.
By eliminating from the concept of the State all thought of the
obligation which the State bears towards the race, without finding any
other formula that might be universally accepted, the bourgeois teaching
prepared the way for that doctrine which rejects the State as such.

That is why the bourgeois struggle against Marxist internationalism is
absolutely doomed to fail in this field. The bourgeois classes have
already sacrificed the basic principles which alone could furnish a
solid footing for their ideas. Their crafty opponent has perceived the
defects in their structure and advances to the assault on it with those
weapons which they themselves have placed in his hands though not
meaning to do so.

Therefore any new movement which is based on the racial concept of the
world will first of all have to put forward a clear and logical doctrine
of the nature and purpose of the State.

The fundamental principle is that the State is not an end in itself but
the means to an end. It is the preliminary condition under which alone a
higher form of human civilization can be developed, but it is not the
source of such a development. This is to be sought exclusively in the
actual existence of a race which is endowed with the gift of cultural
creativeness. There may be hundreds of excellent States on this earth,
and yet if the Aryan, who is the creator and custodian of civilization,
should disappear, all culture that is on an adequate level with the
spiritual needs of the superior nations to-day would also disappear. We
may go still further and say that the fact that States have been created
by human beings does not in the least exclude the possiblity that the
human race may become extinct, because the superior intellectual
faculties and powers of adaptation would be lost when the racial bearer
of these faculties and powers disappeared.

If, for instance, the surface of the globe should be shaken to-day by
some seismic convulsion and if a new Himalaya would emerge from the
waves of the sea, this one catastrophe alone might annihilate human
civilization. No State could exist any longer. All order would be
shattered. And all vestiges of cultural products which had been evolved
through thousands of years would disappear. Nothing would be left but
one tremendous field of death and destruction submerged in floods of
water and mud. If, however, just a few people would survive this
terrible havoc, and if these people belonged to a definite race that had
the innate powers to build up a civilization, when the commotion had
passed, the earth would again bear witness to the creative power of the
human spirit, even though a span of a thousand years might intervene.
Only with the extermination of the last race that possesses the gift of
cultural creativeness, and indeed only if all the individuals of that
race had disappeared, would the earth definitely be turned into a
desert. On the other hand, modern history furnishes examples to show
that statal institutions which owe their beginnings to members of a race
which lacks creative genius are not made of stuff that will endure. Just
as many varieties of prehistoric animals had to give way to others and
leave no trace behind them, so man will also have to give way, if he
loses that definite faculty which enables him to find the weapons that
are necessary for him to maintain his own existence.

It is not the State as such that brings about a certain definite advance
in cultural progress. The State can only protect the race that is the
cause of such progress. The State as such may well exist without
undergoing any change for hundreds of years, though the cultural
faculties and the general life of the people, which is shaped by these
faculties, may have suffered profound changes by reason of the fact that
the State did not prevent a process of racial mixture from taking place.
The present State, for instance, may continue to exist in a mere
mechanical form, but the poison of miscegenation permeating the national
body brings about a cultural decadence which manifests itself already in
various symptoms that are of a detrimental character.

Thus the indispensable prerequisite for the existence of a superior
quality of human beings is not the State but the race, which is alone
capable of producing that higher human quality.

This capacity is always there, though it will lie dormant unless
external circumstances awaken it to action. Nations, or rather races,
which are endowed with the faculty of cultural creativeness possess this
faculty in a latent form during periods when the external circumstances
are unfavourable for the time being and therefore do not allow the
faculty to express itself effectively. It is therefore outrageously
unjust to speak of the pre-Christian Germans as barbarians who had no
civilization. They never have been such. But the severity of the climate
that prevailed in the northern regions which they inhabited imposed
conditions of life which hampered a free development of their creative
faculties. If they had come to the fairer climate of the South, with no
previous culture whatsoever, and if they acquired the necessary human
material--that is to say, men of an inferior race--to serve them as
working implements, the cultural faculty dormant in them would have
splendidly blossomed forth, as happened in the case of the Greeks, for
example. But this primordial creative faculty in cultural things was not
solely due to their northern climate. For the Laplanders or the Eskimos
would not have become creators of a culture if they were transplanted to
the South. No, this wonderful creative faculty is a special gift
bestowed on the Aryan, whether it lies dormant in him or becomes active,
according as the adverse conditions of nature prevent the active
expression of that faculty or favourable circumstances permit it.

From these facts the following conclusions may be drawn:

The State is only a means to an end. Its end and its purpose is to
preserve and promote a community of human beings who are physically as
well as spiritually kindred. Above all, it must preserve the existence
of the race, thereby providing the indispensable condition for the free
development of all the forces dormant in this race. A great part of
these faculties will always have to be employed in the first place to
maintain the physical existence of the race, and only a small portion
will be free to work in the field of intellectual progress. But, as a
matter of fact, the one is always the necessary counterpart of the
other.

Those States which do not serve this purpose have no justification for
their existence. They are monstrosities. The fact that they do exist is
no more of a justification than the successful raids carried out by a
band of pirates can be considered a justification of piracy.

We National Socialists, who are fighting for a new WELTANSCHAUUNG, must
never take our stand on the famous 'basis of facts', and especially not
on mistaken facts. If we did so, we should cease to be the protagonists
of a new and great idea and would become slaves in the service of the
fallacy which is dominant to-day. We must make a clear-cut distinction
between the vessel and its contents. The State is only the vessel and
the race is what it contains. The vessel can have a meaning only if it
preserves and safeguards the contents. Otherwise it is worthless.

Hence the supreme purpose of the ethnical State is to guard and preserve
those racial elements which, through their work in the cultural field,
create that beauty and dignity which are characteristic of a higher
mankind. As Aryans, we can consider the State only as the living
organism of a people, an organism which does not merely maintain the
existence of a people, but functions in such a way as to lead its people
to a position of supreme liberty by the progressive development of the
intellectual and cultural faculties.

What they want to impose upon us as a State to-day is in most cases
nothing but a monstrosity, the product of a profound human aberration
which brings untold suffering in its train.

We National Socialists know that in holding these views we take up a
revolutionary stand in the world of to-day and that we are branded as
revolutionaries. But our views and our conduct will not be determined by
the approbation or disapprobation of our contemporaries, but only by our
duty to follow a truth which we have acknowledged. In doing this we have
reason to believe that posterity will have a clearer insight, and will
not only understand the work we are doing to-day, but will also ratify
it as the right work and will exalt it accordingly.

On these principles we National Socialists base our standards of value
in appraising a State. This value will be relative when viewed from the
particular standpoint of the individual nation, but it will be absolute
when considered from the standpoint of humanity as a whole. In other
words, this means:

That the excellence of a State can never be judged by the level of its
culture or the degree of importance which the outside world attaches to
its power, but that its excellence must be judged by the degree to which
its institutions serve the racial stock which belongs to it.

A State may be considered as a model example if it adequately serves not
only the vital needs of the racial stock it represents but if it
actually assures by its own existence the preservation of this same
racial stock, no matter what general cultural significance this statal
institution may have in the eyes of the rest of the world. For it is not
the task of the State to create human capabilities, but only to assure
free scope for the exercise of capabilities that already exist. On the
other hand, a State may be called bad if, in spite of the existence of a
high cultural level, it dooms to destruction the bearers of that culture
by breaking up their racial uniformity. For the practical effect of such
a policy would be to destroy those conditions that are indispensable for
the ulterior existence of that culture, which the State did not create
but which is the fruit of the creative power inherent in the racial
stock whose existence is assured by being united in the living organism
of the State. Once again let me emphasize the fact that the State itself
is not the substance but the form. Therefore, the cultural level is not
the standard by which we can judge the value of the State in which that
people lives. It is evident that a people which is endowed with high
creative powers in the cultural sphere is of more worth than a tribe of
negroes. And yet the statal organization of the former, if judged from
the standpoint of efficiency, may be worse than that of the negroes. Not
even the best of States and statal institutions can evolve faculties
from a people which they lack and which they never possessed, but a bad
State may gradually destroy the faculties which once existed. This it
can do by allowing or favouring the suppression of those who are the
bearers of a racial culture.

Therefore, the worth of a State can be determined only by asking how far
it actually succeeds in promoting the well-being of a definite race and
not by the role which it plays in the world at large. Its relative worth
can be estimated readily and accurately; but it is difficult to judge
its absolute worth, because the latter is conditioned not only by the
State but also by the quality and cultural level of the people that
belong to the individual State in question.

Therefore, when we speak of the high mission of the State we must not
forget that the high mission belongs to the people and that the business
of the State is to use its organizing powers for the purpose of
furnishing the necessary conditions which allow this people freely to
unfold its creative faculties. And if we ask what kind of statal
institution we Germans need, we must first have a clear notion as to the
people which that State must embrace and what purpose it must serve.

Unfortunately the German national being is not based on a uniform racial
type. The process of welding the original elements together has not gone
so far as to warrant us in saying that a new race has emerged. On the
contrary, the poison which has invaded the national body, especially
since the Thirty Years' War, has destroyed the uniform constitution not
only of our blood but also of our national soul. The open frontiers of
our native country, the association with non-German foreign elements in
the territories that lie all along those frontiers, and especially the
strong influx of foreign blood into the interior of the REICH itself,
has prevented any complete assimilation of those various elements,
because the influx has continued steadily. Out of this melting-pot no
new race arose. The heterogeneous elements continue to exist side by
side. And the result is that, especially in times of crisis, when the
herd usually flocks together, the Germans disperse in all directions.
The fundamental racial elements are not only different in different
districts, but there are also various elements in the single districts.
Beside the Nordic type we find the East-European type, beside the
Eastern there is the Dinaric, the Western type intermingling with both,
and hybrids among them all. That is a grave drawback for us. Through it
the Germans lack that strong herd instinct which arises from unity of
blood and saves nations from ruin in dangerous and critical times;
because on such occasions small differences disappear, so that a united
herd faces the enemy. What we understand by the word hyper-individualism
arises from the fact that our primordial racial elements have existed
side by side without ever consolidating. During times of peace such a
situation may offer some advantages, but, taken all in all, it has
prevented us from gaining a mastery in the world. If in its historical
development the German people had possessed the unity of herd instinct
by which other peoples have so much benefited, then the German REICH
would probably be mistress of the globe to-day. World history would have
taken another course and in this case no man can tell if what many
blinded pacifists hope to attain by petitioning, whining and crying, may
not have been reached in this way: namely, a peace which would not be
based upon the waving of olive branches and tearful misery-mongering of
pacifist old women, but a peace that would be guaranteed by the
triumphant sword of a people endowed with the power to master the world
and administer it in the service of a higher civilization.

The fact that our people did not have a national being based on a unity
of blood has been the source of untold misery for us. To many petty
German potentates it gave residential capital cities, but the German
people as a whole was deprived of its right to rulership.

Even to-day our nation still suffers from this lack of inner unity; but
what has been the cause of our past and present misfortunes may turn out
a blessing for us in the future. Though on the one hand it may be a
drawback that our racial elements were not welded together, so that no
homogeneous national body could develop, on the other hand, it was
fortunate that, since at least a part of our best blood was thus kept
pure, its racial quality was not debased.

A complete assimilation of all our racial elements would certainly have
brought about a homogeneous national organism; but, as has been proved
in the case of every racial mixture, it would have been less capable of
creating a civilization than by keeping intact its best original
elements. A benefit which results from the fact that there was no
all-round assimilation is to be seen in that even now we have large
groups of German Nordic people within our national organization, and
that their blood has not been mixed with the blood of other races. We
must look upon this as our most valuable treasure for the sake of the
future. During that dark period of absolute ignorance in regard to all
racial laws, when each individual was considered to be on a par with
every other, there could be no clear appreciation of the difference
between the various fundamental racial characteristics. We know to-day
that a complete assimilation of all the various elements which
constitute the national being might have resulted in giving us a larger
share of external power: but, on the other hand, the highest of human
aims would not have been attained, because the only kind of people which
fate has obviously chosen to bring about this perfection would have been
lost in such a general mixture of races which would constitute such a
racial amalgamation.

But what has been prevented by a friendly Destiny, without any
assistance on our part, must now be reconsidered and utilized in the
light of our new knowledge.

He who talks of the German people as having a mission to fulfil on this
earth must know that this cannot be fulfilled except by the building up
of a State whose highest purpose is to preserve and promote those nobler
elements of our race and of the whole of mankind which have remained
unimpaired.

Thus for the first time a high inner purpose is accredited to the State.
In face of the ridiculous phrase that the State should do no more than
act as the guardian of public order and tranquillity, so that everybody
can peacefully dupe everybody else, it is given a very high mission
indeed to preserve and encourage the highest type of humanity which a
beneficent Creator has bestowed on this earth. Out of a dead mechanism
which claims to be an end in itself a living organism shall arise which
has to serve one purpose exclusively: and that, indeed, a purpose which
belongs to a higher order of ideas.

As a State the German REICH shall include all Germans. Its task is not
only to gather in and foster the most valuable sections of our people
but to lead them slowly and surely to a dominant position in the world.

Thus a period of stagnation is superseded by a period of effort. And
here, as in every other sphere, the proverb holds good that to rest is
to rust; and furthermore the proverb that victory will always be won by
him who attacks. The higher the final goal which we strive to reach, and
the less it be understood at the time by the broad masses, the more
magnificent will be its success. That is what the lesson of history
teaches. And the achievement will be all the more significant if the end
is conceived in the right way and the fight carried through with
unswerving persistence. Many of the officials who direct the affairs of
State nowadays may find it easier to work for the maintenance of the
present order than to fight for a new one. They will find it more
comfortable to look upon the State as a mechanism, whose purpose is its
own preservation, and to say that 'their lives belong to the State,' as
if anything that grew from the inner life of the nation can logically
serve anything but the national being, and as if man could be made for
anything else than for his fellow beings. Naturally, it is easier, as I
have said, to consider the authority of the State as nothing but the
formal mechanism of an organization, rather than as the sovereign
incarnation of a people's instinct for self-preservation on this earth.
For these weak minds the State and the authority of the State is nothing
but an aim in itself, while for us it is an effective weapon in the
service of the great and eternal struggle for existence, a weapon which
everyone must adopt, not because it is a mere formal mechanism, but
because it is the main expression of our common will to exist.

Therefore, in the fight for our new idea, which conforms completely to
the primal meaning of life, we shall find only a small number of
comrades in a social order which has become decrepit not only physically
but mentally also. From these strata of our population only a few
exceptional people will join our ranks, only those few old people whose
hearts have remained young and whose courage is still vigorous, but not
those who consider it their duty to maintain the state of affairs that
exists.

Against us we have the innumerable army of all those who are lazy-minded
and indifferent rather than evil, and those whose self-interest leads
them to uphold the present state of affairs. On the apparent
hopelessness of our great struggle is based the magnitude of our task
and the possibilities of success. A battle-cry which from the very start
will scare off all the petty spirits, or at least discourage them, will
become the signal for a rally of all those temperaments that are of the
real fighting metal. And it must be clearly recognized that if a highly
energetic and active body of men emerge from a nation and unite in the
fight for one goal, thereby ultimately rising above the inert masses of
the people, this small percentage will become masters of the whole.
World history is made by minorities if these numerical minorities
represent in themselves the will and energy and initiative of the people
as a whole.

What seems an obstacle to many persons is really a preliminary condition
of our victory. Just because our task is so great and because so many
difficulties have to be overcome, the highest probability is that only
the best kind of protagonists will join our ranks. This selection is the
guarantee of our success. Nature generally takes certain measures to
correct the effect which racial mixture produces in life. She is not
much in favour of the mongrel. The later products of cross-breeding have
to suffer bitterly, especially the third, fourth and fifth generations.
Not only are they deprived of the higher qualities that belonged to the
parents who participated in the first mixture, but they also lack
definite will-power and vigorous vital energies owing to the lack of
harmony in the quality of their blood. At all critical moments in which
a person of pure racial blood makes correct decisions, that is to say,
decisions that are coherent and uniform, the person of mixed blood will
become confused and take measures that are incoherent. Hence we see that
a person of mixed blood is not only relatively inferior to a person of
pure blood, but is also doomed to become extinct more rapidly. In
innumerable cases wherein the pure race holds its ground the mongrel
breaks down. Therein we witness the corrective provision which Nature
adopts. She restricts the possibilities of procreation, thus impeding
the fertility of cross-breeds and bringing them to extinction.

For instance, if an individual member of a race should mingle his blood
with the member of a superior race the first result would be a lowering
of the racial level, and furthermore the descendants of this
cross-breeding would be weaker than those of the people around them who
had maintained their blood unadulterated. Where no new blood from the
superior race enters the racial stream of the mongrels, and where those
mongrels continue to cross-breed among themselves, the latter will
either die out because they have insufficient powers of resistance,
which is Nature's wise provision, or in the course of many thousands of
years they will form a new mongrel race in which the original elements
will become so wholly mixed through this millennial crossing that traces
of the original elements will be no longer recognizable. And thus a new
people would be developed which possessed a certain resistance capacity
of the herd type, but its intellectual value and its cultural
significance would be essentially inferior to those which the first
cross-breeds possessed. But even in this last case the mongrel product
would succumb in the mutual struggle for existence with a higher racial
group that had maintained its blood unmixed. The herd solidarity which
this mongrel race had developed through thousands of years will not be
equal to the struggle. And this is because it would lack elasticity and
constructive capacity to prevail over a race of homogeneous blood that
was mentally and culturally superior.

Therewith we may lay down the following principle as valid: every racial
mixture leads, of necessity, sooner or later to the downfall of the
mongrel product, provided the higher racial strata of this cross-breed
has not retained within itself some sort of racial homogeneity. The
danger to the mongrels ceases only when this higher stratum, which has
maintained certain standards of homogeneous breeding, ceases to be true
to its pedigree and intermingles with the mongrels.

This principle is the source of a slow but constant regeneration whereby
all the poison which has invaded the racial body is gradually eliminated
so long as there still remains a fundamental stock of pure racial
elements which resists further crossbreeding.

Such a process may set in automatically among those people where a
strong racial instinct has remained. Among such people we may count
those elements which, for some particular cause such as coercion, have
been thrown out of the normal way of reproduction along strict racial
lines. As soon as this compulsion ceases, that part of the race which
has remained intact will tend to marry with its own kind and thus impede
further intermingling. Then the mongrels recede quite naturally into the
background unless their numbers had increased so much as to be able to
withstand all serious resistance from those elements which had preserved
the purity of their race.

When men have lost their natural instincts and ignore the obligations
imposed on them by Nature, then there is no hope that Nature will
correct the loss that has been caused, until recognition of the lost
instincts has been restored. Then the task of bringing back what has
been lost will have to be accomplished. But there is serious danger that
those who have become blind once in this respect will continue more and
more to break down racial barriers and finally lose the last remnants of
what is best in them. What then remains is nothing but a uniform
mish-mash, which seems to be the dream of our fine Utopians. But that
mish-mash would soon banish all ideals from the world. Certainly a great
herd could thus be formed. One can breed a herd of animals; but from a
mixture of this kind men such as have created and founded civilizations
would not be produced. The mission of humanity might then be considered
at an end.

Those who do not wish that the earth should fall into such a condition
must realize that it is the task of the German State in particular to
see to it that the process of bastardization is brought to a stop.

Our contemporary generation of weaklings will naturally decry such a
policy and whine and complain about it as an encroachment on the most
sacred of human rights. But there is only one right that is sacrosanct
and this right is at the same time a most sacred duty. This right and
obligation are: that the purity of the racial blood should be guarded,
so that the best types of human beings may be preserved and that thus we
should render possible a more noble development of humanity itself.

A folk-State should in the first place raise matrimony from the level of
being a constant scandal to the race. The State should consecrate it as
an institution which is called upon to produce creatures made in the
likeness of the Lord and not create monsters that are a mixture of man
and ape. The protest which is put forward in the name of humanity does
not fit the mouth of a generation that makes it possible for the most
depraved degenerates to propagate themselves, thereby imposing
unspeakable suffering on their own products and their contemporaries,
while on the other hand contraceptives are permitted and sold in every
drug store and even by street hawkers, so that babies should not be born
even among the healthiest of our people. In this present State of ours,
whose function it is to be the guardian of peace and good order, our
national bourgeoisie look upon it as a crime to make procreation
impossible for syphilitics and those who suffer from tuberculosis or
other hereditary diseases, also cripples and imbeciles. But the
practical prevention of procreation among millions of our very best
people is not considered as an evil, nor does it offend against the
noble morality of this social class but rather encourages their
short-sightedness and mental lethargy. For otherwise they would at least
stir their brains to find an answer to the question of how to create
conditions for the feeding and maintaining of those future beings who
will be the healthy representatives of our nation and must also provide
the conditions on which the generation that is to follow them will have
to support itself and live.

How devoid of ideals and how ignoble is the whole contemporary system!
The fact that the churches join in committing this sin against the image
of God, even though they continue to emphasize the dignity of that
image, is quite in keeping with their present activities. They talk
about the Spirit, but they allow man, as the embodiment of the Spirit,
to degenerate to the proletarian level. Then they look on with amazement
when they realize how small is the influence of the Christian Faith in
their own country and how depraved and ungodly is this riff-raff which
is physically degenerate and therefore morally degenerate also. To
balance this state of affairs they try to convert the Hottentots and the
Zulus and the Kaffirs and to bestow on them the blessings of the Church.
While our European people, God be praised and thanked, are left to
become the victims of moral depravity, the pious missionary goes out to
Central Africa and establishes missionary stations for negroes. Finally,
sound and healthy--though primitive and backward--people will be
transformed, under the name of our 'higher civilization', into a motley
of lazy and brutalized mongrels.

It would better accord with noble human aspirations if our two Christian
denominations would cease to bother the negroes with their preaching,
which the negroes do not want and do not understand. It would be better
if they left this work alone, and if, in its stead, they tried to teach
people in Europe, kindly and seriously, that it is much more pleasing to
God if a couple that is not of healthy stock were to show loving
kindness to some poor orphan and become a father and mother to him,
rather than give life to a sickly child that will be a cause of
suffering and unhappiness to all.

In this field the People's State will have to repair the damage that
arises from the fact that the problem is at present neglected by all the
various parties concerned. It will be the task of the People's State to
make the race the centre of the life of the community. It must make sure
that the purity of the racial strain will be preserved. It must proclaim
the truth that the child is the most valuable possession a people can
have. It must see to it that only those who are healthy shall beget
children; that there is only one infamy, namely, for parents that are
ill or show hereditary defects to bring children into the world and that
in such cases it is a high honour to refrain from doing so. But, on the
other hand, it must be considered as reprehensible conduct to refrain
from giving healthy children to the nation. In this matter the State
must assert itself as the trustee of a millennial future, in face of
which the egotistic desires of the individual count for nothing and will
have to give way before the ruling of the State. In order to fulfil this
duty in a practical manner the State will have to avail itself of modern
medical discoveries. It must proclaim as unfit for procreation all those
who are inflicted with some visible hereditary disease or are the
carriers of it; and practical measures must be adopted to have such
people rendered sterile. On the other hand, provision must be made for
the normally fertile woman so that she will not be restricted in
child-bearing through the financial and economic system operating in a
political regime that looks upon the blessing of having children as a
curse to their parents. The State will have to abolish the cowardly and
even criminal indifference with which the problem of social amenities
for large families is treated, and it will have to be the supreme
protector of this greatest blessing that a people can boast of. Its
attention and care must be directed towards the child rather than the
adult.

Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unfit must not
perpetuate their own suffering in the bodies of their children. From the
educational point of view there is here a huge task for the People's
State to accomplish. But in a future era this work will appear greater
and more significant than the victorious wars of our present bourgeois
epoch. Through educational means the State must teach individuals that
illness is not a disgrace but an unfortunate accident which has to be
pitied, yet that it is a crime and a disgrace to make this affliction
all the worse by passing on disease and defects to innocent creatures
out of mere egotism.

And the State must also teach the people that it is an expression of a
really noble nature and that it is a humanitarian act worthy of
admiration if a person who innocently suffers from hereditary disease
refrains from having a child of his own but gives his love and affection
to some unknown child who, through its health, promises to become a
robust member of a healthy community. In accomplishing such an
educational task the State integrates its function by this activity in
the moral sphere. It must act on this principle without paying any
attention to the question of whether its conduct will be understood or
misconstrued, blamed or praised.

If for a period of only 600 years those individuals would be sterilized
who are physically degenerate or mentally diseased, humanity would not
only be delivered from an immense misfortune but also restored to a
state of general health such as we at present can hardly imagine. If the
fecundity of the healthy portion of the nation should be made a
practical matter in a conscientious and methodical way, we should have
at least the beginnings of a race from which all those germs would be
eliminated which are to-day the cause of our moral and physical
decadence. If a people and a State take this course to develop that
nucleus of the nation which is most valuable from the racial standpoint
and thus increase its fecundity, the people as a whole will subsequently
enjoy that most precious of gifts which consists in a racial quality
fashioned on truly noble lines.

To achieve this the State should first of all not leave the colonization
of newly acquired territory to a haphazard policy but should have it
carried out under the guidance of definite principles. Specially
competent committees ought to issue certificates to individuals
entitling them to engage in colonization work, and these certificates
should guarantee the racial purity of the individuals in question. In
this way frontier colonies could gradually be founded whose inhabitants
would be of the purest racial stock, and hence would possess the best
qualities of the race. Such colonies would be a valuable asset to the
whole nation. Their development would be a source of joy and confidence
and pride to each citizen of the nation, because they would contain the
pure germ which would ultimately bring about a great development of the
nation and indeed of mankind itself.

The WELTANSCHAUUNG which bases the State on the racial idea must
finally succeed in bringing about a nobler era, in which men will no
longer pay exclusive attention to breeding and rearing pedigree dogs and
horses and cats, but will endeavour to improve the breed of the human
race itself. That will be an era of silence and renunciation for one
class of people, while the others will give their gifts and make their
sacrifices joyfully.

That such a mentality may be possible cannot be denied in a world where
hundreds and thousands accept the principle of celibacy from their own
choice, without being obliged or pledged to do so by anything except an
ecclesiastical precept. Why should it not be possible to induce people
to make this sacrifice if, instead of such a precept, they were simply
told that they ought to put an end to this truly original sin of racial
corruption which is steadily being passed on from one generation to
another. And, further, they ought to be brought to realize that it is
their bounden duty to give to the Almighty Creator beings such as He
himself made to His own image.

Naturally, our wretched army of contemporary philistines will not
understand these things. They will ridicule them or shrug their round
shoulders and groan out their everlasting excuses: "Of course it is a
fine thing, but the pity is that it cannot be carried out." And we
reply: "With you indeed it cannot be done, for your world is incapable
of such an idea. You know only one anxiety and that is for your own
personal existence. You have one God, and that is your money. We do not
turn to you, however, for help, but to the great army of those who are
too poor to consider their personal existence as the highest good on
earth. They do not place their trust in money but in other gods, into
whose hands they confide their lives. Above all we turn to the vast army
of our German youth. They are coming to maturity in a great epoch, and
they will fight against the evils which were due to the laziness and
indifference of their fathers." Either the German youth will one day
create a new State founded on the racial idea or they will be the last
witnesses of the complete breakdown and death of the bourgeois world.

For if a generation suffers from defects which it recognizes and even
admits and is nevertheless quite pleased with itself, as the bourgeois
world is to-day, resorting to the cheap excuse that nothing can be done
to remedy the situation, then such a generation is doomed to disaster. A
marked characteristic of our bourgeois world is that they no longer can
deny the evil conditions that exist. They have to admit that there is
much which is foul and wrong; but they are not able to make up their
minds to fight against that evil, which would mean putting forth the
energy to mobilize the forces of 60 or 70 million people and thus oppose
this menace. They do just the opposite. When such an effort is made
elsewhere they only indulge in silly comment and try from a safe
distance to show that such an enterprise is theoretically impossible and
doomed to failure. No arguments are too stupid to be employed in the
service of their own pettifogging opinions and their knavish moral
attitude. If, for instance, a whole continent wages war against
alcoholic intoxication, so as to free a whole people from this
devastating vice, our bourgeois European does not know better than to
look sideways stupidly, shake the head in doubt and ridicule the
movement with a superior sneer--a state of mind which is effective in a
society that is so ridiculous. But when all these stupidities miss their
aim and in that part of the world this sublime and intangible attitude
is treated effectively and success attends the movement, then such
success is called into question or its importance minimized. Even moral
principles are used in this slanderous campaign against a movement which
aims at suppressing a great source of immorality.

No. We must not permit ourselves to be deceived by any illusions on this
point. Our contemporary bourgeois world has become useless for any such
noble human task because it has lost all high quality and is evil, not
so much--as I think--because evil is wished but rather because these
people are too indolent to rise up against it. That is why those
political societies which call themselves 'bourgeois parties' are
nothing but associations to promote the interests of certain
professional groups and classes. Their highest aim is to defend their
own egoistic interests as best they can. It is obvious that such a
guild, consisting of bourgeois politicians, may be considered fit for
anything rather than a struggle, especially when the adversaries are not
cautious shopkeepers but the proletarian masses, goaded on to
extremities and determined not to hesitate before deeds of violence.

If we consider it the first duty of the State to serve and promote the
general welfare of the people, by preserving and encouraging the
development of the best racial elements, the logical consequence is that
this task cannot be limited to measures concerning the birth of the
infant members of the race and nation but that the State will also have
to adopt educational means for making each citizen a worthy factor in
the further propagation of the racial stock.

Just as, in general, the racial quality is the preliminary condition for
the mental efficiency of any given human material, the training of the
individual will first of all have to be directed towards the development
of sound bodily health. For the general rule is that a strong and
healthy mind is found only in a strong and healthy body. The fact that
men of genius are sometimes not robust in health and stature, or even of
a sickly constitution, is no proof against the principle I have
enunciated. These cases are only exceptions which, as everywhere else,
prove the rule. But when the bulk of a nation is composed of physical
degenerates it is rare for a great spirit to arise from such a miserable
motley. And in any case his activities would never meet with great
success. A degenerate mob will either be incapable of understanding him
at all or their will-power is so feeble that they cannot follow the
soaring of such an eagle.

The State that is grounded on the racial principle and is alive to the
significance of this truth will first of all have to base its
educational work not on the mere imparting of knowledge but rather on
physical training and development of healthy bodies. The cultivation of
the intellectual facilities comes only in the second place. And here
again it is character which has to be developed first of all, strength
of will and decision. And the educational system ought to foster the
spirit of readiness to accept responsibilities gladly. Formal
instruction in the sciences must be considered last in importance.
Accordingly the State which is grounded on the racial idea must start
with the principle that a person whose formal education in the sciences
is relatively small but who is physically sound and robust, of a
steadfast and honest character, ready and able to make decisions and
endowed with strength of will, is a more useful member of the national
community than a weakling who is scholarly and refined. A nation
composed of learned men who are physical weaklings, hesitant about
decisions of the will, and timid pacifists, is not capable of assuring
even its own existence on this earth. In the bitter struggle which
decides the destiny of man it is very rare that an individual has
succumbed because he lacked learning. Those who fail are they who try to
ignore these consequences and are too faint-hearted about putting them
into effect. There must be a certain balance between mind and body. An
ill-kept body is not made a more beautiful sight by the indwelling of a
radiant spirit. We should not be acting justly if we were to bestow the
highest intellectual training on those who are physically deformed and
crippled, who lack decision and are weak-willed and cowardly. What has
made the Greek ideal of beauty immortal is the wonderful union of a
splendid physical beauty with nobility of mind and spirit.

Moltke's saying, that in the long run fortune favours only the
efficient, is certainly valid for the relationship between body and
spirit. A mind which is sound will generally maintain its dwelling in a
body that is sound.

Accordingly, in the People's State physical training is not a matter for
the individual alone. Nor is it a duty which first devolves on the
parents and only secondly or thirdly a public interest; but it is
necessary for the preservation of the people, who are represented and
protected by the State. As regards purely formal education the State
even now interferes with the individual's right of self-determination
and insists upon the right of the community by submitting the child to
an obligatory system of training, without paying attention to the
approval or disapproval of the parents. In a similar way and to a higher
degree the new People's State will one day make its authority prevail
over the ignorance and incomprehension of individuals in problems
appertaining to the safety of the nation. It must organize its
educational work in such a way that the bodies of the young will be
systematically trained from infancy onwards, so as to be tempered and
hardened for the demands to be made on them in later years. Above all,
the State must see to it that a generation of stay-at-homes is not
developed.

The work of education and hygiene has to begin with the young mother.
The painstaking efforts carried on for several decades have succeeded in
abolishing septic infection at childbirth and reducing puerperal fever
to a relatively small number of cases. And so it ought to be possible by
means of instructing sisters and mothers in an opportune way, to
institute a system of training the child from early infancy onwards so
that this may serve as an excellent basis for future development.

The People's State ought to allow much more time for physical training
in the school. It is nonsense to burden young brains with a load of
material of which, as experience shows, they retain only a small part,
and mostly not the essentials, but only the secondary and useless
portion; because the young mind is incapable of sifting the right kind
of learning out of all the stuff that is pumped into it. To-day, even in
the curriculum of the high schools, only two short hours in the week are
reserved for gymnastics; and worse still, it is left to the pupils to
decide whether or not they want to take part. This shows a grave
disproportion between this branch of education and purely intellectual
instruction. Not a single day should be allowed to pass in which the
young pupil does not have one hour of physical training in the morning
and one in the evening; and every kind of sport and gymnastics should be
included. There is one kind of sport which should be specially
encouraged, although many people who call themselves VÖLKISCH consider
it brutal and vulgar, and that is boxing. It is incredible how many
false notions prevail among the 'cultivated' classes. The fact that the
young man learns how to fence and then spends his time in duels is
considered quite natural and respectable. But boxing--that is brutal.
Why? There is no other sport which equals this in developing the
militant spirit, none that demands such a power of rapid decision or
which gives the body the flexibility of good steel. It is no more vulgar
when two young people settle their differences with their fists than
with sharp-pointed pieces of steel. One who is attacked and defends
himself with his fists surely does not act less manly than one who runs
off and yells for the assistance of a policeman. But, above all, a
healthy youth has to learn to endure hard knocks. This principle may
appear savage to our contemporary champions who fight only with the
weapons of the intellect. But it is not the purpose of the People's
State to educate a colony of aesthetic pacifists and physical
degenerates. This State does not consider that the human ideal is to be
found in the honourable philistine or the maidenly spinster, but in a
dareful personification of manly force and in women capable of bringing
men into the world.

Generally speaking, the function of sport is not only to make the
individual strong, alert and daring, but also to harden the body and
train it to endure an adverse environment.

If our superior class had not received such a distinguished education,
and if, on the contrary, they had learned boxing, it would never have
been possible for bullies and deserters and other such CANAILLE to carry
through a German revolution. For the success of this revolution was not
due to the courageous, energetic and audacious activities of its authors
but to the lamentable cowardice and irresolution of those who ruled the
German State at that time and were responsible for it. But our educated
leaders had received only an 'intellectual' training and thus found
themselves defenceless when their adversaries used iron bars instead of
intellectual weapons. All this could happen only because our superior
scholastic system did not train men to be real men but merely to be
civil servants, engineers, technicians, chemists, litterateurs, jurists
and, finally, professors; so that intellectualism should not die out.

Our leadership in the purely intellectual sphere has always been
brilliant, but as regards will-power in practical affairs our leadership
has been beneath criticism.

Of course education cannot make a courageous man out of one who is
temperamentally a coward. But a man who naturally possesses a certain
degree of courage will not be able to develop that quality if his
defective education has made him inferior to others from the very start
as regards physical strength and prowess. The army offers the best
example of the fact that the knowledge of one's physical ability
develops a man's courage and militant spirit. Outstanding heroes are not
the rule in the army, but the average represents men of high courage.
The excellent schooling which the German soldiers received before the
War imbued the members of the whole gigantic organism with a degree of
confidence in their own superiority such as even our opponents never
thought possible. All the immortal examples of dauntless courage and
daring which the German armies gave during the late summer and autumn of
1914, as they advanced from triumph to triumph, were the result of that
education which had been pursued systematically. During those long years
of peace before the last War men who were almost physical weaklings were
made capable of incredible deeds, and thus a self-confidence was
developed which did not fail even in the most terrible battles.

It is our German people, which broke down and were delivered over to be
kicked by the rest of the world, that had need of the power that comes
by suggestion from self-confidence. But this confidence in one's self
must be instilled into our children from their very early years. The
whole system of education and training must be directed towards
fostering in the child the conviction that he is unquestionably a match
for any- and everybody. The individual has to regain his own physical
strength and prowess in order to believe in the invincibility of the
nation to which he belongs. What has formerly led the German armies to
victory was the sum total of the confidence which each individual had in
himself, and which all of them had in those who held the positions of
command. What will restore the national strength of the German people is
the conviction that they will be able to reconquer their liberty. But
this conviction can only be the final product of an equal feeling in the
millions of individuals. And here again we must have no illusions.

The collapse of our people was overwhelming, and the efforts to put an
end to so much misery must also be overwhelming. It would be a bitter
and grave error to believe that our people could be made strong again
simply by means of our present bourgeois training in good order and
obedience. That will not suffice if we are to break up the present order
of things, which now sanctions the acknowledgment of our defeat and cast
the broken chains of our slavery in the face of our opponents. Only by a
superabundance of national energy and a passionate thirst for liberty
can we recover what has been lost.

Also the manner of clothing the young should be such as harmonizes with
this purpose. It is really lamentable to see how our young people have
fallen victims to a fashion mania which perverts the meaning of the old
adage that clothes make the man.

Especially in regard to young people clothes should take their place in
the service of education. The boy who walks about in summer-time wearing
long baggy trousers and clad up to the neck is hampered even by his
clothes in feeling any inclination towards strenuous physical exercise.
Ambition and, to speak quite frankly, even vanity must be appealed to. I
do not mean such vanity as leads people to want to wear fine clothes,
which not everybody can afford, but rather the vanity which inclines a
person towards developing a fine bodily physique. And this is something
which everybody can help to do.

This will come in useful also for later years. The young girl must
become acquainted with her sweetheart. If the beauty of the body were
not completely forced into the background to-day through our stupid
manner of dressing, it would not be possible for thousands of our girls
to be led astray by Jewish mongrels, with their repulsive crooked
waddle. It is also in the interests of the nation that those who have a
beautiful physique should be brought into the foreground, so that they
might encourage the development of a beautiful bodily form among the
people in general.

Military training is excluded among us to-day, and therewith the only
institution which in peace-times at least partly made up for the lack of
physical training in our education. Therefore what I have suggested is
all the more necessary in our time. The success of our old military
training not only showed itself in the education of the individual but
also in the influence which it exercised over the mutual relationship
between the sexes. The young girl preferred the soldier to one who was
not a soldier. The People's State must not confine its control of
physical training to the official school period, but it must demand
that, after leaving school and while the adolescent body is still
developing, the boy continues this training. For on such proper physical
development success in after-life largely depends. It is stupid to think
that the right of the State to supervise the education of its young
citizens suddenly comes to an end the moment they leave school and
recommences only with military service. This right is a duty, and as
such it must continue uninterruptedly. The present State, which does not
interest itself in developing healthy men, has criminally neglected this
duty. It leaves our contemporary youth to be corrupted on the streets
and in the brothels, instead of keeping hold of the reins and continuing
the physical training of these youths up to the time when they are grown
into healthy young men and women.

For the present it is a matter of indifference what form the State
chooses for carrying on this training. The essential matter is that it
should be developed and that the most suitable ways of doing so should
be investigated. The People's State will have to consider the physical
training of the youth after the school period just as much a public duty
as their intellectual training; and this training will have to be
carried out through public institutions. Its general lines can be a
preparation for subsequent service in the army. And then it will no
longer be the task of the army to teach the young recruit the most
elementary drill regulations. In fact the army will no longer have to
deal with recruits in the present sense of the word, but it will rather
have to transform into a soldier the youth whose bodily prowess has been
already fully trained.

In the People's State the army will no longer be obliged to teach boys
how to walk and stand erect, but it will be the final and supreme school
of patriotic education. In the army the young recruit will learn the art
of bearing arms, but at the same time he will be equipped for his other
duties in later life. And the supreme aim of military education must
always be to achieve that which was attributed to the old army as its
highest merit: namely, that through his military schooling the boy must
be transformed into a man, that he must not only learn to obey but also
acquire the fundamentals that will enable him one day to command. He
must learn to remain silent not only when he is rightly rebuked but also
when he is wrongly rebuked.

Furthermore, on the self-consciousness of his own strength and on the
basis of that ESPRIT DE CORPS which inspires him and his comrades, he
must become convinced that he belongs to a people who are invincible.

After he has completed his military training two certificates shall be
handed to the soldier. The one will be his diploma as a citizen of the
State, a juridical document which will enable him to take part in public
affairs. The second will be an attestation of his physical health, which
guarantees his fitness for marriage.

The People's State will have to direct the education of girls just as
that of boys and according to the same fundamental principles. Here
again special importance must be given to physical training, and only
after that must the importance of spiritual and mental training be taken
into account. In the education of the girl the final goal always to be
kept in mind is that she is one day to be a mother.

It is only in the second place that the People's State must busy itself
with the training of character, using all the means adapted to that
purpose.

Of course the essential traits of the individual character are already
there fundamentally before any education takes place. A person who is
fundamentally egoistic will always remain fundamentally egoistic, and
the idealist will always remain fundamentally an idealist. Besides
those, however, who already possess a definite stamp of character there
are millions of people with characters that are indefinite and vague.
The born delinquent will always remain a delinquent, but numerous people
who show only a certain tendency to commit criminal acts may become
useful members of the community if rightly trained; whereas, on the
other hand, weak and unstable characters may easily become evil elements
if the system of education has been bad.

During the War it was often lamented that our people could be so little
reticent. This failing made it very difficult to keep even highly
important secrets from the knowledge of the enemy. But let us ask this
question: What did the German educational system do in pre-War times to
teach the Germans to be discreet? Did it not very often happen in
schooldays that the little tell-tale was preferred to his companions who
kept their mouths shut? Is it not true that then, as well as now,
complaining about others was considered praiseworthy 'candour', while
silent discretion was taken as obstinacy? Has any attempt ever been made
to teach that discretion is a precious and manly virtue? No, for such
matters are trifles in the eyes of our educators. But these trifles cost
our State innumerable millions in legal expenses; for 90 per cent of all
the processes for defamation and such like charges arise only from a
lack of discretion. Remarks that are made without any sense of
responsibility are thoughtlessly repeated from mouth to mouth; and our
economic welfare is continually damaged because important methods of
production are thus disclosed. Secret preparations for our national
defence are rendered illusory because our people have never learned the
duty of silence. They repeat everything they happen to hear. In times of
war such talkative habits may even cause the loss of battles and
therefore may contribute essentially to the unsuccessful outcome of a
campaign. Here, as in other matters, we may rest assured that adults
cannot do what they have not learnt to do in youth. A teacher must not
try to discover the wild tricks of the boys by encouraging the evil
practice of tale-bearing. Young people form a sort of State among
themselves and face adults with a certain solidarity. That is quite
natural. The ties which unite the ten-year boys to one another are
stronger and more natural than their relationship to adults. A boy who
tells on his comrades commits an act of treason and shows a bent of
character which is, to speak bluntly, similar to that of a man who
commits high treason. Such a boy must not be classed as 'good',
'reliable', and so on, but rather as one with undesirable traits of
character. It may be rather convenient for the teacher to make use of
such unworthy tendencies in order to help his own work, but by such an
attitude the germ of a moral habit is sown in young hearts and may one
day show fatal consequences. It has happened more often than once that a
young informer developed into a big scoundrel.

This is only one example among many. The deliberate training of fine and
noble traits of character in our schools to-day is almost negative. In
the future much more emphasis will have to be laid on this side of our
educational work. Loyalty, self-sacrifice and discretion are virtues
which a great nation must possess. And the teaching and development of
these in the school is a more important matter than many others things
now included in the curriculum. To make the children give up habits of
complaining and whining and howling when they are hurt, etc., also
belongs to this part of their training. If the educational system fails
to teach the child at an early age to endure pain and injury without
complaining we cannot be surprised if at a later age, when the boy has
grown to be the man and is, for example, in the trenches, the postal
service is used for nothing else than to send home letters of weeping
and complaint. If our youths, during their years in the primary schools,
had had their minds crammed with a little less knowledge, and if instead
they had been better taught how to be masters of themselves, it would
have served us well during the years 1914-1918.

In its educational system the People's State will have to attach the
highest importance to the development of character, hand-in-hand with
physical training. Many more defects which our national organism shows
at present could be at least ameliorated, if not completely eliminated,
by education of the right kind.

Extreme importance should be attached to the training of will-power and
the habit of making firm decisions, also the habit of being always ready
to accept responsibilities.

In the training of our old army the principle was in vogue that any
order is always better than no order. Applied to our youth this
principle ought to take the form that any answer is better than no
answer. The fear of replying, because one fears to be wrong, ought to be
considered more humiliating than giving the wrong reply. On this simple
and primitive basis our youth should be trained to have the courage to
act.

It has been often lamented that in November and December 1918 all the
authorities lost their heads and that, from the monarch down to the last
divisional commander, nobody had sufficient mettle to make a decision on
his own responsibility. That terrible fact constitutes a grave rebuke to
our educational system; because what was then revealed on a colossal
scale at that moment of catastrophe was only what happens on a smaller
scale everywhere among us. It is the lack of will-power, and not the
lack of arms, which renders us incapable of offering any serious
resistance to-day. This defect is found everywhere among our people and
prevents decisive action wherever risks have to be taken, as if any
great action can be taken without also taking the risk. Quite
unsuspectingly, a German General found a formula for this lamentable
lack of the will-to-act when he said: "I act only when I can count on a
51 per cent probability of success." In that '51 per cent probability'
we find the very root of the German collapse. The man who demands from
Fate a guarantee of his success deliberately denies the significance of
an heroic act. For this significance consists in the very fact that, in
the definite knowledge that the situation in question is fraught with
mortal danger, an action is undertaken which may lead to success. A
patient suffering from cancer and who knows that his death is certain if
he does not undergo an operation, needs no 51 per cent probability of a
cure before facing the operation. And if the operation promises only
half of one per cent probability of success a man of courage will risk
it and would not whine if it turned out unsuccessful.

All in all, the cowardly lack of will-power and the incapacity for
making decisions are chiefly results of the erroneous education given us
in our youth. The disastrous effects of this are now widespread among
us. The crowning examples of that tragic chain of consequences are shown
in the lack of civil courage which our leading statesmen display.

The cowardice which leads nowadays to the shirking of every kind of
responsibility springs from the same roots. Here again it is the fault
of the education given our young people. This drawback permeates all
sections of public life and finds its immortal consummation in the
institutions of government that function under the parliamentary regime.

Already in the school, unfortunately, more value is placed on
'confession and full repentance' and 'contrite renouncement', on the
part of little sinners, than on a simple and frank avowal. But this
latter seems to-day, in the eyes of many an educator, to savour of a
spirit of utter incorrigibility and depravation. And, though it may seem
incredible, many a boy is told that the gallows tree is waiting for him
because he has shown certain traits which might be of inestimable value
in the nation as a whole.

Just as the People's State must one day give its attention to training
the will-power and capacity for decision among the youth, so too it must
inculcate in the hearts of the young generation from early childhood
onwards a readiness to accept responsibilities, and the courage of open
and frank avowal. If it recognizes the full significance of this
necessity, finally--after a century of educative work--it will succeed
in building up a nation which will no longer be subject to those defeats
that have contributed so disastrously to bring about our present
overthrow.

The formal imparting of knowledge, which constitutes the chief work of
our educational system to-day, will be taken over by the People's State
with only few modifications. These modifications must be made in three
branches.

First of all, the brains of the young people must not generally be
burdened with subjects of which ninety-five per cent are useless to them
and are therefore forgotten again. The curriculum of the primary and
secondary schools presents an odd mixture at the present time. In many
branches of study the subject matter to be learned has become so
enormous that only a very small fraction of it can be remembered later
on, and indeed only a very small fraction of this whole mass of
knowledge can be used. On the other hand, what is learned is
insufficient for anybody who wishes to specialize in any certain branch
for the purpose of earning his daily bread. Take, for example, the
average civil servant who has passed through the GYMNASIUM or High
School, and ask him at the age of thirty or forty how much he has
retained of the knowledge that was crammed into him with so much pains.

How much is retained from all that was stuffed into his brain? He will
certainly answer: "Well, if a mass of stuff was then taught, it was not
for the sole purpose of supplying the student with a great stock of
knowledge from which he could draw in later years, but it served to
develop the understanding, the memory, and above all it helped to
strengthen the thinking powers of the brain." That is partly true. And
yet it is somewhat dangerous to submerge a young brain in a flood of
impressions which it can hardly master and the single elements of which
it cannot discern or appreciate at their just value. It is mostly the
essential part of this knowledge, and not the accidental, that is
forgotten and sacrificed. Thus the principal purpose of this copious
instruction is frustrated, for that purpose cannot be to make the brain
capable of learning by simply offering it an enormous and varied amount
of subjects for acquisition, but rather to furnish the individual with
that stock of knowledge which he will need in later life and which he
can use for the good of the community. This aim, however, is rendered
illusory if, because of the superabundance of subjects that have been
crammed into his head in childhood, a person is able to remember
nothing, or at least not the essential portion, of all this in later
life. There is no reason why millions of people should learn two or
three languages during the school years, when only a very small fraction
will have the opportunity to use these languages in later life and when
most of them will therefore forget those languages completely. To take
an instance: Out of 100,000 students who learn French there are probably
not 2,000 who will be in a position to make use of this accomplishment
in later life, while 98,000 will never have a chance to utilize in
practice what they have learned in youth. They have spent thousands of
hours on a subject which will afterwards be without any value or
importance to them. The argument that these matters form part of the
general process of educating the mind is invalid. It would be sound if
all these people were able to use this learning in after life. But, as
the situation stands, 98,000 are tortured to no purpose and waste their
valuable time, only for the sake of the 2,000 to whom the language will
be of any use.

In the case of that language which I have chosen as an example it cannot
be said that the learning of it educates the student in logical thinking
or sharpens his mental acumen, as the learning of Latin, for instance,
might be said to do. It would therefore be much better to teach young
students only the general outline, or, better, the inner structure of
such a language: that is to say, to allow them to discern the
characteristic features of the language, or perhaps to make them
acquainted with the rudiments of its grammar, its pronunciation, its
syntax, style, etc. That would be sufficient for average students,
because it would provide a clearer view of the whole and could be more
easily remembered. And it would be more practical than the present-day
attempt to cram into their heads a detailed knowledge of the whole
language, which they can never master and which they will readily
forget. If this method were adopted, then we should avoid the danger
that, out of the superabundance of matter taught, only some fragments
will remain in the memory; for the youth would then have to learn what
is worth while, and the selection between the useful and the useless
would thus have been made beforehand.

As regards the majority of students the knowledge and understanding of
the rudiments of a language would be quite sufficient for the rest of
their lives. And those who really do need this language subsequently
would thus have a foundation on which to start, should they choose to
make a more thorough study of it.

By adopting such a curriculum the necessary amount of time would be
gained for physical exercises as well as for a more intense training in
the various educational fields that have already been mentioned.

A reform of particular importance is that which ought to take place in
the present methods of teaching history. Scarcely any other people are
made to study as much of history as the Germans, and scarcely any other
people make such a bad use of their historical knowledge. If politics
means history in the making, then our way of teaching history stands
condemned by the way we have conducted our politics. But there would be
no point in bewailing the lamentable results of our political conduct
unless one is now determined to give our people a better political
education. In 99 out of 100 cases the results of our present teaching of
history are deplorable. Usually only a few dates, years of birth and
names, remain in the memory, while a knowledge of the main and clearly
defined lines of historical development is completely lacking. The
essential features which are of real significance are not taught. It is
left to the more or less bright intelligence of the individual to
discover the inner motivating urge amid the mass of dates and
chronological succession of events.

You may object as strongly as you like to this unpleasant statement. But
read with attention the speeches which our parliamentarians make during
one session alone on political problems and on questions of foreign
policy in particular. Remember that those gentlemen are, or claim to be,
the elite of the German nation and that at least a great number of them
have sat on the benches of our secondary schools and that many of them
have passed through our universities. Then you will realize how
defective the historical education of these people has been. If these
gentlemen had never studied history at all but had possessed a sound
instinct for public affairs, things would have gone better, and the
nation would have benefited greatly thereby.

The subject matter of our historical teaching must be curtailed. The
chief value of that teaching is to make the principal lines of
historical development understood. The more our historical teaching is
limited to this task, the more we may hope that it will turn out
subsequently to be of advantage to the individual and, through the
individual, to the community as a whole. For history must not be studied
merely with a view to knowing what happened in the past but as a guide
for the future, and to teach us what policy would be the best to follow
for the preservation of our own people. That is the real end; and the
teaching of history is only a means to attain this end. But here again
the means has superseded the end in our contemporary education. The goal
is completely forgotten. Do not reply that a profound study of history
demands a detailed knowledge of all these dates because otherwise we
could not fix the great lines of development. That task belongs to the
professional historians. But the average man is not a professor of
history. For him history has only one mission and that is to provide him
with such an amount of historical knowledge as is necessary in order to
enable him to form an independent opinion on the political affairs of
his own country. The man who wants to become a professor of history can
devote himself to all the details later on. Naturally he will have to
occupy himself even with the smallest details. Of course our present
teaching of history is not adequate to all this. Its scope is too vast
for the average student and too limited for the student who wishes to be
an historical expert.

Finally, it is the business of the People's State to arrange for the
writing of a world history in which the race problem will occupy a
dominant position.

To sum up: The People's State must reconstruct our system of general
instruction in such a way that it will embrace only what is essential.
Beyond this it will have to make provision for a more advanced teaching
in the various subjects for those who want to specialize in them. It
will suffice for the average individual to be acquainted with the
fundamentals of the various subjects to serve as the basis of what may
be called an all-round education. He ought to study exhaustively and in
detail only that subject in which he intends to work during the rest of
his life. A general instruction in all subjects should be obligatory,
and specialization should be left to the choice of the individual.

In this way the scholastic programme would be shortened, and thus
several school hours would be gained which could be utilized for
physical training and character training, in will-power, the capacity
for making practical judgments, decisions, etc.

The little account taken by our school training to-day, especially in
the secondary schools, of the callings that have to be followed in after
life is demonstrated by the fact that men who are destined for the same
calling in life are educated in three different kinds of schools. What
is of decisive importance is general education only and not the special
teaching. When special knowledge is needed it cannot be given in the
curriculum of our secondary schools as they stand to-day.

Therefore the People's State will one day have to abolish such
half-measures.

The second modification in the curriculum which the People's State will
have to make is the following:

It is a characteristic of our materialistic epoch that our scientific
education shows a growing emphasis on what is real and practical: such
subjects, for instance, as applied mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc.
Of course they are necessary in an age that is dominated by industrial
technology and chemistry, and where everyday life shows at least the
external manifestations of these. But it is a perilous thing to base the
general culture of a nation on the knowledge of these subjects. On the
contrary, that general culture ought always to be directed towards
ideals. It ought to be founded on the humanist disciplines and should
aim at giving only the ground work of further specialized instruction in
the various practical sciences. Otherwise we should sacrifice those
forces that are more important for the preservation of the nation than
any technical knowledge. In the historical department the study of
ancient history should not be omitted. Roman history, along general
lines, is and will remain the best teacher, not only for our own time
but also for the future. And the ideal of Hellenic culture should be
preserved for us in all its marvellous beauty. The differences between
the various peoples should not prevent us from recognizing the community
of race which unites them on a higher plane. The conflict of our times
is one that is being waged around great objectives. A civilization is
fighting for its existence. It is a civilization that is the product of
thousands of years of historical development, and the Greek as well as
the German forms part of it.

A clear-cut division must be made between general culture and the
special branches. To-day the latter threaten more and more to devote
themselves exclusively to the service of Mammon. To counterbalance this
tendency, general culture should be preserved, at least in its ideal
forms. The principle should be repeatedly emphasized, that industrial
and technical progress, trade and commerce, can flourish only so long as
a folk community exists whose general system of thought is inspired by
ideals, since that is the preliminary condition for a flourishing
development of the enterprises I have spoken of. That condition is not
created by a spirit of materialist egotism but by a spirit of
self-denial and the joy of giving one's self in the service of others.

The system of education which prevails to-day sees its principal object
in pumping into young people that knowledge which will help them to make
their way in life. This principle is expressed in the following terms:
"The young man must one day become a useful member of human society." By
that phrase they mean the ability to gain an honest daily livelihood.
The superficial training in the duties of good citizenship, which he
acquires merely as an accidental thing, has very weak foundations. For
in itself the State represents only a form, and therefore it is
difficult to train people to look upon this form as the ideal which they
will have to serve and towards which they must feel responsible. A form
can be too easily broken. But, as we have seen, the idea which people
have of the State to-day does not represent anything clearly defined.
Therefore, there is nothing but the usual stereotyped 'patriotic'
training. In the old Germany the greatest emphasis was placed on the
divine right of the small and even the smallest potentates. The way in
which this divine right was formulated and presented was never very
clever and often very stupid. Because of the large numbers of those
small potentates, it was impossible to give adequate biographical
accounts of the really great personalities that shed their lustre on the
history of the German people. The result was that the broad masses
received a very inadequate knowledge of German history. Here, too, the
great lines of development were missing.

It is evident that in such a way no real national enthusiasm could be
aroused. Our educational system proved incapable of selecting from the
general mass of our historical personages the names of a few
personalities which the German people could be proud to look upon as
their own. Thus the whole nation might have been united by the ties of a
common knowledge of this common heritage. The really important figures
in German history were not presented to the present generation. The
attention of the whole nation was not concentrated on them for the
purpose of awakening a common national spirit. From the various subjects
that were taught, those who had charge of our training seemed incapable
of selecting what redounded most to the national honour and lifting that
above the common objective level, in order to inflame the national pride
in the light of such brilliant examples. At that time such a course
would have been looked upon as rank chauvinism, which did not then have
a very pleasant savour. Pettifogging dynastic patriotism was more
acceptable and more easily tolerated than the glowing fire of a supreme
national pride. The former could be always pressed into service, whereas
the latter might one day become a dominating force. Monarchist
patriotism terminated in Associations of Veterans, whereas passionate
national patriotism might have opened a road which would be difficult to
determine. This national passion is like a highly tempered thoroughbred
who is discriminate about the sort of rider he will tolerate in the
saddle. No wonder that most people preferred to shirk such a danger.
Nobody seemed to think it possible that one day a war might come which
would put the mettle of this kind of patriotism to the test, in
artillery bombardment and waves of attacks with poison gas. But when it
did come our lack of this patriotic passion was avenged in a terrible
way. None were very enthusiastic about dying for their imperial and
royal sovereigns; while on the other hand the 'Nation' was not
recognized by the greater number of the soldiers.

Since the revolution broke out in Germany and the monarchist patriotism
was therefore extinguished, the purpose of teaching history was nothing
more than to add to the stock of objective knowledge. The present State
has no use for patriotic enthusiasm; but it will never obtain what it
really desires. For if dynastic patriotism failed to produce a supreme
power of resistance at a time when the principle of nationalism
dominated, it will be still less possible to arouse republican
enthusiasm. There can be no doubt that the German people would not have
stood on the field of battle for four and a half years to fight under
the battle slogan 'For the Republic,' and least of all those who created
this grand institution.

In reality this Republic has been allowed to exist undisturbed only by
grace of its readiness and its promise to all and sundry, to pay tribute
and reparations to the stranger and to put its signature to any kind of
territorial renunciation. The rest of the world finds it sympathetic,
just as a weakling is always more pleasing to those who want to bend him
to their own uses than is a man who is made of harder metal. But the
fact that the enemy likes this form of government is the worst kind of
condemnation. They love the German Republic and tolerate its existence
because no better instrument could be found which would help them to
keep our people in slavery. It is to this fact alone that this
magnanimous institution owes its survival. And that is why it can
renounce any REAL system of national education and can feel satisfied
when the heroes of the REICH banner shout their hurrahs, but in reality
these same heroes would scamper away like rabbits if called upon to
defend that banner with their blood.

The People's State will have to fight for its existence. It will not
gain or secure this existence by signing documents like that of the
Dawes Plan. But for its existence and defence it will need precisely
those things which our present system believes can be repudiated. The
more worthy its form and its inner national being. the greater will be
the envy and opposition of its adversaries. The best defence will not be
in the arms it possesses but in its citizens. Bastions of fortresses
will not save it, but the living wall of its men and women, filled with
an ardent love for their country and a passionate spirit of national
patriotism.

Therefore the third point which will have to be considered in relation
to our educational system is the following:

The People's State must realize that the sciences may also be made a
means of promoting a spirit of pride in the nation. Not only the history
of the world but the history of civilization as a whole must be taught
in the light of this principle. An inventor must appear great not only
as an inventor but also, and even more so, as a member of the nation.
The admiration aroused by the contemplation of a great achievement must
be transformed into a feeling of pride and satisfaction that a man of
one's own race has been chosen to accomplish it. But out of the
abundance of great names in German history the greatest will have to be
selected and presented to our young generation in such a way as to
become solid pillars of strength to support the national spirit.

The subject matter ought to be systematically organized from the
standpoint of this principle. And the teaching should be so orientated
that the boy or girl, after leaving school, will not be a semi-pacifist,
a democrat or of something else of that kind, but a whole-hearted
German. So that this national feeling be sincere from the very
beginning, and not a mere pretence, the following fundamental and
inflexible principle should be impressed on the young brain while it is
yet malleable: The man who loves his nation can prove the sincerity of
this sentiment only by being ready to make sacrifices for the nation's
welfare. There is no such thing as a national sentiment which is
directed towards personal interests. And there is no such thing as a
nationalism that embraces only certain classes. Hurrahing proves nothing
and does not confer the right to call oneself national if behind that
shout there is no sincere preoccupation for the conservation of the
nation's well-being. One can be proud of one's people only if there is
no class left of which one need to be ashamed. When one half of a nation
is sunk in misery and worn out by hard distress, or even depraved or
degenerate, that nation presents such an unattractive picture that
nobody can feel proud to belong to it. It is only when a nation is sound
in all its members, physically and morally, that the joy of belonging to
it can properly be intensified to the supreme feeling which we call
national pride. But this pride, in its highest form, can be felt only by
those who know the greatness of their nation.

The spirit of nationalism and a feeling for social justice must be fused
into one sentiment in the hearts of the youth. Then a day will come when
a nation of citizens will arise which will be welded together through a
common love and a common pride that shall be invincible and
indestructible for ever.

The dread of chauvinism, which is a symptom of our time, is a sign of
its impotence. Since our epoch not only lacks everything in the nature
of exuberant energy but even finds such a manifestation disagreeable,
fate will never elect it for the accomplishment of any great deeds. For
the greatest changes that have taken place on this earth would have been
inconceivable if they had not been inspired by ardent and even
hysterical passions, but only by the bourgeois virtues of peacefulness
and order.

One thing is certain: our world is facing a great revolution. The only
question is whether the outcome will be propitious for the Aryan portion
of mankind or whether the everlasting Jew will profit by it.

By educating the young generation along the right lines, the People's
State will have to see to it that a generation of mankind is formed
which will be adequate to this supreme combat that will decide the
destinies of the world.

That nation will conquer which will be the first to take this road.

The whole organization of education and training which the People's
State is to build up must take as its crowning task the work of
instilling into the hearts and brains of the youth entrusted to it the
racial instinct and understanding of the racial idea. No boy or girl
must leave school without having attained a clear insight into the
meaning of racial purity and the importance of maintaining the racial
blood unadulterated. Thus the first indispensable condition for the
preservation of our race will have been established and thus the future
cultural progress of our people will be assured.

For in the last analysis all physical and mental training would be in
vain unless it served an entity which is ready and determined to carry
on its own existence and maintain its own characteristic qualities.

If it were otherwise, something would result which we Germans have cause
to regret already, without perhaps having hitherto recognized the extent
of the tragic calamity. We should be doomed to remain also in the future
only manure for civilization. And that not in the banal sense of the
contemporary bourgeois mind, which sees in a lost fellow member of our
people only a lost citizen, but in a sense which we should have
painfully to recognize: namely, that our racial blood would be destined
to disappear. By continually mixing with other races we might lift them
from their former lower level of civilization to a higher grade; but we
ourselves should descend for ever from the heights we had reached.

Finally, from the racial standpoint this training also must find its
culmination in the military service. The term of military service is to
be a final stage of the normal training which the average German
receives.

While the People's State attaches the greatest importance to physical
and mental training, it has also to consider, and no less importantly,
the task of selecting men for the service of the State itself. This
important matter is passed over lightly at the present time. Generally
the children of parents who are for the time being in higher situations
are in their turn considered worthy of a higher education. Here talent
plays a subordinate part. But talent can be estimated only relatively.
Though in general culture he may be inferior to the city child, a
peasant boy may be more talented than the son of a family that has
occupied high positions through many generations. But the superior
culture of the city child has in itself nothing to do with a greater or
lesser degree of talent; for this culture has its roots in the more
copious mass of impressions which arise from the more varied education
and the surroundings among which this child lives. If the intelligent
son of peasant parents were educated from childhood in similar
surroundings his intellectual accomplishments would be quite otherwise.
In our day there is only one sphere where the family in which a person
has been born means less than his innate gifts. That is the sphere of
art. Here, where a person cannot just 'learn,' but must have innate
gifts that later on may undergo a more or less happy development (in the
sense of a wise development of what is already there), money and
parental property are of no account. This is a good proof that genius is
not necessarily connected with the higher social strata or with wealth.
Not rarely the greatest artists come from poor families. And many a boy
from the country village has eventually become a celebrated master.

It does not say much for the mental acumen of our time that advantage is
not taken of this truth for the sake of our whole intellectual life. The
opinion is advanced that this principle, though undoubtedly valid in the
field of art, has not the same validity in regard to what are called the
applied sciences. It is true that a man can be trained to a certain
amount of mechanical dexterity, just as a poodle can be taught
incredible tricks by a clever master. But such training does not bring
the animal to use his intelligence in order to carry out those tricks.
And the same holds good in regard to man. It is possible to teach men,
irrespective of talent or no talent, to go through certain scientific
exercises, but in such cases the results are quite as inanimate and
mechanical as in the case of the animal. It would even be possible to
force a person of mediocre intelligence, by means of a severe course of
intellectual drilling, to acquire more than the average amount of
knowledge; but that knowledge would remain sterile. The result would be
a man who might be a walking dictionary of knowledge but who will fail
miserably on every critical occasion in life and at every juncture where
vital decisions have to be taken. Such people need to be drilled
specially for every new and even most insignificant task and will never
be capable of contributing in the least to the general progress of
mankind. Knowledge that is merely drilled into people can at best
qualify them to fill government positions under our present regime.

It goes without saying that, among the sum total of individuals who make
up a nation, gifted people are always to be found in every sphere of
life. It is also quite natural that the value of knowledge will be all
the greater the more vitally the dead mass of learning is animated by
the innate talent of the individual who possesses it. Creative work in
this field can be done only through the marriage of knowledge and
talent.

One example will suffice to show how much our contemporary world is at
fault in this matter. From time to time our illustrated papers publish,
for the edification of the German philistine, the news that in some
quarter or other of the globe, and for the first time in that locality,
a Negro has become a lawyer, a teacher, a pastor, even a grand opera
tenor or something else of that kind. While the bourgeois blockhead
stares with amazed admiration at the notice that tells him how
marvellous are the achievements of our modern educational technique, the
more cunning Jew sees in this fact a new proof to be utilized for the
theory with which he wants to infect the public, namely that all men are
equal. It does not dawn on the murky bourgeois mind that the fact which
is published for him is a sin against reason itself, that it is an act
of criminal insanity to train a being who is only an anthropoid by birth
until the pretence can be made that he has been turned into a lawyer;
while, on the other hand, millions who belong to the most civilized
races have to remain in positions which are unworthy of their cultural
level. The bourgeois mind does not realize that it is a sin against the
will of the eternal Creator to allow hundreds of thousands of highly
gifted people to remain floundering in the swamp of proletarian misery
while Hottentots and Zulus are drilled to fill positions in the
intellectual professions. For here we have the product only of a
drilling technique, just as in the case of the performing dog. If the
same amount of care and effort were applied among intelligent races each
individual would become a thousand times more capable in such matters.

This state of affairs would become intolerable if a day should arrive
when it no longer refers to exceptional cases. But the situation is
already intolerable where talent and natural gifts are not taken as
decisive factors in qualifying for the right to a higher education. It
is indeed intolerable to think that year after year hundreds of
thousands of young people without a single vestige of talent are deemed
worthy of a higher education, while other hundreds of thousands who
possess high natural gifts have to go without any sort of higher
schooling at all. The practical loss thus caused to the nation is
incalculable. If the number of important discoveries which have been
made in America has grown considerably in recent years one of the
reasons is that the number of gifted persons belonging to the lowest
social classes who were given a higher education in that country is
proportionately much larger than in Europe.

A stock of knowledge packed into the brain will not suffice for the
making of discoveries. What counts here is only that knowledge which is
illuminated by natural talent. But with us at the present time no value
is placed on such gifts. Only good school reports count.

Here is another educative work that is waiting for the People's State to
do. It will not be its task to assure a dominant influence to a certain
social class already existing, but it will be its duty to attract the
most competent brains in the total mass of the nation and promote them
to place and honour. It is not merely the duty of the State to give to
the average child a certain definite education in the primary school,
but it is also its duty to open the road to talent in the proper
direction. And above all, it must open the doors of the higher schools
under the State to talent of every sort, no matter in what social class
it may appear. This is an imperative necessity; for thus alone will it
be possible to develop a talented body of public leaders from the class
which represents learning that in itself is only a dead mass.

There is still another reason why the State should provide for this
situation. Our intellectual class, particularly in Germany, is so shut
up in itself and fossilized that it lacks living contact with the
classes beneath it. Two evil consequences result from this: First, the
intellectual class neither understands nor sympathizes with the broad
masses. It has been so long cut off from all connection with them that
it cannot now have the necessary psychological ties that would enable it
to understand them. It has become estranged from the people. Secondly,
the intellectual class lacks the necessary will-power; for this faculty
is always weaker in cultivated circles, which live in seclusion, than
among the primitive masses of the people. God knows we Germans have
never been lacking in abundant scientific culture, but we have always
had a considerable lack of will-power and the capacity for making
decisions. For example, the more 'intellectual' our statesmen have been
the more lacking they have been, for the most part, in practical
achievement. Our political preparation and our technical equipment for
the world war were defective, certainly not because the brains governing
the nation were too little educated, but because the men who directed
our public affairs were over-educated, filled to over-flowing with
knowledge and intelligence, yet without any sound instinct and simply
without energy, or any spirit of daring. It was our nation's tragedy to
have to fight for its existence under a Chancellor who was a
dillydallying philosopher. If instead of a Bethmann von Hollweg we had
had a rough man of the people as our leader the heroic blood of the
common grenadier would not have been shed in vain. The exaggeratedly
intellectual material out of which our leaders were made proved to be
the best ally of the scoundrels who carried out the November revolution.
These intellectuals safeguarded the national wealth in a miserly
fashion, instead of launching it forth and risking it, and thus they set
the conditions on which the others won success.

Here the Catholic Church presents an instructive example. Clerical
celibacy forces the Church to recruit its priests not from their own
ranks but progressively from the masses of the people. Yet there are not
many who recognize the significance of celibacy in this relation. But
therein lies the cause of the inexhaustible vigour which characterizes
that ancient institution. For by thus unceasingly recruiting the
ecclesiastical dignitaries from the lower classes of the people, the
Church is enabled not only to maintain the contact of instinctive
understanding with the masses of the population but also to assure
itself of always being able to draw upon that fund of energy which is
present in this form only among the popular masses. Hence the surprising
youthfulness of that gigantic organism, its mental flexibility and its
iron will-power.

It will be the task of the Peoples' State so to organize and administer
its educational system that the existing intellectual class will be
constantly furnished with a supply of fresh blood from beneath. From the
bulk of the nation the State must sift out with careful scrutiny those
persons who are endowed with natural talents and see that they are
employed in the service of the community. For neither the State itself
nor the various departments of State exist to furnish revenues for
members of a special class, but to fulfil the tasks allotted to them.
This will be possible, however, only if the State trains individuals
specially for these offices. Such individuals must have the necessary
fundamental capabilities and will-power. The principle does not hold
true only in regard to the civil service but also in regard to all those
who are to take part in the intellectual and moral leadership of the
people, no matter in what sphere they may be employed. The greatness of
a people is partly dependent on the condition that it must succeed in
training the best brains for those branches of the public service for
which they show a special natural aptitude and in placing them in the
offices where they can do their best work for the good of the community.
If two nations of equal strength and quality engage in a mutual conflict
that nation will come out victorious which has entrusted its
intellectual and moral leadership to its best talents and that nation
will go under whose government represents only a common food trough for
privileged groups or classes and where the inner talents of its
individual members are not availed of.

Of course such a reform seems impossible in the world as it is to-day.
The objection will at once be raised, that it is too much to expect from
the favourite son of a highly-placed civil servant, for instance, that
he shall work with his hands simply because somebody else whose parents
belong to the working-class seems more capable for a job in the civil
service. That argument may be valid as long as manual work is looked
upon in the same way as it is looked upon to-day. Hence the Peoples'
State will have to take up an attitude towards the appreciation of
manual labour which will be fundamentally different from that which now
exists. If necessary, it will have to organize a persistent system of
teaching which will aim at abolishing the present-day stupid habit of
looking down on physical labour as an occupation to be ashamed of.

The individual will have to be valued, not by the class of work he does
but by the way in which he does it and by its usefulness to the
community. This statement may sound monstrous in an epoch when the most
brainless columnist on a newspaper staff is more esteemed than the most
expert mechanic, merely because the former pushes a pen. But, as I have
said, this false valuation does not correspond to the nature of things.
It has been artificially introduced, and there was a time when it did
not exist at all. The present unnatural state of affairs is one of those
general morbid phenomena that have arisen from our materialistic epoch.
Fundamentally every kind of work has a double value; the one material,
the other ideal. The material value depends on the practical importance
of the work to the life of the community. The greater the number of the
population who benefit from the work, directly or indirectly, the higher
will be its material value. This evaluation is expressed in the material
recompense which the individual receives for his labour. In
contradistinction to this purely material value there is the ideal
value. Here the work performed is not judged by its material importance
but by the degree to which it answers a necessity. Certainly the
material utility of an invention may be greater than that of the service
rendered by an everyday workman; but it is also certain that the
community needs each of those small daily services just as much as the
greater services. From the material point of view a distinction can be
made in the evaluation of different kinds of work according to their
utility to the community, and this distinction is expressed by the
differentiation in the scale of recompense; but on the ideal or abstract
plans all workmen become equal the moment each strives to do his best in
his own field, no matter what that field may be. It is on this that a
man's value must be estimated, and not on the amount of recompense
received.

In a reasonably directed State care must be taken that each individual
is given the kind of work which corresponds to his capabilities. In
other words, people will be trained for the positions indicated by their
natural endowments; but these endowments or faculties are innate and
cannot be acquired by any amount of training, being a gift from Nature
and not merited by men. Therefore, the way in which men are generally
esteemed by their fellow-citizens must not be according to the kind of
work they do, because that has been more or less assigned to the
individual. Seeing that the kind of work in which the individual is
employed is to be accounted to his inborn gifts and the resultant
training which he has received from the community, he will have to be
judged by the way in which he performs this work entrusted to him by the
community. For the work which the individual performs is not the purpose
of his existence, but only a means. His real purpose in life is to
better himself and raise himself to a higher level as a human being; but
this he can only do in and through the community whose cultural life he
shares. And this community must always exist on the foundations on which
the State is based. He ought to contribute to the conservation of those
foundations. Nature determines the form of this contribution. It is the
duty of the individual to return to the community, zealously and
honestly, what the community has given him. He who does this deserves
the highest respect and esteem. Material remuneration may be given to
him whose work has a corresponding utility for the community; but the
ideal recompense must lie in the esteem to which everybody has a claim
who serves his people with whatever powers Nature has bestowed upon him
and which have been developed by the training he has received from the
national community. Then it will no longer be dishonourable to be an
honest craftsman; but it will be a cause of disgrace to be an
inefficient State official, wasting God's day and filching daily bread
from an honest public. Then it will be looked upon as quite natural that
positions should not be given to persons who of their very nature are
incapable of filling them.

Furthermore, this personal efficiency will be the sole criterion of the
right to take part on an equal juridical footing in general civil
affairs.

The present epoch is working out its own ruin. It introduces universal
suffrage, chatters about equal rights but can find no foundation for
this equality. It considers the material wage as the expression of a
man's value and thus destroys the basis of the noblest kind of equality
that can exist. For equality cannot and does not depend on the work a
man does, but only on the manner in which each one does the particular
work allotted to him. Thus alone will mere natural chance be set aside
in determining the work of a man and thus only does the individual
become the artificer of his own social worth.

At the present time, when whole groups of people estimate each other's
value only by the size of the salaries which they respectively receive,
there will be no understanding of all this. But that is no reason why we
should cease to champion those ideas. Quite the opposite: in an epoch
which is inwardly diseased and decaying anyone who would heal it must
have the courage first to lay bare the real roots of the disease. And
the National Socialist Movement must take that duty on its shoulders. It
will have to lift its voice above the heads of the small bourgeoisie and
rally together and co-ordinate all those popular forces which are ready
to become the protagonists of a new WELTANSCHAUUNG.



Of course the objection will be made that in general it is difficult to
differentiate between the material and ideal values of work and that the
lower prestige which is attached to physical labour is due to the fact
that smaller wages are paid for that kind of work. It will be said that
the lower wage is in its turn the reason why the manual worker has less
chance to participate in the culture of the nation; so that the ideal
side of human culture is less open to him because it has nothing to do
with his daily activities. It may be added that the reluctance to do
physical work is justified by the fact that, on account of the small
income, the cultural level of manual labourers must naturally be low,
and that this in turn is a justification for the lower estimation in
which manual labour is generally held.

There is quite a good deal of truth in all this. But that is the very
reason why we ought to see that in the future there should not be such a
wide difference in the scale of remuneration. Don't say that under such
conditions poorer work would be done. It would be the saddest symptom of
decadence if finer intellectual work could be obtained only through the
stimulus of higher payment. If that point of view had ruled the world up
to now humanity would never have acquired its greatest scientific and
cultural heritage. For all the greatest inventions, the greatest
discoveries, the most profoundly revolutionary scientific work, and the
most magnificent monuments of human culture, were never given to the
world under the impulse or compulsion of money. Quite the contrary: not
rarely was their origin associated with a renunciation of the worldly
pleasures that wealth can purchase.

It may be that money has become the one power that governs life to-day.
Yet a time will come when men will again bow to higher gods. Much that
we have to-day owes its existence to the desire for money and property;
but there is very little among all this which would leave the world
poorer by its lack.

It is also one of the aims before our movement to hold out the prospect
of a time when the individual will be given what he needs for the
purposes of his life and it will be a time in which, on the other hand,
the principle will be upheld that man does not live for material
enjoyment alone. This principle will find expression in a wiser scale of
wages and salaries which will enable everyone, including the humblest
workman who fulfils his duties conscientiously, to live an honourable
and decent life both as a man and as a citizen. Let it not be said that
this is merely a visionary ideal, that this world would never tolerate
it in practice and that of itself it is impossible to attain.

Even we are not so simple as to believe that there will ever be an age
in which there will be no drawbacks. But that does not release us from
the obligation to fight for the removal of the defects which we have
recognized, to overcome the shortcomings and to strive towards the
ideal. In any case the hard reality of the facts to be faced will always
place only too many limits to our aspirations. But that is precisely why
man must strive again and again to serve the ultimate aim and no
failures must induce him to renounce his intentions, just as we cannot
spurn the sway of justice because mistakes creep into the administration
of the law, and just as we cannot despise medical science because, in
spite of it, there will always be diseases.

Man should take care not to have too low an estimate of the power of an
ideal. If there are some who may feel disheartened over the present
conditions, and if they happen to have served as soldiers, I would
remind them of the time when their heroism was the most convincing
example of the power inherent in ideal motives. It was not preoccupation
about their daily bread that led men to sacrifice their lives, but the
love of their country, the faith which they had in its greatness, and an
all round feeling for the honour of the nation. Only after the German
people had become estranged from these ideals, to follow the material
promises offered by the Revolution, only after they threw away their
arms to take up the rucksack, only then--instead of entering an earthly
paradise--did they sink into the purgatory of universal contempt and at
the same time universal want.

That is why we must face the calculators of the materialist Republic
with faith in an idealist REICH.




CHAPTER III



CITIZENS AND SUBJECTS OF THE STATE


The institution that is now erroneously called the State generally
classifies people only into two groups: citizens and aliens. Citizens
are all those who possess full civic rights, either by reason of their
birth or by an act of naturalization. Aliens are those who enjoy the
same rights in some other State. Between these two categories there are
certain beings who resemble a sort of meteoric phenomena. They are
people who have no citizenship in any State and consequently no civic
rights anywhere.

In most cases nowadays a person acquires civic rights by being born
within the frontiers of a State. The race or nationality to which he may
belong plays no role whatsoever. The child of a Negro who once lived in
one of the German protectorates and now takes up his residence in
Germany automatically becomes a 'German Citizen' in the eyes of the
world. In the same way the child of any Jew, Pole, African or Asian may
automatically become a German Citizen.

Besides naturalization that is acquired through the fact of having been
born within the confines of a State there exists another kind of
naturalization which can be acquired later. This process is subject to
various preliminary requirements. For example one condition is that, if
possible, the applicant must not be a burglar or a common street thug.
It is required of him that his political attitude is not such as to give
cause for uneasiness; in other words he must be a harmless simpleton in
politics. It is required that he shall not be a burden to the State of
which he wishes to become a citizen. In this realistic epoch of ours
this last condition naturally only means that he must not be a financial
burden. If the affairs of the candidate are such that it appears likely
he will turn out to be a good taxpayer, that is a very important
consideration and will help him to obtain civic rights all the more
rapidly.

The question of race plays no part at all.

The whole process of acquiring civic rights is not very different from
that of being admitted to membership of an automobile club, for
instance. A person files his application. It is examined. It is
sanctioned. And one day the man receives a card which informs him that
he has become a citizen. The information is given in an amusing way. An
applicant who has hitherto been a Zulu or Kaffir is told: "By these
presents you are now become a German Citizen."

The President of the State can perform this piece of magic. What God
Himself could not do is achieved by some Theophrastus Paracelsus (Note 16)
of a civil servant through a mere twirl of the hand. Nothing but a stroke
of the pen, and a Mongolian slave is forthwith turned into a real
German. Not only is no question asked regarding the race to which the
new citizen belongs; even the matter of his physical health is not
inquired into. His flesh may be corrupted with syphilis; but he will
still be welcome in the State as it exists to-day so long as he may not
become a financial burden or a political danger.

[Note 16. The last and most famous of the medieval alchemists. He was born
at Basleabout the year 1490 and died at Salzburg in 1541. He taught that
all metals could be transmuted through the action of one primary element
common to them all. This element he called ALCAHEST. If it could be found
it would proveto be at once the philosopher's stone, the universal
medicine and their resistible solvent. There are many aspects of his
teaching which are now looked upon as by no means so fantastic as they
were considered in his own time.]

In this way, year after year, those organisms which we call States take
up poisonous matter which they can hardly ever overcome.

Another point of distinction between a citizen and an alien is that the
former is admitted to all public offices, that he may possibly have to
do military service and that in return he is permitted to take a passive
or active part at public elections. Those are his chief privileges. For
in regard to personal rights and personal liberty the alien enjoys the
same amount of protection as the citizen, and frequently even more.
Anyhow that is how it happens in our present German Republic.

I realize fully that nobody likes to hear these things. But it would be
difficult to find anything more illogical or more insane than our
contemporary laws in regard to State citizenship.

At present there exists one State which manifests at least some modest
attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done
in this matter. It is not, however, in our model German Republic but in
the U.S.A. that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the
counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they
are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the
right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce
principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People's
State.

The People's State will classify its population in three groups:
Citizens, subjects of the State, and aliens.

The principle is that birth within the confines of the State gives only
the status of a subject. It does not carry with it the right to fill any
position under the State or to participate in political life, such as
taking an active or passive part in elections. Another principle is that
the race and nationality of every subject of the State will have to be
proved. A subject is at any time free to cease being a subject and to
become a citizen of that country to which he belongs in virtue of his
nationality. The only difference between an alien and a subject of the
State is that the former is a citizen of another country.

The young boy or girl who is of German nationality and is a subject of
the German State is bound to complete the period of school education
which is obligatory for every German. Thereby he submits to the system
of training which will make him conscious of his race and a member of
the folk-community. Then he has to fulfil all those requirements laid
down by the State in regard to physical training after he has left
school; and finally he enters the army. The training in the army is of a
general kind. It must be given to each individual German and will render
him competent to fulfil the physical and mental requirements of military
service. The rights of citizenship shall be conferred on every young man
whose health and character have been certified as good, after having
completed his period of military service. This act of inauguration in
citizenship shall be a solemn ceremony. And the diploma conferring the
rights of citizenship will be preserved by the young man as the most
precious testimonial of his whole life. It entitles him to exercise all
the rights of a citizen and to enjoy all the privileges attached
thereto. For the State must draw a sharp line of distinction between
those who, as members of the nation, are the foundation and the support
of its existence and greatness, and those who are domiciled in the State
simply as earners of their livelihood there.

On the occasion of conferring a diploma of citizenship the new citizen
must take a solemn oath of loyalty to the national community and the
State. This diploma must be a bond which unites together all the various
classes and sections of the nation. It shall be a greater honour to be a
citizen of this REICH, even as a street-sweeper, than to be the King of
a foreign State.

The citizen has privileges which are not accorded to the alien. He is
the master in the REICH. But this high honour has also its obligations.
Those who show themselves without personal honour or character, or
common criminals, or traitors to the fatherland, can at any time be
deprived of the rights of citizenship. Therewith they become merely
subjects of the State.

The German girl is a subject of the State but will become a citizen when
she marries. At the same time those women who earn their livelihood
independently have the right to acquire citizenship if they are German
subjects.




CHAPTER IV



PERSONALITY AND THE IDEAL OF THE PEOPLE'S STATE