Mein Kampf (Stackpole Sons)/Volume 1/Chapter 3
3. General Political Considerations of My Vienna Period
I am convinced today that in general, making exception for persons of extraordinary talent, a man should not be publicly active in politics before his thirtieth year. He should not do so because up to this time he has usually been building a general platform, from which he can examine the various political problems and definitely determine his own attitude to them. Only after he has thus gained a fundamental world-concept, and so has stabilized his own way of looking at the individual questions of the day, should the man, now at least inwardly mature, be allowed to take part in the political guidance of the community.
Otherwise he is in danger some day of having either to change his previous attitude in fundamental questions, or, contrary to his better knowledge and insight, to cling to a view which his understanding and convictions have long since rejected. The first alternative is very painful to him personally, since, being himself undecided, he can no longer rightfully expect his adherents’ faith in him to have the old unshakable solidity; but to his followers such an about-face of their leader means complete confusion in addition to their feeling a certain shamefacedness toward those they have previously attacked. The second alternative brings about a result which is particularly common today: the less the leader continues to believe in what he says, the more hollow and superficial grows his defense, and the viler his choice of means. Then he no longer dreams of working seriously for his political revelations (no one dies for something he does not himself believe in), and his demands upon his followers grow proportionately greater and more impudent, until at last he sacrifices his remaining fragment of leadership, to end up as a “politician.” He has joined the class of persons whose only real conviction is absence of conviction, coupled with insolent obtrusiveness and an often shamelessly developed virtuosity at lying.
If, unluckily for decent people, such a fellow goes so far as to get into parliament, we should realize from the beginning that for him the essence of politics consists only in a heroic battle for permanent possession of this nursing-bottle for his life and his family. The more wife and child cling to him, the more stubbornly he will fight for his seat. If only for this reason he is the personal enemy of every other man with political instincts; in every new movement he scents the possible beginning of his end, and in every greater man a danger which may probably threaten him. I shall have much to say later about this sort of parliamentary vermin.
Even the man of thirty will yet have much to learn in the course of his life, but what he learns will merely fill out and complete the picture which his fundamental world-concept presents to him. His learning will not be merely re-learning of principles, but learning more, and his followers will not have to choke down the uneasy feeling that hitherto he has instructed them falsely. On the contrary the visible organic growth of the leader will give them satisfaction, since his learning seems only the deepening of their own doctrine. In their eyes this is an argument for the rightness of their previous views.
A leader who has to abandon the platform of his general world-concept because he sees it is false acts honorably only if, realizing his previously faulty understanding, he is ready to draw the final conclusions. He must then give up any further public political activity. For since he has already once fallen victim to error in fundamentals, the possibility of a second lapse is always present. In no case has he any further right to assume, let alone to demand, the confidence of his fellow-citizens.
How little such ideas of honor are put in practice today we can judge from the general depravity of the mob who feel called upon in these days to “do” politics.
Many feel called, but scarcely one is truly chosen.
I used to avoid making any sort of public appearances, although I believe I concerned myself more with politics than many others. Only in the smallest groups did I talk about what inwardly moved or attracted me. This talking at close quarters did me a great deal of good: I probably learned less about “speaking,” but I came to know people as revealed in their often infinitely primitive views and objections. In doing so, I trained myself, wasting no time or opportunity for my own further education. There was surely nowhere in Germany any such favorable opportunity as in Vienna at that time.
General political thinking in the old Danube monarchy was, judging by its extent, larger and more inclusive than in the old Germany of that period—excepting parts of Prussia, Hamburg, and the coast of the North Sea. In the present instance I mean by Austria that part of the great Hapsburg Empire which, being settled by Germans, was in every respect the cause of that state’s creation; and whose population alone had the strength to give cultural life for centuries to the nation, politically so artificial. The longer time marched on, the more the existence and future of that state depended on the preservation of this germ cell of the Empire.
If the old Patrimonial Dominions were the heart of the Empire, forever sending fresh blood into the circulation of state and cultural life, Vienna was brain and will together.
From its mere outward show alone you would have credited this city with the strength to rule as sole queen over a conglomeration of peoples, and by her own splendid beauty causing the grave signs of the whole’s senility to be forgotten.
No matter how the interior of the Empire was convulsed by the bloody turmoil of individual nationalities, the world outside, and Germany in particular, saw only the charming image of this city. The illusion was the more receptive because at this time Vienna seemed to be taking perhaps its last and greatest visible rise. Under the rule of a mayor who was a true genius the august Residence of the Kaisers of the old Empire awaked once more to a wondrous new life. The last great German born to the colonist people of the Ostmark was not officially counted among the so-called “statesmen”; but as Mayor of the “Capital City and Imperial Residence” of Vienna Dr. Lueger, by pulling out of a hat one unheard-of achievement after another in (we can safely say) every field of communal, economic and cultural policy, strengthened the heart of the entire Empire, and by this roundabout route became a greater statesman than all the so-called “diplomats” of the time together.
The fact that the collection of races called “Austria” went to its doom casts not the slightest discredit upon the political ability of Germans in the old Ostmark; it was the inevitable result of the impossibility of maintaining a State of fifty million persons of various nations with ten million people for any length of time, unless certain definite principles were provided before it was too late.
The German-Austrian was more than broad in his thinking. He had always been accustomed to living within the frame of a great Empire, and had never lost his feeling for the tasks this involved. He was the only one in this state who could still see the frontier of the Empire beyond the frontier of his own smaller kingdom; more, when at last Fate parted him from the common Fatherland, he still tried to master the vast task, and to preserve for Germany what his fathers in endless battles had once wrung from the East. Besides, we must not forget that this could happen even with divided strength, for the best men’s hearts and memories never ceased to feel for the common mother country, and only a fragment was left for the homeland.
Even the general outlook of the German-Austrian was comparatively broad. Frequently his economic connections embraced almost the entire manifold Empire. Almost all the really great enterprises were in his hands; he furnished the majority of the managing personnel—technicians and officials. And he conducted the foreign trade in so far as Jewry had not laid hands upon this specially characteristic domain. Politically he alone still held the State together. Even his military service now flung him far beyond the narrow limits of his homeland. The German-Austrian recruit might join a German regiment, but the regiment itself was as likely to be stationed in Herzegovina as in Vienna or Galicia. The officers were still Germans, and the higher civil servants predominantly so. And finally, art and science were German. Aside from the trash of more recent art, which, after all could be easily done by a race of negroes, the Germans alone possessed and propagated a true feeling for art. In music, architecture, sculpture and painting Vienna was the fountain head whose inexhaustible wealth supplied the whole Dual Monarchy, without itself apparently ever running low.
Germans, finally, were the pillar of all foreign policy, if we except a numerically small body of Hungarians.
Nevertheless every attempt to preserve the Empire was futile, since the most essential prerequisite was lacking.
For the Austrian state of peoples there was only one possible way of overcoming the centrifugal forces of the individual nations. The state had to be centrally governed, and organized internally for that purpose, or it would be no more.
At occasional lucid moments this truth was realized even in “All-Highest” quarters, but usually only to be soon forgotten or set aside as too difficult to carry through. Every thought of a more federative development of the Empire was bound to go wrong because there was no strong state germ cell of dominant authority. Besides, the internal situation of the Austrian state was very different from that of the German Empire as Bismarck shaped it. In Germany it was only a question of overcoming political traditions, since a common cultural basis was always there. Above all, Germany, aside from small alien fragments, was made up of only one people.
In Austria the situation was reversed. Here, except for Hungary, the individual countries had no political memory of their own grandeur, or it had been rubbed out by the sponge of time, or it was, at least, faint and confused. Now came the age of the nationality principle, and in the various countries popular forces developed which were increasingly difficult to overcome as national states began to form along the edge of the Monarchy. The people of these states, racially related or similar to the individual Austrian fragments, now began to exert a stronger attraction than the German-Austrian could. Even Vienna could not survive this struggle indefinitely.
Budapest’s development into a great city had given Vienna for the first time a rival whose task was not to hold together the whole Monarchy, but rather to strengthen one part of it. In a short time Prague was to follow this example, then Lemberg, Laibach, etc. The rise of these former provincial cities to national capitals of individual countries produced centers for a more and more independent cultural life. Only thus could popular political instincts find an intellectual footing and a new depth. The time was bound to come when these instinctive forces of the various peoples would be stronger than the force of common interest, and then Austria was done for.
The course of this development after the death of Joseph II was plainly to be seen. Its rapidity depended on a series of factors, partly inherent in the Monarchy itself, partly depending on the Empire’s position in foreign politics at the moment.
If the battle to preserve the state was to be seriously undertaken and fought to a finish, only a centralization as ruthless as it was persistent could possibly succeed. In that case it was necessary above all to establish a uniform state language, thus emphasizing the purely external community, but furnishing the government with a technical tool which no unified state can exist without. Only then, in the long run, could a uniform state consciousness be produced by the schools. This was not to be attained in ten or twenty years; it was a matter for centuries. In all questions of colonization a great purpose is more important than momentary efforts.
It scarcely needs mentioning that both administration and political leadership must then be conducted with rigid unity.
I found it infinitely instructive to discover why this did not happen, or rather why it was not done. The person guilty of this omission was alone guilty of the collapse of the Empire.
Old Austria more than any other state was dependent on the greatness of its leadership. For in it the foundation-stone of a national state was lacking: a people, the basis of a national state, has still a preservative power, no matter how bad its leadership is. Thanks to the natural inertia of its inhabitants and their consequent resisting power, a unified national state can often survive astonishingly long periods of the worst administration or leadership without being inwardly destroyed. A body of this sort often seems to have no further life at all, as if it were dead and done for, when suddenly the supposed corpse rises up again, and furnishes the rest of mankind with astonishing signs of its indestructible vital force.
Not so an empire composed of unlike peoples, maintained not by common blood but by a common strong arm. Here any weakness in governing leads not to hibernation of the state, but to an awakening of all the individual instincts which are present in the blood, although unable to develop under a dominant will. Only centuries of common education, common tradition, common interest, etc., can reduce the danger. Hence state structures of this sort depend the more upon the greatness of their leadership the younger they are; in fact the work of outstanding figures of force and intellectual heroes often collapses again immediately after the death of the great, lonely founder. But even after centuries these dangers cannot be considered overcome. They are sleeping, often only to awake suddenly the moment weakness of common leadership and the force of education, the grandeur of tradition, are no longer strong enough to overcome the impetus of the native life force in the various races.
Not to have grasped this is the perhaps tragic fault of the House of Hapsburg.
For one of them alone did Fate once more hold the torch over the future of his country; then it was extinguished forever.
In fleeting alarm Joseph II, Roman Emperor of the German Nation, saw how his house, driven to the outermost edge of the Empire, was bound some day to disappear in the maelstrom of a Babylon of people unless all that his fathers had failed to do was made good at the eleventh hour. The “Friend of Mankind” set himself with superhuman strength against the negligence of his forefathers, and tried to make up in a decade for that which centuries had neglected. If he had been granted but forty years for his task, and if but two generations had continued the work he had begun, the miracle would probably have succeeded. But when he died, worn out in body and soul, after ruling scarcely ten years, his work accompanied him to the grave, to sleep forever, without reawakening, in the Capuchin Vault. Neither the intelligence nor the will of his successors was equal to the task.
When the first revolutionary heat-lightning of a new age began to flash through Europe, Austria, too, gradually began to catch fire. But when at last the flames broke out, they were fanned less by economic, social, or even general political causes than by forces having their origin in the people.
The revolution of 1848 might have been everywhere else a class struggle; but in Austria it was the beginning of a new war of nationalities. At that time the German, forgetting or not realizing his origin, entered the service of the revolutionary uprising, and thus sealed his own fate. He helped to awaken the spirit of Western Democracy, which soon deprived him of the foundation for his own existence.
The formation of a parliamentary representative body without first determining and consolidating a common state language had laid the foundation for the end of German supremacy in the Monarchy. From that day on the state itself was lost. Everything that followed was merely the historical liquidation of an empire.
To watch the dissolution was as moving as it was instructive. This execution of a historical sentence took place in a thousand separate forms. The fact that most people walked blindly among the phenomena of decay only proved the Gods’ will to destroy Austria.
I do not wish here to lose myself in details, since that is not the purpose of this book. I wish only to submit to more thorough scrutiny those processes which, as unchanging causes of the decay of people and state, still have importance for us today, and which helped to consolidate the foundation of my political way of thinking.
Among the institutions which most plainly showed the decay inside the Austrian Monarchy, even to the otherwise hardly keen-eyed bourgeois Philistine, the chief was the one which ought rightfully to have been strongest—Parliament, or, as it was called in Austria, the Reichsrat.
The model for this body was plainly in England, the land of classical “Democracy.” The whole beneficent arrangement was taken thence and transported to Vienna with as little change as possible.
In the House of Deputies and the House of Lords the English bi-cameral system was resurrected. Only the “houses” themselves were somewhat different. When Barry had caused his parliamentary palace to sprout from the waves of the Thames, he had resorted to the history of the British world empire, and had got thence the decorations for the twelve hundred niches, consoles, and pillars of his splendid building. Sculpture and painting made the House of Lords and Deputies into the nation’s temple of fame.
Here was Vienna’s first difficulty. For when the Dane Hansen had finished the last gables on the new marble house of the peoples’ representatives, by way of ornament he could do nothing but borrow from Antiquity. Roman and Greek statesmen and philosophers beautify this theater of “Western Democracy,” and with symbolic irony the four-horse chariots above the two houses pull toward the four quarters of the compass, a perfect expression of what was then going on inside.
The “nationalities” had objected to any glorification of Austrian history in this building as an insult and a provocation—just as in Germany itself it was only in the thunder of the World War’s battles that anyone dared dedicate the Wallot Reichstag building with an inscription to the German people.
When I, not yet twenty, first went into the splendid building on the Franzensring to see and hear a sitting of the House of Deputies, my feelings were mixed.
I had always hated the Parliament, but not as an institution in itself. On the contrary, as a lover of freedom I could imagine no other possibility of government. In view of my attitude to the House of Hapsburg the thought of any sort of dictatorship would have seemed a crime against liberty and reason.
No small factor in this was the fact that my constant newspaper-reading had innoculated me as a young man, without my realizing it, with a certain admiration for the English Parliament—an admiration I could not get rid of in a moment. The dignity with which even the lower House over there fulfilled its duties (according to the beautiful reports in our newspapers) impressed me greatly. How could there possibly be any nobler form of self-government of a people?
For that very reason I was an enemy of the Austrian Parliament. The form in which the whole thing was carried on seemed to me unworthy of its great model.
But there was also the following consideration: the fate of the German race in the Austrian state depended upon its position in the Reichsrat. Until the introduction of universal secret suffrage there was still a German majority, if an insignificant one, in Parliament. Even this was dangerous; the national attitude of the Social Democrats was unreliable, and in crucial questions concerning Germanity they always fought against German interests to avoid losing their followers among the various alien peoples. Even in those days Social Democracy could not be considered a German party. But the introduction of universal suffrage destroyed the German superiority even numerically. Then there was no longer any obstacle to the further de-Germanization of the state.
Even in those days therefore, the instinct of national self-preservation gave me no love for a representative body in which the German interest was always betrayed instead of represented. But these, like so many other things, were faults to be attributed not to the object in itself but to the Austrian state. I still believed that if the German majority were restored in the representative bodies there would no longer be any cause for opposition on principle so long as the old state continued to exist at all.
This, then, was my attitude when I entered those sacred and much-fought-over chambers for the first time. It is true that I thought them sacred only for the noble beauty of the magnificent building. It is a work of Hellenic magic on German soil.
But how soon I was outraged at the wretched spectacle that took place before my eyes! There were present several hundred of these representatives. They were expressing their opinions on a question of economic importance.
This first day alone sufficed to give me food for thought for weeks.
The intellectual content of what they said was at a truly depressing level, in so far as one could understand their chatter at all. Some of the gentlemen spoke not German but their Slavic mother tongues, or rather dialects. Now I had a chance to hear with my own ears what so far I had known only from reading the papers. It was a gesticulating mass in wild turmoil, yelling and interrupting in every tone of voice, in its midst a harmless old gaffer who was striving in the sweat of his life to restore the dignity of the House by violent ringing of a bell and by shouts now soothing, now monitory. I could not help laughing.
A few weeks later I visited the chamber again. The scene was transformed beyond recognition. The hall was almost empty. Down below people were asleep. A few deputies were in their seats, yawning at one another while one of them “spoke.” A Vice-President of the House was present, and he gazed into the chamber with visible boredom.
I had my first misgivings. After that, I kept looking in whenever I could possibly find time. I watched the scene of the moment quietly and attentively, listened to as much of the speeches as was understandable, studied the more or less intelligent faces of the chosen of the nations in this sad state—and then gradually formed my own ideas.
A year of calm observation was enough absolutely to change or destroy my former opinions on the nature of the institution. I no longer objected to the mistaken form which the idea had assumed in Austria. No, now I could no longer acknowledge Parliament as such. Hitherto I had seen the ruin of the Austrian Parliament in the lack of a German majority; but now I saw destruction in the whole nature and character of the institution in general.
I saw a whole new series of questions to be answered.
I began to familiarize myself with the democratic principles of majority rule as the foundation of the whole institution; but I was equally attentive to the intellectual and moral values of the gentlemen who were supposed to pursue this object as the chosen of the nations. Thus I became acquainted with both the institution and the men who made it up.
In the course of a few years my perception and understanding allowed me to form a clear and well-rounded image of the most dignified figure of modern times: the Parliamentarian. He was impressed on me in a shape which has never significantly changed since then.
Once again the object-lessons of practical reality had preserved me from smothering in a theory which many people find so seductive at first glance, but which nevertheless belongs among the signs of decay in mankind.
The democracy of the West today is a forerunner of Marxism, which without it would be quite unthinkable. It alone gives this world plague the soil on which the pestilence may spread. Its outward form, parliamentarism, is a “preposterous creature of filth and fire,” but unfortunately at the moment the fire seems to me burnt out.
I am more than grateful to Fate for propounding this question to me in Vienna; I fear that in the Germany of that time I would have made the answer too easy. If my first acquaintance with the ridiculous institution called Parliament had been in Berlin, I might have fallen into the opposite error, and, (not without apparently good reason) have joined those who saw the salvation of people and Empire solely in strengthening the power of the Imperial idea, and thus remained blind strangers to the age and to human nature.
In Austria this was impossible. Here it was not so easy to fall from one mistake into the other. If Parliament was worthless, the Hapsburgs were worth even less—certainly not more under any circumstances. To oppose parliamentiarism here was not enough, for the question would still remain, what then? The abolition of the Reichsrat would have left only the House of Hapsburg as a governing power—an idea to me especially intolerable.
The difficulty of this particular case led me to a more thorough consideration of the problem in itself than one would perhaps otherwise have given at so early an age.
The thing that first struck me and gave me most food for thought was the obvious lack of any individual responsibility.
Let Parliament take a resolution, no matter how disastrous its result, and no one is responsible; no one can be called to account. After all, is it assuming responsibility for the guilty government to retire after an unparalleled collapse? Or for the coalition to change, or even for Parliament to be dissolved? Can any vacillating majority of persons ever be made responsible? Is not the very idea of responsibility indissolubly connected with persons? And can one, in practice, make the leading figure of a government accountable for actions whose existence and execution must be blamed exclusively upon the will and inclination of a multiplicity of persons?
Again, is the task of a governing statesman not regarded as less the actual producing of a creative idea or plan than the art of making a herd of empty-headed sheep realize the genius in his plans, and then of successfully begging for their kind approval?
Is it the sign of a statesman that he be as perfect in the art of convincing as in that of statesmanlike wisdom in making decisions or laying down broad lines of conduct?
Is a leader’s incapacity proved because he does not succeed in converting to a certain idea the majority of a crowd flung together by more or less savory accidents?
Has this crowd, in fact, ever understood any idea before success proclaimed its greatness? Is not every deed of genius in this world the genius’s visible protest against the inertia of the masses?
But what is the statesman to do if by flattery he fails to win this crowd’s favor for his plans? Is he to buy it? Or, in view of the stupidity of his fellow-citizens, is he to abandon the tasks which he knows are vital, and retire; or is he to stay nevertheless?
In a case like this, does not a real character fall into hopeless conflict between insight and honor (or rather honorable intentions)? Where is the dividing line between duty to the community and duty to one’s personal honor?
Must not every true leader decline to be thus degraded into a political juggler?
And conversely must not every juggler feel called on to go into politics, since the ultimate responsibility falls not on him, but on some intangible mob?
Must not our parliamentary majority principle lead to the total destruction of the leader idea? And can anyone believe that the progress of this world comes from the brain of majorities, and not from the heads of individuals? Or does anyone suppose that in future we can do without this essential of human civilization? Does it not, on the contrary, seem more necessary today than ever?
By denying personal authority and substituting the number of the crowd in question, the parliamentary principle of majority rule sins against the basic aristocratic idea of Nature; though we must admit that Nature’s idea of nobility is by no means necessarily personified in the present decadence of our upper ten thousand.
Unless he has learned to think and examine independently, the reader of Jewish newspapers can scarcely imagine the havoc wrought by the institution of modern democratic parliamentary rule. This rule is the chief reason why our whole political life is so incredibly overrun with the inferior figures of the present day. A true leader is bound to withdraw from a political activity which must consist largely not of creative work and achievement, but of trading and haggling for the favor of a majority, while such activity is sure to suit and to attract small minds.
The more dwarfish the mind and powers of this sort of petty tradesman, and the more clearly he recognizes the wretchedness of his own real dimensions, the more loudly he will praise a system which does not demand a giant’s strength and genius, but is contented with the slyness of a village mayor, nay even prefers this sort of wisdom to that of a Pericles. Besides, that sort of ninny need not be plagued with responsibility for his actions. He is quite beyond reach of such worries, because he well knows that no matter what the results of his “statesmanly” muddling, his end has long since been written in the stars; some day he will have to give way to another and equally great mind. For it is one of the signs of such decay that the number of great statesmen increases at just the rate that the standard for individual statesmen shrinks. But the individual statesmen is bound to grow smaller with increasing dependence on parliamentary majorities, since great minds will refuse to be the hireling of silly incompetents and windbags, while on the other hand the representatives of the majority, that is to say of stupidity, hate nothing more fiercely than a superior brain.
It is always a consoling feeling for one of these town meetings of Podunk selectmen to know they have a leader whose wisdom is on a level with their own. In this way, after all, each man from time to time has the pleasure of letting his intellect sparkle; and more than this, if Jack can be boss, why not Bill?
But this invention of democracy is most truly paired with a quality which in more recent times has grown to a real scandal, namely the cowardice of a great part of our so-called “leadership.” What luck—in all real decisions of any importance they can hide behind the skirts of a so-called majority! Just look at one of these political footpads carefully begging the approval of the majority for every action in order to assure himself of the necessary accomplices and thus to be always able to unload the responsibility! That is perhaps the chief reason why this sort of political activity is disgusting and hateful to any really decent and therefore courageous man, while it attracts all the contemptible characters—and anyone who will not take the personal responsibility for his actions, but hunts for cover, is a craven scoundrel.
Once let a nation’s leaders be such wretches as these, and retribution will be swift. People will no longer have the courage for any decisive action, and will rather accept any dishonor, no matter how abject, than pull themselves together for a decision; after all, there is no one left who is ready on his own responsibility to stake himself and his head upon the carrying through of a ruthless decision.
One thing we must never forget: here too, a majority can never replace a man. It always represents stupidity as well as cowardice. And a hundred cowards do not mean a heroic resolve, any more than a hundred blockheads make one wise man.
But the less the responsibility of the individual leader is, the larger will grow the number who feel called upon, even with the most wretched gifts, to devote their immortal powers to the nation. In fact they will be quite unable to wait for their turn; they stand in a long queue, regretfully counting the people ahead of them in line, and almost calculating the minutes which in human likelihood may bring them to the train. Hence they long for any change in the office on which they have fixed their eye, and are grateful for any scandal which thins the ranks ahead. If on occasion someone refuses to move from the post he has taken, they feel this almost as a breach of a sacred compact of common solidarity. Then they grow spiteful, and do not rest until the bold fellow, overthrown at last, puts himself at the public disposal. And after that he will not soon occupy his position again. For if one of these creatures is forced to give up his post, he will at once try to crowd into the queue of those who are waiting, unless he is prevented by the yelling and abuse which the others set up.
The result is an alarming rapid change in the important posts and offices of such a state—a result always unfortunate and often absolutely catastrophic. For not merely blockheads and incompetents will be the victims of this custom, but even more the real leader, if Fate can still manage to put one in this position. The moment people recognize him they form a united front for resistance, particularly if a real brain presumes to intrude on this exalted company without having risen from their own ranks. On principle they want to keep things among themselves, and they hate as their common enemy every mind which might be a figure one among the zeros. In this respect their instinct is the more acute, the less it exists in any other direction.
The result is an ever-spreading intellectual impoverishment of the governing classes. The result for state and nation can easily be judged by anyone who does not himself belong among this sort of “leaders.”
Old Austria had parliamentary government in its purest form. The prime ministers, were, it is true, appointed by the Emperor and King, but even this appointment was merely the carrying out of the will of Parliament; and the trading and haggling for individual ministerial posts was Western Democracy of the first water. The results were worthy of the principles employed. Replacement of individual personalities, in particular, took place at shorter and shorter intervals, to become at last a regular mad chase. At the same time the stature of the successive “statesmen” shrank, until only parliamentary jugglers remained—the petty-type whose value as statesmen was judged more and more by their ability to glue together the various coalitions, that is to carry out the tiny political deals which alone can make one of these peoples’ representatives fit for practical work.
Vienna was a school offering the best of insights in this field.
I was no less interested to compare these popular representatives’ actual knowledge and ability with the tasks which awaited them. To do so it was necessary, whether one would or no, to concern oneself with the intellectual horizon of these chosen of the people; and then one was obliged to give some attention to the processes leading to the discovery of these mangnificent figures in our public life. The fashion in which these gentlemen put their actual ability to work for the Fatherland—the technical course of their activity, that is,—also deserved thorough examination and study.
The more one determined to get at these internal conditions, to study persons and factual foundations with ruthless objectivity, the more pitiful became the full panorama of parliamentary life. Because of course, we must be objective in considering an institution whose members think it necessary in every second sentence to refer to “objectivity” as the only just basis for any judgment or attitude. Anyone who examines these gentlemen themselves and the laws of their bitter existence can only be astonished at the result.
There is no principle which, objectively considered, is so wrong as the parliamentary principle.
We can say this without reference to the way the election of the honorable deputies takes place, the way they reach their office and their new dignity. Only in a tiny fraction of cases is this the fulfilment of a widespread desire, let alone of a need,—as anyone can see who realizes that the political understanding of the masses has not reached the point where they can arrive at general political views of their own and pick out the person to suit them.
What we always call “public opinion” is based to only a minute degree on individual experience or knowledge; it rests mostly on notions produced by a kind of so-called “enlightenment” often infinitely penetrating and persistent.
Just as religious attitudes are the result of education, and only the religious urge itself slumbers within mankind, so the political opinion of the masses is but the result of an often incredibly thorough and determined drive upon mind and soul.
By far the greater part of political “education,” in this case very aptly characterized as propaganda, is the work of the press. It is the press which chiefly takes care of the “work of enlightenment,” thus acting as a sort of school for adults. The instruction is, however, not in the hands of the state, but in the clutches or forces of extremely mean characters. Vienna gave me as a young man the best of opportunities to make intimate acquaintance with the owners and intellectual manufacturers of this mass-education machine. At first I was astonished to see how quickly this most evil power in the state succeeded in producing a given opinion among the public even though it might be a complete transformation and falsification of public wishes and views that undoubtedly did exist. A few days were enough to turn some ridiculous affair in to a momentous act of state, while, conversely, vital problems were generally forgotten or rather were simply stolen away from the memory of the masses.
In the course of a few weeks names could be conjured up out of nothing, the incredible hopes of the great public attached to them, and a popularity even given them which a really important man often never enjoys in a lifetime; and these were names which, a month before, no one had so much as heard of; while at the same time old and tried figures of governmental or public life, in the best of their ability, simply died so far as the world was concerned, or were buried under such contumely that their names soon threatened to become symbols of vileness or rascality. We must study this infamous Jewish way of deluging the clean garments of honorable men with the swill-buckets of vile libel and slander from hundreds of directions at once as if by a magic spell—we must study it if we are to appreciate the real danger from these journalist scoundrels.
There is nothing which one of these intellectual robber barons would not adopt as a means of attaining his savory ends. He sniffs his way into the most secret family affairs, and he does not rest until his truffle-hunting instinct has rooted up some wretched occurrence which will serve to cook the unlucky victim’s goose. But if even the most thorough smelling uncovers absolutely nothing in either public or private life, a fellow of this stamp resorts to slander. He has a rooted conviction that some of it will stick despite a thousand contradictions, and that with the libel’s hundredfold repetition by all his accomplices the victim can usually put up no fight at all. This pack of scoundrels never undertakes anything from motives which might be credible or at least understandable to the rest of mankind. Heaven forfend! Attacking the rest of the world in the most scoundrelly way, these idle rascals, like cuttlefish, hide in a veritable cloud of rectitude and unctuous phrases, chattering of “journalistic duty” and similar falsehoods, and even—at congresses and conventions, occasions where these pests congregate in considerable numbers,—go so far as to twaddle about a very particular duty, to wit journalistic “honor,” which the assembled rabble then gravely confirm in one another.
This rabble manufactures more than two-thirds of all so-called “public opinion,” from whose foam the parliamentary Aphrodite rises.
To describe this process rightly and to show its whole falsehood and mendacity would take volumes. But putting all this aside, if we look only at the product and its effect I think this will be enough to show the objective madness of the institution, even to the most devout of souls.
We can soonest and most easily understand this senseless and dangerous aberration by comparing democratic parliamentarism with a truly Germanic democracy.
The peculiarity of the former is that a body of, let us say, five hundred men, or recently even women, is chosen, whose duty it is to make a final decision in every kind of issue. Practically, they alone are the government; for though they may choose a cabinet which outwardly undertakes to manage affairs of state, this is only for show. In reality the so-called government can take no step without first getting the permission of the general assembly. Consequently it can be made responsible for nothing, since the final decision never rests with the government, but with the majority of Parliament. In any case the government merely carries out the will of the majority. Its political capacity can be really judged only by its skill in either fitting itself to the will of the majority or pulling the majority over to its side. This degrades it from the level of a real government to that of a beggar at the feet of the momentary majority. From occasion to occasion its most urgent task is to assure itself of the favor of the existing majority, or to undertake the formation of a more amenable new one. If it succeeds, it can go on “governing” for a little while; if it does not succeed, it must quit. The intrinsic rightness of its intentions is no consideration.
This practically cuts out all responsibility.
A very little consideration will show what this results in. The membership of the five hundred representatives of the people according to individual occupation or abilities presents a disjointed and usually a pitiful picture. After all, no one can suppose that these chosen of the nation are also the chosen of the spirit, or even of reason. It is to be hoped that no one will expect statesmen to sprout in hundreds from the ballots of an anything but intellectual electorate. We can never sharply enough denounce the silly notion that geniuses are born of general elections. In the first place any nation has a real statesman once in a blue moon, not a hundred at a time; and in the second place the aversion of the masses for any outstanding genius is always instinctive. Sooner shall the camel pass through the eye of a needle than a great man be “discovered” by an election.
Anyone who exceeds the normal dimensions of average humanity usually personally announces his presence in world history.
But as it is, five hundred people of more than modest stature vote upon the most important interests of the nation, and install a government which has to get the approval of the exalted five hundred for every individual event and particular question that arises. The policy, in other words, is actually created by five hundred people; and it usually looks it.
Even if there were no question of the originality of these peoples’ representatives, we must remember how various are the problems awaiting solution, and in how many totally separate fields answers and decisions must be given. We can easily understand how worthless is an institution of government which entrusts the right of final determination to a mass meeting of people only a fraction of whom have any knowledge and experience in the matter under discussion. The most important economic measures are presented to a forum only a tenth of whose members have any economic training. This is simply putting the final decision on a matter into the hands of men who lack any equipment to meet it.
And so it is with every other question. Things are always settled by a majority of ignoramuses and incompetents, since the membership of this institution remains unchanged, while the problems presented extend to almost every field of public life, and in fact would require a constant change of deputies to judge and vote upon them. It is impossible, after all, to let the same persons deal with matters of transportation as, for instance, with a question of important foreign policy. Otherwise they would all have to be universal geniuses such as in fact scarcely occur once in centuries. But unfortunately these are mostly not “brains” at all, but only narrow, conceited, and puffed-up dilettantes, an intellectual demimonde of the worst sort. That is in fact the reason for the often incomprehensible carelessness with which these gentry discuss and decide things that even the greatest minds would find a matter of anxious consideration. Measures of utmost importance for the whole state, nay of a nation, are taken as if a game of Old Maid or Tarock (undoubtedly more suitable for such people) were on the table, instead of the fate of a race.
Of course it would be unjust to think that by nature every deputy in such a parliament has so slight a sense of responsibility. Not at all. But by forcing the individual to make up his mind on questions which do not suit his talents, this system gradually corrupts the character. Nobody is going to have the courage to say “Gentlemen, I do not think we know anything about this matter. I, personally, at any rate, certainly do not.” (In any case it would make little difference, for surely that sort of frankness would not be understood, and besides people would hardly let such an honest donkey spoil everyone else’s game.) But anyone who knows human nature will understand that in such illustrious company nobody likes to be the dunce, and in certain circles honesty is always synonymous with stupidity.
Thus a representative who begins by being honorable is forced into the crowded path of falsehood and cheating. The very conviction that an individual’s abstention would in itself make no difference kills every honest impulse which this or that person may feel. He will end by telling himself that he personally is far from the worst of the lot, and that by joining in he may simply prevent worse things from happening.
But, it will be objected, though the individual deputy may have no special understanding of a given matter, his attitude has been determined by the party as the guide of his politics; and the party has its separate committees, which are more than sufficiently informed by experts.
At first glance this seems to be true. But then comes the question: why choose five hundred when but a few of them possess the necessary wisdom to adopt any policy in the most important matters?
Yes, there is the crux of the matter.
It is the object of our present democratic parliamentarism not to form an assembly of wise men, but rather to put together a herd of intellectually dependent ciphers, who become easier to steer in particular directions as their personal incapacity increases. Only so can party politics in the present bad sense of the phrase be carried on. And only so is it possible for the real wirepuller to remain always cautiously in the background without ever being personally called to account, since thus every decision, no matter how harmful to the nation, is blamed not upon one rascal visible to everybody, but on a whole party. And so all practical responsibility disappears, for it can exist only in the obligation of an individual, and not in a parliamentary windbag association.
Nobody but a lying turnspit, afraid of daylight, could approve this institution; while every honest, straightforward man, ready to assume personal responsibility, must find it hateful. And consequently such democracy has become the tool of that race whose real purposes make it fear sunlight, now and forever. Only the Jew can praise an institution as dirty and untrue as himself.
Opposed to this we have the true Germanic democracy consisting of free election of the leader, who is bound to assume full responsibility for his acts and omissions. Here there is no roll-call of a majority on individual questions, but only the rule of an individual who has to back his decisions with his property and his life.
To anyone who objects that under such conditions scarcely anyone will be willing to devote himself to so risky an undertaking, there is but one answer: thank God. It is the very purpose of a Germanic democracy to keep every chance unworthy climber from attaining the government of his fellow-man through the back door; the greatness of the responsibility to be assumed is meant to scare off weaklings and incompetents.
But if such a fellow should try to steal in nevertheless, we can more easily find and harshly rebuke him: Away, craven scoundrel! Draw back your foot; you are befouling the stair. The front steps to the Pantheon of history are not for skulkers, but for heroes!
I had arrived at this opinion after two years of visiting the Vienna Parliament. Then I stopped going.
Parliamentary government had been quite largely responsible for the ever-increasing weakness of the old Hapsburg state during the previous few years. The more its work broke German supremacy, the more a system of playing off nationalities against one another gained ground. In the Reichsrat itself this was always at the expense of the Germans, and thus eventually at the expense of the Empire; for by the turn of the century it must have been obvious to any simpleton that the centripetal force of the Monarchy could no longer overcome the countries’ attempt to break loose. On the contrary, the more pitiful the means which the state had to use for self-preservation, the more universally the state was despised. Not only in Hungary but in the individual Slavic provinces people identified themselves so little with the common Monarchy that they did not feel its weakness as a shame to themselves. Instead they were rather pleased at the signs of senility, for they preferred the Monarchy’s death to its recovery.
In Parliament, complete collapse was prevented by ignominious yielding and by paying every sort of blackmail (of course the Germans had to foot the bill); in the country it was prevented by adroit playing-off of one people against another. But the general line of development still bore down on the Germans. Particularly when the Imperial succession began to give a certain influence to Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the increase of Czech influence began to proceed by orderly plan from above. By every possible means this future ruler of the Dual Monarchy tried to promote de-Germanization, to encourage it, or at least to cover it up. By way of the civil servants, purely German towns were slowly but surely pushed into the danger-zone of mixed language. Even in Lower Austria this began to progress even more swiftly, and many Czechs already considered Vienna their greatest city.
The family of the new Hapsburg spoke only Czech (the Archduke’s morganatic wife, a former Czech countess, belonged to a group whose Germanophobia was a tradition). His guiding principle was gradually to set up in Central Europe a Slavic state built on a strongly Catholic foundation as a bulwark against Orthodox Russia. Here again, as so often with the Hapsburgs, religion was made the servant of a wholly political idea, and—at least from the German standpoint—of a disastrous idea at that.
The results were more than sad in several respects. Neither the House of Hapsburg nor the Catholic Church got the reward it expected. The Hapsburgs lost their throne; Rome lost a great state.
For by putting religious elements to work for its political calculations the Crown awakened a spirit which it had not dreamed was possible.
In answer to the attempt to exterminate Germanity in the old Monarchy by every means came the Pan-German movement in Austria.
By the eighties, Manchester liberalism of Jewish fundamental tendency had reached, if not passed, its height even in the Monarchy. But like everything in old Austria the reaction against it was chiefly founded not on social but on national considerations. Self-preservation forced Germanity to defend itself with the utmost vigor. Only as an afterthought did economic considerations slowly gain an important influence. Two party structures emerged from the general political turmoil, one national in tendency, the other more social, and both extremely interesting and instructive for the future.
After the crushing conclusion of the War of 1866, the House of Hapsburg pondered the idea of reprisal on the battlefield. Only the death of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, whose ill-fated expedition was blamed chiefly upon Napoleon III, and whose abandonment by the Frenchman aroused universal indignation, prevented a closer alliance with France. But even then the Hapsburgs were lying in wait. If the War of 1870–71 had not turned out to be such a triumphal march, the Viennese Court would probably still have ventured on the bloody game of revenge for Sadowa. But when the first hero tales came from the battlefield, tales wondrous and hardly to be believed, but nevertheless true, the “Wisest” of all Monarchs saw the moment was inopportune, and tried to make the best of a bad business.
The heroic struggle of those years produced a yet greater miracle; for with the Hapsburgs new attitudes never meant a change of heart, but only pressure of circumstances. The German people in the old Ostmark were carried away by Germany’s joyful intoxication in victory, and were stirred to the depths by the resurrection of their fathers’ dream as a magnificent reality.
For make no mistake: the truly German-spirited Austrian from that time on saw even in Königgrätz the tragic but inevitable prerequisite for the resurrection of an Empire which should not be contaminated with the foul aura of the old German Confederation—and which no longer was so. Above all he learned by bitter personal experience that the House of Hapsburg had at last completed its historical mission, and that the new Empire must choose as Kaiser only a man whose heroic spirit made him worthy of the “Crown of the Rhine.” And no praise was too high for a Fate which bestowed this honor upon the descendant of a House which in the dim past had already given the nation, indeed, a shining symbol of national exaltation in Frederick the Great, a symbol to endure for all time.
But after this great war the House of Hapsburg began slowly but implacably, with desperate determination, to exterminate the dangerous Germanity (of whose true sentiments there could be no doubt) in the Dual Monarchy—for this was certainly the purpose of the policy of Slavicization; then the resistance of this people marked for destruction flamed up in a fashion new to German history.
For the first time, patriotic and nationally-minded men became rebels. They were rebels not against the nation, not even against the state in itself, but rebels against a way of government which they were conscious must lead to destruction of their own nationality.
For the first time in recent German history the customary dynastic patriotism was distinguished from national love of Fatherland and people.
To the Pan-German movement of German Austria in the nineties belonged the credit for realizing clearly and unmistakably that a state’s authority has the right to demand respect and protection only if it helps the interests of a nationality, or at least does them no harm.
State authority cannot exist as an end in itself, or every tyranny in the world would be sacred and untouchable.
If by governmental means a nationality is being driven to its destruction, the rebellion of that nationality’s every member is not merely a right, but a duty.
But the question of when such a condition exists is decided not by theoretical treatises, but by force—and by success.
Of course every governing power claims the duty of preserving state authority, no matter how bad, and though it betray the interests of a nationality a thousand times over. In fighting down such a power, therefore, in winning freedom or independence, the peoples’ instinct of self-preservation will have to use the same weapon by which its adversary attempts to maintain itself. That is to say, the battle will be carried on by “legal” means so long as the power which is being overthrown also employs them; but there must be no hesitation in using illegal means if the oppressor also resorts to them.
In general it must never be forgotten that the highest purpose of man’s existence is not the maintenance of a state, let alone of a government, but the preservation of his own kind.
Let that be in danger of suppression or destruction, and the question of legality is but subordinate. Then, though the methods of the ruling power be a thousand times “legal,” the self-preservation of the oppressed is always the noblest justification for a struggle using any and every weapon.
Only because that statement is recognized as true does this earth’s history show such tremendous examples of wars of independence against inward or outward enslavement of peoples.
The law of humanity is above the law of the state.
But if a people is defeated in its battle for the rights of man, that means simply that in the scales of Fate it weighed too lightly to have the good fortune of survival in our mundane world. For anyone who is unready or unable to fight for his life has already been marked for extinction by an eternally just Providence. The world is not for coward peoples.
How easy it is for a tyranny to wrap itself in the cloak of so-called “legality” we see most plainly and strikingly once again by the example of Austria.
The legal state power at that time rested on the anti-German foundation of the Parliament, with its non-German majority—and on the equally anti-German ruling House. These two elements embodied the entire authority of the state. An attempt to change the lot of the German-Austrian people by that path would have been nonsense. Consequently our admirers of the “legal” way, as the only “permissible” one, and of the state’s authority itself, were bound to think that all resistance must be abandoned because it could not be carried on by legal means. But this must inevitably have meant the end of the German people in the Monarchy, and that quickly. Germanity was in fact saved from that fate only by the collapse of the state.
The bespectacled theorist would, it is true, rather die for his doctrines than for his people. Since men made laws for themselves, he believes that afterward men exist for the laws.
It was the merit of the Pan-German movement in Austria at that time that it swept away this nonsense, to the horror of all theoretical hobbyists and other state fetish-worshippers.
While the Hapsburgs were trying to get at Germanity by every means, this party ruthlessly attacked the “exalted” ruling House itself. The party was the first to probe the rotten state, and to open the eyes of hundreds of thousands. It deserved the credit for rescuing the magnificent idea of love of Fatherland from the embrace of this sorry dynasty.
When it first began, the party had an extraordinary following, and in fact threatened to become a regular landslide. But its success did not last. By the time I arrived in Vienna the movement had long since been overtaken by the Christian Socialist Party (which in the meantime had attained power), and in fact had sunk to complete insignificance.
The whole process of the Pan-German movement’s growth and decline on the one hand, and the Christian Socialist Party’s unheard-of rise on the other hand, was a classical example for study, and as such of great importance to me.
When I came to Vienna my sympathies were altogether on the side of the Pan-German movement. The fact that people had the courage to shout “Hoch Hohenzollern” in Parliament impressed and delighted me; I felt a happy confidence because they continued to regard themselves as an only temporarily separated integral part of the German Empire, and let no moment pass without announcing the fact. To speak out without hesitation on every question concerning Germanity, and never to compromise, seemed to me the only remaining road of salvation for our people; but why, after its first magnificent rise, the movement should fall so low, I could not understand. Still less could I understand how in the same period the Christian Socialist Party had arrived at such enormous power. It had just then reached the peak of its celebrity.
While I was attempting to compare the two movements, Fate, hurried by my general sad situation, gave me the best of instruction in understanding this puzzle’s causes.
I will begin my consideration with the men who must be considered the leaders and founders of the two parties: Georg von Schönerer and Dr. Karl Lueger.
In purely human terms they both tower above any so-called parliamentary figures. Through the slough of general political corruption their whole lives remained pure and above reproach. My personal sympathy, however, was at first on the side of the Pan-German Schönerer, and only gradually was extended also to the Christian Socialist leader.
In the matter of ability Schönerer even then seemed to me the better and more solid thinker on problems of principle. He realized the inevitable end of the Austrian State more clearly and more correctly than anyone else. If the German Empire especially had listened to his warnings of the Hapsburg Monarchy, the catastrophe of Germany’s World War against all of Europe would never have occurred.
But if Schönerer could grasp the inner nature of a problem, he was completely unsuccessful as a judge of men.
This was Dr. Lueger’s strong point. He was a rare judge of human nature, and took great care never to see men as better than they are. Consequently he reckoned chiefly with the practical possibilities of life, of which Schönerer had little understanding. Everything that the Pan-German Schönerer thought was theoretically true; but he lacked the strength and the knack to impart this theoretical realization to the masses—that is, to put in it such a form that it would suit the capacity of the common people, which is and remains a limited capacity. Therefore all his insight was but the wisdom of a seer, which could never become practical reality.
This lack of actual knowledge of human nature eventually led to errors in judging the strength of whole movements, as well as of ancient institutions.
Lastly, Schönerer did recognize that these were questions of world-concept, but he did not see that only the broad masses of a people are suited to be the mainstay of such almost religious convictions. Unfortunately he had but slight realization of the extraordinarily limited fighting spirit in so-called “bourgeois” circles—a result of their economic position, which makes the individual fear to lose too much, and therefore holds him back.
And in general a world-concept can hope for victory only if the broad masses, the mainstay of the new doctrine are prepared to undertake the necessary battle.
His lack of understanding of the importance of the lower strata of the people resulted in an entirely inadequate conception of the social question.
In all this, Dr. Lueger was Schönerer’s opposite. His thorough knowledge of human nature allowed him to judge the possible forces, and at the same time preserved him from underestimating existing institutions, and perhaps even taught him, on the contrary, to use them as a means for the accomplishment of his purposes.
He understood only too well that the political fighting strength of the upper bourgeoisie in modern times was small, not sufficient to win the victory for a great new movement. In his political activity, therefore, he put the chief emphasis on winning over levels of the population whose living was threatened, thus spurring rather than paralyzing their fighting spirit. He was likewise willing to use every instrument of power already at hand, to win the favor of powerful existing institutions, and so to derive the greatest possible advantage for his own movement from the old sources of power.
So he aimed his new party chiefly at the middle class, which was threatened with destruction, and thus assured himself of an almost unshakeable following, ready for great self-sacrifice, and of dogged fighting determination. His relation to the Catholic Church was built up with infinite shrewdness, and soon attracted so many of the younger clergy that the old clerical party was forced either to abandon the field of battle or, a wiser choice, to unite with the new party, and thus win back many strongholds.
But if we were to see this alone as the characteristic picture of the man, we would be doing him a grave injustice. Besides being a shrewd tactician he had the qualities and the genius of a truly great reformer, even though here too he was restricted by exact knowledge of actually existing possibilities and of his own personal capacity.
This truly outstanding man set himself a completely practical goal. He wanted to capture Vienna. Vienna was the heart of the Monarchy; from this city the last remnants of life went out into the sickly and aging body of the rotten Empire. The healthier the heart became, the more vigorously the rest of the body must recuperate.
The idea was right in principle, but could be put in practice for only a certain limited time. And that was the weakness of the man.
What he achieved as Mayor of the city of Vienna is immortal in the best sense of the word; but that did not enable him to save the Monarchy—it was too late.
This his adversary Schönerer had seen more clearly.
What Dr. Lueger attacked in practice succeeded marvelously; what he hoped for as a result was not fulfilled.
What Schönerer wanted he could not accomplish; but what he dreaded unfortunately did happen to a fearful degree.
Thus neither man attained his ultimate goal. Lueger was too late to save Austria, Schönerer to preserve the German people from destruction.
It is vastly instructive for us today to study the causes of both parties’ failure. It is particularly useful for my friends, since at many points conditions today are like those of that time, and mistakes can be avoided which brought about the end of one movement and the sterility of the other.
In my opinion there were three reasons for the collapse of the Pan-German movement in Austria: first, only vague ideas of the importance of the social problem, particularly to a new and by nature revolutionary party.
Schönerer and his followers addressed themselves primarily to the bourgeois classes, and so the result was bound to be tame and weakly.
Although its individual members would never suspect so, the German bourgeoisie, particularly in its upper strata, is pacificistic to the point of self-surrender in matters of nation or state. In good times, (that is to say in this case times of good government), this disposition is the reason why these strata are extraordinarily valuable to the state; but in times of bad rule it is absolutely catastrophic. Even to make possible the fighting of a really serious battle at all, the Pan-German movement would have had to devote itself above all to winning the masses. It did not do so, and thus from the beginning was deprived of the elemental drive which a wave must have if it is not quickly to recede.
But if this principle is not realized and carried through from the beginning, the new party can never afterward make up for its omission. For when a large moderate bourgeois element is taken in, the movement’s attitude will always be directed accordingly, and thus all further prospect of winning any considerable strength from the common people is lost. After that the movement can never get beyond pale wrangling and criticism. No longer shall we find an almost religious faith and self-sacrifice; in their place comes the attempt gradually to wear away the rigors of battle by “constructive” work—which in this case means acknowledging what already exists—, to wind up at last in a corrupt peace.
And that was what happened to the Pan-German movement because it did not begin by emphasizing the recruiting of its followers from the great mass of common people. It became “bourgeois, respectable, restrainedly radical.”
This mistake bred the second cause of swift decline.
By the time the Pan-German movement arose, Germanity’s situation in Austria was already desperate. From year to year the Parliament had become more of an institution for slow destruction of the German people. Only the removal of this institution could give any hope, no matter how small, of rescue at the eleventh hour.
This raised a question of fundamental importance for the movement. In order to destroy the Parliament, should they go into Parliament, to “bore from within,” as they used to say, or should they attack the institution as such from outside?
They went in, and came out beaten. True, they did have to go in. To fight such a power from outside means to arm oneself with unshakable courage, and to be ready for infinite sacrifice. In so doing we seize the bull by the horns. We take many a shrewd blow, are often knocked down, perhaps to arise only with shattered limbs; only after supreme struggle will victory rest with the bold attacker. Only the magnitude of the sacrifices can gain new fighters for the cause, until at last doggedness is rewarded with success.
But for that purpose we need the children of the people from out of the great masses. They alone are determined and tenacious enough to fight the battle through to the bloody end.
These great masses the Pan-German movement did not control; there was no choice, therefore, but to go into Parliament.
It would be a mistake to think their decision a result of long-continued spiritual torment, or even reflection; no, they had never thought of anything else. Participation in this nonsense was but the concrete result of generally vague ideas concerning the importance and meaning and effect of taking part in an institution which they recognized as wrong in principle. In general, they probably hoped it would be easier to enlighten the broad masses of the people by grasping the opportunity to speak before a “forum of the whole nation.” Also it seemed obvious that an attack at the root of the evil must be more successful than assault from without. They believed the screen of parliamentary immunity would add to the safety of the individual fighter, so that the force of the attack could not but be increased.
In reality the course of events was quite different. The forum before which the Pan-German deputies spoke had become not greater but smaller, for no one can speak out further than to the circle which can hear him, or to the circle which receives in the papers a report of what he has said. The greatest direct forum of listeners, however, is found not in the chamber of a Parliament, but in great public mass-meetings.
Here there are thousands of people who have come simply to hear what the speaker has to tell them; while in the Chamber of Deputies there are but a few hundred, most of whom are there to receive extra pay, and by no means to be enlightened by the wisdom of some “honorable representative of the people.” But more than that, it is always the same audience, which will never learn anything new since it lacks not only the intelligence but the inclination, no matter how slight.
Never will one of these representatives bow of his own accord to superior truth, and then adopt it as his cause. No, nobody ever does such a thing unless he has reason to hope that by about-facing he can save his seat for another session. Only when it is in the air that the previous party will get off badly at a coming election do these ornaments of manhood make it their business to move over to the other and presumably more successful party or tendency; the shift usually takes place amid a cloudburst of moral explanations. Consequently a great migration always begins when an existing party seems to be in such popular disfavor that a crushing defeat is threatened; the parliamentary rats leave the party ship.
But this has nothing to do with superior knowledge or intentions; it is just a clairvoyant gift that warns the parliamentary vermin in time to fall into a new, warm, party bed.
To speak before such a “forum” is really only to cast pearls before the well-known quadrupeds. It is truly not worth while; the result cannot but be nil.
And nil it was. The Pan-German deputies could talk their throats sore: effect there was none.
The press either greeted them with dead silence or so distorted their speeches that any cohesion, often even any meaning was twisted or altogether lost. Public opinion consequently received a very bad impression of the new movement’s purposes. What the individual gentlemen said made no difference; the meaning lay in what one could read. But this was a mere fragment of their speeches, whose disjunction could not but seem like nonsense—and was meant to. The only forum to which they really spoke consisted of barely five hundred parliamentarians, and that tells the whole story.
But the worst of it was this: the Pan-German movement could count on success only if it understood from the outset that the matter was one not of a new party but of a new world-system. Nothing less could rouse the indispensable inner strength to fight this gigantic battle through. Only the best and bravest brains were of any use as leaders.
Unless heroes, ready to sacrifice themselves, lead the fight for a world-concept, there will soon be no rank-and-file warriors ready to die either. A man who is fighting for his own existence can scarcely have much left over for the common cause.
But to preserve this essential it is necessary for everyone to know that while the new movement may offer fame and honor among posterity, for the present it can offer nothing. The more a movement has at its disposal in the way of easily-acquired posts and positions, the greater will be the rush of nonentities. Finally these political day-laborers overrun a successful party in such numbers that the honest fighter of the early days no longer recognizes the old movement, and the new arrivals strongly object to him as an “interloper.” That is the end of any such movement’s “mission.”
The moment the Pan-German movement sold its soul to Parliament, it naturally got “parliamentarians” instead of leaders and fighters. Thus it sank to the level of one of the ordinary political parties of the day, and lost the strength to defy a fatal destiny with the courage of martyrhood. Instead of fighing, it learned to “speak” and “negotiate.” The new parliamentarian soon felt it a preferable, because a less risky, duty to fight for the new world-concept with the “intellectual” weapons of parliamentary eloquence rather than to fling himself, possibly risking his own life, into a battle whose result was uncertain, but which in any case could bring no profits.
Now that they had people in Parliament, the followers outside began to hope for and expect miracles which naturally never happened and never could happen. They very shortly became impatient; for even what they heard from their own deputies by no means suited the expectations of the voters. This was easily explained, since the hostile press took good care not to give the people a truthful picture of the Pan-German deputies’ work.
But the more taste the new representatives acquired for the even gentler style of “revolutionary” struggle in Parliament and Landtag, the less willing they were to return to the more dangerous work of enlightening the broad masses of the common people.
For this reason the mass meeting, the only truly effective (because directly personal) way of exerting an influence on, and thus possibly winning over, any great part of the people, was more and more neglected.
When the beer-table of the meeting-hall was finally exchanged for the auditorium of Parliament, and the speeches were poured out not to the people but into the heads of the so-called “chosen,” the Pan-German movement ceased to be a people’s movement, and shortly sank into a more or less serious club for academic discussions.
Accordingly the bad impression given in the newspapers was no longer corrected by personal activity of the various gentlemen at meetings, so that finally the word “Pan-German” got a very bad taste in the mouths of the common people.
One thing all the ink-stained knights and fools of today should take particularly to heart: the great upheavals in this world have never been guided by a goose-quill.
No, the only thing left over for the pen has been to explain them in theory.
But the force that sent down the great religious and political landslides of history has since the beginning of time been only the magic power of the spoken word.
The great masses of a people, in particular, yield only to the force of speech. All great movements are people’s movements; they are volcanic eruptions of human passions, set off either by the cruel Goddess of Privation or by the torch of words hurled among the masses. They are not the lemonade outpourings of aesthetic-talking literati and parlor heroes.
Only a storm of hot passion can change the fate of peoples; and passion can be aroused only by a man who himself bears it within. Passion alone can give to its chosen vehicle the words which like hammer-blows will open the gates to a people’s heart.
But a man whom passion fails, and whose mouth is closed, has not been chosen by Heaven as a messenger of its will.
Let writers stick to their ink-pots to do “theoretical” work, if their intelligence and ability will let them; for leaders they are neither born nor chosen.
A movement with great aims must, therefore, be anxiously alert to keep its connection with the common people. Every question must be considered from that standpoint and decided with that view.
Furthermore it must avoid anything which might reduce or even slightly weaken its ability to influence the masses, not for any “demagogic” reason, but because of the simple fact that without the mighty force of a people’s masses no great idea, however noble and exalted, can possibly be realized.
Harsh reality alone must determine the path to the goal; unwillingness to go by disagreeable roads in this world only too often means abandoning the goal; this one may or may not be willing to do.
When by its parliamentary direction the Pan-German movement threw the emphasis in its activity not upon the people but upon Parliament, it lost the future, and in its place won cheap successes of the moment. It chose the easier battle, and so was not worthy of the final victory.
I thought these particular questions through very thoroughly in Vienna, and in the failure to understand them I saw one of the chief causes of the collapse of the movement which at that time I supposed was destined to assume the leadership of Germanity.
The first two mistakes which wrecked the Pan-German movement were closely related. The Pan-Germans did not understand the inner driving forces of great upheavals, and thus made too low an estimate of the importance of the great masses of people; hence their slight interest in the social question, hence their inadequate attempts to capture the soul of the lower levels of the nation, and hence their attitude toward Parliament, which could only increase their inadequacy.
If they had realized the enormous power always inherent in the masses as the mainstay of revolutionary resistance, they would have gone to work differently in social and propaganda matters. The chief emphasis of the movement would have been put not on Parliament but on factory and street.
Even their third mistake had its germ in the fact that they did not recognize the value of the masses which, like a flywheel, originally set in motion in a given direction by superior intellects, lend impetus and consistent tenacity to the attack.
The hard struggle which the Pan-German movement carried on with the Catholic Church can be explained only by its insufficient understanding of the people’s spiritual nature.
The causes of the new party’s violent attack upon Rome were as follows:
When the House of Hapsburg had finally decided to transform Austria into a Slavic state, it resorted to every means which seemed at all suited to the purpose. This most conscienceless of ruling houses even unscrupulously put religious institutions to work for the new “state idea.”
Employment of Czech pastorates and their spiritual shepherds was but one of the many means used to attain the purpose, a general Slavicization of Austria.
The process took place something like this:
In purely German parishes, Czech pastors were installed, who slowly but surely began to place the interests of the Czech people above the interests of the churches, and became focal points of infection in the de-Germanization process.
Faced with these tactics the German clergy, unfortunately, were almost a total failure. Not only were they completely useles in any similar struggle on the Germans’ part, but they could not offer the necessary resistance to the attacks of the other side. Thus, by way of a misuse of religion on the one hand and by inadequate defense on the other, Germanity was slowly but unceasingly pushed back.
If it happened as described on a small scale, unfortunately things were not very different on a large scale. Here too the anti-German attempts of the Hapsburgs were not resisted as they should have been, particularly by the higher clergy, while the upholding of German interests was pushed entirely into the background.
The general impression could not but be that the Catholic clergy as such had committed a grave infringement on German rights.
In other words, the Church did not seem to feel itself as one with the German people, but unjustly to take the side of its enemies. The root of the whole trouble (particularly in Schönerer’s opinion) was that the Catholic Church did not have control in Germany, and that for this reason if for no other it was hostile to the interests of our nationality.
In this, as in almost everything in Austria, so-called cultural problems were almost entirely in the background. What determined the Pan-German Party’s position toward the Catholic Church was not nearly so much the Church’s attitude toward science, for instance, as its insufficient efforts on behalf of German rights, and its constant advocacy of Slavic presumption and greed in particular.
Now Georg Schönerer was not the man to do things by halves. He took up the struggle against the Church in the conviction that this struggle alone could save the German people. The “Freedom-from-Rome” movement seemed the most violent, but also the hardest method of attack, and one which must surely destroy the enemy fortress. If it succeeded, the unhappy Church schism in Germany was also at an end, and the inward strength of the Empire and the German nation could not but gain enormously from such a victory.
But neither the premise nor the conclusion of this struggle was correct.
Undoubtedly the power of nationalist resistance among the Catholic clergy of German nationality in all questions concerning Germanity was less than that of their non-German, particularly their Czech colleagues. And only an ignoramus could fail to see that it almost never even occurred to the German clergy to take the offensive for German interests. But anyone except a blind man had also to admit that this was due chiefly to a fact from which we Germans all suffer most bitterly: the objectivity of our attitude toward our nationality as toward everything else.
The Czech priest’s attitude toward his people was subjective, toward the Church only objective, while the German pastor was subjectively devoted to the Church, and remained objective toward his nation. This is a phenomenon which, to our misfortune, we can also observe in a thousand other cases.
This is by no means a special heritage of Catholicism; it very soon contaminates almost every one of our institutions, particularly state or intellectual institutions.
We have only to compare, for instance, our civil servants’ attitude toward attempts at a national revival with the attitude which the civil servants of another nation would take in such a case. Is it possible to suppose that any army officers in the world would put aside the interests of their nation designating them “governmental authority” as ours have done for the past five years, nay, are even thought specially meritorious for so doing? Do not both Churches today take a standpoint in the Jewish question which suits neither the interests of the nation nor the real needs of religion? We have but to compare the attitude of a Jewish rabbi on all questions of any importance for Jewry as a race with the attitude of by far the greater part of our clergy—our clergy of both Churches, at that.
With us this phenomenon always occurs whenever it is a question of maintaining an abstract idea.
“Governmental authority,” “democracy,” “pacificism,” “international solidarity,” etc.—these are ideas which we almost always turn into such rigid, wholly doctrinaire concepts that we can judge generally vital national matters only from the point of view they give us.
This calamitous way of regarding all our concerns from the standpoint of a preconceived opinion kills any ability to think oneself subjectively into anything which objectively contradicts one’s own doctrines; and it eventually leads to a complete reversal of means and end. People resist attempts at any national revival that depends on the removal of a bad and destructive regime; this would be an offense against “governmental authority.” But “governmental authority” in the eyes of one of these fanatics for objectivity is not a means to an end, but the end itself, sufficient to fill his whole sorry life. Thus for instance they would indignantly resist any attempt at a dictatorship even though its head were a Frederick the Great and the statecraftsmen of the momentary parliamentary majority were but incompetent dwarves or worse, because these pig-headed men of principle think the law of democracy more sacred than the welfare of a nation. Some of them will defend the worst tyranny, destroying a people, because at the moment it embodies “governmental authority;” while others oppose even the most beneficent government if it does not fit in with their notion of “democracy.”
In the same way our German pacifists will pass over in silence any rape upon the nation, no matter how sanguinary, even though carried out by the worst militaristic forces, if this fate has to be averted by resistance, that is by force; for this would violate the spirit of their peace society. The international Socialist can be plundered by the rest of the world in solidarity; he pays it back in fraternal affection, not dreaming of reprisal or even of defense, simply because he is—a German.
This may be a sad fact, but trying to change anything involves recognizing it first.
The same thing holds for the weakness in upholding German interests by part of the clergy. It is neither malicious ill will in itself, nor compelled by, let us say, orders “from above;” we see in this lack of nationalist determination only the result of an inadequate training for Germanity from childhood, along with complete subjection to an idea which has become an idol.
Training for democracy, for international Socialism, for pacifism, etc., is so rigid and exclusive—that is, so completely subjective—that the fundamental conception influences even the general image of the rest of the world, while from childhood onward the attitude toward Germanity has always been most objective. Thus the pacifist, subjectively surrendering himself altogether to his idea, will (if he is a German) look for the objective justice in every grave and unjust menace to his people, and will never join and fight, purely from an instinct of self-preservation, in the ranks of his herd.
How true this is of the two churches may be seen from what follows.
By nature, Protestantism upholds the interests of Germanity better, in so far as this is implicit in its birth and later tradition; but it fails whenever the defense of national interests carries over into a field either missing from the general line of its concepts and traditional development, or for some reason actually objectionable to the Church.
Protestantism will always make a stand for the betterment of Germanity in itself, so long as it is a matter of inner purity or deepening of the nation, of the defense of German character, the German language, or German freedom; all this is firmly rooted in Protestantism itself. But it is quick to combat bitterly every attempt to free the nation from the embrace of its most deadly enemy, because its attitude toward Jewry is more or less firmly fixed by dogma. And yet this is the question which must be solved before any further attempts at a German renaissance or revival can ever have the slightest sense or possibility of success.
While I was in Vienna I had leisure and opportunity enough to look into this question without previous prejudice; and my daily social contacts confirmed my opinion a thousand times over.
It was quickly proved in this focal point of miscellaneous nationalities that only a German pacifist will always try to look objectively at the interests of his own nation, but that the Jew never does so with the interests of the Jewish people; that only the German Socialist is “international” in a sense which forbids him to win justice for his own people except by whimpering and bawling to his international comrades, while it is never true of the Czech or the Pole; in short, I saw even then that the harm was only partly in the doctrines as such, and quite as much in our wholly inadequate training for our own nationality, and our consequent less intense devotion to it.
This disproves the first purely theoretical argument for the Pan-German movement’s struggle against Catholicism as such.
Let us train the German people from childhood to exclusive recognition of the rights of their own nationality, and not infect the children’s hearts with our curse of “objectivity” in matters even of our own self-preservation; we shall soon see that (given a radically nationalist government), as in Ireland, Poland or France, so too in Germany the Catholic will always be a German.
We find our strongest proof in the period when, to protect its existence, our people last appeared before the judgment-seat of history for a battle of life and death.
So long as leadership from above was not lacking, the people did its duty overwhelmingly. Protestant pastor and Catholic priest both contributed enormously to the long continuance of our resistance, not only at the front, but at home even more. During those years, and particularly in the first flaring-up, for both camps there was really but one holy German Empire, on behalf of whose existence and future everyone turned to his own Heaven.
There was one question which the Pan-German movement in Austria should have asked itself: Is the preservation of Austrian Germanity possible with a Catholic faith, or not? If so, the political party had no business to concern itself with religious, to say nothing of confessional matters; but if not, a religious reformation was necessary, never a political party.
Anyone who thinks he can arrive at a religious reformation by way of a political organization shows only that he has not the faintest notion of the growth of religious ideas or teachings and their results in the Church.
Here one really cannot serve two masters. And make no mistake: I believe the founding or destruction of a religion is a far greater matter than the founding or destruction of a State, let alone of a party.
Let no one say that the above-mentioned attacks were only self-defense against attacks from the other side. In all ages, obviously, conscienceless fellows have not hesitated to make of religion a tool for their political business (almost always the sole concern of such characters). But just as obviously it is wrong to make religion or a Church responsible for a number of scoundrels who misuse it, for they would probably make anything the servant of their base instincts.
Nothing could suit one of these parliamentary ne’er-do-wells and sluggards better than thus finding an opportunity to justify his political jugglery at least ex post facto. For the moment religion or a sect is made responsible for his personal badness, and is attacked on that ground, the lying fellow summons all the world with loud shouts to witness how justified his behavior has been, and how the salvation of religion and Church is due solely to him and his eloquence. The rest of the world, as stupid as it is forgetful, usually does not recognize him amid the shouting as the real author of the whole struggle, or at least does not remember him, and so the scoundrel has really attained his object.
These crafty foxes know perfectly well that it has nothing to do with religion; all the more will they laugh up their sleeves while their honest but clumsy adversary loses the game, and finally, despairing of man’s honesty and good faith, retires from it all.
In other respects too it would be unjust to make religion as such or even the Church responsible for the misdeeds of individuals. If we compare the greatness of its visible organization with the average imperfection of men in general, we shall have to admit that the proportion of good to bad is better there than almost anywhere else. No doubt there are among the priests themselves those whose holy office is but a means for the satisfaction of political ambitions, yes, who amid the political battle forget in an often more-than-regrettable fashion that they are after all the guardians of a higher truth, and not defenders of lies and slander; but for every one such unworthy figure there are a thousand and more honorable shepherds of souls faithfully devoted to their mission, who stand out like little islands from the general slough of the present corrupt and untruthful age.
I do not and must not condemn the Church as such if some corrupt creature in priest’s garb chances to go wrong in some morally unclean fashion; no more do I if some other one among many befouls and betrays his nationality—particularly in an age when that is an absolutely every-day matter. Today especially we should not forget that for one such Ephialtes there are thousands who feel the misfortunes of their people with bleeding hearts, and who, like the very best in our nation, long for the moment when Heaven will once more smile upon us.
If anyone replies that these are not petty every-day problems, but questions of fundamental truth and dogma in general, we can give him the necessary answer only with another question:
If you think you are chosen by Fate to proclaim the truth here, by all means do so; but have the courage not to do it by way of a political party—for this too is jugglery—, but instead of the evil of today, set up your improvement of the future.
If you lack the courage, or if you are not quite clear yourself about your better substitute, then let things alone; but in any case do not try to get by stealth through a political movement what you dare not attain openly.
So long as religious problems do not, like an enemy of the people, undermine the morals and ethics of one’s own race, political parties have no business to meddle with them; just as religion should not identify itself with political party mischief.
If ecclesiastical dignitaries use religious institutions, or even doctrines, to injure their own nationality, we must never follow them on this path to fight them with their own weapons.
To the political leader, the religious beliefs and institutions of his people must be sacrosanct; otherwise he has no right to be a politician, but will become a reformer if he has the stuff for it.
Any other attitude, particularly in Germany, would lead to catastrophe.
In studying the Pan-German movement and its struggle against Rome, I came at that time, and increasingly as the years went on, to the following belief:
This movement’s slight realization of the importance of the social problem cost it the truly able-bodied fighting masses of the people; its entrance into Parliament deprived it of its mighty impetus, and infected it with all the weaknesses peculiar to that institution; its struggle against the Catholic Church made it impossible in many lower and middle-class groups, and thus robbed it of many of the best elements the nation can call its own.
The practical result of the Austrian Kulturkampf was close to zero.
They did succeed in wresting about a hundred thousand members from the Church, but without even inflicting any particular damage. The Church had in this case really no need to shed tears over the lost sheep; for what it lost it had inwardly long since ceased fully to possess. Here was the difference between the new Reformation and the old one: during the former, many of the Church’s best had turned away as a matter of religious conviction, whereas now only the naturally lukewarm departed, and this from “considerations” of a political nature.
But precisely from the political standpoint the result was as sorry as it was ridiculous.
Once again a promising movement toward political salvation for the German nation had gone to pieces because, not being conducted with the necessary ruthless clear-sightedness, it lost itself in directions which were bound to divide its force.
For one thing is surely true: the Pan-German movement would never have made this mistake if it had sufficiently understood the native character of the broad masses. If its leaders had known that to succeed at all one must, for purely human reasons, never show two or more adversaries to the masses, because then the fighting force is completely split up—if they had realized this, the Pan-German movement would have been directed at one single adversary. Nothing is more dangerous for a political party than to let itself be led hither and yon in its decisions by vaporing fools who wish for everything without ever being able to accomplish anything whatever.
No matter how much may actually be wrong with a particular religious persuasion, a political party must never for an instant lose sight of the fact that, judging by all previous historical experience, no purely political party in a similar situation has ever succeeded in arriving at a religious reformation.
We do not study history to forget its teachings when they should be put to practical use, nor to think that things are different now, and that its eternal truths are no longer applicable; on the contrary, we learn from history its practical application for the present. Let no one who cannot accomplish this imagine himself a political leader; he is in actuality a shallow if usually very conceited simpleton, and all the good will in the world does not excuse his practical incapacity.
And in fact the art of truly great popular leaders in all ages has consisted chiefly in not distracting the attention of a people, but concentrating always on a single adversary. The more unified the object of the people’s will to fight, the greater will be the magnetic attraction of a movement, and the more tremendous its impact. It is part of a great leader’s genius to make even widely separated adversaries appear as if they belonged to but one category, because among weakly and undecided characters the recognition of various enemies all too easily marks the beginning of doubt of one’s own rightness.
When the wavering masses see themselves fighting against too many enemies, objectivity immediately appears, casting up the question whether all the others are really wrong, and only one’s own people or movement alone is in the right.
And just there is the first weakening of one’s own strength. Therefore a multiplicity of inwardly various opponents must always be lumped together so that in the eyes of the mass of one’s own followers the battle is fought against but one single enemy. This strengthens their faith in their own cause, and increases their bitterness against him who attacks it.
That the Pan-German movement did not realize this cost it its success. Its goal was rightly seen, its will was pure; but the road it took was wrong. It was like a mountain-climber who keeps his eye fixed on the peak to be scaled, and takes the trail with great decision and energy, but pays no attention to the path, and, his eye always on his goal, neither sees nor examines the nature of the ascent, and thus finally goes astray.
The situation of its great competitor, the Christian Socialist Party, seemed to be reversed. The road it took was shrewdly and rightly chosen, but a clear realization of the goal was lacking.
In almost every matter where the Pan-German movement was lacking, the attitude of the Christian Socialist Party was right, and was deliberately planned for results.
It had the necessary realization of the masses’ importance, and secured at least part of them by plainly emphasizing its social character from the very first. By adjusting itself to win the petty and lower middle and artisan classes it obtained a following as faithful as it was dogged and self-sacrificing. It avoided fighting any religious institution, and thus secured the support of a mighty organization such as the Church is. Consequently it had but one truly great adversary. It recognized the value of large-scale propaganda, and was skilled in working upon the human instincts of the broad mass of its followers.
It too failed to reach its dreamed-of goal of saving Austria. The fault was in two shortcomings of its method, as well as in its uncertainty about the goal itself.
The anti-Semitism of the new movement was founded on a religious concept instead of a racial insight. The reason that this mistake occurred was the same which also caused the second error.
If the Christian Socialist Party was to save Austria, it must not, in the opinion of its founders, take its stand on the race principle, since otherwise a general dissolution of the State was soon bound to take place. Particularly the situation in Vienna itself made it necessary, in the party leaders’ view, to put aside as far as possible all dividing tendencies, and in their place to emphasize all the unifying considerations.
By that time Vienna was already so thoroughly impregnated with Czech elements, particularly, that only the greatest tolerance in race questions could hold these elements in a party which was not anti-German from the beginning. If Austria was to be saved, they could not be dispensed with. An attempt was therefore attempted to win especially the very numerous Czech petty artisans in Vienna by a drive against Manchester liberalism, and it was supposed that thus the struggle against Jewry on a religious basis was provided with a slogan which would bridge all the national differences of old Austria.
That an attack on such a basis would cause but slight worry to the Jews is plain on the face of it. At worst, a dash of baptismal water would always save his business and Judaism together.
With a superficial argument such as this they never achieved serious scientific treatment of the whole problem, and so they repelled all too many to whom this sort of anti-Semitism was incomprehensible. Thus the attractive power of the idea was almost exclusively confined to limited intellectual circles, if they did not want to go from there to a real insight through pure emotional experience. On principle the intelligentsia remained hostile. The whole affair took on more and more the appearance of being a mere attempt at a new conversion of the Jews, or even the expression of a certain competitive envy. The struggle thus lost the ear marks of an inner and higher consecration, and seemed to many people (and not the worst sort) immoral and reprehensible. The conviction was lacking that this was a vital question for all of humanity, upon whose solution the fate of all non-Jewish peoples depended.
This half measure destroyed the value of the Christian Socialist Party’s anti-Semitic attitude. It was an apparent anti-Semitism that was almost worse than none; for being lulled in security, people thought they had the enemy by the ears, while in reality they themselves were led around by the nose.
The Jew, however, soon became so accustomed to this sort of anti-Semitism that he would surely have missed it more if absent than he was hampered by its presence.
If the State of nationalities had already demanded one great sacrifice, the upholding of Germanity as such demanded a greater.
The party could not be “nationalistic” if they were to avoid losing the ground under their feet in Vienna itself. By gentle evasion of this question they hoped still to save the Hapsburg State, and the very attempt drove it to ruin. At the same time the movement lost the great source of strength which alone in the long run can fill a political party with inner driving force. The Christian Socialist movement thus became a party like any other.
I followed both movements with the greatest attention, one from the urging of my own heart-beat, the other because I was carried away by admiration for the rare man who even then seemed to me a bitter symbol of all Austrian Germanity.
When the tremendous funeral procession carried the dead Mayor from the City Hall out toward the Ringstrasse, I too was among the many hundreds of thousands who watched the tragic spectacle. My feelings, deeply stirred, told me that even this man’s work must be in vain because of the dire fate which was leading the State inevitably to its doom. If Dr. Karl Lueger had lived in Germany, he would have been ranked among the great minds of our people; that he had worked in this impossible State was his misfortune and that of his work.
When he died, the flames in the Balkans were already greedily flickering higher from month to month, so that Fate had mercifully spared him from seeing what he had still believed he could prevent.
I tried to discover the causes behind the failure of the one movement and the misdirection of the other, and came to the definite conclusion that (quite aside from the impossibility of fortifying the State in old Austria) the mistakes of the two parties were the following:
The Pan-German movement was right enough in principle in its views on the goal of a German revival, but unhappy in its choice of weapons. It was nationalistic, but unfortunately not social enough to conquer the masses. Its anti-Semitism, however, rested upon a proper realization of the importance of the race problem, and not on religious concepts. On the other hand, the attack upon a particular religious persuasion was actually and practically wrong.
The Christian Socialist movement had vague ideas of the goal of a German renaissance, but was intelligent and fortunate in its choice of roads as a party. It realized the importance of the social question, was mistaken in its fight upon Jewry, and did not have any conception of the might of the national idea.
If in addition to its shrewd knowledge of the broad masses the Christian Socialist Party had adequately understood the importance of the race problem as the Pan-German movement had grasped it, and if finally the Party had been nationalistic; or if the Pan-German movement besides its true insight into the goal of the Jewish question and the meaning of the nationalist idea had adopted also the practical shrewdness of the Christian Socialist Party, and particularly the latter’s attitude toward Socialism, the result would have been the one movement which in my opinion might successfully have changed the Germans’ fate.
It lay chiefly in the nature of the Austrian State that this did not happen.
As my convictions were not realized in any other party, I could not afterward make up my mind to join or fight for one of the existing organizations. Even then I thought all the political movements were failures, incapable of carrying out a national renaissance of the German people on any large and not merely external scale.
My repugnance for the Hapsburg State kept growing. The more attention I began to pay to questions of foreign politics particularly, the more did my conviction gain ground that this State structure could only be the misfortune of Germanity. More and more clearly, too, I saw that not only the fate of the German nation was being decided from here, but within the German Empire itself. This held not only for general questions of politics, but equally for every manifestation of cultural life.
Even here, in the field of purely cultural or artistic affairs, the Austrian State showed every sign of enervation, or at any rate its meaninglessness for the German nation. This was most true in the field of architecture. If for no other reason, modern architecture in Austria could have no conspicuously great successes because (at least in Vienna) after the building of the Ringstrasse was completed, the jobs to be done were but insignificant compared to the plans being developed in Germany.
So I began more and more to lead a double life; reason and reality bade me go through a bitter and useful school in Austria, but my heart dwelt elsewhere.
An uneasy discontent possessed me as I came to realize the hollowness of this State and the impossibility of saving it, while I felt with certainty that it could not but be the misfortune of the German people in every respect. I was convinced that the State must confine and hamper any truly great German, whereas on the other hand it would foster everything non-German.
I found revolting the conglomeration of races which the Imperial capital presented, revolting the whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs and Croatians, etc., and mingled with them all the eternal decomposing fungi of mankind—Jews and again Jews.
To me the gigantic city seemed the embodiment of incest.
The German of my youth was the dialect which is spoken also in Lower Bavaria; I could neither forget it nor learn the Viennese jargon. The longer I stayed in the city, the higher burned my hatred for the alien admixture of peoples which began to gnaw away at this ancient seat of German culture.
The idea that this State could be preserved much longer seemed to me absolutely ridiculous.
Austria was like an old mosaic, in which the cement holding together the separate bits of stone has become old and crumbly. So long as it is not touched, the work of art can still pretend existence; but the moment it receives a jar, it falls into a thousand fragments. The only question was when the jolt would come.
Since my heart had never beat for an Austrian Monarchy, but only for a German Reich, the moment of the State’s collapse could but seem to me the beginning of the salvation of the German nation.
For all these reasons my longing grew ever stronger to go at last where my secret wishes and secret love had been pulling me since early youth.
I hoped some day to make a name as an architect, and so, on the large or small scale which Fate might assign me, to devote my honest labors to the nation.
And lastly I wanted to enjoy the happiness of being and working at the place whence the most burning wish of my heart must some day be fulfilled: Union of my beloved homeland with its common Fatherland, the German Empire.
Many people even today will not be able to realize the greatness of my longing; but I address myself to those whom Fate has either thus far denied this happiness, or with harsh cruelty has deprived of it; I addressed myself to all those who, separated from the mother country, must fight for even the sacred possession of language, who are pursued and tormented for their faithfulness to the Fatherland, and who long in anguished emotion for the moment that will bring them back to the heart of the beloved Mother; to all these I address myself, and I know they will understand me!
Only those who know by bitter experience what it means to be a German without the privilege of belonging to the dear Fatherland can measure the deep longing which always burns in the heart of the children parted from the mother country. It torments its victims, and denies them happiness and contentment until the doors of the paternal house shall open, and common blood shall find rest and peace in a common realm.
Vienna was and remained the hardest, if also the most thorough, school of my life. I had entered the city half a boy, and I left it as a quiet and serious man. There I laid the foundation for a world-concept in general and a way of political thinking in particular which I had later only to complete in detail, but which never afterward forsook me. Only now, in fact, can I fully appreciate the real value of those years of apprenticeship.
I have treated this period at some length because it gave me my first object-lessons in those questions which go to form the basis of the Party which, from tiny beginnings, in a scant five years[1] has begun to develop into a great mass movement. I do not know what my attitude would be today toward Jewry, toward Social Democracy, or rather toward Marxism as a whole, toward the social question etc., if a cornerstone of personal views had not thus early been laid by the pressure of Fate—and by my own self-education.
For even though the misfortunes of the Fatherland may stimulate thousands upon thousands to ponder the inner causes of the collapse, still this can never bring the thoroughness and the deeper insight which are revealed to the man who himself masters Fate after years of struggle.
- ↑ Written in 1924.