Germany in Solution

I

THE Central Alliance has collapsed. The German Empire has fallen. We are celebrating victory, forgetful of the fact that victories may be the most precarious experiences in the life of nations. Germany’s past — even the recent past of the four years of world-war — has suddenly lost interest in the intense climax of the drama immediately before our eyes. Yet from that past we must judge the present and plan the future.

We have long cherished a mistaken idea of Germany’s inner unity. We have known that Austria was divided into many discordant races, and that Turkey was but a military automaton operated from Berlin. We suspected that Bulgaria had lost her martial spirit after gorging herself with her transient annexations. But Germany itself we imagined a personification of unified, harmonious, disciplined, efficient, though malign, power.

In reality, that country has been, almost from the beginning of hostilities, a land of internal discord — an autocracy where the spirit of dissent was almost anarchic in comparison with the unity of purpose in our democracy. Few better illustrations have occurred in history of the fact that palace rule is divided rule. To be sure there has been what a German newspaper recently called ‘An Olympian military government,’ with a fairly consistent policy. That policy did not represent the will of the German nation, but of a governing clique whose power was based upon the caprice of military fortune. But military rule was only a war-manifestation of autocracy. The system of palacecontrol was older than the war. For two generations it had been a school of shifty statesmanship. Its policies were opportunist and inconsistent. It made public men of individual integrity appear collectively a group of liars; for even a cabinet’s promises were constantly canceled by higher authority. No one could depend upon such a government. The real interests of the country were sacrificed to caste ambitions and personal rivalries. Without attaching too much actuality to Prince Lichnowsky’s assertion that personal antagonism to himself in high places defeated his efforts to bring England and Germany together in a common policy of coöperative world-development, and thus prevent a world-war, what may be dubious as a historical record is an authoritative characterization of Prussian governmental conditions.

The test of war put such a government under a strain that revealed its weakness. Its diplomacy has failed, principally because it had no moral standards. We may not admire the men who are leading the bloody terror now ravaging Russia; but we must concede them intellectual acumen. Leon Trotsky has recently published a book entitled From the October Revolution to the Brest Treaty, from which translations have appeared in the German press. He describes the tremendous effect, produced in Russia by the liberal phrasing and democratic formulæ contained in the German reply to Russia’s request for an armistice and peace negotiations, and the violent disillusion that followed, when Germany’s real demands were known.

It was at first glance hard to understand what German diplomacy was aiming at in presenting such democratic proposals, merely to reveal itself as a wolf in sheep’s clothing three days later. . . . The secret of Von Kühlmann’s policy was his conviction that we were ready to play a double game in partnership with him. He calculated like this: — Russia must have peace. The Bolsheviki have got control by advocating peace. They are bound to a democratic peace-programme, to be sure; but we diplomats know how to represent black as white. We Germans will relieve the situation for the Bolsheviki by camouflaging our plundering in decorative democratic formulæ. The Bolsheviki representatives will have enough personal interest in success not to go into the political aspect of the thing too closely and unveil to the world the real situation behind our democratic pretence. — When we showed that we Russians were determined to insist upon the actual application of democratic principles in the intercourse of nations, Von Kühlmann resented it as the intentional and malicious breaking of a tacit promise. For nothing in the world would he vary from the formulation of December 25; and with complete confidence in his bureaucratic logic, he endeavored to impress upon the world that white and black were absolutely indistinguishable from each other. . . . General Hoffmann introduced a refreshing feature by his interjections, without showing any sympathy or regard for Von Kühlmann’s diplomatic instructions. Several times, while these complicated juristic debates were going on, the general thrust his soldier’s boots upon the table. We, for our part, never doubted that the boots of General Hoffmann were the only real serious fact in the discussion.

Berlin was dealing in the same spirit, not only with hostile governments, but also with its own people. It tried to treat the German nation precisely as it did the representatives of the Bolshevist republic at Brest-Litovsk. Now the Germans criticize themselves as ‘politically undeveloped.’ At least, that is the description with which the defenders of the old régime flattered their fellow citizens. But the German public was far too intelligent not to appreciate increasingly the incapacity and the fundamental insincerity of autocracy, as revealed more glaringly each day that the war continued, and to attack it, at first more vociferously than valiantly, but ultimately with real determination. Even in 1909 Scheidemann, in the Reichstag, called wordbreaking, ‘the most characteristic tradition of the Prussian royal house.’ The war has been a period of constant domestic agitation, in which the backwardness of Germany’s political institutions, and its uncandid policies, have been abundantly advertised to its own people. The recent franchise and parliamentary reforms were no death-bed repentance. They were not a manifestation of the proverbial German respect for authority shown to the President of the United States. They were the logical product of a long campaign of political agitation and education, culminating in a period of chastening national misfortune.

II

More particularly since the Reichstag peace resolution of July, 1917, the German nation has seemed to an outsider, watching it through the windows of its press, like a strong man writhing in his chains. It would confuse the picture with too much detail to recount the series of rapidly succeeding incidents which convey this impression. The Vossische Zeitung recently said: ‘If a nation becomes accustomed to regard constantly recurring crises as a normal aspect of its political life, it is reaching a time when it is too callous to take energetic measures to avoid more serious catastrophes.’ All too prophetic words!

The disintegration of Germany’s political morale was hastened by the breakdown of the autocratic administrative machinery. The most vital interest of the common citizen was in the equitable distribution of food. But a government inspired by the caste spirit cannot apportion the public’s resources justly. Both the German and the Austrian food-administrations failed less through inadequate supplies than through inability to treat rich and poor, powerful and weak, alike. While the privileged classes in the Prussian and Hungarian parliaments were denying equal suffrage to the voters, the same classes, in their capacity as landlords, were refusing equal rations to the people. In an appeal to its members for franchise reform, the Social-Democratic party said: ‘Only by a resolute struggle against the pernicious spirit of a privileged caste, which swears by a policy of force abroad and clings to its anti-social privileges at home, can the people attain the rights that have been promised them.’ In a petition to the Prussian food-administration, it cautioned: ‘There is no doubt that we are facing a condition which must prove fatal, if the government is not resolved to break finally with the policy of favoring the interests of the producer to the prejudice of the vital needs of the people at large.’

In our admiration for the efficiency of Germany’s military machine, and in an uncritical acceptance of Germany’s own accounts of its administrative superiority, Americans have at times been inclined to concede that an autocracy, considered solely as a method of government, was more efficient than a democracy. The test of war has gone far to disprove this view in both England and the United States. Germany has shown indications of a situation resembling that in Russia between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The State-of-Siege Act, which was enforced throughout Germany from 1914 until last month, subordinated the police powers and certain judicial and administrative powers of the civil authorities to those of local military commanders. The latter assumed functions beyond the visible intent of the act, and exercised them with satrapic disregard for the supremacy of law over official caprice. To illustrate this by a single example — the discussion of the proposed franchise-reform law in Prussia was forbidden in some towns, while it was permitted in neighboring towns which chanced to be in another military district. A man might be arrested and imprisoned for advocating equal suffrage at one end of a trolley-line, and permitted to argue himself hoarse in its favor within the next nickel-fare limit.

Equally inconsistent was the treatment of the press. This treatment was liberal or the reverse according to the aspect under which it is considered. On the whole, German newspapers have discussed war-issues more objectively than those of America. The Pro-German Stockholm Aftonbladet is perhaps a dubious witness, and the view it presents is one-sided; but there is a degree of truth in its comment that,—

A person who reads the German, French, and English newspapers must note that during the war the German press has enjoyed almost anarchic freedom in discussing foreign affairs, while the press of the Entente has been bound down as rigidly as Prometheus to the rock. To illustrate this by one of the most obvious examples, the German press has regularly published the official army reports of the hostile countries, and still publishes them. No German army report has ever been published unmutilated in France since the war began. The English either publish them or not, as they deem expedient. No German newspaper can get into France or England. Germany permits the entry of all foreign newspapers. . . . In the Entente countries one view of the situation reaches the public, and that is the view of the responsible officials. . . . Only absolutely trusted men are given access to the press or permission to address public meetings. This is done in England more cleverly than in France or America, but the result is the same. Consequently the English and French newspapers show a unity of policy that is imposing. When we turn to the German press, we meet the characteristic German tendency to split up into a thousand parties. Nearly every newspaper has several staff writers who deal with foreign topics, and each one has his particular private views on foreign problems. Every professor of public law and economics, every well-known journalist, or influential merchant, or politician, freely expresses his opinion. One nowhere finds that unity that prevails in the English and French press.

Nevertheless German newspapers frequently reach us with broad white patches, where articles have been deleted by the censor and the form printed without substituting other matter. When Secretary von Hintze, in addressing the Vienna journalists last September, spoke of the press of the Central Powers as free and of that of the Entente as controlled, some German papers professed to understand his statement as a joke. The Frankfurter Zeitung commented : —

We are following closely the articles published in the newspapers of the countries fighting us, and find no evidence that the Secretary’s remark was justified. Particularly in England there has always been an independent and very outspoken press, which has not failed to publish views differing from those of the government, and which has directed wholesome criticism to political institutions and military orders during the war. We frankly envy those papers their ability to do this, not primarily out of selfish motives, but in the common interest of Germany and our cause. The wild ranting and the violent abuse in the enemy press — a tone which we have been fortunate enough to escape for the most part in Germany — is presumably not due to the instigation of the Entente governments, but is merely an ugly manifestation of national hysteria.

One feels that the Germans are not natural team-workers, and that this may explain in part their failure to attain a higher degree of political liberty. It has taken the compulsion of unsuccessful war to drive them to revolution, and unless they learn to subordinate individual opinion to public opinion, as we do in America, — thus attaining the ‘unity of policy that is imposing,’ — the period of unsettled conditions in their country may be indefinitely prolonged.

Professor Delbrück, in discussing the recent parliamentary reforms in Germany, writes, ‘The fact that our Reichstag has not governed like the English Parliament was due not so much to constitutional provisions as to the fact that the Reichstag, since its organization in 1867, has never had a united majority. This made it possible for the administration to follow very much its own course by constructing majorities according to its needs from different minority groups. Indeed, it not infrequently happened that the government worked with two different majorities at the same time.’

Traveled Americans will recall what seem to us inconsistencies in Germany — autocratic institutions, reverence for caste, implicit obedience to authority, hand in hand with democratic social customs and radical social theories. Germany was the land not only of a divine-right Kaiser and his Junkers, but of Karl Marx and his followers. The issue between democracy and autocracy cuts deeper there than in America, because the government performs so many more functions than our own. In a highly socialized nation political administration affects the working classes more intimately than with us. Democratization means to the Germans, not only a step toward the rule of the people, but possibly a step toward the rule of the proletariat.

Most Americans are living in innocent obliviousness of facts which are infinitely portentous to Europeans — of the deep, shuddering stir of social revolution. The red flag is already flying in Germany, and that means more than either a political or a national movement. It means class-war and internationalism. The empire that was of the Tsars may have collapsed as a kingdom of material power, but it has vastly extended its boundaries and made far-reaching conquests and annexations as a kingdom of social ideals. Its new subjects are not only among the poor and the ignorant, but also among the multiplied proletariat of the educated which the war has created. We think of Russia — with sufficient reason — as a land of anarchy and famine, of the red terror and the dictatorship of the unfit. The nominal supremacy of the Bolsheviki may be short-lived. Yet to almost every laborer and mechanic in Europe Russia stands for something which few of us comprehend. It is to the present generation of the European masses what America was to libertyseeking Europe in the days of our fathers.

The classes which have ruled Germany hitherto feared this new movement intensely. They appreciated vividly how real and imminent a peril — for they saw it only as a peril — Russia’s example presented to bankrupt and famished Europe. It is just the same peril to Italy and Spain, and possibly to France, that it is to Germany and Austria. There are men of all tongues and birthplaces in the Bolshevist ranks. With the inconsistent opportunism characteristic of such a palace régime as controlled Germany during the war, the powers-that-were in that country alternately flirted with and betrayed the Bolshevist dictators at Moscow. With feverish concern they erected a protective zone of propertysacred states between their own territories and the infected area of revolutionary Socialism; but they maintained a peace with the Bolsheviki which the latter termed ‘an armed truce.’

A cartoon has gone the rounds in Germany, representing the Russian border countries with a sign bearing the inscription, ‘German princes unloaded here.’ With the obtuseness of the unteachable, the Kaiser and his entourage plotted and planned the erection of a ring of thronelets occupied by German princelings, from Finland to Poland and beyond. Scheidemann protested vehemently in Vorwärts, that the fact that such a thing was possible was ‘scandalous’; and the liberal press was equally outspoken in its objections. The people at large in Germany did not want to see these little monarchies set up by their government. That was one reason why they turned against their recent rulers. They would not indorse a policy which committed the nation to spilling German blood in defense of dynastic interests in foreign countries.

However, these states were created, not only to promote monarchy as a form of government, but to protect the great landlords from an agrarian revolution and to isolate so far as possible the infection of communism and nationalized production which had established a virulent focus in ancient Russia. Even the indifference with which the Central Powers permitted their vanquished enemy, Roumania, to annex new territories in Bessarabia, was due partly to the consideration that the land-confiscating peasantry of the latter province would be held in check by the manor-holding boyars of the former country — just as the hostile King of Roumania was allowed to retain his throne in spite of popular protest in both Germany and Austria, partly because, — as a private emissary of Emperor Charles told him, — ‘We kings must stand together.'

However, there is a new current cutting directly across the drift toward social revolution in eastern Europe. That is nationalism in its intensely active nascent state — a movement not wholly reconcilable with the internationalist basis of the class-struggle. Though peoples representing ancient kingdoms and vanished dreams of empire, like the Poles and Ukrainians and Lithuanians, are in one sense by no means nascent, their rebirth is accompanied by phenomena of new nations — the aggressive self-assertion which has been tragically illustrated by the new German Empire itself. Europe will be fortunate if it escapes a long series of petty wars, or near wars, arising out of the conflicting historic, ethnographic, economic, religious, and political claims of these new nationalities.

However, although nationalism is in important aspects anti-Socialist and Socialism is international; and although the new nationalism is manifesting itself most actively in the industrially less developed parts of Europe, — in the Balkans, Slavic Austria, distant Caucasus, and along Germany’s eastern borders, — none the less this nationalist movement is transfused with Bolshevist ideals and sympathies.

The latter fact is due to the land question. Most of these countries are regions where large landholdings prevail. This is not entirely so in the Balkans and Slavic Austria, or in the Baltic Provinces and Finland. But the landless class is large enough even there to afford recruits for a strong radical movement. Finland would have a social-democratic government in all probability to-day, had not German troops interfered to suppress it; and the soul of the Finnish social revolutionary agitation is the landless peasantry. Analogous conditions exist throughout the Baltic provinces. A letter in a Berlin paper, dated Moscow, in mid-September, reports a recent conversation with an old Pole, intimate with the country people, during a railway journey through Poland. He said, —

The peasant keeps his own counsel, but he is angered almost beyond control by the occupying authorities [the Germans], who compel him to deliver his produce to them for a price he regards as out of all proportion less than he could get in the open market. His hatred of his own wealthier countrymen is no less bitter. The example of Russia has increased the normal hatred of the peasant for his landlord to a veritable fury. Moreover, he now reproaches the Polish upper classes with taking refuge under the wing of the Germans, profiting by their favor, and joining them in exploiting the peasants.

Abundant evidence exists in the German papers that exactly the same sentiment prevails throughout Ukraine and Roumania. It even extends to Bosnia, where the heriditary tenants have long been restless. In fact, the large landholdings have been actually divided among the peasants without compensation in Bessarabia, and the King is behind a new land law for old Roumania. For weeks before the collapse of the Bulgarian army, according to German reports, the cars on the trains carrying supplies to the troops at the front were inscribed with Bolshevist propaganda. Long before they had received recognition as belligerents, the Czechs were divided into a Conservative and a Socialist group, that intrigued against each other at Prague, Paris, Petrograd, and Kieff, and the Socialists — not to be confused with the Bolsheviki in this instance — won the leadership of the movement.

The Bolshevist army in Russia and Siberia is international. We hear of large numbers of war prisoners from Germany and Austria among them. The German papers estimate that in some places former subjects of the Central Powers constitute one fourth of the Bolshevist forces. But these Germans and Hungarians, and occasional Slavs, are not fighting for the Kaiser. They have become citizens of the Soviet Republic, and are internationalists whose only banner is the red one.

Americans should keep in mind that the most liberal political institutions may accompany what the Social-Democrats regard as dire reaction. America is by no means a land of liberty in the eyes of these men. Last January the Finns, though they enjoyed complete independence under a constitution even more democratic than our own, inaugurated one of the bloodiest revolutions that has ever occurred in Europe.

Again, the revolt in the army and navy of the Central Powers means more than a political and social movement. It contains an element of vengeance for past abuses. To cite one mild example. An Austrian soldier, after long service on the Italian front, recently was granted a short furlough to visit his family in Galicia, which required a railway journey of several days, as trains were running then in Austria. He had nearly reached his destination when he was forced to leave the crowded train — he and six other soldiers — and to wait at a way-station for twenty-four hours, because the compartment was wanted by an orderly with a great quantity of luggage belonging to an officer.

Yet it would not do to assume that the revolution in Germany will take a course even remotely resembling that in Russia. The nationalization of production will come pretty rapidly under a real Social-Democratic government. Captains of industry and the present bureaucracy will be ready to coöperate in that movement.

Moreover, there are significant indications of ideal ethical motives behind the transformation in Germany. The liberal elements of the nation, at least, — and they constitute a vast numerical majority, — are by no means callous to the charges of moral obliquity brought against their government. Social-Democrats use these charges to support their policies. At a recent mass meeting near Essen one of the Reichstag members said, —

‘It is the Social-Democracy which will free the German nation forever from every possibility of double-dealing, from every blot of doubtful character. . . . The German nation is an honorable nation, and it should have an honorable government. . . . We shall enter the new community of nations with purged hearts and without guile, with the honest conviction that we may benefit humanity by our presence. If we attain that, and I believe it is attainable, the world will begin again to acquire confidence in the German nation, and this fearful war will not have been in vain for our countrymen.'

The story of the quiet revolution which was going on through late September and early October — for the revolution began before its outward manifestations were observed in this country — will be a most interesting chapter in some future history. And in that revolution an unexpected, and perhaps unintended, voice from America helped the reformers at an opportune moment. President Wilson’s Liberty Loan speech upon a League of Nations, at New York, delivered on September 27, was not reported in full in Germany until nearly a week later. It created a profound impression; for it chanced, by a stroke of fortune that could have hardly been foreseen, to fill the need of the movement. Vorwärts merely echoed the sentiment expressed by the radical and liberal press in general, when it said, —

In order to judge this address rightly, we must consider that it is delivered by a statesman who feels himself on the crest of military victory. We must in all justice admit that the former rulers of the German Empire have used a very different tone in similar periods of good fortune. Wilson does not speak of a severe peace to be imposed upon his enemies. We are prudent enough to add that this may show his political shrewdness more than his good intention; and that it does not prove at all his ability to impose his views upon his-allies. After four years of frightful warfare has alienated nations, no statesman can melt away the ice of mutual distrust and hatred by the mere fervor of his eloquence. But this much we may say: If the path which Wilson points out is actually open, then the German people, in its new government, will not hesitate one moment to take that path.