Ominous Parallels

by Leonard Peikoff

  This is what can make intelligible the fact of Hitler’s rise, and the possibility of America’s fall.

  At 3:15 P.M. on February 6, 1919, an historic National Assembly, comprised of 423 freely elected delegates, was formally convoked in the city of Weimar, Germany. Its purpose was to replace the imperial regime of the Hohenzollerns, which had collapsed after the country’s defeat in the war, with a new German government, operating in accordance with a new, republican constitution to be written by the delegates.

  The delegates appreciated the significance of their meetings. The product of their debates, they knew, was to be not a paper formality, but the document that would determine the political system and thus the future of the country.

  The leaders of the interim government (who were Social Democrats) had decided not to hold the assembly in Berlin, because the risk of violence was too great: Germany’s Communists, refusing to participate in any parliamentary process, had taken to the streets, crying “All power to the Soviets.” Besides, the leaders wished to emphasize the postwar desire to be “free from Berlin,” i.e., from rule by Prussia.

  Prussia, the largest and most powerful German state—a semifeudal, militarist verboten-ridden tyranny—had dominated the nation’s affairs since the first united Germany was formed in 1871. The new Germany, its leaders vowed, would be made in the image not of Potsdam but of Weimar. Weimar was the longtime home and symbol of Germany’s non-Prussian tradition: the tradition of Goethe and Schiller, of classical humanism, of political liberalism. It was, in effect, the symbol of the German Enlightenment.

  The German Enlightenment was essentially different from its counterparts in England, France, or America. The difference may be condensed into a single fact: whatever the greatness of its artistic representatives or (as in the case of Schiller) their love of liberty, the top philosopher of the German Enlightenment, the figure universally taken as the country’s leading champion of man, reason, and freedom, the most Influential thinker of “the Weimar tradition,” is Immanuel Kant.

  In the meetings of the Weimar Assembly, however, during the fateful spring of 1919, the contending parties had little time to be concerned with philosophy or with Kant. They were concerned with politics and with Marx. The major contenders were the Social Democrats—an officially Marxist group carried over from the imperial period, who had emerged from the postwar elections as the nation’s largest party—and various groups of conservative nationalists, who opposed the creation of a republic.

  The Social Democrats continued all the longtime traditions of their party and sought support in essence from only one segment of the electorate: the “proletariat,” i.e., the urban workers. The party’s goal, in the words of one resolution, was “to unite the entire strength of the proletariat in the struggle against the common enemy, capitalism and reaction.”1

  The purpose of the struggle, Social Democratic leaders told the workers, is to achieve a single ideal: socialism. Socialism, they said, means public ownership of property; it means an end to rule by bourgeois greed; it means a selfless, egalitarian, classless society, in which all men live to serve the common good. Until the withering away of the state, the leaders added, socialism also means a powerful government. We must fight against the “night watchman” view of government, in order “to protect the age-old vestal fires of all civilization, the state, against the [liberal] barbarians,” said Ferdinand Lassalle, the most influential source of German Social Democracy in the nineteenth century and “the greatest single figure in the [party’s] history.” “The state is this unity of individuals in one moral whole...,” said Lassalle. “The purpose of the state is, therefore, not that of protecting the personal freedom and property of the individual which, according to the bourgeoisie, the individual brings with him into the state.”2

  The single most eloquent presentation of the Social Democrats’ view of life is The Weavers, a play by the famous late-nineteenth-century dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann. The Weavers, which helped to make Hauptmann “the idol of the Socialist masses,” deals with the German weaving industry in the 1840’s. The play depicts a mass of oppressed toilers, “flat-chested, coughing creatures with ashen gray faces ... broken, harried, worn out,” creatures bowed by servility and tortured by constant hunger (one old man must eat his pet dog in order to stay alive). The cause of all the misery, says the play, is the forces of the establishment—above all, the fat, rapacious “devils of manufacturers,” who live in palaces, gorge on pastries, and bathe their babies in wine and milk. Such men, the weavers cry, are “hangmen all ... demons from the pit of hell.... Your goal is known to everyone, To bleed us poor men dry.” In the end the weavers, pushed too far, rise up in the name of social justice, sack the homes of the capitalists, wreck all their possessions, and then march off to smash once and for all the workers’ chief enemy: “From here we’ll go over to ... the steam power looms.... All the trouble comes from those factories.”3

  The Weavers conveys perfectly the basic emotion, and emotionalism, which animated Germany’s Marxists of both kinds, Social Democrat and Communist. In their bitter, sweeping denunciations of the “class enemy” and in their fiery predictions of its “revolutionary” overthrow, the two groups, whatever their differences in regard to tactics, were at one.

  In practice, however, the Social Democrats did not approve of sacking homes or smashing up power-looms—and their struggle was not so much against class enemies as against Communist guns. The Social Democrats opposed violence, a proletarian putsch, and Bolshevist Russia—not its ends, which they regarded as noble, but its methods, which they regarded as uncivilized and brutal. Socialism, they said, must come to Germany lawfully, by parliamentary decision; which, they said, meant a slow, evolutionary process, inasmuch as a majority of the German people was anti-Marxist and would have to be reeducated.

  In the interim, party leaders decided, they would continue to preach Marxist ideas with all the party’s traditional zeal, but would confine themselves in practice to pursuing a limited, “Reformist” program in the Reichstag. “Reformism” in this context means a form of welfare statism. It means the policy of working within the framework of a semisocialist, semicapitalist “mixed” system, in order to secure the passage or strengthening of piecemeal pro-labor programs, including such items as the extension of union power, the eight-hour day, minimum wages, unemployment insurance, government housing, socialized medicine, government controls over industry, and higher, graduated taxes on upper-income individuals and on business profits.

  The party, said its Marxist oratory, rejects the kind of temporizing, social-welfare measures introduced in the imperial era by Bismarck—measures which merely delay and subvert the coming revolution. Such measures, said the party’s Reformist practice, are precisely what the party is fighting for.

  We stand solidly, said the Democratic face of Social Democracy, with the moderate bourgeois parties in defense of the republican system, which protects the civil rights and liberties of all men. This “capitalistic” republic, said the Social face of Social Democracy, is merely a transitional stage, a necessary evil, on the road to a truly moral society, in which men will enjoy something greater than liberty: economic equality. “The worker,” said August Bebel (a revered prewar party leader), “has little interest in a state in which political liberty is merely the goal.... What good is mere political liberty to him if he is hungry?”4

  Down with the sham liberty of capitalism, shouted impassioned speakers at party rallies. Not now, pleaded the same men the next morning; first we must give the capitalists a chance to rebuild the country after the war: “[I]t seems impossible for us to transfer industry into the possession of the community at a time when the productive forces of the country are almost exhausted. It is impossible to socialize when there is hardly anything to socialize.”5

  “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet,” said Augustine in a famous prayer, expressing the torture of a profound inner conflict. Transposed to the political arena, this
in essence was the conflict and the torture of postwar Germany’s leading party.

  The Social Democrats have been condemned as ineffectual by virtually all commentators on the Weimar Republic. The standard explanation is that the party leaders’ moral character or experience or strategy was inadequate. In fact, the root of the party’s deficiency was not personal or tactical; it was ideological. In their Marxist ideals, the Social Democrats were heirs to Germany’s central, collectivist tradition. In their republican methods, they were clinging to remnants of an opposite (and in Germany weak and peripheral) tradition: the Enlightenment world view. The result was a party incapable by its nature of providing a nation with decisive leadership, a party impaled from the outset on a fundamental contradiction.

  It did not take long for the political jokes to begin. Their butt was revolutionists who wanted peace and quiet; proletarian militants who made collaboration with the bourgeoisie an essential policy; socialists who refused to socialize.

  Such were the men whom the German conservatives at the time took to be the champions of a scientific approach to life.

  The conservatives, whose main political outlet was the Nationalist party, were the groups that sought a restoration of the monarchy (or, failing this, rule by a military junta). These groups included most of the leaders of the imperial establishment, such as the wealthy Junker landlords, the powerful Officer Corps, and many prominent German judges, bureaucrats, industrialists. Two groups in particular were the most influential in proselytizing for the conservative viewpoint. One was the country’s largest religious denomination, the Lutheran Church, which, faithful to the ideas of its founder, had long been a bulwark of Prussianism. The other was the profession trained to teach young minds, the educational-professorial establishment, which, transferred intact from the empire to the Republic, remained to the end a loyal product of the Kaisers.

  What socialism was to the leftists, nationalism was to the conservatives: it was their ideology, their political ideal, their common bond. “Nationalism” in this context means the belief in the superiority of the “German soul” over “Western decadence,” and, as corollary, the belief in the historic mission of the Fatherland, its mission to guide (or rule) the world’s lesser peoples.

  The conservatives did not attempt to prove the inherent superiority of all things German. They felt it, and that was enough for them. The German soul, they often said, rejects intellectual analysis; it functions decisively, by instinct. It rejects the plodding debates of “isolated” individuals, which characterize parliamentary government; instead, it demands “organic unity” and a state embodying “the principle of authority.” It rejects all talk about man’s rights as mere “Western selfishness.” What it cherishes is duty, and self-sacrifice for the Fatherland.

  Most of the conservatives were religious men, who regarded their basic ideas as inherent in a Christian approach to life. Typically, the public statements of these men dwelt on such themes as the value of faith, the evil of atheism, the importance of church and family, and the need of religious schools to guide the young and immunize them against radicalism. Whether they invoked religion or not, however, the conservatives characteristically reviled “the rational Republic.” This was not meant as sarcasm; in their opinion the Republic war rational. On this subject, all were prepared to agree with Luther. “There is on earth among all dangers no more dangerous thing than a richly endowed and adroit reason,” Luther had said. “Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed.”6

  In economics, as in philosophy and politics, the conservatives stood for tradition, German tradition.

  Faithful to its dominant nineteenth-century ideas, Germany, alone among the major Western nations, had never entered the era of classic liberalism; in varying forms and degrees the German states had characteristically been regulated economies. Then, in the Prussian-dominated empire, Bismarck and his successors had entrenched many new controls, including the policy of awarding special favors from the Reich government—subsidies, protective tariffs, and the like—to the country’s big landowners and industrialists. In addition, to placate the rising labor movement, Bismarck in the 1880’s had created in Germany the world’s first welfare state, complete with programs for compulsory health insurance, workmen’s compensation, and old-age and disability insurance.

  Bismarck’s conservative supporters at the time, including the professorate and the Lutheran Church, had accepted such programs enthusiastically, as a natural expression of Prussian paternalism, social-mindedness, and sense of duty. The base of Bismarck’s approach was established by the so-called “socialists of the chair,” a group of highly influential social-science professors at the German universities. The ideas of these men, notes von Mises, “were almost identical with those later held by the British Fabians and the American Institutionalists....” As to the Lutherans, most had followed the lead of such figures as Pastor Adolf Stoecker; they had rejected capitalism as an evil, Jewish idea, incompatible with the spirit of Christianity. “[I]n no other country had the idea of social reform taken hold of people’s minds as thoroughly as in Germany ... ,” summarizes one historian (who makes no attempt to explain the fact).7

  The Weimar conservatives followed their Bismarckian mentors. They advocated all the imperial types of controls, programs, taxes, and rejected two policies. One was unhampered Western capitalism (which they often described as plutocracy, pacifism, or “Jewish greed”); the other was “radical experiments,” i.e., any new government programs designed to tip the balance of power in favor of labor. In place of both policies, the conservatives demanded private property “in the German sense.” The German sense, they said, means a recognition of private ownership (in some areas), combined with the principle that property must be used to serve the welfare of the nation, as determined by the authorities of the state.

  The deadliest enemy of the country, the conservatives declared, is socialism. Their working definition of socialism was: state control of the economy for the sake of benefiting the lower classes. They fumed against it, demanding state control of the economy for the sake of benefiting the upper classes.

  The Nationalist party (and a somewhat similar group, the People’s party) was regarded in Germany as the political right. The term “right,” in Germany, had nothing to do with and did not mean classic liberalism, individual rights, a market economy, or capitalism. It stood for the opposite of all these ideas. It stood, in economics as in politics, for an explicit version of statism.

  In 1919 the conservatives knew that it was still too soon for them to achieve their social goals. They knew that they had to give the new government a chance. They resolved to bide their time and see what the defenders of the “rational Republic” would do.

  The defenders did not consist only of Marxists. The Social Democrats had two indispensable “bourgeois” allies, without whom neither the new Constitution nor the Republic to which it gave birth would have been possible. These two allies were the Center party and the Democratic party.

  The Center party (which regularly drew nearly 20 percent of the vote in the Weimar years) had been organized in 1870 to serve as the political arm of the Catholic Church in Germany. 8

  Whatever their disagreements on other issues, the Centrists prided themselves on being united as a moral force able to combat the spread of decadence in postwar Germany. The moral values which party leaders upheld included faith in God, a return to the commandments of traditional Christianity, and obedience to authority, not only religious but also political (since, according to Catholic teaching, political power derives from God). The chief cause of the country’s spiritual decay, the leaders said, was the modern trend to secularism and freethinking. Freethinking, to these men, did not mean merely atheism; it meant independent thought on any philo- sophical question. A member of the Reichstag once declared: “It is impossible for me to recognize the moral basis of any action if I do not understand it.” The Centrists present responded by calling out: “Materialism! Materiali
sm!”9

  Like their counterparts in other lands, the Centrists did not rely only on the methods of persuasion to spread their ideas. They sought to impose their moral code on the rest of the country by force of law, urging measures such as the prohibition of abortion, restrictions on sexual practices condemned by the Church, the censorship of pornography, and a statute to protect German youth from “worthless and obscene literature.” 10 The party also demanded state financing of Catholic public schools.

  On matters not decreed by their religion the Centrists often differed with one another. Some were political conservatives, who did not approve of the new German system; others were liberals, who did. (“[E]very government enjoys God’s blessing, whether it be monarchic or republican,” a party spokesman told the Weimar Assembly.)11 On one basic question of politics, however, all factions were in agreement: the party rejected both capitalism and socialism.

  Capitalism, the Catholics held, is a godless system. Capitalism, they said, represents an inherently secular approach to life, one which counts on man’s unaided intellect and rewards his striving for material success. It also represents an amoral approach: it claims a man’s right to act on his own judgment, which implies a “sinful permissiveness” on sexual and political questions. Above all, in historian Koppel Pinson’s words, “the motive of self-interest and the incentive of competition ran counter to Catholic religious belief, which espoused a social rather than an individual ethic. Society was a corpus christi mysticum [mystical body of Christ], and the individual was not to be considered an isolated phenomenon.”12

  As to socialism, the Centrists rejected it for one fundamental reason. Socialism, the party argued, is impractical idealism; Marx’s vision of a perfect, egalitarian society on earth is noble, but impossible. It is impossible because of ‘Original Sin. which, no matter what man’s aspirations, dooms him to greed and failure. “To suffer and to endure ... is the lot of humanity,” Pope Leo XIII had said; “let men strive as they may, no strength and no artifice will ever succeed in banishing from human life the ills and troubles which beset it.”13