A Democracy Destroyed

INTO THE SHADOWS

By CONSTANTINE FITZGIBBON It is said with increasing frequency these days that the political, social and moral climate in Britain somehow re- sembles that which prevailed in Germany when the Weimar Republic was tottering towards the outstretched arms of Adolf Hitler. Such historical parallels can, of course, easily be misleading in the extreme, and many intelligent people and perhaps most contemporary historians believe that they should therefore never be drawn. On the other hand, similar causes do, quite frequently, produce similar effects in politics and economics as well as in the natural sciences. And there is quite a lot to be said for Thucydides' thesis that the purpose of history is to instruct present or future genera- tions through the lessons of the past. It would therefore seem well to examine the fall of the Weimar Republic just in case there are any lessons that we can learn from its miserable fate. It might also be useful to examine the attitude of the British press to the events in Germany in 1932, since this might give us some indication as to how reliable and perspicacious our newspapers are when it comes to analysing a cataclysmic disaster in the making. This will be attempted in the next three articles.

WHil: arc the supposed resemblances be- tween our society and that of Germany a . generation and more ago? The first and most obvious is a basic political dissatisfaction, deriv- ing in part from the condition of the country, but also from a loss of national power and from national humiliation. In Germany the root cause of this malaise was the loss of the First World War and the indignities of 'war guilt,' partial occupation and reparations. Nor did any supra- national ideals and aims materialise in place of .. the ideals and aims of Imperial Germany, for the socialism that had inspired some of the founders of the Republic failed to get off the ground. In Britain the basic factor has been the accelerated decline, since the Second World War, to second-class power status with consequent dependency oil the United States, to which must now be added Britain's rejection by Europe when the belated attempt was made to substitute Euro- pean for imperial aims and ideals..

In 1914 Germany had been free to make her own decisions, for better or for worse. So in 1939 was Britain. In 1930 Germany could .make no important decisions, either political or economic, 'without the approval of her former enemies, and her only real freedom of manoeuvre lay in play- ing these enemies off against one another. Suez, Nassau and Brussels have shown that Britain .today must have the approval of her former allies before the triost important decisions can '

be taken. The exception has been Britain's free- dom to dissolve her Empire, thus further weakening her position vis-a-vis her allies. There is, of course, a great difference in being bossed about by your hereditary enemies and by your . hereditary allies. Nevertheless, loss of status, in nations as in individuals, does produce social strain which in formerly great States has, in . modern times, frequently and perhaps usually led to violent reactions when those States have not voluntarily, merged into larger power units.

The second basic point in which a certain resemblance can be detected between Britain today and Weimar Germany has been an ap- parent inability in each country satisfactorily to solve the problems of the national economy.

• This becomes particularly acute when, as in these two cases, the country is dependent on its manufactures and its export trade if it is to • eat.. Here again the difference in degree is so great as probably to invalidate the comparison. We may have failed so far to expand the economy at a rate that is considered desirable

and has been proved. feasible on the Continent, and we have our nagging toothache of local un- employment. But Weimar Germany passed through an inflation which destroyed the savings of the middle classes, and this was followed within a very few years by the Great Depression, when the unemployment figure reached six mil-.

• lions. We may suspect that our leaders arc not as efficient as they should be, and we may even tear an impending economic disaster. This is very different from having actually passed through two such disasters within a decade and in which almost the entire nation suffered grievously.

Satire and Disillusion.

The disillusion in Germany was consequently far greater than any similar disillusion in Britain today. The activities here of such politi- cal 'movements' as the British Nazi Party, the Committee of 100, the Trotskyist% the Mosleyites,. and the agitprop wreckers within the unions reflect to some extent current disillusion with our party political system. But one has only to com- pare these anti-democrats, unpleasant and squalid as they may be, with the vast armies of street lighters, often armed, who obeyed Hitler and the Communists to see how relatively un- important their contemporary British equivalents arc at present.

This also applies to the handful of anti-social writers, 'satirists' and other such persons who attract such a disproportionate publicity in the press and the new BBC. One has only to com- pare the feeble invective of a John Osborne with the distilled malice and hatred of a Bert Brecht, the puerilities of Private Eye with the corusca- ting wit of Simplithsimus, to. see the difference. There is no British cartoonist or painter who can express a loathing of his society's injustices, immorality and selfishness with the point-blank intensity of George Grosz. Some would doubtless like to, but here it's a matter of 'they would if they could but they can't,' and not merely for lack of talent.

For one reason why they can't is that our society is not, or not yet, so disorganised and brutalised as was Germany's. This Was particu- larly true of Berlin, once the capital of Prussian kings who prided themselvds on their modest, frequently Spartan, way of life. Their motto- - to be more than one appears—set to some extent the tone for a governing aristocracy of soldiers and farmers which produced such men as Moltke and Bismarck. With" the establishment of the .German Fmpirc this ethos began to be under- mined, increasingly so •during the Wilhelmine period, by the Kaiser's vulgar love of pomp and display, by the sudden vast increase in industrial wealth, and by the dilution of the Prussian governing class, as industrialists from the Ruhr and the Rhineland, and South Germans \\ ith attitudes closer to the Austrian, became increas- ingly important, powerful and tone-setting.

Opting Out of Politics

The Prussian aristocracy reacted to the Revo- lution of 191$ much as their French equivalents had reacted to their revolutions in the previous century: they did not, in general, co-operate with the new regime, which was supposed to be based on the political parties. Indeed, these families, which had ruled Germany latterly in alliance with the bankers and industrialists. had never had much to do with party politics. .1-he cOuntry had been ruled by the Kaiser's entourage, and therefore to be a member of the Reichs;.tL2. had never been seen as a particular badge of distinction. Before the First War the Germans regarded. their deputies more as the Americans regarded their congressmen than as the British .did their MPs. And after 1918 the Rinker class took no more to government through the parties than had the French aristocrats, even though one of their number, the bonetieaded old Field- Marshal von Hindenburg, might preside over a system Which both he and they hoped was only ephemeral. True,. they organised the Stahl/who, an ex-soldiers' organisation which was consider- ably more political than the equivalent British Legion here. But mostly they withdrew to their estates or into the a-political army and left the running of the country to an equally a-political and highly efficient bureaucracy and to the pro- fessional politicians. If a comparison were here to be drawn it would be rather with the France of the Fourth Republic than with the Britain of today. For the professional politicians did not make a particularly good job of it. This was not alto- gether their fault. The Weimar Constitution was perhaps the most perfectly democratic instrument the world has es er seen, in that it ensured. by proportional representation and other means, that every shade of political opinion should be represented in the Reichstag to the maximum. And in a country that had been only recently and imperfectly united, this meant that not only class interests but also regional and religious interests had their say. No fewer than ten political parties each commanded more than a million votes at one time or another. Only the Social Democrats ever had a working majority, in the very begin- ning, and the Communists soon split that. The result was a series of coalitions which looked like, and often were, crude political deals in the interest of particular factions. The prestige of the Reichstag, never high, declined further. The idealistic young—and young Germans seem to need ideals even more than the young people in other European countries—either turned to the anti-democratic parties or opted out of politics in favour of sport, hiking, nudism. new-fangled religions and the world of Mr. Norris.

These coalition governments, usually weak, were susceptible to pressure from the great indus- trial combines and the banks which steadily grew as a result of amalgamations, takeovers and a system of vertical and horizontal cartels, fattening on the carcases of their smaller competitors, too weak to stand up to inflation and slump. The Germans had no Sherman Act : on the contrary, the 'rationalisation' of industry and commerce was looked on favourably in peace as it had been in war. The heads of gigantic combines such as AEG, I. G. Farben, the Flick, Krupp and Thyssen empires, to name but a few, were looked up to as the real heirs to the authority that had once been vested in the Kaiser. They provided most inadequate father-figures as the German ship of state lurched among the reefs and rapids of a boom-and-bust economy. There were inevit- ably a series of bankruptcies and, less inevitably, of financial scandals, and these, of course, were fully ventilated in the press, in the Reichstag, and utilised by the propagandists of the totali- tarian movements.

The new rich are seldom particularly attrac- tive or beloved. The German tendency towards exaggeration in eVerything also produced an exaggerated display of opulence, even of greed, which, unattractive in the Wirtschaftswunder tycoons of today or in some British entre- preneurs, was infinitely more so a generation ago where poverty and even misery were the lot of the majority. It was not hard to spread the story that even the honourable and honest rich, even industrialists and bankers who by their labour had saved Germany from yet worse disasters, were nothing but war-and-inflation profiteers, for there were plenty of such profiteers.

Sodom and Gomorrah

There was a marked decline in public morality, not only financial, but also sexual, particularly in Berlin and the Protestant north. The govern- ment believed that tolerance was automatitally democratic, and Berlin soon acquired a reputa- tion as the modern Sodom and Gomorrah, comparable to the reputation Paris had enjoyed during the Second Empire and that London en- joys today. The flashy new rich set the public tone. Sex was brutally commercialised, and it is said that great crowds of prostitutes of both sexes paraded nightly through the principal streets. Pornography was easily available. And, as is usual in such circumstances, gaiety was at a discount. The Germans are notoriously coarse in their pleasures. Berlin in 1930 may have been no more intrinsically vicious than Victorian or contemporary London, but there is a horrid omen in all that flesh-peddling along the Kurffirstendamm, perhaps because we know what happened later on. Is it too far-fetched to sug- gest that if human beings are mere -objects to be bought, enjoyed and dismissed, then it is no great step to conclude that if they are not wanted at all they might as well be gassed and burned?

Anti-Semitism had never been particularly strong in Germany, hardly stronger than in England and less so than in France and the United States, It was really Hitler, the Austrian, who imported it and deliberately used it, as he told Rauschning, as a crowbar with which to topple the world. The seed fell on fertile ground, and for two reasons. The first was that in the political and moral bewilderment in which the people found themselves, the Jews provided, as always, a convenient scapegoat. The second was the uncontrolled influx of foreign Jews from- the East which took place after 1918. The Ger- man Jews had been, in general, most desirable citizens, hard-working, highly intelligent and in- tensely patriotic. But it was another story with these new immigrants, accustomed to a much lower standard of living and ready to undercut the Germans in order to get it. Their foreign ways, their. manner of dress, their frequent ignorance of the German language, and their habit of crowding together, of building dingy colonies, drew upon them the same sort of odium that some English people feel for coloured im- migrants today. It was not hard for Hitler to transfer this dislike from their foreignness to their jewishness, and thus to create hatred of the whole Jewish community among his fol- lowers. It was in this connection particularly unfortunate that some of the more spectacular financial scandals involved Jewish businessmen, and that almost the whole a the entertainment and publishing industry, including its seamiest side, was in Jewish hands.

Enter- the Nazis •

It was in the election of September; 1930, that the Nazis first emerged as a major force in Ger- man political life since their defeat in 1923. In 1928 they had polled fewer than a million votes: now they polled .six and a half millions. The Communists likewise increased their votes from three and a quarter millions to .four and a• half millions. The root cause of this great swing against the democratic system was obviously the depression. But another and perhaps equally im- portant reason was the arrival at voting age of a post-war generation which not only Jacked the ideals of the socialists and democrats who had created Weimar, but which had reacted violently against what Hitler contemptuously called 'the System.' They did not really know what they wanted, but they knew what they dis- liked. And more of them turned towards the Nazis than the Communists precisely because the Nazi programme was intellectually nil and emo- tionally promised all things to all men, socialism, nationalism, wealth, glory, even peace. This is the essential advantage of a 'movement' over 'a political party when aspiring to power in a democracy. Placing itself above party politics, it can simultaneously appeal to all that is negative, to c.■ nicism, envy, malice, on the one hand, while making the vaguest promises, on the other; it does not need to formulate a policy, and if it should achieve power there is no one who can hold it to its promises or reject it if these be not Throughout 1931 the Bruning Government struggled honourably but ineffectively to deal with the worsening economic crisis. Its 'defla- tionary policy was orthodox • in that pre- Keynesian period, and proved as ill-suited to the circumstances as did Snowden's similar policy in Britain or Hoover's in America. Unemploy- ment soared. The great Austrian bank, the Rothschild Creditanstalt, crashed, and the Ger- man banks very nearly followed it over the edge. As it was they had to close briefly, and drastic bank mergers had to be rushed through, in order that they Survive at all as one over-capitalised industrial concern after another defaulted. An attempt to boost the German and Austrian economies by a customs union between the two democracies was vetoed by France, Italy and Czechoslovakia. More and more young men joined the Nazi and Communist Parties, which were now openly fighting for control of the streets, and political murders became of almost • daily occurrence. It was growing obvious to many people that the Weimar Republic was draw- ing to its end. The Reichstag had almost ceased to legislate, since government was now earried out almost' entirely by presidential .decrees—more or less the equivalent of our Orders in Council— as was constitutionally possible •according to Article 48, but not according to the spirit, of the Weimar Constitution.

. The great debate in Germany throughout 1931 was what system should .succeed .Weimar if it was in fact • dying. There were at least four pos- sible solutions. The Communists wished to sec the system collapse as totally and chaotically as possible, so that they might collect the .pieces. The Party Line then was that 'even a Nail triumph was preferable to a •continuation of the Republic, on the grounds that the 'inevitable'. working-class reaction against the Nazis must play into the Communists' hands. The Ccirn, munists regarded the Social Democrats,' or 'Social Fascists' as they called them, as their real enemy, for Ilistmat had taught them that .power must come soon to the proletariat, and when it came they were -determined that they should have no rival for the workers' allegiance. The Social Democrats and the various liberal parties wanted, somehow, to keep parliamentary democ- racy alive. It might be moribund, but it was not yet dead, and numerous theories were•produced as to how it could be revived. Even a temporary military dictatorship would be preferable to totalitarianism. But Germany had no de Gaulle waiting in the wings, only the slippery intriguer, General Schleicher, who could probably rely on the bayonets of the a-political Reichswehr to deal with Nazi and Communist street fighters.

The .right wing also favoured a number of solutions, among which perhaps the most popu- lar was a Hohenzollern restoration and a 'return to the pre-war system of authoritarian, quasi- democratic government. However, the Hohen- zollerns were not popular outside Prussia, and even in their own former kingdom there was con- siderable doubt. as to which member of that large family was the least unacceptable. [he French, and many Germans, would have objected strongly to the return of William II, then an exile in Holland. His son, Little Willy, a foolish womaniser and political dabbler, was hardly a suitable choice to restore the Prussian virtues or to provide •a dynastic centre of gravity for the German State. Many favoured one of his sons, but Hindenburg announced flatly that he would only abdicate his presidential powers • to the •old Kaiser himself. So on the right, as on the left, a sort of deadlock was reached. And Hitler waited.

Jockeying for Position

He did not merely wait. He attempted to create a temporary alliance with the right-wing parties, the so-called Harzburg Front. A great meeting of the right-wing parties and of the Stahlhelm was, held at Bad Harzburg on Octo- ber II, 1931,•'and Hitler and some Of his storm- troopers were there, but outnumbered by H ugen- berg's people. This was a quite cynical manceuvre on both sides. Hitler disliked the old right almost as cordially as he did the old left, and some of his principal lieutenants, such as Goebbels and Strasser; disliked it considerably more.. Nevertheless, he believed that he could use the Nationalists, not only in the • game of .political tactics, but also to give an aura of respectability to his gutter movement of nihilistic protest. The Nationalists Were equally confident that they could'harness the Nazi mass movement for their •own purposes and emasculate their sordid allies'once, those ends had been achieved. It was not, however, to work out quite that way.

During this winter of 1931732 there was much political manoeuvring in preparation for the presidential election in the .following March, since Hindenburg's seven-year term was due to expire. Halpin persuaded the eighty-four-year- old Field-Marshal to run again. Hitler and his new Nationalist allies offered to support the old man if he would dismiss Bribing and appoint a *National' government. When the President re- fused to be bribed in this fashion, Hitler announced his own candidacy, and the National- ists also put their man in the field, as did the Communists.

But the real issue was now between Hitler and Hindenburg, and the paradox was that Hindenburg's most solid support came from the Social Democrats, with whom he had a minimum of sympathy. The sort of political deal 'which had already discredited Weimar in the eyes of many was now employed to decide the highest office in the land, which was supposed to be above politics. And the unemployment figures continued to rise,. and at night the shots rang out as Nazis clashed with Communists, and the whores paraded, and the nightclubs did a fine trade. Post mortem nu/la voluptas.

The world at large, preoccupied everywhere with the deepening economic crisis, and talking as usual and as fruitlessly about disarmament, may not have realised it—the British press seems in general to have regarded the German problem as remote, perennial and not very interesting-- but democracy in Germany was entering upon its death •agony. This was to last just one scar.