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Henry Morgenthau, The German Character
Five chapters from Morgenthau’s book, Germany is our Problem, here published with an introductory note by Ellopos. Emphasis, in bold or italic letters, by Ellopos. Complete book in print.
52 Pages
Page 46
Hardly anyone outside Germany, certainly no one in any really democratic country would regard Schaeffer, who in his time was a political ally of the industrialists and most backward clerical elements in Bavaria, as a representative of democracy. But it is not the democratic peoples elsewhere so much as the Germans we have to consider. To them Schaeffer and his kind are reminders of the Weimar Republic's failures—a symbol of what many of them distrust in democracy. The groups to which these men belonged once served as a cloak for the war plans of the Junkers and the chiefs of heavy industry who were the real masters of Germany. To put them back in power or even the semblance of power is to discredit genuine democracy far more than would the nomination of actual Nazis. The same forces that undermined the Weimar Republic would operate, intensified by the recollection of how it was done twenty years ago. The United Nations should not permit that bit of history to repeat itself.
The republic, and what Germans said was democracy, were blamed then for unemployment, reparations, the occupation by Allied troops, riots, inflation, assassinations, shortages—all the evils that descend upon a defeated people. Dislike of the Weimar regime was cleverly fostered by propaganda. Even if the republic itself had not been so much the creature of its enemies, it would have become distasteful to Germans before long. The quirks that democratic shams took in Germany seemed to the world of the long armistice to be rather amusing, although a few recognized them as dangerous. It is important that we understand the danger this time, and be ready to meet it. When Field Marshal von Hindenburg was elected President— the only man the Germans ever did elect to that post, for Ebert was the product of a national assembly—it seemed faintly ridiculous that a democratic republic should elect an old Junker who disapproved of republics and would take the job only after asking his former imperial master for permission.
What failed to register then, and has not registered with many yet, is that it would have been more than ridiculous; it would have been impossible, if the republic really had been democratic. It seemed funny, too, when the Nazis in spite of their loud contempt for democratic parliaments competed eagerly for seats in the Reichstag. It was laughable that these men thought as much of the salaries of deputies and the free railroad tickets as they did of political influence which membership might give. It was not taken seriously when Goebbels wrote in Der Angriff: We enter Parliament in order to supply ourselves in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons, to paralyze the Weimar sentiment with its own assistance. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this purpose, that is its affair.
Cf. H. Arendt: totalitarianism reduces men to impersonal natural forces * German philosophers in support of Nazism * Beethoven and Mauthausen * The Superior Race of Germans * Kalergi, European Spirit must Precede Europe's Political Unification * La Construction de l'Europe selon Jean Monnet * Plan Fouchet * Mitterrand and Kohl urge European Political Union * Il Manifesto di Ventotene
