Germany and "Reconstruction"

The Second of Two Articles by Germany's Foremost Publicist on the Winter of the German Conscience

MAXIMILIAN HARDEN

THE most sinister feature of the present appalling destitution of Germany is the thorough satisfaction of the class which profits by it. For general impoverishment still gives delight to the big business interests—who are untroubled by conscience and recognize only the religion of opportunity. (Not that it is only in Germany that such a society of profiteers exists—but it is true that under the second William and his heir, in an atmosphere of short-sighted, Germano-centric attitudes, this class was able to attain a disastrous influence. It was only such an atmosphere as this that could give rise to the wild notion that God had made the Germans out of his best material and, when this crowning feat of his creation had been finished, made what was left into the other nationalities, whose worth was consequently inferior to that of the Germans. This seems childish, and yet it swayed millions of minds.)

The Business Point of View

THIS acquisitive class has, for tomorrow and the day after at least, renounced the idea of conquest and world domination. But it still swears by the certainty that all wrong done to the German Empire will be recompensed; it believes in a rapid "reconstruction" of the former shaken splendor; and it still sees, more in a rage than ever, a world filled with hatred, envy, deceit, robbery, in which the German will be able to avoid annihilation only by learning to hide the goodness of his soft heart and keep from carrying it, so to speak, on his tongue. It is considered an undeniable fact that Germany, of all the great powers Germany alone, was completely innocent of starting the war; and that in absolutely every instance where there was a fair battle with weapons Germany was triumphant, on land and sea, with the submarine and in the air; while they were beaten solely through high treason committed behind the ranks by Socialists and other Jews who were bought by the treacherous enemy, were forced into an armistice just when they were on the point of a final victory, and were then shamelessly betrayed by their perjured representatives at the signing of the treaty; they claim to have been defeated by pacifist methods when the militaristic ones failed; and they warn the country against Germany's losing its rank as an independent nation. Of course, all of Germany's wretchedness is ascribed to the Versailles treaty and to the overthrow of the monarchical system of government; and every added obligation in the way of reparation is contended.

"Our victors would like to drain us of so many millions in money and goods that we should no longer be able to breathe, and could not save the empire from disintegration. But that will never work, if we stand firm and suppress our cursed good-heartedness. They, also, are being ruined by the depreciation of our money. Our present dumping through low exchange is even more fatal to them than that of the imperial period. Today our paper money has reached a circulation of over 350 billion marks. The whole world loses by that; and it will have sustained still greater losses when this paper circulation has climbed to 600 billions. And it will have to rise with the speed of warmed quicksilver when we deliver further billions for reparation and occupation and the presses are speeded up still more.

"But if the payment is demanded in wares and raw materials, then all this mass of cheap goods will block every road and channel of commerce and industry in other countries. Consequently, we have nothing serious to be afraid of. Simply: we must not weaken; we must keep our nerves steady; play up our poverty and insolvency; regain as much of our national resources from the enemy's clutches as possible, by investing in and building up vast commercial enterprises; produce with all our might and with a longer working day (ten hours instead of eight); get a strong foothold in every market; and never cease to show that we were innocent of causing the war, were victorious in the war, and were the victims of a shameful deception after the war.

"Then the reconstruction, the recovery of the old splendor, is certain; and the new rising of the German sun will dissipate all this fog of phrases about democracy and popular, republican sovereignty."

This is pretty much the state of mind among the business classes.

In this whole reckoning they are wrong, just as they were in the pre-war period. Even if Germany's innocence were so easy to prove, all these nations whom the war has robbed of millions of their sons and the greater part of their traditional prosperity would not be especially willing to admit that all this had occurred as the result of a misunderstanding or of a vast hoax. Such admissions would bring about the most frightful and the most legitimate of revolutions. These persistent attempts to establish innocence are simply looked upon as a manoeuvre which is designed to remove the reparations requirements from the shoulders of the conquered.

For Germany was conquered, had- to be, in a struggle against twenty-three states, a billion people. And this defeat, of itself, has brought with it no disgrace. The armistice was made necessary, not through treason, but through superiority of arms; it had been feverishly demanded by Germany's generals, who kept renewing their pleas day and night; and it saved this brave but exhausted and disheartened army from a sweeping drive which had been carefully prepared with gas, tanks, aeroplanes, artillery, and alongside of which the battles of Cannae and Sedan would seem mere child's play.

The Treaty of Versailles

THAT the treaty of Versailles—a product of angry vengeance and suspicious fear rather than cool statesmanship—contains many unwisely strenuous hardships which fail to take into account the essential economic unity and solidarity of all nations, and which are in a great measure impracticable—this is now known to almost every adult even in the most devastated and martyred regions of France. But the treaty has often been changed and moderated, and one simply does harm by clamoring for its formal "revision". Furthermore, it is impossible to accuse the treaty of the major responsibility for Germany's destitution, for the simple reason that its provisions have not yet been carried out.

This destitution is the result of an unusually bad policy which has straggled along for years, without the slightest germ of an original move, with nothing but evasions, sighs and curses, whimpering and barking. A people which had been held in tutelage for whole centuries, which had never learned the use of freedom and had hardly even acquired the appetite for it, could not survive with immunity such incompetence and misgovernment, such amateurish and bungling politics. They could not under-

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stand what suspicions of themselves awoke in the world by acclaiming solely the representatives of the shattered imperialism, princes, defeated generals, ministers and party leaders who had been proved stupid and dishonest. They did not realize the mistake of putting up with all the murderous attacks against avowed Republicans. With the wisdom of the peasant woman who looks on the fever as the cause of the illness, they lent themselves to the erroneous belief that the new democracy was to blame for all the sins and the mistakes which it had to liquidate as heir to the monarchy. And they believe that butter, wool, linen, and coal will become cheap again only when another Kaiser is ruling over Germany as the head of a powerful army.

There can never be a "reconstruction". Entire capital industries, along lines in which Germany had an almost complete monopoly, have been built up in other countries during the war. All the economic prerequisites of blind production, anarchistic competition, underselling, have been done away with; and the old conditions can never return. All efforts should be centered only on the construction of a new world.

This new world will not be a paradise out of a children's Bible; it will not be a Canaan flowing with rivers of milk and honey, but a world of hard work. This work requires the unity of the entire continent; it can bear fruit only when national governments have been consolidated and the cost of living has been reduced.

Europe must no longer allow itself the unwholesome luxury of various nationalisms which are inimical to one another and which teach the patriotic duty of fighting among themselves for life or death. It will develop in harmony, at least preparing economically for the United States of Europe by a tariff union and a pooling of the means of transportation; and, without regard for political boundaries, it will concentrate agrarian and industrial work in those quarters where it can be done best and cheapest, with a minimum of effort and a maximum of result. Or else it will have to surrender to other continents its rank as the leader of mankind. No European nation shall lose its own personality, its own particular flavor. But each of them, instead of relying for its prosperity on the distress of other peoples, will realize the solidarity which exists between all dwellers of the earth, and come to understand that each must adapt itself modestly to the will of all mankind. The knowledge that even business and profit can thrive only in honesty will break the hold of big business, and the world will then loudly applaud again the remark of Shakespeare's innkeeper in The Merry Wives of Windsor: "Germans are honest men."

Teach all peoples to see the possibility and the blessing of having each one's contribution supplement the others and they will overcome all the centuries of envy and hatred. Peoples, races, and continents, like individuals, progress only so long as purity and dignity of the spirit are accounted by them more precious than any momentary material advantage.