George Young

“ A people, as docile and disciplined as the Germans, would have accepted any terms dictated them while still under the impression of their military defeat and of the moral derailment caused by the revolution. They would have welcomed our armies as allies in spite of the efforts to rally them made by Chauvinist or Bolshevist extremists. And nothing that a foreign State could have done was better calculated to make such efforts successful than the blockade and the boycott. Neither in Germany nor in Russia have we learnt that it is better to feed an idealist than to fight him. ”

“ We have not yet won the war because we have not as yet supported in Germany the progressive—that is, the revolutionary—elements and suppressed the Prussian—that is, the reactionary—spirit: while we have, of late, been really losing the war by actually assisting German reaction against German revolution. And we are doing this just from the ignorance of our democracy and the insouciance of our diplomacy.
Our democracy has been prevented from ascertaining, and our diplomacy has been precluded from understanding what the German revolution really means, both to Germany and to Great Britain. ”

“ Prussia was a force making for reaction, owing to its antiquated suffrage and constitution and to the activities of its upper and middle classes. Prussia still dominates the German Republic much as England would dominate in a British Federation. But it is not the same Prussia. If Prussia is still the citadel of reaction it is also the centre of revolution. The fight between the two is not yet fought out, but if, as seems probable, neither wins, the result will be that the Prussian influence in new Germany will be a somewhat colourless compromise, what we should call Liberalism. ”

“ It has also deprived Germany, not only of its colonies, but also of its commercial establishments abroad, so closing foreign markets to it except by way of foreign intermediaries, bankers, brokers and shippers. There is nothing left of German foreign commerce and little left of German industry but a mutilated torso; for it has not only lost its right hand in Lorraine but also its left in Silesia. Yet, what German men of business feel it hardest to forgive is not the injury done by the Treaty but the insult. ”

“ No doubt it was good policy in one way to transfer the Constituent Assembly to Weimar. An Assembly whose vitality is that of an elderly politician after a contested election and whose voice is that of a tired lawyer talking in his sleep, could not make itself heard, still less felt, against the violence, and volleyings of modern Berlin. Whether its work will be worth much must depend on how slow things move. They could easily move too fast for the pace of the Assembly. But at least as Dr. Preuss said to me of his Constitution—"it will not get in the way of anything better." ”

“ So long as France and Great Britain continue to enforce the principles and procedures of the Treaty of Versailles and of the Paris Council, Germany will remain a danger to Europe—a danger, not because of its recent relapse into a Conservative reaction, nor even because of the decreasing risk of a Communist "second" revolution, but because Germany is an essential and vital member of our European body politic that is being kept in a morbid, even moribund, condition by the provisions of the peace. ”

“ Round a long table in an upper room sits a sort of council of war distractedly discussing whether Brunswick shall resist the Prussian troops that are due to arrive at dawn. In a sort of drawing-room adjoining, other members of the Independent Government sit about listlessly in fauteuils brought over from the palace, or pace restlessly about the room. A Communist is trying to spur the Council on to fight, assuring them that the soldiers and sailors are ready to face the tanks and trench mortars—which is true, and that the workmen will support them—which is not. ”

“ The Weimar Parliament is so dead that only civil war can galvanise it to action. If reinforced by a Council system, the Weimar Party Government and the Preuss Federal [197] Constitution would perhaps have steam enough to work.
The Councils are as essential to Germany to-day as the Commons were to us a century ago. Indeed, our insistence on the supremacy of the Weimar Assembly as a guarantee for the maintenance of peace, can be paralleled by our insistence a century ago on the maintenance of Upper Houses in the constitutions of the States revolutionised from France. ”

“ Thursday Evening.—The General has deposed the Government of Independents and set up another of Majoritarians, has arrested all the leaders he can find and has proclaimed the severest form of martial law. Many burghers are already regretting the revolutionary régime. The streets are almost deserted for it is already dusk and no one may be out of doors after sundown. In the shadows under the overhanging gables of the mediæval market-place gleams the steel helm of a Prussian picket. ”

“ The German has for so long been drilled and dragooned in his public life that his civic conscience is little developed. Whereas in England one had the impression that the government and authorities, and especially the army, were the worst offenders against national economy and the mass of the middle class the most conscientious, in Germany it seemed quite the other way. Undoubtedly one of the irritants that excited the revolution was the failure of the rationing system to secure an equitable distribution—or anything more than a minimum of certain staple foods. ”

“ The one desire of the lower classes of Germany, whether industrial or agricultural, is for peace and plenty. In condemning them to a continuance of war conditions for nine months after their surrender and revolution we turned them from internationalists, ready to welcome us as representatives of democracy and as crusaders for an international ideal, into either nationalists who looked on us as enemies seeking the destruction of all Germans, or into internationalists who looked on us as enemies of the revolution seeking their destruction as we were seeking that of the Russians. ”

“ The war had crippled militarism, but only real revolution, the council system, could kill it. He was glad he had escaped the war, so as to have a life to offer [61] to the right side. The next day he was taken and shot.
Now, I do not intend to convey that the Germany of to-day is a fighting country. It is quite the reverse. But a section of idealists at each extreme has decided that they are bound to die for their ideals as Spartans or Spartacists. That they will die in vain is inevitable. If only because there is no Sparta and no Spartacus. ”

“ The Prussian officer is the creation of conditions that no longer exist to-day, and the Frei-Corps a creation of conditions that will not exist to-morrow. When Germany again gets peace, Prussia will lose a predominance that it owes to past conditions, but not to the Constitution.
It is indeed in its efficiency as a bond between the past and the future that the Constitution must be judged; as a bond that will reduce revolution to rapid evolution. Dr. Preuss, its author, claims no more for it than that it will not [259] act as a bar to any normal and natural growth. ”

“ The function of the territorially elected Parliament will, in Germany, and probably everywhere, become more and more that of an Upper House; while the industrially elected Congress will be the creative and constructive institution. The whole difficulty lies in finding a working compromise, or rather co-operation. Just as Feudalism imposed its political system which survives in the House of Lords, just as Liberalism imposed its system as represented in the House of Commons, which now obviously requires supplementing, so Socialism must have its political system in the Councils. ”

“ Germany has lost a greater part of its mineral wealth, the coal of the Saar, the potash of Alsace, the ores of Luxembourg. She has lost her colonies with their great potential wealth. She has also lost her fleet and a great part of her railway material. Over a million and a-half, or 16 per cent. of the male working population are dead. Industry has neither the capital nor the energy to reconvert itself to peace productivity. ”

“ The radical opposition had tried to delay the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, partly because it was for [21] the moment discredited by its secession from the Coalition and its connection with the Communists, and partly because it recognised that a reaction towards nationalism and conservatism had already been set up by the attitude of the Allies and would be given exaggerated expression at the polls. The drift of a weakened and wearied mass can raise a dictator to "save society"; only the driving power of a devoted and determined minority can realise a social revolution. ”

“ Incidentally, Germany is to-day much more like Turkey than its old, well-fed-up, well-fitted-out self. Dingy soldiers everywhere, dirt, decay and deprivation everywhere, listlessness and laissez-faire on the surface, with unrest and upheaval below.
But once inside the theatre things are not so different from the old days. The young ladies from the pensions can still "schwärmen" for the debonnaire premier Scheidemann or the distingué Brockdorff-Rantzau, or "schauern" at handsome Koenen, the saturnine Tribune of Halle, or at Merges, the hunchback tailor of Brunswick. ”

“ In vain did the Government profess its intention of pushing through the two Bills approving, in principle, nationalisation of coal mines and potash deposits; for no one wanted nationalisation except as a step to socialisation. The workmen felt that the Government was, as one put it to me, "a revolution profiteer." It had perverted the purposes and pocketed the profits of the revolution. They felt that Weimar, as another [66] one expressed it, was only a "soviet of profiteers" and would produce no socialist legislation. ”

“ On this grey winter's morning it is crammed full of grimly earnest men—the delegates. On the stage is the Executive Council. The chairman the Independent, Richard Müller, is of the pastor or professor type—his colleague Däumig a heavily built, grey-haired man, might be an English engineer or merchant captain. On the left of the hall are the Communists, in the middle the Independents, and on the right the Social-Democrats, with a little knot of Democrats—the two latter parties supporters of the Government and opposers of the strike—but in a minority here. ”

“ If Bolshevism meant Sovietism and merely is a constitutional conflict between parliamentary and council government, it could. There is no such traditional belief in the parliamentary system in Germany as to make it an essential foundation of constitutional government. Neither the old Berlin Reichstag nor the Weimar [115] Assembly acquired popular confidence. But if by Bolshevism we mean an economic class conflict concerning the dictatorship of the proletariat, the answer seems to be that it cannot be established in Germany, under normal conditions. ”

“ Yet there is life still in Berlin, for men must be alive who can face death for a cause, whether it be for law or for liberty. But you must go further afield to find it than Unter den Linden where are haunting only ghosts of the past. We are hunting the genius of the future. ”

“ While, most pessimistic of all, a cosmopolitan Jew considered that the result of breaking up Austria and barring off Germany must be to Balkanise Central and Eastern Europe first, and to Bolshevise it afterwards. All one can say, is, that where such revolutionary forces are loosened as are now at large in Central Europe, German nationalism offered us a stronger line to hold than that of Lithuanian or Ukrainian or even Polish independence. ”

“ But this policy, if policy it is, depends on whether and when Germany is sufficiently recovered to work again.
When we measure the exhaustion of Germany on the one side against the enormity of its burdens on the other, it is difficult to believe that it can ever recover in the near future. German economic life has had to endure three crushing blows—the war, the revolution, and the peace. It was financially ruined by the war, industrially ruined by the revolution, and economically ruined by the peace terms. ”

“ Descriptions of economic conditions in Germany must therefore be read with the realisation that they are morbid symptoms. Germany may be, no doubt is, working its way through revolution to a saner, sounder condition, but at present is as abnormal and helpless as a snake changing its skin. Meantime, we, using the complete control over Europe that the war has put into our hands, have so interfered with this process as to risk making out of Germany as great a danger to the existing order in Europe as we made out of Russia. ”

“ But any association will serve; and so, in the German Revolution, besides the Workmen's Councils there were Soldiers' Councils, Communal Councils, and even Unemployed Councils. If this new system were to develop, so to say, in a vacuum, without opposition, it would theoretically provide a democratic representation for every human relationship. As it is, such representation is reduced, as in Germany, by political pressure, to association that is rooted in the most vital relationship ”

“ Therefore, while our policy requires the maintenance of the present German parliamentarians and their police as the only possible native agents for the realisation of our economic exploitation of Germany, our procedure renders their retention of power materially and morally impossible. As I myself think that the economic policy is as shortsighted as it is wrongheaded, I do not regret that the territorial and military provisions will, unless materially modified, prevent any possibility of realising any part of it. ”

“ While we are rapidly getting back to the material and mental conditions of pre-war days, Germany is daily getting farther and farther away from us. It is difficult to express the difference. We all know the curious psychological change that comes over our lives when the doctor tells us we must "give up"; how then in a moment, as we sink into bed, we are changed from responsible personalities, ruling our own and others' lives, to helpless encumbrances ruled by doctors and nurses; and how we only recover our rights through a long convalescence. Germany has given up. ”

“ As the German Revolution best shows, the growth of Councils is the result of a revolutionary impulse in a modern community. Such an impulse uses any form of association between men and women for the urgent political purpose of appointing a spokesman and leader. The most widely spread and deeply rooted association nowadays is industrial—in the workshop. Consequently, we find the Councils taking predominantly an industrial character and origin, as in our native embryo the Shop Stewards' Committee. ”

“ It is curious that Germany should now be paying the same amount to terrorise a few working quarters that it paid five years ago to terrorise the world. And the second attempt is as hopeless as the first, for the revolution will not be denied. Even the bureaucratic Social-Democrats of the present Government recognise this and try to placate it with words.
"Socialisation has come," proclaim the Government posters all over Berlin, and when I was in Berlin I thought I'd see if I could find it. ”