Greater German Reich

“ The Socialists of Germany, working upon the minds of a defeated and discouraged people, are laying the blame for this disaster upon the shoulders of the very class which has made Germany what it is. We, it is, who have made the German Empire and given to it the only system of government which, bearing in mind the century-long training and peculiar temperament of its people, can maintain it intact amid the powerful and jealous nations of Europe, and carry it forward to the greater future that awaits it. ”

“ The overthrow of the German revolution, the treachery of the German bourgeoisie to its own democratic ideals, led to the Bismarck regime and to its creature, present-day Greater Prussia, twenty-five fatherlands under one helm, the German empire. Modern Germany is built upon the grave of the March Revolution, upon the wreckage of the right of self-determination of the German people. The present war, supporting Turkey, and the Hapsburg monarchy, and strengthening German military autocracy is a second burial of the March revolutionists, and of the national program of the German people. ”

“ Small matter whose side they stood on in their day, all those daring dukes, great kings, formidable warlords, mighty emperors, and around them the inspired geniuses and heroes of the past served as instruments of Providence in the formative process of a nation. Insofar as we embrace this great Reich in grateful reverence, the wealth of German history reveals itself to us in all its splendor. Let us thank the Lord Almighty for bestowing on our generation the great blessing to be alive at this time and this hour. ”

“ Can a Man of Destiny lose?
¶ A new era is dawning. The old worn-out system for a disunited Germany of 39 jealous states is to be swept away.
¶ For thirty years he dreamed of the inevitable German Union, had his visions of that glory. He was greater than himself in those black hours before the Parliament, for four long years thundering for his side;—with public opinion flat [203] against him, and with mutterings on part of angry mobs that would bring the rope and hang Bismarck to the highest tree. ”

“ Questions which have had a continuous interest, or which have had some lasting effect on Germany’s policy, such as the attitude toward Alsace-Lorraine, the Social Democratic party, the retirement of Bismarck, the development of the navy, the Morocco question, have been treated at greater length on the first fitting occasion. ”

“ Germany as the embodiment of the defect of the political present, constituted in her own world, will not be able to overthrow the specifically German obstacles without overthrowing the general obstacles of the political present. ”

“ So popular with Germans is this notion of unity that it has been cleverly exploited as an additional excuse for world conquest. For in every country there are Germans, and, according to the blood theory, they always remain such. There are approximately 33 million Germans outside of the German Reich. Of the 15 million in the western hemisphere, 10 million live in the United States. They cannot, according to this theory, divest themselves of exclusive loyalty to the German state even by acquiring citizenship in another. ”

“ Marx and Engels.
The French Revolution had wiped off the map the lingering shadow of the Holy Roman Empire known as the kingdom of Germany, and the Treaty of Vienna had painted in again an impossible set of German states with Austria as their political chief, but with Prussia as their real head. From those ruins and these impossibilities, the spirit of nationalism rose up. ”

“ Millions of Germans in Alsace-Lorraine, Bohemia, Poland, and East Prussia were transferred to alien domination; millions of others in German Austria were denied the right of self-determination in the form of union with Germany ”

“ In this Pan-German Empire, Germans alone will govern; they alone will exercise political rights; they alone will serve in the army and navy; they alone will have the right to hold land; and they will thus be made to feel that they are a people of rulers, as they were in the Middle Ages. ”

“ The general situation of the German Empire in the period before the war had become continually more brilliant, and for that very reason continually more difficult from the point of view of foreign politics. Unprecedented progress in industry, commerce, and world traffic had made Germany prosperous. The curve of our development tended steadily upward. ”

“ Thus ignobly fell the noblest of the ancient Germans, the man whose patriotism saved the realm of the Teutonic tribes from becoming a province of the empire of Rome. Had not Hermann lived, the history of Europe might have pursued a different course, and the final downfall of the colossus of the south been long averted, Germany acting as its bulwark of defence instead of becoming the nursery of its foes. ”

“ Had not the uprising of the peasants been shamefully betrayed by the leaders of German culture and civilization, the development of the nation would, at that time, have already assumed a normal form, and not only would Germany be the equal of the other civilized nations, but as the first-born modern nation, would have held the roost prominent place among them. ”

“ Germany had become a “second-rate nation.” It had been deprived of important attributes of its sovereignty: No military sovereignty; the Rhineland unprotected; the Corridor, the Saar, and others. I have already described the economic conditions. These economic and political difficulties helped advance political radicalism, and the extremists increased in every election.
If therefore help was to be forthcoming, then not merely the reparations question had to be solved—that was a negative help—but positive, moral aid was required. My program was the restoration of the sovereignty of the Reich. ”

“ In Germany, notwithstanding the greatest division, the most peculiar separation of religion and even of races, yet nevertheless that great German empire is coming forward as a monument of the civilization of the future world, and as the centre of all Europe against any form of Oriental barbarism. ”

“ The great union of Germany has been achieved and it may be confidently predicted that the continuance of the united German Empire will be all the more firmly assured the more popular and free the form of its government. ”

“ One of the chief instruments of the German Government is the belief which they foster that any peace that the Allies would, if they had their way, impose would mean the internal ruin of Germany, and this again would mean that each individual German family would find itself without work, without money, and without food. ”

“ In the revolution which Germany has undergone within a generation, has not the good been sacrificed as well as the evil? Besides its vague longings, its futile struggling, its uneasy doubts as to its own powers, has not the German nation furthermore dropped somewhat of its enthusiasm for ideals—its unselfish striving after truth, its deep and quiet inner life? ”

“ German unity, as at present contemplated, with a common army, common taxes, and common constitutions, under one central government, can only be achieved by an entire prostration of the princes, and the abolition of the kingly dignity. Austria, Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and all the states, must be blotted from the map of Europe, their boundaries erased, their conditions forgotten, and their names for ever proscribed. ”

“ Preamble The German people united in every respect and inspired by the determination to restore and confirm the Reich in liberty and justice, to serve peace at home and peace abroad, and to further social progress, has given itself this constitution. ”

“ Can any one interest himself in this German Empire? Where is the new thought? Is it only a new combination of power? All the worse, if it does not know its own mind. Peace and laisser aller are not types of politics for which I have any respect. Ruling, and helping the highest thoughts to victory—the only things that can make me interested in Germany. England's small-mindedness is the great danger now on earth. ”

“ It is the mainspring of national progress. There are three causes which have ensured the present greatness of the German Empire: moral virtue in the individual, political unity, and economic prosperity. If we were to believe modern theorists, Germany owes all three to the beneficent action of war. Germany is not indebted for its culture to the genius of its writers or artists, but to the iron and blood of its statesmen and warriors. It is the glorious triumvirate of Bismarck, Moltke, and von Roon who have been the master-builders of the Vaterland. ”

“ The Kaiser, the War Staff, the Cabinet, down to the last wretched creature working in the stables and the sewers, reading the play, exclaimed:
"What is the man driving at? Why, of course the Germans are the greatest people in the world—we admit it!"
Now, during the last few years the Germans have spent untold millions in propagating this myth of superiority, and yet the German intellect has never even had a second-rate position. Call the roll of all the tools that have redeemed men from drudgery and you will find that Germany's contributions are hopelessly inferior to the other nations. ”

“ In order to safeguard the representation of interests which arise in particular states from their special economic relations with, or their geographical contiguity to, foreign states, the Reich shall take the necessary measures and make the necessary arrangements in agreement with the states affected. ”

“ I expect of them that until the re-establishment of order in the German Empire they shall render assistance to those in actual power in Germany, in protecting the German people from the threatening dangers of anarchy, famine, and foreign rule. ”

“ Perhaps it is well to remind American readers, who are accustomed to dealing with large, simple, and plainly demarcated political and economic units, that in Europe there are many millions of Germans outside the German Empire who take an active part in their nation's essential and ultimate destiny—by which I do not mean its political destiny. ”

“ But it was a sad and disheartening period for the men who were able to see clearly how Germany, with all the elements of a freer and stronger life existing in her people, was falling behind the political development of other countries. ”

“ Taken as a whole, the period must be regarded as an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the rulers to assimilate by force an unwilling population. The German government had great resources on its side—compulsory education on the German model and in the German tongue, the repressive measures of the greatest army and the strongest administrative system in Europe, the influx of immigrants from beyond the Rhine, the development of communication with the other parts of the empire, an extraordinary material prosperity in which the Reichsland shared. ”

“ The conquest of the feudal nobility between the Elbe and the Oder, and the feudal colonies of the military orders of knights in Prussia and Livonia, only laid the ground for a far more extensive and effective system of Germanization by the trading and manufacturing middle classes, which in Germany, as in the rest of Western Europe, rose into social and political importance since the fifteenth century. ”

“ In the plenitude of his arrogance, which made him consider himself beyond all human laws, he regarded the rights and wishes of others as entirely negligible quantities where the greatness of the German Empire, which meant his greatness, was concerned. Every German child was taught that Germany should be supreme over all. In the schools they learnt that nothing, not even truth or justice, could be allowed to interfere with Germany’s commercial progress. ”

“ However, the forward march of German Socialism presents nothing surprising or inexplicable to the observer who takes account of the economic transformation of the Empire. Within a few years Germany has undergone an evolution which required almost a century in the other western countries of Europe. ”

“ The German Empire is the clearinghouse, the adjutant, the executive officer, the official clerk, the representative in many social, financial, military, and diplomatic capacities of Germany; but it is not, and never for a moment should be confused with, what all Germans love, and what it has cost them blood and tears and great sacrifices to bring into the circle of the nations, the German Fatherland! ”

“ Austria and Prussia being the two ruling states of Germany, every decisive revolutionary victory in Vienna or Berlin would have been decisive for all Germany. And as far as they went, the events of March, 1848, in these two cities, decided the turn of German affairs. ”

“ France refuses that the balance of power in Germany and in Europe should be disturbed, by any change in their possessions or their sovereign rights.' Your majesty can divide the German Confederation into a North German and a South German group, the first to be under the leadership of Prussia, the second under Austria, and you can forbid all other change. ”

“ But its determination to attach them to the new German Empire, and to make that Empire the leading industrial State of the Continent, has had a complete triumph. So far as education, technical training, research, and enlightened laws can make a nation great, Germany is surely on the high road to national and industrial supremacy.
It is a strange contrast that meets our eyes if we look back to the years before the advent of King William and Bismarck to power. In the dark days of the previous reign Germany was weak, divided, and helpless. ”

“ At present the Communists are showing no overwhelming strength in German affairs, but a time may come when great numbers of the German people, trained in hardship, ruined and desperate, may turn to this one party which tells the same story in the Rhineland and Bavaria and Saxony and Prussia. ”