Words to the Germans: To Willy Brandt: A Note of Recollection
P., H.
Dear friend, This may be the right time to remind you of the occasion when we first met. I guess it was sometime in the middle of 1929, when worried young German Socialists convened a powwow...
...an American-type system of two consensus parties may be a safeguard against the revival of a Nazi party, but is it a safeguard against Franz Joseph Strauss...
...He could abandon the untenable claim to territories east of the Oder...
...I guess it was sometime in the middle of 1929, when worried young German Socialists convened a powwow to think of ways to save our party...
...It has long been admitted that only a great coalition can do these things which may be painful for many Germans...
...Many of our friends in Germany say that we should not take responsibility without full power at such a moment...
...When the Socialist ministers agreed to circumvent their promises, a storm broke loose in the party...
...On May 1, 1929, the party had to pay another price for maintaining the coalition: the Berlin police commissioner, a Social Democrat, forbade the customary May Day demonstration, and when the Communists nevertheless demonstrated, 29 civilians were killed...
...in December, Hjalmar Schacht, then President of the Reichsbank, forced the resignation of the Socialist minister of 26 Finance, Hilferding, and the Catholic "Center" party threatened to withdraw from the coalition...
...His coalition partners put Mueller to one test after the other...
...These events led to the expulsion of the left-wing opposition from the SPD and the founding of the SAP (Socialist Workers' Party) of which you were to become a prominent leader...
...2—The "great coalition" between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats worked well for over a dozen years in Austria but has recently been dissolved...
...Partly for this reason and partly because they feel that tactically this is a poor time for a coalition experiment, more than 50 Socialist deputees have not supported the government...
...God knows, we did not need a battle cruiser, but the nationalists considered it a symbol that Germany was liberating herself from the "fetters of Versailles...
...Nevertheless, in the eyes of the voters, the Social Democrats were guilty of doing nothing at a time of great distress, and in September, 1930, extremists on the Right and Left won 38 per cent of the vote...
...This energetic gentleman considers the great coalition as only a stepping stone to his own takeover...
...Meanwhile, the depression had begun and forced the cabinet to review its financial and social policies...
...I do not say that history always repeats itself or that it necessarily teaches the same lessons...
...But the partners were not satisfied...
...Yours, H. P. P.S...
...We foresaw disaster...
...In Germany such a coalition could change the electoral law so as to practically eliminate all "third parties...
...Meanwhile, as foreign minister, Willy Brandt could do something useful by ridding Germany of the Adenauer mortgages...
...But should the government fail to make public these renunciations, fail to abandon the ill-starred MLF project, and fail to adhere to a nonproliferation treaty, it will not advance either the cause of Germany or the cause of peace...
...Only a month after its formation, the government had to decide whether to build a battle cruiser, as the other parties demanded, or not to build it, as the Social Democrats had promised during the elections...
...Over this, the Social Democrats were booted out of the cabinet in March, 1930...
...the opposition was capable of filling large meeting halls, and the Communists did not fail to exploit this new proof of "betrayal of the working class by the Social Democratic leaders...
...Now, at a moment when difficulties begin to appear in the "economic miracle," and when German nationalism is stirring to shed a heritage of defeat, you are again forming a coalition government...
...abolish the self-defeating Hallstein doctrine (which forbids the Federal Republic to recognize governments that recognize East Germany, whose government is referred to in West German officialese as "the Sovietzonal authorities") . Finally, he might educate the Germans to recognize the historic fact that the Munich Agreements of 1938 have been superseded and that the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia is final...
...They fear that they will be co-responsible for an unpopular budget while at the same time they may not come nearer the one goal they always claimed to have uppermost in their hearts—Germany's unification...
...Our chancellor, Hermann Mueller, was then at the head of a "great coalition" whose survival depended on an odd assortment of republican, semi-republican, and poorly assimilated parties...
...But the past of our shared youth is worth contemplating, and I thought it appropriate to recall events which some of our younger friends may never have learned of and some of our older friends may have forgotten...
Vol. 14 • January 1967 • No. 1
