Lost German Liberals
SHUSTER, GEORGE N.
Lost German Liberals The German Idea of Freedom. Reviewed by George N. Shuster By Leonard Krieger. President, Hunter College; former Beacon. 540 pp. $7.50. U.S. High Commissioner in Bavaria The...
...They did manage to bring about a social order inside which there existed a strange but curiously exhilarating mixture of convention and progress...
...The "democrats" were as much and as little to blame as anybody else...
...It was on the one hand frankly mercantilist, on the other intellectual and moralistic...
...The time was ripe for romance, the eventual bestiality of which only a few foresaw...
...The break-up of the "democratic front" which followed the defeat of 1918 seems in large measure due to its impotence to deal practically with the major problems which German society confronted, except insofar as Stresemann succeeded in mitigating the institutionalized resentment of the Peace Treaty...
...the sudden, no doubt fateful exclusion of the aristocracy from the efforts to which it had traditionally been dedicated — all these left the state, the structure of which had not provided for the effective interdependence of its unicameral legislature and its executive branch, denuded of popular support...
...The difficulties inherent in trying to elucidate what happened to the theory and practice of constitutional government between the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the Allied victory in 1918 are very great, but when one adds the conundrum of why the Weimar Republic ended in Nazism the problem becomes one to confuse and confound the most persevering...
...But, if your digestive vigor suffices, you will eventually discover that the book is a somewhat inconclusive but well-informed study of the political movements identified with liberalism in German history...
...The titanic struggle of Social Democracy with Communism, a form of cold war in which all the outlines of the present were foreshadowed ; the collapse of the middle class as a consequence of ruinous inflation...
...In between were thoughtful people of two kinds—thinkers who sought to effect an ideal synthesis of the state's power with its obligation to be a guarantor of natural rights, and practical men like Baron vom Stein who philosophized relatively little and sought to get the job done...
...Nor is the process rendered easier by the fact that the very names of personalities identified with liberalism in Germany are unknown to American readers...
...Some half-dozen German men figure on the world stage of even the more enlightened students of the period—Bismarck, Wilhelm II, Stresemann, Bruening, Hitler, Adenauer...
...Initially the task was to associate trends toward greater freedom for the individual citizen, as championed by the French Revolution and the Whigs of Britain, with the structure of German society, which had welded its principalities into a unified nation...
...the financial weakness of the state, characterized by its indebtedness and therefore by its catastrophic sensitivity to fluctuations of credit...
...Krieger has to sketch in as best he may is a whole world of peripheral figures like Follen and Rotteck,Miquel and Schulze-Delitzsch...
...On one side were the conservatives who wanted above all to preserve the structure, and on the other the radicals who sought to destroy it...
...It was not surprising that in the circumstances liberalism in turn became a sort of political compound which tended always to break up into its several parts...
...He manages surprisingly well...
...What Mr...
...Sentences like "The Western liberals took for granted the malleability of a reality which for the Germans remained formidably resistant" abound and are no easier to digest than globules of goosefat...
...High Commissioner in Bavaria The author of this study of "democratic" movements in Germany may fairly be described as a man who finds satisfaction in what he has written even though others will often be as puzzled by it as is a lover by the varying amorous temperatures of his lass...
Vol. 41 • February 1958 • No. 5
