Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Two Valuable Books on History TWO books have recently come from university presses which hreak new ground in biography and history. Each is likely...
...during and after the First World War (he was murdered bv nationalist fanatics in 1921) Epstein, assistant professor of history at Harvard, is the first scholar who has prepared a detailed account of Erzberger's career in English...
...The safest Communists were those in Polish jails...
...473 pp...
...Although Erzberger was no revolutionary, he had become a hated figure to Germans of the old ruling groups...
...The author gives a very detailed, if slightly repetitious account of the Reichstag peace resolution...
...As Dziewanowski shows, there were two main currents in Polish socialism before World War I. There was the Polish Socialist party, with a strong element of nationalism in its psychology...
...He is now a professor of history at Boston College...
...And he had hurt the well-to-do classes in pocketbook as well as in national pride by giving Germany, as the author savs...
...his religious faith helped him to face the shadow of impending assassination...
...And there was the Social Democracy of Poland and Lithuania, a "dedicated elite of professional revolutionaries...
...After Poland regained national independence...
...This issue was thrashed out in a famous libel suit which he brought against one of his sharpest critics, Karl Helfferich...
...Erzberger had signed the 1918 armistice...
...a centralized system of tax collection . . . based upon national income and inheritance taxes...
...The other is M. K. Dziewanowski's The Communist Party oj Poland (Harvard...
...369 pp...
...was wiped out not so much by the police as by Stalin...
...Their program was strongly internationalist and conceived in terms of world, or at least European, revolution...
...Both its strong points and its weaknesses are set forth with admirable objectivity...
...Although Erzberger was a leading figure in German political life before...
...The Polish Communist party, ironically enough...
...Finally, his enemies circulated and eagerly believed stories that he was corrupt...
...Erzberger's life was so completely identified with politics that a biography of him almost inevitably becomes a history of Germany before and during World War I. Indeed, one of the best chapters is devoted to the German political set-up under the Imperial regime...
...He has conscientiously dug up a vast amount of information about the origins, development and schisms of the socialist movement in Poland and of the Communist party...
...As the author says: "Practically all Polish Communists who were in Soviet territory (in 1937-38) were either physically liquidated or sent to concentration camps...
...Dziewanowski is a Pole who, after fighting in the war and working for the Polish government-in-exile, came to the United States...
...Always a devout Catholic (one of his daughters became a nun...
...which included Rosa Luxemburg...
...In some way Erzberger's career and personality are similar to those of his contemporary, David Lloyd George...
...One is Klaus Epstein's Matthias Erzberger and the Dilemma oj German Democracy (Princeton...
...He was born in a little South German village, the son of a tailor who doubled as the village postman...
...Erzberger had realized in 1917 that Germany could not win the war and had started to work for a negotiated peace...
...Each is likely to rank as the definitive work on its subject...
...Karl Radel...
...His work is based largely on a year of research in Germany, where the author had access to the Erzberger papers in the Bundesarchiv, met Erzberger s widow and pursued to the source every detail of Erzberger's personal and political life...
...S7.50...
...His origin was against him and his active temperament caused him to tread on many bureaucratic toes...
...10.00...
...For this there were several reasons...
...To be sure, he made the best possible terms for a nation that had been defeated and was torn with increasing revolutionary disturbance...
...Leo Yogiches...
...The Polish Socialist party, rejecting Communism and Russian rule, led a harassed, persecuted existence under the dictatorship of Marshal Pilsudski and his heirs, "the colonels...
...the situation in the Leftist camp shifted...
...and assigned the task of ruling Poland in the inlerest of Moscow...
...Felix Dzerzhinski and Julian Marchlewski...
...The book contains a most valuable account and analysis of how the decimated remnants of the Party were nursed to life after World War II...
...Without any advantage of birth or wealth he pushed his way up in the stratified world of pre-war Germany by very considerable natural ability and an enormous capacity for work...
...Epstein weighs the evidence which he presents very fully, and reaches the conclusion that Erzberger was innocent, but not as careful as he should have been to avoid even the suggestion of a "conflict of interest'' in some cases...
...of which Erzberger was one of the prime movers...
...Hindenburg thanked him for "the extremely valuable services he had rendered to the Fatherland": but Erzberger's whole career made him a convenient scapegoat for "the stab in the back'' legend...
Vol. 42 • March 1959 • No. 10
