WEIMAR-THE HOPE OF EUROPEAN PEACE

...It would show to the masses of the people, that it will be a peace to be obtained by negotiations, and not by national suicide...

...By their own moral platform, and self-interest, the Allies are bound to recognize the legitimate German order, which was freely chosen in 1919, and has never been validly abolished...

...According to the Weimar Constitution this, roughly speaking, would be the picture of post-Hitler Germany: no non-German countries would be under its rule...

...Today, everyone who once thought that he could honestly speak about an "ideological" conflict must either be silent or face the reproach at home, that he has been acting as a traitor, or as a dupe, too stupid to be taken seriously...

...It is tragic, but by no means without timely importance, to visualize the world-wide celebrations this anniversary would have evoked, had the events of 1933 and the ensuing years not taken place...

...i. e., that state centralization and extreme nationalism in Germany have always been weaker than in the western nations...

...On this issue all German political parties, with the exception of course of the extreme Left, will readily agree...

...If properly assisted by all men and women of good will, the restored Weimar Republic may then revitalize for the German people its generations-old democratic honor, certainly more efficiently than coercion ever could...

...In analyzing the historic background of Weimar, certainly many Americans would have taken pride in their German descent, as there would have been much reference to the revolution of 1848, which so intimately connects American and German democracy...

...Tribute would have been paid to the protagonists of modern democracy, to Kant, Fichte, Hegel, to the cosmopolitan spirit of Lessing, Goethe, Humboldt, and to the reform work of the Baron von Stein, who at the time of Napoleon transformed Prussia into the first truly modern state of Europe—without shedding one drop of blood...

...On the basis of universal suffrage, also Bismarck's work, the German Reichstag—by no means a 'hall of echoes'—developed into a full-weight parliament, with the Social Democratic Party in control of one-third of all seats...

...Yet, it must be said in all truthfulness, that today it is not any longer just the terror of the Nazi minority which is keeping it in the saddle...

...Today, however, the simplest facts, once known to every newspaper reader, are either denied or drowned in a conspiracy of silence...

...Of all countries, it is the United States, where the black-red-golden colors of republicanism found shelter after 1848 and where their meaning was best understood when they re-emerged in 1919, toward which we German democrats are looking...

...Free Elections Possible On a scale, even wider than in 1919, the representatives of constitutional government are again made to lose face before their own people...

...the executive powers of the President, greatly misused even before Hitler, must be drastically restricted, and the inner structure of Germany must be changed, a number of smaller states taking the place of the over-sized Prussian Free State...

...The code of civic and social rights and liberties, including the right of coalition, of collective bargaining, and all other labor and trade union rights would be restored at once...

...By this I do not mean only the terrible civil war, which the communistic "Spartacus" League unchained in Munich, Berlin, the Rhineland, Central Germany, etc., in order to transform the country into a Soviet state...

...Religious and racial discrimination would disappear...

...On the contrary: even in popular eulogies a number of historic facts would have been clearly brought out...

...It is nothing new that fascism is considered as inimical only if it clashes with certain imperialistic interests...

...America The Hope But these are arguments for, not against, the revival of Weimar—for it is only on the basis of a firm constitution that all improvements and changes can proceed if complete anarchy and chaos are to be avoided...

...Weimar—The Hope Of European Peace By PRINCE HUBERTUS ZU LOEWENSTEIN AUGUST 11 will mark the 25th anniversary of the promulgation of the German Constitution, which had been adopted by the National Assembly at Weimar, with 262 votes against the 75 of the nationalistic Right and the extreme Left...

...Hope may be expressed on this darkest anniversary of Weimar that from here it may receive encouragement for a common ideal of national liberty and constitutional government...

...The German Republic would join the proposed international organization and collaborate in the maintenance of peace and international morality, just as it did, honestly and with universal recognition, in the Geneva League of Nations...

...Praise would have been bestowed upon the German people, who after the nightmare of war and civil strife, of starvation and international blindness had found the way toward so just and forward looking an order...

...Governments and parliaments, political parties and trade unions, schools and universities, the press, the radio in all free countries would have hailed Weimar as the most daring, the most progressive of all constitutions—the first, which without infringing on individual liberty, had taken the decisive step of transplanting democracy from the political also into the economic and industrial spheres...

...Combined with the sadistic raving about the things a defeated Germany has to expect: mass-executions, financial and military control, the destruction of industry, and the deportation of millions to Russia, as slave-laborers and hostages, that formula leaves no other choice to the Germans, regardless of political opinion, than to fight on...

...Only all this must come at a time when in Germany and outside there is still something left upon which to build any democratic state, even if imperfect in the beginning...

...The re-establishment of the independence of the courts, the cleansing of the civil service, and the return of the schools to qualified educators (thousands of them living in Germany, having been ousted from their positions because of their democratic convictions)—all these measures would be taken at the same time...

...Then, only by terror, were they able to secure their dictatorship, martial law and firing squads becoming the only "constitutional" norm...

...After the years of Nazi lawlessness it is vital that first of all a strict moral and legal foundation be re-established...

...The much-maligned Bismarck also introduced in the '80s and '90s that amazing social legislation which, enlarged and deepened at the beginning of our century, made Germany by far the most progressive country in the world...

...Among these facts are : the Nazis, though openly supported by the German Communist Party, upon orders from the Comintern, never succeeded in obtaining a popular majority...

...Thus, the speakers at our hypothetical anniversary celebration would have pointed out, that the survival of the Weimar Republic has been almost miraculous: the right-radical Kepp-Putsch of 1920, the Communist revolts, and the Putsch instigated in 1923 by a certain Adolf Hitler could be squashed with comparative ease, because the vast majority of the people loyally stood by its constitution and wanted nothing of dictatorship...

...Since all opponents of totalitarianism—the trade unions, the religious groups, democratic labor, and so on—all of them in intimate "underground" contact, have maintained at least skeleton organizations, it should not be difficult to set the democratic process of elections and popular representation into motion...

...The articles of the Constitution envisaging land reform and public control over all means of basic production, the full participation of workers and employes in the political and economic life of the state, etc., would be carried out without compromise, thereby eliminating the danger of social and political reaction...

...There is no legal difference between the French, the Dutch, the Belgian constitutions, which will automatically revive, as soon as the Nazi surface is peeled off, and the status of Weimar, after the downfall of the regime...

...Then, within a few years, under the leadership of men like Gustav Stresemann, the impoverished country rose once more to a position of cultural, intellectual, social, and moral leadership...

...Thus, the disastrous multi-party system, which played into the hands of the extremists, must be abolished, replacing proportional representation by a mode of election more closely resembling the American...

...Finally, in the Autumn of 1918, i. e., before the revolution, the government of the Reich became responsible to the people's representatives—a system considered in Europe as essential for democracy...

...I mean the barbarous continuation of the food blockade for nine full months after the signing of the armistice...

...And perhaps some student of history would have added, that it was the famous American scholar, George Bancroft, then minister to Berlin, who one year before the war against Napoleon III hailed Bismarck as the future unifier of his torn people...

...I also mean the high price exacted from the German people by the ever recurrent efforts of the French military clique to create "independent" Quisling governments in the Rhineland and the Palatinate...

...In contested border provinces free plebiscites would ascertain the true will of the population...

...Weimar, trustworthily held out to the German people as an alternative to Nazism and total war, might contribute towards the overthrow of the dictatorship and lead Germany and the world towards an early and lasting peace...

...and that not even in the 17th and 18th Centuries did German government degenerate to the unrestricted absolutism of a Louis XIV in France...

...they were already undergoing a process of rapid disintegration when Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of the Reich...

...The pernicious and insane formula of "unconditional surrender" could almost make the further policing of Germany by SS-de-tachments superfluous...

...Miraculous Survival As a result of the discipline and sound education of the German labor movement very little blood was shed to obtain in November of that year "The One and Undivided German Republic," as a famous song of 1848 had said...

...Apparently it has been forgotten, that all those measures will not hurt the Nazis—simply because there won't be any Nazis by that time—but their first victim: the German people...

...It would not have remained unnoticed, that though the revolution of 1848 failed to achieve German unity, the main civic liberties were established within a few years after that event...

...Such policy, far removed from leading toward an eventual rebirth of democracy, is the only and exclusive one by which this rebirth will become impossible...

...In Italy, which had been living under fascism for 20 years, and which has had far less opposition against Mussolini than Germany had against Hitler, it was possible to revive the political parties literally over night...

...If a remedy and a retracing of those most fateful steps are still to be hoped for, this can only be achieved on the basis of the Weimar Constitution...

...Nobody, but a handful of Quislings, separatistic scoundrels, and communist stooges will call "democracy" an order composed of Amgot, OGPU, national dismemberment, and Kharkov courts, deciding at their good pleasure who must be liquidated as inimical to "liberty and progress...

...Bismarck's Role Of course, if the 25th anniversary of Weimar could have been celebrated in this way, there would have been no room for the slogan of today 'that the Germans simply aren't ripe for democracy.' It usually requires a troubled present to insert, with some hope of success, falsehoods based on ignorance or on deliberate lies, into the past...

...From November 1918 till May 1919 over 300,000 Germans perished, hundreds of thousands more went down in the ghastly inflation, caused mainly by the unlawful invasion of the Ruhr district in 1923...

...A Pernicious Formula This anniversary will not be celebrated—or only in the columns of a few courageous papers, and in the hearts of millions of Germans, waiting anxiously for the restoration of peace and republican freedom...

...International law would once more be regarded as an integral part of German law...

...As the greatest political miracle, however, something else would have received widest comment: namely, that the German Republic survived, though the great democracies, whose word had been accepted at face value, did everything, as if deliberately, to make their own friends in Germany lose face before their people...

...It is an infantile idea that chaos in Germany could be controlled by foreign bayonets, or that it would not affect the rest of Europe and the world...

...Undoubtedly, the Constitution will have to be amended and improved in many ways...

...Precisely this mentality has been responsible for keeping the Nazi regime in power and has discouraged the countless attempts, made before 1939, to re-establish constitutional government and thereby to avoid war...

...However, much blood was needed to maintain it...

...It was not until the Summer of 1930 that the last foreign troops were finally withdrawn from German soil...

...The Reich would again be a federal state, its central government, as well as all state governments responsible to freely elected parliaments...