A MISLEADING GERMAN ON GERMANY
Reimann, Guenter
A Misleading German On Germany THE GERMAN TALKS BACK, by Heinrich Hauser. Henry Holt. $2.50. Reviewed by Guenter Reimann ANEW phenomenon occurred in the American book-publishing world with the...
...They are outraged at his cynical attitude towards "democracy," and at his refusal to acknowledge democracy as a possible solution for Germany...
...A status society or Prussian "socialism" within a deindustrialized Germany ruled by an agrarian aristocracy composed of small individual landholders using most advanced technological methods...
...The misleading slogan of a people's responsibility for the deeds of a ruling class throws an echo that will long be heard all over the world...
...Hauser's outlook should not be brushed aside as merely cynical...
...Reviewed by Guenter Reimann ANEW phenomenon occurred in the American book-publishing world with the publication of the first postwar German book about Germany—Heinrich Hau-ser's The German Talks Back...
...This catastrophe is largely the result of the decisions and policies of the victorious powers...
...I remember how easy it was for Hungarian, or Italian, or Bulgarian political refugees to find asylum in Berlin working-class homes, even during the worst depression years...
...It also was a center of the international labor movement, the home of many millions of workers who never appreciated the spirit of "Prussianism...
...Hauser has ignored the profound changes in Russian society in the last 20 years...
...Germany is a country of starving women and children whose men have been taken away into virtual slavery...
...The book in which a German representing those social classes that formed a majority of the population "talks back" has still to be written...
...The middle class intelligentsia, which formerly stood between the ruling class and the workers, has no longer a chance to climb on the bandwagon of the ruling class...
...He adhered to romantic ideas of the rule of a capitalist aristocracy that could lead the "mob...
...But his prediction may contain a grain of truth...
...If it is not realized, he says, then Germany is lost to "western civilization" and will be incorporated into a Russian sphere of "Communism...
...But his cynicism is far surpassed by the cynicism (and dishonesty) of those "liberals" who support and advocate the enslavement and degradation of a foreign people...
...Unfortunately Hauser's book does not help to show the existence of these two antagonistic Germanys...
...The urban population is entering upon a catastrophic Winter which will cost more in human lives and demoralization than five years of war—this time with the heavies't burdens falling not on soldiers but on women, children, and old people...
...The oppression now being applied against the German people corresponds to that used by Nazi SS troops in Poland and Southern Russia...
...Allied policies are indeed paving the way for realization of the most sinister aspects of his predictions...
...Morgenthau...
...IN spite of many disagreements that I have with Hauser, I agree with one basic point: the methods of Nazi rule are not a national peculiarity...
...Thus he joined the Free Corps which, after the war, fought attempts of the radical workers to create a democratic socialist Germany and Europe...
...Later, during the war, the deep rift between the hierarchical ruling class and the lower classes—the enslaved workers, small peasants, and ruined middle classes—divided the German people still more profoundly...
...YET Hauser appears to be in agreement with his anti-German critics about one basic point: the German people are not fit for democracy...
...At the end of World War I Hauser was a part of the uprooted, economically insecure German middle class youth who feared immersion in the "city mob...
...War and defeat arid Allied occupation have changed the social structure of the German nation...
...Hauser believes that a great part of the German people will turn to Russian "Communism" as-a reaction against oppressive Western policies...
...Members of the German ruined middle class, former officers, uprooted writers, teachers, and adminfstrators may be willing to offer their services to the Russian state—not in the quest of Communism but as policemen and propagandists for the Russians in Germany and in other Russian-dominated countries...
...It has been widely reviewed and vehemently condemned...
...Hauser propounds his pet idea...
...The ranks of middle class desperados and tompen-proletarians will number many millions and from them foreign powers will be able to recruit mercenary armies, for policing jobs against the peoples of Europe—and for new wars on other continents...
...The publisher himself took part in a campaign which denounced the author as a hidden Nazi and falsifier of facts, historical and contemporary...
...I do not share the hysterical indignation with which most critics have met Hauser's book...
...Mothers have been raped in the presence of their children, and girls who resist are killed as a matter of course...
...But Berlin was not only the capital of Prussia...
...But he is himself almost convinced that this is an unrealizable ideal...
...Those who use and defend such methods in the name of "reeducation" accomplish the reeducation only of themselves—in the ideas and spirit of fascism...
...They fought the social liberation movements of the proletariat...
...Hauser's book is an interesting revelation of the bankruptcy of the upper crust of the German middle class intelligentsia...
...It is therefore misleading that he appears in the role of "The German...
...Is there any future for a German nation...
...This prediction was made before Russian armies had seized Eastern Germany, before the ruthless deportation of 15 million Germans was begun...
...He and his friends once sought to create a new solid rule of a German aristocracy...
...Fellow travellers and even many sincere liberals must try hard not to hear the desperate cry of starving children and homeless families, of the 25,000,000 Germans condemned to death by Mr...
...His implication that the German proletariat will welcome such incorporation is based on an utterly unrealistic appraisal of the Russian state regime and Russian foreign policies which are in the worst tradition of oppressive imperialism...
...I remember the many hundreds of thousands of Berlin workers for whom international solidarity was not an empty phrase...
...He tries to defend his point with historical references, particularly to the role of Prussia in German history...
...A Russian-controlled puppet regime in Germany may attract former Nazis, declassed bourgeoisie, and others of the lumpenproletariat, but it will not find supporters among the ranks of the proletariat...
...MR...
...For the latter is itself in a state of dissolution and pauperization...
...Hauser as well as his critics refer only to the history of the old ruling class, in Prussia as well as in the rest of Germany...
...Germany has two histories—one told by Hauser, and another still untold yet very much alive in the tradition and thinking of the great majority of the German workers...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 44
