Classics | Arthur Moeller van den Bruck | Germany's Third Empire | end of Part 3

Beginning

German youth is conscious of the cause of the betrayal; for us it was a betrayal, that the west did not grant us the promised liberty. German youth is exercising the immemorial privilege of youth, when, without formulating a definite political creed, but clearly seeing that it has been betrayed, it turns its back on what it can no longer trust: on the liberalism of all parties, circles and classes, the liberalism which had made us what we are: a fallen nation.

It is the immemorial privilege of youth to fight for freedom. If liberalism spelt freedom, then our youth would not abandon it. But liberalism bears nowadays no relation to freedom. The liberal is a mediocre fellow. Freedom means for him simply scope for his own egotism, and this he secures by means of the political devices which he has elaborated for the purpose: parliamentism and so-called democracy. Liberalism is only self-interest protectively coloured.

To German youth all parties are equally suspect. They are all equally guilty, they are all tainted with liberal ideas, the conservatives were untrue to their principles, the radicals to their logic. Why did Bethmann-Hollweg fail? Because as a statesman he was a liberal. Why did German socialism fail? Because it was infected with liberalism. It is foreign liberalism, especially French liberalism, which with cold-blooded calculation and deliberate intent makes today the German working man the bond-slave of Versailles. The greatest suspicion attaches, however, to that party which more particularly labelled itself the liberal party, which posed as being free-thinking, progressive, above all democratic. Turning over the pages of history we find the liberal party associated with every sort of credulity of which Germans are capable, with all the missed opportunities and belated decisions which have been the cause of our inferiority; and finally we discover the reason why we lost the War. Only a new generation can set us free from the consequences of this fate—a generation less credulous, but more enthusiastic—a generation that from its earliest days sees itself faced with an heroic task, though no man can yet foretell when or how that task can be performed: if at all.

The only thing youth can yet do is to prepare itself. It can skilfully diagnose the causes of its country’s weakness. It can stress those values which are still the sources of her strength. Meantime it can purge itself of any guilt that clings to the nation. German youth is doing this today: thoroughly, ruthlessly, as beseems youth. There are no young liberals in Germany today; there are young revolutionaries; there are young conservatives. But who would be a liberal? There are scarcely any young democrats in the proper sense of the term, and such as there are—who a few years ago were still obsessed by yearnings towards the League of Nations and World Peace—are being swiftly nationalized. The formal democracy that posed as our state is now so discredited that nothing can save it. The young conservative needs no fresh proof of the disastrous results that would follow a mechanical, uninspired parliamentism in Germany; the young revolutionary who has mentally outlived the collapse of Marxism but has retained his labour sympathies, has long since been disillusioned about the Revolution which has led only to a reactionary, sham democracy that is content with the opportunist enjoyment of apparent power.

If we seek to discover the reasons why the young conservative and the young revolutionary have so unanimously come to the same conclusion about the principles, points of view and lines of policy that have led to present conditions, we shall find that they share a common contempt and distrust for the liberal ingredient in political thought. This was the one common factor that Germany possessed after the Revolution, the one common link between the forces of the Right and of the Left.

When once the change of generation is complete, there will not survive in Germany one single individual who will attempt a justification of the liberal achievements to which we owe not only the loss of a war, but the loss of the Revolution; which we must now set out to win.

Liberalism is the philosophy of life from which German youth now turns with nausea, with wrath, and with a quite peculiar scorn, for there is none more foreign, more repugnant, more opposed to its own philosophy.

German youth today recognizes the liberal as THE ENEMY.

Liberalism is the death of nations. What? Was it not the liberal nations who won the War? Are not these the nations who in 1918–20 (or at any rate by 1988, if they succeed in receiving the last instalment of our debt payment) would seem to have attained everything in respect of Germany that they had longed for secretly—or openly, if they were imprudent enough to voice their wishes—before 1914?

For the moment we can only answer that there is a hope that the destruction that they prepared for us will recoil on their own heads; a hope that the Peace of Versailles will result in such an exposure of liberalism to the eyes of all the word that liberalism will be unable to survive.

Our enemies have their present success. The moment is in their favour, but everything else is against them. The secret, however, must not be revealed before its time. What we can, however, already detect is a regrouping of men and nations. All anti-liberal forces are combining against everything that is liberal. We are living in the time of this transition. The change is taking place most logically from below and attacking the enemy where his power began. There is a revolt against the age of reason.

The value of a philosophy of life must be measured by its effects: does it raise men or lower them? Reason turned thinking man into calculating man. It corrupted Europe. The World War was the shipwreck of the age of reason. It exposed the cunning of that practical calculation that is the national philosophy of England, which gives a moral justification to an immoral conduct of life and state and to the tutelage of other nations; which invented the word utilitarianism to cover egotism. It exposed the bankruptcy of the rights of man with which the French Revolution in the name of democracy cheated the nations of their nationality, while it reserved for a political caste at the top the exploitation of the people. The fight against the age of reason which we are entering on, is a fight against liberalism all along the line.

In the course of this fight we shall realize how brief an epoch the Age of Reason has been; how circumscribed, unimportant and feeble its creation; how ephemeral its legacy. In England it produced some practical things, in France some witty ones. But all great achievements on our side of the border were produced in the teeth of the age of reason. All eminent men with us, whether we think of Goethe or of Bismarck, were un-liberal men. Every decisive even, the rise of Napoleon’s power, the foundation of the German Empire, were un-liberal events. The only achievement of the liberal was the skill with which he exploited each turn of events and sought to claim the credit for it.

The calculations of the liberal have been false. The moment always come when the individual realizes his own impotence, when the man who liked to consider himself as independent of society, realizes that if he is to be of any use on earth, if he is to be of any use to his country, he can only be so in alliance with his fellow-countrymen.

The moment has come in which men and nations alike seek cohesion once more, that cohesion which the age of reason thought it could dispense with, sacrificing understanding to reason. The moment has come only after a severe testing-time which has tried the betrayer no less than the betrayed.

But come it has.