Classics | Arthur Moeller van den Bruck | Germany's Third Empire | Part 5-end

Part 5 (end)

There was a time in German history when two classes of the nation raved against each other; when the peasants of the Neckar and the Rhine attacked the castles of the princes, and the heavens were red with war. The fanaticism of the Anabaptists devastated Saxony and Westphalia. Political and social and religious passions were blended and the cry of "divine justice" fired the country and the hearts of men. Many knights were to be found in the insurrectionary camp. An idle nobility, threatened in its rights fought with Franz von Sickingen against the princes of the Empire to establish an independent emperor. Ulrich von Hutten turned from a humanist into a patriot. The rebels achieved nothing of all they had so confidently hoped. The fault was their own. The peasants felt then as the proletarian feels today. Their ideas were "just" but narrow; they distrusted their friends of other classes. They refused the leadership that was offered them.

They had no unity amongst themselves, and greedily snatched immediate success heedless of the ultimate result. We see the same thing today. It was a German communist who recalled the speech of Florian Geyer to his peasant-proletarian comrades: "Know ye what ye have wrought? God gave into your hands the best, the noblest, the holiest of causes—in your hands it has been like as a jewel in a pig-stye." So the Germans of those days frittered their good cause away. The champions of the Clog lost their fight against the oppressor and the exploiter because their short-sighted jealousy would not let them trust the young proletarian knights who might have led them to victory against the princes. The Germans who today do homage to the Soviet star are no less short-sighted. The instinct of the masses is sound, but their leaders want to fight the cause alone, to make it a party cause, a domestic political cause. There is only one hope for us. This time the oppressors and exploiters are the generals and the politicians of another nation; the oppression comes from without; and foreign politics offer the sole hope of relief from our misery. In its need the proletariat is seeking new leaders. It is beginning to realize that these can only be found amongst men who have no mind to be proletarians. We cannot ask that the proletariat should accept the leadership of that generation which lost the War and against whom the radicals carried out the Revolution; but a new generation is coming on. The men of the new generation will not endorse the Revolution, but they will accept the mental revolution that has taken place. They owe no loyalty to the age of William II, whose greatest crime was that it allowed conservative forms to fall into decay. No barrier severs this new generation from the proletariat. The German working man must recognize that he, who was said to possess no fatherland, today possesses almost nothing else. 7 The cry and the promise of a world revolution still echoes amongst the proletariat. The hope is too big a one to be lightly buried, even under the disillusionment which democracy brought. It is more than the mere hope of a new economic system, of a communistic age succeeding a capitalist age, as it in its day succeeded a feudal age; it is the hope of a new humanity, a new enlightenment of heart and head; it proclaims to the masses that life on earth which has hitherto been senseless and accursed, will now be blessed and full of meaning and will make men, men. The socialists preferred the apparent security of the present to the hope of an uncertain future; as opportunists they compromised with the present. But the communist party, the party whom the Revolution had most disappointed, still fights for the idea of the world revolution which is the only ideal left to a proletariat inspired to class war, the only cry that can still rally the masses. In every country the proletariat is too weak to carry through the class war on its own strength alone. In the victor countries it is on the defensive. In France it is held in check by militarism; in Italy it is overwhelmed by Fascism. In England the working classes are too politically-minded to adopt any policy but a national British policy. In Russia the proletariat has captured the state; in Germany, where this attempt failed, we are more captivated than any other people by the idea that the united proletariats of all countries might undertake an attack on capitalism for which the proletariat of any individual country alone is too weak. The communist has learnt a lot. He now makes merry over the idea of pacifism, which was once a fine proletarian ideal. He started the revolution with it, and it ultimately cost him the revolution. He now knows that that enduring peace on earth must be won by fighting, that to renounce weapons is to renounce victory. He had made an equally clean sweep of the whole "chatter about the state" (as Engels called it)—the stateless state. Marx had promised that the state would "die out." Marxism wasted seventy-five years in such talk. The various, empty theories of Engels and Bebel are no less out of date. Russia has given the example of an organization based on power that can only be understood as a "state" though time alone can show whether it will have the permanence that belongs to a state. The German working man has clearly grasped the importance of the Russian example. He has saturated himself with the thought of a "working man’s government," which must depend on the proletariat’s seizing the "state power" before proceeding to solve social problems along communist lines. His own opinion is that it must be in the hands of one party, his own, and he rejects most logically all thoughts of a coalition, whether proletarian-nationalist or proletarian-democrat. The class war idea still haunts him, however, and prevents all conception of a state and a government whose sole preoccupation shall be the nation. A third mental adjustment is taking place in the individual communist’s mind, though the communist party vigorously opposes it: a reaction in favour of nationality. The party opposes it because it spells the end of the International and the world revolution ideas. The problem of nationality is too insistent however to be permanently suppressed. The events of today, the ill-treatment we are enduring, the presence of the enemy within our borders, are forcibly bringing home to the proletarian the fact that the nation as well as the proletariat is being oppressed, that there exist oppressed nations as well as oppressed classes—and that of all nations the German is the most oppressed. Russia has here again set the example. The red flag is the Russian flag. Under it the Soviet State has asserted its national independence both against the Entente and against the reaction. Nor has the lesson of Fascism been lost on the German communist. Even the Red Flag has written that communism must not neglect to harness to revolutionary aims "the strong national feelings" that Fascism has enlisted in the service of reaction. Clara Zetkin in her great programme speech could not avoid a concession to this mood that is beginning to prevail, especially among the young communists: it is true, she stated, that the proletariat has no country; it must conquer the country for itself. This demand is equivalent to ours: the proletariat must become a part of the nation. It is beginning to dawn on the young communist that the question is not so much one of tangible goods as of inner values which must be intellectually and spiritually won. The German of today realizes that the proletarian’s just claim is to a share in all values that Germans have created. Even the world revolution can only be realized nationally. Each nation has its own peculiar mission. We believe that it is the mission of the German nation to translate the world revolution into the salvation of Europe. The world revolution, however, will not be that which Marx envisaged; it will rather be that which Nietzsche foresaw. Here again Marx and Nietzsche are poles apart. Marx spoke of "the legal and political superstructure" reared on "the sum of the conditions of production"; this he proposed to overthrow and destroy. Nietzsche saw "state and society as substructure"; he had the wider outlook of the great mind unfettered by time and party. Nietzsche, writing The History of the Coming Centuries, describing "what is coming, and what must inevitably come, the advent of nihilism," did not shirk the problem of the proletariat. Claiming to "have lived through nihilism in his own soul, to have put it behind him and out of him," he hoped to see that "substructure of social feeling-values" established to form a "basis" on which, as he put it, a "higher species can take its stand and live for its own tasks." Marx was thinking of the masses; Nietzsche was thinking of the individual. In this he was a romantic. In this, on his own lofty aesthetic plane, he was a reactionary. The future belongs not to the problem-monger, but to the man of character. So far we have not seen the MAN who kept his saddle and was able to ride the catastrophe. The masses meantime, the "surplus" millions, are faced with the danger that the catastrophe which broke amongst them will trample them ruthlessly to death. The problem is how to preserve the historic life of Europe, more especially the characteristically German life which shall make a German nation of us and embrace all who belong to the nation. Revolution may change a man inwardly, but this inwardly-changed man must continue the great historic life of Europe, whether to find in it his rise or fall. The problem of every revolution is how and when and whether it will end. If there are any survivors of a world revolution those who will emerge victorious will not be classes, but the nations who after the immense displacement of centres of gravity, have most speedily been able to recover their equilibrium. The problem of the catastrophe is a problem of conservation; not a party problem but a problem fraught with destiny: the problem whether after it we shall resume life with eyes directed forward to the future or backward to the past.