Ominous Parallels (19 page)

The conservatives did not attempt to prove the inherent superiority of all things German. They felt it, and that was enough for them. The German soul, they often said, rejects intellectual analysis; it functions decisively, by instinct. It rejects the plodding debates of “isolated” individuals, which characterize parliamentary government; instead, it demands “organic unity” and a state embodying “the principle of authority.” It rejects all talk about man’s rights as mere “Western selfishness.” What it cherishes is duty, and self-sacrifice for the Fatherland.

Most of the conservatives were religious men, who regarded their basic ideas as inherent in a Christian approach to life. Typically, the public statements of these men dwelt on such themes as the value of faith, the evil of atheism, the importance of church and family, and the need of religious schools to guide the young and immunize them against radicalism. Whether they invoked religion or not, however, the conservatives characteristically reviled “the rational Republic.” This was not meant as sarcasm; in their opinion the Republic war rational. On this subject, all were prepared to agree with Luther. “There is on earth among all dangers no more dangerous thing than a richly endowed and adroit reason,” Luther had said. “Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed.”
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In economics, as in philosophy and politics, the conservatives stood for tradition, German tradition.

Faithful to its dominant nineteenth-century ideas, Germany, alone among the major Western nations, had never entered the era of classic liberalism; in varying forms and degrees the German states had characteristically been regulated economies. Then, in the Prussian-dominated empire, Bismarck and his successors had entrenched many new controls, including the policy of awarding special favors from the Reich government—subsidies, protective tariffs, and the like—to the country’s big landowners and industrialists. In addition, to placate the rising labor movement, Bismarck in the 1880’s had created in Germany the world’s first welfare state, complete with programs for compulsory health insurance, workmen’s compensation, and old-age and disability insurance.

Bismarck’s conservative supporters at the time, including the professorate and the Lutheran Church, had accepted such programs enthusiastically, as a natural expression of Prussian paternalism, social-mindedness, and sense of duty. The base of Bismarck’s approach was established by the so-called “socialists of the chair,” a group of highly influential social-science professors at the German universities. The ideas of these men, notes von Mises, “were almost identical with those later held by the British Fabians and the American Institutionalists....” As to the Lutherans, most had followed the lead of such figures as Pastor Adolf Stoecker; they had rejected capitalism as an evil, Jewish idea, incompatible with the spirit of Christianity. “[I]n no other country had the idea of social reform taken hold of people’s minds as thoroughly as in Germany ... ,” summarizes one historian (who makes no attempt to explain the fact).
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The Weimar conservatives followed their Bismarckian mentors. They advocated all the imperial types of controls, programs, taxes, and rejected two policies. One was unhampered Western capitalism (which they often described as plutocracy, pacifism, or “Jewish greed”); the other was “radical experiments,” i.e., any new government programs designed to tip the balance of power in favor of labor. In place of both policies, the conservatives demanded private property “in the German sense.” The German sense, they said, means a recognition of private ownership (in some areas), combined with the principle that property must be used to serve the welfare of the nation, as determined by the authorities of the state.

The deadliest enemy of the country, the conservatives declared, is socialism. Their working definition of socialism was: state control of the economy for the sake of benefiting the lower classes. They fumed against it, demanding state control of the economy for the sake of benefiting the upper classes.

The Nationalist party (and a somewhat similar group, the People’s party) was regarded in Germany as the political right. The term “right,” in Germany, had nothing to do with and did not mean classic liberalism, individual rights, a market economy, or capitalism. It stood for the opposite of all these ideas. It stood, in economics as in politics, for an explicit version of
statism.

In 1919 the conservatives knew that it was still too soon for them to achieve their social goals. They knew that they had to give the new government a chance. They resolved to bide their time and see what the defenders of the “rational Republic” would do.

The defenders did not consist only of Marxists. The Social Democrats had two indispensable “bourgeois” allies, without whom neither the new Constitution nor the Republic to which it gave birth would have been possible. These two allies were the Center party and the Democratic party.

The Center party (which regularly drew nearly 20 percent of the vote in the Weimar years) had been organized in 1870 to serve as the political arm of the Catholic Church in Germany.
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Whatever their disagreements on other issues, the Centrists prided themselves on being united as a
moral
force able to combat the spread of decadence in postwar Germany. The moral values which party leaders upheld included faith in God, a return to the commandments of traditional Christianity, and obedience to authority, not only religious but also political (since, according to Catholic teaching, political power derives from God). The chief cause of the country’s spiritual decay, the leaders said, was the modern trend to secularism and freethinking. Freethinking, to these men, did not mean merely atheism; it meant independent thought on any philo- sophical question. A member of the Reichstag once declared: “It is impossible for me to recognize the moral basis of any action if I do not understand it.” The Centrists present responded by calling out: “Materialism! Materialism!”
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Like their counterparts in other lands, the Centrists did not rely only on the methods of persuasion to spread their ideas. They sought to impose their moral code on the rest of the country by force of law, urging measures such as the prohibition of abortion, restrictions on sexual practices condemned by the Church, the censorship of pornography, and a statute to protect German youth from “worthless and obscene literature.”
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The party also demanded state financing of Catholic public schools.

On matters not decreed by their religion the Centrists often differed with one another. Some were political conservatives, who did not approve of the new German system; others were liberals, who did. (“[E]very government enjoys God’s blessing, whether it be monarchic or republican,” a party spokesman told the Weimar Assembly.)
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On one basic question of politics, however, all factions were in agreement: the party rejected both capitalism and socialism.

Capitalism, the Catholics held, is a godless system. Capitalism, they said, represents an inherently secular approach to life, one which counts on man’s unaided intellect and rewards his striving for material success. It also represents an amoral approach: it claims a man’s right to act on his own judgment, which implies a “sinful permissiveness” on sexual and political questions. Above all, in historian Koppel Pinson’s words, “the motive of self-interest and the incentive of competition ran counter to Catholic religious belief, which espoused a social rather than an individual ethic. Society was a
corpus christi mysticum
[mystical body of Christ], and the individual was not to be considered an isolated phenomenon.”
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As to socialism, the Centrists rejected it for one fundamental reason. Socialism, the party argued, is impractical idealism; Marx’s vision of a perfect, egalitarian society on earth is noble, but impossible. It is impossible because of ‘Original Sin. which, no matter what man’s aspirations, dooms him to greed and failure. “To suffer and to endure ... is the lot of humanity,” Pope Leo XIII had said; “let men strive as they may, no strength and no artifice will ever succeed in banishing from human life the ills and troubles which beset it.”
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Since capitalism is evil and socialism is too good for man, the party held, a compromise is necessary. “On the one hand,” said a prominent German Catholic leader in 1848, “we see a rigid clinging to the right of property and on the other hand an equally determined denial of all property rights and we desperately seek some mediation between these two extremes.”
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The “mediation” he (and the Center party) reached was the idea that man does have a right to property, but that this right is not unlimited: it is conditioned by man’s overriding moral obligation to use his property in such a way as to serve the general welfare.

Since every German group repudiated individualism, “centrism” in the Weimar Republic meant a middle ground, not between socialism and capitalism, but between statism of the Marxist variety (to benefit the lower classes) and statism of the conservative variety (to benefit the upper classes).

In the early postwar years the conservative Centrists, like monarchists throughout the nation, were relatively subdued, and the party’s left wing was in the ascendancy. It was a wing eager to form a working coalition with the Social Democratic Reformists.

The final member of the “Weimar coalition” was the Democratic party, a middle-class liberal group organized in 1918, which included among its supporters a roster of famous names from the academic and business worlds unmatched by any of the other groups. This party, in Pinson’s words, was the one “most committed to the ideals of a democratic republic, and it made its appeal largely to those in Germany who were truly democratic and socially minded but who rejected all notions of a class [or religious] party....”
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In the January 1919 elections, there was an impressive show of support for such an approach (over five million votes, about 19 percent of the total).

At the Weimar Convention, Friedrich Naumann, the party’s first elected leader, stated the Democratic viewpoint in politics. The new Republic, he told the delegates, should represent a “sort of compromise peace between capitalism and socialism.”
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Such a compromise, the Democrats said, means the acceptance of individual rights—and of a powerful state, one strong enough to ensure that citizens exercise their rights in the service of the community. It means the sanctity of private property, and the socialization of monopolies. It means the rejection of egalitarianism, and a large-scale redistribution of income to benefit the poor.

In the mid-twenties, one of the party’s election posters eloquently depicted its animating viewpoint. The poster, which would have been suitable for all the republican groups, featured a beefy Olympic runner symbolizing determination, along with a banner reading: “NOTHING WILL SWAY US FROM THE MIDDLE ROAD.”

On the whole, the Democrats did not feel the need to defend their politics by reference to any abstract theory, such as dialectic materialism or the dogmas of faith. If, as has often been said, the essence of modern liberalism is “social conscience unencumbered by ideology,” then the Democratic party was the purest representative of liberalism in Weimar Germany.

Even this approach, however, rests on an
implied
philosophic base, which was voiced occasionally by certain party members. Thanks to these men, Germany’s “secular, bourgeois liberals” can be said to have stood for something intellectually distinctive. What they stood for was eloquently expressed a year before his death by the sociologist Max Weber, a major influence on the social sciences in Germany and one of the Democratic party’s most illustrious founders.

In 1919, a group of students at the University of Munich, agitated by the Weimar Assembly debates and shaken by the violence in the country, invited Weber to address them. The students wanted guidance; they wanted this famous scholar-scientist to tell them what political system to endorse, how to judge values, what role science plays in the quest for truth. “Weber knew what was on their minds,” writes Frederic Lilge. “He also knew that a distrust of rational thought was already abroad, a feeling which at any time might assume alarming proportions.... He therefore decided to impress upon his young audience from the outset the need for sanity and soberness of mind....”
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They must not, Weber told the students, be taken in by religious dogmatists, or by irrationalist charlatans, left or right, who pretend to offer solutions to the world’s problems. The fact is, he explained, there are no solutions. Certainty is unattainable by man, knowledge is provisional, values are relative, scholars are merely specialists doing technical jobs detached from life, science has nothing to say about morality or politics—and (in Lilge’s synopsis)

[it] was therefore an error on the part of students to demand from their academic teachers positive moral guidance and decisions, such as would be involved in answering the question as to what is the meaning of life. To attempt such an answer would transcend not only their work as scientists; it would also be a violation of the liberalism which Weber did his best to defend.

Liberalism, according to Weber, means an end to illusions, including the “illusion” of human progress—along with an attitude of endurance, “endurance [in Lilge’s words] to bear the destruction of all absolutes, with no sentimental turning back or rash embrace of new faiths, only the strength to hold out in the radical though bleak veracity of a cleansed mind.” As to selecting the proper course of action, Weber told the gathering, each individual has to decide the ideals that are right “for him.” Since only questions of means, not of ends, fall within the province of science, he said, ends must be chosen subjectively, by reference to feelings.
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