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13 Foreign Aff. 557 (1934-1935)
National Socialism: Theory and Practice

handle is hein.journals/fora13 and id is 573 raw text is: NATIONAL SOCIALISM: THEORY AND PRACTICE By Dorothy Thompson ONRAD HEIDEN says that National Socialism is a union of causes rather than aims,' and certainly the pres- ent form of government in Germany is unimaginable without the history otthe last twenty years. The Great War im- mensely furthered the popular sense of unity, and augmented German national consciousness. Versailles created in the midst of Europe a nation with an acute sense of grievance. The early attempts to enforce the Treaty without modification resulted in the inflation, which had serious social and eventually political consequences, for it impoverished the middle classes and acceler- ated the concentration of capital. The second period of attempted fulfillment, plus rapid industrial reconstruction with borrowed money, resulted in a huge public and private indebtedness, largely to outside banks, and eventually slumped into the depression. All of these things together created a revolutionary situation which in 1929 was obvious to the blindest observers. Further- more, the revolution was ripe along many fronts. The German Republic had occurred, historically, about sixty years too late. It set up a parliamentary democracy at a time when liberal democracy was being challenged in its historic strongholds, and the new state was without elan from the beginning. To no single group in Germany -unless for a time to some of the industrialists - did it unqualifiedly represent a desirable ultimate form of state. The largest single party, the Social Democrats, who represented the organized workers and part of the intellectuals, and were the Re- public's strongest supporters, looked forward to a socialist com- monwealth, and realized that they were continually compromising; while the old feudal classes sabotaged the Republic from the be- ginning. Saddled at the outset with crushing defeat at Versailles, it was associated in the popular mind with misery and humiliation. From being a result of the lost war, it came to be regarded as the cause of the lost war. Liberalism became synonymous with de- featism, and parliamentarism with weakness and disorganization. The German Republic, too, was forced - or so it thought - to present a mien of misery for the benefit of the outside world as 1 Konrad Heiden: A History of National Socialism, New York, Knopf, 1935.