Mount Cambitas
On September 18, 1927 Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934), President of the Weimar Republic of Germany, stood before a crowd of 70,000 and dedicated the Tannenberg War Memorial in Hohenstein, East Prussia. He stated,
“Nicht Neid, Haß oder Eroberungslust gaben uns die Waffen in die Hand. Der Krieg war uns vielmehr das äußerste, mit dem schwersten Opfer verbundene Mittel der Selbstbehauptung einer Welt von Feinden gegenüber."
We took up arms, not out of envy, hate, or imperial desire. The war was much more a costly last resort of self-determination in a world surrounded by enemies.
Paul von Hindenburg. 1927
In February of 1928 Herbert H. Asquith, one of the quieter, but more important conspirators of Britain’s war on Germany, died. In the following month Great Britain officially claimed the island of Malta as part of the British Commonwealth. The island’s location — halfway between the Mediterranean entrance to the Suez Canal and the British territory of Gilbralter, where the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean merge — made it an impressive geo-strategic outpost of the British Empire.
In mid-March the US Government released German wealth that it had frozen in the United States after the war to insure German payment of its requisite war reparations.
On September 16, 1928 it was decided by a group of delegates in attendance at the fall meeting of the League of Nations that a 2nd Committee of experts should be organized to deal with Germany’s handling of war reparations. Represented in this group were delegates from Germany, Great Britain, France, the United States, Belgium, and Japan.
Five weeks earlier the French Foreign Minister, Aristide Briand and US Secretary of State, Frank Billings Kellogg, had met in Paris where they initiated the Briand-Kellog Pact, an agreement to anathematize war. By 1929 sixty-three nations would join the pact.
Between these two meetings, on August 31, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill staged, in Berline, their first performance of the Dreigroschenoper (Three-Penny Opera) — a well-received parody on the municipal political corruption found in the largest cities of Europe in the aftermath of the war. In 1933 both Brecht and Weill emigrated from Germany. Whereas Brecht would eventually find his way to Denmark and later Finland, Kurt Weill took up residence in Paris before he fled to the US via London. By 1943 both had arrived in the United States, but only Weill, of Jewish faith, would remain and become a US citizen. The disaffected Christian, Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, returned to Germany in 1947 after being dragged before the US Congress where he was falsely accused of being a communist agitator.
Yes, both Brecht and Weill shared a socialist world view, but Brecht had never joined the communist party, and who in Congress would call out a German-American, Jewish composer who lived in New York City and wrote Broadway musicals? In the end, Brecht was intellectually sharp and provocative; Weill was entertaining. Had we better listened to the socialist critique of these two important artistic figures on the negative effects of market corruption in their day, we would surely not, in our own day, be in the situation that we are now.
In 1928 the SPD, Germany’s preeminent socialist party, received nearly 30 percent of the popular vote. Other than its willingness to share power with the pro-market, pro-republic, centrist parties including the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP - German Democratic Party), the Zentrum (Centrist Party), Bayerissche Volkspartei (BVP - Bavarian People’s Party), and Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party), it is difficult to explain the SPD’s success. On the one hand, the SPD tolerated the communists, and on the other hand, those who wanted to return to imperial rule were very inclusive in their spectrum of adherents. After all, the Nationalsozialisten, the so-called NAZIs — namely, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) — began as a pro-worker party that wanted to restore the fallen Deutsches Reich (2nd German Empire).
Perhaps it was because Kaiser Wilhelm II had fled Germany just before the armistice was signed. Perhaps, it was because the SPD was quick to embrace the newly formed republic, and there was great misery spread over a large swath of the population by the war’s end. This said, the German economy was recovering. Had the French not occupied Germany for so long, and had the British not continued to insist on war reparations, history would surely have taken another course. Then too, it had always been the goal of the British to stifle German economic growth.
Rather than ending the payment of reparations for a war in which Germany was just as much a victim as an aggressor, the Young Plan finished by prolonging them, and the bankers stood ready to cash in.
In liberty, or not at all,
Roddy A. Stegemann, First Hill, Seattle 98104
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