52. Today's Talk of the Day

We have experienced a rare event these days. Once again, a book has been successful in Germany. The former Reichsgericht official. D. Otto Mittelstädt has put his political wisdom down on paper in his retirement home in Montreux. Today, the whole world is talking about this wisdom, which fills 146 printed pages and has been released to the public under the title "Before the Flood". In just a few days, these 146 pages have gone through several editions. At the moment it is not easy to find a copy in Berlin. In 8 to 10 bookshops you are told: "Currently out of print". In the eleventh, you meet glances from the bookseller that say: Consider yourself lucky that you can still get the booklet here; if you had come a quarter of an hour later, you could have spent a long time looking for the "sensational" brochure. There hasn't been anything like it since the Rembrandt German surprised the public with his immense book on education, and since the pamphlet "Caligula" brought Roman stories to the people with little witty reference to the present, which you can read in any book on Roman history without the failed joke.

"Rembrandt as educator" was a strange spectacle. If you wander through inns for two weeks and sit down near "better" regulars' tables, you can hear the phrase-like science served up by the Rembrandt German. All you have to do is take a piece of paper with you and quickly write down what you have heard. Then write a suitable - or even better, an unsuitable - quote from an important man on each of these pieces of paper at home. Then you send these little pieces of paper to a printer and have them printed one after the other. The result will be a book about the character, nature and significance of "Rembrandt as an educator". After reading this stitched-together book filled with cheap wisdom, I kept asking myself: how could clever people proclaim such a thing to be a European event? But you have to get used to believing in the absurd as reality if you want to ponder the secret of a literary success.

And today we are witnessing the same spectacle with Mr. Mittelstädt's political insignificance. Apart from the fact that Mittelstädt writes in a fairly good style and knows how to express his commonplace wisdom tastefully, there is nothing to be found in his 146 printed pages that can claim any attention. Truths such as the following form the content. "Parliamentarism in particular has become physically disgusting. In Germany, moreover, the unitary needs of the nation must already favor a certain tendency towards autocracy. In the face of all this, countless difficulties and dangers are piling up, especially in the present, which every personal regiment should be able to cope with." "By vigorously developing the idea of empire, we must strive to overcome the dangerous transitional state of today as quickly as possible." "Germany is not on a desert island, but in the heart of old Europe, exposed to all the storms and upheavals that threaten to break loose here and there." If there were no coffee houses in Montreux where one could read such science in the newspapers every day, Mr. Mittelstädt would have to hold one and the other newspaper himself so that he would know how unnecessary it is to say such things in a special publication. Even worse are the self-evident statements that the pamphleteer writes in a tone as if they were the product of unheard-of insight. "The emperor and the empire must either move forward in the sense of state unity or they must develop backwards along the path of multi-statehood - as things stand in Germany, there is absolutely no standing still, no insistence on what already exists."

One could forgive the criticism, which is made up of such self-evident or commonplaces, if the author had something sensible to say about what he would like to replace the conditions of the present, which he so strongly disputes. But he is no happier with his positive suggestions than with his grumblings. "If I look over the conditions of the German present, the general and individual powers on which we are dependent, if I completely disregard everything that is desirable and stick exclusively to what is feasible, then today I know of only one heroic means that would be suitable for tearing the monarchy and the monarchical unitary state out of the democratic mire: that is war. For and against the majesty of war, much effort has been expended with moral indignation and pathetic enthusiasm. ... For my part, I agree with the great Florentine: every war is just and holy that is waged for just and holy ends. All our lives are a struggle against the hostile forces of nature around us and within us. The dull, heavy, animalistic masses of elementary humanity are also part of the forces of nature, the taming or destruction of which is an unavoidable prerequisite for moral development." So in order to tame the dull, heavy, animalistic masses of elementary democratic people, a war should be unleashed voluntarily? It is not a fable, it is written in the book by Mr. Mittelstädt. What do the peace fighters say to such wisdom? You don't need to be a follower of them to find Mittelstadt's war cries more unreasonable than the utopian bickering of the peace congresses.

It would be sad if the success of Mittelstadt's book were due to anything other than curiosity. It is understandable that everyone wants to read what is brought into the world under strange conditions. It would be a bad thing if there were again people who took Mittelstadt's writing for high political wisdom, as there have been those who have presented the phrases of Rembrandt's German as a European event.