Innumerable books, pamphlets, and articles have been published trying to answer the question: What to do with Germany? The present remarks have a more modest aim. They attempt to consider the various possibilities which face a student of German politics in our time. Aristotle liked to practice a kind of discussion intended not to present solutions, but to point out the difficulties and the various aspects of a problem. I think a similar approach may be helpful for those who are bothered by the question: What after Hitler?

In The long history of economic highs and lows, of prosperity and depression, no single change seems to have played so great a political and ideological role as the Depression of 1929–1934. Our generation having lived through that period, cannot gauge its great significance, but future historians (casting a retrospective glance at these years) will probably dwell on the Depression as an astoundingly powerful factor in our psychology as well as on the great number of errors connected with it.

The Origins and the development of the national idea in Europe have been in recent years, particularly since the first World War, a favorite topic of culturo-historical studies. These studies have traced the gradual movement of European peoples toward national self-determination, and have described as normal the development from a vague feeling of warring tribal solidarity to a more conscious patriotism which customarily crystallizes around the prince, the king, in brief, the sovereign. According to these studies, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries national culture was more and more emphasized; the claims of national language increased and finally reached a culmination in the Reformation.

Transition to a war economy is, in its very essence, a shift of economic responsibilities from business to government. This shift covers almost all activities: initiative, planning, execution, coordination. Still the change in our capitalistic structure brought about by governmental leadership and numerous diversified controls should not be overstated. The new frontiers drawn between the private and the public sector do not alter the dualistic character of our economy. It is not “the opposite of free enterprise” since successful entrepreneurs are still allowed to reap the profit of their venture, restricted only by taxation and by some of its efficient supplements, particularly renegotiation of contracts and war bond drives. War profits, moreover, have been so substantial in almost all social groups that the stream of private capital-formation flows broader and deeper than it did in peace time, broader and deeper at any rate than in the public sector where the government has been burdened with an unprecedented federal debt. Broadly speaking, our economy is a hybrid with a collectivistic head and an individualistic heart.

Not Many years ago most political scientists accepted the proposition that it is the spirit and tradition of a political system rather than its structure that informs and governs its operation. We may regard such a proposition as a truism; yet its acceptance came in the wake of what might be called the “second era” of democratic reform in the United States. That era had seen the destruction of the old system of making nominations and the rise of party regulation, the adoption of direct primary elections, and of other devices for direct government, such as the initiative, referendum and recall. It had seen, likewise, the enactment of corrupt practice acts, the growth of the merit system in the choice of civil service personnel, the turn to the popular election of United States senators, attempts at administrative reorganization and other devices for increasing the voter's control over his government.

To Understand the extraordinary fortunes of racism, it is necessary first of all to see the paradox in the success of this ideology. Racism has been condemned over and over again by the Church; it has been refuted a thousand times—and without any great difficulty—for never has a theory with scientific pretensions produced such an accumulation of inconsistencies, of manifestly arbitrary affirmations, of fantastic generalizations and of grotesque constructions. In the course of the last few years racism has been guilty of colossal crimes, crimes that must fill with indignation every soul in which there exists the slightest sentiment of justice or of charity. We are today witnessing the defeat of those temporal powers in which it is incarnate. For all that, racism still flourishes, and nothing would be more un warranted than to say that this plague is in decline.