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Freedom and Democracy in Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
Extract
The ideas of liberty and democracy, Ernst Troeltsch wrote during World War I, came to Germany from the West; but, he continued, there they gained a new meaning, “determined by German history and the German spirit. … Liberty consists more in duties than in rights, or, rather, in rights which are simultaneously duties.” In the same vein, Thomas Mann argued against his “Westernized” brother Heinrich: “German individualism is quite compatible with state socialism, which, of course, is something quite different from the human rights-Marxist kind. For the social principle is opposed only to the individualism of the Enlightenment, to the liberal individualism of the West. … Under our princes' absolutism the individual rarely was short-changed.”
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References
1 “The German Idea of Freedom” (1916); translation from Ebenstem, William, Modern Political Thought, New York, 1954, pp. 315–16.Google Scholar
2 Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Berlin, 1919, p. 267. The antithesis between the despicable menschenrechtlich-marxistisch and the noble fürstlich is difficult to translate into English.
3 Strangely, Mr. Krieger never defines those Western ideas from which the Germans deviated; moreover, he confines himself to political writers, excluding constitutional lawyers. While Dahlmann receives due honor as a theorist (though not as a martyr), such well-known teachers as Laband, Jellineck, Kelsen, etc., are ignored.
4 No proof is offered for 1918, however, and the pattern for 1848–1849 which is developed later in the book is quite different.
5 This socio-political theory is original with Mr. Krieger; it is based, of course, on Pufendorf, and hence is subject to the qualifications which apply to all theories accepting his fundamental assumptions.
6 Goethe's report that his father's house was fritzisch refers to the Seven Years' War, not (as in Krieger, , op.cit., p. 19Google Scholar) to the situation in 1778.
7 Incidentally, this was a return from Hegel to the Jacobin Fichte, who advocated both the “permanent revolution” and the “withering-away of the state.” Furthermore, when Fichte speaks of the state assigning Eigentum to the individual, he does not mean “property,” but a proper field of action.
8 In classical German philosophy, Selbstbewusstsein should never be translated as “self-consciousness,” and an understanding of Hegel is seriously impaired if “nation” stands alternatively for Volk. and Staat.
9 Naumann, an ardent Germanizer of foreign words, simply offered Volksstaat as a translation of “republic”; the term was not meant as an expression of sympathy for the “new Eastern collectivism” (Krieger, , op.cit., p. 464).Google Scholar
10 Mr. Krieger's translations of German names and titles can be misleading as well as exasperating. Wirtschaftspartei des deutschen Mittelstandes is not “Economic Party,” but “Middle Class Party.” Is the Frankfurt News the venerable Frankfurter Zeitung or the Frankfurter Nachrichten? The title of the famous pamphlet Woran uns geigen ist does not mean “What is fitting for us.” A sentence such as “The economy is the enemy of war” makes sense only to readers who know that the German language has but one word for “economy” and “business.”
11 But on p. 457 Bebel is quoted to the same effect. The use of this quotation, however, indicates that Mr. Krieger does not understand the democratic nature of the SPD from the time of its origins. He berates Lassalle for “uncritically accepting liberalism and socialism … as integral” (p. 374) and he assumes a necessary division between political liberalism and egalitarian socialism. This is surprising, because Mr. Krieger is a disciple of Franz Neumann, from whom he seems to have inherited a deep suspicion of the liberals but not the Jacobin concepts which—Neumann and his friends thought—social democracy had inherited from the middle-class radicals. Mr. Krieger describes the demise of the latter, but he does not even discuss the Marxian concept of democracy—or does Marx not count as a German? In his 540 pages, Mr. Krieger does not have room for even a passing remark about the order in which “the free development of each” and “the free development of all” appear in the Communist Manifesto, Part II.
12 Would anyone write a history of French radicalism without mentioning its anticlericalism? Krieger does not understand that in challenging the Roman Church, Bismarck was espousing the cause of the liberal Bildungsphilister.
13 The realm of Bildung is not the only uncharted area on Mr. Krieger's map of Germany. Who told him that the state of Baden is “polyglot”?