Political Considerations of Vienna Period
to the bourgeois classes, and so the result was bound to be tame and weakly.
Although its individual members would never suspect so, the German bourgeoisie, particularly in its upper strata, is pacificistic to the point of self-surrender in matters of nation or state. In good times, (that is to say in this case times of good government), this disposition is the reason why these strata are extraordinarily valuable to the state; but in times of bad rule it is absolutely catastrophic. Even to make possible the fighting of a really serious battle at all, the Pan-German movement would have had to devote itself above all to winning the masses. It did not do so, and thus from the beginning was deprived of the elemental drive which a wave must have if it is not quickly to recede.
But if this principle is not realized and carried through from the beginning, the new party can never afterward make up for its omission. For when a large moderate bourgeois element is taken in, the movement’s attitude will always be directed accordingly, and thus all further prospect of winning any considerable strength from the common people is lost. After that the movement can never get beyond pale wrangling and criticism. No longer shall we find an almost religious faith and self-sacrifice; in their place comes the attempt gradually to wear away the rigors of battle by “constructive” work—which in this case means acknowledging what already exists—, to wind up at last in a corrupt peace.
And that was what happened to the Pan-German movement because it did not begin by emphasizing the recruiting of its followers from the great mass of common people. It became “bourgeois, respectable, restrainedly radical.”
This mistake bred the second cause of swift decline.
By the time the Pan-German movement arose, Germanity’s situation in Austria was already desperate. From year to year the Parliament had become more of an institution for slow destruction of the German people. Only the removal of this institution could give any hope, no matter how small, of rescue at the eleventh hour.
107
