Mein Kampf
German schools, and German character. Today this sad compulsion has been put upon millions of our people from Germany itself, who dream under foreign rule of the common Fatherland, and in their longing for it try at least to preserve the sacred right to their mother tongue. Now at last people begin to realize in greater numbers what it means to have to fight for one’s nationality. And now perhaps a few here and there can appreciate the greatness of the German population in Ostmark which wholly on its own resources, shielded the Reich on the east for centuries, then waged an exhausting guerrilla warfare to maintain the German language frontier in an age when the Reich cared for colonies, but not for its own flesh and blood before its doors.
As always in every combat, there were three groups in the language struggle of old Austria: the fighters, the lukewarm, and the traitors.
Even in school the sifting process began. The most remarkable thing about the language battle, perhaps, is that its waves beat hardest upon the schools, the nursery of coming generations. The war is waged over the child, and the first war-cry of the struggle is addressed to the child: “German boy, do not forget that you are a German,” and “Girl, remember that you are to be a German mother.”
Anyone who understands the soul of youth will realize that young people are the very ones to receive this battle-cry most joyfully. In a hundred ways they carry on the struggle, in their own fashion and with their own weapons. They refuse to sing un-German songs; they are the more wildly enthusiastic over the grandeur of German heroes, the more anyone attempts to suppress it in them; they go hungry to gather pennies for the war-chest of their elders; they have an incredibly sensitive ear for an un-German teacher, and are as refractory as they are acute; they wear the forbidden badges of their own nation, and are happy to be punished or even beaten for it. In other words they are a faithful image in miniature of their elders, except that their feeling is often better and more straightforward.
I, too, had opportunity to share in the struggle for nationality
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