Mein Kampf
to a wondrous new life. The last great German born to the colonist people of the Ostmark was not officially counted among the so-called “statesmen”; but as Mayor of the “Capital City and Imperial Residence” of Vienna Dr. Lueger, by pulling out of a hat one unheard-of achievement after another in (we can safely say) every field of communal, economic and cultural policy, strengthened the heart of the entire Empire, and by this roundabout route became a greater statesman than all the so-called “diplomats” of the time together.
The fact that the collection of races called “Austria” went to its doom casts not the slightest discredit upon the political ability of Germans in the old Ostmark; it was the inevitable result of the impossibility of maintaining a State of fifty million persons of various nations with ten million people for any length of time, unless certain definite principles were provided before it was too late.
The German-Austrian was more than broad in his thinking. He had always been accustomed to living within the frame of a great Empire, and had never lost his feeling for the tasks this involved. He was the only one in this state who could still see the frontier of the Empire beyond the frontier of his own smaller kingdom; more, when at last Fate parted him from the common Fatherland, he still tried to master the vast task, and to preserve for Germany what his fathers in endless battles had once wrung from the East. Besides, we must not forget that this could happen even with divided strength, for the best men’s hearts and memories never ceased to feel for the common mother country, and only a fragment was left for the homeland.
Even the general outlook of the German-Austrian was comparatively broad. Frequently his economic connections embraced almost the entire manifold Empire. Almost all the really great enterprises were in his hands; he furnished the majority of the managing personnel—technicians and officials. And he conducted the foreign trade in so far as Jewry had not laid hands upon this specially characteristic domain. Politically he alone still held the State together. Even his military service now flung him far beyond
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