Mein Kampf
never does so with the interests of the Jewish people; that only the German Socialist is “international” in a sense which forbids him to win justice for his own people except by whimpering and bawling to his international comrades, while it is never true of the Czech or the Pole; in short, I saw even then that the harm was only partly in the doctrines as such, and quite as much in our wholly inadequate training for our own nationality, and our consequent less intense devotion to it.
This disproves the first purely theoretical argument for the Pan-German movement’s struggle against Catholicism as such.
Let us train the German people from childhood to exclusive recognition of the rights of their own nationality, and not infect the children’s hearts with our curse of “objectivity” in matters even of our own self-preservation; we shall soon see that (given a radically nationalist government), as in Ireland, Poland or France, so too in Germany the Catholic will always be a German.
We find our strongest proof in the period when, to protect its existence, our people last appeared before the judgment-seat of history for a battle of life and death.
So long as leadership from above was not lacking, the people did its duty overwhelmingly. Protestant pastor and Catholic priest both contributed enormously to the long continuance of our resistance, not only at the front, but at home even more. During those years, and particularly in the first flaring-up, for both camps there was really but one holy German Empire, on behalf of whose existence and future everyone turned to his own Heaven.
There was one question which the Pan-German movement in Austria should have asked itself: Is the preservation of Austrian Germanity possible with a Catholic faith, or not? If so, the political party had no business to concern itself with religious, to say nothing of confessional matters; but if not, a religious reformation was necessary, never a political party.
Anyone who thinks he can arrive at a religious reformation by way of a political organization shows only that he has not the faintest notion of the growth of religious ideas or teachings and
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