Munich
of the general processes of political life. I became absorbed once more in the theoretical literature of this new world, and tried to grasp its possible effects. These I compared with the actual events and course of its effect in political, cultural and economic life.
For the first time I devoted my attention also to the attempts to master this world plague.
I studied the purpose, struggle and effect of Bismarck’s emergency legislation. Gradually I laid a rock-ribbed foundation for my own belief, so that I have never since been forced to undertake a revision of my views in this question. I also further scrutinized the connection between Marxism and Jewry.
But while, in Vienna, I had taken Germany for an unshakable Colossus, now I began to have occasional uneasy misgivings. In my own mind and in the small circle of my acquaintances I quarreled with German foreign policy and with what I thought the incredibly negligent treatment of the most important problem that then existed in Germany, Marxism. I really could not understand how they could stagger so blindly toward a peril whose results as intended by Marxism itself must eventually be monstrous. Even then among my acquaintances, as I do now on a large scale, I warned against the soothing slogan of all cowardly wretches. “Nothing can happen to us!” A similar pestilential attitude had destroyed one giant empire already. Was Germany alone to be exempt from the laws applying to all other human communities?
In 1913 and 1914, in various circles some of which adhere faithfully to the National Socialist movement today, I announced my conviction that the question of the German nation’s future is the question of destroying Marxism.
In the pernicious German alliance policy I saw but one of the results of this doctrine’s disintegrating work; for the fearful thing was precisely that this poison almost invisibly destroyed every foundation of a healthy economic and state concept, often without the victims’ dreaming to what an extent their acts and wishes were the outcome of a world-concept which they other-
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